The blame culture- fromm football365.com
great read on football365.com
'Kick The Blame Culture Out Of Football'
Ah to be back in the green and pleasant lands of the north of England under leaden skies with sleet beating against my window and a roaring log fire in the grate.
I have not been totally sober for about a month while on holiday. It's been great. I have enjoyed a fine range of adult beverages all across the states of California and Nevada and I wouldn't dream of blaming my distended, bloated belly, increased blood pressure and numb liver on anyone else but me and my passion for the falling down waters.
However, it would seem that in today's victim culture, I should really be writing to the brewing giants to complain that their finest beverages are making me fat, giving me headaches, damaging my internal organs and making me very thirsty in the morning.
Worse still, they're bringing my life into disrepute because their products are causing me to behave in a lewd and riotous manner in public. How dare they do this to me? I'm a victim of the brewing industry's lust for profit. Feel my pain - and give me some money as compensation.
Some people really are suing McDonalds and other fast food joints for making them fat. It's really happening. Other prosecutions have been brought for the coffee and the apple pies being too hot.
A woman in Irvine, California filed a lawsuit against a restaurant claiming 'negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress' when she found an unopened, unused condom in her soup. She said she spent the next 15 minutes in a restroom vomiting and has since seen a psychiatrist and taken medication for depression and anxiety. Can you believe these people?
A woman in jail in Georgia is suing the jail because it's infested with spiders.
Even a woman who appeared on the trashy 'Who Wants To Marry A Millionair?' show on TV, a show where women competed to marry a bloke with lots of dosh, tried to sue a San Francisco rock station when a DJ called her a 'skank' on air, claiming she was 'offended and humiliated'.
The case was thrown out because no one could really define what a skank was and also because the woman had voluntarily subjected herself to 'inevitable scrutiny and potential ridicule by the public and the media anyway'. She didn't get it.
Two blokes even had an action brought against Penthouse Magazine because the promised naked pictures of Anna Kournikova turned out not to be of Anna but of some other woman photo-ed at a distance naked on a beach somewhere. They were 'distressed' by this discovery (presumably it had upset their masturbation satisfaction). Worse still they won. Penthouse settled out of court with them.
These are all crazy but are all true. There appears to be a class of people who wait with baited breath to be offended, injured or psychologicaly upset by almost any thing at any time. These are the same people who watch something full of sex or violence on TV that offends them deeply for two full hours and then write and complain about it in detail to the TV watchdogs.
We're all victims in life. If we're lucky we fart around pretending to be significant for 70 years, then we die after a life hopefully of laughter, love and orgasms but also, pain, humiliation and shrunken genitalia. Nature makes victims of us all. It takes the mick but there's sod all we can do about it. We've just got to get on with it and try and have as good a time as possible.
But the victim culture seems to have spread to all parts of society. It's as though some people think we dont have any responsiblity for what we do at all. It's always your parents, your teachers, your boss, your neighbours' Irish wolfhound or your wicked Uncle Ernie whose
to blame for your sins. Most of us probably think this is all a bit stupid but the culture has become totally established even in football.
Take this weekend's latest Rooney incident. Standing in front of the Kop with your hands behind your own substantial ears, should not in any circumstances cause Liverpool fans to commit an act of riot or violence or communication device hurlage. It might annoy you a bit. You might want to call him a tosspot, but it's not an incitement to social unrest. No-one's ears should be able to do that.
Even so, the FA had to 'take a look' at it and even though they rightly said there was no charge to answer, why was it even considered for a second that there was? Because of the blame culture.
I've heard phone-ins with fans complaining about a player's behaviour towards the crowd, saying he swore and made gestures towards them. Some even report players to the police.
I can't believe the hyypocrisy. As fans we pay money to shout abuse at players - or some of us do anyway - and if a player wants to give it some back why would you be offended? You calling him a useless w***er and him telling you to f*** off is not something to get upset about, let alone report to the police. There are real crimes happening out there, you know.
