New Silicon Graffiti Video: Sex, Lies, And Golf Magazines

In 1980, Lisa Birnbach released the Preppy Handbook, which documented the culture and contradictions of some of the last holdouts of traditionalism during the increasingly liberal tilt amongst American elites during the 1970s.

David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise, published only a few months before September 11^th, 2001 also helped to catalog the styles and mores of an era that no one could see had reached its conclusion.

The cover of Golf Digest’s now-infamous “10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” issue was announced on the Web about five minutes before Woods’ career-altering misadventures at the end of November. But when I finally saw the issue on the newsstand around Christmastime, and could read the actual article inside, it occurred to me that it may be a miniature — albeit entirely unintended — version of those same books. (Much of the rest of the magazine, which combines the aesthetic stylings of Birnbach’s book with the contradictions of Brooks is a hoot as well.)

If the American public is lucky, hopefully, the Golf Digest story marks the final chapter of the mythological hagiographic prose from such Northeast Corridor liberal Obama-boosters as Joe Conason, Tom Friedman, and Golf Digest’s own in-house staff. (To the best of my knowledge, the text of this section isn’t online — I suspect it may be quite a while before it does appear at Golf Digest, but bloggers with scanners and OCR software will have lots of fun blockquoting this material.)