Jade's death is a private tragedy... so why are the public grieving?
Friday March 27 2009
So, have you recovered yet? Have the tears dried, your chest stopped heaving and can you now face maybe even a morsel to eat? After all, when grief kicks in, they do say that the appetite is one of the first things to go.
And there can be no doubt that grief-stricken is the only way to describe how the people of Britain and Ireland felt in the days since Jade Goody died.
In fact, it would appear that not since Princess Diana -- and, to a lesser extent Irish model Katy French -- died has there been such an absurd outpouring of ersatz emotion, crocodile tears and the unedifying sight of strangers competing with each other to see who can be the most visibly distressed.
So let's get some facts down, shall we?
Jade Goody was, in turn, the most hated woman in Britain, a particularly odious example of the new British underclass -- the product of a broken, dysfunctional home barely able to string more than a few simian sentences together without erupting into a deluge of profanity. Then the diagnosis of her fatal illness and her decision to live out her last days in the eye of a media storm transformed her into a type of latter-day saint.
She first came to widespread notice as the poster child for indulged ignorance and those condescending, smug middle class twits who think it is "cute" or "endearingly naïve" when someone thinks that Rio De Janeiro is a footballer and not a city and that East Anglia -- or East Angular as she insisted on calling it -- was actually another country.
Then she was Jade the racist bully, and over the last few weeks and months she was Jade The Nation's Sweetheart -- someone who was going to single-handedly raise the issue of cervical cancer.
In truth, she was never any of these things, but rather an empty vessel into which people could invest their own hopes, prejudices and beliefs.
And now we have been forced to endure the kind of sanctimonious, vomitous rubbish that many had hoped had disappeared forever.
The sight of people who never met the woman queuing up to leave tear-drenched flowers at her memorial shrine is a rather worrying sign of the infantilisation of our society.
Jade Goody's death is indeed a tragedy -- for her children and close family and friends.
It is not a tragedy for me. And it is not a tragedy for you.
Yet the mass hysteria is not confined to the lumpen Proles who felt compelled, like a vast herd of particularly stupid sheep, to turn up en masse and dutifully cry on queue for Sky News, which has treated the whole saga with all the attention and detail one would usually expect from an ailing Queen, not a veteran of some reality show.
No, this strange and rather pathetic obsession with the woman spread to a business more usually known for its hard nosed scepticism than its indulgent wallowing in the shallow, scabrous waters of celebrity.
Indeed, the BBC further increased its decline into oblivion with its obsessive reporting of the story.
Look, guys, at a time when we're in meltdown, when the Middle East is teetering on the edge of the abyss and we all have to try and cope in the new economic reality, people with more than one functioning brain cell wanted to get the news, not Big Brother-inspired drivel.
In fact, Big Brother is largely to blame for this new stupidity.
Because when someone like Goody, or any of the other innumerable wannabes who have polluted and debased our culture in the previous nine seasons, can appear on television then the befuddled masses think that they, too, can get on television. Never mind the talent, just feel the self-absorption.
This has also spread to the Internet, where it seems every sad sack has their own Facebook or MySpace page.
I even heard one person tell their friend that they "have 350 friends on Facebook."
But of course they do not have 350 friends, they simply have a website that 350 people have signed up for.
This blurring of the distinction between the real and the virtual has become a psychological epidemic amongst us, as people too stupid to actually go out and achieve something in the real world simply become micro-Jades, existing in their own limited sphere, posting pictures of themselves getting drunk and convincing themselves that they are, indeed, a legend in their own lunchtime.
Most of this is as harmless as it is tedious, but there is a darker, more detrimental element to it also.
Were you one of the dozens of Irish people who turned up on various radio and television shows after her death crying and talking about her as if they had lost an old and dear friend or family member?
Well, if you fall to pieces when someone you don't know and have never met dies, how on earth are you going to cope with things when someone who is genuinely close to you dies?
This is fast becoming a generation of emotional cripples which is completely unsuited to dealing with real life because so much of their time is spent in an utterly illusory world of reality television (a phrase which surely puts the moron into oxymoron) or their own online existence where they can filter out the unpleasant and real and instead create their own matrix.
Nor is this confined to the kind of bubble-headed 20-something who thinks that Davina McCall is a good broadcaster.
Supposedly respected commentators have come out and with grim inevitability have started to compare her to that other bafflingly popular blond, Princess Diana.
That was the view of the otherwise imperious Stephen Fry, while the London Indie's Johann Hari launched a blistering attack on her critics, claiming that: "Once more, we could hate the poor and feel good about it too."
That's arrant, revisionist nonsense -- Jade Goody brought shame on the working class and many of us felt resentful towards her because of that. There was no hate, just scorn.
I'll make this simple for those of you who are hard of thinking -- emotions are precious, reserve them for those who have earned them, and don't go wasting them on some dead stranger simply because there's a MySpace petition urging you to do so.
