The Masters golf tournament will be played mid-month in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the official beginning of what administration critics around the world call the American Hegemon. What I'm thinking is that what we need next is Operation American Freedom, even if its the freedom of a gaggle of overpaid golfers to stroll around the gorgeous Augusta National track in pursuit of the sports most cherished trophy without a hysterical attack by fringe fanatics led by the gruesome Martha Burk of the National Council of Womens Organizations.
Pressure group tyrants like Burk dominate US political headlines, teeny Saddams furiously and irrationally imposing their views, backed by a constituency representing only a sliver of public opinion. Like Saddam, these one-issue satraps surround themselves with their own peculiar Palace Guard, true believers who create the false impression that their righteousness must mean the cause is just. And like all effective dictators, they control or manipulate the press to carry their banner to the world.
Remember the successes of expert extortionists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who take the process to a level of high art with outrageous accusations and blackmail? Remember the Texaco caper where Jackson manufactured a non-existent racial slur and bilked the energy giant out of millions, the compliant press carrying his water the whole way? Or Sharptons Tawanda Bradley caper?
Martha Burk, in a reality-defying high-wire scam of her own, with no factual nor legal net, has reached in the quiver of politically correct rhetoric and pulled out the term gender apartheid to stain the Masters as chauvinistic and racist and therefore under interdict by all activists, whether they even know the difference between a round of golf and a game of pinochle.
Mind you, I have no particular affection for the members of Augusta National. They are mostly big business alumni, the same sort who have stained Wall Street with bogus accounting and greedy golden parachutes, but they do put on a golf tournament that approaches perfection. The Masters, contrary to the criticism of one of Martha Burks cadre that it is named for old slave owners, has several distinctive features that set it apart from any other tournament.
Perhaps the greatest golfer ever, Bobby Jones (who never turned professionalhe was a lawyer with a masters in history from Harvard), bought an orchard in Augusta in the late 1920s and built the Augusta National club. In 1934, he asked the top golfers of the era to an invitational during the Southern swing of the then nascent professional golf tour. True to his belief that the soul of golf was the club-based non-professional game, the tournament included amateur players, who are still honored each year for winning the low amateur with their own green jacket.
Jones and partner Clifford Roberts also needed the tournament to attract members to their struggling club. These members continue today to host the Masters to pay for the course and clubhouse maintenance. Consequently, dues are quite low for the clubs 300 or so members because of revenue from the tournament. Over the years, thanks to the integrity of the Jones legacy, the beauty and difficulty of the course, and the legendary status the Masters enjoys with the players and the public, it is the only one of the four majors of golf to be played every year on the same course, enhancing its aura and causing the PGA tour not a little consternation.
The haughty attitude of the Augusta National members is legendary. CBS television was brought in to televise the event in the 1950s on a year-to-year basis with the caveat that commercial interruptions be restricted and that cables and other broadcast equipment be kept out of sight. And, in the spirit of the amateur game, there would be no mention of the prize money on the air.
As CBS learned, sometimes after a dressing down by the autocratic Clifford Roberts, The Masters is an invitational with its own set of qualifications (again the PGA is not in charge of who plays). And galleries are limited to long-time ticket holders, some of whom have waited over 30 years to be granted the right to attend. The food costs on course during the tournament are notoriously low. Marshals strictly enforce crowd behavior and every year former winners, no matter their age or declining skills, are invited to play. Decrepit former winners who can't make four rounds are invited to hit the first balls in a ceremony on the first tee, always drawing a large gallery who understand that the game of golf is a game of traditional values.
Martha Burk can't stand any of this, but mostly she is outraged that Augusta National members are all males. Ignoring the fact that the feminist movement is anchored by the holy grail of all-gal organizations (you know, let your hair down, put down men), she wants all-guy Augusta to admit women or face a fatwah. There is no legal basis for this demand. Its just another in a continuous spew of hatred for anything that does not fall into line with the politically correct movement to crush the rights and privacy of individuals in order blindly to promote the gooey and newly pervasive concept of diversity.
