This is the beginning of the lead editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 01 May: “We need the [Kentucky] Derby to refresh our souls. Since the last Kentucky Derby, life has been hard: Unemployment has risen, government treasuries have emptied, the drumbeat of scandals has continued unabated, Tiger Woods has become human.”
Well…yes! Since the passing of the stimulus legislation in March 2009 that was supposed to save the country from bankruptcy and hold the unemployment level to 8%, times have been hard. The nation lives on money borrowed from all over the world, principally China, and unemployment stands near 10% (part-time census-taking thousands don’t count), so souls need refreshing, although a better idea might be the refreshing of the wallet.
The solons in Congress have managed to empty the government’s treasury and many state legislators are in their van, while the drumbeat of scandals all the way from being perpetrated by dogcatchers to senators continues apace. Actually, nothing new! While shepherding the health-care bill through the Senate last year, for instance, Senator Baucus also had to get his mistress settled and employed in Washington – more than a senator should have to face at one time.
But (gasp and five palpitations of the spleen) Tiger Woods has become human. This is a revelation accruing to a wisdom that boggles the mind and could come forth only from the editorial offices of the H-L, compared to which the Oracle at Delphi is kindergarten-level, i.e., IQ-less. Whereas the Tiger was once considered otherworldly and quite above the mere victim-hood of the masses, remarked as applying to most everyone virtually on a daily basis by the paper, he has now shown his true self and succumbed to – ALAS! – normalcy.
And how did that happen, you ask! To answer blatantly or bluntly might be so indelicate as to be unprintable, so one must dance around the particulars, lest political incorrectness or discrimination or bigotry or multiculturalism/diversity-insensitivity be charged. To put it nicely, the Tiger has discovered an addiction for the remedy of which he has sought and is still seeking therapy, the better perhaps to overcome the disease and once again rise above being merely human.
Magnanimously, he has done the nation a service by calling attention to this addiction, occasioned by too much sex (or the chasing/craving of it)…in other words, the Tiger is a sex-addict, placing him in a position of victim-hood not experienced (or enjoyed) by more than a few. Never mind that he would not have revealed this important malady if he hadn’t tried to drive his Cadillac through both a fire-hydrant and a tree, thus causing trauma to all three. Whether or not he was suffering from a nine-iron to the head by his wife at the time has not been established.
Of course, one is left to wonder exactly what the editorialist meant in ascribing to the Tiger the mundane circumstance of being merely human. Did he devolve into this condition because his addiction was so thoroughly “outed” by his accident, which occasioned femme-fatales from here and yon to crawl out of the woodwork and squeal about their all-expense-paid-and-then-some escapades with the Tiger, no matter how quirky? Don’t all males have those escapades, thus proving the Tiger to just be one of the boys…merely human?
Or…does the Tiger’s humanness accrue to his well-staged and now frequent apologies for being a bad boy, especially a bad boy who’s been caught? Or, has his humanness been proven beyond doubt by simply running a car into a fire-hydrant and tree while cold sober but apparently befogged? Don’t all humans ram their cars into things that go bump in the night at one time or another…proving they’re just human, after all?
Or, maybe the editorialist simply meant that the Tiger was reduced to being human because times have been hard since the last Kentucky Derby? Well…of course! This is from ESPN of last October: “Woods had earned $895 million going into 2009, according to Forbes.com. Adding the $10.5 million in prize money from this season, the FedEx bonus and more than $100 million in annual off-the-course earnings, Woods has topped the 10-figure mark.” Hard times will reduce a person to being…well, sometimes even less than human. Check out the nearest jail for some testimonies.
In the meantime, hopefully the Tiger will get a complete cure, assuming that there actually is such a thing as sex-addiction and that he actually wants to get rid of it. Stay tuned to the H-L for updates concerning information noting that the Tiger has overcome whatever has turned him into being human and therefore, by its renewed absence, transmogrifying him into his former state of being supernatural.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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