Sunday, December 20, 2009

Get off Tiger Woods' case

Can I blow a whistle and throw a red flag?

The penalty is “piling on” and I want to enforce a “shut the hell up penalty.”

Tiger Woods is a very good golfer (I am told by some that he is the best there ever was). He plays golf in public, earns a lot of money and leads the lifestyle of a millionaire. None of that gives me—or anyone else for that matter—the right to know every intimate detail of his life. I don’t care if he has dozens of mistresses (God knows he can afford them), I don’t even care if he likes whips and chains or horses.

I really liked it better in the days of Camelot when JFK was cheating on the woman every young man in America would have given any body part of your choice to spend just one night with her. We all kind of knew about the president and Marilyn Monroe and it was great sport to see the news reports of Marilyn in that slinky gold gown singing, “Ha------py, Birth------day, Mister Pres-------i----------dent.” He was good looking, had enough money to buy the presidency and was an unofficial member of the Las Vegas Rat Pack. The Secret Service was a-political in those days and just let things happen. Privacy was expected.

This voyeuristic way of life began with Ken Star investigating a blow job in the oval office, for which we—the taxpayer—paid $40 million. And what did we—the taxpayer—get for the investment? Not a damned thing. President Clinton was charged (the official term is impeached) by the House of Representatives with “lying to congress.” The Senate did not convict him.

The other thing that added to this explosion of voyeurism is the endless news cycle where they have got to find enough “news” to keep those crawls going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days per year. There ain’t enuf real news to do that so the TV talking heads revert to gossip, innuendo and planted stories.

OK, Tiger Woods got some strange. That’s the news. How he resolves issues with his wife and others is none of our frigging business. Tell us when Nike cancels his contract or something newsworthy happens. Do not parade a boatload of tall blond floozies looking for their 15 minutes in front of me for hours and repeatedly.
We’ve had morality police forever. When the morality police gain control we have excesses—just ask the thousands of “heretics” who were burned at the stake by the good old Spanish Inquisition. Our modern morality police are the Talaban. Is that really the direction in which we want to be moving?

Why don’t we all just mind our own damned business and get off Tiger Woods case. Let him resolve his family issues and get back to entertaining us on the golf course. And if after the game he decides to pick up a little strange, that is his business. It isn’t illegal and morality is something that is best left to the individual. I think it is what they call freedom.