Big Brother, Violence of Mouth

I've been following the controversry over BB with mounting disgust and horror. Luckily, just in case I wasn't disgusted, Radio 5 Live have been running regular reports on all their shows for the last two days. They even helpfully played some of Jade's vile outbursts at 7.40am today to soothe my journey into work.

Unfortunately this morally-putrefied episode is giving snobs of left and right full rein to slate the working classes as ignorant and racist, stoking the horrors of underclasses, white van men, ignorance and fear, and generally making comfortable people feel at once happier, with themselves, and more angry,with the vast bubbling mass of racists out there. But I don't read it that way at all.

Jade's outburst on Radio 5 Live this morning was hysterical, primal, and utterly without humanity or restraint. Hatred came spewing like a volcano out of her mouth. Language fails me: she was, as far as I could hear, animalistic in her total inability to control the expression of her hate. It had to be expressed, in buckets, with a violence of mind most of us spend a lifetime trying to calm or work out (and we all have it, to some degree - not racism I mean, but hatreds of one kind or another). It was, despite its uncontrol, a wild seizure of control of space and of other - the elemental cry of the baby and the wounded animal.

I had to teach citizenship today: luckily it was racism and discrimination, and in my leading the class "discussion" I could feel the anger boiling inside me - that this is culture, entertainment, funny - even if we disapprove, like me, there is a part of that which remains voyeuristic in its denunciation. I could feel a degree of the same unreasoning rage: "Why the hell are you watching this?" "Why are we giving this to you as how grown ups behave?" "What are you learning from us?"

And so, amid the debate and the recriminations, the pathetic defences (no Channel 4, it is not the whole of Britain that has the problem here - it is you, you and your cheating cynicism, your contempt and your slimy self-righteousness) - I ended up feeling betrayal. Not of me - I'm white, I don't suffer racism - not, to be fair, even of those who do (though I _do_ feel that, I'm just trying to point out what I felt at the time): but of the children who watch this hell-feed and have to listen to and read about its stinking offal*. There may well be great positives in our society - but we're betraying our most vulnerable people by letting them in on this - and as for that character who goes around in The Simpsons shouting "Will someone think of the children?" - you can fuck right off, you arrogant, cynical tv tossers, with your liberal university pisstake ethics. Fuck off. See what happens down here, on the ground and fuck off.

There's my burst of uncontrolled rage. The victims are the people who choose to come here. I take no payment and I feel no better. The ether is a better receptor for my rage than another human being: so too am I a better holder of it -better that it destroy or damage me than anyone else.


*=a special bang on the tin drum for anyone who can work out my source for this phrase.