Shame of the cokey question

NO, ME neither. When first I heard I thought someone was having a laugh, or perhaps crafting a cunning satire on medieval habits of mind. The daft comic dance with which your auntie would "entertain" the company at a dire wedding? Seriously?

Apparently so. It could stand as a dissertation topic offered by the Faculty of Bonkers at the University of Surreal: "The Hokey Cokey as Figurative Sectarian Symbolism in 21st Century Europe: Discuss". Then expend part of your life on An Enormous Offence Inflicted.

All this, mind, when I had just got over wondering what harm one of my favourite Beach Boys tunes ever did to anyone. Obviously, that was before I was offered sight of all the droll, semi-literate new verses conjured by a person or persons unknown for whom football is, truly, only an excuse. Or rather, no excuse.
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Having your face split with a glass: that, I think, is a sectarian gesture. Being asked by those older blokes to nominate the foot with which you might kick: that's the enduring nature of a malady. But the hokey cokey? It's about as sane as boycotting a supermarket because of its choice of corporate colours.

Silly me. My ability to make any of this stuff up declines, I find, with the passing of the years.

Optimists among you will probably say, at this juncture, that none of it has anything much to do with football. You will then lament the survival of that famous scabrous "minority", but insist that the chimps are not "representative". If you are heroically good-natured, you will add that bigotry is not what it was.

I take half your point. A country that is only nominally Christian, if that, has to bend reality to sustain sectarian hatreds. To then discover "significance" in an old dance requires the sort of mad genius generally confined to a tenacious sub-set of humanity. And there are plenty, thousands, of Old Firm fans who get along famously: that's true.

But madness operates in an interesting way. None of the victims ever see themselves as afflicted. The paranoid - check those delightful message boards - just know they are right, sane and justified. Always. Spending even ten seconds of a brief life discussing the deeper implications of the hokey cokey proves it.

A country dominated by its largest city tends to miss nuances in these affairs. Righteous Glaswegian pride forgets, for one thing, that quite a number of us - north, south and east - object to the notion of "Scotland's secret shame". It is no secret and it is not Scottish. It's Glasgow. So could you take it elsewhere, please?

Bad enough, for those not blessed with an Old Firm allegiance, that the national sport is distorted in the service of a Glasgow franchise. Bad enough that the residue of bigotry is maintained by imitation in Highland towns and Borders villages. But can the followers of two of the biggest clubs in the world still go on posing as victims, and still expect the rest of us to care?

The good news this season is that they are both beatable, just for a change. The bad news is that still, even now, after all the campaigns, all the education, some still think the hokey cokey is of more moment than the collapse of global capitalism. From which planet did they escape?

Here's what they used to call tough love. Caught in the bubble of loyalty and tradition, Old Firm fans rarely wonder why they and their clubs are so despised. Jealousy? If there was substantial success to envy, that would make sense. But in the terms that matter most, Rangers and Celtic are second-rate, if that. Given a bit of luck even Hibs can beat either: I rest my parochial case.

Is it the fact, then, that the pair loot our squads, year in and year out, as though by right? It rankles, obviously, but we have long since grown accustomed to lordly habits.

No-one truly blames a young player for accepting a bundle of cash just to polish a bench at Ibrox or Parkhead.

Contempt has other roots, I think. Fans of Celtic and Rangers are always faintly surprised, in my experience, by the notion that they are found to be deeply unpleasant. This is not because the rest are saintly. I can remember Easter Road Casuals in their poisonous pomp: no excuses there.

Hibs and Hearts have their issues still, and the toxic aftertaste of sectarian nonsense to be going on with. Dundee was once, shall we say, a difficult town. And I have never, personally, managed to mistake an Aberdeen supporter for a sunbeam.

The Old Firm present a different case. It amounts to a kind of emotional overload foisted on a nation, an obsessive insistence that truly silly things - put your left leg in - actually matter. Worse, there is the claim that this is, authentically, Scotland. Wrong.

There are people in Glasgow, amazingly enough, who do not give a toss for football. There are people for whom talk of a putative religious affiliation is beyond absurd. In that city, indeed, the ancestral memory of politics still contains the belief that bigotry has been used, time and again, to divide working people, and to harm them.

The very idea of "debating" the "meaning" of the hokey cokey should cause each of us to rebel. Instead, we embrace the oppression, and the sick joke. One result is that our football is not half as beautiful as it might be, and ought to be. Some of the people who watch it with utmost devotion are as ugly as it gets.

Followers of the others, the smaller and lesser, the clubs that will never amount to much, are growing tired. Glasgow, God love it, is not Scotland. The hatreds are no longer merely unpleasant. They are absurd.

But here's a thing: for as long as the Old Firm's cultists shake it all about, with injury and insult in mind, the two greatest clubs in Scotland will never amount to much.

A pity, I think, and a real sorrow.

Taken from the Sunday Herald