Greetings, gentle readers.
First, the news from the 'Pool. St. Michael is gone, off to sample the wonders of La Liga with Réal Madrid. Coming to Liverpool are a quartet of Spaniards in what looks like some sort of strange exchange program. With Beckham, Owen, Woodgate and Harte now plying their trade in sunny Spain, Xabi Alonso, Antonio Nuňez, Luis Garcia and Josemi have come to Liverpool in manager Rafael Benitez' attempt to replicate his astonishing triumphs at Valencia in the past two years. Odd that the Madrileňos would go for Owen and Woodgate, who have never won a title between them, while Liverpool grabbed the manager of the team that beat Madrid in La Liga last year. Danny Murphy also made his departure amidst sneering remarks and hostile contempt. Spud viciously denounced the Rafa Revolution as "cosmopolitan", his attitude connoting that he would spell it "t-o-o-m-a-n-y-w-o-g-s". And El-Hadji Diouf is out in the cold, without even a squad number. In short, the team is in a major state of flux, and it may be some time before the comfortable victories begin to pile up. Captain Stevie G has been inspirational as always, and hopes are high that he and Alonso will command the centre of midfield while Didi tidies up in front of the back four, where Jamie Carragher has apparently supplanted Stephane Henchoz as Sami Hyypiä's partner in central defence. With Kewell practicing his precociousness on the left, and John Arne Riise rampaging up the right, there should be no shortage of supply for Milan Baros and Djibril Cissé up front. The present looks a bit dour, but the future seems to hold the potential for much jubilation. Despite the fact that Réal Madrid have declared that they will buy Gerrard next season if Liverpool don't do something extraordinary, like win the Premiership for the first time or win the Champions' League for the first time ever. Liverpool has 18 top flight trophies, but none since the old Division One Became The Premiership. We've also won the old Champions' Cup four times, but that was before they shuffled the format into the Champions' League. In any event, history must be made this season, or Stevie G may just vanish into the annals of Liverpudlian history. And that would be catastrophic.
In other parts of the footie world, Canada was robbed of a victory in their World Cup Qualifying match at home against Honduras when the Mexican ref blatantly cheated the hard-grafting Canadians. After awarding a farcical penalty to a Honduran striker who fell over his own feet in the 18 yard-box with no-one around him, the ref turned about two minutes later to disallow a perfectly good Canadian goal because a Honduran had apparently gone down in a phantom collision with no one in particular. The normally polite and sedate Canadian supporters were filled with an unquenchable boiling rage built of righteous indignancy and appalled disbelief. Frank Yallop, the stunned Canadian manager said that while he won't use the word "cheat", he is thinking it. So I'll use it. The ref cheated. And for justice to be done, he should be put to the sword.
Meanwhile, now that I've got my new web-mailbox, I'll need to post the URL so that I can use this page as a springboard to get there, rather than having to sift through several pages about Welsh geography. So here it is:
http://city-of-liverpool.mail.everyone.net/email/scripts/loginuser.pl?EV1=10945921277169344
And since I'm just winding down my shift here at work, I'll draw this missal to a close early so I can start closing down some of my tools and expedite my escape. And if anyone named Emond is reading this - send me a frickin' e-mail, man! The rest of you can carry on as usual. Cheers,
Justice for the 96
-mARKUS
07 September 2004
26 August 2004
Adult undergarments filled with sour cream...
Hey there.
Just discovered some of my old school poetry from my ill-fated university degree program years ago. If Linda Woodbridge had stayed at the University of Alberta for just a couple more years, my whole life would be different, but alas, all I have now is old photocopies of poems written in classes that didn't matter in the pursuit of a degree that means little, if anything to anyone in the real world. In any event, here's a snapshot of myself ten years ago, trying to be a smartass...
Burning Desire
O my love is like a ripe, ripe orange
I can't wait to freshly squeeze her
She opens herself like a rusty door hinge
Each time I try and tease her
Her face is like a new-fallen acorn
Surmounted by squirrel-brown hair
Around her shoulders are sweaters worn
To keep her from chills in the air
Tall she's not, but she's not barred
From sporting as she's quick and thin
O my love is like a new graveyard
And I'm dying to get in.
Okay. Send all raspberries and abuse to jdsilentio@city-of-liverpool.com. I apologize for the weasel that I once was. I hope I've outgrown it. And as the paramecium said, "Adios Amoebas."
Justice for the 96
-mARKUS
Just discovered some of my old school poetry from my ill-fated university degree program years ago. If Linda Woodbridge had stayed at the University of Alberta for just a couple more years, my whole life would be different, but alas, all I have now is old photocopies of poems written in classes that didn't matter in the pursuit of a degree that means little, if anything to anyone in the real world. In any event, here's a snapshot of myself ten years ago, trying to be a smartass...
Burning Desire
O my love is like a ripe, ripe orange
I can't wait to freshly squeeze her
She opens herself like a rusty door hinge
Each time I try and tease her
Her face is like a new-fallen acorn
Surmounted by squirrel-brown hair
Around her shoulders are sweaters worn
To keep her from chills in the air
Tall she's not, but she's not barred
From sporting as she's quick and thin
O my love is like a new graveyard
And I'm dying to get in.
Okay. Send all raspberries and abuse to jdsilentio@city-of-liverpool.com. I apologize for the weasel that I once was. I hope I've outgrown it. And as the paramecium said, "Adios Amoebas."
Justice for the 96
-mARKUS
More epoxy for your sea-monkeys?
Hey there.
In an effort to try and break the monotony of my intellectual maunderings, I thought I would throw in some quick poetry to keep potential readers interested. Who wants to read about aesthetic abstractions all day, every day? I don't, and I write the bloody stuff. So Part Two of the treatise is done, but I won't publish it yet. Instead, here's one of my poems. Haven't set it to music yet, and haven't really found the heart to do so yet.
where on this endlessly frigid
snowscape of ice floes
and impassable drifts
riven with wind
in an unfamiliar silence
could i find you
when by day stabbing
snows penetrate
violate
the domain of sight
and by night stars
smile darkling in their shine
illumined ice still freezes
and my voice
carries as far
as the mist of my breath
(if loneliness was a place
i would see it all my nights
your features woven through it
beneath the northern lights)
- mARKUS
Right. I'll be back tomorrow to bore the socks off the people tenacious enough to try and read through more of my dissertation. Cheerio.
Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS
In an effort to try and break the monotony of my intellectual maunderings, I thought I would throw in some quick poetry to keep potential readers interested. Who wants to read about aesthetic abstractions all day, every day? I don't, and I write the bloody stuff. So Part Two of the treatise is done, but I won't publish it yet. Instead, here's one of my poems. Haven't set it to music yet, and haven't really found the heart to do so yet.
when i can't ring you on a winter night i wonder
where on this endlessly frigid
snowscape of ice floes
and impassable drifts
riven with wind
in an unfamiliar silence
could i find you
when by day stabbing
snows penetrate
violate
the domain of sight
and by night stars
smile darkling in their shine
illumined ice still freezes
and my voice
carries as far
as the mist of my breath
(if loneliness was a place
i would see it all my nights
your features woven through it
beneath the northern lights)
- mARKUS
Right. I'll be back tomorrow to bore the socks off the people tenacious enough to try and read through more of my dissertation. Cheerio.
Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS
07 August 2004
Art and Science, Chapter One
The Inherent Diametric Nature of Aesthetic and Scientific Disciplines
(Warning - may cause drowsiness. Do not read before operating heavy machinery.)
The hypothesis is this: all branches of artistic, spiritual and intellectual endeavour deal with or address absence when contrasted with presence --- being and nothingness, to use Jean-Paul Sartre's translated Gallic phrase. This dynamism which activates art is powered by a tension which must prove itself to be more than merely a commonality which transcends all media. Rather, it must be an inherent and essential component which encompasses all aesthetics and academics. In other words, diametric relationships between people and concepts do not merely enhance a piece of artistic work, they are a direct reflection of the very nature of the process used by the artist to produce his or her creations. The soul, if such it may be called, is revealed through the completed work of the artist to be a universally appealing identity struggling against the essence of existence, generally defined herein as Newton's second law of thermodynamics.
(Warning - may cause drowsiness. Do not read before operating heavy machinery.)
1. Posit
Essentially, Newton said that in a closed system, entropy always increases. What is whole will disintegrate, what is ripe will wither, what is bright will dim, and what is rapid will slow and stop. Energy flows like a river down a valley, always seeking a lower state. Life spirals inevitably toward death, and the feature that makes Art authentic is the ability to create something that we recognize as being a part of ourselves fighting against that inevitability. Jacques Derrida said that existence is a hall of mirrors. We only adore and respect things that echo characteristics of ourselves, and every artist tries to use the one thing that all people have in common - the struggle against the inevitable - to make their works accessible. Hence aesthetics. The crude remark of "I don't know art, but I know what I like." - merely illustrates the extent of which one work of art has exemplified that ideal. What do we all have in common? Birth and Death. Universality of the human experience springs from that elemental touchstone, defined as what we know as existence, and it's diametrically opposed concept.
The concept of binary dynamic struggle proves not to be limited by what the human mind or social constructions perceive to be divisions between intellectual disciplines. Biology, for example, is composed entirely of examinations and experimentations which serve to illuminate a series of systematic methods of attempting to circumvent, or even contradict the second law of thermodynamics. If entropy is a universally true and applicable concept, and all things ought to be moving invariably toward a lower state of chemical and physical organization, then the Krebs Cycle is an anomaly. Nitrogen, Carbon and Oxygen ought not to be configuring themselves into the complicated affair that is organic matter, but rather working on decomposing from whatever compounds they happen to find themselves arranged and releasing heat, which is the derivative by-product of all thermodynamic processes. Hence the "thermo-" in the "thermodynamic".
How can biology exist, even as a concept, or a discipline, if the very foundation is denied by one of the key principles by which the universe operates? The key is in the exact wording of Newton's law. Entropy always occurs in a black-box, or closed system. Looking at life on Earth is not looking at a closed system. Why not? Because we receive loads of energy from the sun. Our little system is being fed by an external source. The entropic forces are operating, but on a much larger scale - life only exists here because our sun is a big fusion reactor which is slowly decaying and will quit supplying us with energy in a few billion years. Right now, it's mushing hydrogen atoms together to form helium, and when it runs out of hydrogen, the lights go out.
In essence, the nature of the definition of the quantity of entropy within a given scenario is dependent upon whether that scenario is closed to the admission of more energy, in which case, entropic decay is not cancelled, merely deferred to the originating energy source. That being said, there is some consternation created when attempting to derive general principles from circumstances and examples which have varying conditions of existence. Even though the Earth receives energy from the Sun, that doesn't mean that an individual life form lives as long as that energy remains constant. Every living thing on Earth still ages, gets sick, and dies. Every living thing is an entropic system, or as Hamlet puts it "A king may go a-progress through the innards of a worm", which is to say that Robin Williams' character in "Dead Poets' Society" is correct in saying that every person you meet or see will eventually be no more than fertilizer, their organic composite elements being used by little engines like the Krebs Cycle to form other living tissue using the energy of the sun.
How does animal life exist then, if only plants can use the photosynthetic effect of the Krebs Cycle to assemble the building blocks of life? And why are plants still subject to the scourge of disease and death? Shouldn't they just grow until the sun stops shining?
The answer is an entropic cascade. That is to say that all individual entropic systems can only slow that entropy by using the entropic force of another system. How does an animal prevent dying? It has to eat something. What does it eat? Something composed of compounds which are then broken down into component parts and absorbed into the animal's system. If you eat a carrot, you accelerate the entropy of that carrot as it turns from an orange veggie into a sludge of constituent minerals, vitamins, beta-carotene, water, and fibre. The carrot must be reduced in order for you to be enhanced. And plants are unfortunately victim to three other principles which limit their lifespan - structural mechanics, population theory, and evolution. In short - your lawn won't live until the end of time because grass grows at the leaf level disproportionate to the root level, and at a certain point, will be unable to feed itself, and there are too many individual plants competing for the resources available, and they will choke themselves to death unless another entropic system contributes (read: fertilizer), and third, grass that grows really, really high and is terribly efficient at doing so would have several properties - it would have been consumed by herbivorous dinosaurs that required acres of the stuff to get through the week, it would suck the nitrogen out of any soil base in which it was planted to get the nutrients necessary for the Krebs Cycle, and third, it would quickly be supplanted (sorry) by plants that could germinate, mature and release seeds to consume any available resources. In short, plants have to eat like we do, and they die in the same way. The Methuselah Bristlecone Pine from the Californian Cascade Mountains that has been dated at 4600 years old is terribly lucky to have the soil and water conditions it does, as well as the lack of competition and its genetically programmed lack of growth.
Parallel to the scientific and physical principles outlined by the principles of entropy are the intrinsic properties which comprise and define aesthetics. Let us examine what can be described as a soul, which is to say the sum identity of an individual, comprising all intellectual and emotional faculties therein. Is such a thing a closed system? The answer must be in the negative, since (Platonic theories of a priori knowledge notwithstanding) it may be comfortably asserted that human beings are able to grow and expand; that statement qualified through centuries of observation and development. Since growth is essentially a linear process, and assuming that either entropy is not operating, or has at least been deferred, the question becomes: from what state do we grow? In terms of the soul, I hypothesize that the ground or original level of the human soul is that of a state of isolation, ignorance, absence, loss, despair and darkness. Freud's postulate that birth is the first formative experience of a human personality reinforces this assertion. The removal from the womb, the separation from the mother, the first breath of dry air all contribute to the incipient intelligence perceiving existence to be nothing more than a series of negative stimuli which compound until an eventual demise and consequent return to the identity-less void from whence it came. Such a traumatic and universal transformative experience must influence the dynamics of society and humanity as a whole. By extension, this means that all achievement and struggles against despair are significant though ultimately futile attempts to return to a womb which cannot exist, even as a metaphorical emotional projection. Heaven, Nirvana, and other such after-life concepts are reflections of this desire to return to the warmth, safety, comfort and painlessness of pre-natal existence. In short, being born breaks us, and we spend the rest of our lives in a vain attempt to put the pieces back together again.
Authenticity, then, finds its deepest roots in emotional and intellectual appeals to states of despair and abandonment, and the quest to restore unity and banish dystopia. Distance, as caused by isolation is therefore ironically the greatest common factor which unites humanity. This serves to delineate the postulate that aesthetic expression predominantly consists of manifestations which address the diametric tension between the appeals to the emotions of emptiness and loneliness, and the emotions of satisfaction and fulfillment. This can be shown by presenting another corollary discipline: economics. Emotional appeal is the fundamental principle which governs strategic advertising and marketing (when applied to demographics), and the objective of marketing is to sell in order to succeed and survive as a corporate entity. The Darwinist nature of market economies dictates that companies which are unsuccessful at convincing people to consume their product or service will soon no longer have the revenue necessary to continue advertising, and shortly thereafter will they cease to exist, but they will not procreate in the sense that their attitudes and philosophies will not be emulated by companies in the future. Thus, the majority of corporations currently advertising in and on various media must, after generations of marketing evolution, be making some significant emotional appeals in order to induce people to follow a pattern of consumer behaviour condusive to the success of those companies. If the extrapolation of personal preferences and affectations into the general or universal are in fact rooted to a universally negative emotion-set, then a great deal is revealed.
Why would people buy deodorant unless they considered themselves malodourous? Why buy diet products unless one considers one's self overweight? And thus are impossibly thin and impeccably coiffured celebrities used to market products in a way that is intended to make people feel inadequate and unloved. Those emotions are latent in every human being, and each bronzed adonis and lithe lilith only serves to create a sensation of discontent, and offer a commercial product as a means of remedying the situation. The nagging sensation of inadequacy is the largest lever in the human machine which is the human identity, and hence the one most vulnerable to commercial exploitation as well as aestethis appreciation.
But if the fundamental basis of aesthetics is dependent upon negative or deprecatory emotional appeals, then it seems odd that such a system can continue to exist. Surely if all the Van Goghs go mad and the Hemmingways commit suicide because they are prostituting their own feelings of loss and pain, then there would surely be a profound dearth of artists. Surely that depth of self-examination, coupled with the honesty required to try and link that individual case with the universal would lead only to the annihilation of the self. The only out to the scenario is found in Nietzsche or Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin asserted that a destructive urge is also a creative one. More to the point, Nietzsche saw the abyss as the source of stimulation to the imagination as well as being poisonous to the soul. Once the nature of existence is fully realized, the individual becomes at once authentic, self-actualized, and possessed of the mindset of the exiled, ostracized, and excommunicated. These artists thereafter can conceive of society from an external point of view, and can comprehend the futility of human endeavour and the naïveté of logical positivism. This understanding allows the individual to act in such a way as to cause disruption of the status quo, and explains why in one of the first precepts in a repressive political régime, it is the poets and the artists who are the first to be silenced and placed into camps. Expansion of cognitive and perceptive ability permits the individual to preclude manipulation or repression. In other words, we may all be marionettes, but those among us able to see the strings are more likely to have greater control over individuality and identity, often to the detriment of would-be puppeteers.
In the next exciting installment - Literature and how it uses a binary dynamic as its source of appeal. Stay tuned, gentle readers. Until then, cheerio.
Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS
17 July 2004
The 2004 Season Break
Greetings, programs.
I was just about to do my post-season recap of Liverpool FC, tie that in to my commentary on the astonishing results at Euro 2004, and finally end off with a season preview for the '04-'05 season when an amazing thing happened. The Official Liverpool Web Site has made an appeal for amateur writers to submit copies of their works for possible publication on-line. That means that this site will, for the foreseeable future, become my draughting pad for my submissions to the lads and lasses actually responsible for maintaining the LFC site. Could it be? Could it be? I may have a possibility of recognition at long last. Any comments which can give me any kind of idea for making my punctuation more punchy or my syntax silkier are not only welcomed, but now enthusiatically endorsed. I want to play in the big leagues with the pundits, and I need your help!
So with that status update stated, here are my thoughts on the state of footy in general and Liverpool specifically following a tumultuous series of events nationally and internationally.
The club finished the season having qualified for the Champions' Cup by virtue of finishing fourth in the league. That's good, since Liverpool FC without European football is like a feast without wine, as Roy Evans once said. But it is also a huge cause for concern, since the enormous difference in points which forms the gulf separating us from Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea would seem to reflect a corresponding contrast in team quality and consistency in terms of results.
