May 22, 2009

This being my last week in the Bagel, the butterflies have arrived with a vengeance. Stuttgart, I am told, will be no picnic. Two top judokas, one Japanese, the other German, are in my age group, which I find quite ironic. My boat is named Bushido — the way of the Samurai warrior — and my admiration for the Wehrmacht’s fighting qualities and spirit is no secret. The greatest fighting unit ever — and I include the Spartans, and the US Marines — was Rommel’s 25th Panzer Regiment of the 7th Panzer Division. I only hope the father of the German I will meet in Stuttgart was not a member. If he was, goodbye title.

I can’t remember having spent a more pleasant two months than these past two. New York has been marvellous, the weather good, the training just about perfect, the boozing satisfactory. Lunching with my friend Dominic Dunne, the writer, and Chris Meigher, the publisher, I was informed by DD, who not only covered the trial, but knows more about this vile person’s background than anyone else, that Phil Spector ain’t doing too well in the pokey. It seems that Spector asked the warders to allow him to keep his wig while he’s awaiting his appeal to come through. (He owns about 30 of them, and changed them throughout his trial.) The jailers said no, and for obvious reasons. A wig is a perfect place to hide drugs, something Spector is synonymous with. He then appealed for permission to wear a hat, and was again turned down. That’s when he suddenly discovered religion. He demanded to have the largest yarmulka ever delivered to him, and this time the powers-that-be gave in. So the murderer of an innocent woman, whose only crime was to resist him, now walks around wearing a yarmulka ‘as big as a sombrero’, which goes to show that rediscovering one’s Jewishness has its advantages. I hope he rots in the place he’s in because this bum really deserves it. He’s been pulling guns on people all his life, slapping and beating up women, and had gotten away with it because of his ghastly music celebrity. He won’t be beating any gels around for the time being.

And speaking of justice being served, I read that an eight-year-old Saudi girl divorced her middle-aged husband after her father forced her to marry the pig last year in exchange for $13,000. There are no laws in Saudi Arabia defining the minimum age for marriage, the conservative Muslim clergy opposing any drive to end child marriages. No wonder all these rogue male Saudis descend upon our shores and ogle our women, especially during Royal Ascot. Living with a child can be tiresome. The 50-year-old husband apparently reached an out-of-court settlement with the child’s father, in whose house, I am reliably informed, hangs a large picture of Dubya holding hands with Abdulla.

Mind you, there are fools in every society and every walk of life. For example: who but a bunch of total fools would invite the former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, the chief suspect of the destruction of the US economy, to address them? The National Association of Realtors, which is brain dead for the moment because of combat fatigue, that’s who. As I wrote last week, Greenspan belongs behind bars for criminal negligence, not receiving yet another fat cheque for getting it wrong.

Celebrity worship has become a deadly plague. O.J. Simpson kills two people in cold blood and gets off. Robert Blake, star of a Seventies American TV detective series, shoots a woman in a parking lot in front of witnesses, and gets off. Phil Spector shoots a woman in the mouth and in his first trial the jury is a hung one. He barely gets convicted in the retrial. Greenspan is treated like a star, and walks around without shame. It gets worse. One of the Revd Martin Luther King’s top lieutenants got just 15 years for having sex with his then underage daughter 15 years before. This monster, the Revd James Bevel, who died last year, was the architect of the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Alabama’s drive for Civil Rights. (A bit like Phil Spector leading the crusade for women’s rights.) Bevel’s celebrity among blacks kept him out of jail for 15 years.

Finally, to my good friend Pacman Jones — I’ve never met the slob — a star American football player, whom the lowlife reality TV programmers are enriching because of his bad-boy reputation. Jones specialises in spitting in women’s faces. He does it everywhere, mostly in nightclubs. He also instigates fights, an easy thing to do when surrounded by bodyguards paid for by the Dallas Cowboys. While in Las Vegas, he grabbed a stripper by the hair, slammed her head against the stage, when gun shots were fired. Three people were shot by Jones’s party. The night manager has been paralysed from the waist down since. This is the man that Spike TV is offering a fortune in order to pump up their advertising rates. Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones. Just perfect. If Joey Barton feels aggrieved in being left out, all he has to do is beat up a woman up there in Newcastle, and the offers will pour in.

So, it’s been grand, as they say, and don’t forget that they also say that happy people have neither age nor memory as they have no need of the past. Which goes to show that ‘they’ know very little. I’ve never felt happier than when thinking of the past.

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