The Greatest Game Ever Played

The Greatest Game Ever Played –

Disney Studios produced a fine film with this title, a semi-historical account of the 1913 US Open and the Story of Harry Vardon, a peasant farmer’s son from the Island of Jersey yet one of the greatest golfers of all time, and Francis Ouimet a young caddy, ditch digger’s son, who manages to qualify for and win the Open becoming Golf’s greatest ambassador.. Like fine literature, the movie is filled with metaphors. analogies, and lessons we ought to pay attention to.  There is a flashback scene in the movie where Vardon is a young lad being evicted from his home so that a group of men in black coats can build a golf course on the property.  “What’s golf?” He asks and the answer comes:  “Golf is game for gentlemen and not for the likes of you.”  The age old conflict between the Aristocrats of Society (gentlemen) and the Peasants (working class) is found throughout the movie.
  

The very name of the film is a metaphor of course, because the greatest game is not golf, as the reader knows, it is, and always will be, politics and since the rise of Democratic Republics in the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, the conflict between the Peasantry and the Aristocracy has been dominant in that game, even as it is today.

What the Aristocrats fear the most is that they might be exposed and their power over others may be diminished.  They might even get told what it means or ought to mean to be a gentleman by the likes of Harry Vardon, a person they may have cultivated to do the winning for them. They fear that someday, somewhere a ditch-digger’s son, like Francis Ouimet, may show them up and demonstrate the failures of the aristocratic pretense by actually winning.   

When people accuse others of class warfare, it is no doubt from those who have, who are accusing those who have less or not at all, of that warfare.  But in fact we have always had class warfare.  The Aristocrats of earlier times have maintained their feudal positions despite the democratic ideals of most contemporary Republics.  Aristocrats do not earn their wealth through their own work, they earn their wealth through inheritance and ownership; they pretend that we too can become Aristocrats by hard work and education.  But can we?

Are not the educated and well educated servants to those who own and have inherited their positions and wealth?  Even government bureaucrats and representatives are servants to those who pay them for their labor, and in most cases it is not the electorate, but the aristocrats who sponsor their campaigns for office.

The working class, are just that, workers, and it matters not what they do for work whether they are an accountants or ditch-diggers workers are workers and not necessarily with their hands, though it seems the lowest of the workers work with their hands.  The so called middle class are those who work primarily with mind and not hands but still they work, for someone who is an owner. In many cases the worker doesn’t really know who the ultimate owners are, they may enjoy their yacht trip in the Mediterranean in summer and the Caribbean in winter, and keep their cash in the Caymans, or Cyprus, or both, for all we know.  There is a kind of anonymity about the Aristocracy today, and unless they are Queen or King we seldom need know whom they are. Like Dark Matter we know not what Dark Money is, but we do know the Aristocracy has a lot of it and it is everywhere.  The farmer, or rancher, who owns his farm, may think he is self-employed, but he buys his seed from someone, his equipment from someone, and sells his product to someone, and in many cases it may be the same corporation of Aristocrats who own the grain through the market and the tools of production.  He, despite his ownership of a minor piece of land, is still a peasant and may be foreclosed on at anytime by a bank who owns his debt and is in turn owned by the same corporation of Aristocrats who speculate on his production.  The same principle applies to the tradesman who must borrow to afford to purchase his materials from someone and sell it to someone who borrows from a bank to gain access to his product.

So it seems, unless we are in the owner class, we are all peasants who may be someday evicted and told that: “Politics is a game for gentlemen and not for the likes of you.”

“Armor maketh a knight, a crown a King, what are we?”