Is it even worth it?

[BHoover]

I'm reluctant to join this circus, but I finally couldn't take it anymore.  Is anyone else bored beyond belief with this thread?  I understand that it may touch upon some important social, economic and political issues (perhaps I'm giving it too much credit), but that being said, it's run its course.  Let's get back to talking about golf.

Golf is meant to be a recreational activity.  So let's not take ourselves so seriously and get back to discussing golf-related matters.

[RJ_Daley]

VK, I wrote the above before seeing your last post.  Seriously, what are your objectives in posting these notions here?  Do you believe there is one person on GCA.com that you think will change their views?  Anyone that knows me, knows I'm probably down with much of what you wrote; but that is beside the point.  In previous lengthy political-economic debates, we have seen the varied aspects of the arguments expressed by folks who are greatly educated and able to express 'expert' opinions on all sides of these issues. I, not being not nearly so learned as some that wade in, do think I have learned a thing or two (even from Lou Duran   ) And yet, there seems to be no evident changes of ideology or political views after the debates, at least that I could discern in those heated exchanges.  Your last post was wide apart from GCA.  The GCA.com contributors are a generally well educated, mostly all professional or retired professional people who have their minds of political and economic matters made up to the great extent.  

I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing left to do but vote and hope that process is not ruined by sinister forces.  You may convert or educate some sector of undecided individuals as to how they should vote.  But seriously, I doubt if you'll find the ground of GCA.com fertile ground to plow, if that is your goal.  

If you have a personal political blog page, I'd probably look in, if only to reinforce my own views and compare how much I agree or disagree with your views.  But, I'm just thinking this isn't going to go much further on GCA.com, unless you can marry your thesis and beliefs to something tangible and demonstrable to our subject matter, going forward.  

[Mac Plumart]

What is worse, an oligarch or a redneck?

I have to admit, I like rednecks better..........

Funny you wrote that Brad.  I play golf with someone we call the "Oligarch" and one who we call the "Redneck".  Two very different people, but they get along quite well. 

The Oligarch is an executive with a very large publicly traded company travels the world and interacts with the who's who in business.  The Redneck is an entrepeneur (did I spell that correctly?) who built his first company from nothing sold it and now focuses on charitable efforts while owning another profitable company. 

Both men successful.  Both men have different backgrounds.  Both men are family men.  Both men enjoy each others company.  One is a Republican through and through.  The other a Libertarian.  Both love to golf.  Both are my friends.

[Howard Riefs]

I'm reluctant to join this circus, but I finally couldn't take it anymore.  Is anyone else bored beyond belief with this thread?  I understand that it may touch upon some important social, economic and political issues (perhaps I'm giving it too much credit), but that being said, it's run its course.  Let's get back to talking about golf.

Golf is meant to be a recreational activity.  So let's not take ourselves so seriously and get back to discussing golf-related matters.

+1

Can we go back to debating about Dismal and Ballyneal?

[Bob_Huntley]

I read Das Kapital more years ago than I can remember and I must say VK's version is much better reading.

As John Cleese would say "Now for something totally diferent".

Whilst in this particular thread I do wish that if anyone should use aphorisms, at least get the name of its author right. Earlier in this  discussion it was mentioned that   "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Voltaire, (Attributed); originated in "The Friends of Voltaire", 1906, by S. G. Tallentyre (Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)  

It seems that just about every time we get a pithy quote it is wrongly attributed to Churchill.

Bob

[Brad Isaacs]

Mac,
Good to have diversity.  I am sure I would enjoy both guys as well, do they laugh?

Is there such a thing as a libertarian democrat?
I am a believer in John Locke- enlightened self interest.

[Brad Isaacs]

I'm reluctant to join this circus, but I finally couldn't take it anymore.  Is anyone else bored beyond belief with this thread?  I understand that it may touch upon some important social, economic and political issues (perhaps I'm giving it too much credit), but that being said, it's run its course.  Let's get back to talking about golf.

Golf is meant to be a recreational activity.  So let's not take ourselves so seriously and get back to discussing golf-related matters.

+1

Can we go back to debating about Dismal and Ballyneal?

There is no debate!

[Michael George]

What is worse, an oligarch or a redneck?

I have to admit, I like rednecks better..........

Funny you wrote that Brad.  I play golf with someone we call the "Oligarch" and one who we call the "Redneck".  Two very different people, but they get along quite well.  

The Oligarch is an executive with a very large publicly traded company travels the world and interacts with the who's who in business.  The Redneck is an entrepeneur (did I spell that correctly?) who built his first company from nothing sold it and now focuses on charitable efforts while owning another profitable company.  

