Easter – the perfect excuse for eggstatic online outrage
My family are staunch traditionalists, and so this Easter, as always, we will be observing one of this country’s most ancient customs. Namely: complaining on social media that Cadbury’s has dropped the word “Easter” from the packaging on its chocolate eggs, even though it hasn’t.
It really has become a tradition. Every single year, the social media team at Cadbury’s are engulfed by the same peculiar accusations. Look at some of the messages they’ve received in the past few weeks.
“Why have you surrendered to faceless liberals and removed the word Easter from your eggs?” demanded one correspondent. “I hear you’ve eliminated the word Easter from your Easter eggs. Bye bye Cadbury,” growled another. “I heard you’re taking the word Easter off your packaging; if you do that I will no longer buy any of your products,” bristled a third.
And to each one, a member of Cadbury’s staff replies, in a polite but slightly pleading tone, that it isn’t true, because the word “Easter” absolutely does remain on the packaging of their chocolate eggs, if their correspondent would only care to look.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon, the annual Easter egg fury: post-truth, in eccentric microcosm. Rather than fire off their complaint, any of the outraged could simply have popped down to their local supermarket, and seen with their own eyes that Cadbury’s chocolate eggs have “Easter” written on them. But they didn’t.
In fact, it may well be that they didn’t want to look, because they didn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true. They wanted to believe it was.
They actively wanted to be outraged, and to feel the thrill of righteous victimhood surging hotly through their veins. They wanted to think of themselves as robbed, maligned, persecuted by a shadowy cabal of cackling elitists, hell-bent on destroying their way of life.
Ultimately, I doubt the complaints were really about Easter. Cadbury’s eggs are not holy relics. There is no mention of chocolate in the Bible; Christ did not feed the 5,000 by dividing up the hollow halves of a Dairy Milk Caramel egg, and the
Holy Chalice was not a branded mug with “Toffee Crisp” printed on the side. The first chocolate egg wasn’t produced until about 1,800 years after Christ’s death.
Yet still the complaints flooded in. The outrage, I suspect, was its own reward. It often is, online. Your eyes narrow, your heart thumps, and suddenly you feel somehow noble, heroic, ready to fight to the death in defence of all you hold dear. You’re a warrior, battling in a just cause. That, when you get down to it, is the essential appeal of online outrage: it makes you feel good.
I don’t mean to suggest that I’m above online outrage, by the way. I’m as susceptible to it as anyone. Which is why, tomorrow morning, my family and I will get up, spend four hours solid haranguing a leading confectioner for something it hasn’t done, then lie back and bathe in the glow of our own fearless valour.
Same time next year, everyone? Small children have such powerful imaginations. So powerful, in fact, that they frequently seem convinced that what they’ve imagined, no matter how outlandish, is real.
Every so often my four-year-old son tells me – with an entirely straight face, and in vivid detail – about a house he owns. Apparently, this house is “round the corner, far away”. Each time he mentions it, he has a fascinating new aspect to relay. He’ll tell me, for example, that “it’s got a tall roof ”, or that in the garage there’s “a double-decker car”.
He imparts this information matter-of-factly, even casually, in the manner of an adult discussing property at a dinner party. Oh yes, darling, simply everyone has a tall roof these days. They’re the latest thing. We had ours heightened by the most wonderful little Polish man, would you like me to give you his number?
Not that everything in my son’s nearby, faraway house is perfect. It does have its flaws. In particular, his bedroom sounds as if it was designed by a complete cowboy. “I can’t switch the light on in my room,” he explained to me ruefully, “because the switch is on the ceiling, and I can’t reach it.”
Still, he has managed to rectify some of the house’s problems.
“Inside there’s a broken window,” he told me last weekend, “because a naughty person fired a snowball at it with a cannon and they broke it. So I found the naughty person and I fired them with a cannon, and now they’re dead.”
I love it when he talks about his house. I always make a note of the things he tells me about it. I like to think that when he grows up, he’ll be rich enough to have the house actually built for him, exactly as he’s described it to me.
I’d love a ride in that double-decker car. Jennie Formby – staunch ally of Jeremy Corbyn, and now General Secretary of the Labour party – was educated at boarding school. Not that there’s anything unusual about that. The hard Left seems to be dominated by people from independent schools. Mr Corbyn himself went to prep school. Seumas Milne (Mr Corbyn’s director of communications), Andrew Murray (his senior political adviser), James Schneider (his head of strategic communications) and Jon Lansman (the founder of Momentum, the pro-corbyn campaign group) also went to fee-paying schools.
Personally, I have no problem with it. There’s no reason why the fight against the one per cent shouldn’t be led by its own members. On the other hand, I can see why some parents might feel concerned. What does it say about Britain’s independent schools that they produce quite so many radical Left-wingers?
If you’re considering having your child educated privately, do first ask the school whether they actually teach history. FOLLOW Michael Deacon on Twitter @Michaelpdeacon; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion