tim's experiment

The thing which has always puzzled me about the interenet is why people sitting in front of a computer feel it is OK to be so rude.  It may well be that I am a bit old-fashioned in these matters, or a bit English. People from other ex-colonies (like the USA) occasionally admit to being amused in a nice sort of way by my habit of saying “please” and “thank you” to people who are paid to serve me. I claim no credit for this. It is, or was, an English thing. Millionaires are said to send their sons to English public schools not because they will learn anything useful (what does a millinaoire’s son need, after all?) but because on their return to the life of a playboy they will at least be polite to their speedboat drivers. I say it maybe was an English thing because perhaps times are changing. I used to have in my office a charming book about English habits and mores. One year one of my students spotted this, and said she had read it during an exchange trip to Englsnd. She had also experimented with some of the observations. Noting that if you bumped into a person in the street in England they would say “sorry”, even though it was not their fault, she had tried bumping into a few people. “And did they say sorry?” I inquired. “No,” said my student, a respectable lady and a pillar of the University Christian Choir, “They said ‘fuck'”

Anyway we seem to have digressed. My complaint is not that people do not go in for elaborate courtesies in chat rooms, comment columns, discussion boards and such like. My complaint is that they are unambiguously and spectacularly rude to each other. No abuse is too violent, no accusation too vile, to be thrown at someone you disagree with. I take it, although of course one knows very little about the poeple one meets on-line, that they are not like this at home, or even in face-to-face encounters with strangers. There would be fights all the time. At first I thought it might be the global nature of the internet which wasz the problem. People from all sorts of countries and backgrounds were mixed up together. None of them was likely ever to meet in the flesh. There were no common conventions, so there were no conventions at all. If there are no agreed standards of politeness, then perhaps anything is OK.

I had to abandon this theory when I started reading The Guardian on-line. Guardian readers are not that cosmopolitan, though I understand the on-line edition attracts a lot of Americans. Most of the participants are clearly educated members of the middle classes in an Anglo-Saxon country. Yet they slag each other off quite mercilessly. And this board is moderated – contributors know that extreme speciments will be removed. Yet they still produce a lot of them. The moderator is kept busy.

Well, I thought, perhaps its a sort of strangers on a train thing. Nobody really knows anyone else. They do not identify the other person as a live humen being. It’s a bit like a cruise – you can pretend to be whatever you like because your fellow passengers will know no better. Managers can become presidents, lecturers can become professors, police sergeants can become superintendants and ordinary decent citizens can masquerade as the sort of Glaswegian who smashes a bottle over your head if you smile at his girlfriend.

But this theory also does not stand up. I frequent a Facebook site which caters for the local bagpipe circle. A conversation started the other week which became so vituperative that the proprietor of the site eventually – and very sensibly – deleted the whole thread. This was not a matter of strangers who will never meet. On the contrary everyone involved has met everyone else at least once, and is very likely to meet them again. I suppose we shall all manage to get along but some slights are difficult to forget. One of my friends pointed out that some of the more virulent specimens had been written very late in the evening. Many people do their internetting late in the evening. I often do myself. It is OK if you haven’t spent the previous part of the evening in a pub. If you have, then maybe not such a good idea.

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The news that an airliner landed on half an engine drew some well-merited applause for the guts and skill of the pilots. It also awakened some slumbering anxieties. On the whole while joining in the applause I was rather on the side of the reader who wrote to the Post suggesting that it might have been a good idea to head for the nearest airport when engine trouble first blew up, soon after leaving Jakarta. This incident will no doubt be the subject of a detailed inquiry and we may find that the real story is less controversial.

Speaking in general, though, it is well known in the industry that the days when no self-respecting airline would send up a plane which was not fully functional are well behind us. Nowadays many systems are duplicated for safety reasons. But if there are four gadgets, each capable of doing the job on its own, there are obvious economies to be had from not being too officious in replacing them when they go on the blink. Airliners are expensive and need to be working to earn  their keep. A few months ago I did a long and uncomfortable flight in a section of the aircraft in which the reading lights were not working. This is of course not a safety hazard, but the seat belt lights were not working either. This sort of thing leaves you wondering which of the parts you can’t see have also been “returned to service for evaluation” as the euphemism goes.

