This is what I find interesting in a sarcastic Yakov Smirnoff "What a Country" type of way. Our media here in the United States is so obsessed with Tiger Woods right now. They're going out of their way to get the latest scoop on whether or not he was assaulted by his wife. They are so insistent on exposing cracks in Woods' heretofore impenatrable armor by showing that he's not a perfect person after all.
This is the most important story in their views. Yet they don't have a problem with Tiger Woods doing deals with corporations that support dictatorial regimes, or forced child slave labor. Which of these things do you think is more important to focus on?
If you said a celebrity domestic dispute, you'd be right on the money!
Dave Zirin at the Huffington Post has a great piece up examining just this very thing:
As the saying goes, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Following his car "accident" Woods's agent said that it is unclear whether he will attend his foundation's Chevron World Challenge Golf Tournament. In 2008, Chevron entered a five-year relationship with Tiger Woods' foundation under the guise of philanthropy. But if Woods had a shred of social conscience, this partnership would never have existed. Lawsuits have been issued against Chevron for dumping toxic waste all over the planet. Alaska, Canada, Brazil, Angola and California have all accused Chevron of dumping. Even worse, Chevron has a partnership with Burma's ruling military junta on the country's Yadana gas pipeline project, the single greatest source of revenue for the military, estimated at nearly $5 billion since the year 2000.
Ka Hsaw Wa, co-founder and executive director of EarthRights International, wrote in an open letter to Woods, "I myself have spoken to victims of forced labor, rape, and torture on Chevron's pipeline -- if you heard what they said to me, you too would understand how their tragic stories stand in stark contrast to Chevron's rhetoric about helping communities." Chevron is underwriting a dictatorship but Tiger Woods apparently sees them as upstanding corporate partners.
And yet the main focus of the media is on a domestic squabble and a potential affair? Just goes to show you where our priorities are. In this era of TMZ and Perez Hilton there's no journalistic integrity or intuitiveness anymore. It's what celebrity nipple slips can we find? Who can we snap pictures of without their makeup so we can humiliate them? Is "Brangelina" going to break up? OMGWTF?
Seriously folks. Investigative Journalism seems to be dead in this country, and to be honest it's been dead for awhile. Perhaps now it's just that the stink is becoming so bad that it's hard to avoid acknowledging it.
Just ignore Tiger Wood's supporting Chevron which is financing the dictators and dumping toxic chemicals into the ground. Just ignore the forced child labor in these countries that Woods is conventiently ignoring as he stacks his money.
He has the right to make money, but is it too much to ask for someone to have a conscience or some sliver of a soul while doing it?
