As witness Tiger Woods' "confession." The golfer did not have to wear a large-character poster around his neck. He was not beaten by jeering Red Guards with bamboo sticks, but by newspaper columnists andc ommentators instead.

True, he didn't have to swear allegiance to "Mao Tse-tung thought,"as the Great Helmsman's name was spelled in those pre-Pinyin days. But Tiger did promise to be a better Buddhist. Afterward, we didn't send him to the countryside to clean up after animals, but back to therapy.  I'm not sure our way is more socially useful.)

What's different about our cult of forced celebrity humiliation and self-criticism is that it is hardly ever about politics or ideology.Nobody knows anything about Tiger Woods' politics, nor does anybody care what they are.

Nor do our self-criticism orgies usually involve fraudulent or criminal behavior. You didn't see much of a media frenzy demanding a nationally televised confession and act of phony contrition from Mark McGwire, who lied about using steroids to illicitly and artificially break some of baseball's greatest records.

No, with us, everything is all about sex.

Today, we are interested in cheap thrills and titillation, and that's all that matters. When that thug and career criminal Kwame Kilpatrick dragged his wife before the cameras to do what the Watergate boys called a "modified limited hangout," he did it not because of what his corruption had done to the city, but because he was caught screwing his chief of staff.

Kilpatrick's lying and perjury cost the desperately poor tax payers of Detroit almost $9 million. But we are a race of hypocritical puritans, and what matters to us is sex.

Think about this: This nation now has a profound financial crisis,and an even greater crisis of political will. We desperately want and need health care reform, but we have a Congress unwilling to act —  and a president who seems unable to rally the people behind him.

The media gives, under the banner of objectivity, vast space andtime to ranting know-nothings who are proud of their stupidity, and toreckless, lying careerist politicians.

Last week U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana,) a highly respected moderate who believed in bipartisanship, announced he was giving up infrustration and wouldn't seek re-election. That devastating development didn't get a tenth of the attention the Tiger Woods story did. By theway, stop for a moment and think about what this "story" was really about.

In December, we learned that a handsome, young billionaire superstar golfer apparently had sex with a lot of willing women. This probably came as a huge shock to anyone under the age of 6. True, he had a beautiful wife and small children, which makes him something of a cad.There is, however, some historical evidence that he may not have been the first celebrity to behave that way.

But why is this anybody's business except his family's? None of this violated the rules of golf. Nor does it seem that any of these women were underage, or that he took them against their will.

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