For All Time in History

Watching the end of the British Open this morning, watching Tiger Woods come apart after tapping in his winning putt, the whole world knowing that this intense and authentic gusher of emotion was based on a love for a lost father who propped him and prepared him to be the very best in the world at something very hard to do. This famous and wealthy beyond dreams young man felt a power that defines the very best part of being human and it brought him past control for a few moments to a place that I hope he realizes how lucky he was to be. Everything indicates that he does.

Those are the rare moments, and, while I agreed that the cameras should back off as he hugged his wife and drenched her shoulder with his tears, we were blessed to see it. We don't get to see it for real much, as drenched as we are in the artificiality and inauthentic blare of our culture. I still get choked up thinking about the purest display of it I think I've ever seen. I don't remember the Olympics and I don't remember the guy's name but it was a track event and one of the runners came up lame well before the finish line, falling to the dirt in such pain that I felt it through my screen. And yet, after a few moments, he struggled to his feet and started hobbling to finish the race that he had trained for, dreamed of all his life. But he couldn't make it. It was clear he couldn't, and the whole stadium, the whole viewing audience just sat there in that stunned, confused paralysis that hits when you know you should do something but nobody knew what.

Except his father.

The older man suddenly appeared at his son's side, put his arm around him to brace him, and together they finished the race.

I'm choking up just typing this.

I haven't said much about what's happening in Lebanon yet again or lately in the civil war disaster known as Iraq. I don't have anything meaningful to add to the analysis you can find on other blogs, and I've expressed my outrage in other ways at other times. There comes a point when you just pass. Billmon has a picture of a US soldier holding a headless baby out in front of him that I advise you not to view but which symbolizes Bush's effect there as well as the fireman/baby picture caught what happened to us in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Walcott provides the words, or actually quotes the words for the caption if there were one:

But it is not enough to blame Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Lieberman, the neocons, the liberal hawks, and other useless idiots. By our actions in Iraq, and our complicity and collaboration with the Israeli assault on Lebanon, American citizens are culpable for letting 9/11 turn them/us into passive accomplices. "The complicity of the American public in these heinous crimes will damn America for all time in history," Paul Craig Roberts rages at Antiwar.

As I think about the human who is Tiger Woods today, I think about all the people who have died in this continuing misadventure of idiocy, superiority, and greed, all the people who will not be there to support their children, all the children who will not be there to be supported, to love and honor their parents in their lifetimes, who will not see their children's accomplishments, who will be grieved for and unforgotten, all in our name, all for the illusions and egos and self-exalting, self-important, self-satisfied dogmas of people who clearly have never felt for one moment what Tiger Woods felt today as that ball dropped into that cup.

What we have done as a nation, this unjust, unnecessary, and ruinous war, global warming, eating our children's seed corn, will take lifetimes to recompense, if we ever can. There are times when history explodes and great nations implode, and everyone is caught in their wake. I'm left just weary and beaten. If these things are not evil, then the word has no meaning, and they are on my head.

But then . . . .

Tiger Woods breaks down in tears in front of a global audience. And I can remember that squat, heavy man coming out of the stands and onto the track to be his son's crutch.

There is hope. It may not, probably will not, come from us as a nation anymore, but it's there. And it can win. We saw that today.

Let's pledge ourselves never to forget.