Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

They’re definitely out there if you look hard enough. Amidst the mountains of commercial crap there are still literary gems to be found, and for me, Tash Aw’s ‘Five Star Billionaire’, is definitely one of them. It would seem another master story-teller has arrived on the scene with a highly compelling style of prose to match his absorbing narrative. I wanted the thing to go on and on, and when it did reach its bitter-sweet conclusion I immediately yearned for a sequel. If Mantel can conjure up an award winning trilogy, I’m damn certain that Tash Aw can do the same. In the meantime I think I’ll dig out his two previous novels in the hope of getting myself on a similar literary high. Read More…

The Madness of George Monbiot

George Monbiot is a fine and courageous journalist. One of the finest in the land. He has been at the cutting edge of progressive thought both domestically and internationally for many years. He has been prepared to take on vested interests and to challenge the conservative status quo. On environmental and social justice issues he has few equals. Yet, if we are to go by his latest offering in The Guardian 2/4/13, we can detect a certain madness creeping into his once acute mind. It’s the same madness that regularly blights the thoughts of Ed Milliband, Ed Balls and Will Hutton. A madness that allows commentators and politicians to sincerely believe there is a national solution to Britain’s economic problems. Read More…

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I continue my Salman Rushdie journey, and for those that have not yet travelled that road, I can strongly recommend the effort. Much to the annoyance to Mr Rushdie, much of the commentary on his Satanic Verses has centred on the non-literary aspects, and I must apologise for now adding to that mountain of over-heated polemic. But before I get going, a few words on the story itself. It’s a cracker! And I would bet my last five quid that most of the religious fanatics that so damned the book have not even read the thing.

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Adbusters UK March/April 2013

Another cracking edition of this relentlessly anti-capitalist journal. The articles present a sparklingly refreshing anarchic narrative, supplemented as usual with powerfully unnerving graphics that get to the very heart of our quite insane world. A world where growth invariably means the never-ending purchase of capitalism’s alienating gadgets and potions all designed, so the advertising corporations strive to convince us, to make us live more prosperous, happier and longer lives. Deep down we know that it is all an elaborate, gigantic scam but the advertising is so all pervasive, that capitalism’s absurd construct becomes the accepted normal. The Adbusters team dares to imagine a different normal and that, in this world of suffocating capitalist conformity, is a wonderfully subversive thing to do. Read More…

Is Israeli Football Racist? Wrong Question!

Albert Einstein was once reputed to have said, when asked if he thought there was anything special about the Jews; I have every confidence that, if given the chance, Jews would behave exactly like all other nations. How prophetic those thoughts turned out to be. Last week I blogged about how white Australians were in denial about their history and culture. This week is the turn of the Israelis. All nations of course are fabrications, a collection of myths, half-truths and damn right lies. The nation state is an artificial construct, lines drawn in the sand to demarcate conquest and oppression of the other.

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Daily Mail School of Hypocrisy

Tony Rennell, writing in The Daily Mail, 28/2/13, had the temerity to criticise China for behaving like a typical capitalist big power. That’s rich coming from a newspaper that has dedicated much of its existence to lambasting any and every country that dared to try and escape from the capitalist orbit. And low and behold, China decides, for reasons best known to itself, to travel in the opposite direction and attempt to re-join the capitalist road, and what does it get for its troubles a tirade of abuse from Tony Rennell and his mates at The Mail. Now that’s what I call hypocrisy on an industrial scale. And what exactly is China guilty of? According to our learned Mr Rennell, it is the crime of behaving precisely as Britain did in the nineteenth century and America did in the twentieth century.

