Jade Goody may be dead, but she's still a vile chav

'AaronF1982' left me this little comment on the SM blog yesterday:

Your rants are no more "intellectual" than that of Nicole Cornes or Amber Petty. They're feministic in nature, bear very little weight based on fact, and are more or less entirely opinionated. I read the Advertiser for news, not pathetic rants on people who are suppose to bear some significant self-importance.

I love these comments, because I can just imagine the crotchety antagonist sitting behind the protective screen of his or her computer thinking ZING! That'll show her! And yet, they're the ones wasting their time thinking up poorly constructed 'witticisms' to fire at supposedly useless bloggers who are doing nothing more than wasting everybody's time writing pointless diatribes no one cares about.

I mean, at least I get paid for doing that.


Cross posted from this week's Sunday Mail blog:

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It’s a curious thing, this fame obsessed society of ours. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that one need have no discernable talent in order to thrust themselves into the (often well-paid) limelight.

All they need have is a desperate aversion to taste, propriety or anything remotely resembling self-awareness.

Perhaps one of the most startling examples of modern society’s willingness to embrace and celebrate absolute mediocrity has been with the now late Jade Goody. From humble (and admittedly tragic) origins, Goody was catapaulted into Z-grade celebrity status following her appearance on that cesspool of talentless hacks all searching for their 15 minutes – Big Brother.

After being widely vilified by Britain following her participation in the 2000 screening of BB, Goody cashed in on one of the golden rules of fickle stardom – the only thing the public loves more than hating a villain is championing a misunderstood, rehabilitated former miscreant (see: Ben Cousins, Wayne Carey, Matt Newton).

Suddenly, Goody had endorsement deals up the wazoo. By 2007, she was the owner of three homes, a $120,000 car and had penned a biography (to join the hordes of other biographies ghost written for people who have the audacity to assume that lives lived before the age of 25 warrant a book detailing them).

But while you can take the girl out of Chavsville, you can’t take the Chav out of the girl.

In 2007, Goody appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and rapidly earned the nation’s hatred once more after becoming embroiled in a racist scandal with fellow contestant Shilpa Shetty. Not only was Goody monumentally stupid – she famously claimed the Mona Lisa was painted by ‘Pistachio’ and that a ferret was a bird – she was also a vile, foul mouthed, ignorant racist consumed by a self aggrandizing obsession with being famous for fame’s sake.

She was an example of one of the worst kinds of people. She was not only vicious and utterly stupid, she appeared to revel in it. The idea that she could have penned a shopping list is dubious, let alone a full length biography.

And yet, when Goody discovered she was suffering from terminal cancer just seven months ago, she was transformed virtually overnight into a saintly doyenne of human suffering. Her constant grabs for exposure and fame were now cast in the light of someone wanting to raise awareness about cervical cancer. People praised her strength and endurance; they mourned for her two sons who would now be forced to live without a mother. Since her death last week, tributes have been pouring in from all over the world.

The entire circus is a gross exercise in gratuitous mourning. Jade Goody had her 15 minutes of fame, and her (now) adoring public can at last have their 15 minutes of claiming they ‘knew and cared about her when’.

In 2008, our Chaser boys wrote an excellent song parodying society’s compulsion to martyr the dead even when they were rightfully reviled in life. We fear speaking ill of the dead (unless it’s about undisputed despots) and instead string together insincere testaments to their enduring spirit or lust for life. The excuse is offered that the dead are unable to defend themselves, so it’s cowardly to criticise them.

But I suspect it’s more simple than that. We don’t want to speak ill of the dead because people on the whole are afraid of death itself. Might we be tempting karma to lambast those who have passed over? Might Death himself be watching us revelling in the Hated One’s demise, and suddenly decide to give us a taste of our own medicine?

But in amongst this is a macabre sense of excitement. The British media circus surrounding Goody’s much publicised illness and expected death amounted to nothing more than tragedy porn of the most exploitative kind. And like most porn, now that it’s over it leaves people feeling rather unfulfilled and vaguely squeamish.

The fact is, there is no reason why a character as despicable as Jade Goody should have been celebrated even in the prime of her life. To hold her up as some kind of example of class and fortitude in the lead up to her death was not only sick, it was also stupidly incorrect.

Having cancer didn’t change the fact she was a money grubbing famewhore with no respect for her fellow human beings and nothing of value whatsoever to offer an audience on a mass scale. It didn’t change the fact she was a racist, aggressive bully, or that the only reason she tried to make amends for this was because her vast fauxlebrity empire was crashing down around her ears.

She may have secured an enviable fortune for her sons, but at what price? To feed off another person’s imminent death as TV and magazine entertainment is a sick indictment on a society already far too obsessed with ‘reality’ television and talentless bozos with no internal barometer for humiliation and no off button.

I’m sad that cancer has claimed yet another victim. I’m sad that two children have lost their mother far too early. I’m sad that Jade Goody has died, but only in the way that I’m not sad that she was alive. If society had a shred of credibility left, Goody would have died as most people do – far away from a slew of cameras and their salivating audience.

Indeed, we would never have been exposed to her in the first place. And we certainly wouldn’t have had to watch while she demonstrated her unremitting desire for public exposure right up until her very last breath.

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Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and waste other people's time by finding new and more annoying ways to be irrelevant.