Now we know what judgment day looks like.
It’s you and Oprah. If you’re going to heaven, Oprah brings out a plate of cookies and reviews your life with you on her couch. If you’ve been a monumental asshole who has bullied, lied to, and destroyed other people in order to win, then you get a hardback chair. No cookies for Lance Armstrong last night.

Oprah asked: “How did you do it? Walk me through it. Pill deliveries, blood in secret refrigerators…how did it work?”
Lance Armstrong answered that it was a “very simple” mix of oxygen-supplying drugs, blood transfusions, and testosterone shots.
He left out the not so simple regime of pressuring his teammates to dope, buying off staffers to get around the drug testing, paying doctors to backdate prescriptions, suing news outlets for reporting on his doping, slandering people as prostitutes and alcoholics for speaking out, bribing top cycling officials, and insisting in interview after interview that he raced clean.
Whew. Lying is exhausting! No wonder Armstrong had to lie down on his sofa below his seven framed yellow jerseys a month after the US Anti-Doping Agency stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles. He wasn’t being an arrogant jerk when he tweeted this photo of himself in response to the USADA’s action. He was just extremely tired from fifteen long years of maintaining a lie.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Telling a lie is easy. We do it all the time. You say you’re going to go to a party when you know you probably won’t. You tell someone you ain’t mad when you’re ready to bite their elbow off. In response to an inquiry regarding a certain smell, you say, “It wasn’t me!”
Lie, lie, lie. We toss them off as easily as Taylor Swift tosses off boyfriends.
But then it comes time to maintain a lie, and that takes energy. The more elaborate the lie, the more energy it takes. Consider the amount of energy – economic and psychic – white southerners have pumped into maintaining the lie that black people are inferior and a danger to whites. Creating and maintaining segregation and its progeny…very tiring. One must recline on the porch with a gin & tonic.
What Lance Armstrong did last night in Oprah’s hardback chair was acknowledge that his racing career was all a lie. Read more…