December Golf

Golf is a game of letting go.

— John Updike

Among the countless magazines where John Updike placed articles—pieces that earned him ten cents a word or less—Golf Digest may seem the oddest, until you realize the writer had a lifelong love for the game.

That love is on full display in "December Golf," a 1,000-word essay that ran in the December 1989 issue.

Its title alone signals Updike's theme—finales—and its opening two paragraphs make clear you're not in for run-of-the-mill sports writing.

You're in for an elegy. 

Through most of the piece, indeed, Updike lingers over closings (the clubhouse, pro shop and regular greens, for instance), the "savor of last things," and the abundant reminders that the golf season is at its bittersweet end.

Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year. 

The sweetest, Updike says, because in December "golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence."

There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts—just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season’s handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition—a simple best-ball Nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland.

In December golf, Updike says, excuses abound and rules are forgotten, freeing the players at last to compete on equal footing.

John Updike

Excuses abound, in short, for not playing very well, and the well-struck shot has a heightened luster as it climbs through the heavy air and loses itself in the dazzle of the low winter sun. Winter rules, of course, legitimize generous relocations on the fairway, and with the grass all dead and matted, who can say where the fairway ends? It possibly extends, in some circumstances, even into the bunkers, where the puddling weather, lack of sand rakes and foraging raccoons have created conditions any reasonable golfer must take it upon himself to adjust with his foot. A lovely leniency, in short, prevails in December golf, as a reward for our being out there at all.

That leniency compensates for the havoc the untended course and chilly air wreak on Updike's swing, a gnawing irritant both to him and his partner.

It is with a great effort of imagination—a long reach back into the airy warmth of summer—that I remind myself that golf is a game of letting go, of a motion that is big and free. “Throw your hands at the hole,” I tell myself. But by then the Nassau has been decided, and dusk has crept out of the woods into the fairways. 

As early night falls, the December golfers are ready to call it quits, for the day, for the season. And why not? They've discovered how to let go—the secret to the game.

Time to pack it in. The radio calls for snow tomorrow. “Throw your hands at the hole.” The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in the gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.

You can read more of Updike's reflections on golf here.

Monsters

If he is indeed a monster, we have created him.

— John D. MacDonald

A Santa Barbara surfing instructor drove his young son and infant daughter to a ranch in Baja California earlier this month and murdered both of them with a spearfishing gun. 

The children

He was arrested at the US border on the way home.

A QAnon follower, the surfing instructor told police he killed his kids because they were infected with serpent DNA inherited from his wife and would grow up to become "monsters." 

He had to save the world from them.

Friends and associates described the surfing instructor as a "loving family man," although he "believed some weird stuff."

There's no need to ask, who's the real monster?

But who's the monster's maker?

I'm reading John D. MacDonald's 1960 novel The End of the Night, a chilling tale of a crime spree that Stephen King once called "one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century."

Part-way in, one of the narrators (there are several) ponders the reasons why an otherwise admirable man can kill in cold blood, often without a rational motive.

It's too easy to say he's a "monster."

"A monster?" the narrator asks. "If he is indeed a monster, we have created him.

"He is our son. We have been told by our educators and psychologists to be permissive with him, to let him express himself freely. If he throws all of the sand out of the nursery-school sandbox, he is releasing hidden tensions. We deprived him of the security of knowing know right and wrong. We debauched him with the half-chewed morsels of Freud, in whose teachings there is no right and wrong—only error and understanding. We let sleek men in high places go unpunished for amoral behavior, and the boy heard us snicker. We labeled the pursuit of pleasure a valid goal, and insisted that his teachers turn schooling into fun. We preached group adjustment, security rather than challenge, protection rather than effort. We discarded the social and sexual taboos of centuries, and mislabeled the result freedom rather than license. Finally, we poisoned his bone marrow with Strontium 90, told him to live it up while he had the chance, and sat back in ludicrous confidence expecting him to suddenly become a man. Why are we so shocked and horrified to find a child's emotions in a man's body—savage, selfish, cruel, compulsive and shallow?"

MacDonald wrote that 61 years ago, but could have done so yesterday.

The surfing instructor is currently being held without bond. 

A GoFundMe page asks for donations for his wife.

Robert's Rule of Online Content

There's an inverse relationship between the quality of gated content and the quantity of fields required to clear the gate.

Tired of Tu Quoque

If you want Black people to trust the vaccine,
don't blame them for distrusting it.

— Dr. Rueben Warren

I'm as empathetic as the next guy, but I'm tired of tu quoque. 

A logical fallacy, tu quoque (Latin for "you, too") turns a criticism back on the critic, instead of addressing it.

Example:

   Climate change threatens our species. We must end deforestation. 

   Sure, and you drive a car.

Tu quoque—also known as the "appeal to hypocrisy" or "whataboutism"—is a red herring used to take the heat off. 

As a reply to a criticism, it's weak, illogical, and blatantly self-serving. 

It lets you off the hook for anything and everything.

And it drives me bonkers.

Right now, tu quoque is being used by apologists to excuse Blacks from getting vaccinated (according to the CDC, as little as 15% of the Black population has received the vaccine).

Public health officials want everyone vaccinated. 

Unless they are, officials warn, Covid-19 will continue to kill. Over 500 Americans die every day from it.

If you criticize Blacks' vaccine-resistance—no matter your own color—you're immediately reminded of Tuskegee.

But in fact most Blacks have never heard of Tuskegee, you answer.

So you're reminded of things like poverty, pharmacy deserts, 1619 and systemic racism.

Tu quoque. Criticize my foolishness, I'll criticize yours. Never mind the substance of your criticism. 

Never mind the fact that spreading the virus encourages mutations. 

Never mind the fact that the virus can cause life-long medical problems. 

Never mind the fact that over 800 unvaccinated Americans die from the virus every day.

   You tell me I should get vaccinated. 

   Well, you're a racist.

That's tu quoque. 

I'm tired of it.

NOTE: Without doubt, White, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian vaccine-resistors are just as illogical as Black resistors, if not more so. Fallacy is an EOE employer.

A 2,000-Year-Old Industry That's Overdue for Disruption (and It isn't Prostitution)

This is the age of disruption.

— Sebastian Thrun

Q: How many industries have remained the same for 2,000 years?

A: Two. 

The first is the "oldest profession," prostitution; the second, the trade-show industry.

That's rather remarkable when you consider the Product Lifecyle Theory.

The theory assumes obsolescence and disruption are baked in, and that only continuity in consumer tastes can forestall a product's inevitable decline.

We know the tastes matched by prostitution haven't changed much—if at all—since Caligula's time. They continue unabated.

Perhaps the same can be said of trade shows. 

As the Ancient Romans did, people still want to meet "face to face" to swap stories and do business, pandemic or no.

The question isn't whether they'll want to continue to do so, but how much? How much will they want to meet face to face—and at what cost and inconvenience?

Show organizers are counting on the answer being a lot.

But their confidence may be based on a pre-virus worldview.

Businesspeople post-virus are favoring smaller, state and regional shows to get their "face-to-face fix," shunning large confabs and southern hot spots.

The days of large national and international shows may at long last be numbered—and their audiences easy pickings for some disruptor waiting in the wings.

I'm hardly the first industry-watcher to say tradeshow organizers' business model is overdue for disruption, and won't be the last.

But 2,000 years is a hell of a long time to grow without innovation.