The 2012 Tour de France has come to a finish.  Like the riders, I am a bit glad.  The commercials, the hype.  Released from my duties, I can now google my torturers, in particular the songs attached to the latest Michelob Ultra ad and the new Spicy McChicken McBites (I did my high school duty of putting on the blue polyester and flipping more than my share of 20 billion hamburgers.)  Strangely enough, finding them finally on YouTube, the songs, independent of the same scenes I've been stuck watching as I wait for the next view of the Pyrenees, aren't that bad, and my spite has left.  I guess it was the set-up of the commercials, the egotistical quality, a lack of humor.  Bob Roll shined in his.

After three weeks, less than that, I stopped watching.  At my age, it's not the race, the 'who wins' sort of thing.  Lance Armstrong must have coincided with my own need for some grandiose egotism, I suppose, but, to be fair, also my great joy that the Tour de France was finally being covered on television, so that on a daily basis, you could see them actually going up roads you've read about in Tour mythology.  It's an amazing job they do, primarily the pictures brought to you by French TV, via helicopter and motorcycle and satellite.  And good news:  France is not overspread by suburban sprawl and landscapes flattened by lights as you would see them in webs from airplanes while thinking of a Larkin poem about vanishing English countryside.  There is the countryside, and small farming operations, and villages with the church in the center, and some form of castle fortress up on high ground, often worn down by the elements.  France is a treasure, preserved by agriculture and certainly vineyards, its share of mountains and rugged streams, rolling hills, estuaries.  Houses built to last, form meets function, simple, golden rectangle.  It's the background of a movie.  And the star of the movie is one person on a bike.  Yes, there are teammates, favorites, stars, notables, the domestique, but it boils down to one rider,  an anonymous ideal but regular person with two legs who looks comfortable on the thing (and without too much ego and vanity), I think they generally look the sort of cool that you can stand, as they do their jobs, unlike, say, the person  you see walking down the street in your own little city neighborhood who is certain of their own coolness (give me a break, I didn't know you were a fancy movie star, an unattainable paragon of all that is stylishly distinctive and beautiful, apparently so very rich as the .01 %.)  A person on a bike.  It's pretty simple.  And incredible, I mean, in the good old way we used to say, 'that's incredible.'

Did the commercials serve that one little Ulysses on a bike, or whoever he or she is, at the center of the roaded landscape, that one person blurred into the wearers of the different jerseys and the, I dunno, 160 or 170 individuals who start the race and hopefully finish?  Oh, probably not.  But then, the Tour always will be, always has been, a parade, a convoy of fun commercial stuff.

This year, we got Mich Ultra (sans the beleaguered Lance Armstrong, but hitting golfballs and going to the same sort of parties, after playing hard, same attitude as he, why be so disloyal to him?), and spicy mc-whatever ( feed them to your chihuahua, if not your vaguely ethnic lady friends), what else?

Except for Bob Roll and Road ID ( an actual useful product for cyclist, especially given the egotistical I-don't-give-a-shit, in-fact-I'm-happy-to-try-to-hurt-you for the sake of the deregulated road type of driver taking a cue from, hmm, where...) the commercials beckon a crumbling empire, a willing fakeness, boredom, a lack of intellectual curiosity.  Or, perhaps they are just jarring, set against a hundred year old bike race that seemingly goes back to the poor Cathars.  That is, one gathers, what to expect from a culture so bombarded with the latest thing.