Hal Phillips

The Catholic Disconnect: The Perils of Exerting a Moral Authority the Church Doesn’t Have

on December 15, 2020

Politics

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 15, 2020) — To understand the Catholic disconnect in our public square, let’s suppose, as a sort of thought experiment, that the Senate Judiciary Committee was presented with a Federal Circuit Court nominee who happened to be active in the Boys Scouts of America the last 20 years. Let’s further suppose this particular figure was not merely a proud former Scout; he credits the organization and its philosophy for providing him a core moral and philosophical compass.

As the number of sexual abuse settlements involving the Boy Scouts of America passed the 80,000 mark this fall, ultimately bankrupting the organization, some U.S. Senator would surely pipe up during the hearing and tell this public figure, “Hey, um, your attitude toward the Scouts, in light of the newly revealed reality, is awkward. It’s actually pretty fucked up, if I’m honest. You, or anyone really, who puts such public faith in the philosophy or teachings of something so clearly dysfunctional, should probably not be in a position of authority in our government, much less the high court.”

Well, I ask you, America: Why does membership in and advocacy for the Catholic Church not prompt a similar rebuke? Today, six of the nine people on the U.S. Supreme Court label themselves Catholics. All five conservative members on the court — including its newest addition, Trump-favorite Amy Coney Barrett — are quite open about the influence their Catholic faith has had and continues to have on their lives and jurisprudence. In light of the church’s ongoing sexual-abuse scandal, one wonders why the American public tolerates this outward accreditation of something so clearly dysfunctional, predatory and criminal.

At the very least, we should be talking more about their recusal from cases involving religious faith.

Two Decades On, and No Public Blowback?

For all the intertwining of Trumpism and evangelical Christianity, no religious force comes close to rivaling Catholicism on today’s high court.The Boston Globe broke the Church’s sexual abuse scandal early in 2001, but its influence in the American public square has only increased. On the contrary, nearly two decades on, each month brings another report of a U.S. diocese admitting to cover-ups and the shuttling around of offending priests — rather than promptly removing them from contact with children.

Twenty-one Catholic dioceses have themselves declared bankruptcy on account of all the financial settlements they’ve been obliged to pay. To be clear, these are just those dioceses that could not afford to compensate all the parishioners who’d been violated by members of organization’s clerical class. There are dozens more that acted as abominably — the priests themselves and their higher-ups in the hierarchy — but could afford to financially compensate its victims.

This is to say, the problems posed by Catholicism remain extraordinarily relevant and widespread. The cynical response to this clearly systemic grotesquery goes right to the top apparently, to the Vatican itself. November’s allegations against former Archbishop of Washington Theodore McGarrick underline both points.

Vocal defenders of the Catholic faith, who include all these conservative justices and our boot-licking attorney general, Bill Barr, tend to blame the church’s abject moral failings on an infestation of homosexuals in the priesthood. They level this charge in concert with what they consider an evil liberalization of the church stemming from Vatican II reforms during the 1960s. When news of all this abuse first broke, in 2001, these and other Catholic apologists attempted to localize the blame in Boston. When that proved impractical, they blamed the liberalization of America generally. Barr is still beating this drum.

It’s high time that Catholics owned the fact, facets and history particular to their own faith, to a clerical hierarchy that has contributed to this systemic epidemic of sexual abuse.

As such, America and Americans should also begin to insist that its Catholic public officials — attorneys general, justices serving on any federal court — refrain from using or otherwise citing their Catholic faiths in the execution of their public duties. Would we ask, in 2020, anything less of former Scouts?

Can Rodent Extermination Yield Life Lessons? You’d Be Surprised

on December 4, 2020

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

[Ed. — From 2000-2003, I wrote a monthly op-ed column for The Portland Press-Herald,which had resolved to make space for a regular op-ed feature called “Stages”. In essence I was the paper’s “30something with kids” columnist. As I’m now 60something and my kids are both out in the world, columns like this make for fun, retrospective fodder. Especially when the subject is rodent extermination.]

By Hal Phillips
“It smells like burnt popcorn.”

“Popcorn?” countered my mechanically inclined brother-in-law. “Really?”

“Yes. Definitely popcorn.”

“Well,” he surmised, “I bet you got a mouse in there or somethin’. ”

So was broached the Great Tailpipe Poser. My riding mower had been belching smoke from its bustled backside and it smelled for all the world like burnt popcorn. There was no other way to describe it. The beast had sat dormant for months, resting comfortably all winter in the shed until my 5-year-old son and I had fired her up to haul some gravel. Silas adores the John Deere. Can’t get enough of it. He’s always more than willing to help with any chores that involve the tractor. On this occasion, he and I were filling a few craterous potholes on our long dirt driveway.

Despite the layoff, our beloved Deere had started up fine, ran fine, hauled the trailer just fine. But when I turned it off, billows of black smoke emanated from the exhaust pipe. It smelled like burnt popcorn, as indicated, and my mechanically disinclined mind didn’t know what to make of it.

So I called my brother-in-law, Brian. He’d know what to make of it.

Rodent Extermination: So Many Different Rodents

Well, according to Brian, mice have been known to crawl into such things as tailpipes during the winter months to stay warm, make nests or what have you. This was news to me, but I was perfectly willing to accept this premise along with his recommended course of action: “Just run the engine for a while. That’ll clean it out.”

No problem. I’ve no great love for mice, nor for their rodent cousin, the gray squirrel. In fact broiling’s too good for them, in my opinion.

