the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I was only thinking about her the other day. Thinking of how she’d been remarkably quiet of late, how she was fast becoming a dimly remembered memory. And then she appeared. It was almost as I’d wished her back into existence simply by thinking about her. If only that were the case. Then I’d never think of her again.

But her visitation in Paris a few days ago demonstrated that the best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that allows it be utilised in support of many issues.  The most audaciously successful example of this modern phenomena is Grating Thunberg. She started off by reframing her bunking off school  as a ‘school strike’. Her way of protesting about climate change. Genius. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain. Nor can I fathom why no-one ever challenged her on why it was a Friday, and not a Wednesday that she choose to bunk off on. That would’ve caused much more disruption. But a Friday? I bet even her teachers were thanking her for the long weekend, occasioned because of the – shockingly – widespread and immediate adoption of a ‘school strike’ among her peers.

But fair play to her. She got away with it. And if she’d have stopped there, had thought ‘It was good while it lasted, but I don’t want to push my luck’’, then she’d’ve played a blinder. The old adage about leaving the audience wanting more is true her case. Because what is charmingly precocious in a 15 year old girl turns into being an insufferable hectoring bore years later.  

Now she is yet another one of those self-righteous annoyances who manages to be wrong about everything. But as long as she’s wrong about the right things, no-one seems too bothered. No-one asks her the obvious question. Namely, how exactly did she manage to pivot from being a world famous truant into being a cruise ship entertainer and how exactly did she finesse that into her current incarnation of being an apologist for vandalism.

And thats because the answer is an indictment of the values of the time in which we live. Of a society with a culture that has allowed an indulgently ideological groupthink to flourish. One that places a greater value upon the sort of performative symbolism that generates social media content and promotes one as being perpetually engaged for fighting against a perceived injustice. It doesn’t matter if that particular injustice is actually an injustice or simply the fortunate beneficiary of it having been deemed to be one.

Even more fortuitous for everyone involved, the very people who loudly proclaim it to be an injustice are often the people fighting on behalf of it. And so Grating continues to grate. As long as she has something to protest about, something else she can be seen to be against, the happier I imagine she’ll be. She reminds me of Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One’. When his character is asked “What are you rebelling against?”, he replies, “What you got?”.