Web of deceit: the internet has killed the celebrity death hoax

I was travelling in Peru when the news broke, enjoying myself at a beachside bar. All of a sudden the music stopped and over the microphone a sombre-toned barmaid announced the sad news of George Michael’s passing. A respectful minute or so of silence passed and then the sound system started up, screeching Michael Jackson’s Bad. After a further minute or so the music cut out again and said barmaid returned to the microphone to clarify the “sad news of Michael Jackson’s passing”.  We stared at each blankly, unsure what was going on, until an Australian friend asked with genuine concern “how is George Michael?”

He was fine of course, unlike poor Michael, but for the first time in my life I found myself worrying about the former Wham singer’s well being. I hoped for instance he was finally getting the upper hand in his battle with cannabis addiction. A year later when he ploughed his car into the Snappy Snaps in Hampstead, I felt a palpable relief that he escaped the crash unscathed. The premonitory effect the mishap had on me brought to mind the celebrity death hoaxes of my schooldays. I recall one such playground rumour that Derrick Errol Evans, better known as Mr Motivator, had expired. The details are a bit sketchy, perhaps that throbbing vein in his head and finally given him the aneurism it had always threatened. Or maybe a naked flame had come into contact with his Lycra spandex. Either way, for the remainder of the day I was certain that sometime between first break and lunch we'd lost a giant of the televised workout world.

The Art of lying

As morally dubious a practice as spreading these rumours was, it's hard not to admire the artistry and effort which went into them. First of all the inventor had to pick a celebrity big enough that everybody knew who they were, but not so big that it would seem far-fetched and unbefitting of their stature for them to die on a school day. Then, because this was the pre-internet halcyon age, the rumour had to be started by actually telling somebody face-to-face. Granted that somebody was more often than not a wide-eyed and gullible 10 year-old, but even so you had to be prepared for even the most rudimentary interrogation. How did they die for instance? When? How do you know?

But it’s not like that anymore. A recent online Eddie Murphy death hoax started on the site Global Associated News gained so much momentum that his brother Charles was forced to respond - "It's really astounding how low people will go for attention. Eddie Murphy is fine!" And this was despite the fact that the website contains the quite unambiguous disclaimer that: "This story is 100% fake! This is an entertainment website, and this is a totally fake article based on zero truth and is a complete work of fiction for entertainment purposes".

Mind you, at least a fatal Swiss snowboarding accident involving the star of Beverley Hills cop is possible, if not exactly plausible. Last week, the comedian Michael Legge started a rumour, (I believe twitterstorm is now the preferred term), that fictional character Gregg Jevin had died - proving you don't even have to exist for rumours of your demise to be greatly exaggerated. Type the word "is" into Google and the search engine prompts you to ask "Is David Guetta dead?” proving both the staying power of internet pranks and the stupidity of people who believe them.

Gotcha!

The virtual playground that is the internet has made killing off the stars easier than ever before. As the famous 71 character tweet goes ‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’. But the spate of celebicide that has seen Charlie Sheen, Owen Wilson and Adam Sandler go to that great rehab centre in the sky is much less believable than the pranks of yesteryear, especially since they were all said to have died in Swiss snowboarding accidents. Such is the lack of imagination in modern hoaxes they have left me mourning the loss of an art form rather than any celebrity. But maybe I’m just nostalgic for a simpler time, when people remember where they were when they first heard the news of Noel Edmonds’ tragic helicopter crash.  

Why we won’t go to war with Argentina and the solution to world peace

The Royal Navy dispatched £1 billion worth of its newest hardware. In response the Argentines renamed their football league and made friends with Sean Penn. The end result is conditions in the South Atlantic that are even frostier than usual.

Yes, in the spirit of 80s revivals that have been sweeping the nation – from sky high unemployment to inner city insurrections – it looks like a second Falklands war, “30 years on, this time it’s territorial (same as last time)” could be next. 

Democracy rules OK! 

Except it won’t. Because unlike then, Argentina is now a democracy and democracies don’t fight each other. Or so goes the democratic peace theory. You’ve probably heard it before, spouted with barely concealed smugness by some insufferable pub bore. We may have even met. If you’re lucky you’ll have heard an even smugger bore cite, with great triumphalism, some apparent exceptions. The Greek Wars of the 5^th century BC for instance, the American War of Independence or even the American Civil War. At this juncture the first bore may have responded with the rationale that slaveholding states such as ancient Greece and the US Confederacy can hardly be considered democratic and that pre 1832 Britain was essentially a monarchy with an incredibly restricted franchise. He probably even looked your way to see if you were impressed, not realising you were long gone. 

Nevertheless it’s true and it’s a truth that irks liberals - who believe it is too often used as justification for self-serving regime change in oil rich nations - and fans of war, who feel it makes any interesting match-ups nigh on impossible. 

I’m lovin’ it

If further evidence is needed that Prince William and his pals are going to be absolutely fine on the Islas Malvinas, just look at McDonald’s. The Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention, as proposed by Thomas L Friedman, states that no two countries that have a McDonald’s have ever fought against each other in a war. Granted NATO briefly dropped a few bombs on Yugoslavia in 1999, but as they didn’t land on the McDonald’s itself it seems a shame to throw away a perfectly good theory. In 1982 Argentina didn’t have any McDonald’s and look what happened. But since 1986`when they joined the 123 strong international McFamily they’ve not had any bother. If only they’d opened one four years earlier it would have saved us all the trouble. 

