Prepping for the Wokepocalypse
They’re coming for your DVD collection. Time to build a bunker.
‘Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields’ sang Jagger, ‘Sold in the market down in New Orleans’. But not any more he doesn’t. Because back in 2021 Sir Mick came over all Paint It Black Lives Matter and pulled Brown Sugar from the dinosaur rockers’ live set list because, you know, racism.
I understand why he made that choice. And it was probably the right one, but when I read that story I immediately stopped what I was doing and rifled through my CD collection, yes my CD collection, to double check I could locate my copy of Best of The Rolling Stones Jump Back 71 -93. And when I couldn’t, I went to straight on E Bay and bought another one. For £3. It arrived two days later. Crisis Averted.
I’m not even that much of a Rolling Stones fan. Sure they’re better than the Beatles. By an order of magnitude. But they’re no David Bowie. But they’re still pretty good. They certainly know their way around a culturally appropriated rock n’ roll tune. But the point is, if you think you might want to enjoy Brown Sugar in the future. Stock up now.
Because while everyone else is out panic buying heating oil and eggs (how did that happen? Does Mick Lynch run the Chickens Union now?) I’ve been busily prepping up for the Wokepocalypse.
Because pretty soon you’ll be able to forget the energy crisis, the real shortage is going to be ‘things we used to enjoy but aren’t allowed to anymore because, racism. And misogyny. And probably something about trans people.’
We simply wont be able to get hold of this stuff any more. Brown Sugar is going straight down the memory hole, along with It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, ABBA’s Does Your Mother Know? (I mean probably fair enough that one, it’s essentially a theme tune for nonces), Dirty Harry films, Edward Colston statues and poor old Uncle Ben.
And not to mention of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
This week we learned that yet another ‘conspiracy theory’ has, surprise surprise, turned out to be true.
They told us that we were living in an Orwellian fantasy, that worries that they might be planning on rewriting our past, and memory holing our culture, were simply based on wrong think and misinformation. Silly talk, the preserve of tin hat wearers and people who, for some reason, still like Russell Brand.
But the identity obsessed elites do seem intent on taking the entirety of our shared history, and replacing it wholesale, with their own approved and ‘improved’ version.
And they are coming for every bit of it. Not just the truly awful, heinous stuff, like the original Disney films, or stories about industrialised confectionary. But all books written in that cess pit of hatred and rage we know as ‘the past’. All paintings, statues, plays, books, fairytales, jokes, TV shows, pop songs, cartoons, and definitely, unequivocally anything, featuring Jeremy Clarkson.
Art is to be chastised, revised, homogenised, and sanitized.
The defence as far as Roald Dahl is concerned seems that the ‘sensitivity readers’ are only fiddling at the edges, simply taking out the bad bits, upgrading the odd word here, expunging the occasionally offensive phrase there. But that is no justification at all. It’s tantamount to saying.
‘Don’t worry. Yes, we’re going to shit on this piece of art. But only a little bit.’
What breathtaking arrogance lies behind this crusade? I’d say it’s what I call The Narcissism of The Now. The sense that this cultural generation believes that it is the one which finally, unequivocally and definitively has all the answers. To everything.
It’s a generation that suffers from no self doubt, no hesitation and no uncertainty. Artists may have been blindly groping across the millennia, hopping tentatively from one giant’s shoulder to the next, towards a balance, a truth, an equilibrium, which may one day perhaps, help them finally solve the perplexing puzzle of humanity.
But don’t worry old dead guys. This lot have nailed it.
Somehow some angry undergraduates, and a nice woman who once worked on The Late Review with Tom Paulin, have finally solved it. In 2023. Job done. Sorted.
Years ago I worked on one of the BBCs inferior cardboard imitations of X Factor. Richard Curtis had been involved in the pilot and when it came to the series I had to regig the basic script a bit. Which I did. The imperious BBC executive rounded on me one day because I’d had the temerity to change something like ‘See you next week’ to ‘Hope you can join us next time’-something like that anyway.
She was apoplectic. That was a Richard Curtis line she shrilled. Do you think you are better than Richard Curtis??
Now our cultural guardians think that yes. Yes, they are better than Richard Curtis. And Roald Dahl. And JM Barrie. (Tinkering with Tinkerbell which surely must already be all kinds of illegal).
And especially of course William Shakespeare who has been ‘improved’ and ‘brought up to date’ so many times, in so many ways by some many super talented people, that you’d be forgiven for assuming Will must have been a pretty crap at writing plays in the first place.
And it’s not only authors. Rex Whistler’s Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats will undoubtedly be improved, according to the Guardian, by having someone else ruin it.
