The Year Reheated

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Oh, and we were treated to the creative efforts of artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose juddering and convulsions were artistically enhanced by twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese. When not “investigating bodies of cultural debris” and being showered with atomised dairy products, Mr Romania teaches those less gifted than himself at New York’s Centre for Performance Research and other places of learning.

The topic of suboptimal hiring choices arose again in April, when parents of students at Fox Chapel Middle School in Hernando County, Florida, discovered that their offspring had been entrusted to Ashlee Renczkowski, a bewigged man in strappy shoes. When not “feeling cute and beautiful” and exploring the possibilities of a “zero-depth vaginoplasty,” Mr Renczkowski passed the time by threatening to kill the children with the three firearms in his possession. Mr Renczkowski’s rather dramatic mood swings could be triggered by any expression of doubt regarding his mental state and his attempt to approximate womanhood. Reservations clearly unfounded.

We also encountered Mr Katie Dolatowski, who, via social media, aired his view that “Trans women aren’t a threat if I use the bathroom” – meaning, one assumes, that other dysmorphic men aren’t a threat to him – while also insisting, “I know I’m not a threat to anyone.” Except, of course, to ten-and-twelve-year-old girls in supermarket toilets. Much like the ones that Mr Dolatowski filmed and sexually assaulted.

May brought more complications of transgenderism – and new frontiers of niche indignation – when a dysmorphic woman, a “binary trans man,” gave a dinner party and then complained about the guests not regarding their hostess as a potential mugger and rapist of other women. This dinner-party courtesy was denounced as “invalidating” and an obvious basis for umbrage: “While I may not be cis,” we were told, “to exclude me from potentially being a danger to women… is transphobic.” Readers were invited to imagine a dinner party at which, in order to be sensitive and suitably affirming, you’re obliged to insinuate that the hostess is rapist material. And to do it convincingly, reassuringly. Rather than, say, complimenting the cooking or the décor.

We also discussed the topic of activist provocation and the exploitation by activists of their victims’ restraint and civilised behaviour. Illustrations of malevolent ingenuity were not hard to find, being as they are both a staple and a perk of progressive campus activism. In each example, a pattern repeated. The dynamic being essentially, “You, unlike me, have some self-restraint, which gives me an advantage, therefore I shall test it and see how far I can go.” A pattern that suggests the psychology of a child unaccustomed to consequences. The Unspanked, as it were. And so, in the name of progressive piety, thieving and spitting ensued, along with repeated and opportunistic physical assault. None of which was done reluctantly or under duress. Instead, it was practised and clearly recreational. A calculated spite.

And scenes that enrich the lives of Portland’s progressive commuters were also burned into our minds.

In June, we browsed the pages of Personnel Today, a publication for the inhabitants of HR departments, and learned of the Royal Air Force’s prioritising of brownness and womb-having as the most important attributes for would-be pilots. Whether the stated, seemingly arbitrary targets for “diversity” relate to any actual interest or aptitude – say, among school-leavers – or to any tactical utility, was not made clear. What was made clear, however, was that selection boards of “white men” are unacceptable, and that the fast-tracking of suitably “diverse” candidates entails the abandonment of even basic fitness tests. And so, the closer the RAF comes to these ideologically corrected demographic ratios, the more reason there will be to suppose that standards have been lowered and corners cut.

And we once again turned to the world of art with a tantalising preview of a “sensitive, sensual performance” by Lisa Hinterreithner and her associates, in which the four ladies fondled straw, tongued moss, and posed the pressing question: “What can happen if we allow ourselves to be intimate with plants?” By way of an answer, the words “sustainable heterotopic space of discourse” were helpfully deployed.

July saw the long-awaited fusion of high-street banking and mental illness, with NatWest boasting of its policy to permit “bigender” staff to “identify as men and women on different days.” To facilitate this innovation, the bank offers “double-sided lanyards to non-binary employees so they can alternate between personas when they please.” Employees unsure who or what they are at any given time will be encouraged to enact their “masculine and feminine” personas in front of customers, according to mood and medication. Further affirmation is offered via the provision of “environmentally-friendly bamboo badges” displaying the name and pronouns that they favour at any given time of day.

We also noted the appetite for ham-fisted pop-cultural subversion, including the urge to sex-swap James Bond, on grounds that “whiteness” and maleness are somehow antiquated and unsavoury. Screen Rant’s Shaurya Thapa, who boasts of his many “domains of knowledge,” was unhappy that a film series about an iconic male character still tends to feature said male character. Which does seem a bit like complaining that every season of the detective series Bosch features, among other things, a white, male detective named Harry Bosch. Nonetheless, we were assured that, “A gendered spin on the character can open up more potential for exploring Bond’s individuality.” And this exploration is to be achieved by erasing a rather fundamental aspect of the character – his maleness – and replacing him with an entirely different person of a different sex.

