the enemy of my enemy is a hypocrite
more thoughts on the politics of golf, but also a show I enjoy
“Everybody has problems,” says the Elizabeth Jennings to her husband and colleague Philip during a mission to the American heartland. Philip has begun to doubt himself and the mission comprising the first three episodes of The Americans’ fifth season, a problem I’ve immediately dubbed as the Everybody Has Problems season.
The Americans’ fifth season is (so far) driven by a suspected United States plot to wipe out the entire Soviet wheat crop for 1984. Philip and Elizabeth, meanwhile, are burnt out by their work and by their family, which are colliding with increasing frequency. They hesitate before the assignment of this new task, because they are more and more scared of the possibility that their daughter Paige might tell the wrong person about her parents’ decades-long masquerade within suburban American life.
I know little about the Cold War and even less about the life and death of the Soviet Union. I don’t expect The Americans to teach me much about it in the long run: it’s a drama and a character study before it’s even a Cold War thriller, and one thing it’s certainly not is factual or even docudrama. I try as much as I can to resist planning out my media diet, and there’s certainly no planning across forms. But I’m like halfway through Orwell’s Roses, which has focused on the Soviet Union more in recent readings (currently more so even than Orwell himself) and it has clarified a block of confusion I’ve had for years about World War II, Stalin, and the way the USSR is clarified to students that pretends to be all for free speech but really has no interest in the slightest possibility that any student might actually learn what communism means.
The way that leftist thought and ideology has become palatable and even commonplace within American political rhetoric is as a diametric alternative to capitalism, or at least to the ways in which the extremely wealthy continue to separate themselves from the masses beneath them. But Rebecca Solnit suggests in Orwell’s Roses that the picture Stalin paints of a common struggle is not far from the bootstrapping individualist propaganda that generations of Americans have taken in as a distraction from the possibility of building solidarity or actually processing the systemic misgivings or atrocities committed seemingly every day at this point. Within Solnit's text is a lesson that I needed, because I don’t know where else I might have found it: that the ideology is not the bit that matters. It’s the inequality that festers from it regardless. The post-Lenin Soviets were forcing the majority of the population into desolate hunger in the name of the country, and American politicians and suits are doing the same thing now in the name of profit. It’s the same shit with a different name and (ostensibly, maybe) different priorities.
Hiding from objectivity like this enables people to tell stories about themselves that are simply not true. I remember very little about what I learned in high school and that’s probably for the best, but I think a Cold War lesson could have probably been taught in one day because the gist of it is that it was a giant dick-swinging contest between some of the biggest egos in history who could not bring themselves to admit that not only might there be more than one way to try to run a country. Crucially, also, the Cold War must have exposed to anyone looking that whenever power is at stake at the foundational level of that design, it is going to have fundamental flaws regardless of its supposed innate superiority.
I think this might be running the risk so far of having that very fake-profound feeling to it, but I’m noticing this oppositional hypocrisy more and more, even just in the small pockets of the world I pay a lot of attention to.
So much of LIV golf’s recruitment summer last year was defined by who was willing to reach a number they were willing to deal with the consequences for, particularly being outed as a hypocrite in public. In one of the definitive pieces of LIV coverage, The New Yorker’s Zach Helfand spoke to golfers and caddies and agents who made clear what many already knew: almost everyone who was talking shit about LIV and its ambitions and its origins were still trying to raise that number in private. But golf’s hypocrisy runs deeper than a rift between billion-dollar leagues: when Helfand went to the Tour Championship, the final event of the PGA Tour season, last August, he spoke to the CEO of Southern Company, a gas and electric provider in the midwestern and southern US which has been one of the sponsors of the tournament since 2016, and before each year’s tournament, the presenter of the Payne Stewart Award each year to a golfer -- usually past their playing prime -- who best exemplifies the values of charity, character, and sportsmanship.
The CEO, Tom Fanning, spoke to the usual values of golf as a gentleman’s game and his doubts that LIV has any interest in sharing the values which Southern Company and the PGA Tour cherish so desperately. But it really has nothing to do with values, because the partnership Southern Company shares with the Tour is fundamentally just a marketing partnership. You can talk all you want about how you see eye to eye with the PGA Tour and not LIV -- let’s ignore the similarities between Southern Company’s repeated efforts to deny climate change and LIV’s source of funding -- but ultimately the white, gentlemanly acceptability of golf is in and of itself a perfect vessel for marketing. The proud partnerships go down easier because of their old-fashioned goodwill. LIV might have spiked golf’s bourbon, but it’s not the bourbon itself. It just tastes worse now because you’re so used to the old stuff.
The annual PGA Show happened last week in Orlando: it’s pretty much the ultimate golf convention, where anyone working in the industry or who plays golf can check out new equipment and gear and apparel and anything else new in the world of golf in 2023. The demo days held at the 360-degree driving range of the nearby Orange County National golf course are probably the best-known piece of the puzzle, because it’s where golfers can try the new clubs for the 2023 season and compare clubs from different manufacturers.
Later this year, LIV Golf is going to put on a tournament at Orange County National’s Crooked Cat course as a part of its expanded 2023 schedule. LIV can set up tournaments wherever it wants; I’m not saying these fighting tours need to have pissing matches to mark their property for where one can play and where the other can’t. In fact, the PGA isn’t even really the one fighting LIV. The PGA Tour is a totally separate thing, as has been well-documented throughout the LIV takeoff. But if you’ll pardon the stretch of my own logic, I think the fact that Orange County National is hosting events run both by the PGA as well as LIV is another emblem of this kind of hypocrisy. All the warring in the battlefield of public opinion is performative, but when the rubber hits the road and there’s not only millions of dollars but also continuity at stake, maybe these established bodies -- regardless of the changes they might be willing to make in the fact of irrational adversaries with a ton of bullshit at their disposal -- aren’t actually so interested in doing the right thing.
I get weird looks when I say that the only difference between high-level Democrats and Republicans in this country is that the Republicans have the benefit of apathy on their side. They know they’re evil and they don’t have to care about that. The Democrats need to appear as if they’re pushing back, and I know plenty of lower-level Dems are genuinely are trying to fight the conservative swing of so much of the US but still, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between them and the figureheads who are simply paying lip service to voters who have no other choice. And that’s a point we’re reaching in our entertainment choices as well, particularly sports. What reason is there to have an actual moral code when you can just act like it and continue participating in a monopoly? I don’t know what choice we have.