Brit Hume (the "good" White Christian)
vs.
Tiger Woods
(the "bad" Black Buddhist)
[image of Brit Hume is from here; RACIST-AS-HELL image of Tiger "The Photoshopped Thug" Woods, by the increasingly disappointing white photographer Annie Liebovitz, which is appearing on Vanity Fair magazine's cover at a newsstand near you, is from here]
Shame on Vanity Fair and on Brit Hume and on Tiger Woods.
Well, you get the idea. The list is as long as days of a jail term for a girl who kills her pimp-rapist. And the money spent on both procuring and betraying women could have been used to support women who want to get out of prostitution and systems of sexual trafficking, so they don't have to kill the damn pimp. In the racist U.S. dominant imagination, Black men are two things, among a few others: "sexually" they are "rapist" and "pimp". Tiger is neither. U.S. white straight men have made quite a social-political-economic career out of being both.
Tiger achieved greatness in a white supremacist sport that didn't allow white Jews and Black Buddhists on their pristine Christian golf courses unless they were hired to mow the lawns and otherwise attend to the spuriously genteel and decidedly gentile white folks. (Whoopi Goldberg chose her career wisely.) Tiger Woods came along and changed the sport, upping prize money by making golf something it had never quite been before: interesting. He gave the sport both intrigue and amazing athleticism. He did for golf what Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and more recently the Williams sisters have done for tennis: they've put Black faces to names of greatness in social clubs where greatness has always only ever meant more or less pale male. Before them "the greats" in golf and tennis were almost always white. They have all changed the political and social complexion of their respective sports. And now there are people from all populated continents playing these sports. South Americans and Asians are as likely to be in the top ten as Europeans and North Americans.
Tiger Woods was perceived to be very white, politically. This means he was seen as not dangerously sexual or terribly criminal, and that he'd be expected to marry a very white woman. The third fact is true.
I don't tend to think of patriarchally philandering men as "very sexual" so much as I think of them as very heterosexually male supremacist. I mean more time is spent arranging for these trysts to happen and speaking with the women being emotionally used than time is spent... well, you know. This whole husbandly endeavor of "making time to fuck over your wife by fucking the women you procure or pay off" is, politically, a regimented exercise of one's economic and celebrity entitlements. Oh those wealthy heterosexual guys! They give heterosexuality such a bad name. And yet, the stigma of naughtiness and evil is still on us queers.
I don't usually report on such dominant media events, especially "news" out of the wily Fox News Corporation, but this is WHM Christian arrogance at its
Before moving us right along to the fiasco, I have two four letter words for Brit Hume, and they are not his name. (There's also one three letter word and one two letter word.) SHUT THE FUCK UP! <3 Julian
What follows is all from here. And the title of the piece that follow is simply stupid.
Brit Hume Offends, Misses the Tiger Woods Sex Boat
One of the mainstream media’s journalistic luminaries, Brit Hume, put religion smack dab in the middle of this unfortunate story recently, counseling Tiger to consider converting to Christianity in the wake of his current predicament. Marital infidelity, betrayal of public trust, and secret meetings and texting with hot young cocktail waitresses—what better religion than Christianity to steer a powerful male through the thicket of public lambasting and condemnations, and lead him back to family, fame, and fortune?
Hume’s clumsy and ignorant attempt to turn Tiger away from the darkness of Buddhism and toward the righteous Christian path of forgiveness and redemption is at once both completely predictable and utterly offensive. The real story here is not what Brit said, or how his remarks reflect a dominant and desperate Christian narrative of human behavior that is selectively employed by the overprivileged to forgive and forget and profit; no, the real story is Brit’s chutzpah in making this kind of public judgment on national television.
Even William Kristol followed up on these remarks with a remarkably humble-sounding (!) refusal to comment on the state of the Tiger’s soul—along with a prediction that he'd come back and win the Masters.
Perhaps this kind of religious moralizing should not be a surprise, coming as it did from a Fox news program. Perhaps this shocking display of religious arrogance is simply another instance in a long line of examples throughout American history of Christians dissing other religions while claiming the superiority of their own. Perhaps more important than any of these possibilities is another element in the religious story of Tiger; an element that has nothing to do with the sacred powers of Christianity or Buddhism or his soul, but everything to do with the sacred powers of sex and sports.
Let’s face it, Tiger is a God—to some. Before the scandal broke, we could easily assert that Tiger’s wealth, skills, success, and celebrity had led to his deification in public culture, a sports figure adored by millions. Whether he identified as a Buddhist or a Jew or a Hindu had nothing to do with the religious culture that engulfed him or the responses of his fans/fanatics over the last decade. Even without knowing whether or how this affected his self-image, or his inner sense of godliness, or his everyday powers of persuasion, we do know that followers flocked to him, wanted to be close to him, and modeled their own lives on his.
As if that weren't enough to contend with, we can assume that Tiger had strong sexual appetites and longings that could be easily fulfilled by some of his stature and which led him outside of the realm of monogamy and into those realms where many mortals dwell: bars and strip clubs. The allure of sexual intimacy and excitement isn’t always sacred, nor is it necessarily a religious matter for everyone, but it can be and has been for many Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists and “nones.” When Tiger comes clean with the nation’s foremost religious confessor, Oprah, I would encourage the Sage One to ask about the power of sex in his life and if it became, like it does for some of us, a pursuit that supplanted those other sacred pursuits Americans are so proud of, like family, wealth, or spiritual liberation.
Brit, oh Brit, you’ve only scratched the surface of this story. If only you were a reporter who was informed, thoughtful, knowledgeable about the power, pervasiveness, and, for some, the perversity of religion in our lives, you might shed light rather than impose darkness on this subject. A good comparative religion class might do the trick, helping to broaden, deepen, and diversify your understanding of this powerful force in our lives.
Tags: brit hume, christianity, fox news, religion, sex, tiger woods
No comments:
Post a Comment