Both men successful.  Both men have different backgrounds.  Both men are family men.  Both men enjoy each others company.  One is a Republican through and through.  The other a Libertarian.  Both love to golf.  Both are my friends.

Mac - I can get along with anyone as long as they are giving me strokes    

[Mac Plumart]

 

Michael, I'm unsure I get your joke. 


Brad...both guys laugh...The Redneck more than the Oligarch.  But one story about the Oligarch.  Big House.  Fancy Car.  Beautiful wife.  Well-dressed.  Might appear to some to be a snob.  When I was having my issues with my legs and needed my first surgery.  I had to go to the Mayo Clinic for advice and guidance.  I was concerned I couldn't make it through the airport due to pain (yes, I'm too proud to take the wheelchair and/or beeping cart through the termincal).  The "stuck up" Oligarch offered to take time off work to personally drive me to the Mayo Clinic in Florida..stay with me...then drive me back.  WOW!!!  Underneath the facade of who people try to pretend to be, there might be good people lurking (or vice-versa I guess).

[Bob_Huntley]

Mac.

"I  was concerned I couldn't make it through the airport due to pain (yes, I'm too proud to take the wheelchair and/or beeping cart through the termincal". (sic)

Your'e nuts, if the pain is such you could do more harm to yourself by not taking a wheel chair.

Bob

[Michael George]

Bob:

I think I read that this is a picture of you at Sand Hills.  If so and you have dealt with health issues, you have my respect for going down after that ball.  WOW.  

[David Wigler]

About once a month I look into GCA and every now and then a thread like this pops up.  It is a train wreck from the start and denigrates to name calling and vastly broad generalizations about people from other people they have never met or know only from screen names.  Inevitably someone leaves GCA over it and nothing is accomplished. 

I have had the pleasure of meeting Pat Mucci, John Kavanaugh and Mike Young personally.  I can say without qualification that I truly enjoyed my time with all three of them and would in an instant accept an invitation to have a beer again with any of the three.  Any broad generalizations of them simply are unfair.  As always, you can disagree with their writings or thoughts (And certainly have that right) but there is no way IMO to judge a man's character from internet prose on an occasionally anonymous site based mainly and loosely on golf architecture.  I learned that years ago when upon meeting several GCAers, my opinions could not have been more different than the people I thought they were from writing.  It takes spending time with people to know what they are all about.  I hope the vitriol tones down here.  Commander Huntly is always a voice of reason.  Blame it all on Churchill and move on.

[George Pazin]

Nice post, David, one of the few sensible ones on an unfortunate thread.

[Bob_Huntley]

Michael,

That was taken about five years ago before my cardio unpleasentness.

I could never show my wife that wonderful picture of Sand Hills as she would take me to task for slouching.

Thanks for posting it.

Bob

[Michael George]

Bob - it is one of my favorite pictures in Ran's course reviews.  Provides the scale of the bunkers and leaves the viewer wondering where you were headed with your club sadly lying on the ground in the bunker behind you.  

[Bryan Izatt]

For those pillorying V. Kmetz, can you at least spell his name correctly.  I don't know him, but from his introductory post on GCA.com, his name is Vinnie Kmetz, and it appears to be a real, and not a screen name.  He has an interesting writing style.  The link below is to what appears to be his thesis for a professional creative writing degree.  An interesting read.  And, it is at least as on topic as Tom's interview.

http://library.wcsu.edu/dspace/bitstream/0/432/1/SPRING+THESIS+for+BRIGGS.pdf

[V. Kmetz]

Hey BI,

Yup, that was my "undergraduate thesis" four years ago, that capstoned the first era of returning to school at age 40.  I'm glad you found and posted that.  Now that my Masters Thesis (in poetry) is about to be entered, later this week; I've been telling my peers and mentors that I want to return to this collection I left off as an undergrad.

I hope to edit the stories that are there; add four more, add some Golf poems and a few essays on GCA and Pro Golf and have a true compendium, anthology that speaks from the Caddie perspective...on golf or the world.

Thanks again for posting that.  I forgot that existed on the Westcollections web venue.

cheers

vk

[Patrick_Mucci]

Hello All,

I haven't posted regularly for more than a year, and I was actually preparing an inquiry to the board on the first ten (chronologically speaking) hard copy books/essays/long articles on GCA...

But then I came upon the feature interview with Tom Paul and that all went away.

