The Crucifixion of Joey Barton

I hope Joey Barton doesn’t let the bastards grind him down.
 
The QPR captain is currently being buried in a barrage of abuse from the British (and Irish) sporting press in one of its risible fits of morality.
Joey was due a bit of chastisement for the triple assault on Tevez, Aguero, and Kompany in the last game of the English season against Manchester City which earned him a sending off and a 12-match ban. Hard to defend that outburst, right enough – although the point should be made that none of his victims suffered such an injury as to require substitution, unlike some on the receiving end of violent misconduct from, for example, Roy Keane or Graham Souness.
The sleekit snobs of the sniffy commentariat shouldn’t be let away with their chorus that Barton must be driven out of soccer entirely and out of respectable society. What really irks them is that over the past year he has begun to be accepted as a man of some intellectual as well as sporting substance. He tweets quotes from Nietzsche, has discussed the state of the nation as refracted through football with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, sat in on a Guardian editorial conference, given us his opinions on portraiture…
Gawd but they can’t stand that. A footballer who thinks he can be accepted as an intellectual. A man who has served time for violence purporting to have opinions on culture and art. Spouting about philosophy in his down-market accent. Bloody cheek…
Barton was quoted a couple of months back expressing admiration for Caravaggio. That’s the Caravaggio who on his time off from creating some of the most glorious works of the 16th and early 17th centuries routinely assaulted and battered anyone who angered him or whose opinions he simply found unacceptable, who resorted to knives and pistols when his fists proved inadequate, who used his connections with the Vatican to evade responsibility for his crimes, who, on May 28, 1606, as was always inevitable, killed a man in a fight in the Campo Marzio in Rome, then fled the country with the aid of wealthy patrons.
Norman Mailer was a street brawler, not above initiating a punch-up with the coward’s blow. Hemingway loved to use his fists, particularly on men smaller than himself. I once helped pull one of Ireland’s most revered artists off a chap for whose life I’d momentarily feared.
What has plunged the anti-Barton brigade into a sort of moral panic has been their inability to believe that a working-class footballer with sudden-rage syndrome and a propensity for violence could also have an intelligent understanding of philosophy or politics or art. Subverts all the assumptions on which they base their compartmentalised lives. “Barton proves he is no renaissance man,” yelped somebody called Daniel Taylor in the Guardian.
That has been the main media reaction, albeit expressed as righteous anger: relief that they won’t have to strive any more to untangle the contradictions of the man from QPR.
No true lover of football can defend Barton putting the boot in the way he did in Manchester. But if we have to choose, and we do, between Barton and the likes of Daniel Taylor, I’m with Joey all the way.
 
I am told that it’s no-go these days to say anything vice-versa about the Queen on the grounds that we are all into reconciliation now. And she did say those couple of words in Irish after a meal here last year, which must have been terribly important, since the property developer Bono mentioned it at a function of some sort.
That’s enough of that.
The late Marie Antoinette is said to have chirruped, “Let them eat cake” when told that her subjects were dying from not being able to put bread on the table.
Now, as levels of poverty in Britain plunge towards penury, it’s “Let them eat 3,120 cakes!” That’s the number which have been baked to form a huge “cake portrait” of the indolent old parasite.
Then there’s the “river pageant”. Eight enormous bells have been specially cast and will be floated up the Thames chiming ‘God Save The Queen’. The bells have been named Elizabeth, Philip, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William and Henry. It would have been nice if they’d commissioned a Diana – with a wistful, ethereal, tinkerbell sound, perhaps. But they are not into nice.
The frumpy old fart will herself lead a 12-mile 1,000-boat flotilla down the river in a new gold-plated Royal barge, the Gloriana. Crack units of the Special Boat Service have been deployed to ensure there’s no repeat of that appalling incident when an Aussie anarchist disrupted the Boat Race by plunging into the river and encroaching on the toffs’ space.
There is to be a parade of 500 of the world’s best-bred horses at Windsor Castle. Horse-owners around the world have apparently been jockeying for invitations. Some horses are being flown in on private jets.
No, I have not made any of this up. These people are as ridiculous as they are offensive. I don’t want them pinned and their heads sawn off. I become more moderate as the years wear on. But I do think a lot of them would benefit from a slap on the gob. I wonder what Joey Barton’s attitude to monarchy is.

This week’s top tip for lovers of classical music: wolfgangsvault.com/the-band/video/willie-and-the-hand-jive_-2076634153.html.