LET US NOW PRAISE INFAMOUS MEN?

When you look up 'fatuous' in a dictionary, there ought to be a picture of Alexander Chancellor somewhere close. If there isn't you could always cut and paste the one on the right. In the column which the Guardian inexplicably (from a reader's point of view) grants him every week--perhaps they felt obliged to soften the blow after he accomplished the rare feat of being a Brit fired by Tina Brown from the New Yorker--Chancellor chose the moment of Sunny von Bulow's death--after 28 years in a coma--to commiserate over the trauma she caused her husband, Claus von Bulow, when he was convicted of her murder, a conviction later overturned on appeal.

'So let us proclaim his innocence,' bleated Chancellor. His logic was somewhat short of Cartesian. Von Bulow's eventual acquital was won by Alan Dershowitz, due primarily to his getting the main piece of evidence against von Bulow excluded on a legal technicality. Dershowitz was one of the team of lawyers dedicated to doing the same, successfully, for OJ Simpson. But according to Chancellor, Dershowitz said recently 'I have been in touch with Claus repeatedly. I have not been in touch with OJ Simpson since his trial.'

'This tells us something,' burps Chancellor. Maybe it tells HIM something, but it doesn't tell me anything except Harvard law professors may find it more comfortable to hang out with socialites than ex-jocks. Dershowitz has called for 'torture warrents' to become part of American law, and also for Israel to begin retaliatory razing to the ground of Palestinian towns. I don't think I'd judge either policy on whether or not he keeps in touch with Dick Cheyney or Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to a famous (but anonymous) quote in Domenick Dunne's profile of Von Bulow for Vanity Fair, he 'does not dwell in the Palace of Truth'. This is in his very essence, as he is hardly more von Bulow than Chancellor. Born Claus Cecil Borberg, he took his mother's family name, Bulow, because his father was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, and in Denmark Bulow was a respected name, then he added the von because in England it would seem posher to those to whom such things matter.

I met him once, and came to my own conclusion rather quickly about the likelihood of his innocence. But that's irrelevant to the obscenity of using a long-overdue tragic death as an excuse for bigging up your friend. He may well be innocent, but that's not the time to be 'proclaiming' anything, except Chancellor's fatuous bad taste, and the Guardian ought to be ashamed for running it.

FORREST ACKERMAN IS DEAD: BUT ONLY 4E NOW!

My obit of Forrest J Ackerman is in today's Guardian, you can find it here. Oddly enough, I was never a reader of Famous Monsters: as a kid I was too sophisticated for that stuff, and by the time my tastes started their precipitate decline, I was already beyond Forry's demographic. But's it's hard not to appreciate him...That's him, on the right in the picture, in 2001 with the B actress Denise Duff, cashing in on all that hard work promoting horror....or maybe she's trying to convert him to scientology, but as Forry was at one point L Ron Hubbard's agent for his sf writing, he's probably too smart to fall for that!

IT SIMPLY ISN'T CRICKET...

In the Guardian last week, there was a piece by cricket writer Moss,S rather predictably excoriating 20/20 cricket, particularly when turned into fun by Indians or fiananced in the West Indies (where, were Joel Garner growing up today, he would be playing basketball) by American millionaires. You can read it here.This prompted a couple of interesting letters last Saturday, which you can read here.

Here's my reply to the first of those letters (equally unsurprisingly, unpublished):

John Dallman (letters 1/11) makes two errors of fact and as a result one of supposition in his theory of Allen Stanton's motives in spending $100 million on cricket. He claims baseball is not a major sport outside the United States. In fact, it is the most popular sport in Japan, Cuba, Taiwan, Venezuela, and several other countries, and its list of first-class nations compares very favourably with either cricket's or rugby's. He also apparently has never heard of the next most important American team sports, basketball, whose reach, if not impact, surpasses football, and ice hockey, whose reach is worldwide among winter sports nations.

