Speaker by Various Artists

Before I moved to New Zealand, I imagined that most Kiwis spent their days picking apples and shearing sheep. I now realize the foolishness of my preconceptions. Most New Zealanders spend their days sailing, surfing, skiing, tramping, mountain biking, road biking, jogging, kayaking, climbing up rocks, rafting down rivers, bungy-jumping and skydiving. If they have any time left, they go to work. Or fishing.

Because I have only experienced a couple of these sporting activities -- one of which is tramping -- I clearly belong in the lowest socio-physical bracket of the New Zealand populace: couch-potato/invalid. This can be quite debilitating when it comes to conversation at New Zealand dinner parties.

In order to cope, I have developed a strategy which involves randomly injecting my sentences with words such as: 'Ironman', 'coast-to-coast', 'pumping surf' or 'icy slopes'. Then, while everyone else is busy talking, I spend the next two hours in my host's wine cellar. In between bottles, I emerge to catch snippets of athletic-type dialogue, such as: "... those adrenalin injections are great when your body gives up on you after a hundred kilometres". I nod, feign interest, and then drift off into an alcohol-induced haze -- dreaming of meeting people who read books from time to time.

Unlike my New Zealand-born friends, I didn't emerge from the womb with a rugby ball in one hand and a hockey stick in the other. Exercise in Germany was slightly more sedate. There was an annual skiing trip to Switzerland, and the odd martial arts class, but that's about it.

I once attended a gym, but the brain-deadening dullness hardly seemed worth it for the miniscule gain in muscle-tone. I did, however, cycle everywhere: to school, the cinema, and work. But, of course, this was never counted as exercise -- just a sensible means of transportation (ask any Dutch people, they have the same strange habit).

I know it seems inconceivable to New Zealanders, but I didn't stand on a surfboard until my late thirties. The occasion, I am now slightly embarrassed to recollect, was called the Roxy Surf Jam. It involved 40 lithe teenage girls from Sumner and myself. Three weeks previously I had given birth to my second son, and in my black wetsuit I resembled a small whale who had inadvertently swallowed an inflatable boat. Whoever said that girls look great in wetsuits clearly didn't see me on that day. The same can be said for lycra, by the way.

Since then I have frequently wondered what could be done to improve my sporting abilities, and turn me into a fully-integrated member of New Zealand society. The answer came from an unexpected quarter: Kiwi Boot Camp.

Boot camp is a new exercise programme based on tried-and-true military techniques. It consists of hardcore physical activity: three times a week, rain or shine. If anything would turn me into a proper New Zealander -- then this was it. Boot camp involves: running in line with your field kit, crawling through mud, and standing at attention. Boot camp does not involve: stepping, dancing, prancing, or wearing silly pink aerobics gear.

According to the promotional material, five weeks of boot camp would "improve my fitness by 70 per cent". Boot camp would make me sweat like a soldier -- at dawn, in the middle of winter, and without lycra. Boot camp would "change my life" and get me "closer to the group".

What more could I ask for? I signed up for a trial session.

On a sunny Saturday morning, I found myself in Christchurch's Hagley Park with three paramilitaristic instructors. Our 'platoon' consisted of four middle-aged women, now called 'recruits'. The instructors began to shout orders at us recruits: requiring us to march, stand still, bend our knees, run, throw ourselves down in the mud, jump up, bend our knees again. After 30 seconds my pulse rate had reached medically-hazardous levels. "Faster, recruits!" yelled the instructor sadistically -- his thumbs hooked into the waistband of his combat pants.

Next we were forced to do 30 push-ups -- five times in a row. I began to understand the full meaning of the expression 'War is hell'. "Pull your elbows back!" barked the instructor. Decades of yelling at recruits had inflated his neck muscles until they were bigger than his shaved head. At any moment, I expected him to pull a hood over my eyes, tie my hands behind my back, and ship me off to Guantanamo Bay. In fact, it would have been a relief.

Surprisingly, I survived.

The next morning I wanted to brush my hair, but my hands would only move up as far as my shoulders. Overnight I had developed a previously-unknown medical condition which I dubbed 'horizontal paralysis'. To brush my teeth or hold a fork was difficult and painful. To reach upwards, for instance to the food shelf, was virtually impossible.

My family, who should have been tending to me in my crippled state, showed no sympathy whatsoever: "No arms, no biscuits!" Germans can be so cruel.

