Before I start on this, I want to say something for the record.
I have no concerns about Sevco signing Joey Barton.
Celtic’s done it’s work, and we’re in good enough shape to handle whatever comes.
This signing is a curiosity though, in particular as to how Sevco can afford it. But more than that, I’m curious about Barton himself and how perverse this decision seems when you consider his very public persona over the last few years.
He’s not a bad footballer. He was the player of the year at Burnley and made the Championship team of the year. That suggests he’s pretty decent, but he’s not a world beater. He’s not an A-Lister no matter what their fans might think.
But Joey Barton is a sign of our times.
In many ways, he’s the absolutely perfect Sevco signing.
That club, after all, has reinvented itself as Rangers, which is pretty spectacular considering they were born a little over four years ago. Yet in that time they’ve claimed its name, its stadium, its lunatic fringe, its sense of entitlement and all the baggage that goes with it.
Impressive. And dangerous.
But that’s for them to sort out.
Barton is good at reinventing himself too. Either that, or he just doesn’t understand himself terribly well, which won’t shock anyone who knows the first thing about him, from his neddish behaviour on the park to the thuggery he was found guilty of off it.
He has real issues remembering which side he’s on too, as was evidenced in his ludicrous attack on his own player whilst at Newcastle.
This guy is trouble, but he’s just their kind of trouble.
This, after all, is the club that’s spent the week so far making excuses for psychotic behaviour.
To me, he’s a perfect Sevco poster boy. He’ll fit right in there.
But he’s a curious case, even without that.
This is the self-proclaimed Celtic supporting, “Irish Republican sympathiser”, anti-Royalist, anti-authoritarian, radical lefty who’s already giving it large with their statement of social and religious superiority and like Judas denying Christ three times he’s rewriting his personal history like Craig Whyte on an Apple Mac.
I bet he’s learning the words of the Loyalist song they call Father’s Advice right now.
Just to fit in, you know?
I wonder how likes that photo that’s hanging in the Sevco dressing room?
Yes, he’s at the right club alright.
Does he realise how far from his so-called principled ideology they actually are?
Of course he does.
Because only a complete idiot would fail to see the meaning of their four letter acronym. Only a deluded fool would believe he can sign up there without getting dirty in the swamp. Principles, be damned. All that stuff he’s been spouting on Twitter, for years? All for nothing, to sign for the establishment team, the one that bows and scrapes to Her Maj and where the only Republicans are of the Donald Trump variety; the poor white trailer trash of hard-core unionism, his new best friends and cheerleaders.
Except, they really won’t be.
They tend to be an unforgiving lot, and when you’re on the record as having said you have certain Provisional sympathies that’s your card well and truly marked in their eyes. They’d be entitled to believe he’s only at Ibrox for financial reasons, paying lip service to the “traditions” just to get paid, and sneering behind their back.
Which is fair play, except that’s not really it either.
See, I know all that radicalism over the years was bollocks.
Barton is like so many others out there in the Twittersphere.
He likes to sound cool, and whether he wants to admit it or not now, Celtic fans are pretty cool as people in this country go.
Republican sympathies?
Man, that’s a bit radical!
That’s a bit different.
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s more interesting than what is on the other side, that Loyalist, unionist, “God and Ulster” cobblers, fronted by shaven headed goons, preaching “freedom from Rome” but tied inexplicably to a hereditary monarchy which is an even bigger anachronism.
There’s nothing quite so conservative and staid and uptight as one of those Glorious Twelfth yahoos in their Halloween costumes and their “Presbyterian values.”
They only half understand themselves, but the parts they do understand are uniformly suffocating; all about loyalty and empire and Queen.
Boring!
On the other side are the outlaws, the outriders of revolution, the people who took an empire on and went toe-to-toe with an occupying force.
That’s cool in anybody’s book.
That’s sexy.
That’s worth talking about at parties.
That’s worth giving yourself some fleeting association with, if what you want is to sound like a pseudo-intellectual.
But deep down, he’s got no real concept of it anymore than he’s got any real concept of the other causes he espouses or thinks he does. The disconnect is pretty clear when you tweet WATP after the chorus of Like A Rolling Stone, which is Dylan’s anthem to the collapse of the egotistical, arrogant, powerful and wealthy.
I can’t believe he doesn’t see the similarity, that he really is as thick as reinforced concerete after all.
Only a moron would fail to see that one belongs nowhere near the other, that the only reason you’d do it is to be ironical … which he wasn’t being.
I mean is he the only person who ever listened to Dylan who heard the line about “Napoleon in rags” and didn’t understand that it’s not a compliment?
Andy Warhol thought that line was about him for years, and woke up every day resenting the Hell out of it.
In fact, it’s quite a fitting analogy for the club he’s joined; the angriest wee guy in the poor house.
But that’s passed him right by.
Barton has signed for a club that’s the precise anti-thesis of everything he’s been blathering about on Twitter for the last couple of years, and I know in part why he’s done it; he’s bought into the Victim Myth. He believes that club was harshly treated after all, that it’s trying to get back on its feet. He’s missed the malice and the vitriol, the smugness, the towering sense of entitlement, all of which belongs at a club that’s pure establishment.
Because in the end, you know, that’s what Barton actually is.
For all he tried his hand at being cool for a wee while, and for his working class background, this guy has been a professional footballer for the whole of his adult life. He’s never known poverty or struggle, although his parents could have taught him about both.
He’s a media personality, who’s spent too long in the bubble.
When it comes right down to it, he, like so many who chose to portray themselves as rebels, he only did so because the establishment he so wanted to be part of wouldn’t have him.
This is as close to it as he’ll get.
Barton’s real psychological tics are pointed towards a supremacist mind-set, and this is the perfect direction of travel for him.
Now he can embrace his inner thug to the fullest, at a club that won’t send him packing for it but where the fans will make him an icon.
It worked for El Hadji Diouf, quite simply the vilest footballer in the history of this land and still some kind of cult hero for fans to whom he gave nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing except leech off the remnants of a dying body.
This body is dying too of course.
Sevco is the last club that can afford a Joey Barton type signing; it’s another example of ego trumping rationality over there, and the money they’re spending on his salary is cash that’s not going elsewhere in the squad.
If Warburton really is upset with how things are going, it’s not hard to see why.