After reading this "interview" (which I feel is nothing of the sort...85 words of questions, hardly a glance at GCA, 13,468 words of response, a passing glance at GCA...this was a prepared, typed manifesto of social assertion put on a pedestal by the proprietors of this site) I felt ashamed to have ever devoted one moment to Golf, GCA and the frivolity of posting thoughts on a forum such as this.

To read the now-60-deep member praise and annex discussion that follows, I realize that I am in the sharpest and smallest minority; but when I look at Tom Paul's life through the prism of this self-published "Memoir of a Gentleman" I see a life wasted, ignorant of what true good fortune is, solipsistic enough for long enough to actually believe that the savages of those outside the gates (including a young Jack Nicklaus it seems) are any different than the savages inside the gates.  The only thing that separates this "Atlas Hugged" memoir from that of Ayn Rand's stories is that a) Rand writes fiction and b)Rand writes only a little longer.

Does Tom Paul realize that behind every golf shot he played, every charming story of Lady Astor and Winnie, every privileged point of access to every sacred reserve of a damn game, there are people in great suffering, earning pennies chasing necessities that cost dollars, thousands of them? And how were these fortunes built and secured (whether in their English origins or in the American iteration)? By divine right, by royal fiat, by exploitation and privatization of resources, by criminal acts, by theft and swindling of native peoples, by wars fought by the poor, by closed-doors incest with government, law and politics (oiled by the profit earned by all such activity).

So to enable the predilections and the full personal blossoming of some 100,000 uber-class lives in the last 200 years, billions (perhaps a trillion) have suffered under the yoke of the master's need for comfort and whimsy--cold, hungry, over-worked, provoked by a life of seeking necessity?  And then I'm to believe that a boys camp in Long Island is payment enough? Read the classic Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne..."Penitence demands a burden."

Please tell me this was all an inside joke, that my indolence in keeping up with the board and posting has made me unaware of some unknown silliness; and that this was actually intended to be a satire of the very class of people so lovingly framed by TP.

If it's not, then though shameful and abhorrent to my personal beliefs, I think this "in-his-view" is perhaps the bravest thing ever concocted and publicly displayed for its snapshot of detached dysfunction, rank de-spoilment, and frank cowardice it displays.

Yes, cowardice...at least in the instance of the anecdote about Papa Paul and Seminole and Nicklaus' desire to join.  C'mon - Dad wouldn't leave the club because he had no stomach to encounter breach with friends but resigning the board is an act of conscience just the same?  Thank God Charlie Sifford didn't apply, Dad might have had a genuine moral quandry--heaven forfend!

And this self-annunciated standard that the true gentleman "treats all men equal in both scorn and praise"...surely that ethos is one part of exemplary character; but the very point of gentleman and his business clubs and his golf clubs is that they are never in contact with any member of the public that might just challenge and require them to truly apply that ethos.  Outside of a few Caddies and that horrible machinist's son that Daughter Ashley is infatuated with, how many fools, felons and flunkies does the true gentleman of Mr. Paul's class encounter?

The whole Lord Jim section of flunking out of Princeton, "banished from the country to a family publishing concern" turning up at Columbia - with a stint in the Marine Corps (I am, like another poster, interested in that term of service; its years and avenues of duty) in between...it makes me ill.  My god, to treat that which would change the life of any of my freshman students at a state college (I am a Graduate Assistant about to receive my Masters) who couldn't in a hundred spins of the wheel over 8000 years prove their merit for the opportunity to be next to the best teachers and the best resources, like a frame to disinterested adventurist hedonism is such an outrage.  If Tom Paul is speaking accurately and with an inured philosophy/biography of a culture, no greater proof exists that the uber-wealthy should be dispossessed of at least one half of their holdings, if only to buy gasoline for the next 5 years for all American households earning less than 35,000 or entirely forgive all student debt in this country...even if it was to buy tickets to Death Metal concerts for 10 year-olds, it would be a better investment than such...dandism.

So, yes Tom Paul you and your WASPforebearers have ostensibly ruled the world; you have run the "machine," it has not run you...and how is that world you have run? 

Does it look very nice from up there in the sky. 

Up there are not those of the bearing and hereditary line and the knowledge of a true gentleman, like a high altitude bomber, dropping a devastation on a littlke place they can't even see? The war is so clean up there is it not? 

You fly home in safety to base, well out of range of any gun, you park your jet, kiss the wife, screw the maid, drink with the boys and do it all over again the next day--until one day you receive a glimpse of what those bombs do. In modern times, a drone operator who kills "possibles" in Afghanistan from a console in a bunker in Nevada.

If as you say, "when those in a leadership role lose the respect of those they lead, they will ultimately fail and they will devolve into irrelevancy somehow at some point."