Through a haze of pain, and the vestiges of yesterday's pseudo-military activities, a sudden thought occurred to me. Maybe I should take up shooting? After all, it is an Olympic sport. Not to mention an interesting opportunity to get even with uncaring family members, boring exercise-nuts at dinner parties, lithe teenage surf-chicks, and sadistic boot-camp instructors.

This is supposed to be Hollywood’s year off. Everywhere you look we’re watching sequels and conclusions of trilogies – At World’s End, Ocean’s Thirteen, Shrek The Third and, any minute now, The Bourne Ultimatum. Movie reviewers from various media are having great fun pointing this out. Such comments have not, however, been levelled at what’s arguably the least original movie of the year so far.

In fact, perhaps the most interesting thing about the hype surrounding Transformers is the frequency with which the term ‘fanboy’ has come up. You know fanboys – those silly, mateless, dateless jerks who collect Spiderman comics and keep their toy lightsabres in the original packaging and e-mail each other in Klingon. I find these guys as funny as the next man, or would do if I’d ever actually seen one, which I didn’t at the midnight showing I attended. It was full of dating couples, groups of friends and one bloke vociferously trying to talk a mate out of going to university. In any case, I certainly wouldn’t call myself a fanboy. I’d call myself a cultural historian. And as such I think I’ve spotted what makes the movie such a mess.

The Transformers were odd in that they were the only one of the holy trinity of ‘80s action-figure franchises to spring from a non-American source. GI Joe was a post-WWII hangover from colonial America’s nationalistic syncretism, He-Man the result of a botched contract to produce Conan The Barbarian toys. Transformers came from Japan. They were, at least initially, mecha animae, the thin end of the same pulp-Orientalist cultural wedge that has since given us Robotech, Battletech, Voltron, Pokemon, Ghost In The Shell and an entire sub-genre of surreal cartoon pornography. When, on first meeting his robot buddy, the hero of Transformers breathes “it must be Japanese”, he’s being more truthful than he seems to realise.

Animae characteristically pushes certain themes and tropes to the fore – supernatural friends, martial mysticism, prepubescent superheroes, secret weapons, what colour the heroine’s knickers are. Transformers pays lip service to a few of these, but most of it takes a much newer and certainly incompatible form, that of the monument-eating ‘90s disaster flick. That’s a genre with its own preoccupations – Jungian insecurities, military history, adolescent heroes, the executive branch of American government. When I say Transformers isn’t much like the Transformers, I don’t mean they look wrong, but that they’ve been foolishly mis-deployed. Put simply, if you can imagine someone taking the characters in Kill Bill Volume One and trying to write them into Independence Day or Deep Impact, you’ll have some idea of what the writers of Transformers have tried to do. It doesn’t work.

With the heavy cultural theory out of the way, we can now have some fun pointing out the more peripheral faults of Transformers. The comic relief is as relentless and dorky as that of The Phantom Menace. The generally excellent Bernie Mack makes a complete tit of himself. The emaciated heroine is likely to set John Campbell off about eating disorders again. The script hobbles along like a marathon runner with a pulled muscle; Optimus Prime doesn’t turn up until halfway through, and subplots are left mouldering for so long that when we finally get back to them, the participants have actually dozed off. Linkin Park get pride of place on the soundtrack.

And the Transformers don’t look right. Indeed, they don’t actually look like anything. I’ve heard director Michael Bay explain that his version of Optimus Prime is created from over ten thousand separately computer-animated parts, which is impressive until you realise the result of such complexity is a shambling, amorphous pile of machinery. His colleagues suffer the same fate – I’m not sure Megatron ever even transforms into any recognisable object. At its worst this recalls the bloated, noxious stupidity of King Kong, which is the last thing anybody needs.

As a final criticism, it ought to be said that Transformers is also unwisely dated. It’s full of references to eBay, The Strokes and cellphone cameras that are going to look just silly in ten year’s time. Even worse, it buys into current social trends such as depicting the US President as a torpid yokel and featuring a bunch of good honest soldiers being dishonoured by sinister secret agents who mistreat their prisoners. If you’re going to make a great big disposable action joyride, which is all this is, then surely you don’t want to get bogged down in attempts at topicality, especially if you’re drawing them from something as toweringly earnest and dry as Fahrenheit 9/11.

