Celebration of Life, Stupidity and Ignorance
Well we are officially back from Haj. We were actually back on 5th Jan, but then I got bogged down in work and suffered from the Post-Holiday blues for a week or so. Then I somehow managed to have the ‘Haji’ cough manifest itself a week later than it should have done, and was it a serious bout, I certainly thought so. My wife defined it as ‘Man Flu’, but I still maintain I was at death’s door.
The Haji cough is something which afflicts pretty much 99% of all people who go on Haj. You have to imaging 3million people all in such close proximity to each other, colds and coughs will always spread. And of course some people are not conscious of the age old adage, “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases”, especially as they splutter there way through their days in a climate which in theory should not cause you to have a cold.
and my return to the UK has also been heralded by a feeling of ‘I am a second class citizen’ by the popular media’s coverage of Muslim’s and their ‘problems’ and while I was away, my beloved Prime Minister identifying Muslim’s as being a bit of a problem community. And then surfaced the ‘Shilpa Shetty Affair’.
for those who may not know, and I understand that the rest of the world is not necessarily obssessed with ‘Reality’ television, Big Brother is a program which puts 10 or so people into a house with no contact with the outside world for a period of a few weeks and watches them disintegrate. And as such there is a ‘Celebrity’ version. This year, our screens were graced with people who ranged from Dirk Benedict (’Face’ from The A-Team, and Starbuck from BattleStar Galactica-the old series), and also Jermaine Jackson (Michael’s brother) which is now a muslim living in Dubai (he is now named Muhammad Abdul Aziz), and of course Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.
But also in amongst this glitterati of B-List stars was thrown in a bunch of ‘Celebrities’ who over the last few weeks have made comments about Shilpa Shetty which have thrown into sharp relief the racial/cultural difference which are still apparent in the UK of 2007.
My concerns obviously lie with the apparently racist comments made, but more worrying I think is that we in Britain have decided to raise people up to the status of celebrity, i.e. to be celebrated, for qualities would normally be used for ridicule.
We glorify stupidity and ignorance (“where is East Angular?”, asked Jade Goody once, oblivious to the fact that it is East Anglia and is only a short drive from her home county of Essex and my favourite of Saddam Hussein being a boxer!).
We glorify people who are willing to take their clothes off in public (Danielle Lloyd, glamour model and Beauty Competition contestant)
And generally we are willing to make people rich on the basis of these qualities. What does this say about a society who will celebrate the existence of people who simply have no idea what is happening in the real world not because they are living privileged lives, but simply because they do not think important what happens in the world outside of their blinkered view of it.
Happy New Year Everyone!!
