You know it’s over when even Barbie surrenders to the woke revolution...
PROFESSOR Dame Sarah Gilbert, the scientist largely responsible for the successful Oxford Covid vaccine, did not look too pleased to find she had been portrayed as a Barbie doll. Who can blame her?
The hideous little idol doesn’t look like her, with its huge hair and absurd glasses – and in any case I’m pretty sure Dame Sarah’s welleducated upbringing did not involve that sort of thing.
Barbie dolls are about as incorrect as you can get in the age of feminism. Even I don’t like them, and I score pretty high in the Incorrectness League Table. You won’t catch me mourning the loss of the traditional Barbie, though if it were up to me, the even more horrible Bratz dolls would be first on to any bonfire.
Yet this is a very odd moment. Here is the Mattel company, with its new range of trouser-wearing, white-coated, stethoscoped ‘role model’ Barbies, frantically sucking up to the Spirit of the Age.
Not all of them are vaccine inventors like Dame Sarah. One is described as a ‘frontline worker’ who ‘joined forces with other Asian-American medics to fight racial bias in the pandemic’. Another is a psychiatrist who has ‘campaigned against systemic racism in the healthcare profession’.
And so once again we see a major corporation making its peace with the new regime. There is barely any company, institution, school, publication or church which has not done the same, or is not about to do it.
People who would have laughed at ‘loony Left’ councils 30 years ago now use language and follow rules which they once mocked when Ken Livingstone and his allies proposed them. Those who claim to despise Jeremy Corbyn often follow the ideas he helped devise in his decades in London town halls. And it is not just that they join in. They are afraid to criticise. Huge areas of opinion are now closed off from discussion, for fear of cancellation, advertising boycotts, and generally being cast into the outer darkness.
With gathering speed and completeness, a total revolution in thought and morals is taking hold of Western societies, just at the moment when they should be girding themselves against pressure to become more like China.
The zero-Covid fanatics, ready to throttle our society in pursuit of an illusion of perfect safety, have greatly benefited from this. And in the weeks to come the zealots of man-made global warming will press their dogmatic agenda and their demands that we impoverish ourselves to save the planet (demands China refuses to follow).
If all this had happened in a few weeks, while Red Guards slouched on street corners and the leaders of the old regime were dragged off to the firing squad, we’d see it for what it is. But, as long as there are enough loo-rolls in the supermarket, and the electricity keeps flowing, most people will never notice the revolution raging all around them.