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

Woke theatre criticism and its complications were topics in July, as two Toronto Star reviewers, Aisling Murphy and Karen Fricker, applauded each other, and thereby themselves, for seeing an indigenous play and submitting to strict conditions on what they may subsequently write about it. Indigenous theatre, we discovered, requires approval that is both pre-emptive and unanimous, and its writers, actors and directors must be exempt from unflattering feedback, i.e., reviews of a kind that paying customers might have found useful, had they been available. Untroubled by irony, the critics, or rather non-critics, then bemoaned the ongoing, quite rapid decline of their profession and of the wider newsprint media.

Cultivated incompetence was also championed by the Oregon Health Authority, on grounds that “urgency is a white supremacist value.” Whereas, in matters of health, tardiness and lack of forethought are apparently aspirational, a woke ideal.

We also noted the scrupulously intersectional priorities of Canadian women’s shelters, where a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, was deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him.

Oh there’s more. Lots more.

There follows some obligatory rumbling about the “freedom” to have ostentatious hairstyles “without negative repercussions,” before we are informed of black employees’ entitlement to speak and behave in ways that are likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.” No, really. You see, if an employee is surly, or starts cursing and shouting, while invading your personal space and flailing their arms about – such that these things can be “interpreted as violent or aggressive” – this is something that employers must tolerate, and of course defer to. We’re told, for instance, that a dislike of being shouted at or bullied by the emotionally incontinent can only be evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”

On workplace self-expression, or at least self-absorption.