PLANK AUGUST 1, 2012
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Paul Krugman has posted a blog item observing, with some amusement, that Ted Cruz, Texas’s Tea Party-favored GOP Senate nominee, is a man who believes that there is a global plot, led by George Soros, to eliminate golf courses. It’s true! (Not that Soros wants to eliminate golf courses, but that Cruz has said he does.) What Krugman may not know, and what I learned from hard experience, is that golf is the very hottest of hot buttons to America’s business class. Regulate my company; tax my seven-figure income if you must. But lay so much as a finger on my teeing ground, my fairway, or my putting green and I’ll raise an army against you. That is the motto of the one percent.
I know this because in my three decades as a journalist I have never received such a flood of angry letters and phone calls as engulfed me in 1994 when, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, I wrote a news feature describing the environmental damage wrought by golf courses. They didn’t even put it on the front page! (It ran on the front of the “Marketplace” section.) The furious response caught me completely by surprise. I suppose I should have guessed that to a typical Wall Street Journal reader, the country club was a sanctuary holier than St. Peter’s basilica. (Most Journal readers in those days were men.) On some level, I guess, I just didn’t want to believe so cartoonish a notion about my readership. I was young; I was naive.
The letters, for the most part, didn’t engage any of the article’s substance, which was beyond dispute. Green though they may be, golf courses are bad for the environment, and in those days, at least, little effort was being made to minimize the damage wrought by their pesticides and their fertilizers. For nearly every letter-writer, the purpose was not to argue rationally; it was to assail me for trying to wipe off the face of the earth life’s greatest (perhaps only) source of uncomplicated pleasure. My correspondents didn’t identify themselves by party affiliation, but it seemed a pretty fair guess that the overwhelming majority were Republicans.
But not all. The most astonishing response came from Colman McCarthy, a Washington Post columnist and peace activist whose politics, then and now, stood well to the left of mine. On the subject of golf, however, McCarthy’s views were indistinguishable from those of a top-hatted plutocrat. I learned this when McCarthy wrote an angry column about my piece:
Some people—a snippy lot—have it in for golf. Of late, the trashing of this tranquil, sociable and healthful game—played on 14,648 courses by millions of us—has reached rare intensity. Next to smokers, only golfers are becoming more scorned. This week’s U.S. Open championship at the Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh, where Ben Hogan won in 1953, brings only temporary relief from the carping.
The Wall Street Journal ran a recent story headlined, “Golf Courses Are Denounced as Health Hazards.” The denouncers include a few environmentalists who gripe that pesticides and fertilizers are overused. Presumably, the Sierra Club, one of the peskier golf critics, would like warning labels on scorecards.
An international group, the Global Anti-Golf Movement (GAGM), claims that pollution from golf courses—more than 1,000 have been built in the past three years—“leads to health problems for local communities, populations downstream and even golfers.”
Sure. America’s emergency rooms are crammed with coughing and gasping people dying from golfitis.
You get the idea. To this day, I probably remain the only person ever attacked by Colman McCarthy from the right.
Quite obviously, George Soros does not want to eliminate golf courses. The U.N. document that Cruz thinks proves Soros does was endorsed by, among others, the eminent Republican golfer George H.W. Bush. Still, liberals should know that to Republicans and to the rich generally, golf courses are the third rail. Never venture near the topic during an election year.
Note: This post originally misspelled Colman McCarthy's name as Coleman McCarthy. We regret the error.
