As a former creative director of an ad agency, I know how difficult it is to foster corporate spirit even in a relatively small group. And when the group involves copywriters (often frustrated novelists), art directors (often frustrated painters) and other creatives, the task becomes exponentially harder.
All kinds of team-building stratagems, most based on heavy drinking, are activated to that end, but typically only with moderate success. People involved in writing and art tend to be cantankerous individuals, who are proud of being both individualistic and cantankerous.
So much more impressive is the achievement of our most liberal newspaper in forging homogeneity among its employees. To wit: 338 of them signed a petition demanding that Suzanne Moore, award-winning columnist who had been with the paper for 10 years, leave or be sacked.
The management went along – one assumes willingly, for Miss Moore’s transgression was egregious by the lofty standards of that august publication. For she’s guilty of transphobia, a crime that rivals racism and homophobia for sheer offensiveness to modern sensibilities.
This isn’t to say that Miss Moore is inordinately scared of transsexuals – and if you insist on the literal use of the Greek term, you too should be sacked from whatever job you have. In today’s parlance, politically charged words are desemanticised. They have a political meaning and no other.
Since old common-or-garden totalitarians typically gained and held power by violence, they were most afraid of violence. Today’s totalitarians are what I call glossocrats, meaning they rise not by the sword but by the word. Hence they are most afraid of words, not swords.
In any totalitarian society, neo-, aspiring or actual, a crime of word is worse than a crime of deed. Glossocrats know that once they’ve gained control of the language, their power will become absolute.
In that spirit, racism doesn’t have to mean fear of other races, and nor does a homophobe duck behind parked cars whenever a camp chap comes round the corner.
Anyone who says that immigration of cultural aliens must be curtailed is a racist. Anyone who finds anything wrong with homomarriage or with homosexual couples adopting children is a homophobe. And Miss Moore is a transphobe.
After all, she dared to introduce a touch of the real world to the schizophrenic virtual reality of Guardian liberalism by writing that sex is a biological classification, “not a feeling”. Hundred of throats opened wide and a thunderous chorus of “You what?!?” shook the Guardian building to its foundation.
But of course sex is just a feeling! Who cares what chromosomes you were born with? You are a free, liberal, tolerant individual (at least as freedom, liberalism and tolerance are defined at The Guardian). That means you have a Guardian-given right to choose any from the menu of the available sexes, currently containing 74 options and growing.
Such is the orthodoxy, and if you defy it you are a heretic. Be jolly thankful if you’re only tossed out on your ear, not into a pyre.
Unfortunately, I’m unfamiliar with Miss Moore’s work and hence can’t judge her overall political inclination. However, since she lasted 10 years at that stronghold of tolerance, it’s safe to assume that she herself is generally liberal.
That makes it even worse. For she isn’t just a heretic, but also an apostate, turncoat, traitor. She’s a worm, a parasite gnawing at the insides of The Guardian’s body, and just getting rid of her offensive presence at the paper is too good for that vermin.
That’s why, in parallel with getting the good news that she was no longer welcome at her job, Miss Moore and her children also received hundreds of death threats. I don’t care how hardy one is – getting such threats is unsettling.
I can testify to that from personal experience, having received hundreds of similar message myself when years ago I wrote a piece in The Mail, in which I described homosexuality as an aberration, specifying that I used the word in its strict dictionary definition only.
Yesterday I asked for help with my English. What prompted that plea was the incessant updating of woke terminology that’s impossible to keep pace with. For example, just as I advocated, somewhat facetiously, the use of the politically acceptable term BAME, it was dumped into what Comrade Trotsky poetically called “the garbage bin of history”.
Now further help is required. Will someone explain to me the meaning of the words liberalism, tolerance and freedom inscribed on The Guardian’s metaphorical banners?
Actually don’t bother; I get it. Liberal means illiberal, tolerant means intolerant, free means enslaved. And put together they mean neo-totalitarian glossocracy.
First they came for J.K. Then they came for Suzanne. Etc. Never going to stop. A small percent of that 1 % of a total population calls the shots for the rest of society.
The new term to dazzle the minds of men today is “authentic self.” Of course this means that a man can fob himself as a she using potemkin-like contraptions to trot out the…authentic self.
That’s a new one for me. Thank you — I need all the help I can get with my English.
All the help you can get with your English, sir? That would make the rest of us beyond help.
That was a literary device.