We had mice in our pantry this fall. They ate our rice and potato chips with impunity, defocated on our shelves, basically intruded quite rudely upon our living space — that is, until I systematically trapped them out of existence (until next fall). Trust me: All this talk of building a better mousetrap is purely metaphorical. There’s no need. The old standbys work great! Baited with a bit of chunky peanut butter, traditional mousetraps are ruthlessly efficient.

Squirrels? Don’t get me started. They’ve haunted me since one literally invaded an apartment I shared in Greater Boston, chewing its way through a cheap drop-ceiling and falling onto the coffee table. Years later, when my wife and I lived in Portland, we had several furry, gray scoundrels living in our walls. They got in through a hole created by some rotting wooden roof-molding. Came and went as they pleased — that is, until I bought a Have-a-Heart trap. I snared a bunch and released them a healthy distance away. Like Yarmouth. Or Quebec.

I couldn’t completely rid the house of them, however. Not until I went up the ladder and blocked off the hole and fixed the molding.

‘I could hear him coming…’

Of course, when one takes this step, he can’t be absolutely sure the walls are squirrel-free. Predictably, my first blocking initiative had trapped one inside. So, next day I went back up the ladder, three stories, and unblocked the hole.Standing on the top rung of this ladder, the hole unplugged, I could hear him coming. I could hear him skittering frantically toward the light, louder and louder as he approached me down the passageway. Then our eyes met. He burst out of the darkness, through the new opening, glanced off my face and fell three stories to the sidewalk! He got right up, like nothing had happened, ran across the street and disappeared into what passes for underbrush on Mechanic Street.

I estimate this episode took a minimum of 18 months off my life.

We would eventually move to rural New Gloucester where my squirrel problems persist. Perhaps these were the same suckers I had deported from Metropolitan Portland, but soon there were several living in the walls of my barn. I work in my barn. I conduct business there. Have you ever tried to conduct a professional phone conversation when some crazed rodent is eating a hole through your office dry wall, pushing pink insulation ahead of him, out the inevitable hole and onto the floor? Believe me: It’s disconcerting.

Having exhausted the efficacy of politically correct traps, I moved on to dangerous toxins. This worked for a time, but as my mother-in-law would say, the squirrels were “off their poison” soon enough. They’ve stopped eating it. Instead, they’re back to eating away at my place of employment.

In 1998, as new homeowners, we sat outside on our stone patio and marveled at a family of flying squirrels as they launched themselves from our roof to the spindly outer branches of a nearby oak. This spring, they were in the wall of my home, sleeping there perhaps, rearing their pups but surely defocating, too. Unlike their grey cousins, these flying squirrels are no bigger than mice and bore holes in my barnboard siding no bigger than a golf ball. I took to affixing Have-a-Heart traps onto the house itself, over these holes — so the little buggers cannot help but leave my family’s place of residence without entering the traps. Worked like a charm. I would cage 3-4 squirrels at a time and summarily drown them in the pool — but not before leaving them up there a couple days, two stories up and caged, as a warning to others.

While I’m now considering the strategic deployment of coyote urine as a further deterrent, the situation remains fluid.

About That Tractor Tailpipe

Long story short, I’ve no ethical hang-ups with having killed off the mouse in my tractor tailpipe, perhaps a family of mice, which had taken up winter residence there. On Brian’s advice, Silas and I ran the engine for 20 minutes or so in an effort to cleanse the steel cylinder of charred rodent.

Then it happened: A projectile shot out of the tailpipe. Then another. And another. I turned the tractor off and retrieved what were clearly charred acorns! By now, Silas and I were laughing hysterically at the sheer absurdity of the situation. “Well,” I joked, “maybe the mouse was storing food in there for the winter.”

To which Silas responded, “Actually, Dad, I think I saw a squirrel putting acorns in there…”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah. I saw him.”

It’s quite a moment when a father catches his son telling his first real whopper of a lie. Clearly the kid had been messing with my tractor, sticking acorns in the tailpipe — a perfectly normal (if foolish) manifestation of a boy’s natural curiosity. But now he was attempting to pin the act on an innocent, if execrable, member of the animal kingdom.

“Silas: Tell me the truth now. Did you put those acorns in there?”

“No.”

“C’mon, Silas. I won’t get mad. I promise. But you have to tell me the truth.”

“No. It was a squirrel. I saw him.”

Well, we had planned to do an errand together that day, after filling the potholes. I can’t remember what it was, but it was something Silas really wanted to do. “Silas, let’s go inside. We can’t do our errands if you won’t tell me the truth.” I turned and started walking toward the house. Silas burst into tears about then. Confessed unreservedly. We had a good long hug and laughed some more about the entire ludicrous episode.

Then we went straight inside to call Uncle Brian.

Barrett and Trump, an Association that Will Never Fade. We Should See to That

on October 22, 2020

Politics

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 21, 2020) — I’ve got a question that Democratic senators might have considered posing to Amy Coney Barrett on the occasion of last week’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee: What’s a nice woman like you doing keeping company with a bunch of fascists like this? That’s perhaps a bit flip, but the matter of Trump and Barrett remains: At what point does someone like Amy Coney Barrett — at what point do all the judges to whom Trump has granted lifetime appointments — take responsibility for who made them?

More important, to what extent can citizens trust the jurisprudence of people who, like Barrett, swallowed hard and accepted these appointments from someone so obviously illiberal, so clearly unfit for the job.

It would be naïve to ask, “What does it say about Trump that he has openly cited the need for Barrett to be on the high court in time to provide him a 5-4 decision, a la Bush v. Gore in 2000, should a disputed election be flung into the courts?” We know why. He’s incorrigible. But this misses the larger, more immediate point. What does it say about Barrett that she’d accept this man’s nomination — then refuse to discuss her recusal during the Senate’s advise and consent process?

