News that a talent show is bent is no news. I wouldn’t care if I really believed this country has no talent. Whatever talent is, it ain’t the stuff of our soft porn entertainment industry. I don’t watch any of this muck, but am sometimes trapped into it in a pub or when they stick it on the news after some carnage somewhere. I don’t want censorship – this just hands things over to moral morons. I think it all is censorship of the opiate of the masses kind. I know I’d rather be zonked out than be aware of any of it.
The idea that ADMASS culture is shite is not new – I think the term was JB Priestley’s. It’s not refinement I would seek, but rather peace from the muck being peddled as the status quo and something for ‘my market segmentation’. When I live abroad, I’m generally free of the awful dross – the peddlers can’t get at me as easily. What there isn’t is any kind of positive opt-in to a world without it. By now, we should be able to schedule our own programming in new ways and not rely on advertisers or BBC bureaucrats.
What I want, in the end, is to be able to choose and I suspect this is a new politics. I would choose a life with very little retailing in it, however direct or indirect. What goes on now gives me no world to join, let alone feel belonging in. There’s a grumpy side in all this of course and I’m rejecting the ‘affluence in privacy’ that one can achieve by preying on existing society. I could move to some ghastly space in Tokyo and buy friends by the night, more the norm there than anyone cares to admit. I’d rather see the smile on my neighbour’s face because I’ve mowed her lawn.
And I’d rather be ‘mowing my neighbour’s lawn’ than stuck in entertainment. We’ve loads of talent. It’s just that we have it all upside down. Join me doing her back garden Dave? I doubt it, Big Society Boy.
Allcoppedout's Blog 