COLUMN: Say It Ain't So, Joe

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By Tobin Barnes
“Tiger Admits Transgressions.”

Well…that’s it. It’s time to call in the dogs.

Even Tiger Woods?

I give up. This is the last straw.

Say it ain’t so, Joe. Shoeless Joe Jackson maybe, but Tiger?

I feel like I’m “Losing My Religion.” You know, as in one of R.E.M.’s hit songs?

That’s right. My long-held, but well over-stretched faith in my fellow man has now fallen to an all-time low. Yeah, it’s currently scraping bottom. There’s sparks coming up from the pavement.

We’ve all read, heard, and seen the painful stories.

Heck, how could we avoid them? Since the Tiger Woods brouhaha broke with that crash and the golf club, et al., the story has sometimes even led off the national news programs, which, gees louise, is in itself a farce, for crying out loud. All the things going on in the world, and the Tiger Woods mess is the top story?

Other scandals have surprised me, but I always thought Tiger Woods had too much integrity and had far too much innate discipline to succumb to cheap temptation the way so many others have.

Need I tell you this has created a seismic shift in my outlook.

Ronald Reagan had it right when he said, “Trust your neighbor, but don’t pull down your hedge.” Of course, he was talking about the Soviets then, but now I realize there’s untrustworthy “Soviets” all over the place.

I’ll admit that I used to be a babe in the woods, a naïve innocent (maybe as late as yesterday). But, alas, the Mary Sunshine in me has been sand-blasted away—a casualty of one-too-many revelations, one-too-many sleazy shots over the bow.

The old saw, “Trust everybody, but cut the cards,” has now become my mantra to the extent that I not only want to cut the cards several times, but I want to bring my own deck.

I think I just may have converted into full-fledged cynic. (Where do I get my official membership card? I’m ready to carry it.)

I’m beginning to realize that being a cynic has its advantages. I believe it was the conservative columnist George Will who said, “The nice thing about being a cynic is that you are either right or pleasantly surprised.”

The curmudgeon H. L. Mencken said, “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”

Author J. G. Cozzens said, “A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and he’s still upset.”

But do I really want to go there?

Do I really want to be that kind of person?

It sounds a little old and hoary, a little decrepit.

One of my literary favorites Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.”

Carolyn Wells, prolific writer of more than 170 books, said, “A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind’s eye.”

The famed 19th century minister Henry Ward Beecher said, “The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.”

Do I want to be a mouser for vermin?

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War during WWII, said, “The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.”

American novelist Fannie Hurst said, “It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”

And as sometime cynic himself Oscar Wilde said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

Okay, okay.

Maybe I’ll hold off on my complete descent into cynicism, but I’m not pulling down my hedge. And, hey, cut those cards!