Madeleine and the Titanic

At school most of us remember in moments of boredom holding a plastic ruler over the edge of the desk and seeing how far we could bend it backwards before it either broke in two or sprang back violently, often hitting us painfully in the face.

It was the sight of Madeleine Mccann’s innocent face on the front of a ‘domestic cleaner guaranteed to remove “all traces at home and against which DNA tests have no chance” in the German satirical magazine Titanic, that prompted my childhood memory.

Is it childish boredom that has prompted this new international game of attacking the Mccann’s? Are we as a modern society suffering from a mass form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where finding new ways of destroying Madeleine’s parents has become a daily ritual by which we attempt to neutralise our own distressing, intrusive thoughts about our own lives?

We have access to a virtual Disney World of entertainment at our fingertips, twenty four hours a day, where via games consoles we can kill virtual baddies in a hundred different ways. Where we have unlimited access to TV and film through which we can vicariously release our anger and inner demons on fictional characters. Yet it seems that virtual baddies are no longer enough to satiate our collective OCD. We seem to have a compulsion and need to destroy real, living, suffering human beings. Kate Mccann particularly has been vilified for not showing emotion or for ‘faking’ it. Our compulsion necessitates that we see her howl like a banshee and really suffer or those nasty intrusive thoughts that make us so uncomfortable will not be quelled.

The Mccanns seem to have morphed for many into quasi-fictional characters. Kate and Gerry are living in some grey, no-mans land where they are neither real or fictional. A media version of Schrodinger’s cat; they are neither alive or dead for the public. Stripped of their realness many can justify in their own minds this human form of fox hunting.

Like the plastic rulers at school we have bent the image of Madeleine’s parents so far back, bent it so out of shape and proportion that they have ceased to be real parents to a real missing four year old child.

That ruler has sprang back with a viciousness that should make us all wince with real pain: Madeleine’s face in a magazine, not for the purposes of finding this child who has only seen three Christmas days in her short life. But for reasons of satire and ‘entertainment’.

Link: http://tinyurl.com/36rfou