The Daily Telegraph

Way of the World Michael Deacon

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For anyone who writes a regular newspaper column dedicated to satirising the excesses of the modern Left, these are difficult times. Obviously the problem is not a lack of material. There’s more material than any columnist could ever hope to accommodat­e. The problem, instead, is that the material is often so utterly prepostero­us, it doesn’t actually need to be mocked or parodied. It leaves satire wholly redundant.

Take, for example, the following news story published over the weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle. It reports that a struggling elementary (primary) school has spent $250,000 (c£200,000) of federal funds on the services of a radical Left-wing educationa­l organisati­on. Its name? “Woke Kindergart­en”.

I mean, for pity’s sake. What am I supposed to do with that? It already sounds like a spoof. In fact, quite a laboured and obvious one.

But it gets worse. If we visit the Woke Kindergart­en website, we find that it describes itself as an “abolitioni­st early childhood ecosystem and visionary creative portal” which supports “pro-black and queer and trans liberation”. Not only that, it refers to children as “lil’ comrades”. Again: what am I meant to do? There’s nothing for satire to add.

But wait. We haven’t even got to the ideas that the website promotes. For example: “Woke Wonderings”. These, it would appear, are talking points designed to stimulate political debate between small children. They include such topics as: “If we eradicate borders, how might we build our communitie­s to include and support neighbors from all over the world?” Other “Woke Wonderings” encourage children to imagine a world without police officers, armies, landlords, money – and even schools.

The site also presents a children’s guide to going on political protests. Its highlights include a list of “what you might see”, such as “masks”, “shutter bombs” and “tear gas”, as well as “what you might hear”, such as “calls to action”, “poetry” and “crying”. We also see a Lego model of a protest, with Lego men brandishin­g tiny placards that read “Black Trans Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace”.

Meanwhile, under “Who We Are”, the site supplies a brief biography of Woke Kindergart­en’s founder. Akiea “Ki” Gross – who perhaps inevitably takes the pronouns “they/them” – is “an abolitioni­st early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy”.

For satirical newspaper columnists, this sort of thing is profoundly dishearten­ing. No matter how hard we try, there’s simply no way our puny imaginatio­ns can compete with reality.

If, incidental­ly, you’re wondering what the impact of all this “pedagogy” is, the story in the San Francisco Chronicle is not entirely encouragin­g. It reports that, two years after Glassbrook Elementary School first hired Woke Kindergart­en to train its teachers in the art of “disrupting whiteness”, pupils’ test scores have “hit new lows”. Last spring, less than four per cent of pupils were “proficient in math”, while less than 12 per cent were at the expected level in English.

Still, at least one person should be happy. For Donald Trump, the story will make blissful reading – because he’ll view it as perfect fodder for his election campaign. (“See! THIS is the woke insanity they’re teaching our kids under Crooked Joe!”)

Then again, perhaps the story actually won’t help Trump, either. Since it sounds so much like a spoof, voters will refuse to believe it’s real.

Anew book, Phew, Eh Readers?, celebrates the work of the journalist Tom Hibbert, who died in 2011. In my view, he was the greatest celebrity interviewe­r in the history of print. Mainly because of his remarkable gift for bringing out the absolute worst in his subjects.

In retrospect, some of his interviews for Q magazine in the 1990s seem even more gobsmackin­g today than they did at the time, given what we now know about certain interviewe­es. For example, Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris.

His most extraordin­ary interview, however, was conducted in 1990, with Jimmy Savile. Savile insisted to Hibbert that he had no “skeletons” in his closet (“I got knighted so that proves it, doesn’t it?”). This did not, however, deter Hibbert from asking him whether it was true that he was “rather fascinated with dead bodies”.

Savile’s reply is mind-boggling.

As a hospital “helper”, he said, one of his “jobs” was to “take away the lately deceased” – and he considered it “a privilege” to “be alone” with them. “Some people get hold of the fact that Jim likes looking after cadavers and say, ‘Aha, Jim’s a necrophili­ac!’ I’m not a necrophili­ac…”

The piece is omitted from the new book. A pity. Given how few journalist­s ever dared to confront Savile, I think we should remember that this one did.

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