See if you can spot the subtle change I’ve made to these lines from Ron DeSantis’s triumphalist victory speech, delivered after he was elected governor of Florida: “We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject the ideology of decency. We fight decency in the legislature. We fight decency in the schools. We fight the decent in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the decent mob. Florida is where decency goes to die.”
That’s right. I’ve changed the word “woke” to “decent”. Ron, if he reads this, would probably accuse me of playing fast and loose with language. But in fact “woke” is just the latest, pejoratively loaded term — following “politically correct” and “right on” — adopted by the regressive Right to legitimise attacks on basic decency. Being woke means being kind, sensitive or respectful. It means treating people as they ask to be treated, not as you feel entitled to treat them.
I’ve been thinking about this because my professional stomping ground, London theatre, has become the latest battleground in this lame culture war. There’s a perpetual background hum from the Right-wing media that theatre in general, and particularly organisations in receipt of public subsidy, are obsessed with a “woke agenda”, forcing colourblind casting and genderfluidity on a hapless conservative populace, and making them watch disabled actors play roles historically played by the able-bodied. Like, um, Richard III.
The latest skirmish is being fought over content warnings. My Twitter feed is regularly clogged with ironic snaps of posters alerting audiences to potentially offensive or upsetting material in shows. Usually they’re accompanied by a ho-ho-ho quip that Macbeth should come with a dagger warning, that Oedipus features incest, and so on.
But what possible harm can there be in warning people about emotionally troubling content?
What’s ironic is that an entirely kind and reasonable act should be so triggering to the Right. It’s they who come over all snowflakey when asked to respect a pronoun or desist from using a slur. They argue that “wokery” is the thin end of the wedge that inevitably leads to cancellation. That warning people is the same as banning things. That changing the offensive name of the dog in the 1955 film The Dam Busters is an act of cultural sacrilege.
Well, no. Culture changes. It’s right that white actors no longer black up to play Othello. It’s appropriate and enriching that Marvellous at the new @sohoplace theatre has a neurodiverse cast, and wonderful that deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis is in its next production, As You Like It. And it’s right that anyone who has paid for a ticket should be warned of something that might traumatise them. “There is quite a lot to be said for what might be termed, abusively, as ‘woke’ culture,” the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro said when I interviewed him recently. Quite. Let’s take back the term and say we’re proud to be woke.
Libraries and Helena — a match made in heaven
My first experience of paid employment, as a teenager, was a Saturday job in Earlsfield library, and it’s left me with an abiding fondness for such places. If I have time to kill in the centre of town, I will often sit and read beneath the huge windows of the Westminster Reference Library off Leicester Square.
Yesterday Helena Bonham Carter was appointed the first female president of the much grander London Library in St James’s, where several writers and journalists I know work (I’m too mean to pay the membership fee). Having sat next to the fiercely brainy HBC at an awards dinner I know she’ll bring intellect as well as a touch of showbiz glamour to the place. But I wonder if she’d consider a wider ambassadorial role for institutions that keep people warm, informed and connected, that don’t try and flog them coffee every five minutes, and that are under threat.