This ignorance leads Dallman to conclude Stanton sees a market for cricket as an international sport in the US. If soccer, hugely successful in the US as a participant sport, and for the US in international play, cannot attract a public either at the stadium or on television, why would any sane businessman conclude that the US public is desperate for America v India cricket matches?

Perhaps a better motive might be that Stanton, like me, simply enjoys the game, which is basically baseball played in two dimensions, or three if time counts as a dimension. But if I am wrong and Dallman is right, I would happily accept a small portion of Stanton's $100 million to lead cricket's assault on my native land.

In reality, I'm afraid David Fine's letter the same day is more apposite. In a few years English cricket's paleolithic rulers will no doubt be staging their own 20/20 tourney at Lords. It will be sponsored by the UK taxpayer, whose money will have been channelled to Lords via the bailouts of merchant banks, all of whose traders will sip free champagne in their luxury boxes while cursing arrivistes like Stanton for spoiling their game.

THE UNCUT KILLER KOWALSKI OBITUARY

My obituary of Killer Kowalski is in today's Guardian, in a slightly shortened format. You might be interested in the uncut version, which basically restores my own personal reminiscence, and that of the wrestler Violet Flame.

The received wisdom of professional wrestling is that to draw punters, wrestlers need to generate 'heat'. Every 'babyface' hero, whether Georgeous George, Big Daddy, or Hulk Hogan, needs a 'heel' the audience can hate, and will buy tickets to see vanquished. For thirty years, and more than 6,000 matches, wrestling audiences hated no one more than the Canadian-born Killer Kowalski, who has died aged 81. Kowalski was arguably the top heel in the era when regional wrestling promotions filled arenas all over North America, and provided hours of programming for the fledgling television industry. He continued to be the man crowds loved to hate well into the start of the modern era of national promotions and cable television.

Everything about Kowalski screamed villain, including his name. Born Robert Wladek Spulnik to Polish immigrant parents in Windsor, Ontario, he followed his father into the Ford factories across the bridge in Detroit, and began wrestling in there in 1947. His physique and good looks saw him billed variously as Tarzan Kowalski, Hercules Kowalski, and even The Polish Apollo, but he had also appeared as 'Killer', and that name stuck after he tore off part of Yukon Eric's ear while knee-dropping him during a match at the Montreal Forum in 1952. At the hospital, the two wrestlers laughed about the mummy-like bandages covering Eric's face; reporters in the corridor heard Kowalski's laughter and his reputation as a heartless 'Killer' was cemented.

It was a reputation he encouraged. Huge for his day, at 6-6 and 20 stone, Kowalski's features could be twisted into a horror-movie type rage. In the ring he was a committed cheat, bully, and thug, his interviews laced with eloquent contempt for both the crowd and its heroes. When he accidentally kicked Jack Dempsey, serving as a celebrity referee for a 1958 match against Pat O'Connor, he was quick to claim he'd been out to cripple the former heavyweight boxing champ. His signature move was 'The Claw,' 'working on to the muscles of the abdominal area,' as the announcers used to scream. In 1967 he used the Claw on an Australian TV interviewer, a gimmick repeated famously by Jerry Lawler on the comedian Andy Kaufman years later, and reprised in the 1999 film Man On The Moon.

Kowalski won his first title, the Texas belt, over Nature Boy Buddy Rogers in 1950. He and Rogers had a long and successful feud, and he did huge business in Canada against Whipper Billy Watson, who called him his favorite opponent. He and Hans Herman, who played a psuedo-Nazi, had huge success as a heel tag team on the West Coast. But Kowalski was biggest in the US Northeast, starting when he and Gorilla Monsoon captured the World Wide Wrestling Federation tag title in 1963. I recall vividly the abuse he dealt out to fan favourites like Edouard Carpentier, Argentina Apollo, or Pedro Morales, but his greatest matches came against New York's champion, Bruno Sammartino, in Madison Square Garden. Sammartino was the master of absorbing punishment before making the 'Superman' comebacks which drove the crowds into a frenzy, and no one was better than Kowalski at dishing it out mercilessly, then cowering abjectly when it was dished back to him.

