RIP JADE GOODY

RIP JADE GOODY Well after five years of painstaking abstinence I have finally succumbed to the blogging frenzy and am left wondering why people have been so upset by this video :

RIP JADE GOODY sélectionné dans Humour

You can also view it on Youtube by clicking

here.

For those of you who aren't lucky enough to have an intimate knowledge of British popular culture don't know who this woman is, I suggest you avail yourself of the services of Wikipedia. Her impending death is being mourned by some but celebrated by others who are looking forward to a more rational take on popular culture as well as some British celebrities who actually have some form of talent to justify the hours we fritter away in front of our television sets. This video has been without a doubt my most popular (at least in quantitative sense) and sparked a furious exchange of video comments and e-mails as well as the creation and destruction of several Facebook groups, Jade Goody is nothing if not a source of controversy which is rather ironic given the fact that my basis for condemning her is that she had nothing whatsoever to offer to society!


I also did a video response for all those people who got in touch after I did the original to say in a rather matter of fact fashion that they did not agree. The main points I addressed were those people who believed I was sick or mentally ill to take pleasure at another's death, particularly from people who had either suffered from cancer themselves or had lost a relative. This came as something of a surprise to me as I hadn't recalled saying that I was amused at the idea of terminally ill people in general, more seeing the resulting improvement of British television programming as an incidental benefit of this woman's death.


Naturally it's wrong to wish death on anyone but of course there some of my viewers were guilty of that very human trait of seeing what we want to see in a situation rather than its reality. The fact that Jade Goody is going to shuffle off this mortal coil whether we want her to or not is the uncomfortable reality. Another uncomfortable reality is her exploitation at the level of attention she has gained from the media while the issue of Cancer research has been sidelined.

One very intelligent poster pointed out that her wealth could better be devoted towards organisations such as the McMillan trust who devote time and money towards providing palliative care and a cure for this disease. The idea of taking pleasure in another's suffering is naturally immoral by its very nature, though as a proponent of euthanasia I have nothing against anyone including this so-called celebrity ending her life by a more rapid and painless means. However I am not the one who has decided that Jade Goody is to die. This would seem to be the belief of all those harbingers who were good enough to get in touch with ominous premonitions of "what goes around comes around" and that I was going to be on the receiving end of some pretty "bad karma" soon.

I found this a refreshing change from the Russell Grant's Horoscope column in the JEP which usually recommends I consider doing more interior decoration but I did feel obliged to ask why such people did not feel that the hand of fate didn't intervene on Ms. Goody's behalf when she contracted a terminal illness. It would seem that the good Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways, that or I'm wasting my time speaking to losers who sit around hoping that providence will do their dirty work for them but I digress.

It's rather surprising for me as a young person to see the streak of traditionalist conservatism of my grandparent's generation alive and well in the youth of today. The kind of muddle headed thining I have seen in posts and video comments seems to run along the same lines as placard wavers outside a Confederate abortion clinic, life for the sake of life regardless of how pointless or downright pathetic and not taking into account the misery caused by the so-called human being in question. While Jade Goody's general appearance lends itself more to an evolutionary theory involving a porcine ancestor for modern human beings, we will accept that she is by and large made of the same stuff as the rest of us. There are those who believe rightly that she is therefore by default entitled to a certain level of respect as such and shouldn't be regarded in the same way as an animal in need of being "put down" as my friends in the Veterinary trade would say.

The loophole in this theory comes down to the concept of "proportionality" of human rights. Those of us who wish to live a life without an ugly, ignorant racist moron in Britain have little choice but to avoid all tabloid style newspapers and mainstream television channels altogether. We people who have a modicum of taste, tend to favour a life free of Jade Goody, that's all of Jade Goody all of the time. While this has not been possible due to the idolisation of the woman by the public at large I am relieved and more than a little satisfied that her demise will bring an end to a rather embarassing chapter in British history, perhaps it's best to think of it in terms of being an Abba fan before Mama Mia was released...

All those who have not been swayed by my less than scintillating logic may be in need of a gentle reminder that others were not put on this earth for the sole reason of hanging on their every word (suprisingly enough I am often accused of failing to respect the rights of others to hold an opinion, usually accompanied by the word "c*nt"). Just today I was offended by a letter to my local rag where a resident boasted that he owned a large 4x4 gas guzzler and was proud of it despite the indisputable impact on the environment. His lack of social conscience notwithstanding it's one thing to revel in having one's own vehicle but to mock those who have the good sense to make use of public transport by saying that we are "losers who stand in the rain" was a little more than my fragile ego could bear. It was at this point I decided to apply a rather unique philosophy which seems to have eluded some of the more persistent ranters known as a "sense of humour". Dictionary.com defines this as:

Noun

Singular sense of humour

Plural senses of humour

sense of humour (plural senses of humour)

1. The quality of an individual to find certain things funny.

Could it be that said individual was using humour to illustrate it's point? By a logical extension, could I then apply my own sense of humour to what he said to prevent myself from taking him too seriously?

I stood in the kitchen for several moments after reading the letter performing a type of mental Indian wrestling with my already overtaxed brain. Impulses flew, neurones reformed, the gears whirred round and round as I desperately tried to concieve how this individual, indeed a complete stranger could make such a personal attack on me, an innocent user of public transport.

My local newspaper publishes the names and addresses of all letters to the Editor and as I stood there flexing my knuckles in my red Linda McArtney apron, a pink mist descended over my vision... I imagined sprinting round to his humble house and taking a cricket bat to his beloved 4x4, all the while laughing manically as I made our planet that much greener. I imagined him looking on in tears as his beloved gas guzzler became so much scrap metal, fit only for recycling (though given his contempt for the environment he would have been more likely to hard the fragments of metal rather than allow them to be reused.)

I regret to inform you that I did not pursue this course of action however, mainly because I was baking Betty Crocker's finest brownies at the time and didn't want to see them burnt, secondly I have been raised with the old fashioned notion that everyone is entitled to an opinion.

No matter how wrong I believed he was, this gentleman wasn't asking my permission to say what he had to say. This is due to the little known human right involving freedom of expression, a tenet of law in most democratic countries which allows us to say anything we wish provided we don't encourage people to hurt each other, stir up race hate, set things on fire (unless it's yours of course) and so on.

This man who had offended me so had exercised this right and in so doing had offended me. Did I then start b*tching about how he shouldn't have said it in the first place or did I write a letter of my own and try to debate with him intelligently?

Time will tell...