The Daily Novel

What a load of crap a lot of the sports journalists write these days. (Well, I sympathasise, they are probably asked to produce their copy before they have had time to think.)

All that stuff about how this final would lack a competitive edge because the contestants were sisters.

Have the sports journalists forgotten their own families? The competition between siblings is far fiercer than that between strangers. Although the rules are different. The elder sister in our society is expected to adopt a caring role to her younger sister. Which might have inhibited Venus’s competitive edge. But the younger sister is expected to be grateful for the caring attitude of her elder sister. So Serena also had familial inhibitions. But they fought it out and one of them won. This time.

The sports journalists have complained about a lack of excitement in women’s tennis. They are faced yet again with having to write about the Williams sisters, instead of telling us all about the new stars, and their detailed personal history.

(Blogging note. When I started my blog I intended not to write about things I did not know about. But given the reality of the modern world I know far more about Venus and Serena, then I do about my next door neighbours in Gospel Oak, where I lived for over 40 years.)

So I will go on. This year I have watched Murray, as the UK hope, behaving in a most un-English manner. Scowling at the umpire just as McInroe did, yelling and showing his muscles, as evidence that he had trained for this. If he listens to his coaches next year his biceps may be even bigger.

But that does not mean he will get to the final.

Contrast the Williams sisters. Who have refused to do what numerous coaches and the Wimbledon hierarchy suggests. Work out every day. Let your lives be devoted to becoming tennis champions.

But since the Williams sisters just happen to have been born in the US of A, not in the old Soviet Union, where Russian grunters like Shopalov, were ‘groomed’ to subject their individuality to the greater good of the Soviet state. Not in the new China, where the new totalitarianism is not driven by an urge to get back to the verities of the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. It is driven by the need to feed the starving. And produce products which the west will buy. And for less money than out west.

Of course, I am talking politics, not sport.

You think they’re in different categories?

As McInroe would say, ‘You can’t be serious.’

The Williams sisters not only fought each other in the women’s singles final, they beat all the opposition and won the women’s doubles’ final as well. But this does not get the kind of media coverage that the singles get.

So this is undoubtedly a triumph for American women’s tennis. Which this year is far better than the women of any other nation. And it is also a triumph for the nation which produced them.

And, as part of the audience, I can vouch that they play just as good tennis as Federer and Nadal, who are battling it out on the centre court all day, as I write this blog.

But back to the Williams sisters. They are a credit to America. Not least in that they have resisted the advisers who have told them to train all year. In effect to devote their whole lives to tennis. They insist in continuing to be individuals, despite the pressures.

They win because of the talents they were born with, but above all they win, because they believe they can win. They have a belief in themselves. Where does this come from?

Certainly not from the American culture, where their fellow blacks are much poorer than many of the most boring and inept whites.

In an interview with ABC Television recently one of the Williams sisters said how much she admired Barack Obama and how she hoped he would make it to be President.

But, she said, she could not vote for him, because she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and her religion urged her to stay clear of politics.

But it clearly has given her a strong sense of self, which the dominant American culture does not accord to blacks or coloured’s or Jews, unless they bow down and worship American consumer capitalism. That culture is still unwilling to elect a woman as President, as Hillary Clinton has found in her campaign.

So I have news for George W Bush. The enemy is not the Muslims. Not the Taliban. It is another Christian sect, which supposedly prays to the same God as George W does when he kneels down with British Prime Ministers like Tony Blair. (Not Gordon Brown, because although he worships the same God, he arranges his schedule so that his meetings with individual human beings are restricted to two minutes.)`

There just is not time to kneel down!

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, decried as a cult by the mass media on the rare occasions they write about them, is in fact an international conspiracy far more effective than the CIA, the old KGB and the Papal hierarchy.

Although I have been here in Dorset for less than a year, they tracked me down here. (Not because I told them, as I told the University pension fund, who still write to me in Gospel Oak.)

They have clearly marked my card. Because, even when I am writing an article, I don’t tell them to get lost when they come to my door. I explain to them just why I don’t to follow their God, or indeed any God.

So I am fodder for the flock. I am, after all, prepared to listen to them. But whatever I think of their beliefs, they have helped the Williams’ sisters to have confidence in themselves. Despite the messages which the American culture sends them daily.

Contrast the Church of England in whose doctrines I was schooled. In 2008 they are shooting at their present leader, because they don’t want to have priests who are female or openly gay.

Since I know the Church of England, this is a joke.

They can’t be serious.

Yet they are.

Despite the fact that the priest in my local church here in Charmouth is a woman. And despite the fact that my local neighbourhood church in Gospel Oak has been used by the Church of England for many years as a living to give to gay vicars, because it is in NW3, where even the faithful mostly don’t think that spiritual guidance is determined by sexual promptings. So you do your priestly job in Gospel Oak, without the parishioners being bothered to tell the Daily Mail that, actually, when it comes to going to bed, your preference is for a bloke, not one of the tabloid bimbos.

So my message to the Williams sisters is that you no longer need religion for your sense of self. So I hope you will both follow your own instincts and vote for Obama.

For the sake of the America I love. And for the sake of the planet in 2008 where America is, temporarily, the most powerful nation on earth with by far the biggest armoury of weapons of mass destruction.