You couldn’t make it up.
The name of the killer dog is ‘Killer’. The 11-month old
baby which it killed, was ‘like a china doll’, according to her paternal
grandmother.
Infant Beauty murdered by Chavs’ Beast of Choice,
geddit?
There’s more: father and mother are no longer together; the
dog, which was put down after the attack, belonged to the mum’s current
boyfriend. Mum-and-Baby-Photo, as released to the press, has both of them doe-eyed
and Bambified; while the current boyfriend – seen in another photo – boasts
high cheekbones, cupid bow lips and a hard look.
The attack took place on a redbrick housing estate in
Blackburn, 20 miles north of Manchester. The litany of those involved sounds
like the cast list from a nearby episode of Shameless:
Bernadette, Chloe, Lee, Dean and ‘china doll’ Ava-Jayne.
What were the parents thinking of, mashing-up Ava (Gardner)
with Jayne (Mansfield)? Just the one film
star wasn’t enough?
Shame on you, Mr News Compositor! Their moment of grief is
not the time to inflict your cultural snobbery on Ava-Jayne’s parents. You’ve
reduced their lives – and the sad death of an innocent child – to the level of
a cartoon show, The Chavs.
Agreed, it can never be right to write
anyone off like this (see Shane Meadows’ movies: he takes the lives of working class
people and writes them up properly). But please note that if I have caricatured
the baby’s family members, it was only to draw out the way their lives have
been cartooned in mainstream media coverage.
More reductionist than mainstream media coverage, amounts to a critique of it – really?
More reductionist than mainstream media coverage, amounts to a critique of it – really?
Conceded, this is not sufficient justification. But there is something more - and more important - which my piece is meant to draw attention to.
Perhaps the cartoon character of the death of Ava-Jayne was
not only introduced after the tragic event (in the subsequent depiction rather
than the event itself). To some extent, it may have been there all along. Not
because these really are the creatures of a mythical underclass; more that in
this part of the world acting the part might have become part of a general attempt
to get real.
Blackburn – how exactly does it work upon the world nowadays? Does it
do anything for anyone else – anything that would make it real to the rest of
us?
Blackburn used to be King of the Cotton towns, playing a
dominant role in the textile industry. But the UK textile industry is now
defunct – gone way, moved, address unknown, though everybody knows it’s not
here. Furthermore, when the mills of the town were decommissioned, so too were
the people: disassociated from the rest of the productive world; demobbed from
social reality.
This means that towns such as Blackburn are not all there.
The people of these towns continue with their little, local
existence – same as anybody else, anywhere else. Except it is not the same: not
without the means of connection to the rest of the world; the connection to our
common humanity previously provided by employment within the means of
production.
Without this, there is bound to be a search for something
else to effect reconnection, and this, in turn, seems to promote the tendency
to act out ready-made roles. At least such roles are recognisable, tangible; a
discernible part of the bigger picture.
Even if the roles themselves are so crude and one-dimensional
they can only negate the complex humanity of the people playing them – Killer Dog
Owner, for example, taking on these roles is nonetheless an attempt to re-enter
the realm of social being and rejoin the human race.
Anything's better than remaining on the terrain of merely individual existence – even if one of the unintended consequences is the sad death of an 11-month-old baby.
Anything's better than remaining on the terrain of merely individual existence – even if one of the unintended consequences is the sad death of an 11-month-old baby.
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