THE BLEAT GENERATION

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - CS Lewis.

Before we go any further, Gentle Reader, you need to watch the video I will be discussing in-depth here. It's an ostensible anti-hate speech public (dis)service announcement made by the Scottish Government last October:

Right. I hope you are as horrified and disturbed as I was by it when I first saw it a couple of months ago. If you were not, and think it's right in its assertions, please stick around, because you are not going to like what I have to say. Some people just need to hear alternate points of view to help them out of the brainwashed rut they're in - and are trying to drag us into along with them.

So okay. To bland, boring, slightly disturbing music, sounding like a John Carpenter soundtrack cast-off, we are introduced to a strange, ethereal world. Punishment-threatening diktats float free in the oppressive atmosphere, tense commandments frozen in the air like a snapshot of an avalanche of potential lawsuits to come. They all come bearing mad tidings about hate groups like racists, transphobes (the current troublemaking cause du jour) and disablists and such.

I have worked as a carer with disabled people before, wiped their tears and mouths and backsides, and never in my life have I ever heard the word 'disablists' used. Nobody else I have mentioned it to has ever heard of it, or used it; I've also never personally met anybody who hates disabled people either. The government is making up terms to be able to control previously freeform areas of society. Right away, we see this is all about words, and language, and control thereof for the 'greater good.' Immediately this sets alarm bells ringing.

We are introduced to a quintet of bland, spooky post-millenials. Nobody has yet come up with a name for this generation (i.e. people born after 1997, the millenials cut-off year), but you get the general idea. If not the Bleat Generation, for their sheep-like tendencies, I would call them a Lynchian mob, after David Lynch, because of the intolerant messages they impart in the slightly surreal video, but that's just me being windy-uppy. Anyway, each of these bland anti-social injustice worriers has a message for their own particular subsection of the Scottish population they want to frighten, threaten and browbeat.

The looks on the faces of these five people are very troubling. Though deceptively perfectly calm in their presentation, there is a quiet, knowing, authoritative surety in their you're-getting-it-cunt faces. They pity any fools who will stand in their young lockstep way. They are going to tell Scotland that they are The Future, anything and anybody else is the past, and what they are going to say is now going to be The Way Things Are...OR ELSE. I have never been threatened by my government before, at least not so explicitly, so this is definitely shaping up to be a learning experience. Tell me more, self-appointed young linguist purists! I am all ears and eyes!

So that's you telt.

They believe in acceptance, except accepting others who don't think or talk like them. Irony is way too facile a word for this hypocritical idiocy. Let's make no bones about this: this horrendous wee unveiled-threatfest is not aimed at contemporaries of the quietly-menacing quintet portrayed in it. Clearly this is the dawning of a new era of intolerant tolerance, and people their coldly enraged age and younger could never be capable of any thought or speech 'crime.' No, this PSA is aimed unfairly and foresquarely at middle-aged people and up, because we clearly are the unreconstructed knuckledragger gaybashers, and transmashers, and disabled-spitters, who are an embarrassment to modern, shiny happy people Scotland. Hell, with our unevolved cavedweller notions of life, the immoral universe, and everything stupid, the quicker we either shut up, or die off, the better.

What a stinking load of total...and utter...SHITE!!

Look at the bland, conformist, entitled arrogance in those young faces. Look at, and listen to, the way they speak, slowly and clearly, enunciating each vicious, barbed verb and vowel, teeth often bared, to get their message across. Want to say something non-PC? Want to get reported? Want to play career, or life, Russian roulette? Do you feel lucky, punk? It makes my racist, transphobe, disablist, bigoted, homophobic skin crawl! I mean, the fact that I am none of these things, and never have been in my life (at least that I would admit in public)(the video worked its chilling magic on me well)(laughing), clearly means nothing. As a grown man, I clearly need and deserve to be condescended to by a load of scary, sterile, language-and-thought-neutering brats. Bring me the fainting couch and smelling salts! I have never been so insulted in my life!

Well, actually, that's not strictly true, I have been way more insulted on a few occasions, but that's neither here not there, so let's move swiftly along.

