Are you playing my Toon?
It is with mixed feelings I hear that the team I have supported for some fifty five years has become the fetish-object of a billionaire. They run pro and con like this:
Pros
Freddy Shepherd will sink, like the R101, below our radar for ever with his personal greed, appalling acumen, crude sensibilities and continual self aggrandisement
We will compete with Chelsea, Man U, Arsenal, Liverpool on the mezzanine that overlooks the so-called level playing field of the Premiership
The Magpies will steal great players from other nests
We will become a world-brand and all who see our stripes will know us
We will play with the artistic swagger we have always craved and only Keagan has given us in recent times
WE WILL END DECADES OF NO SILVERWARE AND WIN THE PREMIERSHIP AND THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING WE ENTER
Cons
The beautiful game is now out of the hands of fans, becoming a backgammon board for FIFA and EUFA bureaucrats, the corporate and the rich – look at the disgraceful treatment of Liverpool supporters in last week’s final and the paucity of tickets for true fans at any major football final nowadays
We’ll have to change our fan - image from blubbing losers, for whom all except Mankies, Scousers, Gunners, Mackems and Chelskiites have held some sympathy, to hated winners because of our untold wealth and appalling new arrogance
We’ll lose our victim-empathy and become part of the priestly cast who will pass by on the other side when other cash-stripped clubs go into free fall and liquidation
We will be left homeless and orphaned when our Sugar Daddy moves on
This is how the irrational love of the team of my life (see early blog) inspires so much intense speculation and over-wrought emotion. It exhausts me. Who can explain this bathos? Answers please……
Sundays for me follow a pattern established through the years – at least when I am in England. In France (two weeks each month) I buy the Observer (if available). Here, I take the Sunday Times as well, probably under some misguided notion that my objectivity is increased by placing the acetate of the Right over the Left so that their combined image is a truer reflection of ‘what is going on’.
I have discussed in a recent blog on Bryan Ferry how commercial interests have taken the rebellious, anti-establishment voice of rock and roll and used it as soundtrack seduction to get us to buy anything from flash technology to pensions. The assumptions behind such adverts may include the fact that:
1) we, relatively well-off baby boomers, sentimentalise our rock heritage and are more vulnerable to any advertising that appeals to it
2 ) most consumers in their fantasies like to feel they have a wild side
3) we all hate any suggestion that we have become the establishment
4) most of us feel we are failed rock and roll stars
5) the great decades of rock and roll (mid fifties to late seventies) have become an Elysian past, an Atlantis of radical creativity and retro-reference has, therefore, become obligatory
6) we all become conservative with age
Thus it is no surprise to be faced with the gross irony – not to mention hypocrisy – of the Sunday Times trying to sell more copies than its competitors by offering a CD compilation entitled 30 Years of Punk. After all, most of those thirty years have involved millions of words fulminating at the nihilism of the upcoming generations with their excesses of drinking, drug toking, sex and fashion And, to illustrate this splenetic hatred, beatniks, hippies, mods and rockers, skinheads, punks, Goths and hoodies have all been pictured, sneeringly, in forensic close-up. The Sunday Times has railed against the ‘shock of the new’ in every medium and level of post-modern art as though it constituted a portal into anything from societal breakdown to communism.
'Anarchy in the UK' is the first track on the CD.
Arms and God
The Right to bear arms
Does this distinguish the liberal from the fundamentalist United States’ citizen? Guns help define its society inside and its foreign policy outside. Together with an interpretation of God’s will.
The right to bare arms
Does this distinguish the democratic from the fundamentalist Muslim state? Is this what ‘body politic’ means? Human skin helps define an Islamic society inside and its foreign policy outside. The subjugation of women comes down to an interpretation of God’s will.
Talking Turkey
One million Turks marched through Istanbul demanding no religious interference in Government. Could this happen in the USA or Iran? If it did, would the world become a more peaceful place?
Labels: Religion and the State