Another change over the years concerns the matter of having spare engines. Now of course airliners did not have four engines to provide a spare. They had four because they needed that much puff to get off the ground. But having got off the ground they could fly comfortably on three engines, less comfortably on two — depending on which two it was — and in an emergency they could limp along on one. Because of this safety feature it used to be a requirement that airliners on long distance flights — especially over water — should be four-engined types. This has gradually been corroded and now seems to have disappeared completely. Engines are, I suppose, much more reliable than they were. Still, if you are a long way from home on two engines clearly the failure of one is a very serious matter and most of us, under these circumstances, would wish to be delivered to the nearest railway station rather than participating in an epic further journey.

The mention of railways brings me to an interesting oddity. I am an eager reader of disaster accounts of all kinds. The stories of accidents combine technical and human interest in a compelling way. Simplifying a bit, we can say that in the 19th century the interesting accidents are on the railways, in the 20th they involve aeroplanes.  But there is another difference. In the railway accidents the inspectors were robustly critical of any part of the arrangements which did not seem to them to be conducive to safety. Managements were  vigourously badgered to adopt improvements like air brakes and automatic train control to improve the safety of their operations. The people who investigate air accidents seem to be less inclined to include the management in their area of operations. Accidents are attrributed to obscure technical deficiencies, blamed on the weather or ascribed to error by the pilots, who are often not there to defend themselves. It is a common observation that some airlines have a lot more accidents than others, which seems to suggest that something more systematic than the fickle finger of fate is involved. But this is rarely discussed in public. Instead we get used to it. There was another air crash in Indonesia the other day. Didn’t even make the front pages.

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This is not going to turn into a golf column, but the fuss over Tiger Woods has wider implications than who will lift the next trophy.  Mr Woods is apparently a very proficient golfer. Occasional glimpses of his personality have been less admiring. It seems he rarely smiles, does not engage in friendly informal interactions with the fans or — big mistake — the press, is often visibly irritated when a shot does not go where he wishes it, does not enjoy team versions of the sport and is generally rather obsessed with his own pursuit of perfection.  These accusations of social deficiency are often levelled at outstanding sportsmen and women. I remember similar things being said from time to time about the Williams sisters, Lester Pigott, Geoff Boycott, Jimmy Greaves (long time since I took much interest, you will gather) and no doubt much of this criticism is human nature’s way of coping with the uncomfortable knowledge that someone else is better. In rather the same way you find successful English football teams invariably disparaged as tactically boring, unfairly well-funded, full of foreigners or all three. Professional sportspeople come with a variety of personalities. Some of them are cheerful extroverts, effortlessly recruiting admiring fans, some are shy people who reluctantly accept the need for a certain amount of public schmoozing for the good of the game, and some are introverts who avoid it as much as possible. In individual, as opposed to team, games a certain amount of self-obsession may be indispensable and even desirable.

Mr Woods’s recent problems stem from the discovery, following a minor car accident, that he has on occasion been unfaithful to his wife. I am amazed that people find this surprising. Professional sportsmen on away trips are not hermits. They are fit young men interested in what may be available. If they are rich, successful and engaged in a glamourous – or better still dangerous – sport they will find many opportunities and few refuse what is eagerly offered. No doubt there are respectable married men who go to bed alone every night with a book. But they are heavily outnumbered by the counterparts who, married or not, enjoy being admired and accept the offers that admiration sometimes brings. This is the way it goes. Bull fighters have always been notorious. Professional footballers are expected to sow oats; the reason why wives and girlfriends willingly undertake boring trips to distant tournaments is because if they are not there then the field is free for the locals. Successful sportsmen arouse many of the instincts which produce exciting social lives for pop stars. And we all know what they get up to.

