Us, the crisis and the Big Brother society

What fools we are, those of us who dreamed of something different on the threshold of the 21st century, of a New World Order based on the Rule of Law in a community of nations that was united, free, fraternal and equal. Just like the other dreamers and thinkers of bygone centuries, who had written or proclaimed the same words with equal affection, we see ourselves confronted by an invisible but impenetrable wall.

Photo: Us, the crisis and the Big Brother society

We finished the last millenium with a shocking act of barbarity, the bombing and slaughter of the courageous and noble Serbian people in acts of wanton and wholesale state terrorism perpetrated by NATO, we began the third millenium with the war in Iraq, tied to the 9/11 event by an unprofessional, bought, ignorant, manipulating and biased media which caters for the interests of those that want to sell a package of disinformation to the gullible public, ever more culturally threatened by reality shows, soccer and the footboys (the professionals that gravitate around this “sport” saying clichés, enriching themselves at the cost of those who willingly part with their hard-earned cash to see 22 mentally diminished morons spitting at each other, kicking each other, swearing and blowing their noses with their hands). This, amid a sea of loud-mouthed thugs spoiling for a fight, chanting racist slogans, throwing things at each other and urinating on the terraces, if indeed they are not doing it in plastic bags and hurling it at the opposing fans. And they call it the Beautiful Game?

The result is a Sky News, that apparently wins prizes every year as Channel of the Year, Site of the Year and so on, for showing Georgian missiles raining down on Russian civilians in South Ossetia, while declaring loud and clear that the Russians had attacked their smaller neighbour to the South, the same channel interviewing US troops entering Iraq and asking if they wanted revenge for the attacks against the Twin Towers and a sickening new phenomenon, “Reality Show Star” like the Englishwoman Jade Goody, who recently died, prematurely and publicly, of cancer and entered almost all the media channels around the planet.

And why was Jade Goody so famous? Because she insulted an Indian lady on the British Big Brother show, later was filmed numerous times with a cigarette butt hanging from the corner of her mouth shouting at people and then she discovered that she had cancer... in the middle of a reality show, of course. This, in the same society that raises David (“You know, We done the Job”) Beckham to the statute of quasi-God, which attributes him an income of 250 million dollars in five years because he just occasionally manages to do with a football what he obviously cannot do with the English language – control it, or rather, manages to do with the language what he does with the ball – bends it like Beckham.

It is precisely this soup of ignorance, inviting society to swim in a sea of mediocrity, ignorance and cultural darkness, rammed down for our throats daily each time that we turn on the the television, listen to the radio or open a newspaper (I avoid the word “buy” because the most widely read now are those that reduce everything to four pages of (dis)information, six of advertisements and the rest, God alone knows what). What the Church did not manage to do with the Inquisition in Medieval times, those that lead our society have achieved in modern times. Congratulations.

They have assaulted each and every fibre of the Welfare State, having removed one by one all the benefits and victories obtained throughout years of struggle, starting with the system of free healthcare and finishing with free public education. You have money? OK you can study. You can live.

And how convenient, at a time when we discover that our hard-earned pensions are at risk because a handful of irresponsible and greedy sons of a bitch, have pulverized billions of dollars of money even before it existed. But what workmanship! If any laborer demonstrated a fraction of the risíble incompetence shown by this flock of wastes of time and space, he or she would be fired and most probably sued - he would never receive a millionaire indemnity.

And who is going to be expected to foot the bill? This is not the question, it would be more correct to say who is already paying the bill? Just imagine. Reality shows, however, are going to continue, the footboys are going to get richer and richer while making less and less sense whenever they open their mouths, the managers of the financial crisis will buy the third yacht, the fourth Ferrari and the second holiday island with their fat bonuses, maybe even because the first one is too near to that of a footboy or a reality show star, and here are the rest of us looking on with mouths agape like demented simpletons “watching” a reality show (if that is what one does).

Do we really have to accept what our society has become?

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY

PRAVDA.Ru