Missing the Point at Augusta

I think the fewer people who play golf, and especially the fewer people who play golf at enclaves of the point-zero-one percent like Augusta National, the better off we'll all be.

But if the sport must exist, then we are fortunate to have sportswriter David Zirin at The Nation, who knows what matters:

In a week where the phrase “legitimate rape” became part of the American political discourse, it’s understandable that anyone who believes in women’s liberation would be scavenging for some good news.

Like a parched soul in the desert, many believe that a trickle of water, if not an oasis, has appeared. After eighty years of antediluvian sexism, the Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters, has finally decided to admit women into its ranks. All hail the trailblazers: President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina billionaire banking executive Darla Moore.

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And yet, please forgive me if I don’t join the chorus of cheers. Rice and Moore are not twenty-first-century Jackie Robinsons, and their acceptance into this bastion of exclusion has nothing to do with women’s liberation and is utterly disconnected from the reality of daily life for millions of American women.

Condi Rice as a symbol of female power? Only if by power, we mean the power to put thousands of Iraqi women in graves all in the name of a war based on lies that she actively promoted.

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In a sane world, Rice would be awaiting trial at the Hague. Instead, she gets to play golf at a club that, incidentally, didn’t allow African-Americans until 1990.

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I’m sure it’s tempting to look at today as an advance for women in sports. But it’s very difficult to think that today’s national celebration of a multi-billionaire and a war criminal has anything to do with women’s liberation. If anything, this should only be a story because it’s so unbelievable that the membership of the Augusta National Golf Club still opposed the presence of women in 2012. The only way this club could be any kind of symbol of progress and justice is if the people of Augusta, Georgia, a whopping 32 percent of whom live below the US poverty line, took to the eighteenth green and occupied the Masters. Let’s see whose side Condi Rice and Darla Moore would be on then.