And so, after the final balls of the season were kicked, the club nicely asked Gérard Houllier to step aside and make room for new management. Being the dedicated Liverpool fan that he is, and knowing that despite his accomplishments to date and projections for the future, he recognized that his continued presence would detract from the team's performance and place undue pressure on all members of the club. He had been second-guessed and scrutinized at every turn, and it was a stirring moment near the end of February when Steve Gerrard scored a critical goal against Levski Sofia in the UEFA Cup, than ran across the pitch to hug Houllier in an unmistakable statement of support for his boss. Despite the faith of his players, punters and publicists throughout the country would have continued to spend more column inches analysing his managerial style and techniques than on actual team performances or overall quality of play. As a younger man in the 60's and 70's, Houllier worked as a teacher on Merseyside, and has been a Liverpool fan and football professional ever since, helping France win the World Cup in 1998 as Technical Director. And so, tears in his eyes, he tendered his resignation and walked away from the only job he's ever wanted. He took a bullet for an under-achieving team and sacrificed his career, assuming all the responsibility for any perceived shortcomings in the team's season.
The team was hamstrung (almost literally) from the opening of the season, with hideous injuries decimating the squad and restricting options in terms of personnel and tactical structure. With Milan Baros, Dietmar Hamann, Chris Kirkland, Jamie Carragher, Michael Owen and other ostensible first-teamers wracked with injury, the rest of the team grew increasingly dependent on Captain Steven Gerrard to dictate the flow of play during each game. The young lad emerged as Liverpool's heart and soul, and earned praise and admiration from all corners.
The biggest development to occur as a result of Gerrard's heroics was the bid submitted by the outrageously wealthy staff at Chelski, who offered extraordinary amounts of money to bring the lad to London. After a Euro 2004 performance that underlined his skills and potential game-breaking genius, it looked as though the club and player would be helpless before the temptation of mountains of lucre from Chelsea owner Roman Abramowich - somewhere between 37 and 40 million pounds to the club, and an extravagant weekly wage increase to the player.
After several days of soul-searching and meditation, Stevie G did something rarely seen in professional sports - he walked away from the big money and stayed with his hometown team. He met the new manager, Rafael Benitez, and was sufficiently impressed with the gaffer's plans and ideas that he is convinced of the club's abilities to win trophies. His loyalty and convictions sent ripples throughout the Premiership. His team-mates praised him, other managers were awe-struck, and the new manager at Chelsea was left giving a news conference fervently hoping that Gerrard does well - but not against his team.
The man put under pressure by Gerrard's decision was none other than fellow hometown hero Michael Owen. St. Michael has only a year left on his contract, but the fans are now in the thrall of an expectation that he will follow his friend, teammate and captain's decision to re-sign with the club. And in a Euro 2004 tournament where England captain David Beckham was so bitterly disappointing, it was St. Michael that played with a selflessness uncommon among strikers, setting young Wayne Rooney free time and again through other team's defences, and sparking the Rooney-mania craze. Every beautiful Rooney strike was presaged by a brilliant move by Owen to squeak balls from inside the man-marking prisons in which defences trapped him, and hit the wide-open and unmarked Rooney with a pass into his stride.
And while St. Michael dazzled with his generosity, it was another Liverpool player who claimed the golden boot for his repeated bulging of the backs of nets: Milan Baros. Baros displayed a hungry predatory instinct which was fed perfectly by the often sublime creativity of Pavel Nedved, Vladimir Smicer, and to a lesser extent, Karel Poborsky. The Czech Republic was simply a juggernaut, scoring goals at will, including a thriller over Holland. Until their irresistible force ran into the immovable object that was Greece, where the Greeks poached a goal against the run of play virtually as the ref inhaled to blow the whistle on the first half of extra-time. According to UEFA, it will be the last "Silver Goal" scored in this tournament - the rules having already been changed, but that will be of scant consolation to the mortified Czechs.
In a season where FC Porto triumphed in the Champions' League, and giants were being killed in cup competitions on an almost weekly basis, this year seemed to be destined to elevate the less fortunate, less glamourous, and less storied teams to the detriment of the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan and Bayern Munich. And with the possible exception of Latvia, no-one was less-favoured than Greece. Even after their shock upset of the hosts on the first day of competition, no one really fancied the Cinderellas to go all the way to the final and win. But somehow, through the virtually incomprehensible babblings of Otto Rehhagel, they formed a team that will go into history as legends. As quite possibly the greatest example of a team winning against astronomical odds through the application of discipline and teamwork in European football history, the Greek team have given their country the biggest posible lift it could have received prior to hosting the Summer Olympics in Athens.
So what can we expect from the upcoming season? More stunning upsets and long-shot David vs. Goliath showdowns? Canvey Island for the FA Cup, anyone?
UEFA, distraught at the comparative ease with which England, Italy, France, Spain and Germany were dispatched from the tournament are looking at ways of shortening the league seaons in those countries, ostensibly because of claims that after a full season, players from those countries are too knackered to participate meaningfully in a summer tournament. Which leads me to a final recap item. Markus Babbel, after three years at Liverpool has returned to Germany to play for Vfb Stuttgart. This is the man who played 60 games out of 63 during the 2000-2001 season, where he helped claim the UEFA Cup, The FA Cup, The League Cup, The Charity Shield and the European Super Cup. The following season, he was struck down by Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which sidelined him for over a year. After months of rehab, he was finally cleared to play, and he was loaned out to Blackburn Rovers for a season, where he slowly regained his match fitness.
His departure is certainly one of the most amicably conducted events of recent memory. He gushed out a glowing tribute to the club, the city and the supporters and cannot comfotably envisage playing for a different Premiership team. A classy full back who helped stock the trophy cabinet in his only full season of fitness, Markus will be fondly remembered. He was part of a back four defensive line which was one of the crucial components of a team which became the only club in history to play every possible fixture in a single season. Thankfully, there was no summer tournament following that magical season, since players like Babbel and Stephane Henchoz were completely out of energy. It took Babbel two years to get any of it back, due to the debilitating neurological disorder.
So this season is likely to prove the last one with a full 20-team Premiership. I expect that the conclusion of the 2005 season will involve four teams being relegated, and only two receiving promotion from Division 1. And the Scottish Premiership is going to have to do some reorganizing north of Hadrian's Wall. The financial situation in Scotland is dire, and the revenues are falling far short of club expectations to meet expenditures. Television contracts, sponsorships and wage bills are going to need a huge restructuring across the board to create financial stability. Unless Scottish clubs can make a dent in Europe, there just aren't enough revenue streams to sustain a healthy league. Glasgow Rangers are tightening their belts, and Celtic are following suit. I suspect that unless the SFA negotiate some form of Home Countries competition with proceeds benefitting the league members, Scotland will turn into a Conference-level of competition compared to England, and their performances in Europe will be on a par with Belorus and the Faeroe Islands.
So there's the structural analysis. As for the actual performances of teams on the pitch - all eyes are looking to Middlesbrough and Chelsea, who have been the most active in the transfer market. Speculation about Alan Shearer's future at Newcastle will continue to active - he's still banging in the goals, but how long before age or injury force the Toon Army to buy a long-term replacement? The departure of Lomanu Lua Lua has already thinned the ranks, and with a rising wage bill featuring Kieron Dyer and Jonathan Woodgate, how much can Sir Bobby Robson afford to spend, and when?
Meanwhile, on Merseyside the theme is one of continuity rather than expansion. Everton are working tirelessly to ensure that Wayne Rooney commits his future to the club, while Liverpool, having secured Steven Gerrard are looking to maintain the presence of St. Michael in the fold. The new faces include Djibril Cisse with the Reds, who has been a goal-scoring machine in the French League - the lowest scoring league in terms of goals-per-game average. Faces on the Kop at Anfield are salivating at the prospect of an in-form St. Michael combining with Baros and Cisse up front.
And many young and new faces that never had a proper introduction to the Kop are on their way out. Young masters Richie Partidge and Michael Foley-Sheridan have been released. Apparently the Benitez revolution does not believe the youth academy will be able to trump the successes of Fowler and Owen, Gerrard and Carragher, and have evicted some of the lads with big potential in order to make room for new imports and the articles that have proven themselves to be genuine already, such as Neil Mellor.
Bruno Cheyrou will not run out on the pitch at Anfield this season, having gone on a year-long loan to Marseilles. Oh, and for a whopping £6.25 million, Emile Heskey has been sold to Birmingham City. A good, solid lad, but he always seemed to flatter to deceive and never lived up to the hype surrounding his arrival from Leicester City. And with Cisse, Owen and Baros in the strike force, it was always going to be Heskey who would either lose first-team playing time or move to another top-flight club. And with Birmingham also scooping up the numerous Chelsea castoffs, they could be a surprisingly powerful team with a number of swift attacking options in Mikael Forssell, Muzzy Izzet, Jesper Gronkjaer and now Heskey joining the lightning-fast Stan Lazaridis and the talismanic and eerily erudite Robbie Savage at St. Andrew's.
But let's leave the midlands for a moment and think of the tragedy in Yorkshire, where Leeds dismantled their team in the wake of their relegation. And strangely enough, that team seems more and more impressive in retrospect as the former White United players are snapped up hungrily by teams with the expectations that most, if not all of them will be stars for their new clubs. Former Liverpool midfielders Domenic Matteo and Nicky Barmby are off to Blackburn and Hull City respectively. Ian Harte is off to Spain to play with newly promoted Levante. Young prospect Stephen McPhail is at Barnsley, England internationals Paul Robinson, Danny Mills and Alan Smith are off to Tottenham Hotspurs, Manchester City and Manchester United, in that order, for a grand total of £7.5 million. Australian star Mark Viduka went to Middlesbrough for £4.5 million, and rising star James Milner was sold to Newcastle for a fee that may eventually reach £5 million, depending on appearances. That's nine players - all highly rated and desirable. Why were Leeds so poor on the pitch last year with such a wealth of talent? And rumours still swirl that Eirik Bakke may be next on the auction block. Alas, Leeds will need to rebuild with some inspired youth and some cut-rate experience quickly if they hope to rejoin the other big clubs in the Premiership. A chilling warning to other clubs of the dangers of mismanagement and the need to keep the wage bills within the bounds of reason.
On the other side of the coin, Manchester United have been splashing out money quite freely to buy the heroes of tomorrow. Now that the first generation of Fergie's Fledglings has begun to fly the nest, Sir Alex has decided to begin rebuilding now with young and impressionable teenage talent that he can shape to his philosophies and tactics - Giuseppe Rossi from Parma, Gerard Pique from Barcelona, and Gabriel Heinze from Paris Saint-Germain. Apparently the success of teenaged Cristiano Ronaldo has filled the Old Trafford staff with the belief that not only can David Beckham be replaced, but so can Nicky Butt and several other members of the youth team that came up through the academy. And it seems that the expensive flops of Juan Sebastian Veron, Karel Poborsky (remember him?), Jordi Cruyff, and even Diego Forlan have burned the fingers and pocketbooks of the directors perhaps once too often. So they're buying for the future, and hoping that some of the old guard can help the youth along, laying a heavy responsibility on Roy Keane in midfield, Rio Ferdinand in defence, and Saha and Van Nistlerooy up front to win matches while the new signings are blooded and try and stay in the championship races of the next two or three seasons.
Chelsea, meanwhile, not content with profligately casting over £100 million of transfer fees around last season, have already spent £39.2 million this off-season. Gone are Emmanuel Petit, Winston Bogarde, Marcel Desailly, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Mario Melchiot, and Joel Kitamirike. All released from their contracts and set free to the four winds. Unwanted, and apparently unneeded. Gone temporarily are Hernan Crespo, Carlton Cole, Mikael Forssell, and Juan Sebastian Veron - all given season-long loans to other clubs. José Mourinho must obviously have liked the performance of PSV Eindhoven last year, since he splashed out £26 million to buy three of them: keeper Petr Cech, attacking midfielder Arjen Robben, and striker Mateja Kezman. What can we expect of Chelsea this year? A half-decent run in Europe, but no silverware, as everyone spends the season sorting through the jerseys trying to determine who's actually on the team.
The Gunners have been doing a bit of house-cleaning as well, though not flexing their purchasing power as indelicately as their blue London rivals. Arséne Wenger has released the contracts of Nwankwo Kanu, Igor Stepanovs, Craig Holloway, Rami Shaaban, long-time servant Martin Keown, and Sylvain Wiltord, and given Stathis Tavlaridis and Giovanni van Bronckhorst free transfers. What can we expect to see from them? They'll probably win the league again this year, though not quite in such dominating style as in the last season. They've lost some depth on their bench, and some leadership in the dressing room, and it'll show during the Christmas Break crunch, when injuries and fixture congestion start to drain them. They'll drop a couple of cup matches and have to turn on the Henry afterburners at the close of the season to take the Premiership.
And as for the 'Pool? Well, I would very much have liked them to have beaten Roma to Philippe Mexes' signature, since a 22 year-old defender who can also play sweeper is a rare commodity in today's game, but the knowledge that he spurned Manchester United's £9.9 million pound offer to sign for the Italian club is victory enough for now.
Benitez made his reputation as a man who can turn fortunes around very quickly, as he did at Valencia. But La Liga is one thing, and England another thing again. It will take some time to adjust to the faster pace, more aggressive play, and focus on fitness that is prevalent in the Premiership. Squad rotation can be almost as critical as a first-team tactical formation, and stamina training can be as important as set-play practice.
The first season will be good. A success even. But the elusive championship of the Premiership will elude the Merseyside Reds for one more year. The FA Cup is a good bet, though. And a very solid run in the Champions' Cup. Semi-finalists, perhaps. Then again, after all of these years of expectation and disappointment, perhaps I'm just a jaded kopite afraid to commit to hoping too much or too hard for something that has never come to fruition. On the other hand, I think that time is on Liverpool's side. The players are young, hungry and willing to shed tears of blood to win. And with Stevie G's commitment to the team, I believe the trophies will come. Loosely assembled squads of mercenaries cannot compete with an elite team of focused and attuned colleagues fighting for each other. Shankly demanded that kind of cameraderie from his teams, and now that Stevie G has made the first critical step in establishing passion, loyalty and dedication, his leadership can forge the great man's Red Army anew.
I was just about to do my post-season recap of Liverpool FC, tie that in to my commentary on the astonishing results at Euro 2004, and finally end off with a season preview for the '04-'05 season when an amazing thing happened. The Official Liverpool Web Site has made an appeal for amateur writers to submit copies of their works for possible publication on-line. That means that this site will, for the foreseeable future, become my draughting pad for my submissions to the lads and lasses actually responsible for maintaining the LFC site. Could it be? Could it be? I may have a possibility of recognition at long last. Any comments which can give me any kind of idea for making my punctuation more punchy or my syntax silkier are not only welcomed, but now enthusiatically endorsed. I want to play in the big leagues with the pundits, and I need your help!
So with that status update stated, here are my thoughts on the state of footy in general and Liverpool specifically following a tumultuous series of events nationally and internationally.
The club finished the season having qualified for the Champions' Cup by virtue of finishing fourth in the league. That's good, since Liverpool FC without European football is like a feast without wine, as Roy Evans once said. But it is also a huge cause for concern, since the enormous difference in points which forms the gulf separating us from Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea would seem to reflect a corresponding contrast in team quality and consistency in terms of results.
And so, after the final balls of the season were kicked, the club nicely asked Gérard Houllier to step aside and make room for new management. Being the dedicated Liverpool fan that he is, and knowing that despite his accomplishments to date and projections for the future, he recognized that his continued presence would detract from the team's performance and place undue pressure on all members of the club. He had been second-guessed and scrutinized at every turn, and it was a stirring moment near the end of February when Steve Gerrard scored a critical goal against Levski Sofia in the UEFA Cup, than ran across the pitch to hug Houllier in an unmistakable statement of support for his boss. Despite the faith of his players, punters and publicists throughout the country would have continued to spend more column inches analysing his managerial style and techniques than on actual team performances or overall quality of play. As a younger man in the 60's and 70's, Houllier worked as a teacher on Merseyside, and has been a Liverpool fan and football professional ever since, helping France win the World Cup in 1998 as Technical Director. And so, tears in his eyes, he tendered his resignation and walked away from the only job he's ever wanted. He took a bullet for an under-achieving team and sacrificed his career, assuming all the responsibility for any perceived shortcomings in the team's season.
The team was hamstrung (almost literally) from the opening of the season, with hideous injuries decimating the squad and restricting options in terms of personnel and tactical structure. With Milan Baros, Dietmar Hamann, Chris Kirkland, Jamie Carragher, Michael Owen and other ostensible first-teamers wracked with injury, the rest of the team grew increasingly dependent on Captain Steven Gerrard to dictate the flow of play during each game. The young lad emerged as Liverpool's heart and soul, and earned praise and admiration from all corners.
The biggest development to occur as a result of Gerrard's heroics was the bid submitted by the outrageously wealthy staff at Chelski, who offered extraordinary amounts of money to bring the lad to London. After a Euro 2004 performance that underlined his skills and potential game-breaking genius, it looked as though the club and player would be helpless before the temptation of mountains of lucre from Chelsea owner Roman Abramowich - somewhere between 37 and 40 million pounds to the club, and an extravagant weekly wage increase to the player.
After several days of soul-searching and meditation, Stevie G did something rarely seen in professional sports - he walked away from the big money and stayed with his hometown team. He met the new manager, Rafael Benitez, and was sufficiently impressed with the gaffer's plans and ideas that he is convinced of the club's abilities to win trophies. His loyalty and convictions sent ripples throughout the Premiership. His team-mates praised him, other managers were awe-struck, and the new manager at Chelsea was left giving a news conference fervently hoping that Gerrard does well - but not against his team.
The man put under pressure by Gerrard's decision was none other than fellow hometown hero Michael Owen. St. Michael has only a year left on his contract, but the fans are now in the thrall of an expectation that he will follow his friend, teammate and captain's decision to re-sign with the club. And in a Euro 2004 tournament where England captain David Beckham was so bitterly disappointing, it was St. Michael that played with a selflessness uncommon among strikers, setting young Wayne Rooney free time and again through other team's defences, and sparking the Rooney-mania craze. Every beautiful Rooney strike was presaged by a brilliant move by Owen to squeak balls from inside the man-marking prisons in which defences trapped him, and hit the wide-open and unmarked Rooney with a pass into his stride.
