It's pure snobbery to assume that a working class footballer can't be violent and also read books
One of my best friends grew up in Huyton; the part of Liverpool Joey Barton calls home. When Barton was elevated to the role of media darling, I remember my friend saying to me: "We all knew Joey Barton around here, but I had no idea he was any good at football." She said his reputation rested instead on his aggressive behaviour.
I have no interest in the reasons why the QPR player once stubbed out a lit cigar in the eye of a teammate or punched someone 20 times while on a night out. Perhaps he's deeply troubled; I don't know. It's not my place to analyse him. But I am fascinated, if slightly irked, by the mythology that seems to have grown up around Barton since he decided to join Twitter and use it to share the philosophical musings on Nietzsche and Orwell. It's a mysticism that moved author Tony Adams to pseudo-intellectually comment, "I love the way Barton's box-to-box wisdom veers so swiftly between OMG textspeak and canonical thoughts from the great western tradition."
During Sunday's game, I imagine Barton disappointed his new friends in the liberal intelligentsia by throwing caution to the wind and attempting to kick anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact. After that, the Guardian's interview with him in the National Portrait Gallery does seem rather incongruous. The problem, I think, is not the belief that Barton is a reformed character, but the notion that one cannot possibly be a philosopher and violent at the same time: that quoting philosophy should automatically be taken as a sign of reformation.
Barton is often depicted as a kind of noble savage by the media, a character who has been able to eschew the base urges that would otherwise define him, and become good and – praise be – introspective. When Barton was just some criminal scouser, nobody batted an eyelid, because casual violence, aggression and lack of remorse are seen as part and parcel of being born and raised in a poverty-stricken area of Liverpool. But once Barton began sharing his intellectualisms with the world, he became intriguing and unusual – someone who had managed to transcend his "savage" working-class roots and become civilised. When he stands in front of history's greatest paintings offering his thoughts on life, I imagine a middle-class liberal elatedly watching Barton and thinking "with the right schooling, he could be one of us".
In my mind, this all boils down to class snobbery. It is automatically assumed that Barton has violent tendencies because he's a working-class man who has chosen to play football for a living. So when he shows signs of intelligence, it's treated as a sign of reform: intellect is the preserve of the gentlemanly middle-classes. How else to explain a 2011 GQ article that noted approvingly that Barton had used "echelons" and "persona non grata" in the same tweet, as though it was some sort of miracle? When the media observes Barton using fancy words, they do it with the same amazement as Simon Cowell did when he watched Pudsey the dog dancing to the Mission Impossible theme tune on Britain's Got Talent: "he's supposed to be snarling and dangerous, but look – he's acting like a person!"
I'm really tired of this, to be honest. A media consisting largely of Oxbridge-educated, middle-class people praising Barton for being able to read books isn't enlightened or generous; it's just snobbery in a different form. It's also rather unfeeling towards the people who have been on the receiving end of Barton's punch-happy demeanour. They get to see their suffering being woven into the tapestry of a complex and interesting character – indeed, I've barely touched upon the fact that Barton's public persona seems to exonerate him of all those things he did. But mostly I'm just tired because I really feel that our society should have moved past such sentimentality. We should be sophisticated enough to comprehend that a man can read philosophy and be violent without acting like it's as shocking as a statue of the Virgin Mary weeping blood. We should, at the most basic level, be able to accept people as people and judge them on their words and actions, rather than against a set of oppressive social stereotypes. Whatever I think of Barton, his tweeting, or his right hook, he at least deserves that. Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
