Too many teardrops

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Theodore Dalrymple

1 September 2007

True grief is often swamped by the mawkishness of strangers

Of course, a virtuous people would reject this cynical and demagogic sop with contumely, that is to say with a dignified silence. If they said anything at all, it would be ‘Enforce the laws properly, seriously, and do not condescend to us as if we were patients in need of psychotherapy.’ But a teddy-bear nation is not likely to miss an opportunity to be emotional in public.

It is hardly surprising that football should play so large a part in the debased soft-toy-CCTV culture upon which the response to the murder cast a narrow but powerful beam, with its hideous pendulum swing between sentimentality and authoritarianism passing through deep criminality. A ‘tribute’ left at the scene of the crime read, ‘Rhys, from a red to a blue, love Joe.’ Even I know that red is for Liverpool and blue is for Everton, the other Liverpool team that Rhys supported. What this appears to mean at best is that, now that Rhys has been shot dead, Joe will refrain for a very short while from shouting the vile obscene abuse and from making menacing gestures in fascistic unison at people like Rhys who are kitted out in blue: the indulgence in such abuse and incipient violence being a large part of the enjoyment of football. It’s not just Liverpool of course; it would be the same in any part of the country.

There was no end to the mushy sentiment that so intimately and dialectically related to the brutality of life in modern Britain (J.G. Ballard, in his latest novel, Kingdom Come, has caught this brilliantly). An Everton shirt with the name Connor on it appeared at the impromptu bier, with the following message: ‘To Rhys, When the Goodison crowd roars it will be for you. Any goals that I score now will be for you. Sleep peacefully my great mate.’

At Everton’s first home match after the murder, the electronic scoreboard carried the following message: ‘Rhys Jones was football mad. If he wasn’t playing football he was watching his beloved Everton play. It was his whole life.’