Grr.

John Hiatt--"Shredding The Documents" (mp3)
Tiger Woods--"Phonecall To Mistress" (link)

Poor Tiger. He can't stand the idea that his perfectly-controlled life and image have been tarnished by speculation. He can't imagine why anyone would dare to invade his privacy, especially the police who came to his house at least three times to find out what happened, which is their job, and were turned away by a high-powered lawyer. Poor Tiger.

Welcome to the first Point/Counterpoint between my fellow blogger, Sir William, and me?

I'll put it simply. If you think Tiger has in any way been treated badly, you do not understand our society. We are a society consumed by our prurient interests--give us a scandal, a potential scandal, even just the tease of a scandal, and we're all over it. Was he drunk? Was he doped? Was there a fight? Was the camel-toed 9/11 "widow" who's all over the Internet with the likes of David Boreanz, Stephen Dorff, and Ryan Seacrest the reason for the fight? Ryan Seacrest? Really? Ryan Seacrest? Doesn't he tend in a different direction?

It's convenient to blame the media for going overboard, but who reads, watches, and listens to the media? Hmm, that's right, that would be us. We want to know if Thomas Jefferson slept with Sally Hemmings, want to know enough to do DNA testing over 200 years after the fact! When my wife read some headline last night about some Argentinian ex-beauty queen dying from plastic surgery, my first question was, "Oh, was it that South Carolina governor's 'soul mate'? People are engaging in international, lustful trysts while we sit in our living rooms and play Wii. It's a dirty world, say the Travelling Wilburys. No, don't blame the media; blame us. We're the ones who sit around and gossip about every scrap and tittle we can get our hands on. Tiger should be exempt from that? No way! But I would even dare to argue that we want to know for more than just the gory details.

Why? We are also a very curious society. We like for things to make sense. Tiger's situation does not make sense. We want to know where he was going and why at such a speed and why a guy who hits some of the longest drives in the world onto the fairway can barely get out of his driveway or stay away from the trees. We want to know what his wife was doing with the golf clubs? Why break two windows? Was Tiger unconscious or not? How did she get him out of the car? Why was he unconscious from an accident that didn't even cause the airbags to deploy? Why does he decide not to attend his own golf tournament due to injuries when he attended it last year even though he was injured?

Our government, our businesses, our churches, our banks, our schools and every part of our lives feed us a lot of malarky that doesn't quite make sense. So, we have a highly-developed sense of wanting to know why something doesn't make sense. And you, Tiger, suddenly do not make sense. We thought we knew you.

But that's only some of who we are. Americans have little patience with the high and the mighty who think they are above the laws that the rest of us have to follow. So throw all of the speculation out the window about what happened with Tiger and why. What you'll still have left is a guy who, when the police come to his house, refuses to talk to them and has his lawyer turn them away. (Warning: these are stunt drivers on an enclosed track. Do not try this at home.) Think you can get away with that one?

And, finally, we are a judgmental society. Too quick to judge, you say? So be it. Tiger now looks like a cock, an asshole, and everything else that makes you realize that, wait a second, the guy rarely, if ever, talks in his commercials. Could that be because no one wants him to open his difficult, egotistical, unlikeable mouth? We'll just show his face and his razor and hope that does the trick. And, he's not aging well, at least not in the face, now that I think of it. Oops, I'm being judgmental.

Sorry, Tiger, but we Americans just don't put up with a lot of bullshit, like carefully-worded statements that are released through your website. Have the balls to attend a press conference you've scheduled and have the balls to say what happened. You have made a billion dollars from us, playing off your celebrity. Now you want to pretend that that celebrity didn't have its own price tag? C'mon. We know you can handle the pressure. But when you bow out, do not even play, do not even speak, use the scratches on your face that your wife gave you because you had an affair as an excuse not to do your job, we start to think differently of you. And it ain't the affair, buddy. Don't you realize we can get over that?

Oh Tiger, poor Tiger, methinks there will be much, much more to this story before it's all said and done. You shoulda just told the truth, pal, or at least some of it. Don't you watch Letterman?