Should we succeed in unseating Il Douché, we as a people will be obliged to confront the incredible damage he and his administration (and his followers) have to done to the United States, its culture, its comity, its government, its legal norms and infrastructures. Addressing and mitigating this damage is already underway — witness the discussion of SCOTUS expansion, of 18-year terms on the high court, of statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico (to remedy the undemocratic concentration of power in 20-odd sparsely populated farm states, many of them literally manufactured in the late 19^th century to, wait for it, boost the electoral power of the Republican Party). There is little question from either side that Biden will win the popular vote in two weeks time. If we are fortunate enough to see that vote reflected in the Electoral College (our most troubling monument to dead Confederates), there will surely be a roll-back of executive actions this administration has backed — a fairly common occurrence when one administration is replaced by another.

But the undermining of U.S. law and legal precedents by Trump appointees extends to the government bureaucracy and its courts. This man’s enablers, those he installed, must be identified and held to account. Amy Coney Barrett is a good place to start.

Trump and Barrett: Expect a Reckoning

I’m 56 years old. Reckoning with this successful attempt to pervert and circumvent our legal system will dominate our politics for the remainder of my lifetime. I recognize the Federalist Society and movement conservatism predate Trump’s inauguration. But the president has bared and magnified the naked, reductive politics at play here, for all to see. As such, for decades to come there will be ongoing reference to and spotlighting of the 300-odd judges that Trump nominated and Mitch McConnell forced through the hyper-politicized Senate from 2016-2020 (after slow-walking Obama nominees for 8 years).

What we do with Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Barrett and their Trump-nominated, lower-court brethren remains to be seen. But their lifetime appointments, from Trump, expose them to a different sort of long-term scrutiny. It’s not going to go well.

Some individual judges will perhaps adjust and move away from Federalist Society-approved originalism and other specious stances undergirded by right-wing, white supremacist, and moneyed interests (methinks Judge Roberts is doing this right now). Others will not. Dealing with this latter group of true believers, and their blinkered attitudes toward precedent, and the legacy of the demonstrably fascist figure who nominated them, will be difficult.

But it will have to be done and the particular case of Amy Coney Barrett is a logical, timely place to begin this effort. If it requires her tarring and feathering, so be it. She has made her bed.

Some senator should have urged her to simply withdraw. “You don’t want to be the face of Trumpism going forward,” Amy Klobuchar should have told her on Monday, Oct. 12, the day hearings began. “You seem like a nice person. Don’t put your family through this. Because, you know, there’s a name for people who do the bidding of fascists and accept their patronage… They’re called fascists.”

Breonna Taylor Takeaway: We Can’t Have Law and Order with Apples this Bad

on October 6, 2020

Politics

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

LOUISVILLE, Ken. (Aug. 4, 2022) — Breonna Taylor’s March 2020 killing, the result of a no-knock warrant gone calamitously awry, took place in a Louisville apartment building full of witnesses. Who, if anyone, should be charged in her death boils down to this nugget from the grand jury testimony made public by the District Attorney on Oct. 2, 2020: “Eleven of 12 witnesses on the scene that night said they never heard the police identify themselves. One of them said he heard the group say ‘police’ just once.”

The three police who broke down the door and traded fire with Taylor’s boyfriend all claim they did announce and identify themselves as police. Today the Department of Justice announced its decision to charge the four officers involved, after the District Attorney for Louisville declined to do so.

In not bringing any charge connected to her killing, the D.A. Daniel Cameron had chosen to believe these three officers who, had they failed to identify themselves (as 11 of 12 witnesses have attested), would likely be facing manslaughter charges today, at the very least. So, even if they aren’t lying about having completed this simple and mandatory identification procedure, we can agree the cops continue to have a very strong incentive to lie — unlike those 11 witnesses, who have no such incentive.

We Americans talk a lot about bad apples, how many there are in police departments, and what percentage of the bunch they might reasonably despoil. But we can agree that lying — in police reports, in sworn testimony to grand juries — is something police officers do routinely. I know this from working with police departments as a reporte, then a city editor. We all know this from simply following the news today, in an age when smart phones and body cams make plain these lies after the fact. If the body cam footage has been misplaced, we can be sure it would likely contradict a falsified police report.

Breonna Taylor: Another lesson in How Cops Lie

We are conditioned to the idea that cops lie. They do so individually, to cover their own wrongdoing. They do it in strategic concert with prosecutors to “solve” criminal cases and get them off the books, or to make prosecutions stick where available evidence cannot. They lie to secure warrants, apparently. And they lie on behalf of fellow law-enforcement personnel, largely refusing to call each other out for their fabrications, which is a clear and conscious subversion of the law and order they’re sworn to protect.

This awkward, troubling relationship U.S. cops can have with the truth is something the African-American community has been talking loudly about — but white America has largely dismissed — for centuries.

It’s not clear to me whether Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Williams, is counted among the 12 witnesses cited above. But he too claims not to have heard the police announce themselves. Is he lying? He certainly reacted like someone who had genuinely NOT heard anyone at his door identified as police. When when they broke down his door and entered the apartment, Williams immediately shot one of them. Shooting anyone is a risky enterprise. If you know they’re cops — because they’ve effectively announced themselves as such — it’s almost ludicrously risky.

And here the grand jury report reveals still more curious behavior from the District Attorney Daniel Cameron: Williams clearly shot a cop, who clearly claims to have announced himself before entering the apartment, despite so much witness testimony to the contrary. And yet Williams has not been charged with a crime either. In this respect, it seems the D.A. is inclined to believe Williams and his right to defend himself, in his home, against an intruder, with lethal force. If the D.A. were convinced that Louisville police had effectively announced themselves, it seems fair to ask why Williams wasn’t charged with shooting one of those cops.

