One of the worst features of the banal celebrity infested and suffocating media wastescape that Britain is immured in is both the obsession itself but also the idea that Andy Warhol's "prophecy" that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes has turned out to be something that has become true: as a talentless purveyor of dreck he was well placed to know .Last year I just could not stand the self-indulgent media bollocks with regards the death of Jade Goody. Have you heard anything about her since ? No, she is totally forgotten. At the time things were very different as when I wrote the following......
Following the death of reality telly star Jade Goody, the BBC has made this item the top news story. Goody was famous for being having her terminal illness filmed on camera no less than her 24 hour day on the Big Brother series.
As with Princess Diana, there will be oodles of collective grief by those who thought they knew her. Those who resist the 'emotional correctness' and mention the fact that she did not acheive much with her life will be attacked with self righteous zeal.
The grief over Goody is narcissistic: partly it reflects the inability of many people in Britain to deal with death or to draw lessons from it with regards the way they are living their own lives now and the way they have lived them and will live them.
It's grief for the consumer age in which nothing is of lasting value beyond the money that will buy the pleasures that divert one from having to reconsider their shallow celebrity, sex and shopping obsessed lifestyle choices. People fear death because they aren't really living a full emotional life.
Plugged into reality through whar Bernard Levin called "the idiot's lantern" in the corner of their 'living room', millions of Britons are living surrogate lives when they are not trying to force themselves to feel something because Britain has become such a deracinated, atomised and eerily denatured society.
People often fear death because they really fear they have not lived yet. When someone famous dies, not least someone who could have been them like Goody, there is a curious relief more that 'Thank God it isn't me' rather than any genuine consideration as to the achievement of that person.
If Goody's death from cervical cancer saves others by getting more young women to get tests that can offer some rationalisation for a largely pathetic and meaningless life that Goody lived. Yet the number who will die from it is hardly equal to those who will die from their current sex, drug and booze binges.
Goody's premature death will not make her life seem any better than it really was and it was not particularly good. The celebrity obsessed lifestyle is not a good one and had she lived it out beyond it's natural duration she would not have been able to get the retrospective good gloss it has been given.
Such criticisms will seem callous. The point is that it is what we do with our lives when the threat of death is not immediately there that has to matter. Otherwise any life, no matter how tawdry or squalid, can be glorified as better than it really was as long as that person is famous for anything.
What matters is that people respond to the knowledge of an early death by realising that we all live on borrowed time and that as we only die our own deaths alone the way we deal with others when we still have our life potential before us is the most important thing.
When Goody believed she had all her life in front of her she was as shallow, vulgar, foolish and narcissistic as those who watch Big Brother. Young people today are more so than ever because they think the world belongs to them and that the old are boring and worthless.
Then when faced with their own deaths they become terrified because death only is supposed to happen to those who are pushed out from conscious view-from the old to the one million dead Iraqis who have died so that people in the UK can continue to drive their cars on cheap petrol.
Elsewhere death is a normal part of life. In Britain it is not supposed to happen which is why, in an age of spectacle, Islamist terrorists are seething to punish Western consumers for not caring about the death of fellow Muslims just so they can maintain their vulgar and trivial pleasures.
It is no good thinking about helping others, or even thinking of them, just when you personally are threatened by the prospect of death or because one sees one dying person on TV. It might mean that the way you have chosen to live is wrong.
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