Putt.
“So, you’re out here looking for the American Dream?”
The ball rolled up the rise of the green and dropped into the cup with a metallic ‘plop’.
“Mmmm, what’s left of it, I suppose,” I bended at the knee behind my own ball, putter in hand, eyeing the line over the cool morning grass at Augusta.
“What makes you think sumpthin’s happened to it,” says my companion, Sully McDaniel, bending to recover his Titleist.
“Or was it ever there to begin with, no?” I stand to address my Maxfli Noodle, line my putt and clap the ball across the green. “Americans, real Americans, rallying with images of their president as a Hitler, or a Nazi; working class Americans servicing their corporate masters, blissfully unaware of the nuances of the moniker ‘teabagger’. I mean, mon frere, what is happening here?”
It was a rare, good putt and sank into the hole with that satisfying hollow sound. We gathered our clubs and made for the thirteenth hole, the Azalea, a wicked par five. Sully is quiet until we begin to cross the green felted bridge over the creek.
“Now, see, I think old Clint Eastwood has it right,” he tells me, brushing a bit of grass from his plaid trousers. “What this here country needs is an ‘Invictus’ moment. I think he’s trying to make an analogy, or a metaphor. You got your Morgan Freeman standing in for Nelson Mandela, whose kinda standing in for Obama. And then there’s Matt Damon standing in for… well, I guess standing in for Matt Damon, but the rest of it, the image of a whole nation coming together, building a new identity out of the ashes of a dark past. Well, it gets a bit tricky, working the whole apartheid as the Bush years thing, but it’s pretty close and old Clint had to use what was there to work with.”
It’s in the low sixties on an overcast morning in Georgia in the middle of December. The course is mostly empty and there is no wait for us at the tee for the 13th.
“I have to admit, Sully, I see flaws in your theory. Number one, the team USA does not look good to get past the quarter finals next summer and Joe Leiberman just came out against buying into Medicare early and hopes to quash the public option single-handedly.”
“Goddamn Joe Lieberman.” Sully sullenly drew his Calloway driver.
“And yet, isn’t that so quintessentially American? The rogue individual, the man who makes a difference?”
“The preening goddamn ego that calls all the attention to himself?”
Sully blasted the drive in a high-soaring arch.
“Sacre’Poutine! That ball needs a stewardess!”
“We don’t need no galldang soccer game, the country can rally round gathering a pile of pitchforks and good rope and head up to Connecticut and lynch that no good Yankee! It’s a goddamn conspiracy to spoil Christmas, that’s what the hell it is! I don’t mean that in any kind of anti-Semitic kind of way, Pierre, you know that.”
“Sully, we’re all friends here,” I say, pressing my tee into the grass. “I think even Wild Bill would share your sentiment.”
I take my stance in front of the ball, look out at the far off, left turn of the dog leg. The American Dream. I’ve come back to find it.
Shank! The ball hooks violently and kertwangs off the footbridge over the creek, half mercifully landing in the rough under the shade of trees just off the fairway.
“Goddamn Joe Lieberman.”
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