Just Read the Grand Jury Report

Anyone who has studied this case and the grand jury report is sure question overall conduct, capability and character of these particular cops. The three officers at the door stick to their story: They announced themselves. They broke down the door. They were immediately fired upon. In returning fire, they killed Taylor. Once inside the apartment, two officers fired a total of 32 rounds, at least six of which struck Taylor.

The grand jury report, however, is damning in multiple respects. Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, told the grand jury that immediately following the shooting, an officer told Walker he was going to jail for the rest of his life. Then the officer asked Walker a question: “Were you hit by any bullets?” Walker said no. The officer responded by saying, “That’s unfortunate.” Grand jurors, increasingly aware of just how shoddy this police work had been, asked whether officers executing the warrant were aware that police had already found Jamarcus Glover, an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s who was the target of the overarching drug investigation. The report includes no answer from police. Glover was, in fact, already in custody by the time the police raided Taylor’s apartment.

According to the New York Times report from Oct. 2, members of the Grand Jury also “asked if the police had recovered drugs or money from the apartment; the detective said no, and that the police had not searched the apartment for drugs or paraphernalia after shooting Ms. Taylor. [Italics mine] They asked whether he had diagrams of the scene (no) and why the officers’ body cameras were not activated (the detective said he did not know).” To call this a botched operation from underperforming police personnel is to spruce it up quite a bit.

There was a fourth cop who, once the shooting started, went outside and proceeded to “discharge his service weapon” randomly into Taylor’s apartment (and other units) from outside the apartment building, on the street. This additional example of substandard policing could not be explained away apparently. That fourth officer has been charged with wonton endangerment and dismissed from the force, though none of the bullets from his weapon appear to have harmed Taylor or anyone else.

Yet this is the brand of policing and grand jury investigation we are told to support, without question.

NBA Bubble Splendidly Unmoored from Post-Season Predictability

on September 29, 2020

Basketball

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

When I sat down in late August to write this essay — about neutral courts and how they’ve made the 2020 NBA Bubble Playoffs the most wide-open, unpredictable tournament the league has ever conducted — turns out I didnot know the half of it. Less than 48 hours later, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake 7 times in the back. NBA players competing in the Disney Bubble would soon go out on a 72-hour wildcat strike.

Don’t believe the right-wing naysaying. Without NBA players and their new post-Blake resolve, arenas in NBA cities would not have been made available for voting on Nov. 3, 2020 — in exactly those urban areas where creeping fascism had closed so many polling places. Neither would the league, its owners and players association have pledged to “immediately establish a social justice coalition, with representatives from players, coaches and governors.”

I don’t want to diminish those efforts. Indeed, I would like to see that coalition formally funded. But events the last week in August only confirmed my original premise. We are in fact witnessing the most mercurial, fascinating NBA post season in history — and perhaps the most competitively compelling.

There are two surprisingly concrete explanations for what makes these playoff games so damned watchable. First, the Bubble’s quarantine construct necessarily does away with home court, as all the games are played on either of two fan-less facilities located on Disney’s Orlando, Fla. campus. No NBA playoff tournament had previously been held on neutral courts. Ever.

The effect has been monumental and fascinating Sporting events are interesting because their results cannot be predicted ahead of time. The less predictable the result, the greater the interest. Traditional NBA playoff games are claimed by the home team 65 percent of the time. Winners are not predestined, of course, but this makes NBA playoff games less interesting from a competitive standpoint. Home teams win NHL and MLB playoff games only 54 percent of the time, according to 538.com. This is why we love the NCAA basketball tournament: 63 one-off games played entirely on neutral courts. Any team can win pretty much any one of those games. That’s compelling.

NBA Bubble brought NCAA-style Unpredictability

The impact of neutral courts inside the NBA Playoff Bubble has been striking. Only four times in 73 NBA seasons had a team fallen behind 3 games to 1 and come back to win that playoff series. The Denver Nuggets did it twice this summer, in consecutive series. We saw the top overall seed, the Milwaukee Bucks, eliminated in Round 2. That’s happened only twice in 20 years. The Clippers, a 2 seed in the West (and odds-on co-favorite to win the NBA title, according to Vegas oddsmakers), also lost in Round 2.

Let’s be clear: Home court protects favorites, the higher-seeded teams. And neutral courts weaken that paradigm almost to the point of shredding. They replace it not with random results but less predictable results. And that’s more fun, full-stop.

Dozens of assumptions and conventions normally attached to the playoff crucible also fell away this summer. For example, the recently completed Miami-Boston Eastern Conference Final. When the Heat won the first two games, it conveyed a different brand of superiority — because they had won neither game with the benefit of home court. And yet, when the Celtics fell behind 3-1, it never felt insurmountable — because, if they were to come back, never would the Celts have to win on Miami’s home court. Denver demonstrated that, on neutral courts, a team can find something, make an adjustment and win three in a row. Sadly, for me, the Celtics could not make that happen. But lo and behold, we do have an NBA finalist, fifth-seeded Miami, that no one would have predicted when these playoffs started.

GOLF Magazine goes Splendidly Small Bore with ranking of Golf’s Best Nines

on September 3, 2020

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

Norfolk among Golf's Best Nines — Norfolk GC in Westwood, Mass.

Sometime this dark pandemic spring, probably late March, I got a call from Ran Morrissett, the North Carolinian who administers the GOLF Magazine course-rating operation. Starved for human contact as we both were, he and I chatted at length on various obscure but tasty course subjects. Somewhere during that extended natter he informed me that GOLF and its web incarnation, Golf.com, would soon be compiling, publishing and posting a Top 50 ranking of top 9-hole courses in the world — and that a fellow named Mike Dutton would be calling me. The resulting 100 Best Short Courses package — Top 50 Nines, 25 notable par-3s, 25 primo courses under 6,000 yards — was posted at golf.com this week. It will be published (on paper!) in the August/September 2020 print edition.

