Judging Tiger Woods

I have read many a comment in different places that condemns Tiger Woods for his escapades with various women. Sure, looking at the results, his behavior was clearly a mistake. But there is a big trap for onlookers: It is the implicit assumption, "If I were the Tiger, I would not be so stupid as to have fooled around with those women because I am on a higher plane morally." It is a claim that you, with your experiences, would have acted differently. It assumes that had you found yourself in the same situation you would have been able to resist the temptations he yielded to.

You cannot justify making this assumption--chances are that given your life and background you would not have gotten Tiger Woods' success and fame, not just because you were not as gifted, but simply because you are you as a result of your own very different personal history and nature. This being so, it would not ever be possible for you to experience the same reality. Why? The content of any reality is determined by the nature of the individual and the situation s/he faces. If either of these two components is different, another person's reality is not the same as yours. This being so, it is wrong to assume a moral superiority allowing you to judge the star who has fallen from grace.

Understanding the Tiger Woods Scandal

Why was Tiger selected as a role model for big corporations to advertise their products?

In the first place it was his fame as a winner in a field that seemed to be closed to minorities. That made him newsworthy in and of itself. The media covered him as a new type of champion. And as any product struggles to get more attention than the rest, being associated with a winner, if not "THE WINNER," makes the product appear as a champion by association.

What qualities make a star more valuable as an endorser of product?

First, the better known a star is to the public the more valuable s/he becomes. The simple reason: A star in the eyes of hundreds of millions is a star with greater candlepower than one with just a few millions. The math is simple: the more people become starry- eyed, the greater the number of viewers who want to buy the products associated with the star.

What about controversy? Doesn't it make the star even more interesting?

Yes, as a news item per se--people at the moment pay more attention to Tiger than before, but his usefulness for sponsorships is lessened. Where before the scandal his pristine reputation in all respects made him appear as a total winner, his endorsement is no longer effective with anyone to whom "moral standards" are important. And with the "flawless" reputation lost, many viewers would longer identify themselves with him.

Was it wise for him to give up golf for the moment?

Undoubtedly. Had he stayed, he would have been hounded every time he appeared in public, resulting in an ever greater hunger for paparazzi and tabloid writers to get material on him. It's much less interesting to keep his story in the headlines while he is not around.

Will his scandal do damage to the golfing industry?

Probably little. People who take up golf because of Tiger have done so already, and it is highly unlikely they will lose interest because of a scandal involving the biggest star in the sport. Sports, whether as a participant or a spectator, are habits, and most habits are not easily broken.

What can we conclude from it all?

Stardom is about money. Prizes for the star's performance, product endorsements and the fame that opens doors are the star's rewards. Publicity surrounding him is food for the tabloids who make money by "exposing the star's flaws." There is money to be made when the star gets brighter and stays brighter, and there is money to be made when his light is darkened by scandal.

Thanksgiving

Woke up super-early this morning realizing how incredibly much I have to be thankful for--big things, little things and what-not-else. The world's film industry is among the many examples. Saw an unbelievably brilliant DVD two nights ago. It is the story of "Bruno", a lesser known member of the Austrian fashion industry. The hero, played by the inimitably talented Sascha Baron Cohen, goes on a global journey in quest of world fame but runs into one flabbergasting obstacle after another. Not wishing to spoil the plot for those who might see the film, I will not go into further detail. Suffice it to say, this is the second time within a little more than a year that Cohen managed to rattle the cage of America's social conventions. If nothing else, he deserves an Oscar as best actor, but I'd be surprised if the academy would have the nerve to step up to the plate.

Obama and the New Kid on the Block Syndrome

[I posted this article a few weeks ago, but removed it temporarily pending further developments]

It is wonderful that President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize and the world may become a better place for it. At the same time, when it comes to domestic reforms that would save the American middle class from extinction Obama appears to be stuck. Why? He may be a victim of the New-Kid-on-the-Block Syndrome.



I remember that, when Clinton ran for his first term, I was so impressed when he described his background of poverty where, among other things, he had to stop his drunken stepfather from getting violent. In that same talk, I was moved when he said "I'll never forget where I came from." I took it to mean that he would always keep in mind the needs of people who struggled with poverty. But when he was well into his presidency he appeared to have forgotten that promise, as he permitted changes in laws that made it easier for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.



What happened? The Clintons, who started from humble backgrounds, as they increasingly came in contact with the wealthy and powerful came to feel very much at home among those who do not associate with the poor. Once they found themselves to be on the right side of the tracks, they were not at all unhappy to enjoy the satisfaction of being separated from the lesser folk. The rich and powerful now treat them as "friends," and they feel honored. Sharing the sentiments of the wealthy has made the Clintons think and act like the oligarchs with whom they associate, and the interests of old acquaintances from their more humble past have simply become less important.



In terms of social adaptation Obama has followed the Clintons' footsteps. Also born into humble circumstances, like the Clintons he went to an ivy league university and ended up in the White House. As president and holder of the politically most powerful position in the country, he is now much closer to the corporate chiefs and the wealthy than he is to the progressives who helped him win the election. Where he may have been the new kid on the block with ideas for change when he first took office, he is now one of the good ole boys that include the Wall Street and banking elite. 



From his speeches we know that President Obama still means well; it is very likely that the reforms he once promised are still on his mind, but as he now sees the world through the eyes of his old pragmatic advisors and his new "friends," their priorities have become his: the ugly duckling of earlier days is now the adult swan who soars with his peers.

