You could call me cynical. And you could call me hungover. And both of these designations would be truthful. Still, I a little appalled to discover Jane McGrath's photo on the front cover of the Smage's weekend magazines. It's another excerpt from Glenn's biography about his life with his recently deceased wife. Wimmin's Weekly and Womyn's Day both seem to feature similar stories - which is just what I'd suspect. If anything I suspect about the production cycles of these weekend supplements is true, the story must have been waiting in the editor's office for some time. Jane McGrath dies and the story is good to go.
As uncomfortable as I am with predatory grief exposés and these shameless national grief stories, I don't object to Jane McGrath's high public profile. As far as I can tell, she certainly wasn't a vacuous celeb but a brave and admirable woman who used this considerable public profile to great effect. And her legacy - informing the public about breast cancer and raising money for the cause - is an important one.
If this was all about continuing her advocacy work, then great. What bothers me is this pack of smarmy vultures feasting on the grief, on the terrible sadness of this woman's husband and children. I object to the construction of a national experience of collective mourning around this too. The woman died two weeks ago - and now, her husband's bio hits the shelves and the broadsheets seem to be cashing in. Just sayin'.
(Because this is the internet and because it's Saturday morning and because I really am about to go for a run, I can finish in the lingo of the tubez. Woo.)
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Anyway
- trixie
- My birth certificate attests to my debut on a Saturday in the middle of May, 1977. You can thus deduce that I am a bullish Taurean, that I was born in the Chinese year of the Snake, that my Burmese animal is the Dragon. This means that I am wont to bellow, hiss, and breathe fire, to stampede, slither and fly. Because my birth certificate was stamped by a bureaucrat in service to Her Majesty’s Government, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom. Because both of my parents were practicing Australians, I am also a citizen of Australia. I have thus two passports both of which inexplicably contain photographs of some random grumpy refugee from an eighties hair band. This means that I am constitutionally duplicitous: I can change my mode from imperial to colonial at will; I can embody, at turns, Old World Charm and New World Pizzazz; I can personify the staid and stagnant as readily as the arriviste and anxious. I do not hold, nor have I ever held, a driver’s licence, a boat licence, a gun licence, a forklift ticket or a motorcycle licence. This means that I have never, ever had to moderate my alcohol consumption for fear that I might have to operate heavy or dangerous machinery.
1 comments:
Lashings of agreement. It must have been an unfortunate situation in the extreme to be a man whose wife died of cancer two weeks ago and who wasn't Glenn McGrath - constant images of someone 'more significant' would have been hard to stomach, I'd say.
And I think you make a very pertinent point that it's neither her life nor struggle that's being highlighted (although she has become universally known as 'breast cancer campaigner Jane McGrath') - it's the fact that she's a celebrity spouse. Her family's grief isn't lessened by that fact, but this magnification of it and force-feeding of what we should grieve over I can only regard cynically.
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