The PGA (Please Get Appealing!) Championship

GM,

As I was walking into work this morning, I passed a gentleman, Joe, who rents some office space from my boss. We generally exchange pleasantries every morning, but this morning--perhaps because my boss is out of town--he asked me how I was enjoying the job. "Well, it's not really what I was looking for," I answered, "but I think I've accomplished enough to impress somebody else one day." He responded to me with the typical "You're gonna be fine," adding that I was a "self-starter." Allow me to reiterate that he doesn't know me too well. But the term "self-starter"--which I think may have won the 2008 Business Cliche of the Year award--served to remind me that the PGA Championship began today. Thanks, Joe.

As I usually do before a golf major, I got to thinking about what I wanted to see this weekend. Do I want to see Tiger and Phil in contention on Sunday? How about an unknown take a three-round lead but with several established, better players nipping at his heals? What about a Sergio Garcia choke job? Do I want John Daly's game and wardrobe to be embarrassing? Would it be fun if we had a streaker? To these, I answer, "Yes, yes, yes, YES, and HELL YES!" Let's face it: Golf is inherently boring, and if it weren't for the fact that these guys look a lot like we do and seem to have real human emotions despite their cushy lives, we would lose interest in a hurry. This is coming from a guy who either wakes up or stays up to watch the British Open's early rounds! The amount of analysis that has surrounded Tiger's fist pumps would be unimaginable in any other sport. In fact, the Tiger fist pump and the Phil head-nod-with-smile-accompaniment have become the gold and silver standards of giving the fans what they want! The Padraig fist pump, as displayed at last year's PGA Championship, is neither. After that maneuver, he only could have redeemed himself by breaking into a river dance from his native land.

Four majors in a year is the perfect number. Any fewer, I wouldn't get my fill. Any more, we'd start to catch on that the so-called stories that shape every event are just worn-out plots from events past. I'm still a huge sucker for it, though.

-JW

JW,

Like you, I really like the majors set-up in professional golf, possibly the fan-friendliest of all sports structures. Everyone agrees to care about these four events and only these four; all the players try their hardest; and the television networks air even the early rounds. Personally, I've added the Players' Championship and the FedEx Cup events to my diet, but I fully support the golf fan who watches only the big four.

What I can't abide, however, is the guy who's a fan not of golf but of Tiger Woods. You know the type: He tunes in on Sunday just long enough to check the leaderboard. If it's Tiger-free, he's out of there faster than Steve Williams can assault a fan. The attraction to Woods is easily explained, of course. Like Barack Obama, Tiger is the perfect specimen for 21st century America: He wins a lot, he makes his opponents look like buffoons, and he's not white. Sure, he's a petulant, joyless crybaby, but he's the greatest golfer ever! We get to tell our grandchildren that we [slept through] him in his prime!

All that said, he's clearly going to win this championship, and I don't see it being particularly close. As I write this, he's a stroke ahead of the field and on the fairway at his eighteenth. Furthermore, he's playing at Hazeltine, a terrible major course whose obsessive, ridiculous length (7,674 yards) has the dual effect of eliminating all but about ten guys from the field and not challenging Tiger at all. I put him at 15-under for the championship--a winner by six strokes.

Of course, the argument can be made that Tiger's the only thing keeping golf in business. Ratings are terrible when he's not playing, and in many ways he really is bigger than the game. Given golf's other obstacles--Hugo Chavez recently denounced it as "a bourgeois sport"; Barack Obama can't be far behind--perhaps we should be grateful that someone's keeping the Lucas Glovers of the world from ruining more than one major per season. I just wish it were someone a little more likable, a little less of a jerk. Let's be honest. I wish it were Colin Montgomerie.

-GM

The Preseason of Our Discontent

JW,

With Summer 2009 stretching into its eighth month, the sports world has grown desperate. Tennis and golf are sporadic at best, basketball's in hibernation, and baseball couldn't matter less if the games were played by nine-year-old girls. As you can imagine, ESPN's attempts to fill up its programming schedule have not fared well. Baseball Tonight spent forty-five seconds describing Lou Piniella's nose hairs last week, and I caught a 2006 World Series of Poker episode on Classic the other night . . . and it wasn't the main event! Let's face it: If it weren't for the PGA Championship this weekend, I'd be seriously considering doing myself harm.