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Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

There is little doubt that Salman Rushdie is a master story-teller, and his recent 600 page memoir is further proof, if proof be needed. But unlike his magically imaginative novels, this one is his very own grim real-life story, focusing primarily on the ten years of living life under an Iranian inspired fatwa a criminal death sentence pronounced on Rudshdie for daring to write critically and creatively about Islam in his marvellously sardonic and satirical Satanic Verses. But the real central protagonist, as I’m sure Mr Rushdie would agree, is not Mr Rushdie himself, but that half completed, ill-defined, largely forgotten creature of the 18th century, The European Enlightenment. Read More…

Australian Sport: Fair Go for Cheats, Dopers and Gangsters

Let’s be clear about one thing. Australia is no worse than other nations when it comes to cheating and corruption in the sporting arena. It becomes a story only in the fact that Australians have long been in denial about such matters. They have been happy to engage in the collective myth of ‘fair play for all’ on and off the sporting field. But like the entire modern Australian narrative, it is nothing but a well-constructed myth, airbrushing out all the nasty bits and creating instead a picture of Aussie mateship, down to earth honesty, no pretentious bullshit, and a fair go for all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read More…

One Billion Rising

At last we have something serious to celebrate on Valentine’s Day, rather than that infantile, wholly manufactured, sickly-sweet thing propagated by the high street chains. The details are on the One Billion Rising website but here is the back story. Global misogyny didn’t drop from the sky. It is firmly rooted in our socio-economic development dating back to the origins of human settlement and farming some ten thousand years ago. One of the unexpected side-effects of that settlement and farming was the creation of a food surplus, a surplus that the clever, the cunning and the greedy were quick to expropriate. Hence the dawn of class society of which we have yet to extrapolate ourselves from. Read More…

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Here’s a story full of spirits and spooks, wizards and witches, demons and monsters, and just about every conceivable mystical, mythical and magical phenomena you could ever imagine. Not exactly the stuff you would expect Sporting Polemics to be bothering itself with. O contraire! This is a book firmly rooted in the reality of today. Employing the literary technique of magical realism, so brilliantly pioneered a decade earlier by a Mr Rushdie, Okri is able to shine a fierce spotlight on Africa’s rural poverty and thwarted dreams like no dry political text book could ever hope to do. In fact, the more fanciful the images that Okri summons up, the greater the impact of his prose when directed at the day to day impoverishment of Nigerian village life. Read More…

The Metro: Beware of free newspapers

Beware of free newspapers. They are starting to proliferate in London and other major UK cities and of course, they have their own agenda. Firstly they are not community newsletters, far from it. They are owned by corporate interests. In the case if the free London Evening Standard, it is the property of the Lebedev’s, an influential family of Russian oligarchs. Say no more. In the case of the Metro, it is owned by Associated Newspapers, part of the Daily Mail Group. Say no more. However, to keep up their populist credentials both papers have been known to take superficially radical positions on certain national and even international affairs.

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Peter Hitchins: Nasty ‘Little Englander’

Peter Hitchens, one of the more vicious ‘little englanders’ peddling the poison of English chauvinism in the British tabloids, finishes his dire diatribe against an internationalist history by arguing that ‘The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.’ How absolutely true. On this single point I am in one hundred percent agreement. The problem is, Hitchens and I have completely different concepts of what our history is. Read More…

Homeland (Series 2) Channel 4

My first mistake was to watch this thing on terrestrial TV. Big mistake. Breaking my usual policy of waiting for the box sets to arrive, I was severely punished by Channel 4, who made their viewers suffer a commercial break what seemed to be every five minutes. It very nearly destroyed any of the pleasure the second series had to offer, but not quite. With just one final episode to go in this second series, I have to confess it was, despite the wall to wall advertising, worth the effort. This is the first attempt by mainstream US TV to explore, albeit very tentatively, the notion that the US ‘war on terror’ is a complex and multi-faceted beast, and that the terrorists might not all be from far away Muslim countries.

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BBC Sports Personality of the Year: Yuk!

I think I am rapidly developing an obsession about the BBC. First it was their OTT patriotic Olympic coverage that got my goat. Then there was and is the never-ending sycophantic fawning over the monarchy births, engagements, marriages, divorces, jubilees. The Beeb just can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s not so much they report the news, more they try to create it. The average Joe, Josephine and Jamaal down the road isn’t intrinsically interested in the monarchy but the constant media frenzy whips up a storm where there would normally be disinterest.

