The Year Reheated

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

In March, readers of the Observer were invited to ponder the profound moral question, “Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?” Much fretting ensued regarding the most appropriate sex and skin colour of the person doing the cleaning, with the paper’s Sally Howard deciding that the most feminist way to empower cleaning ladies – and to avoid the “structural devaluation of women’s work” – is to make said ladies unemployed. The views of Ms Howard’s former cleaners, mentioned only in passing and fired in the name of feminism, were not deemed worthy of inclusion.

Meanwhile, in Salon, Ms Alex Dew, a woman for whom the word overwrought scarcely does justice, needed us to know that “My houseplant garden is a tiny national park that Donald Trump can never destroy.” We also marvelled at the thoughts Ms Wendy Trevino, a communist poet and Antifa enthusiast, whose solution to “racism, misogyny and ableism” is to encourage shoplifting and the breakdown of social norms. Apparently, the collapse of trust and reciprocity will be of enormous benefit to the disabled.

As the coronavirus pandemic tightened its grip, we learned, via an immensely woke Brooklynite podcaster named Billy, “What it’s like to isolate with your girlfriend and her other boyfriend.” And in the pages of The Atlantic, we were told, by Natan Last, a Brooklynite and graduate of Columbia, that crossword puzzles are one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Needless to say, there’s more.