On a less productive but a more enjoyable front, Laura and I have been making the most of our time in Naples to take out our boat, Sea Paws, named for the guide dogs we train - and who irk our little neighbors down here to no end. (They hate charity, it seems, a splendid irony given their advanced and crotchety state.) The dogs aren’t with us this trip (because of said litigious neighbors), but to remember them on the last day of the year - and pay homage to my boating hero William F. Buckley (a.k.a. Captain Crunch), I post this photo of our most memorable boat trip of the year:

So, last week, when after a good decade of newspaper and magazine writing I sold my first book, I let myself relax. I had a little celebration, though not too big since my wife works on Wall Street, which is the second most miserable place in America - after Detroit, of course. We opened a bottle of champagne a friend had given us over the summer with the tag “for your first published book” and ate some nice cheese. In fairness, she suggested a big dinner but I had opted for something more sedate, a clandestine imbibing of vintage Perrier-Jouet in our kitchen.

That was Tuesday. We tried to keep the celebration going until the weekend but it was hopeless. The stories of too many should-be and once-were millionaires called in the meantime, and their siren songs in her mind left me feeling so down that I had to remind myself that I had just accomplished my life’s goal - with a nice advance, no less.

Some of it is my fault. I pay attention. When I hear the autoworkers complain about their lost jobs, I am really hearing the voices of Wall Street that leave my wife feeling beaten down. They’re one in the same, now, Detroit and Wall Street. Both are deeply in debt and bleat cries of entitlement to any and all who will listen. Neither ever believed the boom would end and, so, neither saved a penny. People here in Connecticut are losing their $2 million houses just as quickly as $200,000 houses are going somewhere else. They’re losing them for the same reasons: they could only ever afford them in a Panglossian world. 

The only thing that really irks me is when I hear people make comparisons to the Great Depression. My grandfather lived through that and from his stories it was clear the choice was not downsizing but survival. Where are today’s bread lines? At the Starbucks, where people are replacing their venti lattes with grande house blends? Or is it the longer lines at Wal-Mart for some and Target for others? We’re still a nation that feels sickeningly entitled to everything - except, of course, for the sick, infirm and aged who have nothing. We try to forget them; they’re bad for the bottom line of America.

So, I’ll put my party on ice and hope that in 18 months when my book comes out, I’ll be able to celebrate - a bit.  

To further to take part in the unsettling of the world order, I appeared twice on Fox News’s The Strategy Room and am scheduled to appear again on Monday, from 3pm to 4pm. If me giving my opinion on a live show does not herald the end of civilization as we know it, I don’t know what does.

The bigger golf news, though, is I interviewed Tiger Woods outside Asheville, North Carolina, on Saturday. I had 15 minutes to ask him whatever I wanted - and fifteen minutes with him is like a day and a half with the president. The story will be on the cover of the February issue of Conde Nast Portfolio so I can’t give anything away. I can, however, reveal two tidbits that will not make it into the story. Tiger often says that he did not want to get into golf course design until he played on every continent and he has done that - except for Antarctica. When he began to say this, I offered to partner with him in the semi-mythological “Antarctica Four Ball” he has referenced. “Sure,” he said, without missing a beat. “I’m a solid 8 these days.” Despite the season ending knee surgery that has kept him from swinging a golf club for five months, I told him I was confident we could still win it. 

On another cold weather subject, Tiger and I were talking about the lead designer of his courses, Beau Welling. Wellling’s role is to implement Tiger’s’ designs. I asked, though, if he had been pushing him to take up curling in his free time. (In his spare time, Welling is the president of USA Curling.) “He has tried,” he laughed. “My wife tried to do the same. Being Swedish that’s one of the big sports there.” It’s just as well: no one really wants to see the greatest competitor of all time furiously sweeping a broom in front of a stone sliding along the ice. 

What I read was heartening: Michael Lewis, my hero, recently found himself fighting a losing battle against a house that was always going to win. The story of renting the mansion of his dreams in New Orleans is billed as a parable of the subprime crisis, and it is in the sense that all of us want more, particularly when it comes to a home. Overreaching can lay us low and it almost does to him. There was wonderful metaphor midway through the story, the lure of the rabbit hole as it were: “Three weeks later, I noticed a door near the master-bedroom suite that I hadn’t seen before; it was like a magical door that someone had carved into the wall while I slept. What could it be? I opened it to find…another huge dressing room! Inside, I could have fit every stitch of clothing I owned, three times over. It seemed weird to just leave it empty, but I didn’t have anything left to put in it, so I closed the door and pretended the room wasn’t there. But the thought occurred: Maybe I need more clothes.” 

