A Patriotic Person

Always either spectacularly right or spectacularly wrong, Julie Burchill is firmly in the former camp this time:

Normally, I am a patriotic person. I invariably well up when I hear Land of Hope and Glory and frequently weep openly over war memorials chanced upon in some quiet town square. And I will always believe that the world's moral compass was set once and for all by the British response to the Nazi menace. But in the past few days I have felt my patriotism withering on the vine. Frankly, I am already sick of seeing the English flag everywhere; it seems so dull when compared to the inclusive majesty of the Union Jack.

Right now, it can be found stuck on shop fronts, flapping annoyingly out of endless car windows and peeking from the sides of cereal packets and chocolate bars. Now, if these symbols of national solidarity were celebrating the courage of our fighting men overseas, I would slap one up in my own front window. But they're not, are they? The reason the country is already drowning in a sea of red and white is that the World Cup starts today.

You think you know people. You think that your countrymen and women are level-headed, with a good sense of the ridiculous and a propensity to puncture pomposity when they see it. And then out of a clear blue sky, the simple fact of being allowed to play ball with the big boys from Brazil and Italy induces a sort of mass national lobotomy, during which the man in the street invests a bunch of little men with the qualities of demi-gods. Even the Prime minister has fallen for the hype, announcing that a flag of St George will fly over Downing Street.

But then he's only joining in with the rest of the country, as the pictures in yesterday's Mail showed: houses, cars and pubs plastered with the red cross. And me? I supported this country in the Falklands and I support it in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else it seeks to fight fascism. But I just can't bring myself to support it in South Africa. I know millions of fans will hate me for saying this, but already I can't wait for the day we get knocked out - and the monstrous regiments of this rag will be chucked to the back of the cupboard for yet another four years. 'Put it away!' I want to yell every time I see the red cross on the white background adorning everything from pizza to underpants.

At the moment, you just can't escape it. Go into the street and that nagging red cross (how ironic, taking into consideration our recent World Cup history, that we boast the emblem in war zones of help, given our situation is so flagrantly one of help needed) is everywhere; on cars, in bars. By the time the damn thing actually gets started, I'm sure I'll look up and see it strung between stars. Go shopping - the usual refuge of women who don't want to be bad sports when confronted with bad sport - and even the headless mannequins boasting three lions shirts seem to sneer sinisterly from behind the glass. 'Aha!' they seem to say, 'You may have your power of reason now, but come July you'll be as addled as the rest of us!' Seek refuge in Marks & Spencer - usually so feminine in its appeal - and you will stagger out after half an hour more tearful than Paul Gascoigne at Italia 90.

The place is like a football flea market, piled high with World Cup tat: flags, plates, kids' games and, yes, mugs - which rather sums up anyone who buys this stuff. A quick internet search for 'M&S World Cup' found 217 results across all departments - 125 for men, 108 for kids (to paraphrase the Jesuit saying: 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the binge-drinking, groupie-roasting, money-grubbing man'), 22 for women and 102 for clothing (ooh, the High Streets are going to be a feast for the eye in the coming weeks!). I was momentarily taken aback that there appeared to be nothing in the food and wine section, but a short stroll to my local M&S revealed a food hall positively heaving under the weight of football-themed produce.

After heading home with the Football's Coming Home tune mocking me from car radios, I turned on the TV only to find John Barnes telling me that there were now three lions on my Mars Bar, which will no doubt magically transform it from a calorie-crammed fat-fest into a breakfast of champions. One aspect of the World Cup brouhaha which never ceases to amaze me is how millions of men will consume their own body weight in lager, pizza, chips and dips over the next few weeks while worshipping at the altar of extreme physical fitness. So much for the new Carlsberg beer commercial which urges: 'Men of England, it's time to join the immortals.'

