Colin Sheridan: How long will the anger and revulsion last?

There is a scene in Godfather: Part II, where senator Pat Geary visits Michael Corleone, and outlines to him the mechanics of how he will allow the Corleones to operate their family business in Las Vegas. Geary, as corrupt as he is sneering and hostile, explains to Al Pacino’s Corleone how he sees the Sicilian families expansion west as a necessary but unwelcome evil; “I don’t like your type of people”, Geary tells him “I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, trying to pass yourself as decent Americans. I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself, yourself and your whole f**king family”.

Corleone, unbothered by Geary’s contempt for him, delivers a line in repost that is applicable to almost every societal issue since the time of Socrates.

“Senator, we are both part of the same hypocrisy, but never think it applies to my family”.

The movies have a funny way of making you root for a bad guy. 

Senator Geary was indeed a crook, but at best was guilty of blackmail and corruption. Corleone was a killer and mastermind of a criminal organisation, yet, we revel in his eventual take down of the Senator.

The hypocrisy line hung in the air like an insidious smog last week, as the British government sanctioned Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, effectively ending his 20 year reign as owner of Chelsea football club. Although inevitable in the face of events in the Ukraine, it inspired a fair degree of sanctimony among rival football fans and many, many threads explaining the myriad of implications by experts.

To be fair to those experts, many of them have spent a fair chunk of Abramovich's hiatus in London writing about how immoral it was from the get go. Furthermore, they have risked reputations and livelihoods by highlighting the hypocrisy of Saudi ownership, World Cups in Qatar, and so on. It is largely a thankless task. Abramovich's banishment will come of little solace to those who have long campaigned for it, as it stinks of selectivism and reactionary populous outrage. Those who had the power to wield the axe last week always knew the nuts and bolts of how the Russian oligarch came to be there.

On twitter, meanwhile, the merits of which war warrants most respect is debated in the same manner as Messi versus Ronaldo. Who’s better? Who’s the GOAT?

Yemen vs Ukraine? Gaza or Syria? Most football fans may well see that, by blindly supporting clubs who court investment from flagrantly dubious sources, they are all part of the same hypocrisy, they just never want to stomach the fact that it almost always applies to their own.

Some months ago, the world watched in horror as actual human beings fell from airplanes in a desperate attempt to escape Kabul, Afghanistan. Day and night, for about three weeks, we were dialled into footage of unrelenting chaos. A country was collapsing upon itself, live on television. Social media provided us with neat, palatable explainers to enhance our mile-wide, inch-deep knowledge of the violent entropy.

History will likely reflect that it was the fall of Kabul that birthed the ubiquitous “A thread…”, used on social media to neatly explain to us plebeians what we needed to know in one swallowable pill. 

We all watched, horrified. No premier league fixtures were affected by the fall of Kabul, and by mid-September, we had moved on, proving sadly that Michael Corleone was right.