American Patrol

I’ve always tried to avoid the habit of talking to the television screen as if the people on it could actually hear you, a habit that both my father and grandmother indulged in incessantly, and were roundly teased for, when I was growing up. I was thus somewhat surprised this morning to find myself yelling “Who could possibly give a shit?” and “You dumb son of a bitch, what the hell are you thinking?” at David Shuster this morning.

I usually watch the MSNBC and CNN morning news over breakfast, flipping from one to the other to avoid the incessant commercials, and was doing so this morning when I saw the aforementioned Shuster end an otherwise productive interview with former DNC Chair Howard Dean by asking him what his advice would be to Tiger Woods. “Goddamn,” I thought. “What the hell?” I wouldn’t have been more flabbergasted if he’d asked Dr. Dean “If you could be any kind of animal, what animal would you be?”

Deciding to fortify my somewhat shaken brain with another cup of coffee and a Pall Mall on the porch, I returned to the television just in time to hear Shuster conclude his interview with his next guest with the same question. I then made like Dad and Granny for the next several minutes.

Both MSNBC and CNN proceeded to spend what bits of the rest of the morning not taken up with Tiger Woods’ fourteen minute apology to one and all with analysis of same. As usual when I’m watching TV news, I was much less interested in the questions they were considering than on the one they weren’t, which was this: What exactly makes any of this any of our goddamn business, much less a major news story? Role model, my ass—Tiger Woods is a personable if fallible young man who is very good at playing what I consider to be a particularly silly game. If, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, he had made his career criticizing and attempting to legislate the morality of others, I might actually see the point of bringing up his personal life. Instead, he makes his living hitting a little white ball with a collection of sticks, and I really don’t. In a country in crisis that is fairly brimming with under reported news stories, I marvel at the amount of time and attention wasted on it.

And yes, I know that my recent media kick is starting to resemble Fish shooting at a barrel, and is bringing me dangerously close to qualifying for my own old school KGO award, but jeez, people….