Michael Bay hasn’t, as the now standard charge has it, raped my childhood with this failure. What Bay has done is mishandled his material, shoehorning firmaments of one genre into the framework of another. And those of us who weren’t careful enough with their Transformers as children know what happens when you try to force them to move in a way they weren’t designed to – they break. The analogy only goes so far, however. Somewhere in my parent’s storeroom there is a box containing a dozen maimed robots. I remember them fondly. I am not sure, once the media loses interest in giggling about ‘fanboys’, that anybody will remember this movie at all.

I think it's easy to see what's happening here, folks. It doesn't take a brain the awesome magnitude of Gerry Brownlee's to see the truth peeking out from behind the cloud of half-truths, three-quarter fabrications, and outright 0% credibility hogwash masquerading as media analysis.

It's the Jews. And by "The Jews", I mean "the Chinese". And "the Maoris". As Lady Coddington (I believe Ms. Clark and HRH E. R. II benighted her in the last Honours list) pointed out, there's a vast left-wing media conspiracy designed to oppress the ull-blooded pure-bred Kiwi journalist. While Lady C (or "Codders" as she insisted I call her at her last Remuera cocktails evening) has been vilified in print for her superior intellect and the failings of the Chinese Liberal Media Hegemony to grasp fundamental non-linear hypercomparable statistical theory, it's clear that the taint (the "Yellow Smear" as I hope the Sunday papers shall begin calling it) spreads beyond the cosy back-scratching offices of the Press Council and into our living rooms via the glowing screens of evening news.

That the origins of this lamentable backsliding in journalistic quality and the oppressive regime under which quality journos such as Lady Codders, Fran O'Sullivan, and Joanne Black must labour go back into the mists of our past. It's a little known fact that Samuel Marsden disliked Roman Catholics and Irish. When he began New Zealand's first daily newspaper ("The True and Righteous Sunday Star"), setting the type by hand in a frame made from found Maori bones, he found a local resuming to rewrite his articles and headlines, and ascribed it to Catholics.

As he wrote in his diaries, "The foule hande of the Roman heresie is in my presses. Today I found Hemi, my Native assistant whom I had thoughte to place the utmost faith in, meddling with the presses when he thoughte I was out with the long droppe. Now the origins of the curssed headlines are clear to me. Long have I protested to the villagers that I knowe not what a Foreshore be ..."

Hemi Tupoe's own diary, found stuffed into the walls of the original Waitangi pa before it was "refurbished", reveals that Hemi wasn't Catholic at the time of the editorializing. But, incensed by Marsden's wrath, he reached out to the Catholics and found allies in the occasional Catholic missionaries.

With the help of the Papists, Hemi formed an alliance with the other native peoples in the region. He even took a four month trip to China (he always claimed Aotearoa was an Asian nation) and there established sister-nation status with the Wu Tang monks in the Wudang Mountains in Hubei province. It was with these monks that the infamous Wutangi Treaty was signed, establishing Closer Emigrating Relations between Aotearoa and China.

Much has yet to be written about the Chinese influence in the so- called "Native Wars", although Belich's "Crouching Taniwha Hidden Dragon" is an engaging first step towards historical liberty in this area. Similarly, the unseen yellow hand was at work in the Waihi Miners Strike, the decision of Katherine Mansfield to seek residence in England, and the rise of the first Labour Government.

During the reign of New Zealand's First Man, Earl Robert Muldoon, the Asiatic meddling was kept from the halls of Government. However, forced from overt power they held a secret Congress and Dim Sum night with their Maori activist brethren at Turangawaewae and it was here that their plans for media domination were born.

It began humbly with "The Truth". This bastion of free thought was slowly brought under the yellow heel of the Native Oppressor, seeking ever more space for its corrupted message, until finally it had subliminal autostereograms in the Moire patterns on the breasts of the Page Three girls. Having perfected their art in a minor newspaper, the hungry invaders turned their epicanthic gaze to more mainstream media.

Nowadays, of course, there's not a story gets printed without the interference and editorial intrusion of the Yellow and Brown Brotherhood. They spin every story to support their filthy agenda of hate and national decline, unable to stop until every journalist, every citizen, every Kiwi lies yoked in the filth of their oppression.

And since the 1990s they have been moving into television.

It began with Dr Ropata on Shortland Street. Guatemala? Come on,you didn't see the obvious Catholic connections? And Grace Kwan, that sultry Sino-temptress, was the first mainstream hint at the palsied yellow hand pulling the puppet strings on our nation's culture. There was a scare in the mid-90s when the Maori involvement was suspected, and Ian Wishart was halfway through a book on it before he was threatened off (the exact nature of the threat is not known, although it is rumoured that Wishart still can't ride a horse to this day). This resulted in "Te Karere" no longer leading into the evening news, a propaganda set piece that was too obvious now that questions were being asked.

