Death and shit

It fascinates me the way people are lauded in death. The furore over the Chaser's song the year before last about all the dead celebs was a great example. Is it because we're confronted by our own mortality in a world obsessed by 24/7 media coverage and celebrity? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jade Goody, the young British woman who tragically died from cervical cancer on the weekend. In anyone's language, it's a tragedy. She was only 27 and she had two young sons. The unusual thing about it is that her death was reported by the BBC World service as an actual news item. You may well ask why, I certainly did. Apparently her death was newsworthy because she was on Big Brother in the UK where she thought the region of England called East Anglia (or East Angular as she pronounced it) was in another country. Her fame grew for the wrong reasons when she was on Celebrity Big Brother and made racist remarks to one of her housemates.
Why oh why are people captivated by this? The grotesque thing, which is probably fitting really, considering she lived by reality TV, she also died by it, with her final days managed by PR "guru" Max Clifford. She said she did this to ensure her children were provided for. But what is that going to do to them when they grow up, and even now? Not only do they have to deal with their mother's untimely death, but what is normally an intensely private situation has been played out in the full glare of the media. People have compared it with the death of Princess Diana. And it's true. There was misplaced, mass hysteria then, and now too.
And if people in the public dare call it for what it is, they're lambasted. Noel Gallagher of all people actually put it the best I have seen:
"I mean, I've got fuck all against Jade Goody, that's nothing to do with me," Gallagher continued. "But it bends my head. That, to me, sums up, in one tiny five-minute thing on the news, what an embarrassing place Britain is right now. You might as well shut Number 10 Downing Street down and get Max Clifford to run the country"