Fun Fascists

EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND SAY “YEAH!”

I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.

As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.

This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.

Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.

Fucking Fun Fascists.

They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.

For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.

The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)

Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.

Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:

“Cheer up!”

“Smile!”

“Come on, let your hair down!”

You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.

OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.

Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!