Through Gritted Teeth #44: Alan Pardew
November 16, 2011 § 3 Comments
by Scott Oliver
I’ve often wondered whether ‘irrational hatred’ wasn’t a tautology. Isn’t loathing always ‘irrational’? If not irrational, then unconscious, at least, conscious justifications merely giving our more base, primordial sentiments the ex post facto sheen of legitimacy? Or are there genuinely rational grounds for hatred — the implementation of systematic genocide, say, or the so-called ‘ideological’ call to destroy a supposedly morally degenerate civilization — perfectly sound reasons that can be objectively agreed upon, and consciously assented to by all of ‘right mind’? I have a feeling that to seek to justify hatred in this way makes you, inescapably, as demented as Hitler or Osama bin Laden, and to ‘hate’ them in turn would be an undeniable waste of psychic resources, pity seeming more appropriate. « Read the rest of this entry »
Eye of the lens
March 4, 2011 § 5 Comments
A televised football match contains a hell of a lot of dead time, in which the viewer — as opposed to the attending spectator, who is at least participant in the atmosphere, however insipid it often is — isn’t watching any football. FIFA themselves calculate that a football match has between 48 and 61 minutes of actual football, which is a travesty all of its own, and so the production team have getting on for 45 minutes of non-studio time to fill. Plenty of this is players milling, jostling, chuntering, spitting, limping off, jogging back on, and so on, but there are times when even the narrative grip of such ephemera wanes, and the producer is forced to look to the crowd. « Read the rest of this entry »
