Kanye imagine how toxic Xmas will be for yanks?
Again, wistfully singing “I’m remarkable adventure.”
Because, of course, all eight-year-olds are off on a remarkable adventure. The poignancy for us comes from the knowledge that its is an adventure we will not see the conclusion of. (Our kids’ lives are movies that, if we are lucky, we will only see 70 per cent of.)
Anyway, after the hellish year we’ve had, this all got me thinking: what do the right wing tel l their chi ldren about Hollywood movies? How does the average Brexit- crazed, anti- immigration maniac explain the plot of, say, Paddington to their eight- year- old? Do they say it’s about a scrounger bear who’s come here to live off the sweat of a hard-working British family?
Or how does a Trump-loving madman talk through Star Wars with their kids? Are they taught to root for Darth Vader? That Luke and Han are a dirty pair of bloody hippies? Do these parents tell their kids that in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Scrooge is a proper hero at the beginning and then he goes all soppy snowflake libtard later on? As their kids get older do they urge them to view Schindler’s List as a morality tale about a bad man I wound up having a flaming row with a friend about Donald Trump and Kanye West’s meeting of minds the other day.
They tried to take the line that West is still mentally ill. I couldn’t care less – if you stand with Trump you’re finished.
But aterwards it occurred to me that if two reasonably sane people can descend into this, who swindles the Nazis out of some valuable manpower? Thinking about all of this eventually led me to Twitter, where I asked the question: “what do the truly right wing tell their children about art? Or even about a film like Paddington?” ( I mean, I guess there’s households out there where they’re just reading Ayn Rand and listening to Wagner while they watch The Triumph of the Will, but I suppose most of them watch the same films as the rest of us.) The response was very, very quiet. Not the usual mountain of nutters telling me to shut my lefty gob. It was almost as though you could hear them all thinking, “Yeah, that is a tough one actually.” And then, of course, a woman came at me. First she thought it was worth telling me that Paddington wasn’t real. Bless her. Then she went on to call me all the usual names you get called by right-wing people on the internet. But it was a telling slip she made, when she thought she had to point out that Paddington wasn’t real. There are people out there who would watch Paddington or The Trolls with their kids and tell them that it was just a f ilm, entertainment, that it didn’t really what on earth is Christmas Day going to be like for millions of our American cousins this year?
Take a couple of liberal kids, some conservative parents, add alcohol and have any worthwhile message about tolerance and decency and inclusivity. That they were just films – that a Christmas Carol is just a wee story – that these things should have no bearing on how we see life, on how much we should hate and fear immigrants and that we should build that wall and all the other rubbish these lunatics believe. It was such a profound misunderstanding about what art is and does that you worried about the existence of the person’s soul.
Of course I then went and had a look through this woman’s – this mother’s – other tweets and I found exactly what I expected to find. Retweets of the hateful bile of Katie Hopkins. Praise for Nigel Farage. Anger directed at “immigrant lovers” like Gary Lineker and Lily Allen.
I was reminded there are many people out there who are fine with the concepts of tolerance and decency as long as they extend only to their immediate family. And I was reminded of my daughter singing “I’m off on this remarkable adventure.”
You are darling, you are. But you’ll meet a few trolls along the way.
Keep your head up. Remember – don’t give in to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to the dark side.
You learned that – from a film someone made up. stand back and watch the fun...
Anyway, to all my many millions of fellow Trump haters – Merry Christmas.
To Trump supporters – a festive Get Bent.