Well stories like yours--though torturedly cast through some prism of "golf"--is the open spigot where the respect runs out.  That's why I genuinely think its so brave--it's unintentionally a mea culpa, by the very standards it sets.

Well, I can't be as voluminous as the "interview" was; but there's my gist. I'll be glad to respond to any individual prompts that may occur as I get the chance; I'm caddying at WF this weekend. 

In all of this, though I tried to keep a civil tone; I failed as it was impossible. 

Tom Paul is a top-flight know-nik about GCA and I believe has even extended certain posting kindnesses to me.  This seems a terrible way to re-pay the spirit of that and his generally good reputation, as I know it.  I apologize; I felt this particular case required strident response and because it also had so little to do with golf (really).  In fact, the only thing I can say about the Golf Content of this portion of memoir is that Merion, Gulph, Seminole...etc are likely to be the first places torched, when the impoverished and middle classes have nothing left to lose.

cheers

vk

[Jim_Kennedy]

Michael,

I could never show my wife that wonderful picture of Sand Hills as she would take me to task for slouching.

Probably too late for that wish now that GCA is fast becoming Finks-R-Us. 

[Colin Macqueen]

Mike Y,

Let it be known that I, Colin Mac, am the owner of your second quoted piece from what I thought was a private communication.

"Mr. Young,

I am of no consequence but am astonished, dismayed and unsettled by what you purport to have done in post #113.
Freedom of expression without fear of the direst of consequences is a fundamental tenet of a civilised society. What you have done by your own admission is reprehensible."

I communicated privately as I thought that doing so I would not add any more fuel to this thread. Rest assured I am not in the least bit worried by having these thoughts of mine made public. I kept them private out of what I thought was respect.  In fact I am quite pleased that you forced me to 'fess up I feel better about that.

Yours Colin

[Mac Plumart]

For fun...and maybe to lighten the mood.

Vinnie, if you won the lotto (the GA lotto stands at $173 million) what would you do with the money?  Let's say $65 million after-tax up-front cash payment.

[Don_Mahaffey]

Vinnie,
I read some of your undergrad thesis, as well as your posts on this thread. IMO, you’re an excellent writer and I'm envious of your skill. Of course I never put in the work to learn to write like that; I wish I had spent a little more time paying attention in my English/lit classes.

My only question, and forgive me if this has been already asked, but why do you continue to work for people you obviously abhor? I think I grasp most of your message except for that? To me, the most basic human desire is to be happy. It doesn’t look like caddying for the privileged makes you happy? Or maybe it does in some way as it gives you subject matter. But to what end? 

[Ben Sims]

Vinnie,
I read some of your undergrad thesis, as well as your posts on this thread. IMO, you’re an excellent writer and I'm envious of your skill. Of course I never put in the work to learn to write like that; I wish I had spent a little more time paying attention in my English/lit classes.

My only question, and forgive me if this has been already asked, but why do you continue to work for people you obviously abhor? I think I grasp most of your message except for that? To me, the most basic human desire is to be happy. It doesn’t look like caddying for the privileged makes you happy? Or maybe it does in some way as it gives you subject matter. But to what end? 

Don,

We've spoken about this a lot and you know how I feel.  Everyone has a master (everyone) and the grass is always greener somewhere.  You've got to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.  I think that is the ultimate struggle of the 30-50 year old man in this society.

[George Pazin]

Vinnie,
I read some of your undergrad thesis, as well as your posts on this thread. IMO, you’re an excellent writer and I'm envious of your skill. Of course I never put in the work to learn to write like that; I wish I had spent a little more time paying attention in my English/lit classes.

My only question, and forgive me if this has been already asked, but why do you continue to work for people you obviously abhor? I think I grasp most of your message except for that? To me, the most basic human desire is to be happy. It doesn’t look like caddying for the privileged makes you happy? Or maybe it does in some way as it gives you subject matter. But to what end? 

Don,

We've spoken about this a lot and you know how I feel.  Everyone has a master (everyone) and the grass is always greener somewhere.  You've got to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.  I think that is the ultimate struggle of the 30-50 year old man in this society.

That struggle means nothing if the man isn't man enough to understand he bears responsibility for that decision, not someone else, or society. Blaming others is a sickness that will ultimately lead to misery.

[Mac Plumart]

George, have you ever seen anyone who seems to relish being sad and/or being angry at the world?  I have and I think some people enjoy this misery you speak of.  They rail against the "machine".  The "man" is keeping them down.  Injustice and conspiracy reign supreme.  They base their life off of this mantra and develop their identity around these concepts.

Whatever floats your boat, I suppose.