No longer the Me society; now the Wii society

At Christmas, it's a tradition in many households to consider some light exercise after dinner to encourage the turkey, the puddings and pies to subside gently into the gastric juices.
In years gone by, this would have been achieved by a stroll along some country lane or, for urbanites, to a duck pond in the local park.
This year, for many, the source of the exercise will  be not a gentle perambulation in the fresh air but a mat placed in front of a television screen. It will not be there for anything as enjoyable or energetic as copulation but to enable the assembled friends and relations to pretend they are playing table tennis, skate-boarding or,even, walking and jogging.
They will in other words be WIIing, or whatever the correct verb for using a WII is. Tennis racquets, golf clubs and  running shoes become redundant since the mighty WII, apparently, is also able to simulate any or all of the kit needed to play a particular game.
The most annoying ads on TV at the moment feature the pleasant but extremely limited duo, Ant and Dec, travelling the country, invading people's homes and clubs to issue challenges for various activities on the Wii machine. At least, I assume they are Ant and Dec. For all any of us know, it could be two A&D avatars or holograms doing the challenging - and the challenges themselves might be virtual rather  than actual.
In that sense, Wii and all the other electronic games, are a metaphor for our increasingly ersatz society.
We don't do reality any more.
Why take real exercise that involves real effort when you can stay inside your centrally-heated cocoon and kid yourself that you have played a round of golf or a couple of sets of tennis without breaking sweat?
Why write real drama when you can put together a cast of misfits and failed celebrities and lock them inside a house or jungle and let them work out their psychoses and character faults in full public view?
This philosophy extends into the political arena, education and even into religion.
Politicians long ago gave up on Parliament as a forum for serious debate, preferring to use the TV and internet to shape events and people. Budgets and important announcementsappear courtesy of the BBC or internet rather than in the Commons.
An education system that once acted as the template for large wodges of the globe has been systematically replaced by a new model in which social engineering and indoctrination masquerade as education.
It is entirely possible now to attain a pass in GCSEmaths with a grade that once wouldn't have troubled the scorers. One GCSE Science paper I looked at very recently contained questions similar to those I faced at the end of my first year in senior school. Except that many of these modern questions came complete with multiple choice answers; just to increase the pupil's chance of getting the right answer.
It is no longer necessay to practise a musical instrument such as the guitar. Simply buy the right game, plug it into a console and you are, automatically, transformed into a rock star - even if you can't tell the difference between a chord and a string.
I don't know about you, but the thought that the young surgeon who is about to operate on me or the equally young pilot whose plane I am boarding  might have virtual rather than real qualifications does not exactly fill me with confidence.
The disease has spread into our financial systems. Rather than save real money by cutting our costs, the Bank of England - doubtless at the urging of Gordon B - has chosen instead to print new money - lots of it. Now, at some point, such as when we are printing more money than we are actually generating in income, that cash becomes worthless.
We don't need to look too far back in history to discover the truth of that statement; just as far as the Weimar Republic ought to do it. As Maynard Keynes said at the time: "Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance."

This administration has systematically anaesthetised the populace with a mixture of cheap supermarket beers and spirits, all-day opening and readily accessible hard and soft drugs. It has reduced their ability to question or counter its actions by cutting the legs out of the education system. Thanks to Wii it is now able to reduce them to sedentary vegetables by convincing them that virtual exercise is as good as the real thing. And, to top it all off, they are printing ersatz money so that no family in the land should go without its own Wii this Christmas.

Merry Xmas and a (real) Prosperous New Year