And we found time to shed a tear for London’s struggling artists, with Ms Gayle Chong Kwan informing the world that her “critical creative faculty” is vastly undervalued, while expecting to live way beyond her means at taxpayer expense. The Observer article in which these complaints appeared was oddly coy about the art on offer, and which, it turned out, took the form of unattractive piles of plastic milk cartons.

Highlights of August included a consideration of crime and punishment. Specifically, a progressive lawyer who claimed that “cops and prisons are killing us all” – and that neither custodial sanctions nor more lenient attempts at correction have much impact on rates of reoffending. This claim was then presented, by the same lawyer, as a reason not to imprison the predatory and murderous, who are apparently just like us and deserving of our sympathy. Unlike, one assumes, their numerous victims, and likely future victims. And so, we arrived at the strange reasoning that if a person has been arrested many times for behaving like a dangerous animal – say, by sucker-punching random women for being the wrong race – and has consequently, belatedly, ended up in prison, thereby allowing the law-abiding some relief from his activities, then this is a bad thing. For which, we, not he, should supposedly feel bad.

The topic of crime cropped up again days later, with the Observer’s Martha Gill excusing habitual, organised shoplifting. Thieves, she conceded, are “becoming bolder and more aggressive” as shoplifting has blurred into mob robbery and open, gleeful looting. And therefore – yes, therefore – jail time for repeat offenders is “exactly the wrong approach.” Instead, we should be blaming retailers, who, it seems, are asking for it. What with those short skirts. Sorry, accessible goods. The preferred, progressive trajectory being one in which anything one might wish to buy will be safely out of reach and shuttered away. Because the important thing is that we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are. We will lock up the product, but not the thief, and utopia will surely follow.

Our eyes were also widened by the “queering” of Tudor history at Portsmouth’s Mary Rose Museum, where visitors with an interest in a sixteenth-century mirror salvaged from a warship belonging to Henry VIII, were informed of how a mirror of this kind might induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic. A display of sailors’ nit combs retrieved from the vessel also prompted a bewildering lecture on how “for many Queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity.” The relevance of this claim to a sixteenth-century warship was not entirely obvious. We were, however, assured, “Many objects can be viewed through a Queer lens and can indirectly tell LGBTQ+ stories.” The word indirectly was, one might note, doing an awful lot of work.

Oh, and we encountered a burly, cross-dressing pervert with an interest in the panties of schoolgirls. A pervert employed – naturally – as a coach for a schoolgirls’ tennis team, and whose strange, self-titillating activities were promptly and emphatically defended by an army of progressive women eager to display their tolerance. Because cornering alarmed schoolgirls and enquiring about their underwear, and about whether they were menstruating, and doing this repeatedly, is totally fine, provided the person doing it is a man with big hands and an unconvincing wig.

In September, via a transgender Reddit forum, we explored the previously-neglected concept of bra euphoria – a term whose connotations include sexual arousal – and with it, the perils of the modern lingerie-department sales assistant. Returns policies, underwiring, and the technicalities of bra calibration were all duly noted, along with the shortcomings of bra manufacturers, whose products were deemed wanting by forum regulars on account of their generally being designed for the bodies of women. Female sales assistants who find themselves helping strange men to try on bras, repeatedly, with said men in states of sexual agitation, were not invited to participate in the Reddit discussion.

The month also brought us several, quite vivid illustrations of criminal activity, all caught on camera, along with the consequent moral contortions of progressives. Among which, those of Mr Zack Ford, a “proud SJW,” who believes that women should allow themselves to be mugged, or worse, lest their muggers come to harm. This egalitarian insistence that ferals and sociopaths are, again, just like us, only more deserving of indulgence, and that the wellbeing of our assailants is a matter of great importance, may strike readers as somewhat perverse, and indeed insulting. Not to mention disabling when it really matters.

There was also some machete-wielding-educator news, which inspired us to wonder what it might take for a far-left educator, a self-styled “black Marxist” and “public intellectual,” to become unemployable. Ms Shellyne Rodriguez, an art teacher at Hunter College, New York, blamed complaints about her behaviour – namely, menacing students whose views diverge from her own, shouting profanities at said students, vandalising their property, and chasing people down the street armed with a machete – on “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” You see, assuming that a professional educator should behave like an adult, and not, say, threaten to decapitate people who ask questions about her childish and aggressive behaviour, is part of an “attack” on “women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.” A boldness that suggests Ms Rodriguez is very much accustomed to being exempt from normal academic proprieties, and indeed civilisational basics. Rather than, as she pretends, being downtrodden at every turn.

