Today,
as a group of folk sat in the canteen at work lightly watching the
Grand Prix qualifying, or quietly reading, or staring into the middle
distance with a look of lobotomised despair, some of the usual
overweight and unpleasantly sweaty subjects came in and took control
of the remote control.
“Mind
if we put the football on?” they asked with a redundant question
mark. They were going to whether we screamed in protest or not.
The
football in question wasn't even a football match, as such. It was
watching three people watching football matches that you aren't
allowed to see, while and endless string of numbers, letters, and
non-existent place names in Scotland scrolled down the screen at the
bottom, and staid static on the left.
This
screen, which looked like a really messy “Frames” style website
from 1997, enthralled this bunch of guys who collectively were less
attractive than Masterblaster from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and
also worse company.
All I
could think about, as more people told more things about footballing
men we couldn't see, was that these men, who are just about if not a
bit below the fabled “living wage” were sat watching, and
discussing, the activities of a bunch of men who earn seventy
thousand pounds a week.
Men who
in a few years will earn more in five years than they will earn in
lifetimes.
And are
they angry? Are they shouting, cursing, launching an uprising,
storming the Bastille? Are heads rolling in blood soaked streets. Are
there hell!
Football
gives these guys something to talk about and something to live for
where otherwise, there would be nothing. Rather than make them mad at
the who spewing iniquity about the whole thing, they shell out chunks
of their low wages to watch them, willing sponsors of their
pacification.
Juvenal.
Panem et Circenses. Keep the hoi polloi amused and distracted, and
make them pay for the pleasure. For while the little men on the
screen kick a round thing around, and there little eyes lap it up and
fill up their heads with it, they will not be kicking down the gates
of the palace, or doing anything at all that might actually improve
their lives.
And I
suppose it gives them a sense of community, of belonging, that I have
never had, so perhaps they are the ones who are correct.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/11/13
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