OPINION
So, here it is: my last column of the year. That time of year when columnists, looking forward to a long silly season break of lying on white, sandy beaches sipping Manhattans while oiled young goddesses peel another grape, rattle off some pablum about “the year that was”.
Well, here in Tasmania, the white, sandy beaches are a given, but it’s more likely that Shazza from George Town will be knocking back a six-pack of Woodies while screeching at young Jase ta leave that dead seagull the fuck alone. As for the year that was…
Charles Dickens penned one of the great opening lines of literature, when he wrote that, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But I’d hardly credit 2023 with such distinction. If anything, it was the worst of times, it was the even worse of times, relieved a little by one or two threadbare silver linings. But, the omens portend, even worse may yet come in the New Year.
After all, 2023 was the year that AI really got going, and so did the Democrat Great Terror of arrests, show trials, and jailing little old ladies for the heinous crime of strolling through the Capitol waving little American flags. It was the year Rolling Stone destroyed whatever ragged shreds of credibility it had left, by cancelling Jann Wenner for the even more heinous crime of failing to pretend that women and blacks are magical beings, or that white men should be neither seen nor heard.
And, of course, 2023 closed with one of the most heinous crimes in nearly a century, the terrible atrocities committed by Palestinians in Israel on October 7. With the result, naturally, that the left uniformly declared their undying love and admiration for the perpetrators.
In fact, the left so immediately and completely fell in love with the mentally challenged (average Palestinian IQ: 78 – look it up), inbred (ditto staggering rate of 1st cousin-marriage in that benighted shithole), mass-murderers and mass-rapists of Gaza that they immediately forgot about their Great Moral Cause of the Ages, Ukraine. Eh, Ukraine is so 2022.
Of course, 2023 was also the year that Prince Harry lightened the global mood with the publication of his risible “memoir”, Spare. Well, we all needed a good belly laugh, I guess. Even if we could all have slept better for not knowing about the Ginger Whinger’s frostbitten todger.
Elsewhere in Hollywood, the clown car of blue-haired landwhales, limpwristed soy boys, and barely literate Basketball Americans who fancy themselves as “writers” demonstrated their essential uselessness by going on strike, during which absolutely no one at all noticed. In a splendid case of shooting themselves in the feet, the woke hacks protested against AI taking over their jobs, by letting AI fill in for them, to no discernible difference.
If anything, standards improved. After all, when they were working, Hollywood writers gave us such immortal contributions to cinema history as The Marvels, The Flash, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Sadly, though, the strike was eventually resolved, and Hollywood writer’s rooms are back to writing self-insert fanfic about fat, moody girls smashing the patriarchy and black übermenschen saving the world from racism and, even more miraculously, having an at-home dad.
But there were, as I say, one or two feeble glimmerings of silver in the gathering storm clouds.
In what was not-inaccurately dubbed the world’s first referendum on Wokeism, Australians resoundingly rejected the “Indigenous Voice” referendum. Despite its innocuous name, Australians saw the proposed Constitutional amendment for just what it was: an attempt to inject racially-segregated laws into Australia’s foundational document for the first time since such things were resoundingly rejected in 1967.
In even brighter signs for Australians, the referendum result, combined with a cost-of-living crisis, marked a catastrophic turning point in the poll fortunes of both PM Anthony Albanese and the government he leads. The next election may not be due for another 18 months, but the Albanese Government’s political fortunes seem set on the same trajectory as the Ardern/Hipkins Labour Government in New Zealand.
Because, on the same weekend that Australians so roundly rejected Wokeism, New Zealanders also voted out the Labour Government. Granted, the result was not nearly so decisive as the Australian referendum, but then, New Zealand’s byzantine MMP electoral system is pretty much designed to exclude decisive election results as much as possible. For once, MMP may have worked in Kiwis’ favour: rather than a clear victory for jelly-backed National, new PM Chris Luxon has to negotiate with a slightly less spineless ACT party, and political bomb-thrower Winston Peters’s New Zealand First.
Given the screeching and wailing from both the media party and the race-grifting lobby to date, it all seems rather promising.
So that’s 2023 accounted for. The second dose of the formula for these end-of-year columns is usually a bit of chin-stroking prognostication from we scribes who pretend we have a clue What’s Really Going On.
So, What’s Really Going On? Buggered if I know.
I’d like to be like all the otherwise, would-be entrails-reading hacks, but I’d rather be honest. Political prognostication from the media is the ultimate gambler’s fallacy. Two-bit ink-slingers churn out one sage observation after the other – and then conveniently forget the 90 per cent of them they got it completely wrong.
One thing I will say is the one thing I hope I am wrong on: that, bad as 2023 overall was, I suspect that 2024 is going to get worse. The storm clouds of war are brewing on multiple continents and virulent, open, in-your-face anti-Semitism is on the march in the West. If Jews are indeed the canaries in the global coal mine, then we’re all advised to stock up on gas masks.
Which is not exactly a cheery note to wrap up and head on into the Christmas season with, is it? So, I’ll finish with the best advice I can give: get absolutely shit-faced drunk and stuff yourself stupid, this Christmas. Might as well make the best of it.