In October, we paid a visit to Ferris State University’s Museum of Sexist Objects, where “artefacts of intolerance” are presented to visitors, should any materialise, as a stern warning of darker, more primitive times. Objects deemed sexist and reprehensible included a set of false eyelashes, a joke sign about beer being better than women, a glamour calendar featuring pneumatic ladies in minimal lingerie, a “Hillary Sucks” poster, and, bizarrely, a signed publicity photograph of Dr Condoleezza Rice. Oh, and a 1997 novelty foodstuff by the name of Pasta Boobs. The corresponding novelty pasta for ladies’ hen parties – shaped as you’d imagine – was not, needless to say, deemed worthy of inclusion.

We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony.

And the New Rules Of Pretending also crossed our minds, along with their contradictions. Specifically, the belief that, on the one hand, fat, screeching drag queens are inexhaustibly hilarious, a kind of jolly panto suitable for children – something to make the kiddies laugh. But on the other hand, dysmorphic men and autogynephiles, who are often difficult to distinguish from drag queens, are beings of infinite seriousness and self-evident validity, such that the merest raised eyebrow can result in heated chiding and accusations of hatred. And so, the sight of a cross-dressing man is something that we must find both absurd and amusing, and, simultaneously, not at all funny.

Among the mighty titans encountered in November was a radical young lady named Margot, a “nutrition counsellor” who is “root-cause and system focussed,” and whose profound thoughts included “What do we eat during the revolution?” It turns out that you can’t agitate the proletariat without a solid meal plan. While her comrades “break capitalism” and “abolish” prison, Margot envisions herself “coaching people in how to eat from a revolutionary and resistance standpoint.” A task that involves instructing the little people on how to dry pepper seeds and how to wash foraged bin scraps in vinegar in order to remove any trace of those capitalist pesticides. The revolution, since you ask, will be fuelled by cashew milk and vegan pseudo-cheese. Because as capitalism is toppled, and amid the riots and burning cars, there will, it seems, be space for neurotic niche cuisine. Assuming, that is, that the proletariat are tempted by the prospect of economic ruin, roaming gangs of liberated rapists, and evenings spent washing other people’s bin contents.

Another moral colossus was Ms Xahra Saleem, founder of the activist group All Black Lives Bristol, a band of megaphone-waving statue-topplers who were the subject of much gushing and deferential commentary. Following the group’s feats of vandalism and chanting, the local university promised to “decolonise” All Of The Oppressive Things. Discarded placards and assorted detritus from the group’s protests were fondled reverentially by staff of the local museum and displayed for public worship as holy artefacts. Only later was it revealed that Ms Saleem had stolen £32,344 of charitable donations to the group and had blown it all on taxis, takeaways and prodigious hairstyling, before ending up in prison. Readers were invited to ponder the degree to which disparities in life outcomes, which so animate Ms Saleem’s organisation, may be explained by Ms Saleem’s own choices and the mindset they imply.

The year drew to a close with more reminders of how competence is counter-revolutionary, with Canada’s Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, an institution tasked with “setting national standards for medical education,” informing us that medical training should be centred on “values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise.” “Equity” and “decolonisation,” were advanced as issues of decisive import, rescinding more humdrum concerns, and we were told that the priorities of physicians, nurses, and medical administrators should be less about “professionalised knowledge” – dosages and whatnot – and more about “lenses of social justice.” These allegedly corrective lenses would “allow physicians to more effectively engage in… social change.” Suitably re-educated, medical workers will then have “bidirectional relationships with… the land.” Which is obviously what you want when that itchy rash won’t go away.

We paid our final visit of the year to the lofty realm of art, in which Turner Prize winner Jesse Darling offered up “a work… about Britain for the British public.” And for which, words of appreciation proved difficult to find. The piece in question – a seemingly random scattering of tape, net curtains, and metal crash barriers – was immediately hailed as “bold,” “engaging,” and “sculpturally compelling,” a daring reflection of our “times of crisis,” our “societal breakdown.” These breathless endorsements prompted the thought that if we are indeed in “times of crisis” and civilisational decline, then that may in part be a consequence of the politics and mentality of those who applaud piles of tat as the best that can be done, the peak of human creativity.

And we learned of the need for a redistribution of erotic interest – specifically, the intersectional travails of an erotic dancer who lamented the limited interest in her undergarments, and who insisted that the rest of us must continue doing the work until we become aroused by the sight of a massively overweight neck-bearded woman.

These, then, were the examples set by our betters. The glorious heights to which we must aspire.

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