I need a GAWP card

My generation has lived through the best 5 decades there has ever been to be alive. The 60’s to the Noughties were an explosion of free speech, free love, artistic licence, musical genius, new ideas and freedom of thought.  But now it is over and the creeping madness of political correctness is strangling all that this demi-decade gave my contemporaries and I.

In the current climate I need a something to excuse my attitude. An old persons card that absolves me from responsibility for political correctness, supposed racism and not being gullible enough blindly to support every utterance of Jeremy Corbyn.

Aha, I hear you say, so he’s going political. Well, maybe I am but with a small p (something that in a much more physical sense often affects older gentlemen, but I digress), as I am really beginning to dislike modern attitudes.

Over Christmas, laughing and joking on the way to Roots wine bar on Valbonne with my daughter, Charlie, I was making a joke about something I cannot recall, it may have been an Irish joke, when it became clear from her frown and that phrase “dad, you can’t say that”,  that I had once again transgressed that unwritten modern-day PC code. Monty Python fans will recall the Dinsdale Piranha sketch. It now seems that even Irish jokes are racist. “You need some kind of card that explains why you are how you are”.

Now call me old-fashioned, and I certainly am, but jokes are usually at the expense of someone or something, and in the past , we could mostly all tell a joke and enjoy a joke at our own expense. No longer true it seems. The (horribly political correct) BBC will apparently not show the very popular old series “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum” due to the comedic homophobic Sergeant Major, and “Love Thy Neighbour” because of its perceived racism. The latter used to take the piss out of white people! I loved them both and I have close gay friends and have grown up and worked in a multi cultural society. Indeed I helped set up and ran the first British rap record company and I can take a joke, but the brave new world, it seems, cannot.

One has to accept that attitudes have moved on but at what expense? Universities are now often refusing to allow speakers with opinions different to the majority of students to speak? How on earth can one judge what is right of wrong or form ones own opinions when you only hear one side of the argument? I recall my dad saying something like “I may not agree with what you are saying but I would fight to the death for your right to say it”. In other words, freedom.

Then there is the sexual harassment debacle. Many sex pests deserve to be in jail (indeed I once put out a record by Rolf Harris and he certainly deserved to be incarcerated) but many innocent people like Dr Fox have rightly been cleared of ridiculous vindictive accusations, but only at huge expense, wiping out the achievements of their entire working life. To take this further; where is the line now between wooing a girl and sexual harassment? Would “do you want to come in for a coffee” now be potentially open to an accusation of  sexual harassment?. The world only survives by the interaction between make and female. I am glad that I am off the market nowadays as the whole thing has gone to pot (can I say pot? – I will check with my daughter).

A man in need of a GAWP card

Anyway, rant over. But my daughter has put her finger on it. I need a way of excusing, and I hope, explaining away attitudes of myself of my contemporaries, brought up before the world of political correctness seeped like sepsis into our lives; a Get Away With It Old Persons Card,  GAWP for short. A kind of Get Out Of Jail Free Card in Monopoly terms.

It would take the shape of a business card saying something like;

The holder of this card was born  before political correctness and so has no understanding of the offence he causes by his utterances, please excuse him (and stand him up if he has fallen over). I am having some designed and printed as I write. Shortly I shall be better armed to deal with the new world.

I do however, retain one area of expertise in the modern world and that comes in the form of my relationship with Currencies Direct, the only way to move money from one currency to another.

I hope all my readers have a great new year and that all on of my generation bear up as well as can be expected to the increasing paralysis of the new thought police, such as my lovely daughter!

Chris France