2005-07-08

Stuff I really hate in the wake of public tragedy:

Personal accounts of grief from those who were not personally affected. Movie stars are great for this. At the scene of the event, ordinary people are doing their best to cope with injury and terror and death; meanwhile, on the other side of the country, some assbrained starlet is inevitably gushing to a sycophantic interviewer that they �couldn�t stop crying� or whatever when they heard the news. Oh you poor dear! Who fucking cares fuck! Shut up, give some of your overflowing pots of money to the Red Cross, and then use some more of that money to buy yourself a clue.

Public outcries of shock and surprise. �How could this happen here? How could this happen to us?� and so forth. I�m sorry, when did we all get declared omnipotent? Barring alien attacks from outer space, public tragedies are not generally surprising, which is really what makes them so tragic. Such is life: things catch fire; tectonic plates shift; gigantic waves surge forth from the ocean; dim-witted megalomaniacal warmongering despots piss off jittery fanatical reactionaries; and innocent people die. A lot. The world sucks. This is not news. A small army of German philosophers have been banging noisily on about it for half the history of humankind. And yet every time something awful happens and a bunch of people get messily offed, a hundred thousand editorial columns are spawned to express the monumental astonishment and outrage of Joe Public. What planet have you been living on, people? Life ain�t a bowl of fucking roses, or the mixed metaphor of your choice expressing existential angst.

Ethnocentric overreaction. All the �unprecedented tragedy� posturing that goes on when war and disaster have the audacity to creep within the borders of an industrialised Western nation. What, you mean unprecedented today? Ten points if you can tell me how many people were slaughtered in Sudan last month! You can round it off to the nearest thousand if you like; it�s all the same. Ten more points if you can explain why the UN won�t admit there�s a genocide occurring. Now, go look up �unprecedented� in the dictionary, and try to make it past the pin-up girl next time you read a newspaper, OK?

�And now that I�ve done my bit of supercilious sneering, I�ll admit that the bombings in London have left me feeling just as tearful, shocked, frightened and angry as the next person. I�ll have to see if I have room to squeeze �hypocrite� in under �inveterate drunkard� on my business card.