You can imagine my pleasure, then, when I flipped through my guide on Sunday and came across the Hall of Fame Game, the first sign that football season is upon us and we can finally stop talking about politics. The Titans were decked out in their old Houston Oilers jerseys. The Bills were wearing giant Canadian flags. Whistles were blowing, fans were cheering, and a grand time was had by all.

Until the second quarter, that is.

Look, it's a familiar problem that the NFL in August is nothing but a tease. We get fifteen minutes of the real guys followed by forty-five minutes with scrubs who aren't worthy to serve on Vince Young suicide watch. We get more shots of the sidelines than the field. Come to think of it, watching preseason football is a bit like getting a boyfriend in prison. You're scratching an itch, yes, but you don't feel good about it.

So what can be done to fix these endless months of summer? Seriously, what? Other than turning off the television, I'm drawing a blank.

-GM

GM,

The only reason those guys aren't worthy to serve on Vince Young suicide watch is because they're all a threat to pass him on the depth chart, and that would just be counterproductive. Is it possible that Young's comment about making the Hall of Fame sprung from some sort of confusion about playing in the HOF Game? I was actually waiting for an "I told you so" after the game. Enough with the silliness; I'll do my best to answer your question about how to fill the time--not necessarily productively. Here are my suggestions in reverse order of when I actually tried them out:

2009: Gamble a lot. I just deposited enough money into a poker site that I'll have to play three million hands to earn my 100-percent deposit bonus. I'll also be keeping an eye out for intriguing futures bets, like over-under win totals (my specialty).

2006-2009: Follow the Brett Favre retirement decision, particularly by watching ESPN2's First Take, which makes for amazing television if you're familiar enough with TV to laugh when it's horrible.

2008: Set a physical goal and stick to it. I ran almost every day last July, curiously drawing a multitude of honks from black men.

2007: Work in minor league baseball. You will want to kill yourself by May, but you won't notice the difference in the dead months.

2004: Apply hours upon hours to fantasy football research. That year, I actually researched my stats and formulated player rankings weeks before Yahoo! released its! I probably spent 70 hours (mostly at work) preparing for our draft. Result: taking Kevin Barlow with my second pick and being eliminated from playoff contention by Week 9.

1995: Take a vacation. This is the last summer vacation I recall taking in my life. Years of extreme poverty (at least for someone born to the American upper-middle class) has made the idea of vacationing unrealistic. Even back then, I wouldn't recommend doing what I did, though, which was taking the trip with my family.

-JW

A Conflict of "Interests"

JW,

As you know, there are two types of voters in this country. The first is grounded in a defined political philosophy and votes according to how closely a particular candidate matches it. The second type, a stupider segment of the population, is carried on the wind, led to the polls by media-driven caricatures and slogans. These are the people for whom political advertising is constructed and for whose sake political narratives ("First Black President!") are finely tuned.

Sadly, it's this second group that decides most elections. Vaguely convinced of one thing or another, these voters are little more than the sum of their television watching. Infinitely credulous, they're infinitely malleable, and it's because of them that media bias is not just a curiosity but a legitimate political concern.

Enter the Associated Press, which over the weekend submitted a doozie so bold-faced, I almost wonder if it's a misprint. Recent cooperation between drugmakers and the White House, the AP writes, is "a somewhat surprising political alliance, given the drug industry's recent history of siding with Republicans and the Democrats' disdain for special interests."

Really? Don't make me laugh.

I mean, seriously. Democrats dislike special interests about as much as Wilt Chamberlain dislikes p---y. About as much as Bill Clinton dislikes Lane Bryant models. Yet the Associated Press seems never to have heard of such Democrat-friendly special interest groups as trial lawyers, the teachers' unions, or the UAW. They've never heard of the United Mine Workers or the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Hell, they've never heard of black people!

After all, what's a special interest but a minority group that votes as one? Come to think of it, what isn't a special interest? Pharmaceutical companies have long been recognized (and belittled) as such, but what about the AFL-CIO, a body whose entire membership is only 11 million, less than 4 percent of the population. Certainly their political contributions and prowess are as significant as PhRMA's. At what population threshold do you leave your specialness behind?

Regardless, the problem is not in the definition of terms but in their demonization. Even as we speak, some fool has wandered onto MSN.com and is now internalizing the completely fraudulent claim that Democrats [good] dislike special interests [bad]. Will he stop to consider what any of those words mean? I don't know about you, but I seriously doubt it.

