[Romantic Old Bird]

An article from a few days back:

Perchance to dream

David McKie
Thursday February 19, 2004
The Guardian

Some months ago I had an appalling dream. I dreamed that two high towers rising above a great city were struck by planes, that thousands were trapped inside; that many were burned or choked to death within and many, desperate to escape, hurled themselves to their deaths from windows. I dreamed that millions across the world watched and read of these things with amazement and horror, and that a general conviction set in that the world had changed; that from now on nowhere was safe; that the strike on the World Trade Centre had closed down an age of innocence.
I dreamed that everywhere those writing about these things forecast a new age of seriousness. I dreamed that, musing on a massing of Hollywood stars for a telethon in stricken New York, the Sunday Times columnist AA Gill, normally no Savonarola, wrote: "All of us have spent the best part of a decade being uncritically fascinated and tickled by these people. Their vain, grandiose, deformed lives have lain on the sofa of our indulgence. How could we not have seen that Calista's waist measurement, Tom's sexuality and Arnold's world view didn't amount to a hill of beans?"

I dreamed that a senior television executive declared September 11 had made seriousness fashionable again. I dreamed that one queen of the magazine scene wrote: "To hit the zeitgeist button in the pre-September world, there was a place in most magazines for pieces about celebrity, pretty much for its own sake. Best-dressed, worst-dressed, private pain, public triumph, plastic surgery. Planet fame was right up to the top of the agenda and whatever the story, the presence - even peripherally - of a few celebrities was generally thought enough to perk things up no end. But ... suddenly the mood is radically different."

I dreamed that the editor of the Mirror, who throughout the summer of 2001 had - like his competitors - led his paper day after day on Big Brother bosses plotting a romp for Helen and Paul, and Charlotte the Harlot, of Survivor, denying she was a harlot, now rejoiced that he need no longer splash on the make-believe world of soap opera and "reality" television. "There is a sudden and prolonged hunger for serious news and information," he declared. And I dreamed that even the Sun concurred.

So real did all these things seem that for a while I believed they had truly happened. Yet increasingly over the months I began to discern the world had not really altered at all. If we no longer troubled ourselves with Calista's waist, that was because our gaze had shifted to Jordan's bust. Clearly Gill's disdain for vain and grandiose lives on Celebrity Park and for sofas of indulgence was something I must have imagined, for reflecting this past Sunday on the difference between his local McDonald's and the Savoy, he wrote: "In McDonald's I'm anonymous but in the Savoy they know exactly who I am ... So with a wave of the hand they kindly refused to produce a bill. That's the first rule of attracting the Ivy set, you've got to know who they are."

The change I thought had occurred in the tabloid press was plainly illusory, too. It was, I began to perceive, still hung up on celebrities, still slavering for intimate details of the lives of the stars of EastEnders and Corrie, and who was having who under the reality TV blankets. Even broadsheets found these themes irresistible. It seemed that the general understanding that we lived in a new age when terror could strike any time, anywhere, was imaginary too.

Learned explanations appeared that what we called terrorism was simply a convenient device with which governments sought to cow their people into submission: "a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality", as one leading Marxist intellectual explained.

But the final proof that 9/11 and the birth of this great new seriousness had never in fact occurred came in the word count statistics compiled by the Guardian's Editor team for the week up to February 7. Number of words devoted by the national press to big stories during the week: Pakistan's nuclear secrets 28,024; Lord Butler's inquiry 68,389; I'm A Celebrity 158,652.

So it was all a dream, after all. It's been such a comfort to find this is so. It reminds me of those times when one woke as a child from a nightmare to find mother, saying gently: "Don't worry, dear, it was only a dream." Or how today as they flinch at gory deaths on TV or in the cinema, children are told: "It's all right. Don't worry. They are only actors, dressed up." So that's all right, then.