Reheated (119)

Obviously, activities that are chiefly indulged in by white people – in this case, folk singing – must be deemed suspect and found problematic with great urgency, and then probed for hidden wrongness. At taxpayer expense. And all this scholarly rigour ain’t cheap, you know…

Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though, as so often, details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.

Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.

“Our aim,” say our tearful academics, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences.”

Different audiences. Not the audience that folk music actually has, mind, the one it attracts and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. And again, no actual barriers to participation are specified. But the audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit.

Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on social media. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The term “hate” is used often and expansively – not only to cover threats and vividly abusive emails – “violent messages” – but also mockery and brusque corrections of factual and logical error. Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture.

Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos.

Throughout, the air is heavy with self-elevation, and claims of being scrupulously unbiased and “speaking truth to power” are deployed entirely without irony.

Setting aside for a moment the weird random malice, there’s the more mundane oversight. A Tesla has eight external cameras which record any untoward activity while alerting the owner. The odds of being identified, in high definition, and consequently prosecuted, are fairly high. Yet the people doing the keying and daubing tell us, loudly and quite often, that they’re the smart ones. Our moral and intellectual betters.

It’s not just the conceit that vandalising some random person’s car is a thing one should do, as a good person, as an act of righteousness. Bewildering as that is. It’s the idea of doing that to a make of car that’s famed for its ability to record anything that approaches. Which suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.

Among those traumatised was the Guardian contributor Francine Prose, whose mental health took a catastrophic turn, complete with hair loss and sudden-onset eye-twitching. Symptoms that were accompanied by agitated ramblings about Hitler, Stalin, dictatorship, people thrown from helicopters, and “the imprisonment and execution of those who disagree.”

Of course, Ms Prose was far from alone in her weird theatre of distress, and social media was ablaze with performative convulsion. Among the titans of the fabulist resistance was a tightly wound progressive chap, who envisioned internment camps for those like himself, i.e., tightly wound progressives, with the streets being patrolled by some Trumpian Sturmabteilung.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Ohio high-school teacher Danielle Mann, whose post-election demands, issued from her classroom, included a list of the addresses of likeminded progressives, all of them, everywhere, and the mandatory wearing of identifying bracelets. So that she would know how everyone else voted.

This is the rhetorical pattern for much of what follows. There’s no shortage of self-reference and paying attention to one’s queerness, and much airing of niche woes – the endless agonies of being a “creator,” a “creative,” and an “influencer.” And of course the terrible burden of being so much more complicated and interesting than all those other people. The ones who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.

Readers will note the combination of meandering blather and grafted-on buzzwords, like lumps in porridge. I suppose it’s the curse for people who desperately want to seem more interesting than they actually are, or indeed ever will be, and who are compelled to refer almost any topic of conversation – even quantum mechanics – back to themselves. People who wish to become complicated and fascinating by having an “identity.”

It’s also a curse for anyone unable to escape their presence, of course.