"No, you make me sick. You wouldn't know heart, soul, or decency if it snuck on you and did something thoroughly indecent."
"But it's the anniversary/but his wife/son/brother is dead/but it's a remembrance/but people died to bring this to you."
"Watch out, you might drown on that hypocrisy, you fucking imbecile."
That is how remembrance days should go. The anniversary of 9/11 is coming up; and we're being encouraged to do a "good deed for the day", to... I'm not sure, remember the people for who they were? OK, sure, I'll sit on my roof doing some filing. Why are we being told to do a good deed on this day? Am I only being allowed to remember people who've lost their lives at a designated time? Sorry, I'll throw the thoughts out if they dare encroach in May. I hate it, it's hypocrisy dressed up as compassion; sentimental do-gooding for the 364-heartless proles. I read something a while ago about "Let's party", and how it implies you can only do that, and have fun, at a certain time; this is much the same. It's fucking stupid. It's only participated in by greedy morons who feel that they're doing their good bit of the year by doing a sponsored 'dress like a dickwad' day at work. Yeah, great, you have your clown-costume, asshat, I'll do an internal soliloquy, if that's alright with you? Anyone want to sponsor me? I'll pretend I've done it anyway, I don't pretend to be a decent person.
This segues rather delightfully (too many d's) into my second issue: Sob-stories and how they don't make you a better person. I was watching X-factor (the temptation to prefix that with "the" was almost overwhelming) tonight, it's always a good, cheap laugh - schadenfreude is always superb entertainment. Anyway, it got me thinking: There are a lot of talented people here, a lot of talented people - but you don't think about them, they're good, filler, they're beige after gloss in a dentist's surgery, vanilla seeds in a milkshake from Poundland. You only concentrate on the self-proclaimed fighters; the folks who've lost their pet, wife, son, car, house, and job, all in a week, they've got cancer, IBS, and they've a crippling allergy to oxygen. Why does that make them any more talented? It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't. I hate it, I fucking hate it. It makes me want to deliberately vote against them because they feel that their talent isn't enough to see them through, so they pad it out with some sentimental bullshit, standing back with the grim satisfaction you can only get from watching a lot of people fall for your trick simultaneously. The man who comes on and sings his heart out and is good: "You're great." The woman who comes on and sings her heart out because her dying husband wanted her too: "You're the best thing I've ever seen *weeps*." Judge these people on talent, not on depression. Fuck me, if we started arbitrarily awarding melancholy, Tenerife would be the most affluent nation on earth. Christ.
I'm not suggesting that we don't care for people, that we discount misery and suffering. No, I'm suggesting we view it for what it is: Sad. It's sad, it's not talent enhancing. Yeah, fuckin' 'ell, it doesn't make you a good person. I'm saying that we should remember the people we want to remember, laud the people who deserve to be lauded, enjoy those who should be enjoyed, scoff at those who run on ridicule - people cannot detach emotions from one another. It's really depressing (and thus, this blog is fucking fantastic, seriously, I'm like... bi-polar and schizophrenic, oh yeah, and I'm on fire) that people are unable to see past words and tears, to see what the person really is, and see what they really have. It's insanely myopic to praise people for being of middling talented but having a sob-story.
What am I doing for 9/11 remembrance? The same I do every day. Do I think that the dead would want it any other way? No, I have more respect for them than that.
Will I applaud macabre? No. I will applaud talent.
Catharsis is not found in public adoration.
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