-GM

GM,

Yes, Wilt "The Stilt" sure did like to "party," although rumor has it that the number he attended was greatly exaggerated. I actually collected paychecks from the Associated Press at one point in my life. Fortunately, as a sports stringer, I didn't really get a political sense one way or the other. Naturally, though, we may assume that America's leading wire service, the source from which all those liberal media outlets get their "information," is at least a tad left of center. "Information" gets quotation marks because it is factual by definition. But tack on a convenient little phrase like "given . . . the democrats' disdain for special interests" to the end of a factual sentence--which, by the way, is not part of a commentary piece--and you have people, well, accepting it as a given. Does the article go on to justify such an intriguing generalization with examples as strict journalism suggests? Not at all; the "take our word for it" approach is much easier.

I'm not saying that the unnamed author of the story had any intention to manipulate the "stupider segment of the population," as you so callously called them. He may have a liberal bias that he can't completely shake when writing a story, meaning he never thought that there could be an argument against his claim. He may even be conservative or moderate and have just messed up. I'm even willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. However, the mere fact that we can legitimately speculate that he may have had an agenda is a shame unto itself.

Take it from a former journalist; there's an old saying in news: "We don't tell people what to think, just what to think about." As I said, it's an old saying. We now know that some prominent members of the American media want us not just to view certain issues, but to view certain issues in certain ways. I have a few favorite things in life: friends, sports, ice cream, and the First Ammendment. The first three are in good hands, but the people with whom we've left the most responsibility for the fourth aren't all fulfilling their duties. I'm not talking about Jon Stewart; I'm talking about writers and reporters who make an effort to appear as moderate as possible while subtly making one side look more appealing.

I once heard this statistic at the end of an otherwise well-balanced national news piece on the Boy Scouts/public funding issue: "Studies show that molestation of young males is three times more likely to be committed by a man who purports to be straight."

What they wanted you to believe: Straight men are three times more likely to molest young boys. (Provably, through mathematics, this is false.)

What this actually shows if you think about it: Gay men, who make up 10 percent of the male population at most, are committing 25 percent of the molestations of young boys! (Provably, through mathematics, this is true.)

NOTE: This entry is not intended to be anti-homosexual, as I have no political opinion about sexual orientation, nor should any employer or university, which is why the idea of making a protected class out of bedroom habits is quite non-progressive in actuality. Another topic for another day, I suppose.

-JW

Technology: Fattening Us for the Slaughter

JW,

To see yet another reason why the terrorists hate us, spend an afternoon jogging the trails alongside the river where I live. In addition to the staggering obesity, the lack of basic movement skills, and the tendency of middle-aged men to go shirtless (while walking), you're likely to encounter a new kind of American parent: the To-Hell-With-Conventional-Wisdom-My-Kid-Will-Only-Shut-Up-When-He's-Watching-Television guy. This new breed, buoyed by technological advances that will soon have flatscreens on plies of toilet paper, has pretty much given up on interaction. Reading with their children? Not bloody likely! Helping with homework? I think not. Attaching a television monitor and earphones to their six-year-old's stroller so he'll be quiet long enough for Mom and Dad to squeeze in a walk? Hell yes!

I'm bringing this up, by the way, because it's a great example of a sub-law of the Law of Unintended Consequences--the Law That Each New Convenience Makes Us Slightly Stupider. Consider, for example, the Internet, which, according to studies, is already shaping [read: erasing] the human capacity for memory. Or the GPS device, whose achievements include leading an overconfident driver into a lake, guiding a demolition crew to the wrong house, and directing drivers to turn onto train tracks. Ten years from now, when the television-in-the-stroller generation heads to the workforce, we can pretty much forget about an honest day's work. They literally won't have the capacity to think.

What they will have, however, is the perfect set of skills to vote Democratic: sloth, an overreliance on media (or the media), and an inability to imagine themselves in any but their current circumstances. Just as the almost total domestication of this country--the end of "westering," as Steinbeck called it--took our sense of adventure, just as the welfare state took our self-sufficiency, so our obsession with glowing rectangles will take our intellects. At the rate they're going, the next generation will be even lazier and stupider than ours. And friend, that's saying something.

-GM

GM,

I've always thought that many companies need to hire contract workers for oversight rather than actually having a department for it. Why? Because the stupidity that is built in to some of the world's most amazing technology can only be explained by employees' inability to take an outsider's perspective. Take, for instance, the Garmin GPS that my company provides for me when I'm on the road. It's a true delight roughly 60 percent of the time. The other 40 percent of the time I need it, it can't pick up a satellite signal because of clouds, can't find a business or the address it's been located at for 20 years, leads me to a vacant lot about a mile away from my true desination, or tells me to turn right on "Hamric Doctor."

