In as much as I was paying any attention to the Tyson-Botha fight on Sunday morning, it was only to hope - for the first time in my life - that a white South African man was going to beat the living tripe out of a black man of African descent. Normally, as with most wet Westerners, my heart lies with the black man as the victim species, whereas the white man naturally is identified as the oppressor. This is a common, inversely racist stereotype; infantile and harmless but certainly not liberal.
Tyson has cured me of that disorder. He is an abomination, and should be under sedation in an asylum. He did, after all, rape Desiree Washington, whose name is mentioned no more. Evander Holyfield, a more recent victim, is not so forgotten: Tyson was disqualified from their fight for biting a lump off his opponent's ear; and had he any mustard handy, he probably would have swallowed it.
Public cannibalism is probably boxing's next step - obviously it can tolerate virtually everything else. Instead of a goon like Tyson being shunned and marginalised, instead of rotting in the prison cell which he so richly deserves, instead of being a universal hate-figure, this rapist, thug and semi-cannibal is the highest paid athlete in the world: Sunday's fight in Las Vegas earned him over a million dollars a minute.
$25 million purse
We don't need to be particularly profound moral philosophers to wonder about Tyson's "popularity", which is still extraordinarily high, even if ringside seats for the Botha fight were sold at discount. The total purse came to $25 million - and either the promoters are personally fond of Mike Tyson and were giving him $23 million dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, or they were making money out of the affair; which means that people - Americans, that is - were prepared to watch this virivorous psychopath taking on another human being, and who knows, maybe tucking into him.
Maybe if this trend continues, boxers will be given Michelin stars for their edibility, and there might even be a cross between food writing and boxing journalism, so that an up and coming young heavyweight's earlobes could be particularly recommended for their delicate flavour, and his nostrils reported to be a perfect delight - crisp as celery, but with a slightly peppery after-taste; and as for the eyebrow, perfect with a lightly tossed salad and maybe a portion of sauteed potatoes.
Yet what is utterly perplexing is that the society which is prepared to pay unspeakable amounts of money to a violent, homophagous beast like Tyson is also one which dare not engage in any serious military engagement on the ground for fear of casualties to its troops. Though it is prepared to reward the most publicly violent man on earth with the greatest earnings per minute in the history of sport, it is simultaneously apparently incapable of accepting the deaths in action of the very people who have specifically volunteered and been trained for that possibility. Having been raised to accept death, they must be protected from it at all cost.
Volunteer warriors
Is there a connection between the adulation of violence as represented by the fair Mr Tyson, rapist, thug and cannibal, and the refusal to allow the volunteer warriors of the US armed forces to experience it at almost any level, other than vicariously, through the images of a smart bomb disappearing down the turret of a tank? And is the entire relationship between the reality of violence, as represented by our Michael and the removal of the US armed forces from "harm's way" (the standard Pentagon expression used to describe any location in the world where Big Macs are difficult to obtain) not a vast exercise in self-deluding vicariousness?
Violent death
For at one level, Americans can be seen not merely to reward violence, but clearly to respect it too - as expressed though the medium through which Americans express themselves most powerfully, money; yet at another, violence has become an utter taboo for the very people who have chosen to experience it. And this is not in a society which experiences violence at Icelandic levels, and still talk of the time Ig Igmundson nearly punched Thor Thorlikson back in 1938, and certainly said some very rude words about his salted cod. Quite the reverse: murder, mass gun-ownership and automobile homicides give the US the highest rates of violent death in the democratic world.
Furthermore, would a creature like Mike Tyson would be tolerated if he were white? Has he not become not merely an embodiment of vicarious violence, but also a symbol of subconscious white guilt over the fate of the black American? Worse than that, might he not fulfil a very satisfying role as the black stereotype which white America should beware of? There is a great deal to be said about Mike Tyson and America: what makes that relationship troubling is not the fighter himself - any trawl through the death-rows of US jails will discover such creatures - but the nature of the society which elevates him as an icon of well-rewarded but barbaric primitivism.