It was Joni Mitchell who wrote “they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Her dystopian version of the future is very nearly what happened to us in 1994. I do believe that had Fergus not come along that would have been Celtic Park; maybe not a parking lot, although they were popping up like flu outbreaks at the time. An Asda maybe.
The irony of looking back on those days is that what nearly happened to us came much closer to happening across the city, and it still might. No-one, now, can foresee any circumstances under which Celtic will fall into that kind of trouble again.
People cannot, with confidence, say the same about the Ibrox operation.
Joni Mitchell’s brilliant little song contained this wonderful gem; “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone …”
Which is true.
Some people think that’s about appreciating things in the here and now … it’s really not. It’s about protecting what you have in the here and now, so that you still have it tomorrow.
At one point in the song, the narrator asks the farmer “Put away the DDT, I don’t care about spots on my apples. Leave me the birds and the bees.”
Lovely sentiments.
If only Ibrox fans had once had the same idea.
I like to think, had it been us, that we’d have been more worried than they were back in 2008 when it became abundantly clear to anyone who had a television that something had got majorly wrong in the global banking system and that the effects of it were going to ripple through society like the shocks of an earthquake. Had our club been riding high on debt financing, I like to think we’d have been scared out of our wits and demanding answers.
We might have even have settled for some spots on our apples; the cuts in the budget, the slimming down, the “settling for” for a few years until we had consolidated our position. Maybe we’d have been as blind as they were. We’ll never know.
What I know, what I know for a fact, is that even without having fallen into death and darkness, we learned from 1994, and our club from that moment on ran as a stable organisation. We flirted with high spending, and debts, briefly under Martin O’Neill but it never got out of control. It never reached a crisis point. We almost went out of business, and our custodians from that moment on were determined that it was never going to happen again.
Have they learned any lessons at all across town? No, of course they haven’t, which is why Sevco is flirting with annihilation only seven years after rising from the grave that held Rangers. Can you believe the stupidity of those Peepul?
The trouble is that they never learned to appreciate what they had. They always want more. They want things to go back to the “old days” even though it was the “old days” that killed Rangers. And in that, they are not at all like Joni Mitchell’s narrator, lamenting a world that slipped away and where “they took all the trees and put them in a tree museum” … no, they are more like another musical protagonist who finds himself in the opposite universe.
Sevco fans are lucky they have a club to follow at all.
They should have settled for that, and for a brief flicker of time I think they realised it. They packed their stadium out in the Third Division, and for a moment it must have dawned on them that the sudden upturn in the world as they knew it might not be a disaster but something amazing … a new start.
But a “new start” has no worth to them if they’re not going to be able to wallow in the old supremacy, indulge in the old smug arrogance, if they’re not going to be able to enjoy the things they once had … the things, ironically, that wrecked Rangers.
And so instead, they became David Byrne’s bitter narrator in Nothing But Flowers; after a global transformation that has left most of the people gone and all the modern mods and cons nothing but rusting junk, instead of being grateful to be alive in a world returned to a more natural state he’s standing in what he sarcastically describes as “the Garden of Eden”, where the parking lots have literally turned into fields of green.
And his refrain is “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower.”
That beautifully encapsulates their attitude, as does the darkly hilarious line; “I thought that we’d start over. I guess I was wrong.” Because, of course, this is what starting over looks like, but it won’t be in the world they used to live in, which is his problem, and theirs.
They still fantasise about being able to sign better players than us and “challenge” for the title.
“I dream of cherry pies, candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies,” Byrne’s narrator mourns, like a guy who realises he’ll never see another Brian Laudrup in a home shirt at Ibrox again. “We used to microwave. Now we just eat nuts and berries.”
But as I’m absolutely certain Byrne knows well, there’s probably no healthier diet in the world; the complete opposite of the junk food whose loss his narrator can’t get over. Sevco could have focussed on the good points of working with a limited budget. They could have spent the money on youth, on investing their cash in development and training regimes, instead of squandering it on third rate players like Sandaza and Ian Black, and they’re still doing it; they are literally the last people in football who understand that guys like Bruno Alves are ridiculous signings, guys just topping up the pension pot, and should be avoided.
They are beyond redemption, just like Byrne’s narrator is. “Don’t leave me stranded here,” he begs. “I can’t get used to the lifestyle.”
This is so much like the Sevco fans begging to be “saved” that it’s uncanny. Saved from what? Mediocrity? Some football fans accept that as a matter of course. In Joni Mitchell’s upended world, people actually pay money to go to the tree museum for a glimpse of the world they left behind … and Mitchell isn’t just talking about how gullible and pliable we are as a species. She’s pointing out that people adapt eventually as one reality blends into a new one.
It’s a curse of our species in some ways; we can constantly refine our expectations and valuations until everything’s different.
We get used to even the ghastliest circumstances; it’s why we can survive just about anything.
But doing so first requires an understanding that yes, this is the world now and things aren’t going back to how they used to be.
Byrne’s companions are never talked about directly, but you sense that they get it, and they accept it; “There was a factory, now there are mountains and rivers. We caught a rattlesnake, now we’ve got something for dinner …”
The very fact that by the end of the song they’ve left him “stranded” suggests that they’re sick, fed up, of his moaning.
When it comes to Sevco, aren’t we all?
One other part of the song applies to them perfectly; Byrne mourning how they got there in a single line.
“And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention …”
Beautiful. Sums them up to a T.
Always looking elsewhere, and indulging in fantasy, when dealing with reality might save them a lot of grief.
To quote another wonderful David Byrne song, they’re “on the road to nowhere.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3t5nmgRVMs
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