Nu Labour, Vicky Pollard and “respect”
An excellent and insightful post by the Bionic Octopus:
I put it to you that the axis on which Vicky Pollard functions is almost purely aesthetic. She provides a focus for the visceral aesthetic distaste grownups always feel for youth, and amplifies it into acceptable parody. It’s not that Vicky actually does anything so terrifying–mostly she just spouts shite in a ridiculous patois and is socially overbearing, obnoxious and irresponsible. But she isn’t a figure who threatens violence. What she is, unforgivably, is obese and ugly and stupid, and that provides a ready metonymy for all the other things people want to think about youth.
[…]
What’s that about? Well, it’s Boomers, innit. With their whole complicated, upfucked, unresolved youth thing. They teeter on a knife-edge between, on the one hand, desperately wanting to hang on to youth’s license and privilege (especially now they’ve got the money to seriously indulge it), and on the other desperately needing to assert the authority of their grownupness, in which they never quite seem to wholeheartedly believe.
It’s exactly no coincidence at all that Tony’s framing this latest program of social totalitarianism in terms of ‘respect’. It’s always going to be about respect for them, because they don’t sit in the grownup seat comfortably. They’re just like that weak boss who constantly chews your ass out needlessly in an attempt to affirm her own standing. They are, in fact, David Brent, with all their Stones-listening, Woodstock-reminiscing, hair-loss- concealing bids for cool, in unstable coexistence with an ugly whiplash reflex to defend their political and cultural turf. It’s their pathological fear of losing hegemony over the currency of hip youth culture that fuels their savage spite against its rightful owners.