All I've got to say about a man who can find spiritual enlightenment in the act of gaping at a bunch of goons kicking a pig's bladder around is that he is the testosterone-fuelled equivalent of those tragic women who say chocolate is better than an orgasm. Clueless! Yes, let's be shown the door nice and early on - week two would suit me fine - and then get back to business as usual. Perhaps if we were supporting a group of men who were brave, noble and gentlemanly, it would be a different matter. But when it comes to crimes against common decency, footballers are the lowest of the low. Worse than rugby players, worse than cricketers, worse than boxers; as I said in my book Burchill on Beckham, boxing is a sport where men beat up men and football's a sport where men beat up women. When they're not passing them around like minimally-wrapped pass the parcels at some depraved version of a children's party, that is.

While, of course, rich men with nothing upstairs will always attract poor girls, there is still something unpleasantly unique about modern footballers' lack of sexual restraint. When a man like Ashley Cole loses a woman like Cheryl, you get the sense that there was very little actual pleasure involved in the encounters that robbed him of his beautiful, bright wife - in one case, he was blind drunk - and it was more something that was expected of him by his so-called friends and teammates than burning desire for another woman. What a sad reason to lose your marriage - a quickie that you can't even remember.

The behaviour of John Terry - until recently the England captain, not to mention Dad of The Year - sums up all that is foul about modern football. His drunken speciality of urinating in public, on disco floors and in beer glasses, defines this almost sub-human specimen perfectly. This is a man who had sex with a fellow England player's former girlfriend - what a touching concern he showed for team morale there - and sold secret tours around Chelsea's training facilities to journalists posing as businessmen, for £10,000 in cash, despite being worth an estimated £17 million already.

But all that is apple-scrumping stuff compared to the disgusting show Terry and three other England players put on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. They drunkenly abused American tourists about the victims of the disaster at a Heathrow hotel before stripping naked, vomiting and urinating - as the crying Americans watched TV reports on the massacre. It's sickening to think that men like this are supposed to represent England to the world, while in Iraq and Afghanistan real young lions - not just idiots wearing them on their shirts - are dying every day for lack of adequate equipment as they fight for the freedom of people whose language they don't even speak.

So why do the English put themselves through the agony and the ecstasy of such slavish devotion to the national team every four years? A friend of mine, also a writer, explained to me: 'It's quite hard for me to analyse my feelings about football because I'm so irrationally in love with it. 'When England play, absolutely nothing else matters to me. Life's complications all disappear and I'm completely in the moment. The pleasure of football lies in making something so essentially unimportant into the most important thing in the world, and that does take me right back to being a child, with no adult responsibilities.'

So our mindless love of football, and the consequent turning of a blind eye to any vile act a footballer may be party to so long as he can land a ball in a net, is really a manifestation of a national nostalgia that constantly harks back to a simpler age and that moment when we conquered the world all of 44 years ago. We can ignore the backhanders and the knee-tremblers all we want, but it won't bring Bobby Moore back to life, it won't bring football home and it won't make the complicated modern world conveniently disappear.

Some of our footballers are as rotten and corrupt as our politicians; far from being a bunch of scrape-kneed scamps who stand for all that's decent about this country, they are the sporting counterparts of the troughing MPs who have brought such shame on themselves. Watching them, we do not recapture the innocence of a lost age of sportsmanship - rather, we infantilise ourselves. And innocence and infantilism are not the same thing - as John Terry has so pungently proved.

'Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,' said Samuel Johnson. Well, a patriotism which manifests itself in support and respect for armed forces which fight for the forces of good against evil is the civilian's correct response. But a patriotism which finds expression in cheering on self-adoring, over-paid sportsmen crying over missed goals, rather than self-sacrificing, under-paid soldiers doing their very best not to cry over murdered comrades, is a patriotism which points at a sick, soft society. I don't see anything to celebrate in that.

So, yes, however cross it might make you, I will count the days until England come home with their tails between their legs once again, and the St George's cross - temporarily hijacked in the name of football - is replaced once more by the brave, beautiful Union Jack as a flag the nation can really be proud of.