Blinding hypocrisy

It seems like Arsenal are constantly charged with hypocrisy. Someone breaks a leg at Arsenal and folks immediately point to some poor tackle by some Arsenal player past or present and scream ‘hypocrites! look at how YOU tackle!’ Or as the case with Robin van Persie’s recent statement telling people to shut the fuck up and get on with the game they gleefully yell ‘HA HA I once saw Arsenal surround the referee! HYPOCRITES!’ Ironically, those same people who are so eager to point out Arsenal’s supposed hypocrisy are the ones who are the actual hypocrites. Even more ironically, they will never know that they are the actual hypocrites.

Let me explain. Hypocrisy is a lie, right? But it’s a lie of virtue and that’s what makes it so damaging an accusation. Let’s say that as a man I like to have sex in airport bathrooms with other men. Let’s also say that I am a politician who speaks often about the ‘evils’ of men having sex with other men. One day I get caught trying to pick up a policeman in a known gay cruising spot in an airport. Am I a hypocrite?

Now, let’s compare that to an openly gay man who admits he is trying not to have gay sex in airport bathrooms. This same man goes around the country telling people to stop having gay airport bathroom sex. He gets caught doing the same thing as the guy in the first story. Is he a hypocrite?

The answers are yes and no and if you got those right, congratulations you can get into college in the United States.

Simply put, hypocrisy requires intentional deception based on taking a moral high ground. It’s not hypocritical to simply be weak or even stupid. So, a recovering alcoholic who falls off the wagon then tells his cousin not to drink is not a hypocrite, he’s just an alcoholic.

What I’m getting at is intention. For example, Wayne Rooney and his categorical statement that he has never intentionally dived. The statement was made in the context of him claiming moral superiority in that only ‘Johnny Foreigner’ dives and it’s a lie because Wayne Rooney is a serial diver who intentionally cheats in order to win penalties, get his opponents sent off, and deceive the referee into giving him and his team free kicks. That, my friends, is a fucking hypocrite.

Someone who complains about players surrounding the referee could be a hypocrite but let’s look at the other options.

Option 1 — He’s just stupid.

Option 2 — He honestly believes that he and Arsenal don’t surround the referee.

Option 3 — It’s all part of his master plan to deceive people who have no access to YouTube or any archival game footage into believing that Arsenal have never done this and that only Chelsea do.

Option 4 — It’s legitimately something he’s grown tired of seeing and while he is fully aware that he has harangued the referees in the past (even this season when Vidic should have been sent off for a blatant deliberate handball)  and will probably do so in the future it’s no where near the concerted level of cheating shown by Manchester United and Chelsea (here’s my favorite example) which he would like to see kicked out of the game post haste.

So, is it hypocritical of Robin van Persie to say that Chelsea should shut the fuck up? No. Because the true test is not the past but the future. See, Robin never laid down a marker on this topic before. Now he has and we need to see if he lives up to his own admonitions. This should be made easy since the FA has said that they will crack down on exactly this kind of behavior starting next season. So, please, feel free to judge him (and everyone else, of course, right?) from your moral high ground starting next season.

Which brings me to my last point. There is no shortage of sports journalists out there who will gleefully publish stories that call Robin van Persie a hypocrite for making a statement about what has transpired in the past. Ironically, some of them, like humorist Brooks Peck from Yahoo.com’s Dirty Tackle. who basically report other people’s content while cracking jokes are suspected Chelsea supporters. (Editor’s note, I changed this content when Brooks complained about being called a journalist and admitted to being a Chelsea supporter.)

But ask yourself, what is this journalist’s agenda? Is their agenda to clean up players surropunding the referee or is their agenda to simply ridicule Robin van Persie? If it’s the former, then I have no problem, though I would like a little more content. Maybe a cogent argument describing the problem in detail followed by a proposed solution. But if it’s the latter then aren’t they taking a moral stance with the intention to deceive others about their own true feelings on the topic?

Hmmm… that seems a bit hypocritical to me.

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