Fanone, Biles betrayed by fellow Americans
This was the week when betrayal came home to roost in the American spirit.
The lingering images, for me, are the eyes of gymnast Simone Biles and D.C. police officer Michael Fanone.
Biles, as everybody in the world knows, announced she was not mentally fit to compete in some of the Olympic gymnastic events that made her famous as the best there ever was.
Fanone was one the Four Horsemen of the Capitol Apocalypse. Tuesday he testified to the House select committee about the terrorist mob that pulled him down the steps, beat him, Tasered him and tried to get his firearm from him with the stated goal of killing him with it.
The eyes of Biles and Fanone were like haunted houses.
Let’s start with the gymnast. Ibsen said “To live is to wrestle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain.” Biles made it clear before the Olympics began that she was wrestling with trolls.
Like so many elite U.S. gymnasts, she trained as a girl at Karolyi Ranch in Texas, cut off by miles of dirt road from the nearest anything. The ranch looked like Salvador Dali and Sam Peckinpah collaborated on a Western, with peacock and camels strolling the grounds. The gymnasts were housed in a cabin with an outhouse for toilet facilities.
It was one of several happy hunting grounds for Dr. Larry Nassar, the twisted physician who sexually abused hundreds of girls. One of them was Biles.
When the gymnasts started to grapple with what had happened to them, it was clear that all the institutions — USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and even the FBI — that could have been expected to protect this vulnerable group did essentially nothing.
Aly Raisman, second only to Biles in this generational cohort of American gymnasts, has been perhaps the most outspoken critic of these institutions. In a recent New Yorker interview, she called USA Gymnastics (the sport’s governing body) “rotten from the inside out” and the USOPC “a disaster.”
In April, Biles told NBC’s Hoda Kotb that a major motivation to compete in Tokyo was to force some kind of reckoning. She would be the only known survivor of the molestations at the 2021 games.
“... I had to come back to the sport to be a voice, to have change happen. Because I feel like if there weren’t a remaining survivor in the sport, they would’ve just brushed it to the side,” Biles said.
Believe me, they tried anyway. Coverage of Biles in Toyko has not been Nassar-free, but it’s been Nassar-light. The latest vogue in sports journalism has been to talk about the “twisties,” an insider term for what happens when gymnasts start to think consciously about stuff they normally do in a state of flow. The twisties! It sounds cute. The Roman Catholic
This is the approach to reality right now, in a certain sector driven by a certain brand of American politics. If a fact doesn’t work for you, discount it. If a person troubles you, destroy him or her.
church leadership is probably kicking itself for not coming up with a similarly playful term to paper over the bruised brains and souls of sexually abused children.
Over to Fanone. It could be argued that I’m torturing this comparison, but not as much as the terrorist mob tortured Fanone. I thought I knew the Jan. 6 story very well, but there was a whole new horror story in the hollow looks, the shaking voices and the sickening stories told by Fanone and the other three men.
And now he and the others want to know pretty much what Biles wants to know. How did this happen?
His fellow officer Daniel Hodges told the panel he wants them to find out “”if anyone in power had a role in this, if anyone in power coordinated, or aided and abetted, or tried to downplay, tried to prevent the investigation of this terrorist attack.”
Another witness, Pfc. Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police, compared it to going after a hitman. You have to catch the hitman, and then you have to catch the person who hired him.
These are very dangerous (to certain people) positions, and every effort is being made now to tear these guys apart. A repulsive blonde Fox News host whom I refuse to further publicize mocked Fanone with a fake acting award. I took a call on my show from a guy who said the same thing: that all four witnesses were faking their turmoil.
Fanone was unconscious when he was rescued from the mob. He was later found to have suffered a heart attack, a concussion and a traumatic brain injury. But he needs to ask Lee Strasberg how to act shaken?
Biles got the same treatment. A repulsive British commentator whom I refuse to further publicize tweeted, “Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke. Just admit you did badly, made mistakes, and will strive to do better next time. Kids need strong role models not this nonsense.”
I took a call on that same show from a different guy who said the same thing: Biles should just vomit before each match and then do her job, like his daughter and granddaughter, both gymnasts.
I asked him: If, God forbid, your daughter or granddaughter were sexually abused in the context of gymnastic training, would you tell them to suck (or throw) it up and do their vaults?
Well, he said, he didn’t necessarily believe that Biles was molested.
This is the approach to reality right now, in a certain sector driven by a certain brand of American politics. If a fact doesn’t work for you, discount it. If a person troubles you, destroy him or her.
You wonder how much longer people such as Fanone and Biles can stand by the barricades and balance beams to fight this fight.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.