As it happened, Mike Dutton did call me, in April. He was helping Ran compile info on all these 9-holers and wanted to pick my brain. Mike has it in his head that he needs to play every nine in New England, perhaps the world (before he dies presumably). Had I played Castine? What about Megunticook? And what did I really think of Wayne Stiles’ Wilson Lake Country Club in Wilton? To answer all these questions, Mike and I did the only sensible thing: We made plans to play the 9-hole Clinton Golf Club together, followed by nine more, 15 miles down the road, at an even more obscure nine, Cedar Ridge GC in Albion.

Once COVID-19 golf restrictions were lifted May 1, Mike and I would play several additional Maine nines in the spring and summer, but not all of them — and we didn’t agree on everything. And that is perhaps the most exhilarating thing about rating/ranking golf courses. Mike is super keen on the nine at Castine GC, on the north shore of Penobscot Bay, for example, where I am less so. You can see from the new ranking that his opinion on Castine carried more weight ultimately. But here’s the take-away: It’s great fun to rate a course and defend that rating, to rank the level of “test” here vs. there, to verbalize competing definitions of “shot value”, to compete as to who can more sagely nod one’s head when discussing “great pieces of terrain.” I’ve found it useful to stroke one’s chin whiskers, to break up all the nodding.

I’ve been a member of the GOLF panel since 1997. It is not hard science, this business of ranking one course ahead of another. And yet it is also the highest, most intellectually developed form of grille-room banter there is, or so it says here. No one cares about your golf game. Honestly, they don’t. No one. They don’t care about the irons Dustin Johnson is playing, either, or how Phil Mickelson will do on the senior tour, or Fedex Cup points. Compared to all that frippery, the course you and your buddies just played, or soon will play, stands as perhaps the only truly meaningful and lasting touchstone the game of golf has to offer.

Golf’s Best Nines: Maine Chapter

In that spirit, here’s my own list of Top Maine Nines. My state of residence was represented in GOLF’s World Top 50, but not to the extent warranted, in my view. Wilson Lake, which didn’t make the grade at all, is almost certainly better than North Haven (#14), and way better than Castine (#46). But geography, conventional wisdom and confirmation bias often conspire to blur such realities.

Wilson Lake CC, Wilton — Superb nine from underrated Golden Age designer Wayne Stiles and the only real quibble I have with the otherwise stellar ranking published this week. Definitely top 50 material. I visited here years ago but only for a drive-by. I played it this past June and wow, what a great collection of holes. Huge, diverse greens. Not a single middling hole out of nine. The routing is a bit back and forth (1, 3, 4, 5) but this can and should be forgiven over a great piece of terrain.

North Haven GC, North Haven Island — Another cracking, full length nine that is extremely scenic and pleasantly raw in spots. Not mis-ranked in the Top 50 but because it’s another Stiles design, NHGC’s reputation seems to me a bit overcooked, for reasons likely attributable to the Penobscot Bay ferry one must board to get there.

Clinton GC, Clinton — Homemade nine between Bangor and Waterville and a really good one. One funky hole but 8 strong ones, solid green complexes and immaculately maintained. Suffers in some quarters because it’s new (opened early 2000s) and unabashedly modern in its design aesthetic.

Megunticook GC, Rockport — There is a demonstrable bias toward vintage golf courses within pretty much the entire course-rating community. One tries to resist this an intellectual exercise — because it can hurt some courses and help others unnecessarily. So, I’m surprised Megunticook didn’t make the top 50, for it is very old, really well preserved, splendidly old-world kooky in the extreme, and super fun. The 9^th green is so devilishly small, a foursome likely could not play it and maintain a responsible social distance.

Castine GC, Castine — There are some wonderful holes here and Willie Park Jr. (designer of the North Course at Olympia Fields, host to the recent BMW Championship and 2003 U.S. Open) provides a distinct pedigree. In light of Mr. Dutton’s enthusiasm for the place, I have resolved to revisit, perhaps alongside…

Bucksport GC, Bucksport — Stopped to play here with Maine State Golf Association poobah and noted links hound Michael Moore on the way back from MDI a few years ago. We were both stunned by how good it was, as we’d never heard anything about it, good or bad. The polar opposite of Megunticook: modern, full-length (a brawny par 37), compact routing on high but gently rolling ground, huge greens and not overgrown with trees.

The par-3 8th at Megunticook GC in Rockport. The plateau green here is completely
hidden behind that gnarly outcropping.

The Kittansett Club Stands Alone, Unclassifiable and Sublime

on August 18, 2020

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

[Ed. This integrated piece appeared as a course feature and Walker Cup sidebar in LINKS Magazine during the summer of 2006. With the U.S. Senior Amateur visiting The Kittansett Club this week, it seemed a fine time to place this story “above the fold”.]

Rolling down Point Road toward The Kittansett Club, past Sippican Harbor and passing before an ever more stately line of summer “cottages” (all in gray shingle), the ancient course comes into view through the driver’s side window — initially a hole or two bounded by Cape-style miniature pine, but then a striking, open expanse punctuated by golden fescues, lines of bracken hedgerows and chocolate-drop mounding. From this vantage, at this introductory stage, it’s perhaps too easy to lump Kittansett in with the dozens of quirky, antique but ultimately docile, wind-dependent tracks that dot the Northeastern coastline.

But Kittansett is seldom what it appears to be, especially at first glance.

