[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Due to family health issues, I’m taking some rare time off. I’m not quite sure how long. At most, I’ll be back right after Labor Day. Tom]
He’s never been either an apprentice or a man to miss the main chance. The latest example: only recently in mourning (or do I mean morning?) for his first wife, Ivana, he buried her on the golf course he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. As the New York Post reported, “Not too far from the main clubhouse” — all too appropriately “below the backside of the first tee.”
Oh, as ProPublica noted, the Trump family trust had already established a non-profit funeral business 20 miles away “exempt from the payment of any real estate taxes, rates and assessments or personal property taxes on lands and equipment dedicated to cemetery purposes.” Now, it’s possible that Bedminster could qualify, too, and conceivably get similar tax exemptions.
In other words, his long-rejected wife could all-too-literally prove to be par for the course when it comes to The Donald. He might even profit from her death. How thoroughly expectable, don’t you think? And that’s not the only way in which our former president has been out golfing lately, though not, of course, anywhere near his Mar-a-Lago club, which has been left, for the time being, to the FBI.
No, I was thinking of his latest Saudi escapade, this time with golf club in hand, as TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte, author most recently of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, explains today. Tom
Being Anything But a Good Sport in Saudi Arabia
Even Trump Has a Hand in the Attempted Hijacking of Golf
Here's the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used to cosmeticize Nazi Germany’s atrocities and promote Aryan superiority have sports and an otherwise despised government collaborated so blatantly to enhance their joint international standings.
Will it work this time?
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