News That's Fit To Punt - 7/Oct/2016

Ross Higgins (1931 -2016)

The only thing I know Ross Higgins from was that execrable show 'Kingswood Country'. 'Kingswood Country' loomed over the early1980s like a cloud of politically incorrect humour disguised as witticisms. As Ted Bullpitt, Ross Higgins was the star of the show that ostensibly poked fun at the suburbanite with a narrow mind. The problem was that if you lived in the suburbs back then, you were surrounded by people who took it as validation of their politically incorrect positions.

I'm not entirely sure where Ross Higgins stood in relationship to his creation; there was an element where the character was much larger than the show so Higgins ended up plugging insecticide in his Ted Bullpitt persona. One thing that was clear that I could see was that Ted Bullpitt crystallised a certain kind of cultural posture in Australia that goes around bullying migrants.

In the case of St Ives High School where I was in 1980, it manifested itself as a massive bullying of a kid in the year above me, who was from Chile. Yes, in St. Ives, that was the closest thing the local orcs could find to calling a 'bloody wog'. The bullying was merciless and pretty much out of control on the school bus, outside of the school grounds where the teachers could not see.

It was one of the most unfair treatments of a fellow student I have ever seen - and believe me, until 6months before then, I'd been living in New York City. If this was racism, I'd never seen anything so fierce and awful; and if this was xenophobia I'd never seen anything so hostile and full of hate. Ted Bullpitt wasn't inciting the hated, that much is true. The problem was that the weekly does of Ted Bullpitt on TV was legitimating this hideous bullying through validating this persona. It gave kids licence to be as vile and horrid. It was no joke, it was more identity politics gone completely wrong.

So the two things I've never really forgiven are St. Ives High School and 'Kingswood Country'. As for Ross Higgins, I'll never really know.

Selling The Poles

What might pass for the Coalition Government's Anti-Arts Anti-Sports policy, a Coalition Senator wants to investigate cutting all  government funding to sport and the arts, as well as selling off 'Blue Poles'.

The firesale was necessary to fix Australia's bloated budget deficit, he argued – although the $350 million painting represents only about 0.07 per cent of the country's $470 billion gross national debt. 

Appearing on Melbourne's 3AW radio with Neil Mitchell, Senator Paterson was asked where the belt-tightening would end. 

"Why do we fund $7 billion a year into the arts and who knows how many billions into sport?" Mitchell asked. "Maybe we reassess and say let's fix some grassroots problems and forget about sport and the arts?" 

"I agree, Neil," Senator Paterson replied. "$39 billion deficit last year. It's not a time when we can really be affording luxury. We've got to look at all areas of spending. 

"I find it difficult to understand why Australia is so generous when it comes to professional sport. Given that there's a lot of private funding for professional sport, I don't think it's really necessary for us to be funding it from our taxes." 

Senator Paterson also volunteered Australia Post as "the next cab off the rank" for full privatisation, but drew the line at junking the $200 million same-sex marriage plebiscite to save money. "It's something we took to the election," he said.

It's sort of funny when you consider the Liberal Government in NSW wants to sell off the electricity poles, there might be some Freudian meme in there somewhere.

There's at the famous story of some ministers wanting to cut arts funding in the UK during World War II and Winston Churchill responding "then why are we fighting this war?" Surely somewhere in the dim dark past the conservatives were for the arts. It's only because they hated the counter-culture so much in the 1960s that they've alienated themselves from the arts and by extension cultural undertakings in this country. There's a reason why there are so many philistines walking around Australia; it's because the Coalition has worked very hard to create them so that they can vote for the Coalition. It shouldn't surprise us that with the absolute dearth of brain power going towards the right that the best they can throw up is a 28 year old Senator with the mind of a philistine, a body of a philistine, but not the same philistine.

It gets worse:

Speaking to Fairfax Media later, Senator Paterson declined to go into further detail about axing funding for sport and the arts. "One privatisation a day is enough," he said, clarifying that he was making "a general philosophical point" about the use of taxpayers' money. 

"When you've got a $40 billion budget deficit, every item of spending needs to be scrutinised more closely," he said. "Let's fight that battle once I've got Blue Poles privatised - uh, sold." 

Senator Paterson said former prime minister John Howard and former treasurer Peter Costello exemplified debt reduction strategies because they mixed structural budget repair with privatisation, such as the sale of Telstra. 

"They would not have been able to pay back the debt with just one or the other. You have to do a bit of everything," he said. 