And while St. Michael dazzled with his generosity, it was another Liverpool player who claimed the golden boot for his repeated bulging of the backs of nets: Milan Baros. Baros displayed a hungry predatory instinct which was fed perfectly by the often sublime creativity of Pavel Nedved, Vladimir Smicer, and to a lesser extent, Karel Poborsky. The Czech Republic was simply a juggernaut, scoring goals at will, including a thriller over Holland. Until their irresistible force ran into the immovable object that was Greece, where the Greeks poached a goal against the run of play virtually as the ref inhaled to blow the whistle on the first half of extra-time. According to UEFA, it will be the last "Silver Goal" scored in this tournament - the rules having already been changed, but that will be of scant consolation to the mortified Czechs.
In a season where FC Porto triumphed in the Champions' League, and giants were being killed in cup competitions on an almost weekly basis, this year seemed to be destined to elevate the less fortunate, less glamourous, and less storied teams to the detriment of the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan and Bayern Munich. And with the possible exception of Latvia, no-one was less-favoured than Greece. Even after their shock upset of the hosts on the first day of competition, no one really fancied the Cinderellas to go all the way to the final and win. But somehow, through the virtually incomprehensible babblings of Otto Rehhagel, they formed a team that will go into history as legends. As quite possibly the greatest example of a team winning against astronomical odds through the application of discipline and teamwork in European football history, the Greek team have given their country the biggest posible lift it could have received prior to hosting the Summer Olympics in Athens.
So what can we expect from the upcoming season? More stunning upsets and long-shot David vs. Goliath showdowns? Canvey Island for the FA Cup, anyone?
UEFA, distraught at the comparative ease with which England, Italy, France, Spain and Germany were dispatched from the tournament are looking at ways of shortening the league seaons in those countries, ostensibly because of claims that after a full season, players from those countries are too knackered to participate meaningfully in a summer tournament. Which leads me to a final recap item. Markus Babbel, after three years at Liverpool has returned to Germany to play for Vfb Stuttgart. This is the man who played 60 games out of 63 during the 2000-2001 season, where he helped claim the UEFA Cup, The FA Cup, The League Cup, The Charity Shield and the European Super Cup. The following season, he was struck down by Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which sidelined him for over a year. After months of rehab, he was finally cleared to play, and he was loaned out to Blackburn Rovers for a season, where he slowly regained his match fitness.
His departure is certainly one of the most amicably conducted events of recent memory. He gushed out a glowing tribute to the club, the city and the supporters and cannot comfotably envisage playing for a different Premiership team. A classy full back who helped stock the trophy cabinet in his only full season of fitness, Markus will be fondly remembered. He was part of a back four defensive line which was one of the crucial components of a team which became the only club in history to play every possible fixture in a single season. Thankfully, there was no summer tournament following that magical season, since players like Babbel and Stephane Henchoz were completely out of energy. It took Babbel two years to get any of it back, due to the debilitating neurological disorder.
So this season is likely to prove the last one with a full 20-team Premiership. I expect that the conclusion of the 2005 season will involve four teams being relegated, and only two receiving promotion from Division 1. And the Scottish Premiership is going to have to do some reorganizing north of Hadrian's Wall. The financial situation in Scotland is dire, and the revenues are falling far short of club expectations to meet expenditures. Television contracts, sponsorships and wage bills are going to need a huge restructuring across the board to create financial stability. Unless Scottish clubs can make a dent in Europe, there just aren't enough revenue streams to sustain a healthy league. Glasgow Rangers are tightening their belts, and Celtic are following suit. I suspect that unless the SFA negotiate some form of Home Countries competition with proceeds benefitting the league members, Scotland will turn into a Conference-level of competition compared to England, and their performances in Europe will be on a par with Belorus and the Faeroe Islands.
So there's the structural analysis. As for the actual performances of teams on the pitch - all eyes are looking to Middlesbrough and Chelsea, who have been the most active in the transfer market. Speculation about Alan Shearer's future at Newcastle will continue to active - he's still banging in the goals, but how long before age or injury force the Toon Army to buy a long-term replacement? The departure of Lomanu Lua Lua has already thinned the ranks, and with a rising wage bill featuring Kieron Dyer and Jonathan Woodgate, how much can Sir Bobby Robson afford to spend, and when?
Meanwhile, on Merseyside the theme is one of continuity rather than expansion. Everton are working tirelessly to ensure that Wayne Rooney commits his future to the club, while Liverpool, having secured Steven Gerrard are looking to maintain the presence of St. Michael in the fold. The new faces include Djibril Cisse with the Reds, who has been a goal-scoring machine in the French League - the lowest scoring league in terms of goals-per-game average. Faces on the Kop at Anfield are salivating at the prospect of an in-form St. Michael combining with Baros and Cisse up front.
And many young and new faces that never had a proper introduction to the Kop are on their way out. Young masters Richie Partidge and Michael Foley-Sheridan have been released. Apparently the Benitez revolution does not believe the youth academy will be able to trump the successes of Fowler and Owen, Gerrard and Carragher, and have evicted some of the lads with big potential in order to make room for new imports and the articles that have proven themselves to be genuine already, such as Neil Mellor.
Bruno Cheyrou will not run out on the pitch at Anfield this season, having gone on a year-long loan to Marseilles. Oh, and for a whopping £6.25 million, Emile Heskey has been sold to Birmingham City. A good, solid lad, but he always seemed to flatter to deceive and never lived up to the hype surrounding his arrival from Leicester City. And with Cisse, Owen and Baros in the strike force, it was always going to be Heskey who would either lose first-team playing time or move to another top-flight club. And with Birmingham also scooping up the numerous Chelsea castoffs, they could be a surprisingly powerful team with a number of swift attacking options in Mikael Forssell, Muzzy Izzet, Jesper Gronkjaer and now Heskey joining the lightning-fast Stan Lazaridis and the talismanic and eerily erudite Robbie Savage at St. Andrew's.
But let's leave the midlands for a moment and think of the tragedy in Yorkshire, where Leeds dismantled their team in the wake of their relegation. And strangely enough, that team seems more and more impressive in retrospect as the former White United players are snapped up hungrily by teams with the expectations that most, if not all of them will be stars for their new clubs. Former Liverpool midfielders Domenic Matteo and Nicky Barmby are off to Blackburn and Hull City respectively. Ian Harte is off to Spain to play with newly promoted Levante. Young prospect Stephen McPhail is at Barnsley, England internationals Paul Robinson, Danny Mills and Alan Smith are off to Tottenham Hotspurs, Manchester City and Manchester United, in that order, for a grand total of £7.5 million. Australian star Mark Viduka went to Middlesbrough for £4.5 million, and rising star James Milner was sold to Newcastle for a fee that may eventually reach £5 million, depending on appearances. That's nine players - all highly rated and desirable. Why were Leeds so poor on the pitch last year with such a wealth of talent? And rumours still swirl that Eirik Bakke may be next on the auction block. Alas, Leeds will need to rebuild with some inspired youth and some cut-rate experience quickly if they hope to rejoin the other big clubs in the Premiership. A chilling warning to other clubs of the dangers of mismanagement and the need to keep the wage bills within the bounds of reason.
On the other side of the coin, Manchester United have been splashing out money quite freely to buy the heroes of tomorrow. Now that the first generation of Fergie's Fledglings has begun to fly the nest, Sir Alex has decided to begin rebuilding now with young and impressionable teenage talent that he can shape to his philosophies and tactics - Giuseppe Rossi from Parma, Gerard Pique from Barcelona, and Gabriel Heinze from Paris Saint-Germain. Apparently the success of teenaged Cristiano Ronaldo has filled the Old Trafford staff with the belief that not only can David Beckham be replaced, but so can Nicky Butt and several other members of the youth team that came up through the academy. And it seems that the expensive flops of Juan Sebastian Veron, Karel Poborsky (remember him?), Jordi Cruyff, and even Diego Forlan have burned the fingers and pocketbooks of the directors perhaps once too often. So they're buying for the future, and hoping that some of the old guard can help the youth along, laying a heavy responsibility on Roy Keane in midfield, Rio Ferdinand in defence, and Saha and Van Nistlerooy up front to win matches while the new signings are blooded and try and stay in the championship races of the next two or three seasons.
Chelsea, meanwhile, not content with profligately casting over £100 million of transfer fees around last season, have already spent £39.2 million this off-season. Gone are Emmanuel Petit, Winston Bogarde, Marcel Desailly, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Mario Melchiot, and Joel Kitamirike. All released from their contracts and set free to the four winds. Unwanted, and apparently unneeded. Gone temporarily are Hernan Crespo, Carlton Cole, Mikael Forssell, and Juan Sebastian Veron - all given season-long loans to other clubs. José Mourinho must obviously have liked the performance of PSV Eindhoven last year, since he splashed out £26 million to buy three of them: keeper Petr Cech, attacking midfielder Arjen Robben, and striker Mateja Kezman. What can we expect of Chelsea this year? A half-decent run in Europe, but no silverware, as everyone spends the season sorting through the jerseys trying to determine who's actually on the team.
The Gunners have been doing a bit of house-cleaning as well, though not flexing their purchasing power as indelicately as their blue London rivals. Arséne Wenger has released the contracts of Nwankwo Kanu, Igor Stepanovs, Craig Holloway, Rami Shaaban, long-time servant Martin Keown, and Sylvain Wiltord, and given Stathis Tavlaridis and Giovanni van Bronckhorst free transfers. What can we expect to see from them? They'll probably win the league again this year, though not quite in such dominating style as in the last season. They've lost some depth on their bench, and some leadership in the dressing room, and it'll show during the Christmas Break crunch, when injuries and fixture congestion start to drain them. They'll drop a couple of cup matches and have to turn on the Henry afterburners at the close of the season to take the Premiership.
And as for the 'Pool? Well, I would very much have liked them to have beaten Roma to Philippe Mexes' signature, since a 22 year-old defender who can also play sweeper is a rare commodity in today's game, but the knowledge that he spurned Manchester United's £9.9 million pound offer to sign for the Italian club is victory enough for now.
Benitez made his reputation as a man who can turn fortunes around very quickly, as he did at Valencia. But La Liga is one thing, and England another thing again. It will take some time to adjust to the faster pace, more aggressive play, and focus on fitness that is prevalent in the Premiership. Squad rotation can be almost as critical as a first-team tactical formation, and stamina training can be as important as set-play practice.
The first season will be good. A success even. But the elusive championship of the Premiership will elude the Merseyside Reds for one more year. The FA Cup is a good bet, though. And a very solid run in the Champions' Cup. Semi-finalists, perhaps. Then again, after all of these years of expectation and disappointment, perhaps I'm just a jaded kopite afraid to commit to hoping too much or too hard for something that has never come to fruition. On the other hand, I think that time is on Liverpool's side. The players are young, hungry and willing to shed tears of blood to win. And with Stevie G's commitment to the team, I believe the trophies will come. Loosely assembled squads of mercenaries cannot compete with an elite team of focused and attuned colleagues fighting for each other. Shankly demanded that kind of cameraderie from his teams, and now that Stevie G has made the first critical step in establishing passion, loyalty and dedication, his leadership can forge the great man's Red Army anew.
"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life" - Bill Shankly
Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS
Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS
25 June 2004
The Wind That Shakes The Barley
Hidey-ho.
Following some inquiries about spirituality and the deeply significant quests of the soul upon which some friends have embarked, I've decided to try and delineate some of my thoughts about the relationship between (from internal to external) spirituality, theology, epistemology, philosophy and psychology. But first, an important codicil: as an existential thinker, I tend to shy away from the concept of any sort of formulaic or structured institution which can provide enlightenment or authentic existence for any number of adherent acolytes. The individual is all, as far as I'm concerned. I'll save the potentially upsetting statements for last, thus keeping such readers as I've garnered for as long as possible, and getting the truly open-minded worked up with tension and anticipation.
First, the list of authors that you may want to read, should any of the thoughts expressed herein merit further inquiry. Chronologically, we'll start with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Diogenes and Polybios to get a schmattering of the Greeks; Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca to represent the Roman contingent; St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas for the early Christians; Hume, Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes for the Enlightenment Era or thereabouts; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Camus for the Moderns; and Bloom, Fukuyama, and Derrida for the Post-Moderns.
With that auspicious list of thinkers behind me, I have no choice but to move forward in order to make room.
In short, I think that the search for a spiritual existence is cyclical, which is to say that the journey ends where it first began. With the self. People may say that statement leads to a certain egocentricity which some use to characterize Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy. To them I say, "So what?" The intellectual circles which dismiss Rand as being some form of pseudo-Nazi, and hence not worth academic consideration are not making the best use of the resources available to examine their lives and beliefs.
So let's think about the self and the soul. Like the Christian theological concept - the identity of an individual is a trinity. This definition stretches back to the Ancient Greeks, and carried forward toward psychological expression by Freud. The first part is the desiring part - the bit that deals with wants and needs. Freud labelled this element the id, and associated it with base animal behaviour. The second component of the soul is the seat of reason. Once a person understands what he or she wants or needs, the next step is figuring out how to achieve the objective. The corresponding Freudian concept is the ego, which Freud felt to be the central functioning element of a human being within society. Finally, there is the thymos. This has become somewhat of a fashionable term recently, as everyone from holistic yoga gurus to Republican political pundits wield adverbs like "thymotically" to advance their crackpot theories. The thymos is the part of each of us that deals with recognition and esteem. It's the bit that responds to approval, praise, appeals to posterity, etc. as well as criticism, denigration, and ostracism.
So, your id tells you that you're hungry, your reason tells you how to build a ladder to reach the apples on a nearby tree, and your thymos considers how to establish a system for future generations to continue harvesting apples and seeks someone to compliment you on being so clever.
When considering government (read: manipulating people), Hobbes thought that the id was the most important motivator, basically asserting that the fear of death was the big lever that could shift people into line. Locke also thought that the id was the critical point, but he went with the carrot rather than the stick, believing that people's acquisitive nature, greed, and over-reaching desires could be used to create a social contract which would modulate behaviour. But we are concerned with matters of the spirit, and that means we have to shift our attention elsewhere.
The thymos or superego is the kicker. For most, religious belief is a way of keeping that part of the soul happy and sedate. Of particular note are people who seem to express a co-dependence with their deity and seem to require the belief that their god is a loving caring parental figure who intercedes constantly in the minutiae of their lives. In these instances, the thymos is questing for external validation, and has previously been rebuffed (or interpreted a situation as such) by other people. The alternative is psychological projection of that need-gratification, and religion is a fantastic outlet, since it cannot be rationally resolved into a refutable concept.
Alan Moore's graphic novel "The Watchmen" has a fantastic little anecdote wherein a character is examining a Rorschach inkblot. At first, he thinks of it as a lovely sprig of flowers. Then he realizes that he's hiding from the awful truth that what he really associates the blot with is a dead cat he saw once as a child. Then he realizes that even that association is avoiding the true horror - that there is no pattern. There is no meaning, save what people impose upon the random and chaotic image. All of our illusions and delusions serve to shield us from the awful and ugly realization that we are absolutely alone, and there is no guiding principle or foundation for evaluation.
This is where Kierkegaard comes in. He thought that God is silent, and that true faith is expressed through a belief in the absurd. God will never prove he exists, because faith is more valuable when it is rationally unjustifiable. He said that faith is a leap which a believer must make without any reassurances or evidence. The courage to make that leap and believe in the unverifiable is what Kierkegaard thought made the authenticity of the spiritual believer. There might be a God out there or there might be the interminable void of non-existence. We can't know, God won't help us out in making a decision, and we have to make the choice based on the strength of our convictions. Kierkegaard used the example of the Persian prince who disguides himself as a beggar in order to find a wife who would love him for himself, and not his money or position. Kierkegaard said that Christ is the same way - you've gotta take what he offers, though it looks like emptiness and sackcloth in the absurd belief that it represents eternal life.
One step beyond that is Nietzsche. Like Kierkegaard, he saw the abyss not as a source of despair and despondency, but as a testing ground for the soul. Kierkegaard reckoned that the abyss was the source of fear and trembling which tested the mettle of an individual's character in the face of a crisis of faith. Nietzsche saw the void as a tremendous opportunity for the individual to triumph over the universe.
If there is no greater meaning or value to things, events, actions, then there can be no external sources of morality or ethics. Without tablets of stone to dictate what is right and wrong, Nietzsche thought that the truly great person could assume the responsibility of being the creator of his or her own values and codes of conduct. A single person could assume the robes of the Alpha and the Omega and use willpower and intellect to forge an entire belief system, custom-tailored to the needs and aptitudes of that individual. Such an übermensch would rise above the simple categories of good and evil and become an authentic being, complete unto him or herself.
If this is the case, what would motivate such an individual to act magnanimously or in any manner not self-aggrandizing or self-serving? As far as I'm concerned, that's your decision to make, but Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, Adam Smith et al. put forward many compelling reasons why it's to one's advantage to cooperate and behave considerately, using appeals to the id and the faculty of reason.
So, do I believe in God? Answer: I don't think I should have to. Nietzsche's Zarathustra declares, "God is dead and we have killed him," basically saying that moral and ethical maturity express themselves in the independence from external impositions of morality, and the development of the ability to do what is perceived as right both for its own sake and in the interests of the individual. In short, is it not better to be a good person of one's own nature than to be a good person because one is told/coaxed/forced/bribed to be that way?
OK, those of you still with me after my iconoclastic ramblings, sit really close. Particularly you. You know who you are. This is the good bit.
You are special. You are unique. There has never been anyone like you before in the history of humanity, and there will never be another you. Every cell in your body sings a song singularly perfect and true, and the countless casual miracles that make you laugh and cry and learn and dream are irreplaceable and inimitable. Gods change aspects and religions and mean a myriad many things to the multitudes, but you are one. Indivisible. Individual. Incredible. You are more valuable and significant than God could ever be. Every resolution you make and every promise you keep serves to make you more precious. Believing in yourself is far, far more important than believing in a God. Do I believe in God? I prefer to believe in you.
Now that I've finished saying that, I'm going to sign off and think some superficial thoughts about how much I despise Chelsea FC, and then go back to my theory of the unification of science and aesthetics. Or the application of topology to describe an accretion torus around the Chandrasekhar limit and the rotational energy used to emit Hawking radiation around black holes. Cheerio.
Following some inquiries about spirituality and the deeply significant quests of the soul upon which some friends have embarked, I've decided to try and delineate some of my thoughts about the relationship between (from internal to external) spirituality, theology, epistemology, philosophy and psychology. But first, an important codicil: as an existential thinker, I tend to shy away from the concept of any sort of formulaic or structured institution which can provide enlightenment or authentic existence for any number of adherent acolytes. The individual is all, as far as I'm concerned. I'll save the potentially upsetting statements for last, thus keeping such readers as I've garnered for as long as possible, and getting the truly open-minded worked up with tension and anticipation.
