Tiger Woods and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Robert Zaretsky makes an interesting parallel between Rousseau and Tiger woods:

Reality and truth are elusive ideas in an age of reality television and fictitious memoirs. Yet, the public fascination with his confession is quite real and true. Where does this event leave him and us? At the same place where it leaves us with Rousseau – or rather, where Rousseau leaves us: caught in the modern obsession with authenticity. In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques does not offer an objective standard by which we can measure the truthfulness of his account. Only Jean-Jacques, he insists, can weigh the truth, or authenticity of his self-portrait. The scales that weigh the truth are buried deep inside him, far too deep for the world to assess or affect. Only Jean-Jacques can see these scales (or tilt them with his thumb). This is the only truth that matters, regardless of what passes for “truth” in our everyday world.
But as Rousseau and Woods remind us, there is a problem: every effort to express our authenticity through language is, by definition, a work of artifice. The world is a stage, Jean-Jacques warns, and we are nothing more than actors. Even if we write our own script – another much debated aspect of Woods’s address – words inevitably come between what we say and what we mean. In a world dominated by spectacle, Rousseau claims, even the words and gestures we choose are not our own, but borrowings from countless others who have already had their day on stage.

I find it disturbing that America is obsessed not with the idea that  he has failed it by failing to live up to the image that his talent had enabled him to create, the one of a man who is good and decent because he is so talented and the best. The trouble with America and its  absolute belief in greatness, is that it believes that it has to be authentic and that be God's reward to a good person. Tiger Woods reminds America of itself, of its contradictions, and  more notably of its unwillingness/stern refusal to accept that being  first doesn't always meant being the purest or even being good.