Ordure

28 Mar 2010

I feel like shit. That's enough of a tie in the title, but I may as well cut the self-indulgence and move on to another definition: moral offensiveness.

Someone sent me a link to a new Pepsi Max advert. Here, have a link to it which contains a more intelligent description than I could manage of why it could be viewed as about as acceptable as an advert for Cesar Dog Food that shows a succession of poodles being buggered to death by an enormous man dressed as a smurf while a message flashes up "BUY CESAR OR NEXT TIME IT'S YOUR DOG".

The interesting thing about the Pepsi Advert is that a search of The Daily Mail website gives you no hits on it at all. The moral guardians of the nation have no comment about an ad in which men fake the end of the world to persuade a woman to sleep with their friend. I was particularly disappointed to see Tom Lenk in it, who - as Andrew in Buffy - has actually been in a scene where a bunch of guys messing around suddenly realise that their actions are tantamount to rape. Joss Whedon is probably tutting with disapproval at this very moment.

So, the Daily Mail saves its fire for other causes. I was delighted to see that they had covered the awful behaviour of a B&B proprietor in Berkshire who turned away a gay couple who had booked a room. But then I saw the link to the article: "Christian B&B owner who turned away gay couple faces police investigation", a point they lead on. There's no great opprobrium - it's one of the more balanced articles you'll ever read in the Scale - but they just couldn't help set it up from the angle of the proprietor in a snidey snidey sort of way.

So, they don't think that this was morally outrageous either.

What do they care about then? Well, currently they seem to be very upset that MPs can STILL (!!!!!!!!!! no doubt) employ their wives. And they've managed to get the Government to jump to their tune and ban meow meow - a drug so evil that the Government's advisory council on drugs told them not to ban it - amid claims it makes people rip their own scrotums off (hey, refer madness seems so tame these days!).

But I suppose we asked for it. 'We'. I don't know what that means, but the left had enormous success in closing down the acceptability of certain types of behaviour and offensive speech. Now the Daily Mail is slowly generating it's own version of political correctness. For the paper that so often shouts "It's political correctness gone mad!" it's rather fascinating watching them develop their own version. Whereas the left's PC involved protecting minorities from abuse and persecution, the Scale's version protects children and happy, fluffy innocent people from the corruption of the world. It's all very sweet. And it's working. In the real world it was naive of equality campaigners to think that only the cause of good could benefit from such a tactic. It would now be as big an act of career suicide for a politician to say "you should have listen to the advisory council on meow meow" as it would be for him or her to pull a Hitler salute on a visit to a Synagogue.

Watch it carefully. It's ordure. On many levels.

NOTE: I admit that I know bugger all about meow meow. But I'm kind of assuming that the advisory council do. Something Alan Johnson is clearly not willing to credit them with.