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.
SNIP
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.
SNIP
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.
SNIP
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.
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