Madeleine McCann Is Every Parent’s Bogeyman

MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann: Michael White’s poppy pornography and Our Spanish Maddie keeps Shannon Kyle in work.

FIRST up, the Guardian’s Michael White tells us about how the “pornography of grief has devalued poignancy of the poppy” and how Madeleine McCann is implicated in it:

The Victorians made a lot of fuss over death too. Just look at those tombstones: exotic, even erotic, in old cemeteries. But at least it was the deaths of their own loved ones they were mourning. Death was everywhere all the time before the development of modern antibiotics.

Now death sits in rest homes, impatiently waiting for life to finish swirling round the plug hole.

We, who have so little experience of it by comparison, have forgotten how to handle the great unknown in a largely godless age. Hence the macabre fuss over Princess Di, over missing Madeleine McCann and over poor, abused Jade Goody too.

Jade Goody gets two adjectives; Our Maddie gets none.

After White, the Guardian gives space to Shannon Kyle to deliver yet another of those Odes To Parenting, in which Our Maddie is the parent’s bogeyman:

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Anorak

Posted: 13th, November 2009 | In: Madeleine McCann | Comments (2)