I’m starting to feel a little sorry for Tiger Woods.

He just wanted to do what every out-of-touch, selfish, lusty billionaire possessed of the overfed goose liver pate version of an ego has done for all of human history – boink quantities of beautiful women while gallivanting all over the world to his various disgustingly ostentatious & heavily guarded mansions. But now we know that sex with him can be wild & crazy, we hear stories that he is a tightwad to rival Hetty Green, asking restaurants to comp him his meals because he is…Tiger Woods. We have been alerted to his obscene earnings. This was never secret but no one had any particular interest. We now know about his kids, his parents, his early TV appearances, his life as a child golf prodigy, his beautiful wife, his many homes, what he drives, his investments. (Dubai. What a fool.) And just up are pix of the house his wife is buying on some island off the coast of Sweden. Am I the better for knowing these things? No. My life has no intersection whatsoever with Tiger Woods’. I think golf is surpassed in boringness only by picking fuzzballs off wool sweaters. And I don’t care a flick about Tiger Woods as a person. He is good looking enough but not my type so I’m not feeling crushy, he doesn’t seem to possess any irresistible charisma, he is not styling himself as a leader in any charity or cause I’ve heard of. He’s simply not on my radar. For all that, I now know so much about him. It’s not like I’m trying, he’s on every front page. There’s something wrong when, without trying, I know this much about a person who will never have any effect whatsoever on my life, & who I will never meet.

I feel sort of bad for him because he’s one of the new victims of this growing culture of zero privacy, & the thing about it is – why should we care? Does it make us lose respect for Tiger? Really? How much was respect of Tiger Woods really a part of any of our lives 2 weeks ago? Be honest – if you ran into him at the coffee shop tomorrow, you’d be just as fawning & oogling as anyone, I mean, if that’s your bent. You would act exactly as you would have a month ago before any of these demeaning antics were made public.

The irony, to me, is that nothing he’s done is new. FDR walked with leg braces because he had polio as a child. We know that now, but at the time, very few people had any idea. Why? Because the media all agreed it would be undignified to show him shuffling to the podium. Also it would weaken him in the eyes of his public. It just wasn’t done. By the time Reagan came along, we were seeing cross sections of his prostate on the evening news. And JFK! People at the time thought of him as a young man coming into his best years, blessed with a beautiful & demure wife, a large & supportive family, charming & well bred children, & deep American values. In fact he had tunnels going into the White House to so he could writhe with his mistresses without inconveniencing the gate guards.

I’m not interested in whether Tiger Woods has done right or wrong. He’s not a politician, not a dr, not in a position of public trust. He is living lavishly but not with my money. He’s been a pillar of restraint compared to some celebrities. Heck, Ghengas Khan was a wealthy & powerful man & he slept with quantities of women as his right. I read one study saying some 8% of men in a certain part of Asia share his genes. Tiger was unfaithful which is considered improper in our current times, but hasn’t our country always loosened this standard for celebrities? So why do we need to hear every little detail of this marital train wreck? His wealth & fame have made it so he probably can’t walk 2 steps without some fan or paparazzi hounding him. He’s probably done pretty much what most of us would to if we were convinced by a doting public that we were brilliant, & had enough money to indulge our pleasures. But for Tiger Woods, the walls came down at the confluence of 2 ideas, one a couple of decades old & one rather new – that if it can be found out, we have a right to hear about it; & that every bit of info, good & bad, might as well go out to the networked world ASAP.

We have reached a point of cultural TMI. For all 4 of you who haven’t heard yet, TMI stands for “too much information.” Usually it’s used in the context of too much intimate information, or intimate and gross.  Like more details than you really need on some sex act gone wrong. People will exclaim, “TMI! I didn’t need to hear that!”  And this is what we have in the case of Tiger Woods. The wonders of the Internet strain toward a nadir, & we, the distracted public, plug into incredible technology to ensure we go forth to our days with the vital knowledge that some golfer guy is well endowed. Job well done.