Leading article: Golf-clubs at dawn

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has opened up a whole new offensive in the class struggle. His denunciation of golf as a bourgeois pseudo-sport that takes up space more properly used for housing has sent officials scurrying to close courses across the land. He reserved special scorn for golf carts as exemplifying the sport's "laziness". How right! We ask only why he stopped there.

What about the execrable attire that passes for golf wear? Those checks, those pastel knits, those shoes... The demeaning caddy system? Or the excess inherent in the multiplicity of irons employed for no higher purpose than to propel a little ball into a little hole? And why stop with Venezuela? He could take his cue from H.L. Mencken, who said that, if he had his way, "any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the US" and "any families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina". Perhaps he really meant Venezuela.