NB: if you don’t watch TV at all, you may not get some of the references :)

I think I’m a bit like Oriah Mountain Dreamer (the jury is still out on that one), who says she doesn’t get parties: she feels a bit confused; people stand around talking about meaningless things. I think I’m a lot like that, often confused by what people are standing around DOING. I am not good at small talk, never have been. I suppose I never really got into the habit of social niceties, not being a terribly sociable creature; so I don’t get why people would spend all their waking hours racing and doing meaningless things…

Which brings me to what I was thinking about the other day: the furore over Jade Goody. Not to condone her, but what part of what she said is racist? I am honestly puzzled. But then I have been thinking for a while about how this drive towards political correctness is about to make us clones, and not pretty ones at that. I think people should worry more about Jade’s lousy attitude in general, before even thinking about calling her rant “racist”. It’s also silly to me that Isaiah Washington has gone to “rehab” for calling T. R. Knight a “f****t”... Oh my goodness, I mean really! This world has become so completely obsessed with what looks good, the surface of things… Sending someone to rehab for saying “f****t” three times strikes me as the height of silliness! (Does it fix the problem, I wonder?) And I keep seeing this, over and over... Here we are trying to make over the world, making things as aesthetically pleasing as possible, and people as well… The Extreme Makeover generation.

To be honest, all that’s going to happen is that people won’t express what they really feel anymore… We will become a world of repressed beings, like in that film, Equilibrium. I’m not condoning racist rants or people saying the word “f****t”, but I think societal pressure is becoming seriously slanted in more and more absurd ways. Tyra Banks was being criticized for gaining weight- WHAT??!! Since when is that a crime? (Oh, it is in our weight-obsessed world). I am not her greatest fan, but I was fully behind her when she said she was quite happy, thank you very much…

Sadly, I know I’m in the minority… Few people still think people should be individuals, anymore. No, we must conform more and more to those ridiculous standards… And when we stray, we are not going to simply be laughed at as a nutter (as Jade may very well be), but are going to be accused of racism or some other “-ism”, and carted off to jail/rehab/mind-monitoring/Big Brother’s Re-programming Grey Building. I mean really! Is this what post-modernism means??

(So glad right now I’m not in the “West”).