The Year Reheated
In which we revisit the towers of academia, the intellectual boiler-room of contemporary art and various lamentations from the pages of the Guardian.
In January we marvelled at the inventive ways in which the Arts Council sets fire to our earnings:
One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. Apparently, it is much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and simply hand it over.
Our ongoing series of agonised tweets illustrated the rich spectrum of leftist emoting. From sadness and bewilderment to self-satisfaction, determined righteousness and a tearful longing for “uncomplicated anger.” We also met a student named Arun Smith, a radical saviour of the hypothetically downtrodden, who showed us just how complicated – and dishonest – anger can be:
Despite his extensive commentary on the subject, Mr Smith still hasn’t specified any actual remark that offended him sufficiently to vandalise the free speech wall then boast about it online. Regardless of its content, the free speech wall is, we’re told, “an act of violence.” A “microaggression.” And so Mr Smith feels obliged and entitled to retaliate, in order to pre-empt any hate (as defined by him) that might potentially occur at some point in the future. A line of moral reasoning that’s rather bold and which gives our saviour enormous scope for “forceful resistance” against almost anything he doesn’t like, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
February brought us connoisseurs of stiffness and axial rotation, and the pioneering work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where human endurance meets “excessive G-Force.”
March was of course the month of The Incident, a “level 3” violation of school behaviour, following which a classroom of seven-year-olds were urged to “share their feelings” about a partly-chewed pastry. Other highlights included students at the University of Tennessee being enlightened by a lesbian bondage expert, a reminder of the wickedness that is racist hair, and further evidence of the Arts Council’s discernment and competence. Qualities best illustrated by the £60 million West Bromwich arts centre, which promised to “make the arts more accessible” and two years after opening had failed to attract a single paying customer.
In April Martin Durkin aired an excellent documentary in which he made full use of his right eyebrow. There was also a breakthrough in eco-friendly parenting, and we beheld the theatrical stylings of Bulgarian performance artist Mr Ivo Dimchev.
May provided several insights into the psychology of socialism. First, we sampled the modesty of Mr George Monbiot, a man whose vision and wisdom we simply don’t deserve. And who dismisses his political opponents as dullard conservatives struggling with “low intelligence” and racial phobias. “Liberals,” we were told, by which George means leftists, are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.” Days later, his Guardian colleague Michele Hanson seethed indignantly regardless of the facts and wished fear and misery on people she doesn’t know. For cultural nourishment we turned to the Australian artist Mikala Dwyer, whose two-hour performance piece – “a wonderful, powerful work” – featured six naked dancers shitting onstage.
In June we explored the redefinition of ‘harassment’ and the selective uptightness of our academic betters. A gathering of unhappy Marxists stressed the importance of humility, while wanting to “break the government” and remake the world in their own image. And Godfrey Moase planned to liberate his creativity and “make employment optional” by screwing the taxpayer for everything he needs:
“Submission to a corporation,” we’re told, “will not be mandatory for your survival on Earth.” Though leeching indefinitely on the skills and effort of others – who will be forced to submit to him – will be perfectly okay, apparently.
In July we revisited the Vienna International Dance Festival, where Mr Ivo Dimchev once again transgressed something or other and gyrated in his panties. July also brought us the insoluble sorrows of pretentious racial guilt, the patriarchal horrors of the working class barbecue, and the joys of progressive parenting. Specifically, we learned that the “diffusion” of the family unit – which is to say, absent fathers, hardship and dependence on the state – “is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.”
The heroic stoicism of Ms Icess Fernandez Rojas was a highlight of August, especially her struggle to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” despite the crushing injustice of a mislabelled coffee cup. Our world was further embiggened by fellow Guardian contributors Owen Hatherley and Sophie Heawood, one of whom urged us to share a toilet with people we may not like and thereby “look beyond our obsession with private space,” while the other aired her ruminations on the feminist implications of juvenile bowel movements. And let’s not forget the equally pious Guardianistas Robert and Edward Skidelsky, who want the state to make “us” embrace “less acquisitive modes of living” by removing temptation from the lower orders:
What’s good for us, apparently, is not earning more than Mr Skidesky deems “enough.” It seems we shouldn’t want to travel the world, as Mr Skidelsky does, or sunbathe by the pool at the Caracas Hilton, as Mr Skidelsky did, or own a house as comfortable and spacious as his. “Keynes never owned a house in his life,” says he, “neither for that matter did Virginia Woolf.” And so why should we, the little people? Mr Skidelsky imagines his inferiors “living good lives, surrounding themselves with beauty.” It’s just that he’d rather we didn’t get to own much of it, or have enough money to make more of it happen. Utopia, you see, will “require some restriction.”
September brought us more unhinged leftist educators and the travails of their prey, a catalogue of extreme victimhood theatre, and a large object landing in an unexpected place.
