Is it time to make the 20s roar again? No small part of the exuberance of that decade was in reaction to the misery of its predecessor. After more than half a decade of bloodshed and deadly plague, young people especially were ready to kick up their heels and revel in the sheer joy of living. Often in defiance of the scolding misery-gutses, past and present: not only was the repression of the Victoria era a living memory, the 20s were also the decade of Prohibition in the US.
While even the wars of the past decades pale into comparison with the “haemoclysm” of WWI, the stifling moralism of modern times is long past due having a massive middle finger shoved in its vinegar face. The first shots over the bows of the neo-Victorians came from the political right, when Milo set off the Great Meme War of 2015 and Trump trolled his way into the White House. Now, even avowed leftists are taking aim at the wokescolds.
When Ricky Gervais came roaring onto the stage at the recent Golden Globe awards, he cemented his place as the first anti-woke hero of the 2020s[…]Gervais knew what he was doing. He was daring the Hollywood wokeocracy to reach for the outrage button in an era when every second joke triggers a garbage fire on Twitter, or at the very least a string of interminable online think pieces about how ‘problematic’ it is.
And that’s the rub. That is the whole dynamic that made the 2010s such a dreary and frankly depressing era. Like the celebrities lampooned by Gervais, everyone and everything, it seems, is serious and pompous and exhausting. Nobody has any fun anymore.
Comedians of all persuasions are finally admitting the truth: the left have killed comedy.
It’s not just that we’re no longer able to tell a few bawdy jokes. It’s not even political correctness itself. It’s the deeper mentality that has engulfed society at large, a pathological tendency to see the worst in everything.
These days, it seems like no aspect of daily life – from how we carry our groceries back from the shops to how we get to work in the morning – is safe from overbearing guilt, or worse still oppressive regulation. Meanwhile, advertisements abound telling us we drink too much, we eat too much, that we’re sending our family to the poorhouse with every harmless punt and that – despite ample evidence to the contrary – a great many of us are unknowing bigots.
It’s a mindset that casts Australia and everyone who’s in it with original sin[…]To be fair to Australia, it is a disease that’s afflicted the Western world in general.
No wonder the patron saint of the modern left is a scowling, pig-faced teenager screeching “How dare you?”
Sick of being finger-wagged and scolded, many voters are turning to politicians who refuse to label them “bigots”, “deplorables” and “rednecks”. Politicians who celebrate their nation rather than denigrate it.
Say what you like about Scott Morrison, but when he says ‘How good is Australia’, it resonates. Because more than ever before, there is a deep thirst in the community for a bit of good news, a reprieve from the drudgery of whatever the chattering classes happen to be banging on about. We want to feel good about ourselves again.
It’s not as if there aren’t public policy problems in Australia…But none of those things make Australia – let alone Australians – inherently bad. All it means is that Australia has untapped potential, and lots of it.
What’s true of Australia is even truer of the global world. Despite the hateful pessimism of the left, the facts are that humanity just enjoyed the greatest decade in the history of its existence. What’s more, slowly, but surely, pockets of freedom-loving resistance in the West are finding their voice.
As the popularity of Ricky Gervais’s diatribe shows, the world is increasingly seeing through the dead end of identity politics. Ordinary people are no longer allowing themselves to be intimidated into silence. The emperor’s clothes are falling off[…]
So, Australians all let us rejoice. Let’s draw a line under that wretched decade of self-flagellation and start living large again.
spectator.com.au/2020/02/roaring-into-the-twenties/
Let the 2020s roar.
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