Even if El Hadji Diouf spat at me, I wouldnt report him to the cops or stewards. Life is too short to get outraged by something so minor in that environment.
A player could unfurl a banner which read 'I consider all Middlesbrough people and players to be utter and total b***ards' after scoring against us and I wouldn't care, it wouldnt incite me to riot. Nor would I think it had brought the game into disrepute. It'd be odd, sure. It'd be surreal. But I like that. It wouldn't be morally or spiritually corrupting to football or society though would it? Nah.
I would even argue that elbowing someone in the face doesn't bring the game into disrepute. How can it do that? Doing it doesn't make it acceptable within the laws of the game or make anyone else do it in any walk of life. It doesn't make the game any less enjoyable, any less exciting. It doesnt make me want to elbow anyone in the face.
The next time I see it I wont be looking for a fight after the game, I won't be telling kids its okay to elbow people and frankly, I dont know anyone who will. So what the hell is all the fuss about? Only the bloke who gets elbowed has got anything to moan and get angry about. Send off a player for doing it by all means but lets not get into a moral frenzy about it or waste time investigating it.
Similarly, when you hear fans who get into fights outside matches claim, as an excuse, that opposition fans were taunting them - as though the decision to smash a chair over someone's heads wasnt their own - it all rings a bit hollow. Being insulted by strangers is no excuse for violence unless you already want to be violent.
"He called me a ****, your honour, and suggested I was a champion of self-abuse and my wife was sexually profligate, so I felt compelled to argue to the contrary with the aid of a crow bar."..."Oh well, in that case, I dont blame you for beating him to a pulp then. Case dismissed."
But the FA are paranoid about players inciting crowds - do they think we're all Pavlov's dogs? That's why they think players are role models and that we will slavishly copy everything they do. But that's largely anecdotal rubbish.
If footballers have so much influence how come I don't see many kids with Robbie Savage hair? Does it not apply to him? Do kids go to bed dreaming of looking and living like Joey Barton? Did David Seaman make kids want to grow pony tails and keep horses? Just because a kid likes a footballer, it doesn't mean they want to live or be like them, even if they'd like to play like them. I mean, I like the Libertines but I'm not going to get a crack habit because of it.
And when outraged parents say of players caught brawling, spitting, throwing pizza or taking drugs: "Well if they see their heroes doing it, they'll think its okay to do it too."
Well the answer to that is simple. You tell them it's not okay. That's your job. It's certainly not the FA's job to try and do it for you. If a dumb-ass footballer has more influence on your kid than you do, then surely there's something wrong at home. That's just common sense isn't it?
I never had parents who looked out for me much or who cared what I was up to but it still seems only sensible to me that they actually should have.
I spent my youth getting wasted on anything I could get my hands on - not because all my heroes did it, though they did, and by the way almost every single work of art, music and literature you like was created in whole or in part by people who were reeeeaaaalllll f*ckin' high - but because I had no adult influence in my life to suggest that I might er...well...die and that I might not want to be so wasted all the time if I was happier about myself and life in general.
I loved Zeppelin but they didn't tell me what do. Though maybe I wasn't listening to the backwards masked messages in the outplay grooves close enough.
I'd love to see a situation where the football community and its authorities didn't blame itself and its customers for the ills of society, didn't keep trying to grass each other up, didn't make mountains out of molehills.
I'd like to see the witch hunt for drugs stopped and all the lame disrepute claims such as the Wenger/Fergie nonsense ignored and all the silly 'inciting the crowd' allegations forgotten. Can't we just be a bit grown up about all this? Please? Not a week seems to go by without an avalanche of phoney outrage and accusations about nothing substantial whatsoever.
But sadly, in the current culture of blame and vicitmisation, that doesnt seem likely. It seems like everything is everyone else's fault...except perhaps, our own.
To cheer yourself up, why not take a gander at the t-shirts on offer at www.djtees.com
