So, Tiger Woods has spoken up. Outrageously but not surprisingly, the media response to what he had to say at his press conference has been largely relegated to questions of his reputation’s fate, his failed strategy at addressing the PR crisis, and so on. No one is wondering if what he said, the position he took, was right or not.

Of course it was. Woods seethed that the media opted to stalk his family, “fabricate” elements of story out of whole cloth, speculate and decide his marital status for him, advise him to seek Jesus’s forgiveness, and generally ask and answer questions that are, in fact, nobody’s business excepts the Woods’.

He’s right. The media shouldn’t have even been in the proverbial room. It’s not as if he’s a governor spending tax dollars on prostitutes, or any such thing. He’s a billionaire athlete. Why anyone should assume he doesn’t have affairs, and would therefore be shocked, shocked when his wife takes out a car window with a golf club over a discovered infidelity, is a stupefying mystery. Athletes don’t serve the public, or, God knows, have an unwritten code of ethics they have to live by. They’ve sold dope, killed dogs, beat up wives, gunned down enemies, become politicians. Mostly, they throw or hit balls of varying shapes and sizes.

Whether or not Woods was some trollop’s backdoor man is not only none of our business, we shouldn’t want it to be. We, the public, and the media that reflects our concerns and informational needs, should have more substantial things to worry about. We do, in fact, have a teeming pile of more substantial things to worry about. We shouldn’t care about an athlete’s marital skirmishes. Even if we were a little curious, certainly the media, if it defines itself as anything but a pandering plague of bed lice, should’ve saved its page and air space for stories that actually matter.

But, this week, the media, from Murdoch’s Isengard to NPR, ignored Woods’ unambiguously furious press conference but covered it anyway, as the latest chapter in the pointless story they’d just been scolded for telling. The cognitive dissonce is practically comedy, an old SCTV or SNL skit. Woods should’ve added something to the effect, “Isn’t there real news for you guys to write about? Why are you wasting time following my kid to school, when your editorial budgets are crumbling like sand castles in a typhoon? Isn’t it a little pathetic?”

Or, a la William Shatner on SNL, “Get a life!”

Of course, he would’ve been talking to us all.

(Or, look again at SCTV’s timeless premier episode of “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” and consider that Catherine O’Hara is Woods.)

Even if — and it’s a big if — I saw in three dimensions, which I don’t, and Avatar’s celebrated “immersive” design was able to properly envelop me in its splendiforous fluourescence, I still wouldn’t see it. Even if James Cameron wasn’t a complete Napoleon-psycho windbag. Even if it hadn’t been shoved down my throat months before it came out, even in a shamelessly brownnosing profile in The New Yorker. And I’m somebody who feels compelled to see everything that’s Important to the Medium, which, if you believe the critics, Avatar is, important, that is, a Step Forward in Moviemaking.

Please. It’s pretty apparent to everyone from the marketing stampede alone that Avatar is a some kind of substantial uptick in digital F/X. If you care about that sort of thing. Which is to say, if you’re young enough to still have trouble buying beer in New York, or if you’re still masturbating three times a day. If I was 15, I’d see Avatar. But I’m not. And neither, chances are, you.

But even if Cameron got that much right — if he somehow managed to get digital characters to act, and didn’t make the women look cross-eyed, and the 3-D was, like, dude, so very cool — so what? Not only is the story recycled garbage and the script (reportedly, even by fans) idiotic, but the very essence of the film — its visual cataract of fantasy — is infantile. What, am I a forest animal, unthinkingly hypnotized by shiny objects? Oooo, I’m building a nest, I need something bright and pretty. Am I a toddler in the cereal aisle, blindly drawn to the box of Froot Loops because of the bright colors?

Since when is a flush of rainbow hues and sparkly art supposed to engage the adult mind? You read David Denby’s review of the film in The New Yorker (a month or more after Dana Goodyear’s Cameron rimjob), and you hear a grown man — who’s written books — try to explain that the film is stupid but he just loved the shimmering Crayola colors anyway. Maybe he’d like a mobile above his bed.

I’ve seen Avatar already, frankly, because I spent my youth looking at Roger Dean album covers and sci-fi/fantasy paperback covers and the art of Frank Frazetta, Chris Foss, the Brothers Hildebrandt, etc. — and that was a good 30 years ago. But since then, something happened: I grew short hairs and read Hemingway and had sex. There’s no going back.

