Chamblee54

There is a lady in England named Jade Goody. She is a star. She is going to get married on Sunday, and then she will die. The entire spectacle will be on television.
Miss Goody became famous as the participant in a reality tv show. She caused an international incident with comments about Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.
This is a story for the modern age. The growth of entertainment styles has been explosive. The growth of substance has fallen behind.
Like television, the internet has a great disbalance between style and substance. Here is an example:
George Bataille wrote about the role of death in religion, and in particular the function of sacrifice. He argued that a spectacular death, like a sacrifice – one that is staged, ritualized, publicly performed – works paradoxically. It actually leaves the spectators with a sense of immortality: they watch someone or something else die, and because they do not die too, are left with a sense of immunity. Psychologically, sacrifice allows the spectator to flirt with the fantasy that they may not die. Religious sacrifices are death-defying. ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’
The spectacular element will determine the nature of her death. Like Diana’s, Goody’s ‘sacrifice’ will not be a rational affair, a moment when we all coolly ponder our mortality, as we might be able to do after someone we know and love dies with us in private. Rather, it will be a media event, and that will make it a religious event; it will come to us as a simulacrum of death. And then, even as the newspapers are thrown out and the TV turned off, we will return to life. I can’t help but think that Goody’s death will be in vain.
HT to JoemyG-d. PG misses a lot by not watching TV or being British.