Like all tyrants, she does not allow facts and legal fundamentals to get in the way of her jihad against the rights of the members of Augusta National to gather and socialize and run their golf tournament as they please. And unlike most golf clubs, Augusta is not a tax-exempt organization and pays federal income taxes (unlike the National Organization of Women or Burks National Council of Womens Organizations) and is therefore under no federal guidelines that could interfere with their right to be free to do as they see fit.
Rub of the green
There is one dimension to this crusade that could make the Masters dormie before the ordeal is over. Burk threatened the few Masters advertisers with the smear that they would be perceived as chauvinistic and racist if they sponsored the event this year. Sadly, like the sheep that they are, the firms capitulated. Masters chairman Hootie Johnson countered that this years event would be televised commercial free, trumping Burks move but setting up another issue. Will CBS carry the Masters anyway? The network is not licensed and the FCC has no power to prevent them from broadcasting the tournament commercial-free. But the local CBS affiliates are indeed licensed. Will local affiliates, including WRAL-TV 5 in Raleigh, turn down the network feed for fear that Burk and company will challenge their licenses? God, I hope they are brave enough not to cower in the face of the fatuous attacks by Burk, but I am not holding my breath.
Another dimension of the Masters controversy that strikes a chord with metouched on by writer David Owen in the March issue of Golf Digestis the underlying contempt for the South and Southerners by social activists. Burk has made comments about the good-ole-boy network and mocked Hootie Johnsons accent in order to apply the popular activist ploy of stigmatizing the enemy. The nuclear attack by the Left against the lowly tobacco plant falls into this Southern Strategy in its effort to characterize Southerners as racists, chauvinists, warmongers and homophobes. And for Burk, just being a man, any man, is enough to make her coil up and hiss.
What the now-deceased US Senator Sam Ervin once said about an opponent, He don't know nothing and he ain't got that right, sums up Martha Burk perfectly. She is not a golfer nor does she understand, much less respect, the game, its rituals and its importance to the men (and women) who do. Yet, consistent with other pressure groups littered around the American political landscape, she is willing to destroy it because its in the way of her mission to undermine the rights of individuals in our society to live freely, and yes, to pursue happiness with 14 clubs and a little white ball.
Notes from La-La Land
In last months piece on my hero Lafayette, I said he was imprisoned by Robespierre after playing a key role in winning our Revolution. Actually, the Germans and Austrians imprisoned our marquis after he fled the Terror. He spent five years in several dungeons. His wife Virginnie joined him in his cell for three of those years.
That said, I offer to our troops overseas this quote from the great man: The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and of peaceful liberty. Get it now, those of you who fail to understand the special role of America in the world?
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I recommend that one of the first targets of Operation American Freedom be the Smithsonian Institution to rid the national treasure house of the politically correct petty tyrants who are imposing morally relative anti-American propaganda in their exhibition halls (you know, Americans murdered the Indians, raped the earth, imprisoned Japanese-Americans, owned slaves, shackled women, etc.) with no balance in perspective.
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A new book is out amplifying what we all know: Teacher unions have almost single-handedly ruined our public schools. The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education by Peter Brimelow (HarperCollins) lays out the case that teacher unions have taken over the system, the schools, the legislatures and local governing bodies, creating a sclerosis in achievement even as more and more money is sunk down a pit of mediocrity. They impose their contract demands on weakened school boards and prevent incompetent teachers from being dismissed while insisting on more unnecessary and costly staffing. They spend millions in union dues to fight school choice and higher standards for entering teachers while running questionable insurance schemes that bilk their members. A worthy target for Operation American Freedom, don't you think?
The FCC held a hearing at Duke University, March 31, to hear local opinion on the recent proposed rule-making that would allow broadcast owners to increase their centralized control of the airwaves by tossing out the 35 percent concentration of ownership restriction. This dastardly piling on by the broadcast oligarchs comes in the wake of the stunning decline in the quality of broadcast content caused by recent betrayals by the FCC in giving broadcasters free rein to control a local market. Just look at concentrated radio ownership in the Triangle and you get the picture: canned content, miserable music and a singular lack of joy or respect for the listener. Guess whose son is FCC chairman and a proponent of allowing the big broadcasters to run roughshod over the public ownership of the airwaves? Michael Powell, son of the US Secretary of State.