His main objection to Blue Poles was that it was an American artwork with little cultural value here. "It's a great painting and it's had a huge impact on the art world, but it's not Australian," he told 3AW.

Funny that. If you're going to complain about a work of art hanging in the National ArtGallery not being Australian, you might want to invest in Australian artists a bit more not less. You know, through arts fundings, through state organs like the Australia Council. (God, I don't think I can do this much longer, pointing out the logical inconsistencies of an intellectually deficient government.  I really ought to quit.)

There are people who would love it that the government funding for the Arts was in the order of $40 billion, and that it could be cut. Ah, would that it were so simple.

"'T'werrrrr." That we do elect such imbeciles says a lot about our polity; but then so do all the other things this government does and says.

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

"Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee"

A long time ago, I first learned of 'Mohammed Ali'. I must have been nine. Muhammad Ali was going to fight Antonio Inoki, a wrestler in Japan. it was a bit of a farce. What I understood of the farcical 'fight' was that Ali was the greatest boxer on the planet and Inoki was the greatest wrestler and so it was going be a fight to sort out who was 'the Greatest'. What it was, was the greatest farce, but for us Gen-Xers, the greatest moments of Ali-as-fighter were already in the past by the time we were conscious of Muhammad Ali. He was like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, a figure whose record I had to piece together in the library. And I was a young sport nut enough to put the pieces together in the school library in NYC. Sometimes it takes stupidity to open the door to knowledge.

There also was this one fight they keep playing over and over in replays of past glory:



That right there is the famous fight with Sonny Liston where he knocked him out and demanded Liston say his name. Liston leads with his left and Ali gets a cross-counter over it, into the head and Liston drops. It looks nothing like a Rocky movie, but it's considered one of the great moments in boxing.

Ali loomed large in my imagination the more I read about him. His record prior to his suspension seemed immaculate. Although he had lost to Joe Frazier in '71, he had gone comeback to beat him in '74 and '75. He certainly fit the bill of the Greatest as far as I could tell.



There was also the 'Rumble in the Jungle' fight with George Foreman in '74 that kept coming up in conversation to do with Ali.



Ali lost some important years during the middle of his career when he conscientiously objected to being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. He famously quipped "No Vietnamese ever called me n-gger". How could he not be a cultural hero to the world after that?

The defiance and race consciousness were of its time, yet Ali transcended the kind of ordinary discourses on race. He was beautiful - "how can I be humble when I'm so pretty?" he asked rhetorically. He was fast and graceful, and possessed that marvellous wit. Above all, he demanded to be recognised as "the Greatest". When he met the Beatles he still insisted he was the Greatest, but that they were beautiful too, just like him. And so the banter went with Ali.

I did catch the broadcast of a few his fights towards the end of his career. I remember distinctly the two fights with Leon Spinks, one where he lost surprisingly on a split decision, and then the one where he came back and beat Spinks on an unanimous decision. Just as he had done with Frasier, Ali had gone back and beaten the guy who beat him. Then he fought Larry Holmes and lost and then Trevor Berwick and lost, which were his last fights. If anything the Holmes fight showed he had stayed the ring too long. Even as a kid, I could see that he wasn't the guy that he once was when he thumped Sonny Liston with the cross counter.

I think about it now and I'm a little surprised my parents let me watch this stuff but the truth is, Ali was such a showman, it was must-see television. And as good as Holmes and Spinks were, they were never the kinds of campions Ali was in his heyday. Truly, we would not see that kind of dominance until Iron Mike Tyson came along, and Tyson was a completely different kind of boxer and champion as well as a showman. Just as Ali - myth, record and all - belonged to the Baby Boomers, Iron Mike - his myth, record and all - was very much of Generation X. Ali was such a presence in the world, he was like a one man mission statement.

Then, there was this carton show:



The years after he left the ring were more fraught. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in his early 40s, and by the time he was carrying the torch at the Atlanta Olympics in '96 he was shuffling like an old man. It was sad, watching him with his arm shaking and his stiff facial expression without a smile. He wasn't tense, he was fighting his twitches all the way as he raised the torch. It was meant to be triumphant but looking back on it now, it's painful and pathetic.

Perhaps Ali is better to be remembered for his greatest win, the one against George Foreman, immortalised in the documentary 'When We Were Kings'.



Rest in peace Muhammad Ali; we will certainly never see the likes of him ever again, for he truly was The Greatest.