First, the list of authors that you may want to read, should any of the thoughts expressed herein merit further inquiry. Chronologically, we'll start with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Diogenes and Polybios to get a schmattering of the Greeks; Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca to represent the Roman contingent; St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas for the early Christians; Hume, Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes for the Enlightenment Era or thereabouts; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Camus for the Moderns; and Bloom, Fukuyama, and Derrida for the Post-Moderns.
With that auspicious list of thinkers behind me, I have no choice but to move forward in order to make room.
In short, I think that the search for a spiritual existence is cyclical, which is to say that the journey ends where it first began. With the self. People may say that statement leads to a certain egocentricity which some use to characterize Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy. To them I say, "So what?" The intellectual circles which dismiss Rand as being some form of pseudo-Nazi, and hence not worth academic consideration are not making the best use of the resources available to examine their lives and beliefs.
So let's think about the self and the soul. Like the Christian theological concept - the identity of an individual is a trinity. This definition stretches back to the Ancient Greeks, and carried forward toward psychological expression by Freud. The first part is the desiring part - the bit that deals with wants and needs. Freud labelled this element the id, and associated it with base animal behaviour. The second component of the soul is the seat of reason. Once a person understands what he or she wants or needs, the next step is figuring out how to achieve the objective. The corresponding Freudian concept is the ego, which Freud felt to be the central functioning element of a human being within society. Finally, there is the thymos. This has become somewhat of a fashionable term recently, as everyone from holistic yoga gurus to Republican political pundits wield adverbs like "thymotically" to advance their crackpot theories. The thymos is the part of each of us that deals with recognition and esteem. It's the bit that responds to approval, praise, appeals to posterity, etc. as well as criticism, denigration, and ostracism.
So, your id tells you that you're hungry, your reason tells you how to build a ladder to reach the apples on a nearby tree, and your thymos considers how to establish a system for future generations to continue harvesting apples and seeks someone to compliment you on being so clever.
When considering government (read: manipulating people), Hobbes thought that the id was the most important motivator, basically asserting that the fear of death was the big lever that could shift people into line. Locke also thought that the id was the critical point, but he went with the carrot rather than the stick, believing that people's acquisitive nature, greed, and over-reaching desires could be used to create a social contract which would modulate behaviour. But we are concerned with matters of the spirit, and that means we have to shift our attention elsewhere.
The thymos or superego is the kicker. For most, religious belief is a way of keeping that part of the soul happy and sedate. Of particular note are people who seem to express a co-dependence with their deity and seem to require the belief that their god is a loving caring parental figure who intercedes constantly in the minutiae of their lives. In these instances, the thymos is questing for external validation, and has previously been rebuffed (or interpreted a situation as such) by other people. The alternative is psychological projection of that need-gratification, and religion is a fantastic outlet, since it cannot be rationally resolved into a refutable concept.
Alan Moore's graphic novel "The Watchmen" has a fantastic little anecdote wherein a character is examining a Rorschach inkblot. At first, he thinks of it as a lovely sprig of flowers. Then he realizes that he's hiding from the awful truth that what he really associates the blot with is a dead cat he saw once as a child. Then he realizes that even that association is avoiding the true horror - that there is no pattern. There is no meaning, save what people impose upon the random and chaotic image. All of our illusions and delusions serve to shield us from the awful and ugly realization that we are absolutely alone, and there is no guiding principle or foundation for evaluation.
This is where Kierkegaard comes in. He thought that God is silent, and that true faith is expressed through a belief in the absurd. God will never prove he exists, because faith is more valuable when it is rationally unjustifiable. He said that faith is a leap which a believer must make without any reassurances or evidence. The courage to make that leap and believe in the unverifiable is what Kierkegaard thought made the authenticity of the spiritual believer. There might be a God out there or there might be the interminable void of non-existence. We can't know, God won't help us out in making a decision, and we have to make the choice based on the strength of our convictions. Kierkegaard used the example of the Persian prince who disguides himself as a beggar in order to find a wife who would love him for himself, and not his money or position. Kierkegaard said that Christ is the same way - you've gotta take what he offers, though it looks like emptiness and sackcloth in the absurd belief that it represents eternal life.
One step beyond that is Nietzsche. Like Kierkegaard, he saw the abyss not as a source of despair and despondency, but as a testing ground for the soul. Kierkegaard reckoned that the abyss was the source of fear and trembling which tested the mettle of an individual's character in the face of a crisis of faith. Nietzsche saw the void as a tremendous opportunity for the individual to triumph over the universe.
If there is no greater meaning or value to things, events, actions, then there can be no external sources of morality or ethics. Without tablets of stone to dictate what is right and wrong, Nietzsche thought that the truly great person could assume the responsibility of being the creator of his or her own values and codes of conduct. A single person could assume the robes of the Alpha and the Omega and use willpower and intellect to forge an entire belief system, custom-tailored to the needs and aptitudes of that individual. Such an übermensch would rise above the simple categories of good and evil and become an authentic being, complete unto him or herself.
If this is the case, what would motivate such an individual to act magnanimously or in any manner not self-aggrandizing or self-serving? As far as I'm concerned, that's your decision to make, but Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, Adam Smith et al. put forward many compelling reasons why it's to one's advantage to cooperate and behave considerately, using appeals to the id and the faculty of reason.
So, do I believe in God? Answer: I don't think I should have to. Nietzsche's Zarathustra declares, "God is dead and we have killed him," basically saying that moral and ethical maturity express themselves in the independence from external impositions of morality, and the development of the ability to do what is perceived as right both for its own sake and in the interests of the individual. In short, is it not better to be a good person of one's own nature than to be a good person because one is told/coaxed/forced/bribed to be that way?
OK, those of you still with me after my iconoclastic ramblings, sit really close. Particularly you. You know who you are. This is the good bit.
You are special. You are unique. There has never been anyone like you before in the history of humanity, and there will never be another you. Every cell in your body sings a song singularly perfect and true, and the countless casual miracles that make you laugh and cry and learn and dream are irreplaceable and inimitable. Gods change aspects and religions and mean a myriad many things to the multitudes, but you are one. Indivisible. Individual. Incredible. You are more valuable and significant than God could ever be. Every resolution you make and every promise you keep serves to make you more precious. Believing in yourself is far, far more important than believing in a God. Do I believe in God? I prefer to believe in you.
Now that I've finished saying that, I'm going to sign off and think some superficial thoughts about how much I despise Chelsea FC, and then go back to my theory of the unification of science and aesthetics. Or the application of topology to describe an accretion torus around the Chandrasekhar limit and the rotational energy used to emit Hawking radiation around black holes. Cheerio.
10 June 2004
Any Savage Beasts Need Soothing?
Greetings, gentle readers.
In keeping with the varied and eclectic offerings on display on this page, I thought I'd throw out a song I've been working on in the hopes that someone has some cool ideas of what to do with it. I've primarily just done the guitar accompaniment for it, and it sounds pretty dolorous the way I've laid it down. And I don't have a bridge or a middle eight for it. Any contributions are welcome.
a losing game of solitaire
the sun slid slowly setting
- Bm - - - - - G - F#m -
while I watched you walking there
- Bm - - - - - - - - - - G - - - F#m
every second stacked in detail
- Bm - - - - - - G7 - - - Em
the king of spades lay torn in two
- - C - - -- - Am - - - - Em
a losing game of solitaire
- G - - - - D - - - Em
closing my venetian blinds
dark evening draws my stare
my fingers slipping randomly
through poorly shuffled portraits
a losing game of solitaire
in cabinets dark harbours
secret memories still care
tender words sting poignantly
postcards and your letters play
a losing game of solitaire
and so I don my inky cloaks
solemn suits the ones I wear
until you return my queen of hearts
and allow someone to win
this losing game of solitaire
- mARKUS
I was thinking that switching the F#m and Bm for F and Am might rock it up a bit, but then, I'm not sure just how bopping a song this fundamentally depressing could be. The puns are a little ham-handed at times, but I think that's part of the charm of a country-esque sounding song. It has to make truck drivers cry and the intelligentsia giggle. To be honest, I started writing this in hopes that one of my sister's contacts at her recording studio in Nashville would pick it up, flesh it out, turn it into a multi-platinum number, and I could live off my share of the royalties for the rest of my natural life. Another get-rich-quick scheme foiled. I'm starting to feel like the mice from "Pinky and the Brain" - my plans for world domination never seem to come to fruition.
in any event, two points for anyone who picked up the Shakespeare references, and one point if you can nail all of the "card" references. Several million points if you record this song, sell a million copies, and give me my share of the royalties. Any takers? Damn...
Oh, and for anyone wishing to catch me on ICQ, my number is 27286061. Those who spam shall feel the cold touch of my icy and wicked retribution crawl up their spines before my chill black wrath embraces them with brutal and unyielding walls of inhuman anguish. So there. That should be enough of a deterrent to dissuade even the strongest-bladdered specimen of that revolting sub-genus of primate that spams people. And I won't even start to comment on the irony that a telephone repair agent and tier 1 helpdesk ADSL analyst not only is without a mobile phone from his company, but without a telephone in his residence. A bit like Stevie Wonder giving driving lessons, really.
And soon, there will be celebrations as I not only get a break from work, but I get paid at the outset of such a wee furlough. O happy day. Cheers, mouseketeers.
-mARKUS
In keeping with the varied and eclectic offerings on display on this page, I thought I'd throw out a song I've been working on in the hopes that someone has some cool ideas of what to do with it. I've primarily just done the guitar accompaniment for it, and it sounds pretty dolorous the way I've laid it down. And I don't have a bridge or a middle eight for it. Any contributions are welcome.
a losing game of solitaire
the sun slid slowly setting
- Bm - - - - - G - F#m -
while I watched you walking there
- Bm - - - - - - - - - - G - - - F#m
every second stacked in detail
- Bm - - - - - - G7 - - - Em
the king of spades lay torn in two
- - C - - -- - Am - - - - Em
a losing game of solitaire
- G - - - - D - - - Em
closing my venetian blinds
dark evening draws my stare
my fingers slipping randomly
through poorly shuffled portraits
a losing game of solitaire
in cabinets dark harbours
secret memories still care
tender words sting poignantly
postcards and your letters play
a losing game of solitaire
and so I don my inky cloaks
solemn suits the ones I wear
until you return my queen of hearts
and allow someone to win
this losing game of solitaire
- mARKUS
I was thinking that switching the F#m and Bm for F and Am might rock it up a bit, but then, I'm not sure just how bopping a song this fundamentally depressing could be. The puns are a little ham-handed at times, but I think that's part of the charm of a country-esque sounding song. It has to make truck drivers cry and the intelligentsia giggle. To be honest, I started writing this in hopes that one of my sister's contacts at her recording studio in Nashville would pick it up, flesh it out, turn it into a multi-platinum number, and I could live off my share of the royalties for the rest of my natural life. Another get-rich-quick scheme foiled. I'm starting to feel like the mice from "Pinky and the Brain" - my plans for world domination never seem to come to fruition.
in any event, two points for anyone who picked up the Shakespeare references, and one point if you can nail all of the "card" references. Several million points if you record this song, sell a million copies, and give me my share of the royalties. Any takers? Damn...
Oh, and for anyone wishing to catch me on ICQ, my number is 27286061. Those who spam shall feel the cold touch of my icy and wicked retribution crawl up their spines before my chill black wrath embraces them with brutal and unyielding walls of inhuman anguish. So there. That should be enough of a deterrent to dissuade even the strongest-bladdered specimen of that revolting sub-genus of primate that spams people. And I won't even start to comment on the irony that a telephone repair agent and tier 1 helpdesk ADSL analyst not only is without a mobile phone from his company, but without a telephone in his residence. A bit like Stevie Wonder giving driving lessons, really.
And soon, there will be celebrations as I not only get a break from work, but I get paid at the outset of such a wee furlough. O happy day. Cheers, mouseketeers.
-mARKUS
04 June 2004
Links:
Not to be confused with those cute furry bobcats, here are some entertaining sites that you may want to check out:
The Official Liverpool FC Website:
http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/
The Footy-Mad Liverpool FC Page:
http://www.liverpool-mad.co.uk/
The Fun Activity Page With The Beatles:
www.beatles.com/top.html/
Instamatic Language Translation Service:
http://world.altavista.com/
My Local Pub Page:
http://dukeofkendal.tripod.com/
Bob the Angry Flower's Official Homepage:
http://angryflower.com/
Ryan Estrada's Bizarre Comics:
http://www.ryanestrada.com/Planet1.html
Tips for Young Hackers:
http://www.hackersprogrammers.com/articles/Dos.htm
Computer On-Line Diagnostics
http://www.pcpitstop.com/
Plus, if I'm at a computer without my favourites, I can use these things. Yippee!
The Official Liverpool FC Website:
http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/
The Footy-Mad Liverpool FC Page:
http://www.liverpool-mad.co.uk/
The Fun Activity Page With The Beatles:
www.beatles.com/top.html/
Instamatic Language Translation Service:
http://world.altavista.com/
My Local Pub Page:
http://dukeofkendal.tripod.com/
Bob the Angry Flower's Official Homepage:
http://angryflower.com/
Ryan Estrada's Bizarre Comics:
http://www.ryanestrada.com/Planet1.html
Tips for Young Hackers:
http://www.hackersprogrammers.com/articles/Dos.htm
Computer On-Line Diagnostics
http://www.pcpitstop.com/
Plus, if I'm at a computer without my favourites, I can use these things. Yippee!
The Origin of the Specious
Salut.
Many people have asked about the whole JdSilentio name thing, and usually I'm patient enough to go through the whole long and painful story before my listener erupts with a sudden "That's it?" Thus, in order to diminish expectations, increase clarity, and preclude redundant inquiries, I'll lay the story down as quickly and as simply as possible.
Our story opens with Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and existential thinker. Søren had a bit of a nasty habit of pointing out various hypocrises and theological inconsistencies in the teachings and structure of the Danish State Church of the day. This incurred a not-inconsiderable amount of enmity from his fellow Danes, and he began publishing his work (after ditching his fiancée, more on that later) using noms de plume so that those who were convinced he was a dangerous kook might accidentally read some of his thoughts, and to Kierkegaard's hopeful mind, see some sense. One of his books in particular, "Fear and Trembling" was published under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio.
"Fear and Trembling" is a very searching book which tries to come to terms with the spiritual aspects of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard eventually corners the situation morally and concludes that if one is to use a Hegelian moral and ethical method of evaluation, Abraham's actions cannot be justified, and he provides no spiritual guidance or insight. Basically, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The situation is a logical paradox. If Abraham defies God, he violates an ethical principle, but if he commits murder in a particularly socially injurious way, he becomes morally damned. How then, can this great leader of multiple religions be upheld as a moral, religious paragon? The tricksy bit about Kierkegaard is that he considers the capacity for sin to be held in the intent. Did he intend to kill Isaac and hope that God comes down to save the child? Did he intend to go through the motions until the very last second, waiting for the proverbial telephone call from the governor? Either way, he's failing to create an adequate moral and ethical situation. Does he trust God absolutely? If so, does that make him want to kill Isaac, and thus a murderer at heart, if not deed?
Kierkegaard's solution was that Abraham made a movement of infinite faith. Kierkegaard looks at spirituality in three stages: the material or empirical - where the person is prepared to demonstrate faith (through sacrifice) but only conditionally. The next stage is what he called the knight of resignation, who can make enormous sacrifices with no promise of reward or compensation. Beyond that stage, says Kierkegaard, lies Abraham - the knight of infinite faith. At that stage, reason and rationality themselves are sacrificed, and decisions can be made on the basis of the absurd. Abraham's attitude, then is that he honestly he believes simultaneously that God can be obeyed, morality followed, and sacrifice offered all at once. He can hold in his mind the concept of sacrificing Isaac to God's command and God somehow changing the situation so that the whole moral context shifts.
Now, Kierkegaard, speaking as Johannes de Silentio, writes that he can appreciate the enormity of the faith required to make those "movements", but that he himself can only aspire to be a knight of infinite resignation. Next.
Why does he use that pen name? Answer: it's the Latin translation of the name of the title character in an old Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale called (depending on the translation)"Silent John", "Faithful Hans" (short for Johannes), or simply "The Faithful Servant". In that tale, a faithful servant swears to a dying king that he will not forsake the prince and heir nor allow any harm to come to the new king, even at the cost of his own life. Later, after an adventure involving kidnapping a beautiful princess from a land across the sea, John is above decks as the young couple are getting acquainted below. John overhears three ravens talking about the obstacles that will come between the king and a happy marriage. There are three obstacles, only one way to deal with each, and if anyone were to reveal the nature of the obstacles, they would be turned to stone.
The first is a beautiful horse. If someone doesn't hop upon it and kill it as soon as the ship touches the pier, the king will mount it, and it will carry him off, never to return. The second is a wedding garment which will appear to be cloth-of-gold and silver, but it in fact sulphur and pitch, and it will burn and kill the king unless someone grabs it with asbestos gloves and throws it straight into the fire. The third is that at the wedding reception dance, the new queen will faint and die, unless someone draws three drops of blood from her breast and spits them out onto the floor.
So of course, John does all of the protective things to serve his king. At each obstacle, the king becomes more and more exasperated, and finally flips out when he sees John at his new wife's breast. He orders John to be hanged. As John stands at the gallows, for his final speech, he tells the king of the perils that he had navigated for the royal highness. The king, relieved that something finally makes sense, orders John to be brought back down, but John has become merely a stone statue.
Over time, the king and queen have twin sons who are the joy of the castle. As the king passes the statue of Silent John, he finally cracks and weeps at the feet of the statue that he would to anything to right the injustice he has caused. The statue whispers that John can come back to life if the king will cut off the heads of the two princes and wipe the blood on the statue. (Ha - ha! Now you can start to see where I'm going with this...) The king does, and John comes back to life, and magically puts the heads back on the children. The king hides John and the boys in a closet, waits for his wife to come home, and asks her if she would sacrifice her children to bring back the faithful servant. She blanches a bit, but finally stammmers out a yes. The king yanks the boys and John out of the closet, and everybody celebrates and goes to Boston Pizza afterwards. And extra jalapeños on the sombrero pizza.
So there we go again. Themes of sacrifice without hope of reward that are requited because they are done by a noble heart.
