Philip K Dick died a frustrated man. Though he was one of the most popular and highly regarded genre writers of the 20th century, he lamented how unseriously his peers took his work, and (quite rightly) considered his output to be far more literary and grounded in aesthetic or philosophical themes than the vast majority of academics of his time would credit. The debate around the artistic merit of ostensibly pulp writing is as old as the hills, and as unthinkable as it is in the age of the marvel blockbuster, there was a time when those in the know considered science fiction writing to be the gutter of literary endeavour.
Consider the journalistic career of George Orwell. An Etonian old boy, Orwell read voraciously from his youth, developing his own aesthetic critique of the development of modern English writing through his formative years. His withering essays, written between his return from a stint as an imperial policeman in Burma and his untimely death shortly after the publication of 1984, showed an obsession with the vulgar mediocrity of contemporary journalism and fiction, particularly in English, but more broadly aimed at the consensus uselessness of political journalism; journalists, he argued, mangled the language and the facts in order to present a case of affairs that suited the establishment. He loathed the thinly veiled propagandist efforts of both journalists and highly esteemed national darlings, like Rudyard Kipling and Tennyson. Orwell, like Dick, was uncomprehending of how such self evident nonsense could possibly be presented in such farcical and ugly fashion by the very people who proclaimed themselves as being best to direct the hive mind of the newly emerging popular market.
Both Orwell and Dick were sensitive to charlatanry in supposedly lettered writing and correctly predicted the compounding impact of modernity upon the quality and clarity of thoughts communicated in English. One can only imagine the beautiful vitriol that may have flowed, had either the luck or longevity to live to see the absolute fucking state of football journalism in the year of our lord 2021.
From the matted curls and troglodyte beard of couch ungulate Martin Samuel, to the alice band wearing pearlescent shirts of head boy super swot Oliver Holt, English football is riddled with a venereal disease more objectionable than any heinous oil state or philandering manager. For there is nothing in this life or the next that can approach the obsequiousness and genuflected effluence pouring forth from the fingers of Britain’s football journalists.
People rightly castigate modern political journalists for the emergence of the phenomenon of access journalism and lobby journalism. Commenters below the line groan like tectonic plates when Laura Keunsberg emerges to explain away the latest failing of the government, yet flock like pigeons outside a bakery when the football media softlads publish their latest half arsed, speculative prognostications.
If an alien had landed on Tuesday morning and had been scuttled away inside some day-glo underground laboratory and shown sky sports news, they would be forgiven for thinking that Steve Bruce had been murdered in cold blood for the crime of being too good at his job. Bruce, thick as thieves with journalists for as long as he’s been giving press conferences, has long enlisted middle-class, picked-last-at-school mediocrities to provide a better defence than he can organise in a stadium.
The smell of the drivel that has been put forth in defence of Bruce since his run of the mill sacking is so strong it could lift paint from the walls. Bruce’s record as Newcastle manager, in the full two and a bit years he’s been in charge, has been more than enough to get him sacked at any of the clubs that the son of someone journalists defending him pretend to support. It is almost November, the league started in August, and Newcastle have not won a single game.
Yet these halfwit lemmings prostrate themselves before an effigy of Bruce’s corpse that they’ve imagined in their yellow, fevered ramblings. His penultimate press conference featured the unbelievably petty sight of Bruce reminding the journalists who really makes their news, suggesting they get a slap from their bosses. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I suppose. Steve Bruce was hounded out of Newcastle with vitriol!
No he wasn’t. There weren’t any fans in the stadium for the vast majority of his time in charge. The supposed vitriol aimed personally and directly at Steve Bruce amounted to the sane and reasonable suggestion that, after such a terrible start to his third season, he would probably find himself sacked at dawn. The journalists regurgitate an obvious lie that he was targeted with death threats; in actual fact, Bruce referred to his son telling him that a random fan on a message board had wished Steve Bruce had died of covid. Tasteless yes, objectionable yes, but a death threat? No. Not that it matters, the narrative has been decided.
So while you sit there aghast at the rank hypocrisy of the terrible, non-footballing sycophants that masquerade as football journalists in England, give a thought to poor old George Orwell and Philip K Dick, who died fearing that their great literary expeditions in the name of truth and material reality would never be taken seriously, and consider the velocity at which their corpses are currently boreing through the earth, propelled through stone and mantle by the unspeakable force of appeasing flattery that infects the mind of every man, woman or beast in England who wakes up one day and decides, ‘fuck playing football, I’m going to write shite about it instead’.