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Brazil’s Decade Of Sport

When you start poking around behind the glossy headlines, some pretty disturbing statistics start to emerge from World Cup and Olympic hosts Brazil. The mainstream media is usually content just to report on Brazil’s growth figures spectacular before the 2008 crash and still respectable at 4% four years after the crash. The EU would die for those sort of figures. But these sort of broad brush statistics only tell part of Brazil’s story. Admittedly, Brazil is no longer under the direct control of the generals, and its national government, like much of South America, has a leftist direction to it.

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Cuba’s New Now: National Geographic

A reasonably readable article but you get the sense that not only is it a tad superficial but that it’s all been said before. Ok, Gorney adequately summarizes the new government policies that are being tentatively rolled out in Cuba and convincingly expresses both the enthusiasm and scepticism of the Cubans for these reforms. But what Gorney does not do, either because it’s not her brief or she simply hasn’t got the wherewithal to do so, is to put these new policies into some sort of theoretical perspective. Read More…

Brazil’s Decade of Sport Bulletin: No 1

The first significant off-plan event of Brazil’s decade of global sport has just hit the streets. Some 200,000 protesters took to the streets of Rio to protest a new government statute that calls for a wider national distribution of Brazil’s newfound oil wealth. The protesters claim the new law will cripple Rio’s ability to host the World Cup 2014 and the Olympics 2016. The government responded that the oil royalties should be spread more evenly. The obvious solution is that the multinational oil companies should be expropriated, the oil industry should be fully nationalised and the wealth distributed according to a rational plan. Brazil might look to Venezuela for the way forward. Read More…

BBC TV: Not Fit For Purpose

I’m rather reluctant to criticise the BBC knowing that the corporate vultures are forever circling, eager to tear the old lady to pieces. Murdoch’s empire would like nothing better than to see the Beeb unravel, all the better for it to get its claws into the rotting carcass and increase its already considerable share of the media market. Vultures indeed. But to be honest, the golden age of the BBC is well and truly over, and what remains is a sad residue of lack-lustre dramas and dumbed down soaps, most of which seems to be a bland amalgam of Dr Who, Casualty, East Enders and Spooks. The dialogue and acting is wooden, the actors and plots seamlessly interchangeable, and the emotional range limited and cliched. And the least said about the directing the better. Read More…

UK Uncut to target Starbucks

What does the global financial crisis, climate-change, the never-ending crisis of under-development and the ever-expanding crime of corporate tax evasion all have in common? The answer is blazingly obvious they can only ever be solved at an international level. And that goes for a whole lot of other socio-economic scourges that ravage our planet such as corporate profiteering, people trafficking, drugs trafficking and arms trafficking. All these global 21st century man-made crimes, committed by the one percent against the ninety-nine percent, have long transcended national borders.

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The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton

Let’s clear the decks first. I for one, along with countless millions, was largely seduced by the Lance Armstrong global propaganda machine, a machine it seems that incorporated some extremely powerful people, up to and including people near the Obama White House. Not necessarily Obama himself, but those charged with protecting his image and getting him re-elected. More of that presently. When I first blogged on Armstrong a few years back I was moved, naively it turns out, by his, ‘It’s Not About the Bike’ story, a story of human endurance against all the odds. I was wise enough to avoid coming out directly in Lance Armstrong’s corner, but deep down I believed no one could tell such a moving story while at the very same time being up to their neck in doping and lying.

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Jimmy Saville, Tip of a Misogynist Mountain

The nation has got itself in a right lather over Mr Saville, an odiously, evil little man by all accounts. Abusing physically and mentally disabled children ought to be beyond anyone’s moral boundaries no matter how libertarian they claim to be. But the more they delve into Saville’s past, the more the spotlight shines on Britain’s hidden culture, a culture of rampant child abuse, of hypocritical moral standards, and of a culture of deeply ingrained misogyny and exploitation. I’ve quoted elsewhere, I think, Marx’s famous adage that the level of any civilisation can best be judged by how it treats its women. If this is true, then global society, east and west, north and south, is damned both in the past and in the present.

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