Now, as I aspire to knight of infinite resignation-dom, and frequently experience situations where to speak would be to diminish others and elevate myself, I thought it appropriate that I try and reflect constantly on the nature of sacrifice and hope. Hence the name: JdSilentio. And I've had it for so long, that now it's in all of my systems. It's my username on a bazillion sites, webmails, e-mails, admin logons, passwords, work ID, even some of the work I printed off in Africa. I can't even drop jdsilentio any more because it's become intrinsic to my whole computerized identity, even though I suspect that someone else in North America has been using it. Some weirdo named Bryan in Washington State. Oh well. Maybe he'll become despondent over the loss of a pickle fork and take his own life with a deck of playing cards.
Right. I think that's quite enough rambling for now. Excelsior.
Many people have asked about the whole JdSilentio name thing, and usually I'm patient enough to go through the whole long and painful story before my listener erupts with a sudden "That's it?" Thus, in order to diminish expectations, increase clarity, and preclude redundant inquiries, I'll lay the story down as quickly and as simply as possible.
Our story opens with Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and existential thinker. Søren had a bit of a nasty habit of pointing out various hypocrises and theological inconsistencies in the teachings and structure of the Danish State Church of the day. This incurred a not-inconsiderable amount of enmity from his fellow Danes, and he began publishing his work (after ditching his fiancée, more on that later) using noms de plume so that those who were convinced he was a dangerous kook might accidentally read some of his thoughts, and to Kierkegaard's hopeful mind, see some sense. One of his books in particular, "Fear and Trembling" was published under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio.
"Fear and Trembling" is a very searching book which tries to come to terms with the spiritual aspects of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard eventually corners the situation morally and concludes that if one is to use a Hegelian moral and ethical method of evaluation, Abraham's actions cannot be justified, and he provides no spiritual guidance or insight. Basically, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The situation is a logical paradox. If Abraham defies God, he violates an ethical principle, but if he commits murder in a particularly socially injurious way, he becomes morally damned. How then, can this great leader of multiple religions be upheld as a moral, religious paragon? The tricksy bit about Kierkegaard is that he considers the capacity for sin to be held in the intent. Did he intend to kill Isaac and hope that God comes down to save the child? Did he intend to go through the motions until the very last second, waiting for the proverbial telephone call from the governor? Either way, he's failing to create an adequate moral and ethical situation. Does he trust God absolutely? If so, does that make him want to kill Isaac, and thus a murderer at heart, if not deed?
Kierkegaard's solution was that Abraham made a movement of infinite faith. Kierkegaard looks at spirituality in three stages: the material or empirical - where the person is prepared to demonstrate faith (through sacrifice) but only conditionally. The next stage is what he called the knight of resignation, who can make enormous sacrifices with no promise of reward or compensation. Beyond that stage, says Kierkegaard, lies Abraham - the knight of infinite faith. At that stage, reason and rationality themselves are sacrificed, and decisions can be made on the basis of the absurd. Abraham's attitude, then is that he honestly he believes simultaneously that God can be obeyed, morality followed, and sacrifice offered all at once. He can hold in his mind the concept of sacrificing Isaac to God's command and God somehow changing the situation so that the whole moral context shifts.
Now, Kierkegaard, speaking as Johannes de Silentio, writes that he can appreciate the enormity of the faith required to make those "movements", but that he himself can only aspire to be a knight of infinite resignation. Next.
Why does he use that pen name? Answer: it's the Latin translation of the name of the title character in an old Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale called (depending on the translation)"Silent John", "Faithful Hans" (short for Johannes), or simply "The Faithful Servant". In that tale, a faithful servant swears to a dying king that he will not forsake the prince and heir nor allow any harm to come to the new king, even at the cost of his own life. Later, after an adventure involving kidnapping a beautiful princess from a land across the sea, John is above decks as the young couple are getting acquainted below. John overhears three ravens talking about the obstacles that will come between the king and a happy marriage. There are three obstacles, only one way to deal with each, and if anyone were to reveal the nature of the obstacles, they would be turned to stone.
The first is a beautiful horse. If someone doesn't hop upon it and kill it as soon as the ship touches the pier, the king will mount it, and it will carry him off, never to return. The second is a wedding garment which will appear to be cloth-of-gold and silver, but it in fact sulphur and pitch, and it will burn and kill the king unless someone grabs it with asbestos gloves and throws it straight into the fire. The third is that at the wedding reception dance, the new queen will faint and die, unless someone draws three drops of blood from her breast and spits them out onto the floor.
So of course, John does all of the protective things to serve his king. At each obstacle, the king becomes more and more exasperated, and finally flips out when he sees John at his new wife's breast. He orders John to be hanged. As John stands at the gallows, for his final speech, he tells the king of the perils that he had navigated for the royal highness. The king, relieved that something finally makes sense, orders John to be brought back down, but John has become merely a stone statue.
Over time, the king and queen have twin sons who are the joy of the castle. As the king passes the statue of Silent John, he finally cracks and weeps at the feet of the statue that he would to anything to right the injustice he has caused. The statue whispers that John can come back to life if the king will cut off the heads of the two princes and wipe the blood on the statue. (Ha - ha! Now you can start to see where I'm going with this...) The king does, and John comes back to life, and magically puts the heads back on the children. The king hides John and the boys in a closet, waits for his wife to come home, and asks her if she would sacrifice her children to bring back the faithful servant. She blanches a bit, but finally stammmers out a yes. The king yanks the boys and John out of the closet, and everybody celebrates and goes to Boston Pizza afterwards. And extra jalapeños on the sombrero pizza.
So there we go again. Themes of sacrifice without hope of reward that are requited because they are done by a noble heart.
Now, as I aspire to knight of infinite resignation-dom, and frequently experience situations where to speak would be to diminish others and elevate myself, I thought it appropriate that I try and reflect constantly on the nature of sacrifice and hope. Hence the name: JdSilentio. And I've had it for so long, that now it's in all of my systems. It's my username on a bazillion sites, webmails, e-mails, admin logons, passwords, work ID, even some of the work I printed off in Africa. I can't even drop jdsilentio any more because it's become intrinsic to my whole computerized identity, even though I suspect that someone else in North America has been using it. Some weirdo named Bryan in Washington State. Oh well. Maybe he'll become despondent over the loss of a pickle fork and take his own life with a deck of playing cards.
Right. I think that's quite enough rambling for now. Excelsior.
03 June 2004
2004 Mid-Season Recap
So here we are again. It’s mid-season of the 2003-2004 season and once again, Liverpool have been written off by the critics, the voting public and the punters. Five league losses, an unconvincing home record and whispers of dissention in the ranks seem to be the order of the day, and the naysayers are rather happy about proclaiming it to the world. Can the season be salvaged? Can Liverpool win? Can they triumph over the Manchester Uniteds and the Arsenals and reclaim the enormous deficit in points to rise to first place? Or should Liverpudlians just resign themselves to another season with a UEFA Cup or somesuch small recompense for devoted service and fanaticism? Answer: Maybe. What can fans do? Be that twelfth man on the pitch. Fight for Fortress Anfield. Cheer for your mates on the pitch. Support the gaffer. Send in your letters, e-mails, and telephone calls crying your belief out for all to hear. All that we have to give must be given. This is not to say that we are in crisis. Where are we? At a crossroads.
Contrary to popular and folk wisdom, the journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step. It begins with the adoption of the mindset of stepping. In other words, all that ordinary and cliché tommyrot about “giving 100%” or “focusing on the next game” is pure and unadulterated tar. Success is about being correct at the smallest level before you even begin to worry about the result of the game. Do Liverpool need to win more games? Yes. We basically need to win almost every single game from here until the end of the season. Certainly every home game. We will win them through the application of timing, perspective, precision and accuracy.
Critics have said that Liverpool are a one-horse team, and that without Michael Owen, the offense flounders and all is lost. We all know that to be incorrect now with Milan Baros, Emile Heskey and Harry Kewell supplying a number of critical goals thus far in the campaign. The lack of success is in no part due to a lack of talent. The Reds are packed with talent. What we lack is will. And Gérard Houllier is not to blame. Each player must take responsibility for each play. Make sure that that pass lands on that blade of grass. Ensure that that through ball gets past the marker and to your team-mate. Make sure that that clearance gets more than 30 yards away from your keeper and to a man in the same colour jersey as yourself. The victories are there. The hearts and minds of every man in a red shirt just need to adopt the philosophy that will permit them to seize those victories. And where the skill fails, the teammates must compensate. For too long, we’ve had too much compensation and not enough true quality. As the great Shankly said, “Form is temporary, excellence is permanent.” We need more players to take a personal stake in the welfare of the club, and in every minute play of every game.
I used to love watching Ian Rush. Not necessarily watching him score, though that was more than mildly enjoyable. But when he played with Robbie Fowler, he was always shouting at the younger man to follow him back so that he could tackle back on opposing defenders. When I played midfield as a child, I had a bugger of a time convincing my strikers to tackle back. Strikers always seemed to me to be somewhat of a breed of poncers, looking for a glory-grabbing opportunity so that they could get credit for everyone else’s hard work. Rushie taught me otherwise. There is a breed of striker that cares about defence, and who will sprint like the devil for his own 18-yard box when he senses the danger. To see a striker who cared so passionately about his own team’s welfare that he took over the responsibility of coaching his own colleagues to follow his example was awe-inspiring. That was leadership. That was what won all those trophies in the Anfield Museum.
So what’s the recipe? What’s the magical elixir that will solve all of Liverpool FC’s problems? I could throw out the old chestnut of teamwork, and convince you all that the panacea of 11 men working their bollocks off for one another will solve the ills of the world, let alone my beloved team. No. Work is part of the solution, but so is intelligence. Keeping your head up when you’ve got the ball, spotting that open man, watching for the lapse in marking, finding the right moment to go over the top of the last defender. Blind, tireless and mindless running won’t win games.
Specifics? Danny “Spud” Murphy has got to penetrate more. He has to trust that Didi Hamann can cover the space behind him and free him up to tee up some shots. His shot is devastating, and he has to learn to trust that more. Emile Heskey has got to gain the confidence to shoot from within the 18-yard box. He’s suffering from a bizarre strain of Andy Cole virus which allows him to score wunderkind goals, but prevents him from scoring run-of-the-mill ones. Stevie G has to trust his team-mates more. They will get into viable positions if he can just buy them that extra second. Michael Owen has to trust his instincts more. His goal-poaching instincts are redoubtable. If any player on the team is over-thinking, it’s St. Michael. Jamie Carragher has to believe that he is the player that every manager in England wants. His challenges are strong, and his general positional play is great, but his man-to-man defending lacks confidence. I have to say that I miss Vedgy, but John-Arne Riise does a great job of rampaging up the wing. If he practised his deep crosses a little more, I would not complain. As for Hÿypia and the Henchoz? I wouldn’t dare criticize them. They’re the only reason Liverpool aren’t fending off Wolverhampton’s challenge for the relegation sweepstakes. Focus and intensity at the back are the only extra ingredients that have fallen by the wayside during this new era of Liverpool attacking-philosophy football. I love it, by the way. I’ve just been waiting for a bit too long to see it truly in practice, despite claims to the contrary.
Will Liverpool heft the Championship? Unlikely, unless someone in Merseyside is psychic and relays this column. I still find it difficult to understand why, with a coaching staff including Gérard Houllier, Ian Rush, and Steve Heighway, the players are not doing what they’ve been schooled, trained, and paid to do: execute their precise tasks. I don’t mean to say that people ought to concentrate on their duties to the exclusion of all else, but that when St. Michael is in the 18-yard box, that should be a goal. End of sentence. When Danny Murphy gets a through-ball at the top of the 18-yard box, that should also be a goal. If Hippie and the Honcho are both back defending, no striker should be able to split them. Simple execution of tasks.
The game is not that complex. It’s about space and time. Einstein could have described it in exactly the same terms. If given enough of either of those quantities, you will score a goal. In defence, if you deny a player either or both of those quantities, you will have reduced his or her effectiveness, and all but negated the probability of that player scoring a goal. Dribbling and shooting both require time and space, and if those characteristics are not available, generally speaking, possession is lost and any opportunity to distribute or shoot the ball is also lost.
There is hope. Not some form of misinformed or ignorant defiance of the evidence, but real hope that the capacity for success lies within this team. As fans, all we can do is offer our support and be that twelfth man on the pitch, week in, week out. We can exhort that each man must do his duty, but in the end, the true difference can only be measured on the pitch. The players must take the responsibility and perform as only they know they can. As individuals. As a team. As a clockwork unit that co-ordinates every motion with a corresponding and complementary motion. That team will win the Championship. And that team will conquer Europe.
Contrary to popular and folk wisdom, the journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step. It begins with the adoption of the mindset of stepping. In other words, all that ordinary and cliché tommyrot about “giving 100%” or “focusing on the next game” is pure and unadulterated tar. Success is about being correct at the smallest level before you even begin to worry about the result of the game. Do Liverpool need to win more games? Yes. We basically need to win almost every single game from here until the end of the season. Certainly every home game. We will win them through the application of timing, perspective, precision and accuracy.
Critics have said that Liverpool are a one-horse team, and that without Michael Owen, the offense flounders and all is lost. We all know that to be incorrect now with Milan Baros, Emile Heskey and Harry Kewell supplying a number of critical goals thus far in the campaign. The lack of success is in no part due to a lack of talent. The Reds are packed with talent. What we lack is will. And Gérard Houllier is not to blame. Each player must take responsibility for each play. Make sure that that pass lands on that blade of grass. Ensure that that through ball gets past the marker and to your team-mate. Make sure that that clearance gets more than 30 yards away from your keeper and to a man in the same colour jersey as yourself. The victories are there. The hearts and minds of every man in a red shirt just need to adopt the philosophy that will permit them to seize those victories. And where the skill fails, the teammates must compensate. For too long, we’ve had too much compensation and not enough true quality. As the great Shankly said, “Form is temporary, excellence is permanent.” We need more players to take a personal stake in the welfare of the club, and in every minute play of every game.
I used to love watching Ian Rush. Not necessarily watching him score, though that was more than mildly enjoyable. But when he played with Robbie Fowler, he was always shouting at the younger man to follow him back so that he could tackle back on opposing defenders. When I played midfield as a child, I had a bugger of a time convincing my strikers to tackle back. Strikers always seemed to me to be somewhat of a breed of poncers, looking for a glory-grabbing opportunity so that they could get credit for everyone else’s hard work. Rushie taught me otherwise. There is a breed of striker that cares about defence, and who will sprint like the devil for his own 18-yard box when he senses the danger. To see a striker who cared so passionately about his own team’s welfare that he took over the responsibility of coaching his own colleagues to follow his example was awe-inspiring. That was leadership. That was what won all those trophies in the Anfield Museum.
So what’s the recipe? What’s the magical elixir that will solve all of Liverpool FC’s problems? I could throw out the old chestnut of teamwork, and convince you all that the panacea of 11 men working their bollocks off for one another will solve the ills of the world, let alone my beloved team. No. Work is part of the solution, but so is intelligence. Keeping your head up when you’ve got the ball, spotting that open man, watching for the lapse in marking, finding the right moment to go over the top of the last defender. Blind, tireless and mindless running won’t win games.
Specifics? Danny “Spud” Murphy has got to penetrate more. He has to trust that Didi Hamann can cover the space behind him and free him up to tee up some shots. His shot is devastating, and he has to learn to trust that more. Emile Heskey has got to gain the confidence to shoot from within the 18-yard box. He’s suffering from a bizarre strain of Andy Cole virus which allows him to score wunderkind goals, but prevents him from scoring run-of-the-mill ones. Stevie G has to trust his team-mates more. They will get into viable positions if he can just buy them that extra second. Michael Owen has to trust his instincts more. His goal-poaching instincts are redoubtable. If any player on the team is over-thinking, it’s St. Michael. Jamie Carragher has to believe that he is the player that every manager in England wants. His challenges are strong, and his general positional play is great, but his man-to-man defending lacks confidence. I have to say that I miss Vedgy, but John-Arne Riise does a great job of rampaging up the wing. If he practised his deep crosses a little more, I would not complain. As for Hÿypia and the Henchoz? I wouldn’t dare criticize them. They’re the only reason Liverpool aren’t fending off Wolverhampton’s challenge for the relegation sweepstakes. Focus and intensity at the back are the only extra ingredients that have fallen by the wayside during this new era of Liverpool attacking-philosophy football. I love it, by the way. I’ve just been waiting for a bit too long to see it truly in practice, despite claims to the contrary.
Will Liverpool heft the Championship? Unlikely, unless someone in Merseyside is psychic and relays this column. I still find it difficult to understand why, with a coaching staff including Gérard Houllier, Ian Rush, and Steve Heighway, the players are not doing what they’ve been schooled, trained, and paid to do: execute their precise tasks. I don’t mean to say that people ought to concentrate on their duties to the exclusion of all else, but that when St. Michael is in the 18-yard box, that should be a goal. End of sentence. When Danny Murphy gets a through-ball at the top of the 18-yard box, that should also be a goal. If Hippie and the Honcho are both back defending, no striker should be able to split them. Simple execution of tasks.
The game is not that complex. It’s about space and time. Einstein could have described it in exactly the same terms. If given enough of either of those quantities, you will score a goal. In defence, if you deny a player either or both of those quantities, you will have reduced his or her effectiveness, and all but negated the probability of that player scoring a goal. Dribbling and shooting both require time and space, and if those characteristics are not available, generally speaking, possession is lost and any opportunity to distribute or shoot the ball is also lost.
There is hope. Not some form of misinformed or ignorant defiance of the evidence, but real hope that the capacity for success lies within this team. As fans, all we can do is offer our support and be that twelfth man on the pitch, week in, week out. We can exhort that each man must do his duty, but in the end, the true difference can only be measured on the pitch. The players must take the responsibility and perform as only they know they can. As individuals. As a team. As a clockwork unit that co-ordinates every motion with a corresponding and complementary motion. That team will win the Championship. And that team will conquer Europe.
Departure of God, 2003
What can one say about gods? Followers will assert that their particular deity is right and just and honest and fair - more so than the next god or spirit. But as for the God of Anfield? What to say about him, now that he’s gone?
The supporters of the Liverpool Reds have been treated to some of the greatest displays of football in history. Now everyone knows that Pélé is the greatest player of all time. In terms of goals, technique, international experience, World Cups, class, and honour, there is no-one to match the Man. Even on Anfield, there are superlative legends - King Kenny, who led the team to their first ever league and FA Cup double as a player-manager - and Special K, who led the team to their first European Cup before leaving for Hamburg to win two European player of the year awards, and then returning to England to transform Newcastle into a top-flight side.