So why such a fuss over Woods? Partly, perhaps, because golf is a game for mature and respectable citizens. If it was alleged that David Beckham had 12 girlfriends on the side the average football fan would feel admiration and envy rather then disapproval. Golfers, on the other hand have reached the age of continence, or at least of hypocrisy. Partly it is because of the puritanical habits of the American press, which likes to write about sex as much as the rest of us but can only do so when provided with a good excuse. Partly it is because the sports writers enjoy having something portentious to write about for a change. And partly, I fear, it is because Mr Woods is black. A black man who sleeps with white women disturbs some prejudices which many Americans prefer to pretend they have not got. See the disproportionate reactions to the O.J.Simpson saga. 

It is all going a bit far. Acres of newsprint were devoted to the analysis of the Tiger’s recent return to action, and the question whether his efforts to masquerade as a cuddly human being were putting him off his normal game. At his press conference, reporters carefully informed us, he gave normal sensible answers but “his eyes were smouldering”. Really?

The person I feel sorry for is Mrs Woods, who is getting a lot of advice, most of it bad. A long time ago there was a much-admired advice columnist called “Dear Pansy” in a Hong Kong newspaper. Her advice to wives of husbands who were mysteriously often called away for business weekends in Bangkok was surprising but practical. It went roughly “All men are pigs. If you want to stay married to your hushand you must learn to accept him as he is.”

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This blog has been quiet for a few days because I was in Henan playing for the opening of a golf tournament.  I was not, I hasten to add, playing golf. As the game was invented in Scotland there is occasionally a demand for Scottish music on golfing occasions.  Actually I have never thought much of golf. I started playing hockey at a very early age so hitting a ball which was sitting still always seemed a bit like shooting a dead duck. Still the game obviously gives some people a great deal of pleasure.

There is occasional controversy about the amount of space consumed, and the amount of water and fertiliser required to maintain a large acreage of exotic foreign landscape in an alien environment.  On the other hand it can be said in defence of the game when played with Chinese characteristics that it is much more labour-intensive than it is in the west. In the suburban golf courses which I occasionally visited in England the members frequently arrived in their golfing attire, which in those less fashion-conscious days just comprised a pair of old trousers and a wind-cheater. They changed into their spiky shoes in the car park.  They carried their own clubs round the course for 18 holes and the only club employee whose services they required was the bar tender in the “19th hole” to which they resorted for a few beers to offset any salubrious effect the exercise might have had on their build. They then, the law in these matters being less enforced in those days, probably drove home.  So a golf club was a large hole in the landscape which employed very few people.

Golf with Chinese characteristics is rather different. The member arrives, usually in a recent-model SUV with heavily tinted glass, under the porte-cochere, where he is greeted by an impressive crowd, even if you disregard the associate professor and a few mates on bagpipes. The driver pulls the remote thing which opens the back door, and the member’s clubs are whisked away while the specialised meeters and greeters are bidding him welcome and conducting him to the dining room. Later the clubs will be found in the back of his electric golf cart, which also has a driver. Along with the clubs will be two members of the corps of caddies, a large formation consisting mainly of young ladies whose selection was clearly  based on more important things than their knowledge of golf. The caddies will carry the bag when play reaches parts of the course inaccessible by road. The player only actually lifts a club when he wants to play a shot. The pursuit of healthy exercise is clearly not a major part of the proceedings.

I do not criticise. Agriculture in Henan does not look much fun. Judging by the size of the plots a lot of work is still done by hand. Probably the golf club is a very welcome addition to the district’s facilities. In the light of the alternatives a career replacing rich people’s divots may be very attractive. 

I am less enthusiastic about golf in Hong Kong. The game does need a lot of space. It seems that in our city there is never any space for poor people’s housing but a hectare or two can always be found for rich people’s sports. People are sleeping under fly-overs to make room for other people to try to whack a pebble into a jam jar from 300 yards. It ought to take some of the fun out of it, but it doesn’t, apparently.

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