For every minute you are angry you lose 60 seconds of happiness, « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
By Don McMahon
For every minute you are angry you lose 60 seconds of happiness, Ralph Waldo Emerson
The plethora of angry, hyper-sensitive, choleric, distressed, fitful, and fickle fans bombarding cyberspace with their tryst lamentations and predictions of imminent doom and unmitigated disaster for all things Arsenal, eagerly abetted and aided by the xenophobic British media and some ex-AFC player ingrates leaves me cold.
This demeaning spectacle of a very small minority of our supporters fervently tearing into the supposed shortcomings and lacunae of our Club,vilifying anyone who sees things differently, based on what these attack dogs have read, heard, believed since the time of Moses, ¨seen¨ with their own eyes, divined by some ethereal illumination available only to them or nurtured patiently and hatefully over decades of dissatisfaction, leaves me cold as well.
Then there is the deluge of ignoble, yellow tabloid journalism, paparazzi puke, media masochism and blog-sphere bollocks which assault our Arsenal sensibilities with hypothetical, extra-speculative and totally fantastical and usually premature declarations which these misguided souls stringently attempt to pass off as truth. This not only leaves me cold but makes excellent toilet paper as well due to its superior capacity to absorb high percentages of sewage.
You may now be at the stage where you want to know what gets my attention. Well here are some things that pique my curiosity and may even breach the carapace of my thick-skinned psyche, providing me with endless hours of mirth and in some cases, tangible joy:
- When we are ¨linked¨ with a big name signing that costs over 20Million Euro, inevitably described as being ¨wanted¨ by Arsene and also invariably described as being our potential ¨saviour¨ from an inglorious EPL nuclear winter or some such thing. Good for a 5 minute bout of ridicule that.
- When a former ¨star¨ is quoted, or more often misquoted in the media as criticizing Arsenal and Wenger’s player development philosophy, on field tactics, business or transfer dealings or his choice of a blue tie over a red one. This player may likely be associated with one of the tabloid toilet papers mentioned above or worse still, a media outlet like Sky TV. I obtain at least 2 minutes of mild chuckling and head shaking from these offerings.
- Under normal circumstances when EUFA and FIFA make some absorbingly dim-witted and pedantic statement having to do with Football in general or Arsenal in particular. Such was my awe when they voted Wenger manager of the decade and when they named Arsenal as the best example of a financially and administratively well managed club and a model to emulate for everyone else, that I almost spilt my tea and inhaled my crumpet whole. Being accustomed, as I am, to hearing the Arsenal denigrated, degraded, disparaged and dismissed as ¨Barca-lite¨ by those icons of Football sagesse mentioned in the above paragraph, it came as a severe shock to my nervous system and was worthy of at least 30 minutes of boasting, derisory phone calls to my Spuds workmates and other scum.
- Stepping up a notch, the gut-wrenching sheer delirium of seeing the Arse give the boot to Barca at the Emirates while the MOTD commentators desperately tried to diminish this accomplishment and the next day the toilet tabloids bombarded us with salient reminders of how ¨lucky¨ we were and what a thrashing we could expect at the Nou Camp, was worth at least 2 hours of furious blogging and surfing other fellow travellers in the Arsenal Universe.
- The cherry on the sundae has to be a comment I read on another blog which described all the crazy season carryings-on as a disease called ¨ premature speculation.¨ The author more or less described it as the tendency for fans to assume the worst(or best) about the goings on at the Club and to wet themselves, well before the presentation of or in the total absence of any empirical evidence available or any rational data presented. This was worth a hearty laugh.
My rather lengthy point here is that a morose and pathological obsession with all things gloomy is not the most useful way to spend your Arsenal days….as Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently testified.
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