THE OBITUARY PAGE

Up all night, leaning on the windowsill, I once watched His Grace The Lord Hatterjee on an Open University programme about boxing, the pros and cons; Spitgob, three sheets to the wind, was banging on, perhaps - who knows the mind of a Lord -  in erotic reverie, about how too very bad it was, seeing “young men beating themselves insensitive (sic)." Most of the time I agree with Roy, about that, at least.  A shame, though, that he never sorted out that filthy business of spraying spit everywhere, I mean, how hard can it be -  a bit of surgery or dentistry or just self-discipline, you’d think that someone who wanted to run the country would be able to deal with a little problem like that;  like Gordon Snot and his filthy habits,

 Now just you watch out young man or I shall set my mother on you.

 Hattersley’s  refusal to deal with  his spit betrayed an arrogance widespread in politicians; in common wth their uniform ugliness,  they share a belief that what they are saying is of such importance that it doesn’t matter if contemporaneously they are eating snot, scratching their balls or spitting all over people.  Fuck ‘em, all of ‘em, filthy, thieving, pimping, lying, murderous, shiteating cocksuckers.

But the boxing.  I agree with Hatters, until, that is, I see some whining little turd like wotsisname, Murray, and the facial agonies he displays if his tennis ball goes out – like his Lordship, Murray is a notoriously petulant Momma’s Boy –

 and he wants to burst into tearful tantrums, ties himself up in knots,  and then I think, This ain’t sport, this is fucking showbiz, for pansies and nitwits, it's like Riverdance.  Boxing, that’s the only proper sport for a man.  Go on, punch his fucking lights out. Kill him.

I know that jockeys can get thrown off their mounts, and that they – mainly tax-evading Irish tinkers and pushy Italian midgets with big, big mouths -

An angry, mimiature wop jockey, Detorri; who gives a fuck, shortarse.

suffer a long, dark night of the soul if they are not allowed to whip the poor beasts down to the bone: I know, too, that Motocross riders and Formula One glamourboys can crash and burn and that the Poppy-flaunting Premiership GangRapists can, when the occasion demands, dive to the ground in the penalty area with spectacular shrieks and grimaces of imagined injury and foul play. It's the modern game, say the pundits, a professional foul;  a what?  Do fuck off.

 Mr Wayne Potato attempts primitive communication with his team-mates.
Why don't we all fuck the same tart, together like, all at the same time?
Teambuilding, that's what that is.
And if she complains we can set the lawyers on her.

But despite all the pain  that professional sportspersons suffer, searching the North Sea for fish fingers  on a trawlerboat, working on a building site or going down a fucking mine remain the most dangerous occupations, alongside, that is,  working for Uncle Sam in Afghanistan. And then relying on charity for your maimed, invalid  lifelong support, stress on the second syllable, inVALid;  well, come on, really now, if they were valid citizens,  or valued, like, say, Neil Kinnock, there wouldn't need to be an annual - these days all-year-round -  begging festival, just to get them back on their feet, those as still   has feet, that is, see Ishmael passim.


Now Look. Members of the armed forces are all in this together, too.
Just like the rest of you.

I read that CallHimDave's chums in the hallowed, wealth creating circles of Bizness hope to cop three hundred billion in reconstruction fees, three hundred billion, after the rest of us paid a half a billion to destroy Libya,  objectively, to protect the citizens, well, the puppet citizens anyway. I suppose a billion or two  of that profit for NewLegs4Tommy'd be out of the question, fat fucking chance, Georgie boy's chums at  Vodafone won't even pay the tax they owe in the first place. Six billion they got away with.

MORE HOW TO SPEAK COALITION
by Mr George Osborne.

Let's be clear, this govament was elected to deal with the defecit.

Mr Nick Robinson, the govament's political editor

If you say so, Chancellor.
And could I just present you with this present as a token of my esteem?

That's more like it.  I hope it's solid gold;
currency's fucking worthless.

  And anyway, the directors'  boards'll  all be packed full of retired British politicians, probably even Gay Dr Fox, all needing to fill their boots.  No, charity's the thing, obviously, not taxation.  A job for that insufferable cunt,  Wogan, below.

Or His Serene Highness, Prince Gormless,

he's a bit of a poppy-waver, and a part-time pilot, when he's not too busy on holiday, which, like his father,  is most of the time.

Or any of the shameless fucking parasites,  they all love talking about Tommy, just as long as it doesn't cost them anything. What I struggle with is how Tommy allows himself to get roped into all this shit, why doesn't he just mutiny until he gets a guarantee of proper lifetime care if injured on duty?  What the fuck is the matter with him? Doesn't he know how much we pay Peter Mandelstein and Tony Blair, for the rest of their pampered lives? The lure of Celebrity, in many cases, I suspect, obscures what should be a simple decision to go on strike. Or maybe shoot a few of their senior officers.

