Performative hysterics

Wherein we establish once and for all that it is in fact possible to both rule AND drool.

The tyranny of the cry-bully
The woke have weaponised their emotional incontinence.

Reading 29-year-old actress Nicola Peltz Beckham’s comment about the recent death of Quincy Jones – ‘my heart is shattered’ – I was somewhat nonplussed. Just think who we’re talking about here. The legendary music producer lived until the age of 91. And when I say ‘lived’, I mean lived. Jones escaped a life of extreme poverty and crime – from being attacked with an ice pick and having his hand pinned to a fence with a switchblade to seeing his schizophrenic mother taken away in a straitjacket when he was just seven. At 11, when he was breaking into a store, he saw a piano up close for the first time. His recollection of this moment is thrilling: ‘The first time I touched it, it’s like every drop of blood, my heart and soul, and every cell in my body, said: “This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’’’

He did indeed spend the rest of his life doing the thing he loved, which he happened to excel at. People frequently called him a genius. Last but not least, he had sex with Nastassja Kinski for a whole three years. I once wrote: ‘Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.’ If ever there was a man to whom this applies, it was Quincy Jones.

But no. These days, it’s not enough to simply feel sad for a bit when someone dies, no matter how advanced their age or fulfilled their lives. Hearts must ‘shatter’. We must feel ‘broken’, ‘in bits’, ‘destroyed’. No one is so old that their death cannot be ululated over as a full-blown tragedy. When the great writer, ER Braithwaite, died in 2016, aged 104, I couldn’t help posting: ‘Taken too soon – I hate you, 2016!’

It has got a lot worse since then. When did a sizeable proportion of the Anglosphere, especially its youth, become such hysterical, hyperbolic ninnies? I call them the fit-wits, as they’re always having convulsions about something. It would be bad enough if their fits were confined to the personal arena of grieving, but they’ve grown to embrace political grievances, too. In the past, when one side lost an election, they’d mostly shake hands and agree to differ. Now they film themselves screaming while punching a pillow and put it on TikTok.

Do the grown men and women with Trump Derangement Syndrome not feel shame about displaying their emotions in such a way? No, because they’ve grown up believing that acting in a way that would make Chicken Licken seem chillaxed is somehow proof of their ‘authenticity’. You can see them all over the socials, adults wailing like toddlers in need of a nap and a weighted blankie. They’re shaving their heads and swearing off sex. Some are apparently so scared for their lives that they’re seeking out ‘safe houses’, ‘listening circles’ and ‘therapy ducks’. They talk darkly of mass trans suicides and the death of democracy and repeatedly say, ‘no words’ (which is two words).

Shame? SRSLY?!? From a shitlib? You MUST be joking.

You can see the most entertaining examples of fit-witism on the excellent Rita Panahi’s Sky News Australia segment, amusingly called ‘Lefties losing it’. You get the impression that this type of behaviour may have started out as performative and a bit keeping-up-with-the-Owen-Joneses (more on him later). But just as fame is a mask that eats the face, emotional incontinence is a poison that eats the brain. It’s possible that these people are suffering from an actual thing called ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, a type of cognitive dissonance produced when new information directly contradicts an individual’s existing beliefs. This causes disciples to double down on the trounced worldview, much as followers of apocalyptic religious cults, disappointed when the aliens fail to land, say it’s going to happen next year instead.

While this is true of the wretched followers, the leaders are good old-fashioned ‘cry-bullies’, a splendid phrase I created nearly a decade ago: ‘This is the age of the cry-bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism.’

WHOA, that’s good squishy! Be sure to read the rest of it; Ms Burchill’s taunting conclusion, in particular, is exquisite.