Rod Liddle at the Spectator (of London, not the excellent American magazine to which this blog is adjunct) is in fine form, with a column about the British left’s outraged response to a New Statesman essay by British feminist Suzanne Moore:
One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves.
Liddle is an example of an endangered species, one of probably two living right-wing (I use that appellation loosely) members of the Labour Party; the other is the redoutable Frank Ernest Field DL, longtime MP for Birkenfield. What a shame that so many Americans believe that the ascent of “New” Labour was a good thing for British conservatism, when really it spelled the end of the honorable, patriotic party of such (more than occasionally misguided) luminaries as Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, and Michael Foot.
Later in the piece, Liddle shares with readers a new word he’s learned: “cissexist”:
Now there’s a term. Have you heard it before? I hadn’t. It is a wonderful day when we can stumble across a new hate crime of which we might all one day be accused: cissexism is the suspicion that transsexual people’s ‘identified gender’ is somehow less genuine than that of people born to the gender in which they remain. Are you guilty of cissexism? You bastard.
Wow: the last time I read such a hard-hitting take-down of a scientifically dubious condition (is that the word I want?) was when, well, Rod Liddle tackled fibromyalgia. The piece in question was long ago purged from the internet, but you can read Frances Ryan of the Guardian fussing about it here.
As a weekend bonus, here is Moore’s original New Statesman essay.
