Socially Inept

Andy Warhol’s late 60s assertion that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes was undoubtedly a glib, throwaway remark, born of the slogan-heavy counter cultural zeitgeist. However, half a century later, if one adds the prefix in to famous, bearing in mind that the concentration span of your average armchair, social media addicted Sky and BT football sponge is around the time it takes to boil a clutch of hen’s eggs, then the albino Slovak charlatan’s words start to ring true.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a bairn, trolls were mythical creatures that hung around under bridges, frightening goats. They certainly weren’t socially inadequate, mindless morons whose sole source of human interaction was via a repeated series of vicious and deliberately hurtful comments on the Internet, aimed at people they didn’t even know on a personal basis, purely for some kind of perverse gratification that psychiatrists would be better analysing than I. Alright, so part of that was as a result of the Internet not having been invented, but you get my point. In the halcyon days of my youth, bullies persecuted you to your face, not behind your back. You knew who they were, what they were about and, generally, how to minimise or end the, predominantly physical, persecution they were able to inflict. Unfortunately, technology has taken that immediacy of interaction out of the equation.

Of course, there were still a few faceless bullies back in the day; the papers would regularly tell tales of “poison pen” letters sent to noisy neighbours and blowsy barmaids from prurient net curtain-twitchers whose moral code was outraged by people actually enjoying themselves in the staid, suburban 1970s. That said; the scarcity of such campaigns of vituperation is what made them newsworthy. These days, it appears that every other day there’s some blank-eyed, dough-faced dullard with borderline personality disorder getting sent down for a series of snide Facebook posts, attacking the poor parents of some teenager who has died in tragic circumstances. Such needless and unremitting cruelty is beyond my comprehension; then again, I don’t see the need for the relentless waves of abuse, directed at media pundits and semi-celebrities who espouse different, or even difficult, opinions. It’s crazy enough that people start frothing at the mouth about politics, but when it’s football that gets the keyboard warriors in attack mode, then the world really has gone mad.

Without question, austerity has made our society a more vicious, bitter entity. Unlike the Thatcher Years when we were all united against the common enemy, the dread hand of media manipulation and an increasing sense of frustrated alienation has caused a proliferation of antagonism towards the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society; asylum seekers, the homeless, the mentally ill and other unfortunate soft targets for irresponsible ire get it in the neck for being weak and somehow to blame for the current malaise. Anyone seeking to point out this standpoint is a load of right wing claptrap, especially on social media, risks getting it with both barrels from the lumpen on-line louts; accusations of being part of the LBGT, cappuccino-sipping, bourgeois intellectual, self-perpetuating metropolitan elite are fired scattergun, without consideration for the rules of spelling and grammar, but often with the bizarre inference such opinions render the person advancing them to be a closet paedophile.

Football, being seen as the property of satellite broadcasters and their dullard demographic, can be a particularly fetid swamp of ghastly opinions and vile, destructive anger on social media. Of course, it all depends how you interact with it; for instance, the renaissance in fanzines a few years back, through the emergence of Stand, The Football Pink, Duck, Mudhutter, View from the Allotment End, West Stand Bogs and several others, enabled me to compile a list of followers who took football seriously, but who understood the deeper importance of the game as social glue that binds proper fans of all clubs together. Sadly, it seems as if I’ve discovered a small oasis of sanity amidst a desert of madness.

The oxygen of publicity that feeds and nurtures the media circus that surrounds professional football in this country can be best illustrated by the level of debate on social media. Facebook and in particular Twitter, are the virtual battlegrounds for cyber firms of brainless authoritarian populists.  There may be less claret spilled than on the platforms of London railway termini 35 years ago, but the anger, posturing and profane language is essentially no different to dust-ups in the distant past, with Everton, Leeds and Sunderland still the front runners in terms of self-mythologising. One essential difference these days is that the targets for mindless macho ire are not dressers, scarfers or stragglers, but commentators, journalists and pundits. When vacuous idiots like Adrian Durham or Martin Samuel post or posit another tiresome opinion that lacks even a nodding acquaintance with the truth, thousands of Carling-swilling Neanderthals, waving their Smartphones like illicit craft knives in Lime Street Station, use pudgy fingers to punch out another quasi-illiterate tirade in response. What the furious fat blokes fail to grasp is that this is exactly the response Talk Sport or the tabloid press hope to engender. It’s the equivalent of clickbait to entice the DFLA version of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells into intemperate invective. It has to be pointed out that such conduct is unbecoming and does little reputational good for either side of the equation.