By the right, quick Karaoke.
The Soldiers, number five in the topten,
singing to raise money for wounded soldiers.
How very Napoleonic Warsish.

  Not as though Ahmed in Kabul is actually, as Field Marshal Gordon Snot warned us, a hair's breadth from  hosing-down Wolverhampton High Street with a load of Kalshnikovs.  And why should he bother, when we send him out plenty of fresh teenage children to eviscerate?  The natural consequence of all this forces showbiz shit  is for people to say, Well Company Sergenat Major, if you can raise a half a million quid just by making a record, then you don't need my fifty pee for a Poppy.....And while you're at it, do you think you could just raise your own wages, you know, as I said, while you're at it.
But I came to talk about boxing and the myth of celebrity.

Two large, extremely fit athletes, fit to the nth. degree,  knocking fuck out of  and hoping to stop each other's  senses and vital organs is a sporting encounter of a whole other order, both incomprehensibly stupid and eye-wateringly courageous.

Who you callin' nigger, nigger?

I've  never seen one, except on the box, which isn't really seeing it at all, knowwarramean'Arry. I don't know if I could watch one, a heavyweight one, at any rate, but it might be somewhere in my hundred things to consume before dying.

Like many of my astonishingly stupid peace and love generation I had my early, well,  teen and twenty,  opinions formed, not, as I believed, by some angelic,  anarchic fraternity writing an underground press -  all those people are millionaires now, or billionaires, or living out in LA, - not by sitar-plucking androgynes, nor by radical priests and psychiatrists but  by all the usual shitmongers,  the same rabid opportunists as have been cutpursing and catchpennying since Mediaeval times, buy my Plague pies, pilgrim,  God's Blood, they're most satisfying, and only a farthing, three for an a’penny, every little ‘elps.

The vague beat-protest-hippy pseudo movement of the fabled 'sixties fragmented, of course, into all sorts of disputatious and counter-productive splinter movements -  I can come back to why they were counter productive, if, that is,   a glance at the current, massive, EU coups d’etats, Western wars of economic occupation and energy crises and Earthcrimes are insufficiently demonstrative of the comprehensive failure of My my my m-my my  generation, baby. Three times my generation voted for Bloody Thieving Tony and Imelda Blair. It was probably the sight of him carrying a Fender Strat into Downing Street wot done it.

Pete Nose, incidentally, librettist, composer, editor, drug addict,  child pornography researcher and leader of the Oo, is up on his ancient hind legs again, berating this or that aspect of new technology for it’s failure to continue adequately  rewarding he and countless other jumped-up layabouts for their artistic achievements, as though what the world needs is an infinite sucession of posturing egomaniacs like himself,  artistically worthless and obscenely overpaid; this wanker' Townshend'd be a little more bearable if he'd actually said to Old Bill, No, fuck off with your caution for kiddie porn, charge me - 

Right, Pete, human morality and social justice.


there was Black Power and Gay Power, WomenPower and GreenPower, all swiftly and seamlessly absorbed into mainstream commerce, enriching all concerned,   New Publishing, NewMusic, NewCinema; worse, coarser than the old, but just as profitable. Steven Fry, the new Oscar Wilde,  Alan Sugar the new PT Barnum, only vile and cruel,  nasty and vicious, a barrowboy gob without restraint,  finally found his metier, not that he'd know what a metier is, getting paid for bullying people;  Steve Odd  Jobs the new Henry Ford;  I, like most people in the world, have  never had an iThing in my life, fuck me, Jesus, however do I manage, here, in consumer purgatory?

If you watch daytime teevee, and it is, trust me,  an education - for one thing,  the war channels will lead you to  the conclusion that the German nation should have been permanently dismantled after the Nazi Terror, even the good Germans, which ninety nine per cent of them of course were, just a few of them doing all that industrial scale atrocity shit, Liebschen.  And given  their extensive criminal record, why don't we just take all their money off them now, and spread it around among ourselves?  Eh, what would Frau Trousers think of that scheissen?

I mean, we could just steal all their shit off them, build another wall around all of them,
and sell them food at extortionate rates, maybe experiment on their children a bit.