A commenter on a PA thread mentioned the proliferation of speech impediments on the screen. Isn't it obvious? Incensed by comments that Asian children faced in the schoolyard, mocked for their accents, the Yellow Overlords have decreed that Kiwis will have to suffer in the same way. The campaign to have New Zealanders think that we as a nation are the linguistic Freak Show that trots across our screens every night has just begun. Even now, by the light of lamps fuelled by the fat of executed dissidents, Chinese R&D teams are figuring out how New Zealand news presenters can audibly confuse "its" and "it's". The worse is yet to come, people.

I could go on, the obvious connection between the Dover Samuels affair and the cancellation of Marcus Lush's first TV news venture, Winston Peters's winebox and Kim Hill's lone season in the television interview chair, and so on ... but do I have to connect the dots for you? New TVNZ head Rick Ellis nearly spilled the beans on his complicity with the Native Fundamentalist agenda when he revealed that Shortland Street, Police Ten-7, and Game of Two Halves were all Maori programming.

And now I've revealed the truth, I think I had better leave. They have black helicopters they use to clean up after news spills. I can only pray that this comment stays on the site for right-thinking New Zealanders to read. The left are renowned for their scorn for the hoi polloi (their own phrase, no good honest Kiwi would use foreign words when perfectly good English ones will do) so I can only pray that the owner of this site, notorious ("flaming" some say) liberal Russell Brown doesn't care what his readers think and so won't notice.

Must go. The invisible silent helicopters are near, I'm sure of it. Remember me the next time you curse the twaddle on television and realize it has nothing to do with the brave journalists but everything to do with the filthy hand of Nationalists and Chinocommie Conspiracies. Over and out.

TVNZ recently bought an interesting little program from the BBC. Created by talented screenwriter Sally Wainwright, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard is about a working-class mum catapulted unexpectedly into the office of Prime Minister. Her first act is to tell George W Bush where to shove his congratulatory phone call. Further episodes call for the charmingly genuine Pritchard to think outside the box, scold reactionary Tories, question the Monarchy, move Parliament to Bradford, downplay the threat of terrorism, prioritise Kyoto, poo-poo the nuclear industry and frequently liaise with and defer to an ill-defined but evidently powerful lobby group known as The People. The tacitly shrieked subtitle is, of course, Tony Should Have Done This.

The Amazing Mrs Pritchard is, in short, part of the storm of editorialising surrounding Tony Blair’s resignation. The general tone of this discussion is one of strained disillusionment, with grudging admission of a few unglamorous successes placed alongside long-winded examination of failures and missed opportunities. The game I like to play is to watch this stuff and see how quickly someone uses the expression “hopes and dreams” – as in, “Blair carried the hopes and dreams of a generation, and he sold us out.” It’s usually turned up by the end of the third sentence. As Tony starts looking for a new flat, therefore, it’s important to remind ourselves why he’s such a disappointment.

In his excellent book Things Can Only Get Better, British humourist and lifelong grass-roots Labour supporter John O’Farrell does an inadvertently excellent job of explaining this. O’Farrell’s core point is very clear – the Tories stayed in power for eighteen years because Labour never provided a remotely credible alternative. The book is marketed as being by someone who “helped Labour lose elections at every level.”
O’Farrell also, however, points out that as Thatcher’s premiership continued, she became less a politician than a fact of life, something like the weather, to be whinged about no matter what, with attendant increasing bitterness and loss of perspective on the part of the whingers. Never disowning Labour’s principals, he nevertheless likens the party to a cult whose members blamed every personal and social ill on one remote, abstract demon. Here, for example, is his chief complaint about the Falklands War – “Why did she have to go to war with a fascist dictatorship? Why couldn’t we have a straightforward goodies and baddies war, where Thatcher was the baddie and the People’s Socialist Republic of Narnia were the goodies?” Victim mentality became absurdly entrenched. In the mid-‘90s, as Labour clawed back influence local elections, O’Farrell caught himself thinking it would be better if they lost – “was there not, I wondered, part of me that would be more comfortable with that?”