In October the Guardian’s Matt Seaton raged against cupcakes, which are apparently exploitative and mentally crippling, at least to womenfolk. Various tweeted agonies continued to pile up. And the Argentine artist Leandro Granato unveiled “a new form of expression,” a new vehicle for his feelings – squirting paint out of his eyes.
The need of Guardian columnists to rage against the innocuous and trivial was confirmed again in November when feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez took vehement exception to vaginal deodorant, while the writer and artist Charles Firth railed against the indignity of not being given money he hadn’t actually earned. Elsewhere, Californian grad school intellectuals protested against the “microaggressions” of corrected punctuation and having their leftwing politics questioned in class.
And in December we had to make do with the activist virtues of wild exaggeration and outright fabrication, the hallucinated heroism of student “occupiers,” and the subtle, self-effacing art of Ms Casey Jenkins – Australia’s foremost exponent of vaginal knitting.
So. Something for everyone, I think. Roll on 2014.
Arun Smith, a radical saviour of the hypothetically downtrodden,
I missed that one. Words fail me.
Keep up the good work, David.
I missed that one. Words fail me.
Yes, the arrogance is breathtaking. Apparently, our self-appointed champions of “social justice” no longer need concern themselves with dreary things like logic and evidence, and can instead act on sheer force of will. Or narcissistic bloody-mindedness. While dismissing their critics as “anti-intellectual.”
It must be so liberating.
There are places where they take their beer seriously:
A South Carolina woman was held on a domestic abuse charge for allegedly stabbing her common-law husband with a decorative ceramic squirrel when he came home late on Christmas Eve without any beer.
Read the rest of it.
*snort*
While this abrasive abbreviation of The Artist’s Due Relevance well evidences your rustic intellectual tier, David, such is absolutely why I subscribe.
The Arts. We but only serve.
There are places where they take their beer seriously
If I understand it correctly, the moral of the story is to keep the beer cooler stocked at all times. It’s basic marital science.
“Microaggression” is the whiniest neologism of the millennium so far.
”Microaggression” is the whiniest neologism of the millennium so far.
But it’s a perfect tool for the chronically passive-aggressive. As opposed to, say, stoicism and a sense of proportion, which are no use at all and terribly old hat.
Micro-Aggression is quite convenient for the accuser. If the aggressions were any larger a non-biased third party might be able to confirm them. But as they are micro, only a true gnostic visionary/intellectual can see them.
Thank you for the year that was, David. My shillings are in your jar.
Thanks, Simen. And to everyone who chips in.
Other highlights included students at the University of Tennessee being enlightened by a lesbian bondage expert,
That wasn’t the kind of lesbian bondage expert I was hoping for.
It never is, is it, Neil?
Micro-Aggression is quite convenient for the accuser. If the aggressions were any larger a non-biased third party might be able to confirm them.
Well, it’s interesting how the term is typically used by people like this, and like this. Which is to say, by people who wish to inflict their psychological baggage and passive-aggressive urges on others. And so the psychodrama escalates, with ever more improbable sources of grievance, anything from grammatical correction to the names of nail polish colours.
But ours is an age of curious inversions. The phrase “critical thinking” is used ostentatiously by people who crave dogma and power other others and for whom autonomous mental activity is anathema, an alien concept. For those whose worldview is suitably inverted, this is a demonstration of heroism and bravery. And the ‘progressive’ faces of MSNBC, the media shop window of ‘progressive’ virtue, behave like this. Let that one sink in for a minute. Imagine the “one of these things” comment being made on air by a non-leftist and affirmed unanimously by the other non-leftists on the show. The projection is quite boggling.
Apparently NOT satire!
http://www.academia.edu/4357706/Toward_a_Feminist_Postcolonial_Milk_Studies
Apparently NOT satire!
It’s a fun-house mirror approximation of scholarship – dogmatic, absurd and all but unreadable. And therefore par for the course. I gave up after a few pages but I still feel as though I’ve lost four pints of blood.
[ Added: ]
And remember, the above “work” isn’t some random parody of intelligence. This has been taught as an ideal; it’s been arrived at by design. As Roger Kimball says, “How many things had to go wrong — intellectually, socially, morally — to account for prose like this?”
Ah hell. AC1 beat me to it.
Gotta be quick with this audience…
My thanks for an entertaining – and informative! – year. Here’s to 2014…
Well, happy new year to all Thompsonites, and hail to our glorious leader for entertaining us all through 2013.
You’ll like this.
http://www.forharriet.com/2013/12/dear-ani-difranco-supporters-you-cannot.html
Ani deFranco announced she was holding a “righteous” songwriting retreat on a former plantation in Louisiana. Some people thought this was a bit racially insensitive. One of her (white) Facebook supporters got tired of defending the decision as herself, and created a fake Facebook account as “LaQueeta Jones”, with a photo of a random black woman she found somewhere on the internet, and defended it in a hilarious argot Jar Jar Binks would find insulting.
The event has since been cancelled.