Extracts.......
Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin and Jade Goody may have come from very different backgrounds, but they have more in common than the passing similarity of their surnames. Both creatures of the zeitgeist, the Paisley-grammar-schoolboy-turned-banker and the sex-chav-turned-reality-TV-princess knew how to play a world which turned on greed and fame to their advantage, and made bucketloads of filthy lucre as a result...
This contrast says so much about the 21st century: we need our saints to give us something to aspire to and we need our sinners to absorb our anger, but the way we choose whom to love and whom to hate is so arbitrary, and public affection so fickle, that a simple twist of fate is often all that separates one from the other. It is not so long ago, after all, that Sir Fred was being knighted on the back of soaring RBS profits, and Goody was leaving the Big Brother house to chants of "Kill the Pig". But then Goodwin pushed through the ABN Amro takeover and Goody contracted cancer, and the seesaw of popular opinion tipped in her favour...
And as for the pledge to hang his effigy from a lamppost at this week's G20 summit, it's almost beyond satire. In fact, the whole affair seems to have been lifted directly from the episode of The Simpsons in which the gullible people of Springfield allow a businessman to persuade them a shoddy monorail will bring prosperity, only to attack him with pitchforks when he makes off with the spoils...
No, what really irks me is the faux naivete of those middle-class whiners who are suddenly outraged by the idea of one man profiting at the expense of others: it's as if they've never heard of Third World poverty; never stumbled across social injustice; never realised that an imbalance of wealth and power is the cornerstone of capitalism. Worse, they seem to labour under the illusion that if we could just get Sir Fred to pay up, all those inequalities would somehow be redressed...
On a more prosaic level, venting our anger at Sir Fred allows us to abdicate our responsibility for a crisis which flourished in a climate of greed almost everyone embraced: every first-time buyer who took on a mortgage they couldn't afford, every shopper who ran up huge credit card bills, every fashionista who boasted about their collection of Prada handbags was driven by the same reckless desire for material gain as Sir Fred – although, admittedly, the stakes weren't quite so high...
... blaming one man for the collapse of the global economy is both psychologically unhealthy and intellectually unsustainable. And more importantly it will do nothing to help the country get back on its feet.
Author: Dani Garavelli
Last Updated: 28 March 2009 7:20 PM
Source: Scotland On Sunday
No comments:
Post a Comment