Golf Goes to the Highest Bidder
BEING TRULY RICH means that, strange though it is, success doesn't matter. There is no such thing as a bad deal when you're rich. The news that the Saudis just bought out the PGA Tour illustrated a lot of other things about how our world works, too, most of them bleak. For instance, obviously, we can stop pretending that chopping up a journalist is a serious offense—life is cheap, after all, as the luminaries at Henry Kissinger's private 100th birthday party could have told you, if they'd deigned to talk about what they were doing there. Oil? Oil is not so cheap. We didn't hold 9/11 against the Saudis; we certainly weren't going to hold Jamal Khashoggi against them.
It gets frustrating even talking about the bone saw anymore. It was such a solid and real detail, the bone saw: Mohammed bin Salman's team didn't just "disappear" Khashoggi in some abstract or obfuscatory way, they physically sawed apart his bones with a piece of hardware they'd flown into Turkey for the occasion. Allegedly. Knowing about it hasn't changed anything, has it?
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