I don’t do resolutions, but everyone’s doing it, but I never do, but it’s an opportunity, isn’t it, why not, so let’s get to it:

• I resolve to spend more time with neo-conservatives. Not because I think it’d be fair to do so or anything, but because I know very few and I have no one to win arguments over.
• I resolve to never see another movie or TV show with zombies or vampires in them, just as last year I resolved silently to swear off superheroes. My life’s getting short, after all. I’d swear off giant robots if I ever bothered to see those movies in the first place.
• I resolve to get on Twitter, now that I’ve read a string of tweets responding to Rush Limbaugh’s recent ER visit; one of them hoped “he gets a black doctor,” while another wondered if he “exaggerated his symptoms, like Michael J. Fox did.” Many simply asked God to kill him.
• I resolve to get better at the dry one-line humor that’s becoming the sine qua non of Facebook, Twitter, et al. I don’t know how, exactly. I may have to steal.
• I resolve to allow my children to play in traffic.
• I resolve to find some way to get Neko Case to sing my outgoing answering-machine message.
• I resolve to try absinthe, mahua, Nepalese raksi, peyote and kratom. Just experimenting, understand.
• I resolve to stop envying David Niven for having had sex with Merle Oberon. And then for being modest about it.
• I resolve to solve the newspaper/magazine problem of “monetizing” journalism online. Don’t have any ideas yet, but when I do, you’ll hear about it.
• I resolve to find some way to write about the very strange and disturbing things that are going on in Internet porn, which no one can really do without shamefacedly admitting that they’ve looked at it. I haven’t yet. But ferChrissake, someone should say something.
• I resolve to lay off bourbon. I never drink it now, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
• And sure, I resolve to lose that midlife 20 by May. And when I resolve, that shit gets done.

I keep hearing about the recent Congressional report detailing how exactly U.S. troops failed to nail down Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, because everybody talking in the media about Obama’s new Afghanistan surge is asked about it and agrees with it, laying the blame for the entire subsequent eight years at the feat of Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld. Let’s face it, if bin Laden had been arrested and jailed for life as other convicted terrorist subjects in this country have been, the ongoing and exhausting crisis of the wars might’ve been avoided, and Obama’s surge, wise and correct or foolish and wrong, wouldn’t have been necessary.

It’s easy to play what-if, but before my scariest speculation drops here with a gruesome splat like a pterodactyl’s egg, a speculation I haven’t yet heard elsewhere, let’s quote the report:

“[T]he Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.”

There’re reams of communication that even Congress didn’t get to peruse, of course, and plenty of gaps in the available record. So here’s my thought, my naturally low-boiling paranoia bubbling over thanks to the fuel provided by the Bush Administration’s countless duplicities, evil machinations and mercenary secrets: if the battle following 9/11 would have effectively ended with the capture of bin Laden and the collapse of a semi-organized Al Qaeda, then what reason would Bush & Co. have had to invade Iraq? They had no real, or sensible, reason, we know that for sure. Just a series of scaremongering flashcards. But they used the ongoing climate of dread and rage to put us there, erecting one temporary justification after another, at a cost of a still untold number of lives. We know the Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc. team were interested in an Iraq invasion before 9/11, and Richard Clarke has told us it was virtually the first thing out of their mouths that morning eight years ago when the towers fell. But they would have lost their opportunity if bin Laden were caught or killed.

What if they didn’t want that to happen? What if they wanted to keep bin Laden alive, to give them a working justification for their already detailed invasion plan?

What if they deliberately pulled back at Tora Bora, to allow the “endless war” to commence?

I’m speculating. We’ll probably never know. But would you put it past them?

Do not let the opportunity to sit before “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966) pass, this October or any other. So thoroughly evocative of its own private universe that once it’s implanted in our cortices it stands little chance of being evicted, the modest TV cartoon remains one of the great masterpieces of American television, a waist-high autumnal idyll like no other, and as evocative of a preteen universe – a place where Halloween has epochal significances, if it’s always difficult to figure out exactly what they are – as any film made in English. Of course, it’s in our genes, relentlessly rerun in October for 30 years now, but look at it again: it’s a lyric, a Frostian ode to the omens of fall, the fire of the imaginative furnace, the awkward tribal brutalities of children, the yearning for a cosmic justice in a landscape where social tension leaves unhealable scars.

What is the legend of the Great Pumpkin if not an answer to the preadolescent rule of might is right, a cry in the wilderness against “hypocrisy,” for “sincerity,” and in the name of all things unlikely and visionary and hopeful. Linus Van Pelt is the John the Baptist here, a square peg kid in a round-headed world, poignantly compelled to follow his private star, howling against the mundane greeds of America (candy!) and holding out, alone in the night, for something better, something grander and more winged, a pagan god of his own invention. Charlie Brown’s tribulations are standard-issue social nightmares, lost as he is in a world where though his contemporaries insult him to his face, unglimpsed grown-ups actually throw rocks in his trick-or-treat bag instead of candy. But Linus’s defiant stand has the markings of a grade-school Galileo, an apostate for whom the weedy lots of Middle American suburbia is the desert of the Old Testament, whipped by winds and glowering under a black-eyed sky.

It’s not a parable of faith-vs.-greed so much as a paradigm of unorthodoxy; Linus is the hero Arthur Rimbaud and Johnny Rotten wanted to be. And, in the end, he is unrepentant. Heroic.

Still, the cartoon’s greatest single passage, and arguably the most mysterious and magical sequence ever animated for TV, is Snoopy’s vivid journey through the night battlefields and barbed-wire trenches of WWI, a flight of brain energy making concrete for us finally what we knew as children, and what the single-minded Linus is too rebellious to realize: play is realer than real, and can set us free.