Think about all that goes into the production of a high-end (Garmin is supposedly one of the best brands) GPS. The technology is beyond my imagination. Garmin spent $206 million on research and development last year. The least they've ever spent in a year is $64 million in 2004. Apparently, though, in whatever year they made mine, their research fell just short of discovering that "Dr," in English-speaking countries with roads, is short for "Drive." Should I remind you this is a GPS--a device whose sole function is to guide people along roads?! Yet somehow no one caught the mistake. You should watch the movie Idiocracy. On second thought, it was dreadful, but it had a novel concept, one I've often envisioned. The world becomes amazingly stupid and ignorant because all the brilliant technology leads to a complete lack of mental activity. Again, don't watch it, please--unless you think Luke Wilson and Dax Shepard can make you laugh while actually trying to do so.

-JW

Our Poor Health

GM,

I want to know your thoughts on health care. Obviously, I expect them to fall into the conservative camp, but an experience from yesterday has left me thinking that we could use just a little reform. My health insurance, which I'm completely paying for on my own, is terrible. It's beyond terrible. If I even call a doctor's office, I have a $400 co-pay, and they actually come cut off my arm if I need any non-generic drugs. So I have this cyst on the back of my neck that goes away for more than a year if I just take one sample pack of a common antibiotic. More than a year! I know the drug I want and the dosage, which wouldn't even be enough to harm a gerbil, much less distribute. I've been prescribed it twice--at times when I had decent insurance. Of course, under our system, I must go see a doctor, have him tell me what I already know, and prescribe me a drug for which there is no generic, which means my insurance won't pay for it...

OR...

I could visit one of the dozens of semi-reputable online pharmacies that operate out of India and have help centers set up in the Caribbean, resulting in an 83-percent discount. According to a few hours of research, the legal lines here are blurred. The drug I need is not a controlled substance, so it's completely legal for me to possess even without a prescription. Essentially, I may be aiding in the illegal process of shipping prescription drugs into the U.S., but consumers don't get prosecuted for that unless the amount indicates intention to distribute. This is how many senior citizens get their medicine. An extensive conversation with Victor, one of the online chat guys for the site I went to, gave me little faith that I could fully trust these people. To be honest, though, part of me wants to go this route just so the greedy doctors and drug manufacturers don't win! That sounds liberal, doesn't it?

-JW

JW,

Very. Like cynical and unilateral, "greedy" is one of those words that liberals throw at conservatives from time to time because they've been instructed by focus groups to do so. It's a meaningless slur, a wholly political attack whose power derives from class resentments and the electorate's incomplete grasp of the English language.

After all, what does "greedy" really mean in this case? Desiring profit? Unwilling to be socialized? You're a free market guy, right? Why is it wrong for doctors and drug companies to charge whatever the market will bear for their services? Unless you're ready to suggest that healthcare is somehow different from other economic products, you can't get mad at those who get rich providing it. And once you do make that suggestion . . . well, you've just let go of your last, best reason why healthcare shouldn't be socialized. Simply put, it's a human right or it's not.

All this is not to say that the current system works, of course, and your dilemma illustrates its flaws. As it stands, the medical industry charges what it likes, while the government (in the name of a ridiculous, counter-productive "war" on drugs) criminalizes the act of going outside the system. It's a legal monopoly--an artificial tariff--and its construction is due to that most basic of liberal assumptions: In the end, our lives are in their hands. The government doesn't have the stomach to watch us die from our own stupidity, so they must protect us from it.

Undergirding the healthcare debate is a truth that governs all life on this planet: The quality of _____ is directly proportional to its cost. Socialize medicine and doctors will make less. Pay doctors less and fewer people will submit to the time and expense of becoming one. Lower standards to increase enrollment and stupider people will become doctors. For every action a reaction.

Frankly, I'm tempted by the solution lingering at the extreme flank of Libertarianism. Unhinge medicine from government totally. Throw out the "D" in FDA; get rid of all licensing oversight. You say you're a doctor? Fine. Kill a few folks and prices will fall. Cure a few and they'll rise. It's unthinkable, I know, but it wasn't too long ago that the same could be said of much of today's "progress."

-GM