Not Playing by the Rules

 

Published: December 5, 2009

Tiger Woods is hardly the first golfer to find himself in an uncomfortable spotlight. John Daly has been suspended so often and has struggled so publicly with drinking and gambling that it’s scarcely news anymore. Fuzzy Zoeller, to take an example closer to home, got himself in hot water by making what seemed to be a racist joke as Woods was winning his first Masters in 1997.

Nor, despite its current squeaky-clean, country club image, is professional golf itself above reproach. For an unconscionably long time, it excluded black players. And we don’t know half of what went on in the ’30s and ’40s, when the pro tour was a barnstorming road show, except that nobody was shy about taking a drink and golfers made more from betting than they did in purses.

In those days, though, journalists, and sports journalists especially, tended to protect those they wrote about. Woods has had the misfortune to come of age at a time when the public appetite for details about the private lives of celebrities is apparently insatiable. Had any other resident of Windermere, Fla., crashed his sport utility vehicle into a fire hydrant at 2:25 a.m., it wouldn’t have merited more than a line or two in the local weekly, and maybe a joke about whether the golf club used to smash the back window was a 5-iron or a pitching wedge.

But because Woods was behind the wheel, the incident became worldwide news, and a few tabloid rumors gave rise to such a plague of Internet gossip-mongering that it’s hard not to sympathize with his plea for privacy. Yet, as so many have pointed out, Woods has become a public figure not just in the way that most great athletes are public figures, but also in a way probably unparalleled in the history of publicity itself. He has made far more money from selling himself, or his image, than he has made from playing tournaments. That image, partly genuine and partly sculptured, has been one of decency, modesty, filial devotion and paternal responsibility, and not of mysterious car crashes and evasive explanations.

It also matters to the image that Woods is a golfer and not, say, a football player. N.F.L. players get into these kinds of scrapes all the time and we hardly notice, while pro golfers, to be honest, sometimes seem straight-arrow to the point of blandness. But golf, unlike just about any other sport, is built on honesty and integrity. It’s the only one whose players are expected to call penalties on themselves and whose rules, rather than being something to be worked around, are accorded a kind of Talmudic reverence. When a golfer’s ball moves while he’s trying to hack it out of the rough, he doesn’t privately acknowledge and regret the mishap and move on; he announces it to his opponent. When he whiffs, he doesn’t look around to see if anyone noticed before marking his card appropriately.

Golf is not life, though it sometimes resembles life in its unpredictability and bad bounces. It actually holds participants to a higher standard than life does, penalizing them for infractions that would readily be forgiven in most social transactions, like accidentally signing the wrong scorecard. That’s why golf is one of the rare games that really do build character, or at least reveal it. And it’s why Woods’s behavior, to golf fans, anyway, has been so disappointing. We hold him — or held him — to a higher standard.

At this point, do we really want a detailed laundry list of what he called “transgressions,” whatever they may be? Probably not. But he has yet to offer a convincing account of what really happened in the early morning of Nov. 27. The scorecard is still muddled. Had he owned up then, he might have saved himself a lot of misery, and the rest of us would have had to find something more elevated to talk about.

None of this, let’s hope, will affect his play on the course whenever he tees up next. He will almost certainly remain one of the most thrilling athletes ever. But watching him won’t be quite the same, either. It turns out that the principles of golf, if not the game itself, are so hard, so exacting, that even Tiger Woods can’t live up to them.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Addicted to Nonsense by Chris Hedges

as posted on TruthDig Nov 30, 2009

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility. We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn’t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it. Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness. Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as “The Hills,” “Gossip Girl,” “Sex and the City,” “My Super Sweet 16” and “The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).”

The American oligarchy—1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined—are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions. They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts. They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

 

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television’s gated community. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation. It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age. 

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Heaven & Hell

I just read another wonderful metaphor from Mitch Albom’s “have a little faith”.

The difference between heaven & hell:

One day a man was shown heaven and hell.

In hell, people sat around a banquet table, full of exquisite meats and delicacies. But their arms were locked in front of them, unable to partake for eternity.

“This is terrible,” the man said. “Show me heaven.”

He was taken to another room, which looked remarkably the same. Another banquet table, more meats and delicacies. The souls there also had their arms out in front of them.

The difference was, they were feeding each other. 

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

What is real “Success”?

Real Success is God measuring you against you.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

A Fool’s Errand & The definition of Insanity

What does a Fool’s Errand & the definition of insanity have in common?  It can be argued they are one and the same.

A Fools’ Errand: “A fruitless mission or undertaking”

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over but each time hoping for a different result.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

What is Faith?

Faith is the rope we use to pull us up the mountainous climb of life.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

A baby’s fist and an old person’s open hand.

