Woke Monstrosity

Years ago we went to a country bluegrass festival in San Francisco. This year, with the idea of touring the US by camper van since the dates matched, we decided to start from San Francisco and go to the same festival.

Country, for those who don't know it well, is the white trash music (sad white misfits of America) par excellence. All the biggest and most famous singers and bands are white, with few exceptions. San Francisco, however, is the capital of woke, and it doesn't like this. So at a festival called "Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival", where from the very name you expect to hear bluegrass, they have invited a disproportionate number of lesbian and African American women singers who have nothing to do with bluegrass, even as a basic culture. Obviously, on a personal level, I'll get over it: I'll watch the little bluegrass that's left, and when the great long-winded sessions of Afro-lesbo blues come on I'll be somewhere else. Of course everyone has their own musical tastes, but I'd like it to be clear that if you can't stand the blues and you like bluegrass, that doesn't automatically make you a racist, homophobic or misogynist.

But my personal story is just a pretext. The woke monstrosity is eating our world piece by piece. You can't speak Italian because it's offensive, and you have to put all that woke crap into your sentences until the whole thing becomes incomprehensible. You can't make a joke in the style of Lino Banfi/Cristian De Sica because otherwise you offend Tom, Dick and Harry. In companies and workplaces meritocracy can't apply. No, you have to hire an equal number from every minority, otherwise it's racist, homophobic and so on. Then of course things don't work, because you can't take whoever is good, only whoever is "right" according to the criteria of someone who isn't God but is mostly an idiot put in a role where he can decide what you have to do. You organise a festival, same thing. You can't just invite whoever you think is good, noooo!! You have to invite a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of the other, so that nobody can accuse you of anything. Watching a film or drama set among the Vikings or taken from a Tolkien story? You have to swallow lesbo-gay-Afro protagonists even though obviously they have nothing to do with the context. Watching something else? Fine, there'll be the grotesque chubby heroine who takes down an entire gang of tattooed, slightly racist white tough guys. Of course, because it's a mortal sin to say that a man is naturally physically stronger than a woman, even though, sorry to the "wokefans", that's the reality.

m.m.