You couldn't make it up: the left is coming for Thomas the Tank Engine ...
I try not to use oversimplitic expressions like "loony left" but there are some people for whom no other description is adequate.
In particular there are, and have always been, a certain number of Guardianista left-wingers who try to reduce everything in life to politics and sometimes end up making paranoid and delusional attacks on the most harmless or irrelevant things.
To this day I can quote almost word for word an article in the Times by the late Bernard Levin, written when I was in my teens, which took the mickey out of some correspondence in the Guardian accusing the painter John Constable of being a class enemy of the working man on the grounds that the popularity of his painting with the midde class was highly "suspect" and that he never depicted agricultural workers burning ricks.
I can also recall hearing Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the WIllows" described as a crypto-fascist manifesto.
Anyone who imagines that this kind of crack-brained nonsense was a thing of the past, or who wants a good laugh, might like to read Tracy van Slyke's article in the Guardian here about the racist and sexist messages allegedly promoted by "Thomas the Tank Engine."
I re-read the article attempting to work out whether it might be meant as a joke or as a work of irony, or perhaps as someone suggested in the comments, if it had been sent my mistake to the Guardian instead of "The Daily Mash."
I might be wrong, but I think it is meant to be taken seriously.
You couldn't make it up, could you?
In particular there are, and have always been, a certain number of Guardianista left-wingers who try to reduce everything in life to politics and sometimes end up making paranoid and delusional attacks on the most harmless or irrelevant things.
To this day I can quote almost word for word an article in the Times by the late Bernard Levin, written when I was in my teens, which took the mickey out of some correspondence in the Guardian accusing the painter John Constable of being a class enemy of the working man on the grounds that the popularity of his painting with the midde class was highly "suspect" and that he never depicted agricultural workers burning ricks.
I can also recall hearing Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the WIllows" described as a crypto-fascist manifesto.
Anyone who imagines that this kind of crack-brained nonsense was a thing of the past, or who wants a good laugh, might like to read Tracy van Slyke's article in the Guardian here about the racist and sexist messages allegedly promoted by "Thomas the Tank Engine."
I re-read the article attempting to work out whether it might be meant as a joke or as a work of irony, or perhaps as someone suggested in the comments, if it had been sent my mistake to the Guardian instead of "The Daily Mash."
I might be wrong, but I think it is meant to be taken seriously.
You couldn't make it up, could you?
Comments
Got me thinking that perhaps "bob the builder" is a deliberate attack on the trade unions, replacing work men with diggers that drive themselves and things.
Fireman sam is a deliberate attack on the education of firemen too, i mean when the alarm bell sounds they slide down the pole then press a button which turns the fire engine around on a turntable. It would be far more efficent to turn the fire engine (assuming it has to drive in not reverse) just after the last call, so its already good to go for the next one. This is a clear message from the show that firemen are not so clever. :o)