Along with many millions of curiosity seekers, I watched the Tiger Woods press conference. Not much of a “conference,” since no questions were allowed. It was a non-event. It was Tiger being Tiger. He wants to be in control at all times. So far, all his efforts in that direction have been flawed. This one was no better.
I am more than a little tired of people in the public eye asking for privacy. He should have though of all that while he was shamelessly and publicly misbehaving. He was out there where everyone could see him.
Hey – he is a golfer! He is not a touchstone of humility, decency, or any other qualities. Those are qualities that we assign to him that we assign to so many celebrities. They become what we want them to be, and cash in on our gullibility.
Perhaps my favourite, when it comes to misguided adulation, is the shrine that has been erected around the life and times of “The Duke” John Wayne. In Orange County, not America’s most liberal place, the airport is named after him. He represents, and this is the secret behind misguided hero worship, part of the national mythology. Because I watch Turner Classics, I often see him, square jaw pointing into the wind, as a war hero. The other day I watched him in “They were Expendable” a movie based on the battle for Bataan during WW2. There he was – all done up in patriotic red white and blue. With all these roles, plus so many of those “winning the west” genre of films, he became associated with the indomitable American spirit, the spirit that opened up the west, the spirit that survived the Battler of The Bulge.
The facts are not important. The fact is that when his colleagues were off fighting the war – Clark Gable as a Flying Fortress gunner, Gregory Peck as a bomber pilot, and dozens more, Wayne was back home, along with Ronald Reagan, making patriotic movies. He didn’t serve. It is rumoured that he had some kind of medical exemption. It is also rumoured, although more quietly, that he managed to elude the draft board.
Not to make a big point of scraping the gold dust of idols, just to illustrate that we all need idols, however fallen they may be. Tiger is one such idol. Yes, he was not shy of allowing himself to be portrayed as a paragon of family virtue and it is only in hindsight that we see the hypocrisy of it all. But it is a hypocrisy in which all of us are complicit. We want heroes, stained or otherwise. We want our Hollywood stars to be the people they are on the screen. We need Robert Young to be a saintly father figure (Father Knows Best) even though he was an unregenerate drunk. We wanted Ingrid Bergman to be the epitome of purity. And – we wanted Tiger to be what he is not and never was.
To put a finer point on it: if Tiger had really wanted to make it up to his millions of fans, he should have returned to the course as soon as the scars from his beating had healed. If he wanted to re-unite with all of us, he should have had a real press conference with questions, no matter how obvious or embarrassing the questions might be.
Tiger has played peek-a-boo with all of us. And he did it again.
Frankly, I don’t much care whether he turns back to Buddhism or re-unites with his wife, or succeeds in getting reporters to stay away. He is the premier figure in golf – not a leader in social reform. Let him play. Whether I or you forgive him or not really doesn’t matter.
Friday, February 19, 2010
LOOKING AHEAD - TO MORE CHAOS
I can’t get off my soapbox. I can promise myself and my readers that I will seek a more positive path; that I will share topics that are of positive benefits to all, especially the slowly and inevitably aging among us. I totter. I teeter. I waver. I cannot abandon my liberal roots, even though I have long since abandoned my membership in a party that espouses liberal causes but is mired in an ideological straightjacket. Enough philosophizing.
I noticed, with a mixture of alarm and amusement, that the Fed decided it had to raise the rate it charges banks to borrow money. They hiked it a whole QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT! Twenty-five basis points. So, instead of Goldman Sachs being able to borrow at one half of one percent to “invest” the money not only in “safe” investments like Treasuries, which yield around 3%, but to venture once again into all the minefields that nearly brought the economy down. But that’s all old hat.
