Ireland, Golf, and the Invisible Lines We Draw Between Us

I will admit that I am at somewhat of a loss over what to write today, my first day back from a weeklong golf vacation in Ireland. Due to extreme jet lag and crossing many time zones, I genuinely do not know what time it is right now. Save for a few days after my dog suddenly died earlier this year, it’s the first extended time off I’ve taken for Splinter since we launched all the way back in the before times in March of 2024. I certainly needed to take a breather after the sprint of Trump’s first six months and a gut-wrenching tragedy I am still processing, and the midsummer lull is a perfect time to take a step back from the fascist hellscape enveloping America and reset a bit.

My most toxic trait is that I am stricken with terminal golf brain that now is at its all-time peak. I have already written about my conflicting feelings over a sport that in practice in most of the United States, is played on a surface being created, maintained and developed in a way that is diametrically opposite to my values. Seeing my blogs about golf next to Dave’s reports on the newest grim climate impacts is hypocritical to a degree, but this is also a website about American politics, and we would be doing a disservice to our readers to shield the inherent contradictions of American life that touch our lives too. As the meme goes, we live in a society.

But I have taken a pilgrimage, returning with a message from the elders that it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to destroy the earth, exacerbate historic droughts and take up valuable land better used to address our housing crisis just to create a picturesque and heavily manicured elite safe space. Golf’s origins are that of a humble game carved out of unused sand dunes spanning from Scotland to Ireland, where farmers couldn’t grow anything and builders couldn’t build anything next to these shores, so some budding masochists picked up some sticks, mowed parts of the landscape and changed the world. It is a spiritual experience to play there in multiple ways. You will see how golf should look, and you will play a different game in the wind and on uneven surfaces than the target golf seen throughout much of America.

They let the rough grow naturally there. Sitting on the ocean provides enough rainfall to water their courses sustainably. They don’t need or want to flood their courses with pesticides to the degree that we do where every other local muni tries its best to look like Augusta National. I will never forget those 72 holes I played and watched in Ireland as long as I live. It was guilt-free golf nirvana.

The British Open was on the shores of Northern Ireland last week, and everywhere you looked you saw its branding of “forged by nature,” reinforcing this cultural golf ethos that much of America has lost track of. Royal Portrush was designed by golf geniuses, and I would rather play it once than Augusta National a hundred times. I have become a convert of the smug “the only real golf courses in the world are on the British Isles” theory. What we have here in the states is partially defined by a misunderstanding of this sport’s origin, but this new era is a hopeful return to its more sustainable and egalitarian roots, albeit while taking place on a lot of courses that are anything but.

It’s fitting that Scottie Scheffler was coronated at a links course evoking golf’s utilitarian origins. On Tuesday, Scheffler gave a profoundly thoughtful answer about the most important things in life like his love for his family versus why he cares about a game this much, then on Sunday, established himself as Tiger-level dominant, capturing his fourth major championship in exactly as many days as it took Tiger Woods to win his fourth. Scheffler is a unique personality in an era where everyone is a brand, as former Paste Politics Editor Shane Ryan so eloquently wrote for Golf Digest:

In short, there’s supposed to be a price to pay for existing in the media-saturated world of athletics as Scottie Scheffler, and that price is at least a little piece of your soul, stripped naked for the ogling masses.

Scheffler won’t give it. Not on those terms. He’ll talk about Jesus, but not too much. He’ll play with his son, but all you’re getting is a photograph from afar. You’ll see his wife on the 18th hole, but her Instagram is set to private. He’ll be a subject on Netflix’s “Full Swing,” but it will be a comically thin depiction clearly borne of scant access. Hell, you can even throw the man in jail, and he won’t milk the trauma. It is almost impossible to believe that someone this good, this famous, living under this microscope, could possibly be this grounded.

Scheffler has successfully drawn a line between his life and the fame his otherworldly golfing has earned for him. Having the #2 golfer in the world, Rory McIlroy, in his homecoming after scaling the mountain to join Tiger in the most elite club in golf, say that Scheffler “is the bar” in the wake of the British Open says a lot about the respect he commands on the PGA Tour. Scottie Scheffler seems to have found a healthy work/life balance that no other world-class athlete has. Sometimes these invisible lines we draw between us can be productive.

But as my drive from Ireland to Northern Ireland proved and the number of differing flags I saw grew, there are unproductive ones too. The Troubles revealed many of them, bringing these invisible lines to life and ultimately, death. These lines divide us so thoroughly that they manifest into actual walls sometimes. Dublin and Belfast are very different cities to experience for the first time, with one being familiar to an American who spent most of their young adulthood out late drinking in the northeast, and another city whose kitchens closing at 7 p.m. on a Friday may as well have resided on Mars.

Religion was not the primary dividing line in the split between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the 20th century, loyalty to the British was, but if I didn’t know which one of those cities was the Protestant one going into the trip, I could have told you in an instant afterwards. While many in our supposed church and state separated society believe that religion and politics are distinctive from one another, I have taken a pilgrimage to my mom’s ancestral homeland, and I can tell you that this is a fantasy rooted in a fundamental misconception of how humanity operates. Politics is just how we put our values into action, and for most of the world, religion is how one’s values are informed. As Brad Lander, New York City’s chief ubermensch said, his Judaism influences his pluralistic political ideals.