Members here bleed the right color and the course itself, perched on Butler Point and surrounded on three sides by Buzzards Bay, is surely transformed by a stiff wind. But the layout is so much more: a steely, uncommon test on the calmest of days. When I visited in late June, a wind-killing fog (thick enough to cancel the first day of the 2006 U.S. Women’s Open down the coast at Newport) had settled over the place. Yet Kittansett’s length (6,814 yards, par 70), its smallish, steeply pitched greens, its overall strategic mettle were undiminished. They are, in fact, enough to humble and beguile just about anyone in any sort of weather.

“I’m not sure people realize just how difficult this golf course really is,” says Steve Demmer, the head pro here since 1994 [departed in 2014]. “Not even the members, who are used to the carries, the obstacles and the speed of the greens. When the rough and wind are up [and they usually are], this is a lot of golf course.”

The Kittansett Club: Not a Dune in Sight

Opened for play in 1923, Kittansett and its various attributes should surprise visitors. It’s a seaside course — peninsular for heaven’s sake; the Aboriginal American name means near (sett) the sea (kittan) — but there isn’t a proper dune in sight. By all geographical rights the course should be links-like, but trees line two thirds of the routing and the soil isn’t sandy at all, meaning it seldom plays hard and fast outside the dog days of summer.

The course feels quite natural but was in fact designed to within an inch of its life by one Frederic Hood, who had consulted with Donald Ross and worked from some drawings provided by William Flynn. But he built the course himself with local crews of similarly inexperienced folk. Kittansett is the only golf course on Hood’s resume; he never designed nor built another.

Indeed, on a largely tree-lined golf course, it’s hard to imagine a seasoned architect would have placed such a proliferation of fairway-impeding obstacles. Thirteen holes at Kittansett feature some sort of deep cross bunker or bank of mounding perpendicular to play. The corridors are naturally ample. Yet hardy stands of white pine, oak, cedar and tupelo frame the inland holes, creating a extremely stout test when it comes to driving the ball — between the trees, over and around these myriad crossing features, and amid a random collection of chocolate drops.

Here and there these oversized Kisses (more like chocolate-covered cherries really) reside on a hole’s periphery, seemingly without purposes. Other times they come off quite strategically. The two that stand sentinel on either side of the somewhat lunar 16^th fairway appear to frame the target but are actually 50 yards short of the green, seriously messing with a visitor’s depth perception. “They had to put the rocks somewhere,” Demmer says with a smile and a shrug.

Because of the ever-present winds perhaps, Hood’s design rarely calls for forced carries into the greens themselves. The oft-photographed 3^rd, a pitch across an ocean inlet to a green surrounded by beach sand, is the notable exception. More often the cross hazards come earlier in the golf hole. At 16, for example. On the 424-yard 6^th, three staggered lines of cross-mounding jut in from the left (the last sits 220 yards from the back tee). A similar trio is reprised at the wonderful, short par-4 10^th, where the hazards are reasonably cleared with a long-iron or fairway wood — mind games notwithstanding.

The 11^th with its massive cross bunker gaping in from the left is perhaps the most brutish poser on a course replete with them. The eye-catching hazard sits well short of a flamboyant green cleaved by a deep swale — but all this is obscured by the bunker’s 7 foot lip. From the back tee, 241 yards away, the tiny exposed portion of the putting surface appears to sit precariously (and inaccessibly) at the edge of the world, 15 feet above a bunker bounded by ball-sucking bogs. The prudent play is left of center, directly over the bunker’s highest point; this allows the contour to shape the ball onto the green. But it’s a leap of faith even for members familiar with the gambit, and a thrilling leap at that.

Trump’s subconscious is desperately trying to tell us something

on August 12, 2020

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Aug. 12, 2020) — I’m starting to wonder whether Donald Trump’s subconcious is trying to tell us something important. To be specific, I’m worried he might have killed some young woman early in this century. Not sexually assaulted her. That’s something he’s apparently been doing, repeatedly, since the early 1980s. I mean killed a woman outright.

I worry about this, as an American, because he’s the president. And because he keeps accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of this exact crime, from this specific period in time. As has become custom, Trump makes this allegation publicly without a shred of evidence. But this particular accusation worries me in another way because, as we’re learning, it’s part of a transgressive pattern — the outrageous lie that falsely accuses or smears someone else, but actually projects the president’s own anxiety about his having already committed the same crime, or embodying the identical character flaw.

This habit of the president’s, what I have dubbed projection lying, is not to be confused with his reflexive, everyday, run-of-the-mill lying — what he himself calls, in his book Art of the Deal, “truthful hyperbole”. To be fair, this is the sort of thing one does when selling condos. As the nation has come to understand, this form of fabrication he unleashes almost continually.

Ethically, even psychiatrists aren’t supposed to diagnose the most obvious sociopaths from a distance. But I’m not a psychiatrist (!). And let’s face it: As American citizens in the here and now, we are more or less obliged to scrutinize the president’s lies, to sort them into various categories, subgroups and classifications. It’s almost our citizen-duty to collectively wonder what sort of psychiatric phenomenon leads to all this lying, all these different types of lies. He is our head of state, after all. Other than lies, we don’t get many other types of communication from the man.

Trump’s Subconcious is a Scary Place

In the main, Trump lies largely for the same reasons anyone else does — to deflect blame, to immunize himself from harm (when possible), to shirk responsibility, etc. However, when taking into account the president’s magisterial portfolio of lies and dissembling styles, I remain fascinated and troubled in particular by the president’s projection lying — his assertion of something clearly false that nevertheless and quite astutely reveals something manifestly true about Trump himself.