As I said elsewhere on this blog, having lived in America from 2005 to 2016, I have been fascinated and nauseated to come back to my own home country to find it changed beyond all recognition. It's not so much in the population's racial demographics, though the population of Scotland has clearly changed forever, which is fair enough. What truly disturbs me is the straight-up regurgitating of the absolute worst excesses of American collegiate fun-damn-mentalism in mainstream politics.

Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are clearly just blithely, blindly copying the extremist, sociopathic, minority-pandering deranged shite coming out of the American middle-to-upper-middle-class 'educational' system for Holyrood social policies, and this is absolutely to Scotland's detriment. Since I have come back here I have been disgusted and appalled by Ms. Sturgeon's clear and very obvious lack of any interest whatsoever in the men, especially white working class men, of Scotland, and her discriminatory affirmative action exceptionalism, where she puts women and minorities above everybody else. Her third-rate, wannabe-social-worker act has really started to grate, and will cost the SNP votes. After all, "We have ways of making you talk like us...or not at all" is not a winning vote strategy with a lot of the populace, really.

The First Minister recently referred to herself as the "chief corporate parent" to a group of kids who grew up in care. Setting aside the slightly unsettling notion of a childless woman (I am not mocking her miscarriage, at all) calling herself a parent, what this says about Ms. Sturgeon's let-the-disadvantaged-children-come-to-me mentality is oddly fascinating. Stuff like this shitty, threatening-stormcloud-burst, authoritarian video, and her constant harping on unimportant, divisive drivel like gender identity politics, and multifuck pronouns, is the sort of thing that helped Trump win in America. The sniffy, deranged, self-loathing, sociopathic, paranoid white middle class over there are doubling down on their poor-people-hating-and-bating Newspeak. With their horrible, tantrum-throwing spoiled brat children dictating educational policy through fear and loathing, they look like they want to put him in power again.

Genius.

Out in the real, working class Scottish world, nobody but deluded, self-righteous, wannabe-American teenagers gives a shit about all this modern censorious liberal fascist drivel. Normal people couldn't care less about all this crap. Switch off the computer (never, ever look at an argument about trans people on social media, your brain will just melt down) and it all just goes away instantly. Real people are too busy trying to earn a living in a country becoming ever more American and corporate and low-wage-paying and horrible by the day, wondering why the SNP aren't calling a second independence referendum. But we'll just put that particular wee hot potato aside right now. 

This all just shows that letting an ideological zealot into power (as Ms. Sturgeon is, in my own opinion - just ask Alex Salmond, who is still waiting for his apology from the Scottish government about that flawed investigation into him) and allowing them free reign to do whatever legacy-assuring madness they want is an extremely dangerous way to go, in certain social policy areas. I don't hate everything the SNP do, and have voted for them before. I doubt I ever will again. But I absolutely will not stand for anybody - especially half my fucking age - trying to tell me what to do and think and say - ever. Not for one single solitary second. And you can take that to the threatening-punishment bank. Nobody in their right mind would argue against fairness, equality, or protecting the weak and vulnerable, especially after what the disabled-people-murdering scum Tories have done to people with their austerity pogrom programmes for benefits claimants. But going to the opposite ideological extreme in reaction as, once again, is happening in America, with the rise of moon-or-bust politicos like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is just turning a lot of people off. 

People are tired of the thought of having the police come to their door for making a joking video about a Nazi pug, or about having their equipment seized by the police for retweeting some 'offensive' tweet passed onto the authorities by some misfit minority fearmonger, enjoying their first and only moment of power in the weird wide warring world. People are tired of the lack of laughter. People are tired of being po-faced in a horrible, crumbling world. The idea of self-righteous, faux-American children dictating to them, and getting them arrested if they try to remove the rainbow boot off their straining neck, disgusts them to their condescended-to core.  And whilst there is obviously an element of young-versus-old-versus-new here, it used to be the older people who would threaten to call the cops because of things said and done, not the reverse! Young people have become old people, now, and it's just sad and depressing and pathetic all round.

