Bird's Eye View
Television, it would appear, is the medium of choice for real people to shed their inhibitions and display positively Armenian levels of grief.
These displays are usually shortly after being told that they can’t sing, have no talent, never will have any talent, are ugly and graceless and have just wasted the time of the ‘judges’ on Slop Idle or whatever. I suspect that the anguish they feel as they exit stage left, either defiant, or crying so hard that their shoes squelch, is as nothing compared to the moment they realise that their humiliation will shortly be broadcast to the nation.
This must surely lead to the sort of mortification that would leave you either rigid with fear, crying so hard you dehydrate, or turn your character from ‘prickly’ to ‘angry with the world’ - surely the default setting for teens anyway? I wonder if the rejects watch their auditions at all? Alone in their bedrooms, wrapped round a bottle of something blue and alcoholic, or in the bosom of their supportive family, hoping for a resounding boo and hiss at the judges and loving assurance that they are not tone deaf?
Imagine watching your humiliation and being greeted by total silence from your supporters watching the recording before somebody says ‘you know, he’s right - you’re shit!’. Your life options now are: to pretend to shrug it off but secretly spend the rest of your miserable adult life watching the moment on DVD over and over again while masturbating into an oven-ready chicken and sobbing (stress does strange things to people), or just running to your room, slamming the door and starting work on the home-made bombs.
Thanks to ritual humiliation, we’ve become a lot more used to seeing real people emoting. But even the shattering of the dreams of some deluded twat in stone-washed jeans singing ‘Angels’ off-key could not prepare us for the press conference of the woman who had just been told by the European Court of Human Rights that she couldn’t use the frozen embryos without the consent of her ex-fiancé, who had fertilized the embroyos but had since gone cold on the idea of parenthood.
I did wonder why she had called a press conference. She was obviously distressed - and by ‘distressed’ I mean hysterical with grief. In contrast, her ex-fiancé gave a press conference where he was calm, measured and, basically, came off like a psychopath.
Medical science is presenting us with all sorts of ethical dilemmas, many of them rather more complex than the people who created them are able to cope with. This is why it goes to wise judges, who toss a coin and break for lunch.
Parental disputes used to be simple. If the kid looked like the milkman, you gave the missus a thump but got on with it. Now things are more complex, but I’m not sure that people (men, basically), should be able to escape the consequences of their actions so easily. If the bloke in question had had a drunken knee-trembler up against a few crates of Newcastle Brown with the woman in question and she had caught pregnancy, what would he have done then?
Just how long after the act of ‘fertilization’ should one be allowed to call a halt to things? Popular milestones would probably be: when your kid comes last at some game on sports day, when he breaks your stereo, when he crashes the car or when he announces he’s gay and, worse, a ‘taker’!
Parenthood, I have observed, is all about gritting your teeth and getting through it. You might never stop being a parent but even I know when you start - and that includes being by yourself in a little room with a jazz mag and a cup.
These displays are usually shortly after being told that they can’t sing, have no talent, never will have any talent, are ugly and graceless and have just wasted the time of the ‘judges’ on Slop Idle or whatever. I suspect that the anguish they feel as they exit stage left, either defiant, or crying so hard that their shoes squelch, is as nothing compared to the moment they realise that their humiliation will shortly be broadcast to the nation.
This must surely lead to the sort of mortification that would leave you either rigid with fear, crying so hard you dehydrate, or turn your character from ‘prickly’ to ‘angry with the world’ - surely the default setting for teens anyway? I wonder if the rejects watch their auditions at all? Alone in their bedrooms, wrapped round a bottle of something blue and alcoholic, or in the bosom of their supportive family, hoping for a resounding boo and hiss at the judges and loving assurance that they are not tone deaf?
Imagine watching your humiliation and being greeted by total silence from your supporters watching the recording before somebody says ‘you know, he’s right - you’re shit!’. Your life options now are: to pretend to shrug it off but secretly spend the rest of your miserable adult life watching the moment on DVD over and over again while masturbating into an oven-ready chicken and sobbing (stress does strange things to people), or just running to your room, slamming the door and starting work on the home-made bombs.
Thanks to ritual humiliation, we’ve become a lot more used to seeing real people emoting. But even the shattering of the dreams of some deluded twat in stone-washed jeans singing ‘Angels’ off-key could not prepare us for the press conference of the woman who had just been told by the European Court of Human Rights that she couldn’t use the frozen embryos without the consent of her ex-fiancé, who had fertilized the embroyos but had since gone cold on the idea of parenthood.
I did wonder why she had called a press conference. She was obviously distressed - and by ‘distressed’ I mean hysterical with grief. In contrast, her ex-fiancé gave a press conference where he was calm, measured and, basically, came off like a psychopath.
Medical science is presenting us with all sorts of ethical dilemmas, many of them rather more complex than the people who created them are able to cope with. This is why it goes to wise judges, who toss a coin and break for lunch.
Parental disputes used to be simple. If the kid looked like the milkman, you gave the missus a thump but got on with it. Now things are more complex, but I’m not sure that people (men, basically), should be able to escape the consequences of their actions so easily. If the bloke in question had had a drunken knee-trembler up against a few crates of Newcastle Brown with the woman in question and she had caught pregnancy, what would he have done then?
Just how long after the act of ‘fertilization’ should one be allowed to call a halt to things? Popular milestones would probably be: when your kid comes last at some game on sports day, when he breaks your stereo, when he crashes the car or when he announces he’s gay and, worse, a ‘taker’!
Parenthood, I have observed, is all about gritting your teeth and getting through it. You might never stop being a parent but even I know when you start - and that includes being by yourself in a little room with a jazz mag and a cup.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home