teed off: a golf shot i can finally use! funny thing...it was made during a wedding shoot!
i wanted to get this blog post finished sooner, but the truth is, i’m pretty beat down… friday’s physical therapy session was the full meal deal and it blessed me with a weekend full of soreness. actually the last few weeks have been pretty rough. let’s just say that there are certain processes we become used to on a day-to-day basis until you find yourself unable to perform those without help. as my body staggers back towards normal operations the process of relearning those activities throws challenges in front of me every step of the way. these challenges have to be overcome obviously, but the cost is often high.
anyhow, unless you live under…like, a lot of rocks you know that on friday tiger woods prostrated himself before the cult of personality. his statement and the unending media coverage of it reminded me of a post my friend doyle put on my facebook page not too long ago regarding a quote from general george s. patton. i have a few patton- isms i’m fond of myself, my favorite being “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
how am i making a connection between tiger woods and george patton? bear with me here, there is one. no, tiger did not publicly slap his caddie. rather, it has to do with how the media creates heroes and villains and how we swallow them hook, line and sinker. i think most americans, unless totally ignorant of world war ii history, would name patton as one of the great heroes of that conflict. however, should you ask a world war ii historian about it, they would tell you the legend is far greater than the man. they would probably tell you in fact, that the allied victory in world war ii had much less to do with patton’s heroics and much more to do with eisenhower’s role as history’s greatest project manager. in fact, people who know much more about this stuff than i will ever forget have told me that patton wasn’t actually a very successful general in the strict military sense, and not a very nice guy either.
he was however a hero to the people of luxembourg, where he was buried…separately from 5075 other american heroes interred at the american military cemetery there. specifically, his grave is at the front of the cemetery, facing all of the others. and, there is some controversy regarding how, among 122,000 other soldiers buried in american military cemeteries, patton is the only one to have ever been granted this special courtesy.
think for yourself: hero or not? you should decide.
the fact is that patton was a complex man, and complex men are often misunderstood. what’s certain is that he was given to making controversial statements, often even sounding like a racist or an anti-semite, and modern press pundits would have had a field day with him, much like they are attempting to do with tiger woods. tiger however, has shut them down with his moratorium on questions. i had to laugh as the outrage poured from the high priests of the cult, who made it sound as if tiger is setting himself above everyone by taking that position. the more they wail the more it sounds as if it is they who think they run the show around here and in fact are just pissed that tiger won’t give them the story they feel they have a right to. tiger has clearly been a bad cat, but how he deals with it should be strictly between he and his family. i’m proud of him for stiff-arming the press, and maybe by sending the message to the media that they can’t tell him what to say, there’s also a lesson in there for all of us about not letting the media tell us what to think.
oh, here’s one more connection… patton died as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. his spine was broken and he was paralyzed from the neck down. if you want to see more images from the cemetery and luxembourg, go here and here.
by will
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