No one needs Alex Rod-riguez to remind them that living in America, even at the edge of a financial precipice called 2009, is to be part of a culture in which nothing is ever enough.

For Rodriguez, baseball's most complete and accomplished player, it apparently wasn't enough in 2001 that a Texas nincompoop was willing to shower him with $250 million (nearly 40 percent more than any salary at the time) just for being his excellent self. Rodriguez wanted more, to be more excellent than his natural self, and this week joined the conga line of current New York Yankees to apologize for using steroids.

And again, just as in the cases of Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte, only after being caught. Giambi, for the persnickety among you, apologized without saying for what, but no one suspects it was for taking soap out of the clubhouse.

It's all so painfully, typically American, isn't it?

The titans of Wall Street, already swimming in luxuriating fashions and prime real estate, apparently found their lives empty enough to deploy a myriad of dubious, unregulated, myopic economic shell games (the kind of things Warren Buffet warned fully five years ago were the "financial weapons of mass destruction") until enough jobs were lost that the global economy sits smoking by the side of the road.

The night the A-Rod story broke on Sports Illustrated's Web site, ABC News delivered a piece on a Manhattan shop where men's suits sell for "something in the $40,000 range." One had pinstripes made of white gold for $43,000. Alterations extra, I presume. Because in this culture, sometimes a $40,000 suit isn't enough. The shop had sold 50 of them. Who would make such a purchase, or could make such a purchase?

Perhaps Alex Rodriguez, whom the Yankees paid just a hair under $200,000 per game in 2008.

Meg Ryan and Melanie Griffith, rich and beautiful not being enough, pumped their lips full of something until they looked like Muppets.

Ben Roethlisberger, two-time Super Bowl champion and conspicuous Disney patron, found that all that and $102 million is not enough. Told SI's Peter King he did it with broken ribs. Dan, give him another $10 million. C'mon.

But don't get me wrong. It's not Big Ben's fault or Melanie Griffith's fault or financial pornographer Bernard Madoff's fault that Rodriguez had to throw himself at the feet of His Excellency Peter Gammons the other day. It's not baseball's fault, not the players union's fault (although that strong case will get made), not the government's fault, and not the media's fault.

It's A-Fraud's fault.

Don't for a second think he didn't know what he was taking, part of the agent-coached mea culpa he performed for Gammons. That's complete tripe. Know as well that Rodriguez has never been beyond steroid suspicion, despite the bonuses in his current contract that were to reward the eclipsing of Barry Bonds' home run record by a supposed cleansing agent. Numerous are the daily eyewitnesses who have commented on the increased size and sculpture of Rodriguez, and though he said he was on the juice only in his three seasons in Texas (2001-03), note the incongruity of his 2007 numbers in New York.

That summer, he hit 54 homers and drove in 156 runs. In his four other Yankee seasons, he averaged 38 and 115, respectively. After three years of failure in the postseason that brought the full wrath of the Bronx down upon him, might Rodriguez have needed a little boost in 2007? Such is the kind of suspicion that comes with admission, and for that admission Rodriguez separates himself from the likes of Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, all of whom likely lied spectacularly in their acquired defiance, but that separation is negligible. Once you've taken steroids, you're living a lie. Once you're living it, lying to a grand jury is nothing, much less lying to Congress or Katie Couric.

There is all kinds of skulduggerous potential associated with the outing of A-Fraud, most of it affixed to his Machiavellian union. When baseball tested some 1,400 players in 2003 to see if 5 percent of them were dopers and needed a punitive testing program, why didn't the union destroy those samples, which were subsequently acquired by the government during the BALCO investigation? Why were such samples even labeled?

But again, this is no one's fault but Rodriguez's.

It makes no difference to me if the man wants to abuse his body with dangerous substances, and frankly, from this side of the steroid era, it doesn't really hurt me anymore that the numbers like 61 and 755 have been eclipsed. They're only numbers after all.

What keeps dragging us back to this drama is the sheer greed of it. The notion that an augmented player, often one already gifted, will defeat a natural player, with the resultant damage to the game's reality, integrity or what's left of it. That and the more grotesque reality that every A-Rod, every Bonds engenders a new army of impressionable young players who'll never be deterred by evident dangers to themselves, the game or the culture.

Some of them will pay with their lives -- another great American tragedy.