Here’s a banal but highly recognizable example: When he prefaces a statement with, Believe me when I tell you, he’s really saying, “I’m preparing to lie to you. In fact, I’m doing it right now.”

We are sadly conditioned to this phenomenon by now, like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled to death. As noted, the man sold condos when he wasn’t doing the impossible: bankrupting casinos (prior to starring in a “reality” series that celebrated his business acumen!). At this advanced stage, it’s as if we expect him to lie to us… And yet Trump has taken this projection lying to a new, dangerous and strangely fascinating place in 2020, because so many of his lies do reveal what the man’s id, his inner voice, what passes for his soul, is trying desperately to tell us. That’s why the Scarborough lie/smear is so arresting, almost macabre.

The president clearly reckons that if a nemesis like Scarborough were first framed up for murder, Trump could better argue that he was being framed up — or that maybe killing someone isn’t so terrible after all (so long as it was done, perhaps on 5^th Avenue, by someone famous enough).

Detailing Dissembling Projection Theme

See here a brief catalogue of the variations on this dissembling projection theme. In most every case, it’s pretty obvious what Trump’s subconscious mind is trying to tell us — things we kind of knew to be true already:

A lot of people are saying = I’m making this up.
She can’t be trusted = You’d be a fool to trust ME.
How has he not been indicted by now? = I’m quite sure I’ve committed several high crimes or misdemeanors — just in the last 3 days.
The president cannot be indicted = I’ve committed several indictable acts in the last 48 hours (but I’m going to keep repeating this because Bob Barr says it’s so).
She can’t be trusted with state secrets = I cannot be trusted with state secrets.
He’s a security risk = I am a security risk (and so are my children)
Nobody knows [insert subject matter here] better than me = I know next to nothing about [insert identical subject matter here]
Who knew health care was so complicated? = I just thought about health care policy for the first time this morning.
I’ve been treated very badly = I’ve committed a crime and/or shattered a longstanding norm and now I’m dealing with the inevitable consequences.
Witch hunt = Constitutionally mandated Congressional oversight
Perfect call = Shakedown
She’s not my type = Yeah, I raped her.
He’s lying = I’m lying.
I guarantee you that conversation never took place = That conversation is digitally recorded.
I don’t know the guy = We have, in fact, vacationed together.

I could go on. For days! The Washington Post recently tallied the president’s lies and purposely misleading statements, since January 2017, at more than 20,000. You get the point.

Replica Course Design, Golden Age Homage and the Sincerest Form of Flattery

on August 11, 2020

Courses & Travel

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Church Pews in Texas — The original Church Pew bunkers are located at storied Oakmont CC. This homage can be found at Tour 18 in Flower Mound, Texas.

[Ed. — The replica course design phase has faded somewhat. This piece ran in the September 2002 print edition of GOLF Magazine — back when the U.S. was still opening hundreds of new courses every year, replica and otherwise. Since 2008, the U.S. course stock has shrunk by some 150 courses each year…]

By Hal Phillips
Television commentators, magazine pundits and denizens of the 19th hole seldom refer to the ’77 British Open. It’s always the ’77 British Open at Turnberry — rarely the ’88 U.S. Open, but rather the ’88 Open at Brookline. This strong sense of place separates golf from sports like tennis; the late Bud Collins might have waxed pedantic about the ’72 Open at Forest Hills, but he never talked about Ken Rosewall’s quarterfinal win on Court 7. Who cares which court it was? Like football fields and hockey rinks, the parameters of play are all pretty much the same.

Golf is different; it’s all about venue. Its tournament layouts — each unique in character, many situated in exotic locales — actively shape the competitive drama and our memories of it. The advent of television has only enhanced this sense of geography, further ingraining these layouts, these holes, in our collective consciousness.

This fascination with “place” begins to explain one of golf’s emerging trends, the replica course, whereby famous holes from various distinguished layouts are re-created and linked together to form distinct, 18-hole loops. A dozen such compilations are now operating across the U.S., with many more on the drawing board. It seems course developers have recognized what Hollywood and Madison Avenue have known for some time — that our culture has long valued familiarity on a par with originality; how else can we explain Back to the Future III?

What’s surprising is that golf has taken so long to recognize the mystical and commercial appeal of replication design which, when done well, is nothing more than trotting out proven quantities.

Replica Course Design? Been around forever

Replica course design isn’t, in the strict sense, a particularly new idea. Most course architects will admit there are approximately 30 to 40 golf hole templates; everything built after 1900 is basically a variation on one of these themes. Indeed, C.B. Macdonald and partner/protégé Seth Raynor made their considerable marks on American course architecture by routinely mimicking specific British golf holes — The Redan at North Berwick, the Alps at Prestwick and The Road Hole at St. Andrews, among others. “Some of Macdonald’s copies are better than originals, most notably the Redan at National Golf Links on Long Island,” says Gary Galyean, who administers GOLF’s Top 100 rankings, lists replete with replication fodder.

That said, the post-modern knocking-off process began in earnest with Golden Ocala (Fla.) Golf & Country Club, a replica layout which debuted in 1986. Three years later, The Ross Memorial — an unabashed reproduction of great holes designed by The Original Donald — opened for play in Boyne, Mich. The genre’s most recent example: The Royal Links, an aggregation of 18 holes pilfered/copied with loving care (take your pick) from British Open courses and replicated a few miles from the Strip in Las Vegas. A similar project called The Tribute opens this August in Dallas where another replica course, Tour 18, has been doing 70,000 rounds a year since it opened in 1993.

One might imagine golf’s uber traditionalists, who are legion, taking umbrage at these attempts to knock off hallowed ground. But a funny thing happens on the way to conventional wisdom; when one starts fishing around for naysayers on the subject, few take the bait.