You may understand my own mindset a little more by reading the response I sent to David Plouffe. During the presidential elections, I was one of millions pulling for Obama so I got on their “mailing” (pronounced “give money”) list. The latest news release told me how Obama was going to help homeowners save themselves. I wrote this back:
“It matters little to you what any Canadian has to say. You will always be at an ideological disadvantage. Bound as so much of American politics seems to be, to the primacy of the market system, no deviation can be tolerated. However "liberal" you will presume to be, you cannot make change without changing. "Stimulus," within the American frame of reference always means something like tax breaks. You do not understand the utter futility of the idea that only the private sector creates jobs. The private sector creates jobs when it is in their profitable best interest to do so. For that I can't blame them. So, to offer tax credits is meaningless. Employers will hire only if they need to, otherwise hiring more is old-fashioned "featherbedding." The government must be the employer of last resort. There are projects that private capital won't go into because they lack the profit profile. Those projects are uniquely the government's. You can offer all the tax credits you want, but as long as oil and coal remain cheaper, no one will build alternate energy sources. It is only one example of ventures where the costs are high and the profits are small. Only government can do it. The notion of "public enterprise" so horrifies you that you shrink away from anything that looks like "socialism." You are following the Bush policy of privatizing tens of thousands of jobs that should have been done by the military by giving them to private contractors.
I am beyond disappointed that the system cannot truly make any fundamental changes in the American mindset. You have flunked out on health care for all the reasons shown above.”
Perhaps I should have added that in Canada, despite protests to the contrary, we live in a liberal democracy. Government does not shy away from participation in enterprise. Our aerospace industry owes its success to government participation e.g. Bombardier, Pratt-Whitney. Our Finance Minister, as right-leaning as you can get, intrudes on the private sector by slowing down real estate speculation. Money is given directly to public enterprise like municipal transit systems. I could go on and on.
What makes Canada is great is that no government can spoil it, although Mike Harris tried his hardest in Ontario. We genuinely understand what government can do, should do, and must do. Americans simply don’t get it.
I noticed, with a mixture of alarm and amusement, that the Fed decided it had to raise the rate it charges banks to borrow money. They hiked it a whole QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT! Twenty-five basis points. So, instead of Goldman Sachs being able to borrow at one half of one percent to “invest” the money not only in “safe” investments like Treasuries, which yield around 3%, but to venture once again into all the minefields that nearly brought the economy down. But that’s all old hat.
You may understand my own mindset a little more by reading the response I sent to David Plouffe. During the presidential elections, I was one of millions pulling for Obama so I got on their “mailing” (pronounced “give money”) list. The latest news release told me how Obama was going to help homeowners save themselves. I wrote this back:
“It matters little to you what any Canadian has to say. You will always be at an ideological disadvantage. Bound as so much of American politics seems to be, to the primacy of the market system, no deviation can be tolerated. However "liberal" you will presume to be, you cannot make change without changing. "Stimulus," within the American frame of reference always means something like tax breaks. You do not understand the utter futility of the idea that only the private sector creates jobs. The private sector creates jobs when it is in their profitable best interest to do so. For that I can't blame them. So, to offer tax credits is meaningless. Employers will hire only if they need to, otherwise hiring more is old-fashioned "featherbedding." The government must be the employer of last resort. There are projects that private capital won't go into because they lack the profit profile. Those projects are uniquely the government's. You can offer all the tax credits you want, but as long as oil and coal remain cheaper, no one will build alternate energy sources. It is only one example of ventures where the costs are high and the profits are small. Only government can do it. The notion of "public enterprise" so horrifies you that you shrink away from anything that looks like "socialism." You are following the Bush policy of privatizing tens of thousands of jobs that should have been done by the military by giving them to private contractors.
I am beyond disappointed that the system cannot truly make any fundamental changes in the American mindset. You have flunked out on health care for all the reasons shown above.”
Perhaps I should have added that in Canada, despite protests to the contrary, we live in a liberal democracy. Government does not shy away from participation in enterprise. Our aerospace industry owes its success to government participation e.g. Bombardier, Pratt-Whitney. Our Finance Minister, as right-leaning as you can get, intrudes on the private sector by slowing down real estate speculation. Money is given directly to public enterprise like municipal transit systems. I could go on and on.
What makes Canada is great is that no government can spoil it, although Mike Harris tried his hardest in Ontario. We genuinely understand what government can do, should do, and must do. Americans simply don’t get it.
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