Want to make up your own mind about this controversial work? Tough luck. We’re commissioning someone to tell you what to think.
They genuinely believe that all works of art, no matter how lauded, respected or celebrated in years gone by, remain unfinished until they themselves, have given their notes, and stuck an explanatory plaque on it.
Modern, and more specifically post modern artists cannot create art of their own. They must instead ruin someone else’s.
They are the sanctimonious, joyless and misguided equivalents of the Russian gallery guard who ‘improved’ Anna Leporskaya's work Three Figures by drawing eyes on it.
At least he had a reasonable excuse. He was was bored.
They think they have the right to kill off James Bond, emasculate Luke Skywalker, create a new dog less version of Scooby Doo.
Not really I think because they genuinely believe that the original works pose a threat to public decency, or modern sensibilities, or weak minded children aged from 8 to 80. But because deep in their heart of hearts. They genuinely think they are better than the artists who originally created them.
Ironically they put me in mind of their own favourite President. Throwing their weight around like an artless angry toddler, and declaiming to all who will listen that they are the very super extra best at everything.
They’re really not.
TV streaming services like Disney plus were first. But if publishers are already censoring new editions of classic books, then online music platforms like Spotify and even digital book sellers like Kindle must surely follow.
That’s why I’ve got a CD collection. And a DVD collection that I saved at the very last minute from the greedy clutches of Sue Ryder. It makes sense. Because pretty soon, you’re going to go online to watch Blazing Saddles, listen to Kung Fu Fighting, watch Fawlty Towers, or download the by all accounts, excellent new Harry Potter video game, you’re not going to be allowed to. Because of Hate. Or something.
That’s why we need to get hold of physical copies of this stuff right now, in the few minutes we’ve got left before Disney Plus deletes all its animated classics and replaces them with the vastly inferior live action remakes. (When your ‘live action’ CGI Genie is out-acted by a 30 year old drawing it might be time for a rethink) Or Spotify decides it would be a public service to name and shame anyone who accidentally still has a R Kelly tune in their workout playlist.
Our only option is to build our own personal trove of these dodgy cultural treasures. Concrete manifestations of the sins of the old, unenlightened, stupid, hateful us. Before they are defunned, defunded and defanged.
So get to it. Build a bunker and fill it with all the dodgiest, most socially harmful, and hate filled cultural icons you can. You know what I’m talking about. Carry On films. Ladybird Books, Father Ted videos, some of those sweet sweet Sweet records. (Wig Wam Bam-probably racist. Ballroom Blitz-Don’t mention the War. Little Willy-Let’s not even go there).
Anything you can get your hands on. If it wasn’t made in the last 20 minutes and hasn’t yet received the Guardian Seal of Approval, I’d be very worried if I were you, if I didn’t have a hard copy.
This, of course, could potentially lead to its own problems. Because you could end up with a collection of material so hateful, it would make a BBC diversity officer clutch their pearls like they/them’s life depended on it. And you could become the target of a new pressure group, Stop Hoarding Hate.
We’ll be like some weird guy on a Channel 5 doco with his collection of Nazi memorabilia, but instead of Lugers and Swastikas, our spare rooms will be filled with Chubby Brown DVDs and Baywatch posters.
But I don’t care. I’m a survivalist. Just instead of beans, bottled water and shot gun shells. I’m stocking up on James Bond movies and Jimmy Carr DVDs. Just in case.
So I urge you to join me and start prepping for the Wokepocalypse .
Stash it away. Start today.
That way, in years to come, when your adorable grandchildren shuffle up to you in glass eyed Tik Tok supplication, emptily mouthing the words
‘Good. Double Plus Good.’
You can hand them a golden ticket, crack open your bunker, and proudly introduce them to a whole new Chocolate Factory of adventure, an entire Mystery Machine of delight and a veritable Never Neverland of wonders.
Good luck!
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A couple of notes if you’re still here.
Talking of Conspiracy Theories, I did a whole post here about how the ‘ridiculous fiction’ that the elites wanted us to chomp down on Bug Mac and fries turned out to be true. When the EU officially put insects on the menu. If you’re interested.
And it’s fun to note that the new improved Scooby Doo, which doesn’t even feature the eponymous great dane, was universally pilloried earning an execrable 1.3 score on IMDb. Yet won 4 out of five stars in the Guardian. I understand a second series has already been commissioned.
‘Better than the Beatles’. No evidence for such an inaccurate assertion.
That’s why I love prog rock even more now. No one listens to it or cares about it so there’s no fear about censoring such bands.