Liverpool created the standard of English excellence by winning four European Cups in seven years. By always challenging and being competitive. After such a tradition, who could possibly assume the role of God? If Liverpool’s most dominant midfielder, most devastating player-manager, and even the highest goal scorer in English football competition, in the person of one Ian Rush, could not assume deital status, who could?
The answer lies in a little lad from Toxteth, one of the less affluent areas of Merseyside. A local boy who was recruited to play for Liverpool Schoolboys, he soon surpassed all scoring records in his league. He soon replicated that form at the highest level, scoring a hat-trick on his league debut with the Reds. He went on to score 151 goals for the club in 377 games, by far the greatest goals per game average by any LFC player. Along the way, he gained cult status among the fans by, amongst other antics, revealing an undershirt after scoring a goal against Arsenal which spoofed the “Calvin Klein” logo, by saying “Support the 500 Sacked DoCKers”, who were on strike at the time.
Robbie was, and is, a working class hero. He truly represents what John Lennon found noble, true and honourable about Merseysiders when he wrote the song. It is a sad day when we consider his career away from Anfield.
On a personal note, Robbie was always my favourite because he was a contrast to the other stellar talent on display in the 90’s - Steve McManaman. I loved watching Steve play. I felt tears well up in my eyes when I heard Sir Stanley Matthews say “That boy can dribble”. I relished every one of his goals. But Robbie was always my man. I could see Rushie telling him to track back and help the midfielders, even hear the Welsh Kop legend shouting at him to help the backs clear corners. And he always had a nose for the net. Not the most attractive nose, particularly when you consider the plaster that he used to wear upon it to help dilate his nostrils and allow him to breathe easier, but a nose with a killer instinct. Keener than Gary Lineker, sharper than Jimmy Greaves - that’s Robbie. Not the fastest. Not the hardest. But when you need the job done, there’s no other man more capable of doing it.
Good-bye Robbie. Good-bye God. The pantheon of Liverpool will be poorer for your absence tonight.
The supporters of the Liverpool Reds have been treated to some of the greatest displays of football in history. Now everyone knows that Pélé is the greatest player of all time. In terms of goals, technique, international experience, World Cups, class, and honour, there is no-one to match the Man. Even on Anfield, there are superlative legends - King Kenny, who led the team to their first ever league and FA Cup double as a player-manager - and Special K, who led the team to their first European Cup before leaving for Hamburg to win two European player of the year awards, and then returning to England to transform Newcastle into a top-flight side.
Liverpool created the standard of English excellence by winning four European Cups in seven years. By always challenging and being competitive. After such a tradition, who could possibly assume the role of God? If Liverpool’s most dominant midfielder, most devastating player-manager, and even the highest goal scorer in English football competition, in the person of one Ian Rush, could not assume deital status, who could?
The answer lies in a little lad from Toxteth, one of the less affluent areas of Merseyside. A local boy who was recruited to play for Liverpool Schoolboys, he soon surpassed all scoring records in his league. He soon replicated that form at the highest level, scoring a hat-trick on his league debut with the Reds. He went on to score 151 goals for the club in 377 games, by far the greatest goals per game average by any LFC player. Along the way, he gained cult status among the fans by, amongst other antics, revealing an undershirt after scoring a goal against Arsenal which spoofed the “Calvin Klein” logo, by saying “Support the 500 Sacked DoCKers”, who were on strike at the time.
Robbie was, and is, a working class hero. He truly represents what John Lennon found noble, true and honourable about Merseysiders when he wrote the song. It is a sad day when we consider his career away from Anfield.
On a personal note, Robbie was always my favourite because he was a contrast to the other stellar talent on display in the 90’s - Steve McManaman. I loved watching Steve play. I felt tears well up in my eyes when I heard Sir Stanley Matthews say “That boy can dribble”. I relished every one of his goals. But Robbie was always my man. I could see Rushie telling him to track back and help the midfielders, even hear the Welsh Kop legend shouting at him to help the backs clear corners. And he always had a nose for the net. Not the most attractive nose, particularly when you consider the plaster that he used to wear upon it to help dilate his nostrils and allow him to breathe easier, but a nose with a killer instinct. Keener than Gary Lineker, sharper than Jimmy Greaves - that’s Robbie. Not the fastest. Not the hardest. But when you need the job done, there’s no other man more capable of doing it.
Good-bye Robbie. Good-bye God. The pantheon of Liverpool will be poorer for your absence tonight.
Review from 2002
Odd. Deuced odd it is, that on my computer’s desktop I should have two icons with the little monikers “Go Back” and “Remember” appellated to them. Considering that the shortcuts to which they apply deal with a computer game that hasn’t been present on my hard drive for more than a year now, the fact that the two little symbols and their names still appear near my recycle bin should be cause for amusement at my forgetfulness and absent-mindedness. I should chuckle lightly and cluck my tongue at how I’ve grown too old and forgetful to use a machine which is now overpowered handily by the cheapest entry-level HP Jornada handheld PDA. Ha. Not even thirty years old, and already being outstripped by the next generation in the use of technology. Too disorganized to maintain a simple desktop on a computer that’s been out-of-date for the better part of a decade, and using an operating system that is so archaic it eludes scorn and criticism like Jurgen Prochnow’s U-Boat dodges depth-charges in “Das Boot”. In fact, no-one bothers to criticize Windows 95 anymore. Not enough people remember how such a piece of old-school software functioned, let alone how it functions differently from today’s upscale and hyper-marketed new Windows products.
But instead, I neither feel the urge for self-chastisement, nor the joviality which comes from a self-consciously anachronistic personality. Perhaps on another day, I might recognize the humour in not tidying up the old shortcuts on my desktop, but today, they just seem like poignant noises. In much the same way that seasoned professional doctors and lawyers still twitch when they hear the sound of a school period bell or buzzer, I am particularly susceptible to statements of meaning on this day. Now, looking at the little icons, I recognize that clicking on them will do nothing at all, since the program to which they were attached has long been deleted. However, it’s April 15th. That changes everything.
Thirteen years ago, everything changed on a bright and sunny April 15th. We didn’t know it then, but it was the apex, the zenith of an era - the last great display of the great Liverpool sides of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Those of us who followed the team were spoiled. We had seen a team conquer Europe four times in seven years, crush domestic opposition as though they were noisome insects, and collect trophies at a rate never equalled, before or after. Manchester United gave it a good run back in the ‘90s, but there really is no comparison. Liverpool Football Club in those days was a titan striding amongst gnats. They played hard in every competition, two or three matches a week, in the days before teams had thirty men to a squad and were allowed to make three substitutions a game. FA Cup, League Cup, League, Champions’ Cup - week in, week out, Liverpool were in it, and more often than not, celebrating afterwards.
The League Cup, brought in as a new competition to allow the old third and fourth division teams another shot at a Cup, became almost the exclusive property of Merseyside, with Liverpool winning it about every other year, and Everton managing to fill in the cracks whenever the titans lapsed. The Champions’ Cup (for that is what it was back then) was not only a private reserve for those who had conquered their domestic league, but had to endure a gruelling set of home-and-away knockout rounds to progress in the competition. Now, an English team only needs to finish in the top four in the Premiership, and then scrape their way through two group stages where they can theoretically still go despite losing twice to the same team. Not to name names here, but in the past year, Arsenal and Manchester United both lost all of their group-stage matches to Deportivo La Coruna. La Coruna then fielded an understrength team in their last group match (against Germans Bayer Leverkusen) to deliberately dump Arsenal from the competition, only for their lackadaisical tactics to backfire and their players to stagger and lose their place to the team they had previously embarrassed twice already - Manchester United.
Not to sound overly nostalgic or too full of the mythology of the past to appreciate the quality of the present, but winning the big prize in Europe was a bigger deal back then. And Liverpool did it often. In between doubles and trebles every year, they still managed to win accolades for fair play and good sportsmanship. Then came Heysel.
Heysel was the first sign that the empire was in decay. Bill Shankly was the coach, the manager, the gaffer that had taken the team in 1958 and crafted a well-oiled machine dedicated to winning things. He had taken a team in decline and foundering in a lower division, brought it up to the top-flight, and then began to swell the confines of the trophy room. First came the titles, then the Cups began to follow. By 1973, Liverpool had won their first UEFA Cup (doing a double by also winning the championship that year), and Shankly had already set up his own systems for training, scouting, and developing players as well as future managers. Like a mediaeval monarch, he set up the conditions for his successor -and what he used was his own creation and consequent Anfield tradition: The Bootroom.
Players generally feared the bootroom. Shankly and his team of coaches and trainers would stand about amidst the racks of uncleaned boots with a couple of bottles of Bell’s Scotch Whiskey and would discuss the game. Occasionally, a player was called to the bootroom. Generally, this meant that the player was being called to account for some form of poor performance or underachievement on the pitch. And specifically, this meant that five or six men who knew football more intimately than any of the players knew their own wives would incisively interrogate them until they realized the error of their ways. Aside from the potential discomforts of any player, the bootroom also provided the perfect grooming-ground for any future manager. Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Roy Evans - all future managers - sprang from the bootroom staff.
When Shankly retired, Bob Paisley took over the management of the club. He quickly became England’s most successful club manager of all time, winning 13 major trophies in 8 seasons. Not only did Liverpool become the most dominant team of their time, they became the flagship for English clubs setting off for Europe. While Liverpool spread their wings of dominance, fledgling teams such as Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest grew to maturity, challenged and won the most prestigious cup in Europe. The Champions’ Cup became an English hallmark, and every year, teams anxiously examined the fixture lists to see when the Mersey giants would thunder through their vicinity. Brian Clough and his exceptional Nottingham Forest team fooled no-one. They were good. They were great. But only when compared with the Red Machine from Liverpool.
After Paisley’s short and benign reign, Joe Fagan relutantly took the throne which now seemed doubly vacant since Shankly’s death in 1981. The Bootroom management seemed older, more world-weary than in the days when Shankly still stalked the training ground. Fagan was particularly susceptible to this malaise. Like Tolkien’s Elves, he seemed to want to join his illustrious predecessors on The Undying Shores rather than suffer further upon the battle-grounds of Middle Earth. In his last year as manager, perhaps the last year that things could be perceived as “being the same”, tired, old and kind, Joe ran face first into Heysel.
He had already announced his retirement. He was on the way out, and his successor was the only player who could hold his own in the bootroom - a cold and sardonic Glaswegian named Kenny Dalglish. Previously, both Paisley and Fagan had tried to summon the short-spoken captain to the bootroom for some form of disciplinary measure, and been astonished to find that the Scotsman could do more than defend himself. He could discuss in detail every movement, every motivation, and every mistake made on the pitch in the previous 90 minutes without batting an eyelid. He knew the game, and Fagan had never seen such a devoted force of will or dedicated spirit, save perhaps in the departed Shankly.
In that year, spanning the autumn and winter of 1984 and reaching into the spring of 1985, things went far, far worse than dear old Joe Fagan could have imagined.
To dispense with the trivialities quickly, Liverpool lost. Quite a bit. Despite winning the League Cup four years in a row, they dropped out in a forgettable match. Having won the three previous league championships, they dropped that trophy to their Merseyside neighbours. They lost the chance to compete in the FA Cup Final by losing in the semi-finals. And despite being both defending champions of the European Champions’ Cup and being champions of England three times previously, they not only lost that Cup, but lost the ability to compete in Europe for six years. After twenty-one years of being an ever-present European power, they had simply dropped off the international map.
What happened? Where human frailties cause flaws in ideals, there is always a loss for words. Heysel happened. For years, hooliganism had been the bane of the English game. Through the previous twenty years, it was always seen as a peculiar feature of urban Englishmen that their young and unemployed men would seek to vent their dissatisfaction and feelings of disenfranchisement at football matches with violence. Whether it was the romance of the gangsterism of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the influx of immigration so colourfully declared by Enoch Powell, the rise of a feeling of tribalism in an increasingly segmented and compartmentalized world, or the growing feeling that populism was dead and that violence was the only way to make a statement in a world without individuals, people in England began to misbehave at football matches. Anthony Burgess banned the movie based on his own book “A Clockwork Orange” in England because he thought that it had too much of an English quality to it. And so it proved. Ordinary, tea-drinking, crumpet-munching Englishmen could turn into rabid monsters given a couple of factors: mobs and incentive. Basically, that is to say that coal is quite sedate and manageable unless turned into aerial dust and exposed to an open flame.
In the early eighties, watching football had given a lot of people both cause and opportunity to perpetrate mischief, and the fact that Liverpool perennially had fixtures on the continent made them wonderful vehicles to perpetrate such mischief abroad. At Chelsea, people had begun to arrive at matches armed with fistfuls of 25 gram darts to throw at stands of opposing supporters or police stewards. Leeds had become a haven for race violence best encapsulated by the graffito “Hitler was a Leeds Fan”. Long-running battles along the canal became stories of legend rivalling Bannockburn or Marathon as Liverpool fans escaped the wrath of Mancunians. In Scotland, the Glaswegian derby was beginning to claim lives for no better reason than one lad was Catholic rather than Protestant. Into this cauldron of hate and dissatisfaction came the European Champions’ Cup match between Liverpool and Juventus of Turin.
Scenes of horror, disgust, and disbelief would do very little to reassure people that the authorities in control have any idea of how to deal with surgung masses of humanity. What can be said of Heysel is best said in quick verbal flashes.
The players become concerned during the pre-match warm-up as they ran around the pitch. One player asks what the fans are eating in order to throw such hard stuff at them. The response: “They’re throwing the bloody stadium at us.” The concrete is so old and decayed that it has begun to disintegrate.
Darts are thrown from a section designated for “neutrals”. Fans react with anger.
Police are unable to control movement of fans, take to clubbing and tear-gassing them.
A group of Juventus fans are cowering in the lee of a wall when the cement wall collapses on them. The screams freeze people within hearing distance like an icy gust of wind.
The hooligans pretending to be Liverpool fans immediately begin fleeing from their side of the collapsed wall. They’d wanted blood, but they hadn’t realized what the devil had given them in their bargain. Several are later caught and incarcerated by the Belgian Police with the help of closed-circuit cameras.
The Belgian Police, meanwhile, while hearing of the “disturbances”, decide that what they really need to do at the moment is to practice their drills, and promptly move out to the middle of the field, declaring the game to be postponed, and march about in formation for 20 minutes.
A little 8 year-old boy begins to cry. His father, laid face-up on the hood of a car in front of him, has just vomited up his intestines and died. The boy can’t think of anything to tell his mother. A Liverpool fan and his son help the young lad, despite the difficulties of language.
The tales of tragedy and sorrow continue, but what purpose would they serve? Thirty-nine people died at Heysel. Ever since, Liverpool have held a soft reverence for the northern Italian club. On the other hand, there have always been crowds in England and elsewhere all too eager to sing “Ice on the Runway” in a morbid celebration of the Munich Air Disaster of 1958 which claimed most of a Manchester United team who may have risen to become heroes. Such crowds are to be despised with more venom than is reserved for Windows 95. The cruelty of some crowds are never to be underestimated. Some opposing fans visiting the Stadio Della Alpi in Torino were known for chanting the numbers one through thirty-nine, a grisly chant perhaps vaguely reminiscent of the taunting given to the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ron Hextall by the New York Rangers fans in the 1980s. He was told to “Buy a Porsche” in an obscene reference to the Flyers’ previous goalie who had died in a car crash whilst driving his Porsche.
Joe Fagan retires in tears. Kenny Dalglish reluctantly takes the reins of the world’s most successful club, and tries to steer it past the catastrophe of Heysel. The club begins to recover, despite being banned from European competition for six years, with Dalglish becoming the first player-manager to claim an FA Cup and a League Championship in the same year. The board begin to find ways of curbing crowd violence, like closed-circuit television cameras and increased police and stadium steward presences. People begin to think that life will continue, that things would get better, and that the wounds and hurts of Heysel would be respectfully allowed closure and resolution. Then came 15th April, 1989.
The Heysel disaster was tragic, but the fact remains that the 39 victims were all Italian supporters of Juve. The people of Liverpool felt the shame, sadness and anger about their involvement - almost complicity - in the terrible events of the day. But Heysel is in Belgium, and the victims of the disaster were Italian. There was distance and space which fans and club could use to insulate themselves from the horrible nature of the tragedy. There was no such insulation from Hillsborough.
It had all the makings of a classic match. Nottingham Forest, having already won the European Cup twice, faced Liverpool, the four-time champs in an FA Cup Semi-Final showdown that looked to determine the relative fates of both clubs. It did, but not in any way the players or managers could have foreseen. The Football Association had chosen , as was the tradition, to have the match played at a neutral venue. They chose Sheffield, South Yorkshire as the city, and Hillsborough as the stadium. Fears that the police crews there were inexperienced, and that the stadium had actually been denied licensing for such events by the city council were pooh-poohed. In retrospect, they were just some of the small details that added to a catalogue of critical blunders that led conclusively to the worst possible result, like snowflakes before an avalanche.
The day was beautiful. Bright, sunny, and with a faint, tingling breeze, it seemed to echo the promise of the most sparkling and exhilarating game of the season. Liverpool fans, though, began to become concerned at a few things. Although they were allocated almost half of the seats in the stadium, they were all forced to enter through the narrow Leppings Lane entrance, while Forest fans and neutrals enjoyed the luxury of all the other entrances. The police had not begun organizing queues or cordons for the line-ups at the turnstiles. Worry and hesitation had already begun to creep into people’s minds as they were forced to wait outside the stadium, seemingly interminably while the turnstiles slowly let one fan after the next to trickle in, before searching and taking the ticket from the fan. The clock ticked by. After what seemed like an eternity, the match began to start. The announcer’s voice began to boom over the tannoy to list the starting line-ups and the commercial sponsors for the event. The teeming crowds outside began to shout in annoyance and frustration.
Meanwhile, in the police control-room, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield supervised an array of television monitors and communications equipment. The decision to filter thousands of Liverpool fans through such a tiny entrance to the stadium concourse had not yet begun to dawn on him as being somewhat unrealistic. He was a man given to following procedure and what he was doing was, according to what his experience and his training had taught him, correct. Shouts of alarm over the police radio that the crowds were beginning to press against the turnstiles, and that there was not enough police staff in the area to cope with the crush of humanity. Of the two thousand cops on duty, there weren’t enough present at the most crucial point of entry into the stadium.