“I don’t have a problem with the practice,” says Barry Palm, president of the Donald Ross Society, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Ross layouts. “Design ideas have always been borrowed and most people will never have the opportunity to play some of these great courses.” Adds Galyean, “The replication of notable golf holes is a time-tested and exonerated practice. A product of admitted plagiarism, The National Golf Links is rightly considered a masterpiece.”

Politics Trump Piety? Yes. Now and Always, Because They’re Baked Right In

on June 24, 2020

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 24, 2020) — Confused by stalwart evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump? Don’t be. Organized religious movements, especially those of the Christian variety, are only nominally “religious” or faith-directed. They are, in fact, political movements. Always have been. When it comes to Christianity, and other monotheistic religious projects, politics trump piety today because always have. They started that way and have not changed. Once we understand this baseline, evangelical support for Trump makes perfect sense.

We aren’t confused by U.S. Chamber of Commerce support for President Trump, for example. These captains of industry don’t like the guy either; it’s not clear they ever respected him as “a businessman” (I mean, who bankrupts casinos? That’s really hard to do and not impressive). But the Chamber anticipated that Trump, as president, would deliver policy outcomes that would keep American corporate interests rich and powerful. The Chamber’s support for Trump doesn’t confuse us at all.

The president’s evangelical Christian support is identically political and transactional.

To be fair, the president’s evangelical support is even more politically on the nose because, as it happens, the world’s two most prominent monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, were both founded as uniquely, overtly political movements — and so they remain. The disconnect and confusion come when something like ‘evangelical Christianity’ is viewed as a movement or phenomenon of faith. As such, its support for someone sporting such a “rich” history of bigotry, sexual predation, white supremacy and transgressive plutocracy would be totally mystifying.

However, when evangelical Christianity is rightly viewed as a political movement, the hypocrisy and our confusion about it fall away. Or they should.

Politics Trump Piety: Because Power is Transactional

Look at what Trump has promised and, in part, delivered to this political constituency of his: not enlightenment or even a righteous example but rather the appointment of judges who are likely to rule against abortion and gay rights (though the latter backfired on the evangelical right last week). He has channeled taxpayer money to private, largely religious, certainly segregated schools; recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thereby laying the groundwork for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. He has restored an America that is ruled by white Christian men, despite a population that is ever more diverse.

Quite apart from Trump and Republican Party policies, evangelical Christians also tend to be strongly supportive of American militarism abroad, race-based immigration policy, and authoritarian policing, three more things that make it darned near impossible to, among other things, love they neighbor as thyself.

We can agree nearly all of these priorities as maintained by Trump’s evangelical base don’t touch on faith much at all. Even the fulfillment of prophecy serves only Christians themselves, not the breadth of God’s human family. Many of these political goals demonstrably transgress New Testament teachings. Instead so-called Christian evangelicals are far more concerned with the wielding of power, social influence and control, and money — the stock in trade of most political movements.

Many Americans are thrown by this — the inability of nominal Christians to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (Romans 13:1). Even religiously observant onlookers get stuck on the hypocrisy of the situation — to a point. Trump’s personal behavior would surely offend lots of evangelicals were he raising their grandchildren or coaching their son’s Little League team. But he’s not doing that. He’s delivering political power and influence, and that trumps all. Apparently. Evangelical Christians are no different from any other political constituency in their search for return on investment — a return they frankly didn’t realize from many Republican presidents up to now.

What has changed with Trump is the extent to which individual members of the religious right wing attempt to cloak these plainly political aims in religious vestments. That is to say, under Trump that practice has fallen away almost entirely — and this should help the rest of us better understand what has always been true: that organized religious movements don’t give a fig about salvation (yours, theirs, anyone’s), not when earthly power, influence, social control and money are at stake.

Christians Need not Like the Guy

Listen to the way Steven E. Strang, founder of the Christian publishing house Charisma Media, reckons this political calculus today: “I believe that God answered our prayers in a way we didn’t expect, for a person we didn’t even necessarily like,” he told The New York Times last winter. “Christians believe in redemption and forgiveness, so they’re willing to give Donald Trump a chance.” Strang added that those who talk about Trump tarnishing the evangelical brand “are not really believers — they’re not with us, anyway.”

One thing is clear: This fellow Strang is not concerned with souls.

Neither is Penny Young Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, an evangelical organization formed to frame the 2018 midterm elections (to potential donors) as a civilizational struggle. Referring to Trump, she said, “His family can talk to him about issues of character.”

“Certainly we are all embarrassed,” Linda Leonhart, who is active in the women’s ministry at her suburban Dallas church, told The Times in March 2019, citing the president’s serial lying, pettiness, impulsiveness, profanity and name calling. “But for the most part he represents what we stand for.” Not the Gospels, in other words, but the political gathering and wielding of earthly power, influence, social control and money.

These folks are not concerned with the teachings of scripture, much though former Attorney General Jeff Sessions might have tried to cite it in defense of this xenophobic policy or that one. Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempted these same diversions. In 2020, it should be clear that Republicans are more concerned with using scripture in the derivation and deployment of political identity and power, reflecting a Christian tradition that is nearly 2,000 years old.

The mere acknowledgement that Trump may be less than ideal morally — but that he delivers things like Brett Kavanaugh and protections for Christian health workers — is itself a tacit acknowledgement, on the part of Christian voters, that political concerns are equally important, if not more important, than matters of personal faith. For them, it’s a simple exercise in compartmentalism, a word that does not appear in the Bible. I doubt very much these folks would want Trump for a son-in-law (faith). But they love what he’s doing as president (politics).