“It’s an amazing Dominican city and Chinese city and lots of other things, but it’s an amazing Jewish city and to me, it proves the point that there is some resonance between Jewish flourishing and inclusive multiracial democracy.”

Taking a week to get away from the day-to-day grind of destroying my brain in the news cycle has given me a bit of a clarity coming back to it today, albeit one I can’t quite grok through the haze of jet lag and my questions about the fundamental nature of time. Ireland was a fulfilling experience in so many ways, as now I can say I have played guilt-free golf while hitting two of the best shots I’ve ever hit, I got to see the best golfers in the world at the peak of their powers in a perfect setting, all while taking some peaceful moments to myself to spread my dog’s ashes on the Irish coasts and even at Royal Portrush (Rory’s wayward tee shot on #17 yesterday went over by where I sprinkled some, making me chuckle at how unhappy he must be over this heartwarming moment for me). Everyone needs to find healthy activities that replenish their soul, and I have found one in golf that I think a lot of young men need–which I believe is part of this surge in golf’s popularity–demonstrated by guys like me picking up a club again in 2020 to try to save my sanity in the midst of a pandemic, and coming out of it with a 12 handicap and terminal golf brain.

The Invisible Lines We Draw

Politics is full of invisible lines that either govern tangible reality or spawn structures that do. The creation of the Post Office sprung from Americans drawing a line at the notion that no lines should divide information and items that people need to live. The Very Serious mainstream media’s entire business model is drawing invisible lines around what is acceptable political thought that always conveniently excludes no less than a third of the Democratic Party, and it helps shape the range of policy outcomes in the Beltway. The Republican Party’s steady march to authoritarianism was defined by moving the Overton Window nonstop, a term proving that what seems like uncrossable lines in politics are simply a reflection of the rules which drew them in the first place. Ireland had one line drawn around it, then in 1921, it had another one crossed through it. Change the rules, change the lines.

Fascism got here by drawing lines that don’t exist and asserting them to be unimpeachable fact, aided by a braindead and craven media whose management clearly has some kind of affinity for Trump’s authoritarianism, making bets in public that this is it for American democracy. Democrats became as unpopular as ever by trapping themselves behind an array of invisible lines they created for themselves, providing their voters with infinite responses as to why they won’t utilize the full force of their power, and few to none for how they will productively use it at scale. While much of this moment feels enduringly helpless, it is simply a product of redrawing the terms of politics around a status quo that is friendly to the GOP’s authoritarian march. There’s no reason to believe that one day we couldn’t draw a different set of invisible lines to favor something else, the way that Scottie Scheffler has set up a system of what lines he will and won’t cross in order to silo his personal life away from the prying eyes of the public.

The world is changing faster than it ever has. Climate collapse is here, and it is coming for home ownership. Fascism is also here, as concentration camps begin to spring up while a new secret police receives a larger budget than the Marines. Corporate America has proven itself far too eager to capitulate to or cower from Trump’s fascism, while political and media elites have revealed their true Trumpy or yellow colors. We now live in an America where comedians are fired for making fun of the president and his enablers. We didn’t in 2006. Things are really, really bad.

But there’s also never been a bigger potential for a brighter future in most of our lifetimes. To build a new kind of liberal coalition around fighters and not the folders that dot the current historically unpopular landscape. A future where a democratic socialist can be the mayor of America’s largest city while another democratic socialist gets priced as one of the top favorites for president in 2028. A future where we build an inclusive message that puts the Republican Party’s rank bigotry on the defensive. Maybe even a world where we expose the predators around Epstein’s operation once and for all. And maybe, just maybe, even if it’s just for me and my weirdo friends and allies, a world where we finally figure out what those unidentified flying objects that have captured the Senate Minority Leader’s attention really are.

We are living through capital-H History. The 20th century is dying. Its structures are crumbling. Some under the weight of a new kind of fascist America that evokes much of old fascist America. Some under the weight of the decaying 20th century’s own hubris, and others simply due to the inexorable march of time. Ours is an age of collapse, but history tells us that these periods are also where the greatest potential for revelatory change lies. Reconstruction could not have happened without the Civil War wiping out an inequitable system that was always leading to that point of self-destruction. The scope of the New Deal grew in proportion to the depth of the Great Depression. And now, we reside in a moment where one world is dying, and another will emerge from its rubble.

What that new world will be is still very much to be determined, despite fascism’s clear head start. There is and will be backlash to Trump’s ham-fisted rule, as he is not doing things that successful fascists do to gain popular support, quite the opposite. The point of him and his two Steves’ strategy of flooding the zone is to fill you with a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair, but it’s important to take some moments away from the chaos, and then you will more clearly see that we still have a say in our own future. We just need to draw new lines that will lead us towards it.