Duckenfield panicked. Over the crackly walkie-talkie static, he heard the word that terrified him: death. He wanted to serve out his term with the police as quietly and as innocuously as possible before retiring to a quiet life with a full pension. There was no desire for drama, conflict, or heroism. On the contrary, he did exactly as he was told so that there would be no opportunity for anyone to identify him as the point of origin for any mistake or controversy. As soon as he heard that the situation outside Leppings Lane turnstiles was becoming dangerous, he began to tremble with fear, but when a police officer mentioned the possibility of death, he saw his quiet existence threatened. A death in the crowd might involve him in an inquiry, or worse, an investigation. His control of procedure left his grasp, and he panicked, ordering one of the large metal exit gates to be opened to let in the influx of Liverpool spectators, and ease the pressure on the turnstiles.
The procedure that Duckenfeld failed to follow was, in the words of the later Taylor Report “a blunder of the first magnitude”. Although he opened the gate, he forgot to block off the tunnel directly in front of the gate which led down to the terraces. All ticketing for that area of the terraces were misleadingly printed, leading everyone to believe that their area was directly ahead, through the open tunnel. There were, in fact, terraces off to the side, but they could only be reached by rather circuitously navigating that area of the concourse. The police who were ordered to open the gate could only look at a few tickets, but they saw what was printed, shrugged, and gestured for everyone to go down the tunnel.
The tunnel led to two penned-in areas. These areas were designed to control crowd violence and prevent potential hooligans from leaping onto the pitch. With those purposes in mind, they were constructed much like corrals for wild animals: chain-link mesh, barbed wire, and bars that overtopped the fence that tilted inward, to prevent anyone climbing over. There were also large metal rails set up horizontally across the pens to prevent any sudden crushes down toward the pitch. By the time that Duckenfield ordered the exit gate to be opened, both pens were completely packed, with people already feeling the discomfort of overcrowding. Then the thousands that flowed in were pointed down the tunnel, and rushed joyfully to see the match from which they’d been previously barred by the limitations of the turnstiles, sighed with relief at getting out of the confines of the surge to get in, and eagerly chased at the chance to see the game already in progress.
Take a full bucket of water. It’s heavy, clumsy to move about, and tends to slosh about a bit. It takes a lot of effort to throw that whole bucket at another person, get them with the full impact, and after that, make a significant effect. Most people can quite easily suffer a splash like that while standing on one foot and not fall over. Now consider a bathtub. If you sit in a bathtub, and slide your torso backwards and forwards, you can soon get a wave running the length of the tub. As you keep adding energy to that wave, it can get larger and stronger. With a very small movement, you can soon get a force that will not only shoot water by the bucketload out of your tub, but can knock many people ass over teakettle. And you don’t have to lift, carry, or throw anything. In the same way, one person slamming his or her shoulder into your chest is no great cause for concern, but several dozen people gently leaning into your chest is suddenly a crisis.
In the same way, the already packed confines of those two pens groaned with compression when another couple of thousand people tried to push their way in. There was a sudden feeling that the air was heavy and hot, like there was a blanket of steam over everyone. Some of the younger girls began to scream, and some of the younger lads tried to climb onto the shoulders of anyone bigger or taller in an effort to rise above the suffocating haze. Those near the pitch began to scream at police to do something: open the doors at the front, or cut down some of the fence walls. Outside the pens, those who stood in the empty side pens began to scream at police to take some form of action. One police response is notable: “Shut your fucking prattle.”
The later inquest said that those who were killed suffered from crush asphyxia, and that their brains, starved of oxygen, had basically shut down, leaving their bodies to slowly die for minutes afterwards. The deaths were supposed to be quick, painless, and without any significant trauma. The reality was more like the sequence from the animated film “Watership Down”. Lungs aching for air, muscles cramping with lactic acid, eyes unnaturally wide, the victims fought for their lives every last second, but as their skin grew blue and their eyes grew red, their panic exploded in a shower of pain and a cataclysm of broken blood vessels, surging stomachs, and spasms in every part of their bodies.
Some escaped. Some of those even lived. The brave Forest and Liverpool fans who flooded onto the pitch, grabbed the advertising boards and began to use them as stretchers were heroes. Duckenfield was now positively paralyzed with indecision. He couldn’t find an option which would allow him to deny responsibility for anything. His mind raced as he thought of ways of cancelling the match, cutting down fences, making appropriate announcements over the tannoy… what was the best way for him to avoid being noticed? The decision was taken from him. Some police officers began to act independently, carrying fans, trying to administer first aid, attempting to bring down the fences of the pens. One ambulance even managed to get onto the pitch. In the absence of Duckenfield’s decisions, everything was still being treated as he had last commanded. And his last commands indicated that there was crowd violence, and therefore no medical personnel were to be allowed near the pitch until police had calmed the situation.
One lad, volunteering for St. John’s Ambulance for the first time, ran about madly, trying to be helpful, but his first aid bag was empty - being only a demonstrator for his first experience. Without any paramedics, doctors, ambulances, or medical equipment, people began to die in the most tortuously slow way possible - feeling their muscles twitch and their esophagus dilate, but having no air enter their lungs. For minutes upon minutes. One man desperately sucked vomit from his daughter’s windpipe to clear her airways. Nearby, his other daughter turned an awful purplish-blue and expired.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever there is a space, something will fill it, or try damnably hard to do so. When a human diaphragm and the other pulmonary muscles are engaged in trying to draw air into the lungs, and there is none to be drawn, all of that muscle tension creates a vacuum. When the levels of panic and desperation in the human body reach a peak, those muscles are working far too hard to draw air from the nose and mouth, and the force of that suction finally causes something else to give it release. The contents of the stomach are vacuumed out and sucked up the windpipe in an effort to relieve the pressure the lungs and diaphragm are exerting. Her mind exploding with fireworks, and her throat muscles stinging with the effort of trying to swallow and breathe at the same time, Vicki Hicks probably felt her father’s attempts to pull the partially-digested food from her esophagus, but that would only have brought her scant relief as she died. Her sister Sarah died nearby, trapped in a mind that was self-destructing from lack of oxygen, and left alone in a state of panic and fear from which she would never escape.
The remaining events of the day, evening and night are too horrid and exhausting to list. Duckenfield, having recovered from his mental paralysis, and beginning to get a grasp on the enormity of the catastrophe, immediately began to cover his tracks. In his mind, he was already rehearsing excuses. In reality, he was trying to suborn the justice system under the guise of protecting the good name of the police service. The closed circuit videotapes of the pens diappeared from police lock-up. Any recordings or writings made by police officers on the day were to be submitted for inspection and revision. In the meantime, his police began asking weeping parents and siblings to identify their loved one from a wall of 95 photographs.
Most of them were young. A few were middle-aged, and less than a handful were elderly. They ranged from 14 to 62 years old and were both male and female. Trying to pick a loved one out of such a morbid catalogue of death was an exercise in plunging the depths of human misery. Meanwhile, Duckenfield’s police had found a new tack - they would blame the whole disaster on the fans. Finding the nearest available stereotype, and trying his damndest to avoid blame, Duckenfield fixed upon the idea that drunk, ticketless fans arriving late had forced him to open the gate. Therefore, they had made the decision and not he, and therefore the responsibility could not be said to lie with him. A wonderful alibi for a cowardly bureaucrat. Fans were to blame. It was their fault.
Bereaved families were asked if their loved ones had bought a ticket, or had had a drink prior to the match. Bodies of the dead weren’t allowed to be taken to mortuaries or hospitals until after blood-alcohol tests were run on them. The results came back resoundingly. 14 to 17 year old boys and girls didn’t drink, and even the older casualties who fancied a pint hadn’t had much opportunity by 2 PM. The results of the tests were hushed up until further review could be conducted. In other words, Duckenfield was grasping at straws. It was around this time, when people were just beginning to realize that almost a hundred people were dead as a result of attending an ill-organized football match, that Duckenfield’s police began to leak stories to the media.
In the records of Greek history, a man who was said to have defiled one of the sacred shrines of the Gods was mentioned by a historian. But, noted the historian, although I know his name, I shall not mention it here. And so his punishment was set: his identity would be forgotten by future generations. And so it has been. In the tradition of such august history, I set the newspaper which printed every lie it could find about the tragedy at Hillsborough. I know its name, but I will not print it here. May future generations learn the lesson of hideously irresponsible journalism without knowing the name of the tabloid rag that caused so much pain.
Liverpool fans were alleged to have urinated on the dead and dying, to have picked the pockets of the dead, and to chant sexually lurid taunts at the dead bodies of the girls who were being carried away. How such accounts could possibly be treated with seriousness is incredible. The fans supposedly urinating on their fallen fellows were frantically carrying away the wounded on stretchers or trying to apply CPR. The two thousand police on duty didn’t arrest or even detain a single person on suspicion of any crime, let alone pickpocketing. And as for chanting explicit or demeaning sexual slogans… I challenge anyone to make any such remarks around any group of Liverpool fans - drunk, sober, young, old, male, female. As has been mentioned, Liverpool fans are not the sort of yobbos who chant the numbers from one to thirty-nine, or sing “Ice on the Runway”, and never shall be. Heysel had put paid to that sort of nonsense four years earlier.
The families of the dead were offered funeral expenses for their losses. No official apologies or acceptance of blame or responsibility has ever been taken. David Duckenfield retired for medical reasons and was accorded his full pension, in addition to immunity against any prosecution against him or his position whilst he was Chief Superintendant.
Liverpool has only now begun to recover from the blow of Hillsborough. The city is invigorated with a host of new EU projects, the restoration of the Albert Docks, and a number of other civil projects designed to beautify and enlighten the city. The club has finally turned a corner. After Hillsborough, the players and managers were directed to be available and on hand to those who suffered the results of the disaster. Player after player burst into tears, and finally player-manager Kenny Dalglish couldn’t take it any more. His son had been at the other end of the stadium, and was one ticket away from death. Shattered, he left the club to Graeme Souness, a former Liverpool player of hard midfield tendencies and fluffy permed-hair tendencies. And a ridiculous 1970s porn-star-style moustache.
And now? After Souness’ horrid reign, in which he drove the club to a second exile from Europe, another bootroom boy took the helm. Roy Evans, everyone’s favourite counsellor and the generally most likable and genial bloke around the staff was made manager. He created a wonderful array of young talent to replace the deadwood that Souness had used to pack the squad. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the wherewithal to control the young lions he’d unleashed. Steve McManaman, one of the most exciting dribblers and skillful wingers in the world, eventually left for Real Madrid. Robbie Fowler, known affectionately as “God” for the numerous times his divine intervention saved the club, eventually had to leave for Leeds United. Jamie Redknapp, the inspirational midfield general whose career was plagued by injuries, eventually left for Tottenham Hotspurs.
And yet, after all these years, it was a Frenchman who taught secondary school in Liverpool when he was younger who had arisen to become the new Shankly. Gerard Houllier, technical advisor to the World Cup-winning French squad in 1998, quietly and firmly established himself as the gaffer. In the 2001-2002 season, his team accumulated five trophies - the League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, the Charity Shield, and the European Super Cup. His young prodigies and shrewd foreign purchases have allowed him the luxury of being able to survive a life-threatening illness, and being able to spend six months recovering while his capable assistants ran the club for him. The sight of the man walking again was inspirational.
And what now? The team is doing well, though not spectacularly. The city is alive, though strangely conserved. And the last match played at Anfield showed that no one has forgotten the 96 that died, nor forgotten that the issue is neither resolved nor concluded. Of course, that last match involved the national team against Paraguay, and it is hoped that the minute’s silence that was observed stands for the entire nation.
And my desktop? It’s always been untidy. I’m a very untidy person. I can’t always dismiss things that aren’t of immediate use as being irrelevant. But whenever I see “Go Back” and “Remember”, I don’t think of the stupid science-fiction game to whch they ought to relate, but rather those memories that should always be kept with me in order to remind myself of who I am and what I do. Clicking on the little icons may not do anything computer-wise, but the fact that they are still around stimulates me to understand that I am a part of a greater whole. I know that while I keep the history alive in my head, I shall never walk alone. I have 96 friends. 15th April is one of the things that brings us together, and I would be a fool to forsake such comrades for trivial interests. Like tidying my desktop.
But instead, I neither feel the urge for self-chastisement, nor the joviality which comes from a self-consciously anachronistic personality. Perhaps on another day, I might recognize the humour in not tidying up the old shortcuts on my desktop, but today, they just seem like poignant noises. In much the same way that seasoned professional doctors and lawyers still twitch when they hear the sound of a school period bell or buzzer, I am particularly susceptible to statements of meaning on this day. Now, looking at the little icons, I recognize that clicking on them will do nothing at all, since the program to which they were attached has long been deleted. However, it’s April 15th. That changes everything.
Thirteen years ago, everything changed on a bright and sunny April 15th. We didn’t know it then, but it was the apex, the zenith of an era - the last great display of the great Liverpool sides of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Those of us who followed the team were spoiled. We had seen a team conquer Europe four times in seven years, crush domestic opposition as though they were noisome insects, and collect trophies at a rate never equalled, before or after. Manchester United gave it a good run back in the ‘90s, but there really is no comparison. Liverpool Football Club in those days was a titan striding amongst gnats. They played hard in every competition, two or three matches a week, in the days before teams had thirty men to a squad and were allowed to make three substitutions a game. FA Cup, League Cup, League, Champions’ Cup - week in, week out, Liverpool were in it, and more often than not, celebrating afterwards.
The League Cup, brought in as a new competition to allow the old third and fourth division teams another shot at a Cup, became almost the exclusive property of Merseyside, with Liverpool winning it about every other year, and Everton managing to fill in the cracks whenever the titans lapsed. The Champions’ Cup (for that is what it was back then) was not only a private reserve for those who had conquered their domestic league, but had to endure a gruelling set of home-and-away knockout rounds to progress in the competition. Now, an English team only needs to finish in the top four in the Premiership, and then scrape their way through two group stages where they can theoretically still go despite losing twice to the same team. Not to name names here, but in the past year, Arsenal and Manchester United both lost all of their group-stage matches to Deportivo La Coruna. La Coruna then fielded an understrength team in their last group match (against Germans Bayer Leverkusen) to deliberately dump Arsenal from the competition, only for their lackadaisical tactics to backfire and their players to stagger and lose their place to the team they had previously embarrassed twice already - Manchester United.
Not to sound overly nostalgic or too full of the mythology of the past to appreciate the quality of the present, but winning the big prize in Europe was a bigger deal back then. And Liverpool did it often. In between doubles and trebles every year, they still managed to win accolades for fair play and good sportsmanship. Then came Heysel.
Heysel was the first sign that the empire was in decay. Bill Shankly was the coach, the manager, the gaffer that had taken the team in 1958 and crafted a well-oiled machine dedicated to winning things. He had taken a team in decline and foundering in a lower division, brought it up to the top-flight, and then began to swell the confines of the trophy room. First came the titles, then the Cups began to follow. By 1973, Liverpool had won their first UEFA Cup (doing a double by also winning the championship that year), and Shankly had already set up his own systems for training, scouting, and developing players as well as future managers. Like a mediaeval monarch, he set up the conditions for his successor -and what he used was his own creation and consequent Anfield tradition: The Bootroom.
Players generally feared the bootroom. Shankly and his team of coaches and trainers would stand about amidst the racks of uncleaned boots with a couple of bottles of Bell’s Scotch Whiskey and would discuss the game. Occasionally, a player was called to the bootroom. Generally, this meant that the player was being called to account for some form of poor performance or underachievement on the pitch. And specifically, this meant that five or six men who knew football more intimately than any of the players knew their own wives would incisively interrogate them until they realized the error of their ways. Aside from the potential discomforts of any player, the bootroom also provided the perfect grooming-ground for any future manager. Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Roy Evans - all future managers - sprang from the bootroom staff.
When Shankly retired, Bob Paisley took over the management of the club. He quickly became England’s most successful club manager of all time, winning 13 major trophies in 8 seasons. Not only did Liverpool become the most dominant team of their time, they became the flagship for English clubs setting off for Europe. While Liverpool spread their wings of dominance, fledgling teams such as Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest grew to maturity, challenged and won the most prestigious cup in Europe. The Champions’ Cup became an English hallmark, and every year, teams anxiously examined the fixture lists to see when the Mersey giants would thunder through their vicinity. Brian Clough and his exceptional Nottingham Forest team fooled no-one. They were good. They were great. But only when compared with the Red Machine from Liverpool.
After Paisley’s short and benign reign, Joe Fagan relutantly took the throne which now seemed doubly vacant since Shankly’s death in 1981. The Bootroom management seemed older, more world-weary than in the days when Shankly still stalked the training ground. Fagan was particularly susceptible to this malaise. Like Tolkien’s Elves, he seemed to want to join his illustrious predecessors on The Undying Shores rather than suffer further upon the battle-grounds of Middle Earth. In his last year as manager, perhaps the last year that things could be perceived as “being the same”, tired, old and kind, Joe ran face first into Heysel.
He had already announced his retirement. He was on the way out, and his successor was the only player who could hold his own in the bootroom - a cold and sardonic Glaswegian named Kenny Dalglish. Previously, both Paisley and Fagan had tried to summon the short-spoken captain to the bootroom for some form of disciplinary measure, and been astonished to find that the Scotsman could do more than defend himself. He could discuss in detail every movement, every motivation, and every mistake made on the pitch in the previous 90 minutes without batting an eyelid. He knew the game, and Fagan had never seen such a devoted force of will or dedicated spirit, save perhaps in the departed Shankly.
In that year, spanning the autumn and winter of 1984 and reaching into the spring of 1985, things went far, far worse than dear old Joe Fagan could have imagined.
To dispense with the trivialities quickly, Liverpool lost. Quite a bit. Despite winning the League Cup four years in a row, they dropped out in a forgettable match. Having won the three previous league championships, they dropped that trophy to their Merseyside neighbours. They lost the chance to compete in the FA Cup Final by losing in the semi-finals. And despite being both defending champions of the European Champions’ Cup and being champions of England three times previously, they not only lost that Cup, but lost the ability to compete in Europe for six years. After twenty-one years of being an ever-present European power, they had simply dropped off the international map.
What happened? Where human frailties cause flaws in ideals, there is always a loss for words. Heysel happened. For years, hooliganism had been the bane of the English game. Through the previous twenty years, it was always seen as a peculiar feature of urban Englishmen that their young and unemployed men would seek to vent their dissatisfaction and feelings of disenfranchisement at football matches with violence. Whether it was the romance of the gangsterism of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the influx of immigration so colourfully declared by Enoch Powell, the rise of a feeling of tribalism in an increasingly segmented and compartmentalized world, or the growing feeling that populism was dead and that violence was the only way to make a statement in a world without individuals, people in England began to misbehave at football matches. Anthony Burgess banned the movie based on his own book “A Clockwork Orange” in England because he thought that it had too much of an English quality to it. And so it proved. Ordinary, tea-drinking, crumpet-munching Englishmen could turn into rabid monsters given a couple of factors: mobs and incentive. Basically, that is to say that coal is quite sedate and manageable unless turned into aerial dust and exposed to an open flame.