Those familiar with British comedy of the period may have noticed this process in action. In 1982 Rik Mayall formed a sitcom around his caricatured anti-Thatcher stand-up routine. The Young Ones pokes fun at student radicals living in a milieu of surreal poverty; Mayall’s frothing, self-dramatising Labourite ninny is the butt of most of the jokes. Eight years later, some of the biggest laughs from the audience of Young Ones co-writer Ben Elton’s televised stand-up routine The Man From Auntie were for his barbed anti-Thatcher remarks. Casual, dyed-in-the-wool hatred of Maggie had become so central to their popular appeal that these guys barely managed without her. Mayall remains irretrievably typecast and Elton now divides his creative energy between musical theatre and rather nifty social-realist mystery novels.

What becomes clear from Mayall and Elton’s comedy, O’Farrell’s book and The Amazing Mrs Pritchard is that, on May 1st 1997, Blair’s core supporters did not elect him to run a country. They elected him to give the miners their jobs back, blow a raspberry at Ronald Reagan, tear down the tower-block flats and secede the Malvinas to Argentina. He was elected to nullify the 1980s, to make it as though Thatcherism had never been. Such expectations were about as reasonable as you’d expect. Blair was elected seventeen years late by a group of people who had used that period of time to imbue him and his party with an importance bordering on the messianic. These people needed lives back then and their pronouncements on him as he leaves office suggest they still do now.

Blair’s government has not been a failure. He took a party that, just a few years earlier, was essentially unelectable and swept it into power. He won two subsequent elections. His chief opposition is in pretty much the same state of flaccidly protean, mewling, self-inflicted irrelevance that Labour was in during the ‘80s. The economy did well enough that every Briton over the age of three could suddenly afford a cellphone, the infrastructure for which was promptly put in place. The Irish can get back to squabbling amongst themselves rather than bothering other countries with their infantile grudges. And the Gleneagles debt-relief deal was closed, providing even such useless sectors of British society as Bob Geldof and U2 with an excuse to feel good about themselves.

Then there’s Blair’s involvement in Iraq, described by one British journalist as an ‘utter disaster’ and likely to skew attitudes towards him until his premiership passes from living memory. One might reasonably ask why. The British have been dealing with organised hate crimes by self-styled patriots since the 1500s, and that experience shows. The portions of Iraq they patrol are among the most peaceful. I can thin of no British equivalent of the Abu-Grahib scandal. And local repercussions – the bombing of the London Underground in 2005 – succeeded in closing down the Tube system for less than twenty-four hours. If, heaven forbid, you still have nothing better to do with your time, you can question the wisdom and efficacy of the invasion of Iraq, but wasn’t the British who screwed up.

When people say Blair shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, they mean he shouldn’t have sided with America, and in a sense they’re right. Petulant, adolescent, you’re-not-my-real-Dad anti-Americanism blights the popular and intellectual culture of Britain as much as most other counties, and the generation that grew up loving to hate the special relationship between Thatcher and Reagan was obviously going to baulk at a repeat performance. Again, however, those people are betraying a habit of thinking Blair was in power during the ‘80s. They’ve forgotten the outcome of the ‘80s as well. After all, Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War. Stupid as it sounded at the time, their foreign policy worked. So might Bush’s. So might Blair’s.

If there’s been a crucial failing that’s ruined Blair’s premiership it hasn’t been on his part. It’s on the part of his electorate, who have been consistently unable to surmount key intellectual obstacles when considering him – those obstacles being the perceived awfulness of Thatcher when they elected him in 1997 and the Baghdad insurgency as he leaves office in 2007. Blair has no control over either and shouldn’t be criticised for them.
For all the wittering about “hopes and dreams”, furthermore, nobody to my knowledge has deliberately addressed the question of what sort of sad, romantic twerp attaches that sort of emotional and intellectual capital to a mere political party. John O’Farrell has inadvertently provided an answer – the British – but his book was published in 1997, not long after Blair was elected, and so was written without reference to their subsequent disappointment. And that disappointment is a reflection on them, not Blair. I would hate to have to be the one to explain this to George Galloway, Ben Elton or The Smiths, but you simply cannot invest liberal democratic governments with the sort of emotional import as they clearly did. Governments don’t promulgate philosophies, they run countries. Blair has done precisely that. Expecting him to have done differently indicates immaturity on your part, not inadequacy on his.

