These excerpts are from Brendan O’Neill’s latest commentary at spiked-online.com, which gives us his description of Greta Thunberg, who just turned 21 years of age (doesn’t it seem like she has been around forever?).
It is, hands-down, the best description of this world-class pain in the ass I have ever seen, so I thought you might like to see it too:
This week Greta Thunberg turned 21. Yes, the diminutive doom-monger is a full-on grown-up now. The pint-sized predictor of End Times has passed the final threshold of adulthood. Once the world’s best-known petulant teen, never knowingly appearing in public without wearing the scowl of the self-righteous youth, Ms Thunberg has reached the full age of majority.
At times it felt as though we were all hostages to her angst. Just as parents walk on eggshells lest they accidentally upset their ungrateful grunt of a teen son by saying the wrong thing, so no one really knew how to respond to Ms Thunberg’s fits of pique.
It was Greta’s curse to live her tantrum years in the public eye. The histrionic displays of unreasonable grievance the rest of us carried out behind closed doors Greta was damned to enact before the clicking cameras of the world media. What happened is that her perfectly natural teenage tendencies – self-involvement, irritability, an arrogance entirely out of proportion to one’s intelligence – merged with the religion of climate-change alarmism to create something of a monster. Like Kevin the Teenager made Pope. My main emotion for Greta was always sorrow, not anger. I think it’s harsh to force a moody teen to come downstairs and say hello to dinner-party guests, never mind parading them around Davos.
That was always the central problem with the Cult of Greta – not Greta herself, but the use and abuse of her by the globalist elites. They marshalled her political naivete, even her emotionalism, to the cynical end of scaring the populace witless about climate change. It was Greta’s very artlessness, her moral immaturity, that made her attractive to elites who had long ago tired of engaging with the irritating adults of the electorate. How much easier it is to march a moralistic teen to the global soapbox where she might cry about the world being ‘on fire’ than to gather facts and make arguments to try to sway stubborn, sceptical adults. Greta’s teen fury was weaponised by political operators to circumvent democratic discussion, to impose their punishing eco-ideology by emotional fiat rather than consent.
What they loved about Greta is that she was so black and white. All teens are. It’s in their nature to be blind to shades of grey. To love their parents one minute, hate them the next. To flit between thinking everything is fine to fretting that MY LIFE IS OVER. Who can forget when the gold-collared superclass of Davos lapped up Greta’s stern rebuke of the old-fashioned adult belief that life is complicated. ‘You say nothing is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie’, she said. Climate change is ‘as black or white as it gets’, she continued. ‘There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.’
And now Greta is 21. Has she discovered that life is, in fact, awash with ‘grey areas’? I fear not. Witness her recent embrace of the ‘Palestinian cause’, where her posturing seems to be informed by the very same black-and-white moralism she so frequently displayed in her eco-tantrum years. Israel oppressor, Palestine victim, yada yada. My concern is that Greta-style moralism is now par for the course in political life. Gretamania wasn’t a blip, it’s what passes for politics in the 21st century. It’s time for the adults to come back into the room. By which I mean us – voters who know that life is complex, the world is not coming to an end, and the last person you should trust on matters of industry, growth and the future itself is a stroppy teenager.
I don’t think it is possible to have said it better.
(Incidentally, “stroppy” means bad “tempered and argumentative”. I never came across this word until I saw it here, and had no idea what it meant. Now I do…and, if you, like me, were unaware of it, now you do too. Regardless, it’s a perfect word to describe Greta Thunberg.)