And maybe we needed more trees? Of course not! We wanted them. But I felt consoled. If my hero, the author of such brilliant books as Liar’s Poker and Moneyball could get seduced when he was smart enough to know better, then it was okay. He walked away from the mansion; I look away from that tiny hole in the tree that let’s me see the edge of my neighbor’s god-awful above-ground pool…

But we live in the age of hypocrisy. A.I.G. celebrates its $85 billion government bailout by throwing a $400,000 party for its top earners and then asks for another $37 billion - which it receives! Robert Steel, chief executive of Wachovia, scuttles his bank on a raft of bad lending and expansion but gets a lifeline from Citigroup - albeit one that wiped out most of the bank’s equity. A week later Wells Fargo, which had dropped out of the initial bidding, comes back with an offer that guarantees some $225 million in golden parachutes for senior Wachovia executives. Of course, he goes with them!  

But there was a tidbit in today’s paper that struck even my cynical heart as too much. Milan Kundera was a Communist Party informant. The novelist who wrote so passionately about individuals living without fear of having their every action monitored allegedly told the Czech secret police about a man he suspected of being a spy. On that information, the man served 14 years hard labor, after narrowly escaping the death penalty. Kundera has denied it and hopefully his denial is honest.

An apologist could explain this away by saying he was a young, college student and haven’t we all done things then that we regretted later. Gunter Grass, the German Nobel laureate, got himself out of a similar pickle - being in the Waffen S.S. as a blue-eyed boy - by admitting it before anyone could out him.  

Yet if what has been alleged about Kundera is true, it’s far worse than any hypocrisy a politician or financier could indulge in. A Florida Democrat paying a mistress $121,000 in hush money doesn’t matter even though he won his seat from a Republican philanderer: he doesn’t matter in his state, except to supporters looking to collect on favors; he doesn’t matter in Congress, really; and he definitely doesn’t matter to the wider world. He’s insignificant to everyone but his wife and kids, who could quickly learn to get along without him. Kundera, on the other hand, matters immensely. He has connected with millions of people through his books. He’s been held up as an paladin of virtue in the face of totalitarian absurdity. In turn, he has accepted his place among those moral men and women who have risked so much to be heard. If it turns out he once was a Communist informant and now will admit to it, civilization has been dealt a serious blow.

Of course, like most things in life it’s easier to subscribe to Bellow in theory than in practice. Whenever I recalled that quote in the past, I did so pridefully: I’m not going to descend into the muck and mire with that cretin; I’m going to stay above that. And I did. But I did because whatever the issue was it didn’t matter. George Bush has been a bad president; I can’t do anything about that other than to vote for someone else.

But then the issue started to matter and what did I do? I spoke to the irrational people. Actually, I screamed at them, that, that gaggle of morons! The issue? My wife and I train guide dogs for charity and these people don’t like it. Since my wife owns a condo in their little association in southwest Florida they want to have a say over where we bring these dogs. The Federal government has a say, too, but we as volunteer trainers fall into the gray area between disabled people who are protected and pet owners who would have to comply with the condo’s no pet policy. Our dogs aren’t pets but we’re not blind. Hence the clash of civilized (us) and uncivilized (all of them, naturally). Add to this a bit of hauteur on my part: dear people, this is a 12-unit condo complex in the sunniest part of the sunniest state - do behave! 

The whole thing started absurdly. A fat old man came tearing out of the boat dock, screaming and sputtering at my wife. This was our second visit and I had let my New York guard down. He was yelling something about us having dogs, which was obvious and, we thought, known by the board president. (Turns out he has a shaky memory after a certain hour of the night.) So I did the chivalrous thing and stepped between this sweaty tub and my wife. He yelled. I tried not to. No dogs allowed! No, sir, the rule is no pets; these are service dogs. No dogs! Right, but, you see, sir, these are service dogs… You’re not blind! Then I yelled. 

It’s only gotten worse. We were accused of running a business out of the condo we visit 50 days a year (I count the days now and calculate the cost, a bad idea). At Christmas, the property manager snuck around the outside of our condo and took pictures through the sliding glass door - even though we’ve never tried to hide the dogs we train. One of the owners’ daughters screamed at my wife because the dog scared her son (wimp!) only to rush to her parents’ condo to shush her yapping dachshund. There are many more instances but I’ve reacted the same way throughout: I’ve made it worse. I did try to reason with these people but it turns out they’re all bullies or cowards so that didn’t work. (They’re also all from the election battleground states of Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, which worries me more.) When reason didn’t work, I tried to ignore them, like I thought Saul Bellow would have done. But I’ve read Saul Bellow and I’m not Saul Bellow: I yelled more. Then I called them bad names. Then I called an attorney. And a judge. And some policemen. And, well, it’s all ballooned  from there.

Today we found out that we’re going to court to give more of our money to the wiley and slow-talking attorneys who feed off of these condo wars. Naturally, I believe ours is a rational man and we look at his hourly rate as a necessary evil: we’d rather be spending these escalating sums on anything else, nice dinners, vacations with rational people, donations to our charity for Christsake! As you might guess, I think their attorney is man without scruples, an ill-informed, over-charging lay-about who cares nothing for charitable acts and is running up the bills so he can buy a bigger boat (which is what every year-round Floridian wants after they have the Mercedes they want). In my calculus, he is the most rational of the irrational people. Why our occasional neighbors are acting as foolishly as they are I do not know. That’s what irrational people do, I guess. And that is all the more reason to practice Bellow!