I can't keep up with the culture war, it's completely exhausting. There we were arguing about statues, and before you know it we're arguing about defunding the police, and then we're arguing about precisely what Marxism means. Then, last week, we started arguing about cancel culture, and that argument was still rumbling on as of yesterday so I thought brilliant, a chance to draw breath.
Except no. The multi-faceted, multi-generational brouhaha in which our commentariat are lucratively engaged has opened up a new front, and it's not one that I saw coming (no job as a super-forecaster working for Dominic Cummings for me, which is just as well, I'm already doing French and Gaelic on Duolingo, I don't want to have to do Russian as well), though I suppose, in hindsight, I should have done.
Wearing masks. I mean, really.
As with so much else down the years, the Culture War is a US import. And as we in the UK always do when we anglicise something that we've imported wholesale from America, our version of it is a little bit crap. A Wimpy to their McDonalds. And one of the issues which has been exercising a particularly wingnutty type of Maga hat wearer has been the wearing of masks.
It's taken me a while to work this one out, as it's so patently a no brainer that I find it hard to understand the objections, but in America, mask-wearing has become a political act. Not to wear one is to assert one's right as a proud American, to keep one's mouth and nose free to inhale as many goddamn commie china virus particles as you want, because it's all a hoax by the deep state to control you anyway, whilst at the same time being a Chinese plot.
Yes, I know. It is quite difficult to follow.
And now we're at it over here. Arguing about masks. Arguing about a minor short-term inconvenience as though it's Magna bloody Carta. Anti-maskers bellow about freedom, they refer to them as "muzzles". HMG, as ever, tries to have it both ways, proclaiming their importance while sending out Gove to muddy the waters by talking about "common sense".
I'm not going to make the pro-mask case here, for much the same reason as I'm not going to make the pro-vaccination argument, or the argument that man-made climate change is a bad thing. The same reason that I'm pro-breathing. These are not positions which should be up for debate, the data is in. But there's a certain type of half-wit that seems to see it as a personal insult, and they want to keep on arguing. Because that's what we do these days. We just keep on arguing.
And it's yet another debate that's illustrative of the societal split which has become ever more apparent since that fateful day in June 2016, though with a few variations this time. Much as the statues argument broke neatly along Brexit lines, there's something a touch Brexity about the anti-mask brigade. Wilful self-defeating defiance in the face of overwhelming evidence is bang on-brand for Brexit types (and watching their increasing panic as reality slowly rises up to smack them is going to be one the choicest spectator sports of what's left of 2020, I haven't stopped laughing since I found out about the giant sodding lorry park in Ashford, a place that voted 60-40 for Leave. Churlish, I know. But still, you won, get over it) disingenuous cant about vague notions of "liberty" masking the fact that they just don't like being told what to do, and have yet to evolve an emotional toolkit to cope with it.
For the permanently aggrieved, this is yet another example of "them" trying to control "us", as opposed to a low-impact, easy fix to a modern crisis of spectacular proportions. It's just yet another example of the snowflake marxist liberal FBPE LGBTQI+ out of touch metropolitan elite forcing their values upon the poor down-trodden folk of the Home Counties, and pointing out that their position is slightly disproportionate is just yet further proof that You Can't Say Anything Nowadays. Someone wittier than I characterised them as the sort of people who'd refuse to turn their lights off during the Blitz, saying it was their right to do so.
This is, I suppose, both the joy and the curse of the modern age, everyone gets to have their say. Unfortunately, what a lot of people say is absolute cobblers, worse than that, it's demonstrably dangerous cobblers which is going to get people killed. But hey, that's freedom of speech for you. So wear a mask. It's not going to kill you. It's the running out of food in January that's going to do that.
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