Was Jade Goody a reflection of our own bigotry and stupidity?
There will be no rewrite of “Candle in the Wind” for Jade Goody’s funeral, but in her own glottal, gobby way, she jabbed a knitting needle into the subconscious of Britain just as surely as Diana Spencer did, and revealed something dark and darkening about us. Why was a big-hearted, big-mouthed young woman who came fourth on a reality show back in 2002 seized on with such glee and turned into one of the most famous people in the country? Because we needed her, to salve our own soiled consciences.
In her short life, Jade showed how as Britain has spiralled into one of the most unequal and immobile societies on earth, we have begun to openly jeer and sneer at the people trapped at the bottom. We gleefully seized on her as “proof” that the people rotting on abandoned estates were not there because of the grim accident of birth, but because they were stupid and ugly and bigoted. And all we proved – with unwitting irony – was our own stupidity and ugliness and bigotry.
I am living well away from British TV and have been rather baffled by what I have read in the press about this sad young woman. Why and how has she achieved a slot on the front page of our national newspapers? Why was her cancer diagnosis such headline news? Why do we hear the Rev Jonathan Blake, who officiated at her rather belated wedding ceremony last month, refer to her “a saint from Upshire and a princess from Bermondsey” who had “laughed in the face of death and given us a completely different approach to the way we deal with cancer”? Just as Diana Princess of Wales was being torn to shreds by the Press before her death elevated her to her saintly position, so someone whom I had never heard about until she was being chastised for her rudeness to someone on screen and dropped from a reality TV programme is now being described as a paragon of virtue and sainthood. I fear that we are being manipulated by the media more than we can ever suspect. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/391711/jade_goody_of_big_brother_punished/
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