Miller Time, Dude

Sometimes, seemingly fleeting parts of our pop culture are such perfect metaphors for larger realities that it's almost too easy to point out.

Watching the U.S. ice hockey team defeat the Soviet Union and go on to win the gold medal at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid was one of the formative experiences of my youth---partly because I played ice hockey in school and on a club team at the time. The Americans were underdogs from the start; the team was seeded seventh out of twelve teams, and it lost to the Soviets 10-3 in an exhibition game a few days before the Olympics began. But my friends and I were obsessed with that team; we idolized each player and committed their biographies to memory. And we weren't alone. The entire nation---beset by inflation, lines at gas pumps, crime and urban decay, the Carter presidency, the interminable hostage crisis in Iran---projected its need for heroes onto that team. In retrospect, the gold medal marked a national rebirth on many levels that lasted for the next two decades.

Flash forward to 2006. The most visible athlete at the Winter Olympics is Bode Miller. He's celebrated by a media machine as a sort of Marlboro Man on skis. A "60 Minutes" feature, Madison Avenue eagerly at his door, cameras and microphones recording his every move. What's his appeal? He just goes for it, dude. It's all about the attitude---and in his case the partying, about which he freely boasts to a spellbound press. The actual skiing? Hey, he'll get to that when the time comes.

And when the time came, here's how our celebrated gold-medal favorite did:

Downhill: 5th
Combined: Disqualified
Super-G: Did not finish
Giant Slalom: 6th
Slalom: Did not finish

We arrived with the attitude. Everyone else left with the medals.

But of course drawing a larger metaphor to a nation in debt up to its eyeballs, a media machine that celebrates the famous for being famous, a live-for-today culture with Las Vegas as its temple and Paris Hilton as High Priestess, the primacy of "heckuva job" spin over actual results, and the invasion and wrecking of another nation based on little more than the rigor of "kids rolling around on the lawn" and a let's-just-do-it-dude ethos---no, that would be too easy. Almost corny, even. So I won't. Better to let our new heroes speak for us. Here's Bode Miller in an introspective moment, thoughtfully reflecting on his Olympic performance:

"I just did it my way. I'm not a martyr, and I'm not a do-gooder. I just want to go out and rock. And man, I rocked here."

Perfect, huh?