I am enjoying reading Mitch Albom’s “Have A Little Faith”.  There is a moment in the story while visiting his rabbi in the hospital they begin to discuss the meaning of happiness.  When they hear an infant scream the Reb (rabbi) shares a story.

“Now that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right?  Like this?  He made a fist.

Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything to say, “The whole world is mine.”

“But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”  What lesson?

As he stretched open his empty fingers.

“We can take nothing with us.”

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

The only thing in Life that makes sense is “nothing makes sense”!

I’ve been trying to understand some of the principles of life and how they relate to human beings.  I find it difficult to grasp the concept that most people are not reasonable when it comes to accepting other people’s ideas.  It seems that the “truth”  is irrelevant to a person’s conviction even when clearly the facts show otherwise.  The following story of Galileo from Bill Bennett’s “The Moral Compass” demonstrates this point.

In Italy some four hundred years ago there lived a young man named Galileo Galilei.  He possessed an intensely inquiring spiritthat is to say, he was the kind of man who makes a point of seeing whatever he looks at, thinking about it afterward, and asking the question: “Why?” He started out as a student of medicine, but soon gave up that plan to spend time on what he really loved-physics and mathematics. He turned his whole mind to the pursuit, and by the time he was twenty-six years old, he became a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa.

In those times, most people accepted without question the theories and statements inherited from the great thinkers of past ages. It did not enter their minds to test the truth ofthese statements for themselves. They regarded Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, as the greatest of all authorities. “The master hath said it” was the motto in Galileo’s day. Scholars committed Aristotle’s doctrines to memory; doubting them was considered an act of blasphemy, if not a crime. Students were actually fined for disagreeing with the opinions of the ancients.

Now, one of the statements of Aristotle was this: The speed at which an object falls to earth depends upon its weight. A ten-pound weight, for example, will fall ten times faster than a one-pound weight.

But Galileo had noticed different objects falling to the ground, and he thought differently. He made a few experiments, and satisfied himself.

“Aristotle was wrong,” he announced. “Weight has nothing to do with how fast objects fall. It is the resistance of air which affects the rate of the descent. As long as two objects can overcome the resistance of the air to the same extent, they will reach the ground at the same time, no matter how much they weigh. A heavy stone and a light stone will fall at exactly the same rate of speed.”

The other professors at the university were shocked and angry. They declared that of course Aristotle had been right and that Galileo was making a fool of himself. He should be quiet and stop bothering them with his silly notions, if he wanted to keep his job.

“All right,” said Galileo. “We’ll have a little test-my theo!) against Aristotle’s. If I’m wrong, I’ll be quiet. Meet me at the tower.”

The bell tower in Pisa is known the world over, of course, as the Leaning Tower, because it stands at an angle and looks as though it might topple to the ground at any time. Construction of the tower had begun in 1174; by the time the builders reached the third story, one side was sinking into the soft ground. They tried to compensate by making the remaining floors taller on the leanmg side, but the settling continued. When it was finished, the 179-foot tower leaned so much that any object dropped from the top story on the lower side would land some fifteen or twenty feet from the building’s base.

Up climbed Galileo. A crowd of scholars, students, and interested townspeople gathered on the lawn below. With every step, he could hear their snickers and jeers.

At the top, on the uppermost gallery, he placed two iron balls. One weighed ten pounds. The other weighed just one. And the question to be answered was this: When Galileo pushed them off, at exactly the same instant, would the heavier ball hit the ground first, as Aristotle had maintained, or … ?

Balancing the weights carefully on the balcony, Galileo rolled them over together.From far below, the breathless crowd saw the two balls plunge over the edge. They came hurtling straight down. They fell at first side by side, then-side by side-and then finally-There was a tremendous thud. One single thud. They had struck the ground together. Galileo was right and Aristotle wrong.

Even then, some who had seen would not believe their own eyes. It is very difficult to let go of old ideas, especially ones that have persisted for centuries. Some of the professors made all sorts of excuses and continued to insist that Aristotle was correct. After all, if they were to admit that Galileo was right, how many more of the great Aristotle’s principles might also be wrong? It was better, they thought, to silence this troublemaker. They booed and hissed Galileo at his lectures, and made his life as miserable as they could.

But Galileo was not one to be browbeaten. He said goodbye to Pisa, and took a job teaching at the University of Padua, where thoughts were given a bit more freedom. There he went on searching, questioning, and discovering, and showing the world what can be done when someone dares to think for himself.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

When it comes to “change,” Americans love the noun, hate the verb.

How we respond to change will determine whether we grow  or experience grief.

If we embrace change we will enjoy the growth as a result.  If we resist change, then we will experience grief.

Our choice!!!

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

What is the purpose of all the Sh.t Sandwiches in Life?

Have you ever considered the “shit sandwiches” of life are the breakfast of champions?

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment