True Grit

I'm reading True Grit at the moment, the 1968 novel by Charles Portis set just after the American Civil War in which the teenage daughter of a murdered Arkansas rancher sets out to track down her father's killer.

Like most people who read the book, I've seen the film based on it in which John Wayne plays Rooster Cogburn, the U.S. marshal she hires to help her apprehend the wanted man in the Indian Territory. The film only hints though at the extent to which Portis manages as a first-person narrator to imitate the voice of the determined and independent Scripture-quoting Mattie Ross.

True Grit seems to be overlooked as a literary work because it falls into the category "Western". I've also just read the novel Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, about the role of the slave trade in the industrialisation of Britain in the late eighteenth century. Apparently when it won the Booker Prize in 1992 there was criticism that a "historical novel" had been given the award.

As Bo Diddley sang, you can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Here's to you Woody Guthrie

Today is the centenary of the birth of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma; he died in 1967 in a New York psychiatric hospital where he had been confined for many years with Huntington's chorea, an inherited degenerative condition.

Guthrie is the epitome of the American rebel, the little guy standing up to the rich and powerful, but in politics, like fellow folk singer Pete Seeger, he stuck closely to the line of the US Communist Party that they both supported. Seeger's song lyrics in World War II changed every time the CP twisted and turned, from C for Conscription ("Well it's C for Conscription/C for Capitol Hill....That passed that goddamn bill....I'd rather be here home/ Even sleeping in a holler log/Than go to the army/And be treated like a dirty dog!") during the Nazi-Soviet Pact to Deliver the Goods ("We're working in the cities, we're working in the woods/We'll all work together to deliver the goods/I got a new job and I'm working overtime/Turning out tanks on the assembly line/Got to crank up the factories like the president said/Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.") after the German invasion of Russia in 1941.

A lot of people know about Guthrie through Billy Bragg's recordings of his unpublished lyrics or Bob Dylan's Song to Woody on his eponymous first album ("Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song/ ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along/Seems it's sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn/ It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born") but I first heard him on a BBC2 Arena documentary in the late 80's presented by Alan Yentob. Not long after that, a General Studies teacher at school who was into blues and folk played us some more of his songs, as well as one by the Mississippi blues pioneer Charlie Patton.

Guthrie is probably best known in the US for writing This Land is Your Land, in response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America which he hated.

Radio 4 has a programme about Woody tonight, presented by his biographer Joe Klein.

The fat of the land

I've just watched the first episode of a new BBC series presented by Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Fat, about the roots of obesity.

In the early 1970's, US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz - a son of the soil from Indiana once memorably described as a "mental midget" - encouraged American farmers to expand with the slogan "Get big or get out."  The surplus maize they produced was then turned into a new high-fructose sweetener for the food industry called corn syrup.  As it was cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it was soon being added to fizzy drinks, bread and other foodstuffs.  Then in the late 1970's, the US food industry responded to Congressional criticism by introducing supposedly healthy low fat products in which the fat content was replaced with sugar.

Like the tobacco industry for decades, the food industry lobbyists Peretti met claimed that there was no evidence of a link between their products and obesity and it was simply a matter of personal reponsibilty - eating less, exercising more - rather than their marketing food that is both unhealthy and addictive. I was left wondering if these people actually believe what they are paid to say.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who has died aged 91, is probably best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, about a future totalitarian American state in which the fire brigade is responsible for burning books.

The book burning has echoes of Nazi Germany, but also of 1950's America where the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunt saw libraries ban books such as Robin Hood for being "socialistic". The novel is also a critique of the consumer society then emerging in which advertising, TV and sport are used to distract the masses from thinking - plus ça change. The ending in which a nuclear war wipes out the totalitarian state and leaves behind a group of survivors with the last remaining books living in the wilderness but intending to return to the devastated cities and create civilisation anew clearly reflects the millenarianism produced by the Cold War world.

Bradbury was also fan of libraries - he typed Fahrenheit 451 in one. As he said in this 2009 interview with the New York Times:

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

Grappling on the gridiron

The National Football League is investigating allegations that New Orleans Saints defensive players set up a so-called bounty programme that paid them for injuring opponents.

There's nothing wrong with big hits, either in American football or rugby league.  The difference is the injuries they cause.  Because linemen in American football don't have to run with the ball, there's more incentive for them to bulk up, either legally or illegally. And the amount of protective gear American football players wear conversely seems to lead to more injury.  Padded up players are more reckless in tackles and collision with a metal helmet is far more likely to cause concussion than a clash of heads.

RIP Angelo

The boxing cornerman Angelo Dundee, who had died aged 90 in Tampa, Florida, is best known for having trained Muhammad Ali.

The first time I went to the United States was in 2002. It was a baseball trip along the East Coast from Baltimore to Boston which included a couple of days in New York for games at Yankee Stadium and the Mets' then ballpark, Shea Stadium.

After the Yankees game, we were sitting on the coach waiting to head back to Manhattan when a small, elderly guy appeared from the direction of the stadium, surrounded by a group of fans. The friend who was on the trip with me is, unlike me, a boxing fan and knows everything there is to know about the fight game. He immediately said, "It's Angelo Dundee!" I must admit I didn't know the name then but he soon filled me in on who he was.

I only caught a glimpse of Angelo that day but it evoked that New York sub-culture, best captured by famed sports journalist Jimmy Cannon, of baseball, boxing, card games, trips to the racetrack, bartenders, fedoras and Cuban cigars. I'm glad that he not only got to celebrate his 90th birthday last year but was also able to attend the 70th of his greatest protege, Muhammad Ali.

Primary questions

Mitt Romney's win in the Florida Republican primary has put him back in the lead in the race to become the party's nominee in November's presidential election.

I've got a basic understanding of the primary process but there are still a few questions I'm not sure on.

Primaries are run by and paid for by the states, with differing rules as to who can take part. In some states you have to register as a supporter of a party to vote in its primary, in others I think anyone can (except voters registered as supporters of another party: I think that's what closed, open and semi-open primaries means).

Has anyone legally challenged the right of states to run closed primaries? Can smaller parties like the Greens take part in the primaries by reaching so many registered voters? What is the difference between being a registered voter and a member of a political party (if indeed you can be the latter, either at national or state level).

The nominees of the political parties are chosen at a convention. Florida is described as a "winner takes all" primary which I take to mean that all the Florida delegates to the Republican convention are bound to vote for Romney. Do other states allow proportional representation of all the candidates in their delegation to the convention, and if so how?

The Democratic party is also running its primary elections at the moment, which are understandably attracting less media coverage: in Iowa, Obama got 98% of the vote against a handful of fringe candidates. Has any incumbent President ever been unopposed in seeking the nomination of his party? If so, would the primaries still go ahead with one candidate? At what stage in the process is it possible for a candidate to have gained enough delegates for his or her nomination to be a formality at the convention? Do other states still have primaries when the result is already decided? Have there been cases of delegates who vote against the primary result at the convention (similar to faithless electors in the Electoral College which elects the President)? Are "superdelegates" (elected officials who attend the convention ex-officio) free to vote for whoever they want?

Any answers from experts on US politics gratefully received!

Why Stan just doesn't get it

Stan Kroenke, Arsenal's American owner, has used his first interview with a British newspaper to outline why he thinks US owners have been good for English football, and specifically to defend the Glazers' ownership of Manchester United.

"We have a whole different philosophy in the States...in the States you would never get this dialogue. 'He took money out of the club.' So what? ...A lot of owners in the US do," he argues.

While US sports fans may be relaxed about owners using clubs as a personal piggy bank, or even relocating the "franchise" to another city to increase revenues, we are rightly not. 

Maths has never been my strongest subject but a quick look at the figures easily disposes of Kroenke's argument that the Glazers' owenership of Manchester United has been good for anyone apart from the Glazers.

The Glazers bought United in 2005 with loans of £660 million from Wall Street hedge funds secured against the club's assets.  Since then, the club has bought Dmitar Berbatov for £30 million and sold Cristiano Ronaldo for £80 million.  More recent signings like Javier Hernandez and Ashley Young were for undisclosed fees but are thought to be well within the surplus created when Ronaldo joined Real Madrid.  So contrary to what Kroenke seems to think, the only thing fans are paying for in the now eye-watering prices of season tickets and match tickets is the interest on the Glazers' loans.

With liberty and justice for all?

The news that Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Italy in 2007, has been freed on appeal has been met with popular acclaim across the Atlantic.  This is unsurprising as the US media assumed from the start that the Italian justice system was so flawed and the Italian police so incompetent that a fair trial was impossible.

Even if it's true that Italy's justice system is flawed, it does not follow that the US one is superior. Those who think so might want to consider the case of Troy Davis, the 42 year old African-American man executed last month in Georgia for the 1989 shooting of an off-duty police officer, who was convicted on similarly shaky evidence and protested his innocence up to the door of the execution chamber.

That the US media assumes an eduicated, middle-class white woman is innocent and a poor Southern black man is guilty says a lot about the racism that still runs through much of American society.

Trial on TV

I've watched bits of the trial of Conrad Murray, the doctor accused of the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson, live from Los Angeles on the BBC and Sky News.  As Tony Hancock said in Twelve Angry Men, it's just like they do it on TV, although the way American lawyers question witnesses seems a bit laborious to English eyes. Sky News have got a English barrister who's also a member of the California Bar to give expert analysis which is useful but they do keep going to a commercial break every five minutes.

Inevitably, watching the trial you come to your own conclusions about the case. Even at this early stage of the trial, I think it's pretty clear Dr. Murray is guilty as charged.  Having said that, given Jackson himself got away with sexual offences against a child, I hope Murray gets away with his crime too, or failing that receives the shortest sentence possible.

Workers and the bomb

The current ITV series in which Billy Connolly travels by motorbike across America on Route 66 is pretty formulaic stuff but the ten minutes of last night's episode I saw contained an interesting bit.

He passed through Los Alamos, New Mexico, home during the Second World War to the Manhattan Project, the US government's programme to build an atomic bomb.  An elderly guy who'd worked there as a machinist after being transferred from the Ford Motor factory in Detroit told him how him and his workmates had climbed into the mountains and watched the weapon being tested.  After seeing the power of the explosion, they started a petition against it being unleashed against civilians which hundreds of workers signed.  It reached the US Defense Secretary who refused to pass it on to the President.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that wiping cities off the face of the earth and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people wasn't a war crime and that Harry Truman by rights shouldn't have been in the dock at Nuremberg. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was supported by the majority of the US population. A major factor in that was the way anti-Japanese racism had been whipped up during the war, describing the enemy in the Pacific as sub-human for example. I doubt there would have been the same feeling about the atomic bomb if it was German or Italian cities that had been targetted.