Jade Goody has died of cancer at the age of 27. I’ve followed Goody’s celebrity career with keen interest – always intrigued, increasingly saddened and frequently angered by the way that this young woman from London has unwittingly acted as the focus for a particularly mean-spirited, condescending aspect of British popular opinion.
Goody had her flaws. I don’t propose to express unqualified approval of everything that she said or did over the past seven years or so. Some of it is clearly indefensible, particularly her notorious harassment of Shilpa Shetty. She has occasionally appeared insecure and needy. Many of her problems were clearly of her own making.
However, I’m appalled by the way that many people seem to have found it perfectly acceptable to treat her with such disdain, based primarily on her lack of education, her unconventional looks and her astute, focused grasp of the fact that capitalising on her celebrity might offer her an alternative to making a living as a dental nurse.
She was accused of being racist. I think that knee-jerk reaction was far from the truth: the agonised hand-wringing of a chattering class that blanched at the mention of “Shilpa Poppadom”, yet which wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the thought of calling someone a “Scouser”. Grotesque comic appropriation of regional foodstuffs is not racial abuse.
I have a theory that Goody was a mirror. When you looked at her, you saw yourself. My impression was of someone who didn’t know all the answers – or indeed, many of the questions – but wasn’t going to let that get in the way of having a good time and making something of herself. Who loved life, even if she didn’t quite understand it.
Clearly others saw a different reflection: someone ugly, stupid, small-minded, who thought very little of themself and took delight in venting their frustration on a weaker member of society in the most ugly, bestial way possible. Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood. Put her head on a pole, teach others to fear and revile her.
Goody was far from unique. There’s a whole class of people in Britain these days who are under-educated and under-privileged, marginalised and disenfranchised, stigmatised as “chavs” and “pikeys”. I hate those words with a passion. Their effete, overweening snobbery offends me more than almost everything else that I can think of.
A society that feels the need to turn so compulsively and viciously on a particular section of its members is a sick, inhuman system. Fuck that, I want no part in it. Fuck you if you’re complicit in it, deliberately or otherwise. It’s not acceptable to think this way, to presume so heartlessly that kindness and understanding are conditional.
When Princess Diana died, there was much talk about Britain having transformed almost overnight into a more caring, emotionally intelligent society. There are minor parallels between death of Diana and that of the woman that I’ve heard described within the past twenty-four hours – without irony – as the Princess of Bermondsey.
And yet, eleven years after the funeral of the People’s Princess, Britain seems more judgemental than ever. Jade Goody’s greatest achievement might, in retrospect, have been to reveal the parallel existence of the United Kingdom of East Angular, whose inhabitants cover their mirrors rather than gaze on what they have become.
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“…I’m appalled by the way that many people seem to have found it perfectly acceptable to treat her with such disdain, based primarily on…her astute, focused grasp of the fact that capitalising on her celebrity might offer her an alternative to making a living as a dental nurse.”
Bravo. I’m glad you’ve said this. There are some truly ugly blog entries floating around out there around the subject of her death – and her life – but all I see is someone who managed to turn making a gobshite out of herself on telly into a career which pulled her and her family out of hideous poverty. Sure, she’s all over the news at the mo, but it’s easy enough to switch off the box/close the browser when it gets too much.
Not being a Big Brother fan – or even viewer – Jade Goody meant very little to me, but the tittle-tattle about her was obviously unavoidable. It seemed to me that the reason the press – and across the board, from the highbrow to the gutter – was so hard on her was because she made us stare ourselves in the face of what part of our society is really like. And we didn’t like it. They’re always very keen to report on the ill-educated, ill-informed, breadline underclass who live for nothing else but to be famous for the sake of being famous, as long as that same underclass isn’t actually present in the argument. Just an unspoken part of society, rather, that we can shake our heads wearily over and wonder what to do about them. Then suddenly Jade was there, making them and us stare it in the face. For that, I’m rather thankful to her.
Then, of course, she goes and gets cancer and they even have to shut up about that.
“A society that feels the need to turn so compulsively and viciously on a particular section of its members is a sick, inhuman system.”
I think humanity in general always needs something to look down on, a sub-sect to blame the problems on.
In non-PC times/types, it was a different nation (or subset of a nation) – The UK had it in for the Irish, for Americans it was Poles who were the brunt, for Aussies it’s Kiwis, etc. etc.
In politics it’s always a sub-set of the populace – be it single mums, people on benefits, immigrants, etc. etc.
In media, it’s a different sub-set that’s always up for vilification – it’s been rapists, paedophiles, etc. and now it’s bankers and finance people.
I suspect that it’s actually “just” humanity in general – that we need something to hate, something to focus on, something to blame.
And in that context, I guess it’s no different from chimpanzee tribes fighting each other, or herds of [insert animal type here] don’t mix/match. But I don’t know, I’m no anthropologist.
Vicky – yeah, I’m not particularly interested in celebrity culture – except in an anthropological sense, in terms of how we relate to each other as individuals within a larger collective grouping – but the fact is that it exists and she appears to be one of the relatively small number of people whose life it genuinely transformed for the better. On the odd occasion that I saw her on TV, I warmed to her. I had far more interest in what she was doing than I ever did in which particular pair of sunglasses Victoria Beckham might have been wearing on any given day.
AUW – I posted a quote on my Tumblr blog recently about consumerism not having been a problem until the “lower classes” started consuming. It’s that snobbery that I can’t stand, that implication that a certain section of society ought to just accept its lot, hide away and not aspire to too much. And when it can’t articulate itself with quite the right set of vowels, when it talks about serviettes rather than napkins, when it can’t pass a somewhat arbitrary set of exams – due to either nature or nurture – it’s fair game for a bit of communal ridicule and bullying. It’s a fucking appalling mentality and those who perpeutate it ought to be ashamed.
Lyle – this post was considerably longer and more ranting in its first draft and I removed the section about the shift to picking on the less attractive or gifted since political correctness came into play. You’re right, people always seem to need someone to bully or feel superior to. Two literary ghosts haunt my thoughts and this piece of writing in particular: Golding’s Lord Of The Flies (which I’ve quoted without attribution in the sixth paragraph) and Orwell’s 1984 (from which, of course, the phrase “Big Brother” comes in the first place). Both vividly stress the dangers of dehumanising sections of society. For me, the treatment of Goody is just a specific example of a wider sneering mentality – amongst those who should know better – towards “chavs”, “pikeys” and so on. I might come across as some kind of bleeding-heart liberal, but I suspect that this actually goes back to the playground, when friends of mine were picked on for no reason other than the fact that their low-income parents couldn’t afford a similar lifestyle to that of their more affluent peers. I hated that then and I hate it now.
I’d agree, I hate that kind of bigotry or unthinking loathing of anyone/class/thing
However, I don’t have an issue with it *IF* there’s at least some reason for that dislike.
Now personally, with Jade’s PR/TV appearances etc., I found her to be an unpleasant person, whether for the racism issues, the lack of intelligence etc. I don’t have an issue with her bootstrapping herself up from Big Brother [whatever] to fame/celebrity/money etc. – that’s understandable, and she made use of what had been handed to her.
The difference between chimpanzees and humans is that we have the luxury of some semblance of ‘being civil’ That means that we can choose to let someone’s foibles go over our head, by reasoning that we all have something about us that is unpleasant or discomforting to our fellow humans and so we ‘give a little’
Calling someone a ‘thick munter’ is probably pushing that a bit.