Out of the ring, however, Kowalski, known as Walter, was considered one of the few truly good guys in an industry not renowned for its integrity. 'Walter is a pussycat,' wrestler Violet Flame told me when she came to Southampton in 2000 for Meridian Television's Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge, for which I did commentary. She had left Minnesota at her first opportunity, to make a pilgrimage to Kowalski's wrestling school outside Boston. He has taken her in, and created her ring name, to symbolise her 'pure flame of dedication'. In 1976 Kowalski and his first star pupil, Big John Studd, donned masks and captured the WWWF tag titles as The Executioners. It was his last big title before he retired in 1977, to concentrate on training wrestlers. Among his graduates was Paul Levesque, now known as WWE champ Triple H.

Unusually for a wrestler, Kowalski was a vegetarian, explaining 'the more you back away from meat, the more you elevate yourself, the vibratory level of your whole body changes and you become more conscious of higher levels of existence. A lifelong bachelor, at 79 he married 78 year old Theresa Ferrioli, telling Esquire magazine 'What could I do? She told me she was pregnant!'

Kowalski died following a heart attack, but his strength saw him live 12 days after being taken off life support. He is survived by his wife and a brother.
Edward Wladek (Walter) Kowalski
born 13 October 1926, Windsor Ontario
died 30 August 2008 Malden, Massachusetts

AMERICA IN HIS WORLD: TIM MONTGOMERIE'S CALL FOR MORE WAR, MORE LIES, MORE BUSH

Tuesday's Guardian (26/8) featured an op-ed titled 'The Kind Of Cop We Need' by Tim Montgomerie, promoting a new website called Americaintheworld.com. As you might guess from his mugshot, this is not the Tim Montgomerie who was once the world's fastest man and married Marion Jones. He's the one who was PPS to IDS, the man behind the Statue of Liberty in a burqua and other fear-mongering ads on a defunct internet TV channel. Why the Guardian feels compelled to offer plug space to the creator of the website ConservativeHome is an interesting question, unless it falls under the category of 'know thy enemy', or more likely it's a question of style not substance in the op-ed pages.

The thrust of the piece was that Europeans like Barack Obama more than George Bush or John McCain, but if America goes all European by electing him, they will be turning their backs on 200 years of peace and freedom and we will all drift back into the dark days of Clintonism, where the world was beseiged by Islamic terrorism. I may be sugar-coating it, but you get the drift.

Montgomerie was quick to blame 9/11 on the preparations Al Queda made 'while Clinton was still in office'. He's slow to recall that when Clinton actually took steps against Osama, it was the American rightwing mainstream, not the Europeans, who accused him of 'wagging the dog' to distract the country from the far more pressing issue of Monica Lewinsky.

He somehow manages to blame the US propping up of a military dictatorship in Pakistan on European 'realpolitick', US support for the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia on European 'appeasement' and the efforts to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as European 'multilateralism'. He then credits the 'surge' for reducing violence in Iraq, and posits that someday it may be 'one of the the Middle East's most stable nations'. Given what Bush policies have done to the region, that's highly likely as everyone else descends into chaos ...but then he flips his own argument around and argues that the very policies he criticised as 'European' have kept the region stable. Huh?

In Montgomerie's world, Bush's invasion of Iraq, built on lies and costing hundreds of thousands dead and trillions of dollars lost or transferred into the hands of his political allies, have caused Syria to withdraw from Lebanon (civil war and a Hizbollah strengthed by the reaction to the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with it), Pakistan's nuclear secrets being exposed (you figure that one out), and whatever problems there are have been caused by US incompetence, which amazingly began only AFTER the invasion was launched.

I checked out his site, which basically trumpets the American dream of democracy, and the American myth that emerged post-World War II of the country as international saviour as the riposte to any glimpse of reality that sees the US presence in the world as narrow and self-serving, prone to wanton violence, and defined by the morality of the Bush White House, their torture, their assaults on democracy and civil liberties, their profligacy in aid of the wealthy, their fraudulant election-fixing, their brutal campaigning, and their total contempt for whatever ideals we still believe America might stand for.

