Saturday, January 2, 2010

Song Lyric of the Day (“Nine,” With Words for Mrs. Woods to Fling at Tiger)


“You grabbed for everything, my friend
But don't you see that in the end
There will be nothing left of me.”—“Take It All,” from the musical Nine, lyrics and music by Maury Weston, sung in the film by philandering director Guido’s wife Luisa (played by Marion Cotillard)

Over the last month, following his overnight SUV crash outside his home—and his admitted marital “transgressions”—many labels are being applied to Tiger Woods that had never occurred to anybody before this year, notably “lecher,” “cad,” and “dog.”

At minimum, the world’s greatest golfer has fallen to “the Hugh Grant syndrome” (i.e., tomcatting around with an inferior woman when his significant other, by universal agreement, is nothing to sneeze at). He might even be a sex addict, as none other than Dr. Drew has speculated.

All in all, the angry response of Luisa above to her husband’s adultery applies nicely here. No matter how much money Tiger makes on the tour now, the departure of his wife and children will leave him spiritually empty. Tiger, who goes crazy on the links when he hears the slightest interruption, is going to have to get used to some of the most ferocious insults ever to come an athlete’s way.

But it takes flights of fancy, hours of free-association on the psychiatrist’s couch—okay, lunacy—to liken the golfer to Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay in epitomizing this past decade’s hucksterism. For that, we have none other than New York Times columnist Frank Rich to thank. Surprise, surprise!

I am mildly amused by media outlets that add political and public-affairs coverage to the portfolio of staffers whose education and prior job experience have prepared them for everything but that: the likes of Mike Lupica, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh. Sure, the magic of the Internet has allowed anyone, no matter how limited their expertise, to comment on anything under the sun, and yes, this is, as they say, a free country. It’s just that you’d expect major organs of the mainstream media, when they’re under severe financial pressure, to think twice about throwing their money around so haphazardly.
Yet the Times has seen fit to give a large portion of its op-ed page to Rich, who had been previously known as a theater critic--perhaps believing, like James Carville, that politics is merely show business for ugly people.

I agree with most of the commentary related to Woods’ philandering. Wife Elin Nordegren (in the accompanying post) is certainly entitled to unleash her attorneys on her horndog hubby in divorce court (though first, given just how much he’s fooled around, she’ll probably want to go to a doctor—and drag him along—to make sure he hasn’t contracted a sexually transmitted disease). I daresay that if she ever shot him, the best prosecutors in the land might find it difficult to gain a guilty verdict from any jury with women on it. (You can almost hear the song from another Rob Marshall movie musical, Chicago: “They Had It Coming.”)

But Rich has gotten himself into a serious moral lather over Woods’ affair(s). Such high dudgeon is a real head-scratcher for longtime readers of his column, as he previously only concerned himself with matters of the flesh when miscreants in its thrall were hypocrites (i.e., conservatives and/or Republicans).

The op-ed columnist has long been tolerated by the Times because he serves red meat to its largely liberal-leaning readers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not on principle against roasting right-wingers myself (see this prior post on the GOP intransigence on health care). But unlike Rich, I like to vary my ideological diet. (Lunatics appear on both ends of the ideological fringe—and anyway, why unnecessarily narrow my targets or deprive myself of much-needed belly laughs, no matter their source?)

Moreover, if you’re going to wield the ideological cleaver, you’d better have your eye firmly on your quarry and not miss when you slash. Unfortunately, the former “Butcher of Broadway” doesn’t bring the same precision to this task as he did to dissecting high-priced musicals years ago.

All kinds of problems exist in this piece, starting with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Tiger Woods, Person of the Year.” (A play, of course, on Time Magazine’s venerable tradition.) David Quigg of the Huffington Post demolishes Rich’s argument until not a brick is standing, making the following points:

* In claiming that Tiger’s “con” might be “more typical of our time” than 9/11, Rich ignores the fact that the latter event is not “typical” (otherwise, why would the Times columnist be disputing the notion that it was “the day that changed everything”?). Like fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman (who suggested something similar in 2002), Rich is wedded to the bizarre and obscene notion that the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans are less crucial to an understanding of this past decade than business wrongdoing.

