You’re sitting there about to have your tea, and having survived the public self-humiliation of a load of brain-dead would-bes whipped on by a fantasy S/M madame, you keep the little telly on for the relative sanity of the informative 6 o’clock – news? News it isn’t. Every night it is the same tired old formula. It is red-top tabloid telly at its worst - sex, crime, scandal, Europe-cut-off-by-fog xenophobia, celebs and bloody football.
In this household football is regarded as being just about as interesting as string, yet a fixed percentage of 6 o’clock programmes’ air-time just has to be devoted to it, whether or not anything has actually happened in this game for little boys with nothing better to do which telly has turned into a multinational industry, so we have to endure gobfuls of padding and gobbledygook from lounge lizards who haven’t shaved for three weeks and who obviously don’t own a tie between them.
And the troubles in Northern Ireland have erupted again, as they will continue to do while tribes think it is perfectly normal to taunt each other in provocative fancy dress parades. Northern Ireland’s troubles have produced many wonderful, brave women, but it is still a mediaeval, male-dominated society where fathers give their little boys guns and tell them to go out to play and women are supposed to know their play-ass (and where even vowels get tortured to death.)
And that is about the only positive thing I can think of to justify the colossal social cost of football – that it ritualises tribalism, puts bromide in its tea, and acts as a safety valve.
..ooOOoo..
And don’t stop me in full rant, because another thing that is sickening is the air-time that these wretched programmes devote to sentimental stories about ‘our boys’ killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is a brutal fact, but if your son or daughter joins the army there is a distinct possibility that they could be killed. The risk of being killed is part of the job. If your offspring were not willing to take that risk they could have found themselves a nice, safe job in a supermarket or a library or doorstep selling the stupor-inducing joys of Sky TV. But they didn’t. They volunteered to do a job that they thought could make the world a better place. The really sad thing about war is that so many altruistic genes never have a chance to reproduce because of an accidental bullet or an enveloping wave of mustard gas. And what are we left with?
Losing a child is awful. I do know. What bereft parents need at times of great shock and grief is comfort from loving friends and family – an enfolding arm of genuine human compassion, not some minor telly celeb reading a script written by a semi-literate who has never heard of the subjunctive and wouldn’t recognise it if it bit them on their media studies PhD.
What bereaved parents and families do not need is the vicarious tears that these abject reporters – no, not reporters, ‘presenters’ of scripted current-affairs human-interest magazine shows – invite us to shed. They are crocodile tears, and they do us all a disservice. They invite us to be participants in the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that surrounded the death – in an all-too-ordinary tragic car accident – of somebody who was probably originally a normal, happy, even if rather privileged young woman until she got pushed into an unhappy marriage. We allow our press to build Disney figures out of people so that we can rejoice when they don’t live up to cartoon perfection, and it is this same social cancer which throws up people – and, God help us, voters – who think that a psychopath like Raoul Moats is a folk hero.
It must have been blindingly obvious to the editors of these programmes from Day 1 that soldiers were going to be killed in the Middle East, just as they were killed in Northern Ireland, and just as they were killed in Ypres or on the Somme or the beaches of Dunquerque, and that by committing themselves to covering the first deaths in detail they had hung a millstone round their necks. When does the air-time run out? 500 deaths? 1,000? In the Battle of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers died in one day. Difficult to fit the reely reely exciting football news in that day, hey?
..ooOOOoo..
Uncontrolled social networking and low standards of journalism encourage us to live in fantasy worlds. Older people may have the wisdom to resist it, but for a new generation of children this cartoon, Facebook world is more real than boring old school and boring old parents. It isn’t only the pervert in the shabby raincoat at the school gates that parents should be worried about. It is also the sort of brainwashing that children are being subjected to by forces that parents have no control over. We live in a society in which ignorance and stupidity are regarded as virtues: a society in which newspaper editors can run campaigns against paedophiles and not care very much if their bumpkin readers bash up paediatricians by mistake. Well, it sells newspapers to people who never learned to think.
The next time you are tempted to lay a £2 bunch of flowers at the roadside where a life was extinguished ask yourself what you think you are doing. It is a gesture as cheap as it is contemptible. It says ‘O look how hearing about this death has affected me’. It says: ‘O watch me beating my breast in woe.’
The vicious me-ist ideology of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham led you to believe that you were the centre of the universe. But ask yourself how this little death of someone you'd never even met, let alone known, has really affected you. Did it make you cry? Oh poor you.
It would be such a great comfort to the bereaved, knowing that.
No comments:
Post a Comment