After this week, I’m convinced that the dumbing-down of America is pretty well complete. The coverage of the Tiger Woods incident has been nonstop. He will be fined $164 and have 4 points assessed against his Florida drivers’ license for an inappropriate relationship between his SUV and a fire hydrant. He has “transgressed.” My guess is a divorce will cost him considerably more than $167, no matter what the prenup says.
We now know a good deal more about Tiger Woods’ marriage than we do about our expanding adventure in Afghanistan. The ratio of news coverage of Woods to the change in war strategy is about 3 to 1. The coverage of the war tends to be things like, “Secretary of State Clinton will be on Capitol Hill explaining things to Congress.” But the news coverage never seems to get around to explaining things to us.
Partly, the Woods’ situation is pretty easy to understand. We don’t have to sort out the Pashtoons from the Taliban from the Northern Alliance. The murky border areas with Pakistan are not a problem. There nothing murky about a wronged wife swinging a golf club. So we can follow the Woods’s mess with our brains half asleep, keep up with the couple who crashed the White House dinner, and still have capacity left over for the balloon boy. Trying to sort out Afghanistan takes real concentration.
I listened to Obama’s speech at West Point and still don’t know what the goal in Afghanistan is, how we know that we have won, or what we get for winning. If we got lucky and killed bin Laden tomorrow, would everybody come home? Everybody says the real problem is Pakistan, but we aren’t going there (wink, wink, nod, nod). Once the problem was Afghanistan, then it suddenly was Iraq, then Afghanistan again, and now Pakistan. The threat seems like whack-a-mole, which it kind of is. The fight is against an idea and a very small, dangerous, fanatic group. They don’t have army bases, airports or battleships. About the only thing Rumsfeld got right was that there is nothing in Afghanistan worth bombing. The “front” is a coffee house in Karachi or Detroit.
Once again, Obama delivered a lofty speech that was high on emotions and short on details. The soaring rhetoric got him elected, and I wanted to soar along with him. But now I want to know what is going on, and why this isn’t Vietnam 2.0 (or maybe 3.0 if you count a war in Iraq that isn’t exactly over). I surely don’t know what the answer is, but there was nothing in Obama’s 40 minutes of glowing adjectives that suggests that he does, either.
But how about that couple who crashed the White House dinner? The White House security detail is pretty embarrassed about that one. Whoops. Let that one slip through, but nobody poisoned the punch or threw anthrax around. Our bad. So I guess we know where at least part of the 30,000 troops headed to Afghanistan will be coming from.
Though it hardly rises to the level of crashing the White House dinner in fact it was open to the public I went to the open house at the St. Regis hotel last weekend. It was mostly because I wanted to ride the funicular, but my friends wanted to see the whole place, and we did a thorough exploration. We talked ourselves into a couple of different rooms and suites. I had expected to be overwhelmed by an ostentatious display of excess, but wasn’t. It’s nicer than any hotel I will ever pay to stay in. They will probably change the towels 5 times a day and the rooms were nicely finished with expensive stuff. But, frankly, they seemed on small side. The views are great. The public spaces are nice but not overdone. It’s not Las Vegas, or even the day lodges at Snowbasin. It was mostly very beige.
The funicular is an interesting amenity for any homeowners association to own. When it breaks, I don’t know who you call for repairs. Maybe they have to send somebody over from Italy, or get a track crew from the Union Pacific. If you even wonder about the cost, you can’t afford it. The views from the funicular are nice, but as an amusement park ride, it disappoints. Unlike the old PCMR gondola, the ride is so quick that not even a jackrabbit could do anything other than ride to the top in heated comfort. On the other hand, it’s as close to employee housing as they’ve got.
I was out shopping the other day and stumbled across leopard-skin Snuggies. Needless to say, my Christmas shopping is complete. You won’t find that in the St. Regis gift shop.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.