So. Mark McGwire finally admitted to something we all suspected him of: steroid abuse. Stop the presses, the word is out. Not that his stubborn silence, his absolutely embarrassing refusal to talk about his steroid use at a Congressional hearing, some years back, hadn’t tipped us off about the awful truth. Hey, love him or loathe him, regardless of whether he had a hand in the demise of Madonna’s marriage or not, if A-Rod could come clean, so to speak, who couldn’t?

In recent times, drug scandals in sports, especially in baseball, have been dropping like bombs. The 2007 Mitchell Report revealed the names of 89 Major League baseball players, including Roger Clemens, identified with the illegal use of the euphemistically termed ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs. The 400-page report was compiled based on interviews with over 700 people, including 60 former players, who testified to the rampant drug usage in the sport during what was termed “baseball’s steroid era”.

As happened when the drug scandals began surfacing about their track-and-field athletes, the rest of the world’s collective jaw hit the ground. Shock and not that much awe. We always suspected their runners weren’t what they purported to be. (There was something about Marion Jones, and — yes, I’m going there — Flo Jo that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but which made me know instinctively that they weren’t naturally the speed demons they appeared to be.) But, come on, baseball cheats? America is, after all, apple pie and baseball. I mean, Jose Canseco? Alex Cabrera? Manny Alexander? Barry Bonds, for God’s sake?

Anyway, so McGwire finally came out and tearfully admitted, in a recent, carefully choreographed one-day media roll-out, that he’d used steroids throughout the 1990s. Which immediately took me back to that summer of 1998, when both he and Sammy Sosa electrified the baseball world as they both duked it out to break Roger Maris’s longstanding record of 61 home runs for a season (since 1961). McGwire passed it first, with a spectacular 70, the apex of a four-year stretch during which he wound up hitting 245 home runs. Even then, there’d been whisperings that he was linked to steroids. Still, I remember being caught up in the excitement, rooting for Sosa, who was from the Dominican Republic and, therefore, my fellow Caribbean ‘peeps’.

But with this admission, suddenly, that feat now seemed to be rendered null and void. Perhaps the slighter Sosa had been the right man, after all. But we’ll never know now, will we? But my annoyance goes beyond the Americans and their win-at-all-costs attitude to sports that put other nationalities, especially Jamaicans, in the shadows. American athletes’ pathological need to be thought of as the best; their egos, the collective American ego, will not have it any other way. Think back to Bob Costas’s public evisceration of Bolt, whose effusive celebration in Tokyo at the last Olympics he deemed unsportsmanlike. Then compare that to his sensitive handling of McGwire on his programme. (McGwire was promised by Bob Costas’s show, in advance negotiations ahead of his appearance, to be given a “credible place” and “unlimited time” to speak, and, in return, the one-year-old MLB channel would be guaranteed the exclusive TV interview. And, as if that’s not enough, we find out that Costas is represented by a company that owns half of McGwire’s publicist, Ari Fleischer’s company. Hmm.)

Weirdly, though, this was not meant to be a meditation on sports.

This column is really a reflection on the small axes and big trees of this world, and the misappropriation of power. In thinking about things like the earthquake disaster that has just rocked Haiti, and even the current hoops Jamaica must jump through for IMF approval, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be a citizen of a rich and powerful country. But it strikes me that with great power comes great responsibility. Americans love to whine about how the world hates them, that everybody’s jealous of them, of their riches, their technological advancement, and whatnot. That’s perhaps true, to a certain extent. But it’s more than simply that. People are just a little sick of insufferable and self-righteous hypocrites who often do not hold themselves to the same standards they expect, nay, demand, of others. Remember that kid you went to school with? The one who was richer than everybody in your class, and made everybody know it, with the up-to-date Nikes that didn’t carry the extra ‘e’ or the swoosh that went in the wrong direction? Or, for the truly old-school, the Reeboks that were spelt with three e’s instead of two, and with a ‘k’ and not an ‘x’ like the ones your mother found in the bargain bin in some seedy little dive on Flatbush Avenue because “crepes are just crepes”? (Hello, Mother, nobody says crepes, ugh; it’s sneakers!)

But that’s what we fear America has become; the kid who threw their authentic sneakers in your face and pointed to your crappy ones and laughed. And that pisses the hell out of some people. There’s never been as much anti-American sentiment as there is today. Disenfranchised peoples are spewing venom towards America and Americans at a rate that’s as unsettling as it is alarming, especially for us as Caribbean people who, by our proximity, have the potential to be caught in the cross-hairs. Thank God Haitians, despite their lifetime of being downtrodden, bear no bitterness or poisonous ill will to America and Americans who watched as the Haitian economy bottomed out and were content to not get involved, yet could find justifiable cause to invade Iraq on trumped-up charges of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps these weapons were hiding in Haiti all along and last week’s chaos was the sound and the fury of their detonation.

We, of course, do not condone the behaviour of extremists; that kind of hatred and rage is equally mystifying. But surely Americans can see why the world isn’t impressed with them. That’s why, after eight years of the George W Bush administration’s crassness visited upon the people of America, the world rooted for Barack Obama to win the presidential election. So he could bring some of his enlightened humility and civility back to a place we all once held up as the standard to which huddled masses could look for succour in time of need.