At the risk of having the whole of British society come
crashing in on me like the proverbial tonne of bricks, I would like to go on
the record as wondering what in blue blazes is going on in the minds of
Mind. You will all no doubt be familiar,
by now, with the furore surrounding the ‘Mental Patient’ and ‘Psycho Ward’
fancy dress costumes which were sold in Tesco, ASDA, and presumably some other
places until Sue Baker, director of Time to Change, called it ‘really
damaging’, ‘breathtakingly insensitive’ and ‘shocking’. She’s entitled to think and say what she
likes, of course, but the speed and ferocity with which the nation agreed with
her, vilifying the makers and vendors of the said costume, was like one of
Uncle Borzoi’s real-life horror stories out of 1930s Russia. Well-known Westminster tower of rage Alastair
Campbell attacked the costumes as something from the ‘Dark Ages’; while the
speed with which the supermarkets in question coughed up five-figure sums by
way of apology for what ASDA called a ‘completely unacceptable error’ was
likewise dizzying.
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It’s not as if
Tesco haven’t been ‘breathtakingly insensitive’ before. Not that anyone noticed
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As you know, I love fancy-dress and indeed clothes of all
sorts. Indeed, Hallowe’en is the
solitary aspect of American cultural imperialism that I do not actually
resent. And I simply cannot fathom why costumes were singled out for abuse in
this way.
To put it bluntly, the ‘axe-wielding homicidal maniac’ is a
stock figure in our society. Not in the ‘Dark Ages’ but now, today. I do not see Tesco and ASDA making mea culpae and £25,000 donations or –
more to the point – huge product bonfires out of their immense stockpiles of
books, songs and DVD films for which vilification and/or mockery of ‘homicidal
lunatics’ is the main or only raison d’être. I do not hear
them saying,
Dear Entire World,
It was ludicrously
insensitive and irresponsible of us to sell any Mark Billingham book, any
Stuart MacBride book, The Shining,
Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’, Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Nature Trail to Hell’, Scream
I-IV, Scary Movie I-IV, Shutter Island, Psycho, American Psycho, Seven
Psychopaths, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, Fatal Attraction, Night of the Hunter, and the 21.43 million other
titles/products on the list attached hereto as ‘Appendix A: 30% of Popular
Culture Since 1945’.
Please expect our
apology/fine equivalent to 86% of the 2012 United Kingdom budget by the next
post.
Yours faithfully,
Sir Gullible Rollover
Chairman
I take the YoungMinds charity and Paul Farmer, CEO at Mind,
at their word that one in ten of us has suffered from mental illness by the age
of sixteen; God knows I did, and as regular readers will be aware, my family
tree is perhaps fuller of this sort of thing than most people’s. But my point is that, precisely because every person in Britain knows someone with mental
health issues, and every person is likewise immersed to some degree in popular
culture, none of us are even slightly likely to confuse the
blood-soaked stock figures of Hollywood horror films and the dodgier end of the
Dundee videogame industry with Uncle Russell who’s having a bit of trouble
coping.
So: logically, each one of us must believe one of two things. Either these Hallowe’en costumes were innocuous;
or they were the tip of a gigantic and ghastly iceberg of hate that is being
produced and consumed to the tune of billions of pounds per year, and which –
if the mental-health-sensitivity campaigners’ logic is to be followed – should
be first boycotted and then retrospectively eliminated ‘root-and-branch’ (as
old Ollie Cromwell was fond of saying).
But this latter course is, obviously, too much for our
society – let alone our economy – to take on board. The greenhouse gases produced by book-burning
alone, of the works of Edgar Allan Poe alone, would no doubt tip the planet’s
fragile ecosystem right over the edge.
So, we scapegoat two costumes; make some hot cocoa; and
toddle off to watch Episode 96 of Dexter
with a clear conscience, knowing that our howls of protest against two
supermarkets we don’t actually shop at have done some good in the world.
At least this fiasco has solved my own immediate difficulty:
namely, what I will dress up as on the 31st.
Happy Hallowe’en, one and all. And in case you are thinking of coming to
Airnefitchie and firebombing and/or axe-murdering me for my insensitivity? Happy early April Fools’ Day, too.
Or are we still allowed to call people ‘fools’?
