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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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