To Take or not to Take the Swine Flu Shot

I saw some interesting videos about the swine flu. One from the seventies is especially worth checking out: :
> http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9mh9f_swine-flu-1976-propaganda_webcam I did the math on it: 46 million people were inoculated against the flu and there were 4000 lawsuits by people who contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which means about one in eleven thousand suffered enough to file a lawsuit. The question that's not answered is how many lives might have been saved among those who would have gotten the flu if they had not been given the shots. As always, it's a crap shoot. I once got very sick from a smallpox vaccination, but thank God I'm still around to tell about it.

A little info from the front lines. My daughter who is an attending physician working full-time in a Portland hospital told us she got a swine flue shot a few days ago. The shot takes about three weeks to become effective. According to her a lot more cases are beginning to show up day by day, and you can do a google on "frequency of swine flu cases" to see what the bigger picture is. Two women across the street from us came back early from a road-trip in their RV because one of them had contracted the swine flu. (She's recovering slowly.)

Of course, it always pays to be suspicious as long as somebody somewhere is out to make a buck, and there is money to be made in vaccine sales.

So what's the answer? The better informed you are from as many sources as possible and the more willing you are to do a little detective work, the better the odds you will make the right decision. It goes without saying that staying in good spirits is always conducive to your health. If things are getting you down, get in touch with a life coach.

Logical Support for Homeopathy

A sudden epiphany: My daughter Brigitte has been struggling with allergies for most of her life, and during a conversation with her I suddenly realized a simple reason why homeopathy is a valid approach to medicine. Allergies can be set off by minute quantities of a given substance, so minute in fact that a food product that was in contact with machinery used to process peanuts can cause a serious reaction for someone allergic to peanuts even after the machinery has been cleaned. Based on this one can reasonably conclude if the trace of an element of a substance can cause harm in someone in instances of allergies, trace elements of substances in homeopathic remedies can promote cures.

Will the Boomers Go Bust?

What Will Happen When the Baby Boomers Retire?

A retirement avalanche is about to descend. The baby boom began shortly after the end of World War II in 1945 and continued well into the 1950s. Numerically the boomers represent a work force of around 70 million, and those born earliest will be sixty-five in 2010. They are old enough to retire, but will they have the money for a living standard beyond that of the homeless?

The answer is no for most of them. Why not? Their parents for the most part retired in comfort as they could rely on company retirement plans. In those days, whether people worked for large or small companies, employers and employees felt they were part of the same family--employers held the role of ship captains and employees participated as loyal crews.

The picture began to change in the mid-seventies. A new breed of managers took over the leadership of corporations. The new business philosophy was for a company to make greater profits regardless of the means. Where once employees were part of a family engaged in a business venture, they now became nothing more than a cost factor, and costs are there to be cut. Now seen as nothing more than a financial burden, they can be eliminated by shutting down factories where they made a decent living and opening up plants in other countries where slave labor wages are the rule.

If a plant stays open, employees soon get the message that they had better accept cuts in health and pension benefits or lose their jobs. If a union threatens a strike, the employer lets workers walk out. If they don't buckle under, whatever service they provided is outsourced

Simply put, a good part of the baby boomers have by now either lost their jobs and/or retirement benefits, or if they are still working, had their benefits reduced so that they cannot possibly retire at any level above poverty.


Why Did the Baby Boomers Allow Themselves to be Reduced to Cost Factors?

The Cold War had broken out, and the power struggle between the communist authoritarian regimes and the militarily superior regimes of the west brought the world closer and closer to war. War needs anger, greed and hatred to thrive, but an unimaginable turn of events took place. As the east-west conflict heated up and America became increasingly involved in Vietnam, the baby boomers, rather than respond to a patriotic call to arms, answered with a message of love and peace. For a large segment of the population in their twenties and early thirties goals of acquiring wealth and career building were replaced by a quest for a peaceful and harmonious world.

When the Vietnam War was over and most civil rights goals were achieved, the generation that had pushed for change took a rest. This was not true, however, for a minority of boomers who had continued to pursue primarily careers and money. Without the distractions of idealistic goals, the acquisition of wealth for its own sake became fashionable and got increasing support from the media through programs like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." While the former hippies and war protesters did not necessarily join in the chase after money, they did not do much of anything to stop the greedy from their ever-greater worship of wealth and power. In a setting of general public complacency, it was easy for the power seekers to climb the corporate ladder by squeezing the incomes of all those on the rungs below them. Once they ruled the corporations, they got salaries and bonuses in the millions while others quietly lost their jobs and were too embarrassed to say or do anything about it.

No Work, No Money, No Retirement: Where Can You Go? How Can You Hide?

People are ashamed of being unemployed. Being broke may get you sympathy, but it won't get you respect. Having no retirement income will leave you either homeless or at the mercy of a relative. Civil servants, teachers or the career military are among the few who survive the race to the economic bottom. But those of the baby boomers who are neither wealthy nor part of a retirement system suddenly find themselves as part of a new underclass having to deal with the contempt of those who are better off. They now find themselves as outcasts much like the racial and ethnic minorities and women were before the civil rights movement.

So it becomes an irony of history that the baby boomers who did so much for the rights of the disadvantaged and in addition stopped a war, are now themselves confronted by a reality that they successfully defeated forty years earlier. Without jobs, no longer part of an "active society," they have little choice but to tap resources they have not drawn on since the early seventies. They cannot fail to recognize and face the fact that they can neither find jobs nor retire because the money they earned over their lifetimes is in the pockets of those addicted to power and greed. Considering that they are a generation of courage and innovation, they will through social and political action find ways to get back what has been taken from them. Given that the baby boomers are far better educated than earlier generations, given the fact that in their youth they were never afraid to challenge gratuitous authority, and given the fact that their personalities were developed in the period of greatest creativity, they will find the way to bring about the change needed for survival with dignity.