But anyway, if you do watch daytime teevee, about every eight minutes you’ll see an old greyhaired gentleman

And you get a free biro, just for signing away a portion of you pisspoor pension.

trying to frighten his fellow elderly citizens into buying a worthless, funeral expenses insurance policy.  He’s a multi-multi-millionaire, having spent a whole lifetime sucking, in one medium or another,  on Celebrity’s cock. His fellow Northerner, the late Sir Jimmy Nightmare, at least raised some money for charity, and the still extant Sir Bruce Fawsyth, although having spent his early career grovelling at the feet of Sammy Davies junior and others can at least sing a dance. A bit. But our man's schtick, on which he built a four-decade career consisted of variations on a theme of:   Mr Bob Hope, I think I have covered, for our delighted viewers, most of the ways in which you are wonderful but I wonder, would you kindly tell us,  in your own words, about some of the other ways in which you are outstandingly magnificent;  Ms Angie Dickinson, you must have had some famous suitors, tell us about them,  Mr Billy Connolly, tell us one of your extremely funny jokes, one about, what is it you call them, Bobbies, Jobbies? And Mr Cassius Clay or Mr Mohamed Ali,

 as I believe you now call yourself and nothing wrong with that, perhaps you’d recite one of your very clever, if I may say so, poems.

The Michael Parkinson Show, along with the A Life In The Day feature, in the back of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement, these were the dawn of celebrity culture,  of the charting of fame, per se; these were the somewhat shocking days when showbiz Gods stepped down from screen and stage and shared their wonderful lives with us,  American stars, coyly baring their arses for Parky's energetic tongue; Cleo Laine, writing, or having ghost-written, in the ST, a page of snooty, self-serving drivel about life in the Laine-Dankworth household -  I remember that the vastly over-rated  chanteuse had trouble with staff, couldn't get them, it seems. And was struggling with jazz renderings of Shakespeare's sonnets.  It was heady stuff, how celebrity lived,  a long way from OK and Hello magazines, but it was their precursor;  I think the ST editor was future Murdoch lickspittle, Andy Jock Neil, who certainly hasn't lost his fascination with shallow celebrity.

Parky's journalistic raison d'etre fecal was that he was from Up North, and in some imaginary childhood of deprivation his woeful, jambutty and rickets British way of life had been transformed by Hollywood stars, larger than life, in some flickering Odeon or Gaumont and By 'Eck, now that he had a chance to lick them arses nowt'd stop him.

How we watched from the other side of the screen as Yul Brynner, for instance,  boasted of his innumerable achievements, his mastery of languages, of dance, of athletics, of the guitar, of remorseless self-promotion;  we thought this was true grit, unaware that like dinner plates on sticks in an ailing Variety act, we were being fervently spun by the infotainment industry.  Others soon followed, chat-showing, Des O'Connor, Swinging London's Simon Dee, Terry Wogan,   eventually the format reinvented itself in the form of poor, mad,  loony witch, Caroline Ahearn,

Mrs Merton her nightmare baggage, Coronation Street on bad brown acid,  and then  that awful motormouthing lawyer, Clive Davis, what a cunt.



The essence remained the same, though, promotion of the latest book or record or film, in exchange, generally,  for a wee bit of banal chitchat.  There is also, of course, a gaggle of  presenters, skilled in the cheap black art of goading the inept, of further damaging the damaged, Jerry Springer was the leader of the pack, followed by the sanctimonious, simpering Trisha, dangerous if employed as Community Psychiatric Nurse, apocalyptic on National TeeVee and then  there's the  monstrous Jeremy Kyle - regular readers will know that we are opposed to capital and corporal punishment, but I could suspend my judgement to watch this man beaten to death, over, say seventy-two  hours;  hard not to think that he's an agent of skymadeupnewsandfilth, engaged  in the ruination and capitulation  to ShitCorp of the entire nation.  The States has studiosfull of chatarses, notably our own Mr Piers Moron, who manages, nevertheless, to get in deep with the stars every week or so, here, in Blighty, a true moron for our times.

Back then, though, we thought all that stinky, watery shit,  the celebrity chat, was truly revelatory, well, I did, anyway, as it splattered around the toiletbowl of my consciousness. And I remember watching Mohamed Ali on Parky.  A great man, I thought, bold, witty  and intelligent.  When he described the white man as his enemy, I almost cheered, that's how dumb I was.  Wasn't he a draft dodger, too? And the way he danced around in the ring, that was magic, that was, for a negro to do all that.  That was showing them.

And that, I am ashamed to say, has, remained, more or less, my opinion of the young Cassius  Clay.  At least it was, until Joe Frazier died and I became, belatedly,  refreshed by the truth of the matter.

