- The Past is a Foreign Country - David Lowenthal.
There is a phenomenon in advertising where companies, during difficult and recessionary times, rely on nostalgia to sell their products. The rationale being that evoking a stable and more confident time will encourage us to part with money we patently don't have, and associate their product with positivity and well being.
Nostalgia allows us to view the past selectively, filtering out the bad memories, the dross, the banal and allows us to focus on good times, long summers and, most importantly, glory. Linda Hutcheon in her seminal essay, Irony, Nostalgia and the Post Modern states that;
" Nostalgia has a distancing effect that sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent safe from the unexpected. "
'Complete', 'stable', 'safe' not exactly the attributes one could apply to the current Arsenal team, but witness how we seek to rectify this. We bring back Lehmann and Aliadiere, talk abounds about the return of Thierry Henry, we regress to a better time, when we were invincible, untouchable, when as a Chelsea supporting friend of mine put it, " If you try to play football against Arsenal, they will destroy you".
Logic dictates that those days are gone forever, but, somehow, nostalgia dictates that we are Arsenal, look upon our work ye mighty, and despair!
But that was then, this is now. Football is immediate, it's about here and now. There is only one important game in football, the one you've just played or the one you're just about to play. Everything else, every victory,every defeat, promise for the future, it all amounts to nothing.
The '89 team did not seek to make history and neither did the Invincibles, we burden the current team with the fact that they did. We demand glory, nothing less. And if glory is not what you want, maybe football is not for you. I don't care about financial stability. I dont give a toss about admiration of our bank balance. I am a Gooner. I demand glory.
After the Blackburn game my mate Johnny, who is the most positive Gooner I have ever known, shocked me by criticizing the team and Wenger. I honestly walked home in a fog of depression, went on Twitter and saw the exact same sentiments. Then I heard our own fans went to blows at the ground, honestly if you looked up 'unprecedented' in the dictionary that would be the picture you would see. Arsenal fans driven to fists!
There is an expression on Twitter that I truly detest and that is 'Hater' . Anybody who expresses any discontent with Wenger, or Wengerian dogma, is leapt upon and declared antiWenger! It reminds me of antiChrist !
A common one on Twitter is the puerile argument " If you know so much, why aren't you the manager", a bit like "If you think the film is shit, why aren't you directing films then?".
The term 'hater' is a bit too similar to 'heretic' for me, anybody who dares question the 'doctrine' is villified. You must believe. There is no middle ground.
Stalin, in pushing for the industrialasation of the Soviet Union, had a series of 5 year plans that were to be completed in 4 years. When we moved to the Emirates I remember saying we wouldn't win anything for at least 3 years. Arsenes 3 year plan was to move to a new stadium, build a new team to ultimately win the Champions League, and show to the world the ultimate model club, financially viable, built from within, victory through a clearly defined ethos. But Football is immediate. We are an impatient lot, we want it now.
We are not idiots, we will not accept that 2+2 makes 5, we will not accept harrasment from the Twitterati KGB and their endless trolling for thought crime. We don't want our players to keep harking back to history, we want them to make their own.
Lets have no more talk about what we were, or indeed, what we will be. It's time for us to celebrate what we are.
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.
Phillip Larkin - Reference Back
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