I have recently been watching X Factor, the public auditions, and a few weeks ago the BBC did an India season, with various documentaries on India 'celebrating' 60 years of Indian independence.
Usually I would watch neither, as reality TV is off putting at the best of times, and it annoys me when the BBC 'celebrates' another nations anniversary, yet fails to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between England and Scotland which created this nation, but hey ho!
What I found interesting is how trivial this nation has become, how immature and how lacking in ambition are the Britons of today compared to the Indians.
In India, young Indians love their country, they are proud of their history and have real ambitions. Ambitions that will benefit their people and enrich their lives and those of their families.
In contrast, young Britons as seen on the X Factor are sad, fat, ugly, ignorant and completely unaware of how talentless they are. How many times can you hear from these ugly, obese and talentless individuals, "this has always been my dream, this is what I will do" and "I will be back next year, I will prove them wrong"?
The Indians however were aspiring to be engineers, doctors and architects, they were engrossed in study, yes they loved their trashy bollywood movies, but they knew were fantasy and reality lay.
The Brits, having been miseducated for generations by clueless socialists with egalitarian ideology, that taught 'everyone is special' are consumed by their own fantasies of being the next Britney Spears (why anyone would want to be her amazes me) or Christina Aguilera, but minus the looks and voice. Someone has obviously told them they are good, good enough to go on a TV reality show and be chosen to get a contract to sing.
In the Indian documentaries I watched, there was a programme about an Indian school in southern India, they showed the children practising for a local talent competition, some chose to do modern bollywood dance, others more traditional Indian dances, what stuck me was they took this seriously, practised for months and once at the competition were told in no uncertain terms whether they were good or not, the children may have cried, but knew the truth and knew that it was not cruel, but only the truth.
So many of the waddling mounds of flab on the X Factor seemed never to have had any lessons or practice, they seemed to really believe that a 18 stone teenager could get through the auditions, and when told they were not good enough threw a strop and had their equally flabby parents wobble into the audition room to harangue the judges!!!
I was struck, because this seems to me a metaphor for how certain nations are on the rise and others, unknowingly (mainly due to ignorance and idleness) are in decline. Serious nations, as Britain used to be, have good schools, rigorous examinations, disciplined training which results in engineers, doctors, businessmen, risk takers and other productive people. This is how nations manage to conquer empires and become wealthy.
Trivial nations exalt celebrity, mediocrity and ignorance, resulting in poverty and moral squalor. The only reason I can see that Britain is not already poor is because the accumulated wealth of our past is not yet spent, however with Gordon Brown on the case, raising taxes every year and borrowing hundreds of billions every year to throw away on a health service that does not work and on benefits for third world scroungers so that they will continue to vote for him, it may not be long before we find we are broke and end up being a tourist theme park for wealthy and hardworking Chinese and Indians.
How ironic and deserved that would be.
