In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”
In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.
Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”
And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.
The world of art enriched us in March, thanks to the Guardian’s gushing coverage of an exhibition – curated “in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups” – of mass-produced My Little Pony dolls. Faced with piles of items both ubiquitous and banal, visitors to the exhibition were assured that the plastic objects on display, which could be found in any toy shop in any city, are tools of resistance for the marginalised and unseen, and are “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” Yes, a full-on face-blast of culture.
We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”
Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.
We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.
And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.
May brought to our attention a cornerstone of many a progressive worldview – specifically, allegations of randomness regarding everyone’s birth. As if you – the person reading this – could somehow have been born to entirely unrelated people, with entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have – and still be the same person. Because, it seems, it was mere “luck and random chance” that your parents’ child was you. Needless to say, the people making these claims were not themselves parents. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some arbitrary or pointless occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events.
Days later, scenes from a bus stop in Ruislip, Greater London, took on symbolic qualities and offered us a snapshot of a culture being downgraded, rapidly and perhaps irretrievably, thanks to its its supposed enrichment by newcomers for whom queueing is a seemingly alien concept. We then explored the gleeful and not infrequent punishment for those careless enough to notice such things.
We also looked on as the Vancouver Police Department, the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation insisted on referring to a deranged man as somehow being a woman, thereby setting fire to whatever credibility they could still be said to have. The man in question, Nathaniel Francis Beekmeyer, had recorded social-media videos in which he describes himself as “super cute” and “a beautiful person,” and hence his enthusiasm for assaulting random women and their four-month-old babies. The passers-by who intervened and overpowered Mr Beekmeyer faced further strange behaviour on seeing news reports in which this shirtless man was referred to by the police and media as a woman. As if their own, first-hand perceptions, from mere inches away, were somehow wildly and implausibly inaccurate.
In June, we encountered the deep, woke wisdom of Hannah McElhinney, who wanted us to know about her “queer temporality,” and the fact that “LGBTQ+ people experience time differently to straight and/or cisgender people.” Which, entirely coincidentally, makes her much more special than you. Paying attention to one’s queerness is, we learned, a favoured activity, along with mentioning at length the crushing burdens of being so complicated and fascinating. As opposed to those ordinary mortals who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.
Another cognitive colossus raised our eyebrows days later, in the form of the World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken. Ms Auken wishes to correct our primitive, territorial lifestyles – say, by making us surrender our cars to random strangers, at seemingly random intervals, and for purposes unknown. Having people you don’t know take away your car would, we were assured, be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.” This vision of an unpropertied tomorrow, in which everything belongs to the state, and nothing belongs to you, prompted many replies, among which, “Anybody ever wash a rented car? No?” And, “Sorry about your wife going into labour, I needed some cigarettes. By the way, you need some new tyres.”
And we beheld the dazzling thoughts of Atlantic columnist Xochitl Gonzalez, a supposedly downtrodden Person Of Pigmentation, whose article was highlighted by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. Ms Gonzalez wanted us to believe that she is oppressed by expectations of reciprocal courtesy and basic consideration. Say, the assumption that you won’t wander into a library, where people are studying for exams, and start blasting out loud music. When not denouncing the “gentrification” of white library patrons, whose appreciation of Brooklyn hip hop combos is insufficiently fulsome, Ms Gonzalez spends her time mentioning how “minority” and “of colour” she is, as if waiting for applause. Or at least deference.
July introduced us to the world of politically radical tableware. By which, I mean unattractive, poorly made objects intended to propagate pretentious racial guilt. Our guide to this phenomenon, Victoria Burgher, a PhD student at the University of Westminster, insisted that creating unattractive plates is “crucial to any antiracist social justice work.” When not making unsightly tat, Ms Burgher spends her time telling the credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.” You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.
No less radical was Kate Auletta, the editor-in-chief of Scary Mommy, a publication for ladies of a progressive leaning. Ms Auletta’s contribution to human advancement entails showing her bare arse to her small boys, then applauding herself in print. Having listed her numerous physical imperfections, including a big, sagging bosom and a fat upper pubic area, Ms Auletta went on to detail the ways in which her two small boys are being politically improved by the sight of her incongruous crack and badger. This feat of not wearing knickers.
And we encountered Argentina’s first transgender pilot, a burly chap now named Traniela Campolieto, who bangs on about the super-girly tightness of his uniform while using the cockpit to take endless, pouting selfies. Before becoming a shimmering vision of womanliness, Mr Campolieto was a professional bodybuilder, a proverbial brick shithouse. Which may explain his enthusiasm for bad wigs, the transformative powers of which may have been overestimated. And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are somewhat unreliable, not least regarding himself.
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