Le monde, ce qui passe?

I swear the world is going mad. And I don’t think it’s just me – though that is a possibility I should never rule out. My journey to work each morning consists of taking the autobus, after having walked the kids to school. My feelings on the quality of this often maligned form of transport will have to wait for another time and so for the purposes of this piece let us assume the journey itself is fine – helped along in its passing by just enough time to read through Metro, the free newspaper taking over the world.

Now I’m a broadsheet man myself generally but Metro, to give it credit, has just enough in it to distract me as I face the short journey to work and the long day ahead. It’s full of light hearted stuff, environmentally sound in that most of the items seem to be re-cycled from other papers, and it’s got a good listings section.

It also has a particular feature called “60 Second Interview” which is where…oh you get the idea, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you. Today a particularly frisky young sort was featured, Jessica Sutta from the popular beat combo “The Pussycat Dolls”; a group that my younger colleagues assure me have superlative musical talent and an attractive wardrobe.

Reading on then, I found out that The Pussycat Dolls have had dolls of themselves banned in the USA for being too provocative (dolls?). They sing a song about wanting to have groupies, but, Jessica assures, “It’s just a fun lyric. Our groupies are all pre-teen girls.” Now hang on a minute and let’s just review this; they sing a song about wanting groupies, fans to have sex with on a casual basis. But it’s only a “fun lyric”, perhaps in the same way that people who make jokes about disabled, gay or black people don’t really mean anything by it. But then she reckons all their groupies are pre-teens – and this coming only a couple of weeks after Gary Glitter’s return to the UK.

Why are these kinds of moronic reflections tolerated? Has our society fallen to an all new low where a girl who sings and dances in her underwear can proclaim in a national newspaper that frequent casual sex is OK and, more worryingly, associate this thought process and their public behaviour with pre-teens?

Anyway that’s the puritan in me, probably driven by my family’s heavy ancestry in the Quaker movement (true as it happens). But this girl continues to amaze and redefine the meaning of moron, albeit in a less tawdry way. Apparently the band has a stylist, and their doing very “innovative” things with – wait for it – their nails. Goodness, how that is going to affect the credit crunch, world poverty and oppression of the people by fascist regimes.

Finally, and to cap it all for I can’t go on much longer without frothing at the mouth, she gets her Tarot Cards read. Apparently she sees this amazing psychic who tells her what’s going to happen! Yeees, that’s the definition of a psychic. She told her not to run in high heels in the rain. Nothing wrong with that advice, but it’s hardly predictive is it? It’s just good old fashioned common sense – something that Ms Sutta seems completely devoid of.

But hey, where does this leave me in my desire to move south; to sell up the ancestral pile to forage a living in a better place? Well it’s exactly this sort of thing that makes my blood boil. That the world is full of idiots is not a surprise – the law of averages means that they’re going to be out there. What I object to is the elevation of these idiots in our society to positions of influence.

I even know and accept that there are idiots in France, but I never get the feeling that idiots are tolerated in the public eye quite as much as they are here; I’m not convinced, for example, that Jade Goody would have been able to forge quite so successful a career in France as she has in the UK out of being ignorant.

Either way, the sun-drenched veranda is still calling me as I sit here in the tail end of the wettest summer on record.