Aside from training,  gabshiteing and the occasional fight, Cassius Clay Mohamed Ali  never did a day's proper work in his life, he was groomed for the Olympics and after winning there he just moved from one huge paycheck to another,  there was a hiatus, of course, when he was stripped of his license to fight after declining Uncle Sam's invitation to IndoChina, where he could have  joined in the killing of  three million, roasted some gook children, thrown some suspects out of Huey helicopters and fucked up the forests for decades to come, defending Freedom at home and abroad;
Frazier, on the other hand, was nigger trash from Carolina, who started working in the fields at the age of seven, never had an education and took up fighting in Philadelphia in order to feed himself. He didn't go to 'Nam because he was  then a father, but always said that if called on by his country he would've. As he evaded the Draft, Ali was cute enough, and by this time being micromanaged and scripted by the Nation of Islam's capo, Elijah Mohamed, to get himself declared a conscientious objector, without having to flee, as did so many, to a  cold Canada. Elijah Mohamed wrote  the winning phraseology, No VietCong never called me a Nigger; Why should I go halfway around the world and kill other brown folks, which resonated globally and as war popularity waned, endeared Ali to the Peace Movement. The records and testimonies of those present indicate that, rather than a free spirit who had just found Allah, Ali was, body and soul, Elijah Mohamed's bitch. But  ironically, it was Frazier who prevailed upon Tricky Dicky, then president, successfully petitioning him to restore Ali's fighting license, and Frazier who had bunged Ali substantial sums, as his income dried-up.

Fit to fight again, Ali faced Frazier  three times, in each fixture sharpening the taunts which, once amusing,  were now hateful.  Despite Frazier's quiet, fraternal  support in his dark hours, Ali, in his fashion, insisted on calling him an Uncle Tom. He was not a cosy liberal by any means, a Republican and unfashionable among the cognoscenti, but Frazier was by no means an Uncle Tom. Enraged by Ali's cheap taunts, in their first match, at Madison Square garden Frazier, in what became known as the Fight of the Century,  nearly dismembered the favourite, the wisecracking jive-ass, showy Black muslem.  Afterwards Ali, despite his thorough beating at Frazier's hands  screamed fix! The ref and judges were white and had sided with the Uncle Tom. The press, of course, rolled with their gobby darling and a swift rematch saw Ali beating  a then lacklustre Frazier. The ref and judges, this time, according to Ali, were still his enemy but had managed to deliver the correct decision, despite being whites.

Their final fight was the mythical Thrilla in Manilla, in October 1975. Ali, the hypocrite,  pious and sanctimonious about marriage publicly, had jumped at the opportunity to take his new mistress out of the States, away from his wife.  But at home his wife was watching teevee coverage of the event as Ali and his bint were received with What a beautiful wife you have, Mr Ali,  by President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Cherie.
 

President Tony and Imelda Marcos,
corrupt, greedy dictators and unlikely boxing promoters.

The rightful Mrs Ali was on the first  jet out to Manilla and gave the Champ a swift rub-down with a thick copy of the Holy Koran.


Ali's fun, this time, which nearly killed him  - and may well have caused the illnesses from which he has suffered for decades - was to rhyme Gorilla with Manilla, dressing in a Gorilla suit and repeatedly slapping a Gorilla doll, as though Frazier was a Gorilla, a uniquely black-on-black insult. Ali, pampered, spoiled,  theatrical,  over-confident,  forever thinking that he was clever, woefully understimated the blitzkrieg he was storing up for himself inside the muscled rage of former field nigger, Frazier.

Ali took the first few rounds but thereafter Frazier punished him without mercy;  the ref, a Japanese, also halted Ali's customary dirty trick of holding opponents by the back of the neck and the ensuing rounds are breathtaking,  the amount of punishment absorbed by both fighters is beyond imagining, Frazier, for instance, pummelling Ali's hips, in order to raise massive, immobilising haematomas, stop his fucking dancing around, thumping him time after time in the heart, the liver nad the kidneys, to cause swelling and internal bleeding.  But by the fourteenth round Frazier's right eye was nearly closed by Ali's repeated left hooks, he was almost blind, anyway, in the left eye and his trainer, fearful that he would be killed, and much against Joe's own wishes, threw in the towel unaware that Ali was unable or unwilling to come out for the last round, having told his corner team that he felt he was dead;  a few premature seconds had cost Frazier the fight which he would otherwise surely and deservedly and justly won. As Ali was declared the winner, he collapsed on the floor and lay there immobile for minutes, Frazier, meantime, dancing angrily around the ring and vivacious at the ensuing press conference was every inch the winner. Only he wasn't.

The bad blood rightly continued for decades. And as Ali slid into Parkinson's disease and a role in the States as,

well, I don't know what, some sort of avuncular, wheezing has-been, Frazier continued to train fighters in his gym


and at every opportunity reminded folks that
You see that man, 
Ali,


 you see what's wrong with him, I did that to him,
don't float like no fuckin' butterfly no more.

I don't know if there was some fearful, last minute rapprochement between two of the best fighters in boxing  history. But I do hope not.