Hiaasen golfing?

Osama bin Laden waving sparklers on the Fourth of July. Adolf Hitler reciting the Torah. Martin Luther King, Jr., burning a cross.

These things are so crassly out of character that they would only really show up in the most grotesque kind of political cartoon--and maybe not even there because they're so unrealistic that they wouldn't even be funny or pertinent. They don't even bear thinking about.

With them, I would have put Carl Hiaasen being a devoted golfer. Hiaasen is the Florida-based author of pulpy, humorous about, among other things, lovable ecoterrorists.

But Hiaasen has written a new book that turns my world upside down. It's called "The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport” and, from New York Times reporter Charles McGrath's rather perplexing article on it, I gather that it is a playful, jargon-laced tribute to the author's love of the sport of St. Andrew's.

I'm confused. I swear, although I can't back it up (I don't own a copy and the library's is borrowed until August), that Hiaasen's "Sick Puppy" contains a passage damning the environmental consequences of golf courses.

I'm not an environmental scientist, but I'm pretty sure that golf courses threaten Hiaasen's beloved Everglades--even more so after ten seconds' googling.

Hiaasen only addresses the contradiction between golf and the environment with this weak observation: “The great irony is that golf courses are becoming the last bit of wildlife refuge we have. I saw a bobcat on a golf course once, and I don’t know that there’s anyplace else you could do that now.”

Of course, I'm willing to give Hiaasen the benefit of the doubt. It's possible, given the "Ruinous Sport" part of his latest title, that he addresses this conflict in his new book. I think this conflict is probably instead down to the Times story's author.

I didn't need to go to Houghton Mifflin's profile on McGrath to guess that he was a regular contributor to Golf Digest. The story on Hiaasen is plagued by jargon-laden banal passages like: "He suffers, it’s true, from occasional, unpredictable bouts of the ailment golfers dare not name: the shanks. But he has a not-bad-looking swing with a nice finish, and he hits the ball a long way."

As someone who doesn't play golf, I have no idea what that means.

McGrath does suggest that some of the slimy, environmentally negligent villains of Hiaasen's novels might like the golf course he plays at, but that seems to be more a commentary on the social, rather than environmental issues related to golf, and he dismisses that before he can even get into it anyway.

Whether because he is simply too much of a golf writer to see the essential contradiction in Carl Hiaasen's playing golf or because he is too much of a powder puff to wade into a turgid, ambiguous question like that one, McGrath is missing the point.

If he ever writes something good, I might just drop a tip with the CIA to start looking for Osama in the fireworks aisle of their local supermarket in midsummer.