Witness the recent contretemps between Rio Ferdinand, ably assisted by Richard Keys, and Newcastle United fans. As a former Newcastle fan, sickened by the appalling mismanagement of the club by the loathsome Mike Ashley who has driven me to the bosom of my beloved Benfield of Northern League Division 1, I have to declare an interest here. I also have to declare some sympathy for the opinions advanced by Keys, who correctly pointed out Rafa Benitez, is ultimately to blame for Newcastle’s league position as he picks and trains the team, though suggesting he buy players with his own money is beyond stupidity. Of course, such nuanced debate is utterly beyond the pale in the theatre of social media warfare, where 280 characters is the limit of articulate debate. However, let’s put it out here from the very start; Ferdinand is as thick as a whale omelette. His still unbelievable defence for drink driving back in his West Ham days that he didn’t know Alcopops had alcohol in them, set the bar particularly low for all future public displays of his intellect, crowned by his preposterous excuse for missing a drug test that it had slipped his mind, got him an 8 month ban. His ill-founded, ill-judged and inaccurate comments about Newcastle were predictably oafish. These pundits don’t do any research and inarticulately speak out the top of their hats, continuing to get broadcasting gigs as they were half decent at kicking a ball around minimum of a decade ago.

What bothers me is that Ferdinand’s struggling clothes company have been bailed out by Sports Direct, who are now the sole vendors of his tasteless, USA-inspired range of tacky leisurewear. Ferdinand’s comments about how Newcastle fans should be grateful to Ashley struck me as payback for digging Ferdinand out of a hole. Unfortunately, some Newcastle fans couldn’t leave it there and began taunting Ferdinand about his late wife. Such conduct is simply appalling. This is not acceptable behaviour in a civilised society. Meanwhile, Richard Keys is a deplorable, oleaginous dinosaur. His dismissal from Sky for sexual harassment, for which he has singularly failed to apologise, sums the man up. The fact he cheated on his wife with his daughter’s best pal is equally reprehensible, though I’m not sure the woman involved deserves to have her part in the whole sordid affair examined from a decade distant.

As the procession moves on and the shouting is over, Ferdinand and Keys remain smugly in situ after their 15 minutes of infamy, their opinions challenged but unchanged. Never apologise; never explain. The vast majority of unthinking football fans have still been hoodwinked into believing Mike Ashley is doing a great job and that Newcastle fans, who only hate him because he’s a cockney, are deluded malcontents who demand their team wins the Champions’ League every year. Sadly, it’s still the case that most people prefer a simple lie to the complicated truth.

Mind, things are considerably better nowadays than during the semi-anonymous messageboard era before Twitter, when every Kriss, Kris and Chrissy could adopt a tough guy persona and get away with it. The Newcastle United board I went on between September 2003 and February 24^th 2007 was a bear pit; the on-line equivalent of the Hellfire Club, owned by an ex con Monkey Hanger who’d never set foot in SJP. The modern day equivalent of the Medmenham Sect who wallowed in the amoral cesspit of their own making included David Caisley, who as you’ll recall defrauded me of £500 after I’d offered him a roof over his head, but he wasn’t the worst by a long chalk. Other habitués included an educationally subnormal assembly line operative with hydrocephalus, an atrichorous Munchausen sufferer who used the forum to write pornography , a socially inept accountant with anger management problems, a stereotypical pisspot lawyer, a pair of repressed gays, a moronic expat with fake hips living in a cabin outside Yellowknife and a dentist who has gone from a car crash personal life to living la dolce vita in Dubai, from where he boasts about the number of servants he employs and the gaudy watches he buys on a weekly basis, while his mates back here work their arses off for the West End Food Bank.  How glad I am none of them are still in my life, though I’m glad to know the amiable, retired IT bod everyone liked, as well as a couple of proper pals; one of whom parks his car in my drive for work each day and the other I still play five a side with. They are, of course, the exceptions.

Of course, the best solution is to ignore the bluster and invective and be satisfied you know the truth. As Miss Gartlan, my Year 2 Primary School teacher was fond of saying; sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me or my football team. I’ve got a chairman who does that all by himself.