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Recently, Pope Leo XIV spoke about sports as a unifying factor, teaching athletes teamwork and respect for other traditions.
But is that true? With the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in play, there has probably never been a bigger moment for nations to come together through sports. And yet if sports bring people together, teams and fans alike, they also divide.
As with everything concerning President Donald J. Trump — including the boos that greeted him for Game Three of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan Monday night — much has been written about his on and off Freedom 250 concert series. It included an array of performers from country music’s Martina McBride to funk and soul’s The Commodores — until it didn’t.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold” is an old saying. But an even better one is “Seek revenge, dig a grave for two.”
In Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo,” recently reimagined on PBS, Edmond Dantès digs many graves, so to speak, as he seeks revenge on those who robbed him of his future, including with the woman he loved, only to find that his vengeance, however juicy and ingenious on the page and screen, is ultimately hollow and destructive beyond what he imagined,
President Donald J. Trump’s revenge on those he believes harmed him and his supporters may eventually prove the same.
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Some 23 years ago, at the start of the Iraq War, I was senior cultural writer for Gannett Inc., writing a story about the nature of leadership and interviewing, among others, New York City developer Donald J. Trump, who had agreed to answer some questions by email. At the time, Trump owned the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which featured the $10,000-a-night Alexander the Great suite.
Alexandrian that I am, I was intrigued and began by asking him why Alexander? “Because he was the best, and it’s the best,” Trump wrote back.
I was reminded of that the evening of Friday, May 1, as I watched Ashley Parker, a staff writer with The Atlantic, discuss “The Yolo Presidency,” an article she co-authored, on PBS’ “Washington Week with The Atlantic,’’ about how President Trump aspires to be a great man affecting history in the spirit of Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon and, especially in19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s interpretation of the “Great Man Theory.”
The world has been shocked, but I would venture hardly surprised, by the contretemps between the blustery American president and the steadfast American-born pope over Iran that absorbed much of last week. President Donald J. Trump, incensed over Pope Leo XIV’s antiwar stance, accused him of being weak on crime, terrible at foreign policy and ungrateful for his in effect making him pope. (Apparently, even Trump subscribes to the belief that an American pope serving as a counterweight to an American president was what the College of Cardinals had in mind when they elected Cardinal Robert Prevost pope.) For his part, Leo doubled down on his message of peace, grounded in the Gospels.
But this isn’t the whole story or the only one….
