I'm kind of bothered by memes that keep saying that Joe Biden doesn't play golf.
Look, I know what they mean: That the last president did little else. Yes, that meant a number of things, none of which were good.
They were a way to dodge responsibility. Oh, he could say, maybe, that that was his favorite place to think, but we knew better. He didn't think about his responsibilities much at all.
He used golf to run away from them. That's why he played it so much.
Any executive in any business who played golf as much as he did while he was the Chief Executive would be subject to back-stabbing asides by associates and assistants out of hearing distance. It wouldn't look good. It sure didn't in his case.
And, of course, he cheated when he played, something that someone who believes in the game would never do. Golf is, above all, a game of honor, and he hasn't had any for his entire life.
Much was written during his presidency about the fact that he would kick the ball into a better lie or make up a better score than the one he had. It does tell you a number of things:
- He lives in his own little world;
- He has to win in his own mind, even if he loses;
- He has to have his own little way;
- The rules do not apply to him, or they do only if he feels like it, or else he makes up other rules.
There's one other little problem: the extent to which he ridiculed the president before him for how much he played golf, even though he played it far less. It was just another way of deflecting ridicule away from him, he who developed golf courses throughout the world for him to cheat on.
He paid the price. The PGA, which was going to hold its sacred championship on a course he paid for, cancelled that date and came up with another. It figured, rightly so, that anyone who would try to stir up a crowd to overthrow the constitutional process of making someone else the president shouldn't have his name attached to whatever it was doing.
Then Joe Biden comes along, and he doesn't play golf at all. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, and it implies that he's using the time he'd be on the course to actually do his job, which is, among other things, to figure out how to bail us out of the deep, intense mess the previous president was only too happy to plunge us into.
Lots of memes have been developed to point out that Biden doesn't play golf. Yeah, okay, but does he do anything to relax? Seems to me that someone 78 years old would want to do that, no matter what job he had. Look, I don't care that he doesn't play golf; lots of people don't, and it's detaches him from what are, in fact, some of the pursuits of the rich, with country clubs and $600 drivers and the like.
It would bother me, at the other end of the spectrum, to know that Joe Biden does not have a pastime or hobby or something. Through his book, Promise Me, Dad, he revealed that he likes to ride bikes. That would be great. Bike riding can be far more strenuous than golfing, especially riding a cart to do so, and bike riders have control of how fast they want to go. That Biden has done that, and is inclined to do that, is only healthy.
In my day, I went out and played golf alone to relieve tension. I wasn't bad at it, which helped. It restored structure to my world. But I didn't do it every day I could. That would represent running away from things.
Barack Obama played a little golf. But a little. He never went straight out onto the course the first thing he could. He utilized it in the same way Biden did for bike riding--to clear his head. Presidents have played golf a lot more than Obama. Woodrow Wilson did it practically every day, and he had a war to deal with. (Except media coverage was a more sparse, and I really wonder if he'd have continued if its intensity was, back then, the same as it is now.)
Maybe Biden has already done some bike riding while in the first two months of his job. Maybe not, but I would recommend it if he didn't. The mind has to get away from things for even an hour or two to refresh it, and the endorphins from physical activity can generate ideas that someone didn't even know were there. (Ever have that happen while on a walk or run or playing tennis or--dare I say it--talking with fellow golfers? See--there you go.)
So stressing the fact that Joe Biden doesn't play golf makes a point, but not about Joe Biden. It should be taken off of future memes that try to make him look good. Instead, someone should write that he "rides bikes," to emphasize that he's reasonably athletic but not so much so that it doesn't take him away from what he supposed to be doing. Or, maybe, dropped altogether.
I like the job Biden's doing. He's learned from the past and, in his own way, is "going for it" in terms of establishing policy and disciplined in practice, despite a very narrow Congressional majority. He seems nice enough, but beneath the surface, there's a very determined and focused man there. It's a refreshing departure from the disaster of the past four years, golf or not.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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