Why, in the name of Keir Starmer’s Prime-Ministerial-shaped-head, are Gen X so determined to follow in the footsteps of Boomers? Yes, I know that’s a lazy stereotype, but they're yet to prove me wrong. As a lazy, entitled, millennial snowflake, I’m the worst culprit for coming up with mean words to describe my elders. Words like ‘melt’, ‘centrist dad’, and ‘gammon’ have caused middle-aged white men to become the demographic facing the most prejudice in our society- apart from literally everyone else. As someone who will one day be a middle-aged white man, I feel I have the right to criticize.
Before I turned to writing about things I didn’t like, I would never have read an article in The Spectator by a Z-list actor. But I feel like he’s talking about me, or at least, some of my fellow millennial snowflakes, and so feel obliged to give a response no one asked for. However, Fox’s piece contains so much stupidity and pathologized anxiety, I’m going to have to unpack it one paragraph at a time. Let’s do some discourse analysis.
Fox’s ‘piece’ is currently the most clicked on article in the Spectator, and sits behind a paywall, like a premium Snapchat. The first thing that caught my attention, unsurprisingly, was the title- ‘The pitfalls of wrongthink’. Straight away we know we’re dealing with someone who thinks alluding to Orwell will convince people he knows what he’s talking about. Much like how a similar article by Karl McDonald referred to words like ‘melt’ as ‘Corbynspeak’, Fox adds himself to the list of middle-aged centrists who watched a YouTube video about 1984, and proceeded to incorporate his prefixes and suffixes into everything he says. I call this ‘Orwellspeak’, or ‘the Orwell fixation’.
As if the title wasn’t cringe enough, the next thing we see is a picture of his concerned-looking face, presumably thinking about the Sikh character in 1917. He then one-ups himself again with the opening line: ‘First they came for the statues’.
(Sigh).
Much like with Orwell, Fox demonstrates he too has read and misunderstood Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, the moral of which was that the Communists, Socialists, Trade Unionists, and Jews should take a stand against oppression together- something I don’t think Fox would relish the thought of.
Whatever pertinence this ‘first they came for…’ reference was supposed to have was surely undermined by the following, ‘then Basil Fawlty got cancelled’. Already we know that what we’re reading is going to be deranged; he’s referenced the toppling of a slaver’s statue and a fictional sit-com character under an allusion to a poem he doesn’t understand all in the first eleven words. Next is a lament for the three Harry Potter actors lost to ‘wokeness’, and finally, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse- a musing on Ron Weasly’s ultimate betrayal.
“Rupert Grint looked for a moment like holding firm, but he too quickly succumbed to the growing pressure to slip his golden dagger between Rowling’s shoulder blades”
- Laurence Fox’s actual words.
Why someone would care so much about three famous thirty-somethings voicing support for trans people on Twitter is beyond me. But Fox is hurt. He finishes his opening paragraph with this:
“Fearing for their virtue or their future or both, the three children rounded on their mother. We must hope for better from Neville Longbottom”.
- More of Laurence Fox’s actual views.
At this point in the article the proofreader must have broken down. What the fuck is he on about? Why is he looking to some early 2000s child-actors to protect his ‘free speech’? He’s like someone who watched Fight Club and completely missed the point. I think he misses the point of almost everything he reads; every observation is off-kilter and warped. He’s a man with directionless rage, trying to rationalise an anxiety he can’t quite explain. A golden dagger, JK Rowling, Neville Longbottom? This isn’t a ‘think piece’, these are the ramblings of the unhinged.
It’s unclear how much Fox knows he is feeding into a right-wing sentiment of anti-intellectualism. His first paragraph is so packed with awful analogies, melty metaphors, and sickly self-pity that it doesn’t even function well as propaganda. If you want to recruit people to your cause, your writing has to be readable, your speeches intelligible, and your references somewhat real. The mother-children analogy is particularly weird; is this how he sees the world? Does he think that because JK Rowling wrote the characters these people played as children, that they should be her intellectual offspring? He seems to be implying a kind of disloyalty on the part of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson for not backing their former colleague, sorry- ‘mother’, to the hilt on any given issue.
Perhaps it’s because millennials grew up with Harry Potter that he picks the Quidditch Pitch as his battle-ground, fighting the snowflakes on their own territory; a fearless guardian of exclusionary politics, putting himself forward and bravely condemning his acting career to martyrdom. All while the traitorous Daniel Radcliffe’s of the world proceed to impale their mothers in his fevered nightmares.
Paragraph two analysis coming soon...
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