Meet Freddy Heron.
A private man.
Someone who’s Facebook page has been taken offline. Someone who’s Twitter feed is “locked”.
A man who doesn’t want to be known.
Not anymore, at least.
But at some point yesterday a craving for fame seized him the way the desire to set something ablaze occasionally seizes a pyromaniac.
In this case, it was his own life he wanted to burn.
And as stupidity now has the tools at hand to let anyone do his or her worst, he set about the task with vigour.
It takes imagination to compose that. Diseased imagination, to be sure, but dark credit where it’s due, because you have to motivate yourself to do something like that, and he was. You need to want it. And he clearly did.
His desire lasted about as long as it took him to see it live.
Then his bottle crashed.
Of course it did. Because then it sunk in; “I just drove a wrecking ball through my own world in a tweet.”
And yes, it’s that easy.
It’s that simple these days. You really can destroy yourself in less than a minute, by going online and writing a 140 characters or less.
But I’m not going to sit here and write a sympathy piece, mourning this guy.
My sympathy isn’t with this piece of excrement; he deserves what’s coming to him. No, I’m more concerned with Jay’s mum and dad, who take these hits on behalf of their son, who shield him from the swirling unpleasantness out there, from sick scum like this one and their abysmal behaviour.
David Potter kind of beat me to one of the points I wanted to make here, when he posted just in front of me, the question as to why some Hearts feel the need to appropriate the language and ideology of the gutter rats of Ibrox. I understand that some people are so empty in self that they do need role models and something on which to base their own existence … but Jesus, they couldn’t do better than this? What is wrong with these people?
I would have understood back in the days of Rangers; now these people are modelling themselves on the followers of a NewCo, run by a crook, managed by a guy who’s half mad, on supporters so gullible that Craig Whyte was able to breeze into their club for a mere £1, tint the windows green and then liquidate the lot of it. And he got away with it.
The sickness isn’t confined to Glasgow.
The media has had a rare old time this past week commenting on the sins of a handful of guys in Celtic shirts – their coverage extended to Hearts fans appropriating the name of a dead man yesterday – and a ridiculous, manufactured, controversy involving a “bomb threat” from a guy with less Twitter followers than he even had brain cells, but this story is more revealing of what’s wrong in our sport. He’s from the East of Scotland, and so he doesn’t slide neatly into the narrative the press enjoys so much. They had the guy from Sunderland all over their websites for days; what if he’d turned out to have been from Edinburgh? Would they have taken the stories down?
There’s no doubt that there’s an active media agenda being pursued to turn the Celtic support into cartoon villains and if this story had involved one of our fans they would have got a week of coverage out of it.
They are covering it, but I bet no-one will demand that Hearts issue an apology over it.
I am betting no-one seeks to taint their whole support.
For the record, I don’t mind the media covering scum like this. They deserve it. If you’re going to put this kind of filth online where everyone can see it they deserve the scrutiny that goes with it. But I recognise the agenda behind some of last week’s coverage. If they were serious about removing this from our sport they would work to leech the poison out of our game rather than gleefully spreading it around to make us look bad.
In the meantime, there are victims at the end of this disgusting treatment. I am sorry Martin and the family keep having to wade through this stuff. All we can do is highlight those responsible over and over again, and make sure they pay a price for it.
But there’s a wider issue here, of course.
There are people in Scottish football stands – all of them, at every club – who wallow in this stuff to a truly staggering degree.
Their obsessive need to offend, and to moralise as if their own hands were clean, appals every decent fan.
I thought the Lee Rigby song at Celtic Park yesterday was truly ghastly; it was a shameless attempt to use a tragedy to attack our club. But this tweet is far, far worse and look at the number of likes and re-tweets … there’s more than a little of this out there.
It has to be tackled, and by everyone who cares about our sport.
