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Article: 20060718

Attention in class

I bought a bag of carrots over the weekend.  Not particularly adventurous, you might say, and you'd be right.  I'm not for one moment claiming originality of thought here, but what's significant is what this bag of carrots reveals about our modern society.  You see they were cheap budget carrots, they have to hang their heads in shame.  They were bought from a supermarket, and they've been clearly marked as "Class II".  And why do these benighted carrots deserve such ignominy?  Because they look like carrots, that's why.  They look just like the illustrations of carrots you got in your toddlers' A-Z reading books.  They're pointy with green sprouty tops.  And their biggest crime of all?  To be different sizes, and shapes - even bent.  They just didn't match up to the uniformly chunky orange cylinders that boast the vaunted status as "Class I" vegetables.

In this mad-cap industrialised society we are now so used to the regularity that mechanical manufacturing processes provide that even the products of nature are expected to conform to definite standards of regularity.  Who on Earth dictates that only carrots suitable as a penis substitute can be deemed first class produce?  A carrot's a damned carrot for heaven's sake.  They don't grow uniformly, and we have no need for them to do so.  The irony is these supposedly second class vegetables are probably the best tasting carrots I've bought from a supermarket for some time.

It may seem strange to be obsessing about a bag of carrots, and I suppose it is, but this fixation with uniformity and regularity as an indicator of quality extends into every facet of our lives these days.  Magazine photographs are air-brushed, because - hell - we can't have people looking like flawed and irregular human beings.  We're so conditioned to expect perfection in the form of uniformity that we're not even allowed to be satisfied with ourselves any more, unless we conform to the perfect model (which doesn't, in reality, exist).  It's positively absurd.  In striving to achieve perfection we're industrialising the true beauty - that of non-conformity, of individuality, imperfection even, right out of life.

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