Fear And Loathing And Gary Hart: Tangerine Nightmares

Ahhh it doesn’t take long for the latest bubble to burst, eah?

I think, sometimes, of the Ibrox operation in the same way seasoned American political professionals must have thought of Gary Hart, standing in front of his audience for the final press conference of the 1988 Presidential primaries, where he announced that he was going back home and dropping out of the race. They said he was the front-runner (that’s actually what the movie about his spectacular flame-out is called) and he was … but he couldn’t outrun his own limitations.

The incredible thing about it is that he and everyone around him understood those limitations very well. He had been warned against his personal tendencies many times before he was consumed by them that during that race … but he gamely soldiered on believing that in the end they wouldn’t matter when, in fact, in that peculiar era they were all that did.

Denial of reality. A good liar can bullshit others just fine, but so many of them do it out of a warped sense of the world, and so they save the best of their work for themselves. The lies they tell in the mirror are the most destructive.

For Hart it was believing that his personal conduct didn’t reflect on his character, and that even if it did, who cared about the character of a President? The irony of that, of course, is that he would have won by a landslide today and the world would have been vastly better off for it. But as a strategy for winning elections in that time and place … well it was crazy. Only someone utterly heedless of the risks would have had an affair without taking the least precautions and then dare the media to investigate him. Only a moron would have pulled her on a party boat called Monkey Business … the jokes just write themselves, don’t they?

For Ibrox the denial of reality goes much deeper. They can come to Celtic Park and be handed an absolute lesson and leave convinced that they are still the better team, and then draw evidence from two midweek European results which will have no bearing on this title race at all. A clown like Keevins can risk a broken neck from the whiplash of going from backing them to backing Celtic to drooling all over them again before having to hit the brakes and prepare for the next u-turn. We are surrounded by these morons and the question that keeps coming to me over and over again is the one the US political press really wanted to ask Hart by didn’t.

How could you have kid yourselves that this story would end well for you? Since the turn of this year they’ve dropped points in four away games on the bounce. They were visiting the only to have beaten this except us … and on the same ground. It was on the cards, which is why I was able to write the other day that we’d be the ones smiling come Monday.

Well they aren’t laughing this evening, just as Hart understood that he was engaged in serious business not Monkey Business when the questions kept on coming in spite of his bizarre defence that it was none of anybody else’s that he back-doored his missus and used other women and then just as casually threw them away.

What I realise at times like these is that for all the opprobrium we pour on Ibrox and their fans that we still give them more credit, for having more sense, than they probably deserve. They do believe all the lies they tell themselves, they still manage to convince themselves, and by dint their media allies, that they are special, that the laws of gravity don’t apply.

But sometimes you are just living in the wrong world at the wrong time. How could a man as intelligent as Hart believe he could be President with that sort of background in the era of Reagan and the Moral Majority? How do these Ibrox fans think they can compete with a team that wins games in the dying stages with such fearsome regularity as us?

And so many of our players are coming to the fore at the moment; today was the Greek’s turn and he was magnificent. It was a Hell of a day to turn in his best display, but without a doubt he was the man of the match and in the aftermath he gave a fantastic press conference where he was unequivocal in his belief that we have the title winning team now.

Van Bronckhorst looks more and more like a temporary answer to a question nobody expected to ask. Gerrard’s team might have been slipping before he fled for the exit, but the act of fleeing itself, nobody has counted on. The appointment of his replacement reeked of grabbing the first famous name who happened to be passing by … it has disaster written all over it, much as the insane act of signing Ramsey is developing along all the lines we predicted.

We’ve all seen this movie before. It’s amazing that so many of them tuned in for it expecting it to have some twist nobody saw coming, some different ending in a genre where everybody knows the end before the movie even starts.

Their fans thought that last season was the moment the world turned, but that’s not how the world really works. Exceptional circumstances and bad management at Celtic Park are what gave them their title win, but the underlying reality never changed one bit; we are the biggest club in the country and this is nothing but things returning to their equilibrium.

How can you hope to defeat that? And especially with borrowed money and a strategy based on robbing Peter to pay Paul. How can you expect to beat it with a squad who’s best players are eyeing the exit door? When Goldson said months ago, prior to Gerrard leaving, that the dressing room there had lost the hunger, that was the moment when they started to lose their edge, the moment when the pendulum swung the other way and you can see it in their play and you can see in ours that this is a Celtic side which has that hunger all over again.

Ange and this team have got the scent of blood in their nostrils. At Ibrox the smells are of fear and loathing. The midweek result they crowed over … that was an FA Cup style shocker, the sort that happens more and more in Europe. They were mad to think that it actually mattered, that it made any difference, that it altered the lay of the land.