Curiously, later episodes of The Amazing Mrs Pritchard seem to acknowledge this. Increasingly concerned with the difficulties she encounters fulfilling her election promises, the first series ends with a cliffhanger as Pritchard confronts a potentially lethal skeleton in her closet. Agonising over whether to come clean or cover it up, Pritchard wonders “Should I just get over myself?” Whether she can get over herself will be shown in the next series. And whether the British public can get over themselves will be shown by what they think of Blair in five year’s time. Both will be interesting to observe.

We’re suffering a plague of emos. Knots of whimpering teenage poets have rendered many of our streets and malls impassable. All the public toilets are clogged with bloodstained tissues used as they cut themselves. Their moping and sighing drowns out our sports commentary and global warming alarms. And every radio station blares their shrieking suicidal melodramas, 24/7.

Or so I understand. Personally I’ve never met an emo. Nor have I seen one. Nor do I have any solid evidence that they actually exist. And yet in the twelve months since the term sprang unbidden into our vocabulary, they’ve been subject the sort of obsessive, intense, casually hostile media scrutiny usually reserved for Republican presidential administrations and Paris Hilton. And frankly, as an intellectual historian – someone whose job involves placing exactly when, where and how ideas and movements arose and developed – it’s starting to bore me.

Of course, based on what I’ve seen the term used to describe, I know what an emo is. An emo is basically anyone who has black hair and doesn’t follow the Super XIV. Beyond this membership of the subculture appears to consist primarily of running an account on a social networking website. Which, it seems, pretty much everybody under about 30 is doing. My siblings and I run five between the four of us. Ergo, if we want emos to exist as a distinct subculture, we have to differentiate them from the great bulk of us who just can’t think of anything more useful to do with our computers.

Thoughts immediately turns to the emo ‘look’. Based on the incessant caricatures, this appears to consist of wearing predominantly dark clothing, buttoning on wristbands and dying part of your hair an artificial colour. Pretty much every supposed subculture – Goths, punks, bogans, shredders et al – does this; do we really need to mint a new one because eyeliner is back in fashion? Besides, the clothes don’t make the man. Oscar Wilde is a more clearly-definable proponent of Gothicism than The Cure. These days the people I know who spend the most time snivelling about how Nobody Understands Them devote considerable effort to ostentatiously vicious denigration of emo-rock.
Which, since we’re on the topic, certainly tries to cater to a set target audience, that being “all the boys who the dancefloor didn’t love, and all the girls whose lips couldn’t move fast enough…” – that is, people who Didn’t Fit In At High School. But if the art, literature and music of the last thirty years have taught us anything, it’s that nobody much did. I’ve witnessed numerous arguments between people competing to demonstrate that they were the one who had the most trouble adjusting to fourth form, and much of our recent cultural output has pandered to such self-mythology. And besides, no emo-rock group has yet come up with a lyric more self-absorbed, maudlin and pathetic than:

When the light’s out it’s less dangerous
Here we are now – entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now – entertain us

And that from a cultural property whose citation as brilliant and wonderful is so frequent it’s starting to get boring in and of itself.

Then there’s this business of cutting yourself. So far as I know, two of my friends do it, and neither are called emos. One is called sick and is currently in residential psychiatric care. The other has just about managed to keep it a secret so far. Both are chirpy, gregarious, colourfully-dressed, popular girls cracking under the strain of insecurities you wouldn’t otherwise suspect – exactly the kind of people, as I understand it, who’re most likely to get up to such mischief. Cutters don’t advertise. They don’t hang out together and certainly don’t have a uniform. And if it’s okay to giggle dismissively about at the symptoms of an illness, where does that leave John Kirwin’s depression ads?

This could be a regional thing. We don’t seem to have emos here in Dunedin, although I’m informed Wellington is crawling with them. Of course, many of the people who say so also insist on describing the pointlessly broad, irrelevant Scarfies as a documentary, so who knows?

Ultimately, the term “emo” seems to belongs to that group of terms and expressions – like “just wrong”, “fascist”, and “stupid Americans” – that have achieved currency more because they’re fun to say than because they actually mean anything. The touchstones of the subculture either don’t exist or are things every man and his modem are doing anyway. This ain’t a scene, it’s a widespread societal conceit. There are no such things as emos. Suggesting there are indicates intellectual sloppiness and mean-spirited slavishness to fashion. This is historical misconception in utero.

I don’t know when the trend for calling people this name will end. All I know is that in 2027, when people start throwing costume parties themed after this decade, three quarters of the guests will turn up as emos. How long it will take intellectual historians to put that record straight is anybody’s guess. After all, we’re still busy sorting out the mess you guys have made of the 1960s.