10 comments
Yes, the privileges of the golfing class. One of America's premier resorts for the very rich recently went through bankruptcy when the third generation owner, on the eve of the financial collapse, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to "upgrade" the resort in order to attract an international rich crowd rather than just a domestic one. Anyway, the family's billion dollar plus asset is gone, having been purchased in bankruptcy by a couple of private equity funds. What I found most interesting about this saga was the treatment of the members of the very private golf club. The resort's private golf club has a membership list that is as sterling as the list of owners of the "cottages" at the resort. Yes, "is", as in none of the dandies lost his membership (or a day of golf) as a result of the bankruptcy, the bankruptcy judge having decided not to "discharge" the unsecured obligation to the members of the bankrupt club. Sure, the judge discharged obligations to local vendors and contractors, but not the $150,000,000 plus membership deposits in the golf club theretofore made by the members. I suppose some unsecured creditors have more clout than others, none more than the dandies who play golf at expensive golf clubs. Fore!
- rayward
August 1, 2012 at 3:48pm
Yet another reason to hate golf, which is flog spelled backward.
- tmmats
August 1, 2012 at 4:08pm
A week or so ago, the WSJ had a largish article about the rapid loss of interest in golf, the number of clubs going bankrupt and the costs of getting stuck with property near a premier course. I don't' have a problem with that. I read it on cellulose, but it might be online too.
- jet
August 2, 2012 at 12:39am
For another angle on golf as a catalyst of class war, check out Donald Trump's travails in Scotland: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/10/donald-trump-golf-course-internet
- roryharden
August 2, 2012 at 5:59am
You have convinced me Tim Noah, I will join the Tea Party. I denounced all they stood for till now, but you have demonstrated their redeeming social value above all else. Golfers unite, protect golf against liberal extremists. I just need to look at your (other) commentators to know it is right to support the Tea Party now. Who cares about health care, income inequality, poverty, the environment. If you are attacking golf, I am with them.
- bwickes
August 2, 2012 at 10:11am
@bwickes: right on, brutha!
- rhoneyman
August 3, 2012 at 7:37am
From the pacifist-anarchist wing of the American Left, a wing that flaps with more verve than that of the flaccid New Republic Left, I’d be happy to supply Timothy Noah with a dozen Titleists, a handful of biodegradable tees and direct him to any golf course he chooses—perhaps Toxic Hills Country Club--and shepherd him around for a quick 18. I say quick lest he asphyxiate from all those pesticides he claims are ankle-deep drenching the nation’s fairways, lest he meet some Republican grandees and dauphins who accepted Warren Buffett’s invitation to give away most of their billions, lest he learn that both private country clubs and public courses supply jobs for tens of thousands of workers, lest he meet a conscientious greenskeeper who keeps the fairways green with no help from Monsanto or Dow Chemical, lest he hole a few 20-footers that induce a greater joy than editorially driving golf carts into a foursome of CEOs. Now that The New Republic’s new publisher and editor is super-rich and a certified One Percenter, perhaps the till can be dipped into to buy land and build a golf course—let’s name it The TNR Country Club—that would be model of environmental purity. And from a chair on the clubhouse veranda overlooking the 18th green, Timothy Noah, like P.G. Wodehouse crafting masterful golf tales, could devote his days to producing his fine commentary and reporting which I’ve always enjoyed reading--even as much as reading greens. -Colman McCarthy
- C.McCarthy
August 3, 2012 at 1:01pm
Lo! A shot across the bow from the 19th hole! Look out, Tim, those damn Titleists hurt when you get in the way. Mr. McCarthy, chill out - it's not about golf. It's about misrepresentation in politics, which slices (I forget the other term but I committed both of them along with some decent shots way back when) both ways.
- wamba1
August 6, 2012 at 10:17pm
While driving from Las Vegas to Utah, I approached the small gambling town of Mesquite. After hours of nothing but brown, I saw a bright emerald golf course on the horizon. The contrast was startling, and my first thought was how much water that takes. Recreating Britain in the desert. I once heard a long time ago that the tony Congressional in Bethesda gets a tax break because of the open space it provides. Don't if that's still true.
- dstatton
August 9, 2012 at 11:45am
"Golf is not a sport. It's men in ugly pants walking." The only good joke that Rosie O'Donnell ever told.
- lump516
August 31, 2012 at 3:56pm