Gleeful of heart.

In the final episode of the series Glee has shown the key to its popularity, its emotional heart. Girl A says to girl B we’re like family, whatever happens we carry on accepting each other. It’s true they do. They treat each other abysmally then there’s an emotional scene and they say they love each other. That’s the moral lesson. We’re all ordinary people with failings but underneath we have a good heart and if we can find forgiveness anything’s possible. It gives one such a warm feeling doesn’t it? Well no, it makes me sick. It’s suggesting one can treat people appallingly and get away with it by beguiling oneself into believing one loves them and going gooey moments before they lose it and stab you in the eye, which by that point you thoroughly deserve. As a polite youngster I trod on an old woman’s foot while dancing at some do. My apology was met with a rather stern, “I’m not so pleased either.” It was a learning moment. I couldn’t just apologise my way out of it. Years later on a station platform another older woman asked me if this was her right train. I said I thought it was but she dismissed me with, “Thinking’s not good enough.” It seems these women, though I’m sure forgiving souls, required a moral rectitude from their acquaintances, and that protestations of, “I’m just a fallible human being” doesn’t slice any cucumbers. 

So ask yourself when you get all warm watching Glee, “Is it subtly teaching me it’s OK to be a nasty bastard so long as I say “I love you” after one’s moral underperformance has reached catastrophic levels?”  Is it debasing my most cherished human emotion into an empty form of words leaving me free to be selfish and callus most of the time whilst maintaining my rosy narcissistic glow of self-love? This is after all the devious frozen heart of America’s foreign policy. Is Glee teaching us that the rosy glow of vacuous emotionality is a wonderful thing? Is that why all their show stopping numbers, though heartily performed, are as threadbare as a three year olds first attempt at crocheting?