celebrity end game., c/o : the deep blue dreams.,

so jade goody has cancer. its spreading. she has been given months to live. we get to watch the brutal destruction of her body in front of our unbelieving eyes... it is a tragdy. very few people can deserve the suffering that cancer brings., and though goody is a racist, stupid and, as much as i hate to say it, she's probably not going to be one of those who find a cure for cancer... it is still sad to see her suffer like this., just as watching scientific experiments on animals is heart rendering so is this.
what ever you may or may not think about all this, it sells. somewhere inside the majority want to see someone else suffer, witness with a tight stomach another person's demise. plato always maintained that democracy would descend into tyranny. he was speaking of a city state but the meaning applies here as well. the majority have decided that it is fit to display images of grotesque personal suffering in the public sphere, and not only that, consent to profits being made from the act of doing so. what is it about a fully grown woman facing the end of her life in a bathroom and breaking down - not hysterically, just with the inevitability of it all - that makes us fork out our wallets and hand over the cash..? the tyranny of the eye. television - literally vision at a distance. real enough to feel but far enough away not to make any difference to our own lives.
but the celebrity cult is constantly in danger of loosing its shock factor. just like the economy requires inflation to maintain its steady pace (if prices are constantly rising - especially if they rise quicker than real wages do - the buyer is encouraged to buy now now now now always now not tomorrow... and therein lies the danger of deflation., that consumption might slow down, that people might not spend spend spend but sit tight and wait for prices to fall - cutting profits - and if this were to continue for long enough the whole system would come to a standstill... remember that...) . but the celebrity industry is a mirror of the economy in reverse. its not inflation that drives it but deflation, or degradation. the quest is to find out how far people are prepared to degrade themselves and their privacy to be famous. the "game shows" where celebrities are made fools - big brother to name one where even elected MPs have partaken - where they eat insects, perform acts that would not be out of place in hard core dominatrix porn movies., and all to stay in the public eye. of course, its not really that which they seek., they are bought, they do so at a price (orwell "a bought mind is a spoiled mind"). they are paid big money to do these things but all the while its generally hush hush that its not the public eye they desire (though some do i suspect) . in truth it is the public who wants to feel like they own the celebrities. and that's really the whole point of this grand sharade. when we see these human beings degrading themselves they are in our hands., or at least in our field of vision. they entertain us. we think, i won't do that. we think they're just like us and that brings us hope in our trampled down futile solitary lives., yes this is the essence of the celebrity cult. we pay for it so that we can relieve ourselves of the guilt of not living our own lives the way we had dreamed them to be and so we make them suffer in front of us... its worth remembering that christianity - undoubtedly the religion of the western consumer world is fundmentally based on human sacrifice - jesus died in agony to save us from our sins...

jade goody does have cancer and it is spreading. but there is a metaphoric cancer also that she has succumbed to. a recent series of the big brother program was getting pretty bad ratings. basically people had figured out that it was boring. so jade goody was brought in adhoc almost it must have seemed to viewers, and within minutes of entering the big brother house she was making racist slurs against an attractive indian film star. of course in a country such as the uk where racism is endemic (to the point where we have our own ministry of truth which dictates what we can and cannot say - goes under the general name of political correctness but do not miss what it truly is, it is censorship of speach to a terrifying degree that requires us to "duck speak" whenever confronted with someone who is not white middle class and fairly well educated and institutionalised - in other words we repeat words and thoughts that we were told to use in these situations., positive discrimination is one of the ministry's greatest acheivements., and jesus wept., )
now before this drifts into the realms of a tirade,. let me tie it back together. the celebrity culture and the economy is the story of jade goody. jade goody once heralded as a working class hero for being the most popular person in a house where she and other "contestants" were incaserated, watched by uncountable cameras and on the other end uncountable eyes, where the contestants were deliberately encouraged to fall out and argue (live pain and hurt are good for tv ratings)., then after she'd sold all the newspapers and filthy rags that she could she was reintroduced as a racist (something which we are allowed by law to hate, and more importantly to publically get together and hate - this also sells newspapers...) and now finally the circle is complete. we can't hate someone who has cancer. that would be un-PC as the jargon goes, it would be too wrong to hate someone for whatever reason who now has cancer and is prepared to publically humiliate herself and share all her trivial concerns. and so now we in our hearts make the transition back again to loving her, poor her, how she is suffering. and we become complicit to the whole pantomime., and though i do not wish to be the voice of cruel truth surely it's sadder that kids all around the world are dying of thirst or diseases that we can cure simply because we don't really care as much as we do about this grotesque maronnete
perhaps next, after a "black" president the usa can vote in a man who is actually suffering from terminal cancer, with only a matter of weeks or days to live after his puppet inauguration, perhaps then the nation would know what it is to love... positive discrimination is another way of terming nationalism., or today, the requirements of the consumer society. each week several people are refused entry to the UK on the grounds of their political or social beliefs, yet as a nation we are happy - in fact pay - to watch a pathetic woman dying without any dignity in our own living rooms... and what's more, we sleep just fine after watching it...
so here's a clip of this woman :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krpFoZN8nSs .
perhaps we're all secretly glad that she's been taken down a notch. who did she think she was anyway. someone like that was probably bound to get cancer it can't be totally random, i mean take smokers, they deserve it too... or maybe, her death is ours. perhaps we all share in the crime. or perhaps, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end game of the celebrity cult.
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