Amazingly, he calls for a strong America to remain true to 'the values of Kennedy and Reagan'.This would be the JFK who was assassinated before he could withdraw from the Vietnam war? That would be the Reagan who negotiated weapons to Iran in exchange for holding Americans hostage until AFTER the 1980 elections, the Reagan who sold those weapons to Iran and used to profts to launch his own illegal war in Central America, whose allies in that war were shipping drugs to the US to feed America's massive addictions. That would be the Reagan whose first campaign speech attacked racial equality at the site where three civil rights workers were murdered, who praised the SS who ran the concentration camps. That would be the Reagan whose corporate attack ads condemned Kennedy as a commie for his nuclear test ban treaty with the Russians. God bless.

Sure it would be nice to believe in American ideals again. Barack Obama seems to me to be asking Americans to see reality, to realise they cannot pretend to be a beacon of freedom for the world while they pursue the policies of tyranny which the Bush regime has committed in their name. This is a little closer to the Kennedy myth than Ronald Reagan was: Reagan was asking Americans to believe everything was just like one of the movies he'd been in in the 1930s, the nation obliged by ignoring reality as long as they could, and now, despite the corruption of the Reagan regime, the worst presidency since Harding's, we are asked to look at him as the template for the American presidency.Certainly eight years of Cheney should have cured us of that. The City On The Hill preached tolerance and freedom (while enforcing Puritan values).The Bush version preaches intolerance, hate, and curtailing of freedom, in the name of freedom.The central issue in the current election is whether the US can survive four more years of this blinkered world view: survive it not just abroad, but at home.

I can only conclude that this lumping of Obama with Europe is part of the right-wing's Kerry-style smearing of Obama as an effete European. Remember, Kerry was out of touch because he'd married a millionaire heiress; McCain's millionaire heiress wife with more houses than he can recall doesn't make him out of touch because, uh, he was a POW. What next? Attack Obama because people like him? Oh, they've already done that.

There is money to be made by trumpeting the 'values' of the right, the 'special relationship' and US/NATO militarism. A website like AmericaInTheWorld can't help but attract cash from think tanks, government agencies, and corporate sponsors. More power to him. But I am an American in the world, and I'd suggest Tim Montgomerie visit this planet before supporting America in whatever alternate world he's living in.

MY GUARDIAN OBIT OF TIM RUSSERT

My Guardian obituary of Tim Russert is in today's paper.

This wasn't commissioned until after I'd posted Saturday morning's quick reaction to Russert's death, and I wrote it Sunday.

It has been edited slightly: I liked his line, after testifying in the Libby trial, that it was easier throwing grenades than catching them, and I also gave him credit for recognising Ohio as key to the 2004 election. I had included a quote from Nicholas Lemann, describing how his book is not really about his dad, but about validating the likeable, just-folks, Russert 'brand'.

There was also a bit describing the apotheosis of the celebrity/inside problem, pointing out that the April Clinton-Obama debate, where Charles Gibson (celebrity chat show host) and George Stephanopoulos (ex political insider) took their imitation of the Russert method to near-parody in their embarrassing chase of the 'gotcha' moment through trivial question after question. It was a valid point, but for a piece on media, not for Russert's obit, and I'm glad it was lost. The lead bull isn't responsible for every word from the herd.

One thing I didn't write, but I can't help thinking, and the photo the Guardian used reinforced my thought, was that if you were going to hire an actor to play Russert, it might be WC Fields.
Or vice-versa.

Re-reading it, I don't think I emphasized quite enough just how much agenda-setting Meet The Press could do, and, especially in the sense that Russert's tenure on the programme virtually paralleled the presidencies of Clinton and this Bush, how pathetic, how trivial, how tragic, that agenda-setting was. But perhaps that would be speaking too much ill.

Follow this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/16/usa.television