Keith Brumley

These are strange times. In point, the retired porn actress and alleged Tiger Woods mistress Veronica Daniels Siwik (a.k.a., Joslyn James) and attorney Gloria Allred hosted a press conference Feb. 2. Siwik and Allred addressed the issue of Canadian-manufactured golf balls portraying pictures of Tiger Woods’ sexual paramours.

Siwik’s portrait was included. She didn’t like it.

“It was wrong,” Siwik said.

“As a victim of violence myself,” she explained, “it bothered me to think someone would be standing with a dangerous club in their hands and hitting a ball with my face on it.”

I’ve no problem with that. Being one of Tiger’s alleged lovers is just plain embarrassing, and Siwik’s attorney Gloria Allred provided appropriately embarrassing visual aids. A big golf ball painted with Siwik’s face was presented. Allred then brought out an oversized and colored golf club, rubbing it on Siwik’s portrait and leaving her visage covered with grime. That, by golly, is embarrassing.

The day’s press conference received later airtime on “Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell,” on CNN’s sister channel HLN. Talking heads provided commentary. Among them was Siwik’s attorney. The segment opened with a reasonable suggestion that all involved take co-responsibility. Velez-Mitchell dismissed this. Instead, she asked who was “more” morally degenerate.

Since Tiger Woods had taken marriage vows, Velez-Mitchell argued that he was more “wrong” than his mistresses. Woods’ sex partners had taken no such vows and were thus free of the larger burden of responsibility. Woods, Velez-Mitchell suggested, used his status and prestige to lure these innocents into illicit and emotionally devastating relationships.

This sets the sex scandal industry several notches up on the Bizarro Scale. It now makes sense to resurrect obsolete rhetoric: furthering absurdities, and perhaps making it right, by reframing the whole debacle.

Tiger Woods, then, is not a philandering PGA golfer packing a club that’s bigger than his brain, and his alleged sexual liaisons are not entrepreneurial chippies doing what they can to coerce themselves out of court settlements. Instead, Tiger, being a person of color, spent his entire life oppressed by the dominant imperialist post-colonial culture of middle-class white people. His alleged girlfriends, who by no coincidence happen to be Caucasian, are also victims.

The Tiger Woods scandal isn’t about sexual infidelity. It’s a metaphor wherein Woods was successfully manipulated into being the archetypal black and therefore demonic defiler of white feminine virtue and helplessness. This plays on unconscious white, liberal, middle-class fears of being overrun by hordes of people of color and substandard social status, thereby usurping meaningful progress in civil rights. Those who disagree are in denial.

These are strange times … Strange indeed.

The Ballad of Tiger Woods

Tiger is a golfer.He’s famed from East to West. His togs are the very finest,His comforts are the best.He’s learned to read,He’s learned to write–Alas, he is no fool.The only problem with Tiger ?He’s too handy with his tool.

Keith Brumley is an SDSU alumnus and current journalism graduate student at SDSU.