In the early eighties, watching football had given a lot of people both cause and opportunity to perpetrate mischief, and the fact that Liverpool perennially had fixtures on the continent made them wonderful vehicles to perpetrate such mischief abroad. At Chelsea, people had begun to arrive at matches armed with fistfuls of 25 gram darts to throw at stands of opposing supporters or police stewards. Leeds had become a haven for race violence best encapsulated by the graffito “Hitler was a Leeds Fan”. Long-running battles along the canal became stories of legend rivalling Bannockburn or Marathon as Liverpool fans escaped the wrath of Mancunians. In Scotland, the Glaswegian derby was beginning to claim lives for no better reason than one lad was Catholic rather than Protestant. Into this cauldron of hate and dissatisfaction came the European Champions’ Cup match between Liverpool and Juventus of Turin.
Scenes of horror, disgust, and disbelief would do very little to reassure people that the authorities in control have any idea of how to deal with surgung masses of humanity. What can be said of Heysel is best said in quick verbal flashes.
The players become concerned during the pre-match warm-up as they ran around the pitch. One player asks what the fans are eating in order to throw such hard stuff at them. The response: “They’re throwing the bloody stadium at us.” The concrete is so old and decayed that it has begun to disintegrate.
Darts are thrown from a section designated for “neutrals”. Fans react with anger.
Police are unable to control movement of fans, take to clubbing and tear-gassing them.
A group of Juventus fans are cowering in the lee of a wall when the cement wall collapses on them. The screams freeze people within hearing distance like an icy gust of wind.
The hooligans pretending to be Liverpool fans immediately begin fleeing from their side of the collapsed wall. They’d wanted blood, but they hadn’t realized what the devil had given them in their bargain. Several are later caught and incarcerated by the Belgian Police with the help of closed-circuit cameras.
The Belgian Police, meanwhile, while hearing of the “disturbances”, decide that what they really need to do at the moment is to practice their drills, and promptly move out to the middle of the field, declaring the game to be postponed, and march about in formation for 20 minutes.
A little 8 year-old boy begins to cry. His father, laid face-up on the hood of a car in front of him, has just vomited up his intestines and died. The boy can’t think of anything to tell his mother. A Liverpool fan and his son help the young lad, despite the difficulties of language.
The tales of tragedy and sorrow continue, but what purpose would they serve? Thirty-nine people died at Heysel. Ever since, Liverpool have held a soft reverence for the northern Italian club. On the other hand, there have always been crowds in England and elsewhere all too eager to sing “Ice on the Runway” in a morbid celebration of the Munich Air Disaster of 1958 which claimed most of a Manchester United team who may have risen to become heroes. Such crowds are to be despised with more venom than is reserved for Windows 95. The cruelty of some crowds are never to be underestimated. Some opposing fans visiting the Stadio Della Alpi in Torino were known for chanting the numbers one through thirty-nine, a grisly chant perhaps vaguely reminiscent of the taunting given to the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ron Hextall by the New York Rangers fans in the 1980s. He was told to “Buy a Porsche” in an obscene reference to the Flyers’ previous goalie who had died in a car crash whilst driving his Porsche.
Joe Fagan retires in tears. Kenny Dalglish reluctantly takes the reins of the world’s most successful club, and tries to steer it past the catastrophe of Heysel. The club begins to recover, despite being banned from European competition for six years, with Dalglish becoming the first player-manager to claim an FA Cup and a League Championship in the same year. The board begin to find ways of curbing crowd violence, like closed-circuit television cameras and increased police and stadium steward presences. People begin to think that life will continue, that things would get better, and that the wounds and hurts of Heysel would be respectfully allowed closure and resolution. Then came 15th April, 1989.
The Heysel disaster was tragic, but the fact remains that the 39 victims were all Italian supporters of Juve. The people of Liverpool felt the shame, sadness and anger about their involvement - almost complicity - in the terrible events of the day. But Heysel is in Belgium, and the victims of the disaster were Italian. There was distance and space which fans and club could use to insulate themselves from the horrible nature of the tragedy. There was no such insulation from Hillsborough.
It had all the makings of a classic match. Nottingham Forest, having already won the European Cup twice, faced Liverpool, the four-time champs in an FA Cup Semi-Final showdown that looked to determine the relative fates of both clubs. It did, but not in any way the players or managers could have foreseen. The Football Association had chosen , as was the tradition, to have the match played at a neutral venue. They chose Sheffield, South Yorkshire as the city, and Hillsborough as the stadium. Fears that the police crews there were inexperienced, and that the stadium had actually been denied licensing for such events by the city council were pooh-poohed. In retrospect, they were just some of the small details that added to a catalogue of critical blunders that led conclusively to the worst possible result, like snowflakes before an avalanche.
The day was beautiful. Bright, sunny, and with a faint, tingling breeze, it seemed to echo the promise of the most sparkling and exhilarating game of the season. Liverpool fans, though, began to become concerned at a few things. Although they were allocated almost half of the seats in the stadium, they were all forced to enter through the narrow Leppings Lane entrance, while Forest fans and neutrals enjoyed the luxury of all the other entrances. The police had not begun organizing queues or cordons for the line-ups at the turnstiles. Worry and hesitation had already begun to creep into people’s minds as they were forced to wait outside the stadium, seemingly interminably while the turnstiles slowly let one fan after the next to trickle in, before searching and taking the ticket from the fan. The clock ticked by. After what seemed like an eternity, the match began to start. The announcer’s voice began to boom over the tannoy to list the starting line-ups and the commercial sponsors for the event. The teeming crowds outside began to shout in annoyance and frustration.
Meanwhile, in the police control-room, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield supervised an array of television monitors and communications equipment. The decision to filter thousands of Liverpool fans through such a tiny entrance to the stadium concourse had not yet begun to dawn on him as being somewhat unrealistic. He was a man given to following procedure and what he was doing was, according to what his experience and his training had taught him, correct. Shouts of alarm over the police radio that the crowds were beginning to press against the turnstiles, and that there was not enough police staff in the area to cope with the crush of humanity. Of the two thousand cops on duty, there weren’t enough present at the most crucial point of entry into the stadium.
Duckenfield panicked. Over the crackly walkie-talkie static, he heard the word that terrified him: death. He wanted to serve out his term with the police as quietly and as innocuously as possible before retiring to a quiet life with a full pension. There was no desire for drama, conflict, or heroism. On the contrary, he did exactly as he was told so that there would be no opportunity for anyone to identify him as the point of origin for any mistake or controversy. As soon as he heard that the situation outside Leppings Lane turnstiles was becoming dangerous, he began to tremble with fear, but when a police officer mentioned the possibility of death, he saw his quiet existence threatened. A death in the crowd might involve him in an inquiry, or worse, an investigation. His control of procedure left his grasp, and he panicked, ordering one of the large metal exit gates to be opened to let in the influx of Liverpool spectators, and ease the pressure on the turnstiles.
The procedure that Duckenfeld failed to follow was, in the words of the later Taylor Report “a blunder of the first magnitude”. Although he opened the gate, he forgot to block off the tunnel directly in front of the gate which led down to the terraces. All ticketing for that area of the terraces were misleadingly printed, leading everyone to believe that their area was directly ahead, through the open tunnel. There were, in fact, terraces off to the side, but they could only be reached by rather circuitously navigating that area of the concourse. The police who were ordered to open the gate could only look at a few tickets, but they saw what was printed, shrugged, and gestured for everyone to go down the tunnel.
The tunnel led to two penned-in areas. These areas were designed to control crowd violence and prevent potential hooligans from leaping onto the pitch. With those purposes in mind, they were constructed much like corrals for wild animals: chain-link mesh, barbed wire, and bars that overtopped the fence that tilted inward, to prevent anyone climbing over. There were also large metal rails set up horizontally across the pens to prevent any sudden crushes down toward the pitch. By the time that Duckenfield ordered the exit gate to be opened, both pens were completely packed, with people already feeling the discomfort of overcrowding. Then the thousands that flowed in were pointed down the tunnel, and rushed joyfully to see the match from which they’d been previously barred by the limitations of the turnstiles, sighed with relief at getting out of the confines of the surge to get in, and eagerly chased at the chance to see the game already in progress.
Take a full bucket of water. It’s heavy, clumsy to move about, and tends to slosh about a bit. It takes a lot of effort to throw that whole bucket at another person, get them with the full impact, and after that, make a significant effect. Most people can quite easily suffer a splash like that while standing on one foot and not fall over. Now consider a bathtub. If you sit in a bathtub, and slide your torso backwards and forwards, you can soon get a wave running the length of the tub. As you keep adding energy to that wave, it can get larger and stronger. With a very small movement, you can soon get a force that will not only shoot water by the bucketload out of your tub, but can knock many people ass over teakettle. And you don’t have to lift, carry, or throw anything. In the same way, one person slamming his or her shoulder into your chest is no great cause for concern, but several dozen people gently leaning into your chest is suddenly a crisis.
In the same way, the already packed confines of those two pens groaned with compression when another couple of thousand people tried to push their way in. There was a sudden feeling that the air was heavy and hot, like there was a blanket of steam over everyone. Some of the younger girls began to scream, and some of the younger lads tried to climb onto the shoulders of anyone bigger or taller in an effort to rise above the suffocating haze. Those near the pitch began to scream at police to do something: open the doors at the front, or cut down some of the fence walls. Outside the pens, those who stood in the empty side pens began to scream at police to take some form of action. One police response is notable: “Shut your fucking prattle.”
The later inquest said that those who were killed suffered from crush asphyxia, and that their brains, starved of oxygen, had basically shut down, leaving their bodies to slowly die for minutes afterwards. The deaths were supposed to be quick, painless, and without any significant trauma. The reality was more like the sequence from the animated film “Watership Down”. Lungs aching for air, muscles cramping with lactic acid, eyes unnaturally wide, the victims fought for their lives every last second, but as their skin grew blue and their eyes grew red, their panic exploded in a shower of pain and a cataclysm of broken blood vessels, surging stomachs, and spasms in every part of their bodies.
Some escaped. Some of those even lived. The brave Forest and Liverpool fans who flooded onto the pitch, grabbed the advertising boards and began to use them as stretchers were heroes. Duckenfield was now positively paralyzed with indecision. He couldn’t find an option which would allow him to deny responsibility for anything. His mind raced as he thought of ways of cancelling the match, cutting down fences, making appropriate announcements over the tannoy… what was the best way for him to avoid being noticed? The decision was taken from him. Some police officers began to act independently, carrying fans, trying to administer first aid, attempting to bring down the fences of the pens. One ambulance even managed to get onto the pitch. In the absence of Duckenfield’s decisions, everything was still being treated as he had last commanded. And his last commands indicated that there was crowd violence, and therefore no medical personnel were to be allowed near the pitch until police had calmed the situation.
One lad, volunteering for St. John’s Ambulance for the first time, ran about madly, trying to be helpful, but his first aid bag was empty - being only a demonstrator for his first experience. Without any paramedics, doctors, ambulances, or medical equipment, people began to die in the most tortuously slow way possible - feeling their muscles twitch and their esophagus dilate, but having no air enter their lungs. For minutes upon minutes. One man desperately sucked vomit from his daughter’s windpipe to clear her airways. Nearby, his other daughter turned an awful purplish-blue and expired.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever there is a space, something will fill it, or try damnably hard to do so. When a human diaphragm and the other pulmonary muscles are engaged in trying to draw air into the lungs, and there is none to be drawn, all of that muscle tension creates a vacuum. When the levels of panic and desperation in the human body reach a peak, those muscles are working far too hard to draw air from the nose and mouth, and the force of that suction finally causes something else to give it release. The contents of the stomach are vacuumed out and sucked up the windpipe in an effort to relieve the pressure the lungs and diaphragm are exerting. Her mind exploding with fireworks, and her throat muscles stinging with the effort of trying to swallow and breathe at the same time, Vicki Hicks probably felt her father’s attempts to pull the partially-digested food from her esophagus, but that would only have brought her scant relief as she died. Her sister Sarah died nearby, trapped in a mind that was self-destructing from lack of oxygen, and left alone in a state of panic and fear from which she would never escape.
The remaining events of the day, evening and night are too horrid and exhausting to list. Duckenfield, having recovered from his mental paralysis, and beginning to get a grasp on the enormity of the catastrophe, immediately began to cover his tracks. In his mind, he was already rehearsing excuses. In reality, he was trying to suborn the justice system under the guise of protecting the good name of the police service. The closed circuit videotapes of the pens diappeared from police lock-up. Any recordings or writings made by police officers on the day were to be submitted for inspection and revision. In the meantime, his police began asking weeping parents and siblings to identify their loved one from a wall of 95 photographs.
Most of them were young. A few were middle-aged, and less than a handful were elderly. They ranged from 14 to 62 years old and were both male and female. Trying to pick a loved one out of such a morbid catalogue of death was an exercise in plunging the depths of human misery. Meanwhile, Duckenfield’s police had found a new tack - they would blame the whole disaster on the fans. Finding the nearest available stereotype, and trying his damndest to avoid blame, Duckenfield fixed upon the idea that drunk, ticketless fans arriving late had forced him to open the gate. Therefore, they had made the decision and not he, and therefore the responsibility could not be said to lie with him. A wonderful alibi for a cowardly bureaucrat. Fans were to blame. It was their fault.
Bereaved families were asked if their loved ones had bought a ticket, or had had a drink prior to the match. Bodies of the dead weren’t allowed to be taken to mortuaries or hospitals until after blood-alcohol tests were run on them. The results came back resoundingly. 14 to 17 year old boys and girls didn’t drink, and even the older casualties who fancied a pint hadn’t had much opportunity by 2 PM. The results of the tests were hushed up until further review could be conducted. In other words, Duckenfield was grasping at straws. It was around this time, when people were just beginning to realize that almost a hundred people were dead as a result of attending an ill-organized football match, that Duckenfield’s police began to leak stories to the media.
In the records of Greek history, a man who was said to have defiled one of the sacred shrines of the Gods was mentioned by a historian. But, noted the historian, although I know his name, I shall not mention it here. And so his punishment was set: his identity would be forgotten by future generations. And so it has been. In the tradition of such august history, I set the newspaper which printed every lie it could find about the tragedy at Hillsborough. I know its name, but I will not print it here. May future generations learn the lesson of hideously irresponsible journalism without knowing the name of the tabloid rag that caused so much pain.
Liverpool fans were alleged to have urinated on the dead and dying, to have picked the pockets of the dead, and to chant sexually lurid taunts at the dead bodies of the girls who were being carried away. How such accounts could possibly be treated with seriousness is incredible. The fans supposedly urinating on their fallen fellows were frantically carrying away the wounded on stretchers or trying to apply CPR. The two thousand police on duty didn’t arrest or even detain a single person on suspicion of any crime, let alone pickpocketing. And as for chanting explicit or demeaning sexual slogans… I challenge anyone to make any such remarks around any group of Liverpool fans - drunk, sober, young, old, male, female. As has been mentioned, Liverpool fans are not the sort of yobbos who chant the numbers from one to thirty-nine, or sing “Ice on the Runway”, and never shall be. Heysel had put paid to that sort of nonsense four years earlier.
The families of the dead were offered funeral expenses for their losses. No official apologies or acceptance of blame or responsibility has ever been taken. David Duckenfield retired for medical reasons and was accorded his full pension, in addition to immunity against any prosecution against him or his position whilst he was Chief Superintendant.
Liverpool has only now begun to recover from the blow of Hillsborough. The city is invigorated with a host of new EU projects, the restoration of the Albert Docks, and a number of other civil projects designed to beautify and enlighten the city. The club has finally turned a corner. After Hillsborough, the players and managers were directed to be available and on hand to those who suffered the results of the disaster. Player after player burst into tears, and finally player-manager Kenny Dalglish couldn’t take it any more. His son had been at the other end of the stadium, and was one ticket away from death. Shattered, he left the club to Graeme Souness, a former Liverpool player of hard midfield tendencies and fluffy permed-hair tendencies. And a ridiculous 1970s porn-star-style moustache.
And now? After Souness’ horrid reign, in which he drove the club to a second exile from Europe, another bootroom boy took the helm. Roy Evans, everyone’s favourite counsellor and the generally most likable and genial bloke around the staff was made manager. He created a wonderful array of young talent to replace the deadwood that Souness had used to pack the squad. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the wherewithal to control the young lions he’d unleashed. Steve McManaman, one of the most exciting dribblers and skillful wingers in the world, eventually left for Real Madrid. Robbie Fowler, known affectionately as “God” for the numerous times his divine intervention saved the club, eventually had to leave for Leeds United. Jamie Redknapp, the inspirational midfield general whose career was plagued by injuries, eventually left for Tottenham Hotspurs.
And yet, after all these years, it was a Frenchman who taught secondary school in Liverpool when he was younger who had arisen to become the new Shankly. Gerard Houllier, technical advisor to the World Cup-winning French squad in 1998, quietly and firmly established himself as the gaffer. In the 2001-2002 season, his team accumulated five trophies - the League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, the Charity Shield, and the European Super Cup. His young prodigies and shrewd foreign purchases have allowed him the luxury of being able to survive a life-threatening illness, and being able to spend six months recovering while his capable assistants ran the club for him. The sight of the man walking again was inspirational.
And what now? The team is doing well, though not spectacularly. The city is alive, though strangely conserved. And the last match played at Anfield showed that no one has forgotten the 96 that died, nor forgotten that the issue is neither resolved nor concluded. Of course, that last match involved the national team against Paraguay, and it is hoped that the minute’s silence that was observed stands for the entire nation.
And my desktop? It’s always been untidy. I’m a very untidy person. I can’t always dismiss things that aren’t of immediate use as being irrelevant. But whenever I see “Go Back” and “Remember”, I don’t think of the stupid science-fiction game to whch they ought to relate, but rather those memories that should always be kept with me in order to remind myself of who I am and what I do. Clicking on the little icons may not do anything computer-wise, but the fact that they are still around stimulates me to understand that I am a part of a greater whole. I know that while I keep the history alive in my head, I shall never walk alone. I have 96 friends. 15th April is one of the things that brings us together, and I would be a fool to forsake such comrades for trivial interests. Like tidying my desktop.
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