* Rich’s column assumes that Tiger became fabulously wealthy by being a family man. Nonsense—he did so, Quigg notes matter-of-factly and correctly, by being “really, really, really good at playing a game that lots of Americans spend lots of time, effort, and money striving to play even slightly well."

* Quigg has lots of fun with Rich’s superficial research into Accenture, one of Tiger’s corporate sponsors. The columnist merely quoted from the firm’s Web site when he could have found far more interesting facts on Wikipedia--a highly superficial (and sometimes suspect) source, for sure, but better than what he found. (I’ll go a step further: haven’t Rich and the Times editors heard of Nexis? And for all the effort the paper has made in securing research assistants for their columnists, couldn’t they at least have found one who found more material than a company Web site?)

For all his fine work in taking Rich down a peg or two, however, even Quigg missed some points. The main one is this: Tiger’s deceit, no matter how distasteful or despicable, was designed to fool one person only: his wife. Lay, Madoff, and their ilk concocted schemes to delude government regulators and fleece thousands of investors, many of whom lost their life savings. Tiger revealed nothing more than his own emotional bankruptcy; the financial scammers made millions of dollars disappear like smoke.

Let’s look at other figures—members of both political parties--who have committed marital transgressions. We’ll then judge if Tiger was guilty of the same kind of moral (or legal) outrageousness:

* Governor Mark Sanford went incommunicado for a South American jaunt to his "soul mate," leaving aides totally confused about how to reach him in case of an emergency in South Carolina. Did Tiger? No.
* Former Presidential candidate John Edwards had an affair behind the back of a wife who had just experienced a cancer scare. Did Tiger? No.

* Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told his wife—still in the hospital recovering from a cancer operation, mind you—that he was leaving her for another woman. Did Tiger? No.

* Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy tried to appoint his male lover--a man with minimal, if any, qualifications--to the highest national-security post in the state after 9/11. When the news broke, he told his wife Dina that at the mortifying press conference they were about to endure, she'd have to put on a stoic face, "like Jackie Kennedy." Did Tiger? No.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger, while still a movie star, became what Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau termed “the Gropenator” by fondling underlings on film sets, enjoying the fact that Hollywood’s #1 box-office draw of the time could get anyone fired who objected. Did Tiger do this? No.
* Eliot Spitzer, only months after signing into law some of the nation’s most stringent penalties against johns, himself patronized high-priced call girls. Did Tiger do so while governing a state? No.
* Nev. Senator John Ensign not only had an affair with the wife of an aide, but had his parents pay off the aide and violated lobbying laws by meeting with the cuckolded employee’s new clients. Did Tiger do this? No.
* Bill Clinton hit on an employee while he was in the White House. Has Tiger hit on an employee? No.

* Senator Edward Kennedy had a young woman die in his car when it drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick. Has Tiger had anyone die under such unusual circumstances? No.

It takes a mind such as Rich’s—i.e., one used to cheap moral equivalence—to equate Woods’ real, repeated sins against his wife with the gigantic wrongdoing that ruined philanthropic activities supported by Madoff, let alone the violations of public and/or private trusts represented by the above figures.

The only action that Woods could have perpetrated that might have begun to rise to the level suggested by Rich would be if the golfer used steroids. That would have involved cheating everyone competing with him on the tour, as well as all the professional golfers who preceded him whose records would have fallen by the wayside as a result. And even that would not have the sheer ripple effect created by fraud in a huge public company. And so far, nobody has come forward to accuse him of such use.

Tiger can be blamed for much, but—unless he decides to press charges against his estranged wife for assaulting him (which doesn’t look likely at this juncture)—his wrongdoing involves nothing more than the problems of two people in (or out) of love. His infidelities do nothing to rob Rich, you, me, or anyone else of our hard-earned money. To claim otherwise makes a travesty of a newspaper that has long claimed to stand for the finest in American journalism.


Like Nine's Guido, Tiger has tried to take it all, but now he's paying the price. Frank Rich has tried to claim it all, and continued columns like this will make him pay a price, too: becoming the laughingstock of the Paper of Record's op-ed pages.