Julie Burchill on top form

Julie Burchill in the Guardian on June 15th:

(Sometimes she seems so sane, yet at other times so pointless... why?)

You know - George Clooney earns more in a year for pretending to be a doctor than a real doctor gets in a lifetime. But then, we're not paying Clooney's wages out of our taxes; we are paying the man who sits behind a desk and runs our railways into the ground rather than the man who walks the railways and helps them work properly, and we are paying the man from the ad agency who dreams up yet another crap campaign to tell us how good our public services are, rather than giving that money directly to the criminally underpaid nurses and firefighters who struggle ceaselessly to keep them as they are.

We are now, under New Labour, in a situation where the teller of the tale is rewarded far more handsomely than the doer of the good deed, where the blarney, the spin, the simulacra are treated with far more esteem than the real life. This is as good a definition as I've heard of a society gone mad.