AT&T; is latest to end Tiger Woods sponsorship (AP via Yahoo! News)

As hard as I’ve tried to avoid the whole Tiger Woods thing these past few weeks, it’s kind of hard to do that, especially when seemingly everyone, everywhere, is talking about it. After all, it’s a perfect distraction from all that health care stuff, and who really cares if people go bankrupt or die because of our health care system if we can spend all our time talking about the umpteenth alleged Tiger Woods mistress and what job she has and whether or not she’s prettier than Tiger’s wife? Keep in mind, this is the same country that, when faced with the reality that Saddam Hussein did not have a viable WMD progamme in Iraq when we threw him out of power, decided that instead of calling congressional hearings about that, called them instead over Janet Jackson showing her nipple at the Super Bowl.

Speaking of this country’s puritanical views on sexuality, while I don’t mean to diminish the pain that people across this country feel when a spouse or partner reneges on a promise to remain faithful, our continuing obsession over celebrity love lives is simply absurd. You would think that by now this country would realize that a good handful of celebrity marriages are nothing but shams from the start, designed to boost publicity for the two parties instead of being, you know, for love. For all the rhetoric about same-sex marriage destroying the institution of marriage, or America, or the space-time continuum, or whatever the excuse is this week, I think a convincing argument could be made that far more damage is being done to marriage by these sham pairings. It’s like some agent somewhere is shuffling around celebrity names trying to find the next roll-off-the-tongue pairing name like "Brangelina," and once that name is found phone calls are made, dresses are picked out, and writers are called in to concoct a story about how X and Y really met months ago and instantly knew they were soulmates. At least the stories manage to be marginally more believable and entertaining than the garbage Hollywood is putting on film screens these days; perhaps that’s the awful truth of it, that people follow these celebrity entanglements because they’re more entertaining than any films or CDs out there.

Getting back to Tiger Woods, though, him losing so many endorsements over these alleged infidelities — I think more women will come out once the holidays are over and the morning shows are no longer being anchored by the third-stringers — is just completely out of proportion to what Tiger did. After all, this past weekend I saw several commercials for Hanes t-shirts featuring Charlie Sheen, even after he allegedly held a knife to his wife’s throat and threatened to kill her. One has to wonder what the public and/or the marketing people who control them see Tiger as having done that’s so much worse than what Charlie Sheen did. Anyone who tries to tell me that race and gender aren’t playing factors in here clearly hasn’t been living in America for very long. Let’s face it; if Tiger Woods had skin as white as Charlie Sheen’s, would there be anywhere near as much attention paid to him, and would he have ringed up so many endorsements? This is to take nothing away from Tiger’s athletic skills, but let’s face it, watching someone play golf is only about a step up from watching paint dry. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a self-admitted fan of curling. At least the physics and geometry in curling is interesting.)

This gets me to my solution, simple as it may be, to this whole Tiger Woods thing. Much has been made of the fact that, through his golf winnings and endorsements, Tiger has become the first professional athlete to earn a billion dollars. Going back to that health care thing, nuisance as it is, instead of continuing to obsess over this Tiger Woods things so ridiculously, how about we simply make him pay $900 million to go to health care for uninsured Americans? Uninsured Americans will get health care at his expense, so they’ll be happy, and as a country we’ll be happier because not so many people will be going bankrupt and dying. Republicans will be happy, because Tiger’s contribution will probably mean that they can get rid of the upper-class tax hike in the health care bill. Democrats will be happy, because their health care bill will likely be enacted into law and they can claim a major legislative triumph. Tiger Woods will still have $100 million left over, which is hardly a small sum, and after this act of generosity, I think it would only be fair for him to get his endorsements back and for us to all forget about this whole silly mess, and let him get back to winning hundreds of millions more dollars for whacking a tiny white ball into a hole in the ground.

We would save lives, save families, stop a lot of political squabbling, and get this whole Tiger Woods media mess off of our screens once and for all. I really don’t see a downside to this. Better yet, if Tiger gets caught sticking his nine iron in someone else’s bag again, we can simply make him pay for universal health care for all Americans, and then this country will really, truly, be a better place. You’re welcome.

(Oh, and Happy New Year and all of that.)