Funny, for a group of youngsters so supposedly against the nonexistent-bogeyman myth 'patriarchy,' they still want to use authoritarian police figures to come in and solve their problems for them, and will tell their surrogate daddies on you if you disobey whatever they say or feel is right at any hormonally-driven teenage moment. The idea of being dictated to by people with no real life experience, who have never had time to make mistakes, and thus have never learned from them...is one of the sickest, blackest jokes I have ever heard of. They can come back to me in ten years with a few bad hangovers, regretted harsh words, renounced extremist political views, embarrassing one-night stands, or fights under their currently-fledgling-level belts. Until then, these pretenders to the existential throne can keep their barely-formed uninformed opinions to themselves, unless asked for them. And it stands to treason that they're sure as shit not going to beat them into me, or others I know. I mean, they're not shy about loudly, angrily, hatefully telling other people what they think of their views, if they don't share them. They are allowed to say anything they want, but we are not supposed to say anything back to them as they dish out their quasi-religious judgement on us poor miserable identity politics sinners.

Aye right.

Having said all this, I must admit that I am not without some sympathy for the younger generations these days. They are growing up in a difficult, burning, frightening world. But they need to stop trying to control (freak) it by controlling other people of whatever age and mindset and political persuasion. That way lies pogroms (these kids are so soft they look like they would weep at the thought of killing an insect, though, if you tell people they have right on their mighty side...you never know, as history has often shown us) and shaved-brain 'equality' of a type that nobody really wants or needs or will ultimately put up with. I mean, you have to admit, for a production about diversity and acceptance, the moral minorities video here certainly doesn't showcase much of either. Everybody is young, and looks like they could have mostly been recruited from some modelling agency. Well, except maybe the cocked-head guy in the boiler suit, but you know what I mean. They're hardly representative of the population of Scotland. At all. And to claim to speak for the whole country? Well, they can suck my fucking disdain.

Your Hate Is Not Welcome Here is a perfect name for this video, just not in the way they intended. Religious fundamentalists spewing dogma is the most uninteresting thing in the world, next to football, vegan food, and all modern American popular cultural output. It's funny. The dead-eyed blonde young woman in this video, and I mean no disrespect to her in real life, looks exactly like a grown-up version of a young child from the old 1960 horror/sci-fi film Village of the Damned:

In that film, everybody in a small English village collapses unconscious for a few hours, and when they wake up every woman of childbearing age in the place is pregnant. They all give birth to children who look exactly the same, using their weird psychic powers, and threats thereof, to get what they want. Sounds to me like a decent enough analogy and sign-off for the subject under discussion. As is a line from the monochrome film: "This isn't a police state...yet."

And speaking of police states and musings on such, let's give the final word to the Dead Kennedys. They have an old song, Moral Majority, which has a couplet  that goes: "Pissed at your neighbor don't bother to nag/pick up the phone and turn in a fag!" These days, it's the fag who would be turning you in!  The DKs (thanks to Mark Price for this excellent, pertinent observation) foresaw all this extremist leftist lunacy coming quite some time ago, in California Uber Alles. I did my own five-minute fuckaboot with the lyrics, and have enclosed below an instrumental version of that classic song here. Sing along ya mad karaoke punk bastirts! 

CALEDONIA UBER ALLES

I am First Minister Nicola Sturgeon

Do my PC biddin' I'll be urgin'
Salmond power has gone away
I will be your queen one day
I will command all of you
Your weans will learn to hate in school

Your weans will learn to hate in school

Caledonia Uber Alles
Caledonia Uber Alles
Uber Alles Caledonia
Uber Alles Caledonia

PC fascists will control you

Hundred percent unnatural

You will inform for the master race
Always hate the white male face
Close your eyes can't happen here
Big sis in Holyrood is near
The gulags won't come back you say
PC shout or you will pay

PC shout or you will pay

Caledonia Uber Alles

Caledonia Uber Alles
Uber Alles Caledonia
Uber Alles Caledonia

Now it is 2019

Smile and salute the politiqueen

Anti-social injustice worrier cops

They have come for your uncool pops

Come quietly to the camp

All white men should have no champ

Don't you worry, it's only poetry reading

Listen to all the hate we're breeding
Die on gluten-free poison gas
Future way's already hatched
You will croak, you white male dick
When you mess with President Nic
When you mess with President Nic

Caledonia Uber Alles

Caledonia Uber Alles
Uber Alles Caledonia
Uber Alles Caledonia

(The rewritten lyrics are parody. Not to be taken seriously. No animals were harmed during the making of this production.)

                                       

(WHEN WILL IT) END?