I have it on unimpeachable authority. Apparently, watching a spectacular goal can make fans doubt their identity, sexual and possibly any other.
The moment the ball hits the net, they start asking themselves probing questions, such as “Who am I?”, “What am I?” and, most worrying, “Am I a man or a woman?”
This last one comes as a particular surprise. It’s true that female football fans often acquire male traits. They consume gallons of lager before the match, swear in a steady torrent throughout it and then join their men in brawling with the other team’s fans or anyone else who happens to be passing by.
But transition in the other direction isn’t something I’ve ever observed. The men don’t suddenly develop an all-consuming interest in interior decoration, flowers and fluffy kittens. In fact, they do all the things their women do, but more so.
Still, when a major conservative paper breaks a story, it has to be taken seriously. But judge for yourself – here’s a title in yesterday’s Mail:
“Premier League footballer scores solo goal during Beta Squad charity match with viewers left divided over their identity”
You may dispute my inference from the title, but I don’t see how else that statement could be interpreted. It’s only after I read the lead paragraph that I became aware of another possibility. The footballer in question was wearing a mask, which is why the viewers weren’t sure who he was.
My confusion was caused by yet another example of linguistic vandalism, which is to me perhaps the most emetic aspect of modernity. (All my readers are educated people but, if by chance some aren’t, ‘emetic’ means ‘puke-making’.) The other day I cited quite a few examples of such ideological vandalism without delving too deep into its causes.
I did mention the destruction of Britain’s secondary education perpetrated by Leftist barbarians with the silent acquiescence of the other side. However, this cause-effect business calls for more scrutiny. For the urge to bowdlerise the greatest European language (well, Indo-European for the pedants among you) is a child of many fathers.
Some of the parents are of the purely ideological persuasion. The title above illustrates the purge of the masculine personal pronoun from the English language on the assumption that women and members of the other 70-odd sexes would be mortally offended by that objectionable word.
The obvious point to make here is that no one in his right mind would really be offended if a Premier League player’s sex were revealed by his DNA-given pronoun. After all, every one of the League’s 601 players is male.
However, activist haters of our civilisation feel duty-bound to feign offence, and they have the clout to demand that the silent and indifferent majority follow suit. The two groups have different characteristics, but there are a couple they do share.
First, they are both fundamentally dishonest in their insistence on the primacy of ideology over facts. Second, they have no taste.
The second is worse than the first, because ideologies come and go, but bad taste does its destructive work in perpetuity. I’d suggest that, however fervent his commitment to the underlying ideology, no one endowed with a modicum of taste could ever write the cited title. His heart might demand it, his mind might second the motion, but his fingers would simply refuse to type that line.
Aesthetic considerations matter more than political ones because it’s aesthetics and not politics that defines civilisations. They continue to be remembered for their writers, philosophers, architects, artists and musicians long after their politicians are forgotten.
People who love Plato may not even know the names of, say, Meletus or Anytus who prosecuted Socrates. Bach’s music defines his epoch, and few people remember the margraves and Electors who were his patrons. The Renaissance was an artistic movement that gave its name to every aspect of an era.
Our civilisation was at its peak when the hierarchies of wealth, political power and taste were one and the same. They have since gone their separate ways, but the last vestiges of aristocratic culture continue to be an ever-present burr under the modern blanket.
One such is the hierarchy of taste, which rankles even more than the hierarchies of wealth and social status. Hence the ideological insistence on aesthetic equality. You like Schubert, they like pop, I like rap – who’s to say your taste is superior? Different, yes; better, no.
Are you arguing that complex harmonies occupy a higher musical, and therefore civilisational, plane than moronically primitive and repetitive rhythms? Well then, you’re either a toff or someone who pretends to be one. Either way you are a throwback whose place is in the museum or, better still, in the morgue.
This explains why grammatically inept, phonetically demotic and lexically ignorant English stops being a social anchor, becoming instead a social hoist. Ignorant is the new educated, ugly is the new beautiful, and bad English is a good way of pinning the toffs’ ears back.
Whenever one points out yet another awful solecism or a grammatical faux pas, modern barbarians invariably object that language is just a means of communication. That’s an ignorant statement on its own terms: if language were nothing but a means of communication, we wouldn’t have Dante or Shakespeare.
But bad English means bad communication, defeating even the stated purpose for it. For a communication to succeed, both the speaker and the listener must have the same understanding of what words mean. Hence, when Kevin says that a performance was ‘masterful’, I shouldn’t be left wondering whether he does mean ‘masterful’, i.e. forceful, or ‘masterly’, i.e. accomplished.
That’s an example of lexical ignorance creating a break in communications. The Mail title mentioned above is worse: it produces the same effect by ideological grammatical vandalism.
Underpinning all such problems is the universal egalitarianism that modernity prescribes and enforces with everything in its power. That’s why it’s wrong to say that our education system has failed. It hasn’t. If we define success as achieving the desired aim, then British schools represent an unequivocal triumph.
They truncate the cultural pyramid by lopping off the upper half and compressing what’s left into an illiterate and thus malleable mass. Job done, or rather jobs: cultural, aesthetic, social and political.
Just to be on the safe side, however, I should stop watching footie if I want to cling on to what’s left of my flagging masculinity. One never knows: that Mail title could have meant what it said.
In 2021 the NFL ran ads declaring “Football is gay.” I suppose the 2024 equivalent is “Football is trans.” People used to liken the battle for field position to war. Now it’s like removing one’s genitalia? Three cheers for modernity.
My favourite example comes from a local news Web site a few years ago: “The male driver of the car said that they were shaken but uninjured.” The tendentious use of the words “male” and “they” says everything you need to know about the long march through local journalism. Did the “male driver” have passengers in his car? If so, were they injured or killed? There’s no way of knowing.
There’s an obvious connexion between the ongoing loss of the 3rd person singular pronouns with the previous loss of the 2nd person singular pronouns. But we made the mistake of losing “thou” and “thee” because of our increasing politeness: we’re losing “he”, “she”, “her” and “him” because of our increasing madness.