Today’s panic porn
Panic. Panic! Panic about everything. Panic about the same old things if you must
with the same story you run every few days, in which the population could reach twenty eleventy billionty five if everyone stopped dying and all those bladdy immigrants kept coming over here, and had a million kids each, and so on, and so on...
Or if you can't raise yourself to panic about the population you can panic about petrol, if you like.
Prices are going up! Who would have thought that the prices of things increased over time? Why hasn't someone come up with a name for this incredible phenomenon? We should call it something like 'inflating' to emphasise how things are blowing up and there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, rail fares and bus fares going up by double digits every year is one thing, and something well worth ignoring entirely, but when it's petrol, that means it'll hit the poor old middle class folk on the school run and no-one else at all!
My favourite panic porn today, though, is about this:
Aaargh! Some kids have copied a scene in which kids did something - and became ill because of it - and have become ill because of it. Next they'll be copying someone smashing themselves in the face with a brick, and it'll be the BBC's fault when they end up with bloody noses! But seriously. How reckless of the BBC to promote guzzling loads of booze! No-one would ever do that.
Great! I'm off to down 10 drinks because even though the headline says it might be dangerous, I'm too stupid to know about things! And I'm too busying about petrol and the BBC to care any more...
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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November 19th, 2009 - 14:49
Yeah you're back,enjoy your hols?
Evenm hen i could use my car it only cost £30 to fill it up(can't now because it failed its mot and is being repaired so it passes next time.I wonder if mail readers ever wondered if they didn't drink so much wine or even stopped buying the mail they would afford petrol.
November 19th, 2009 - 14:53
Welcome back, Anton. We've missed you.
November 19th, 2009 - 14:56
Welcome back Anton.
To be fair, petrol prices hit haulage companies as well, and more could be done to support them and promote alternatives.
But then, that's not who the Mail is targeting their argument for, is it?
November 19th, 2009 - 17:17
In the late 1970's Lewis Thomas identified that in the western world we have developed a distinct fear of disease and have become obsessed with health.
He believed there was "something fundamentally unhealthy" about this "loss of confidence in the human body" and saw much of these attitudes being created through (apart from the obvious) such seemingly unlikely sources as television medical dramas and those shows where the central human dilemma is illness.
I would say that the "cult of fear," meaning fear in general, has really caught on. It is what keeps alive entire industries. It feeds self-obsession.
This in turn has infected that species of person whose mind is always never too far from the state of their own body. They can be heard in trendy cafes talking about how their last purely organic meal affected them or how they are desperately craving some holistic yoga therapy.
They are not only looking for power over their own physical domains but over fear of ageing and inevitable decay.
As Lewis Thomas pointed out, the "healthy hypochondriacs" should not distract us from more urgent problems.
Three decades ago he correctly foresaw that preoccupation with personal health would be a worrying distraction. While, just outside the body, "the whole of society is coming undone."