Those pesky Iranians

So as with everything else, don’t believe the hype. The chances of Argentina challenging us to a war, thumb or otherwise, would require the refutation of two flimsy and overly simplistic political science theories. And that ain’t gonna happen. If you do feel the need to fret over future international conflicts, I’d suggest Iran as a country more likely to confirm your worst fears. 

First of and shock horror, it’s not a democracy. Equally predictably it doesn’t have a single McDonald’s. Then there’s the small matter of the alleged nuclear weapons programme and president who says things like Israel should be “wiped off the face of the earth”. Indeed if profiting from conflicts which threaten the future of mankind is your thing, bookmakers In Trade are giving odds with a 62% likelihood that either the USA or Israel will execute an air strike against Iran before the end of the year. 

For all those out there who’d rather give peace a chance, there is a solution: give Iran nuclear weapons. Admittedly there aren’t too many political commentators out there advocating this view, but they are overlooking the crucial fact that bar a couple of months handbags between India and Pakistan in 1999, (which I’m once again discounting), there has never been a war between two nuclear powers. As long as we keep hold of ours we’re bound to be safe. The rest of the Middle East I’m not so sure.  So there’s the answer to world peace: proliferation. Of democracy. Of Nukes. And of Maccy D’s. There, that wasn’t that hard was it?

Revelling in Rivalry

Amid speculation about the possible demise of their arch-rivals Rangers, it must have seemed strange for Glasgow Celtic’s chief executive Peter Lawwell to be fielding questions on whether his own club could survive without their Old Firm counterparts. 

After all, surely any mishap befalling your oldest and bitterest foe can only be good news. Especially when that mishap takes the shape of a 10 point deduction and makes the small matter of your 43^rd Scottish league title a mere formality. 

“We’ll survive very well”, the Celtic chief executive responded. Adding with just a hint of schadenfreude, “We’re going to be in better shape than them if their problems cause greater difficulties.”

Lawwell’s reasoning was based on practical considerations, the level of Celtic’s debt for instance and the viability of Scottish football minus one of its two behemoths. But his answers won’t have reassured everybody. The last Scottish team outside of the Old Firm to win the title were Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in 1985. In a league rightly criticised for its lack of competiveness, switching from duopoly to a monopoly will leave a spectator sport about as interesting as its board game namesake. 

Trouble down by the riverside

But let’s set aside the enthralling world of Scottish football for a minute. The issue of Rangers’ difficulties and their potential impact on Celtic highlight an important dynamic present in any rivalry: that both sides define themselves antithetically to the other. 

‘Rivals’ is a Latin word in origin, derived from rivalis meaning ‘persons dwelling on opposite sides of the river’. The symmetry in this image of two rival camps across a river is quite apt. Both camps may think they have the best river bank, or the greenest grass, or whatever people squabbled about in Roman times. No doubt they hate each other, but what made them noteworthy and set them apart from the numerous other riverside encampments of olden times was the competition between the two. Like it or not - and the answer for anyone in Glasgow is bound to be not - to outside observers the animosity between Rangers and Celtic is viewed similarly. Like two sides of the same Old Firm coin it’s impossible to conceive of one without the other. 

The good old days of the Cold War

The early 1990s saw the termination of one of the world’s greatest rivalries. Since 1945 Western democracies led by the United States and the communist states of the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union hadn’t seen eye to eye on such trivialities as whether communism or capitalism was the best ideology to live by. Being a contest between two diametrically opposing worldviews encompassing the majority of the planet’s population, as opposed to say two football teams, the Cold War didn’t manifest itself in the same way as other rivalries.  Instead of a derby, both sides participated in a nuclear arms race. Bragging rights focused less on famous FA Cup victories and more on first moon-landings. 

But despite having been concluded for over 20 years you can still find some of the victors lamenting its loss. George W Bush mused: “It was us versus them, and it was clear who ‘the them’ were.” And while it may be surprising to hear such a renowned peace-lover and intellectual express nostalgia for a state of heightened military tensions in a grammatically incorrect manner, Bush is not alone in his views. He’s not even alone among former US presidents.  Whilst in office in 1993 Clinton joked “Gosh I miss the Cold War” as conflicts in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia brought home how unpredictable a post-Soviet world would be. Winning the Cold War had eradicated the Soviet Union, but left a void that needed to be filled and a question to be answered: who will be our rivals now? 

No star-crossed lovers they

As successive details of Rangers’ worsening financial situation have been leaked to the press, Celtic choruses of “we’re having a party when Rangers die” have grown louder. These may be two football clubs alike in dignity, but they’re hardly a pair of star-crossed lovers. But if Celtic get there way and it ends in tragedy for Rangers, what then? Perhaps more than any other, the identities of these two clubs are counterbalanced; each one validates the other. And if you think nobody would miss the unsavoury scenes and sectarian songs that accompany Celtic and Rangers whenever they clash, just remember the former US presidents who pine for a day when the threat of nuclear war loomed over us all.