Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is the notion that none of us can truly perceive a world beyond our availability heuristic, which shapes our perception of reality. In simpler terms, Plato imagines that if people are chained in a cave and can only view those shadows, those shadows become their reality. The best pop-cultural manifestation of Plato’s Allegory was The Matrix , where all unfree characters are in a dream-like sleep and have no idea they are living inside a computer programme.
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The real-life analogy is anyone who consumes so much propaganda that no amount of rationalising, to borrow a line from Dr House, would change their opinion.
Perhaps the most extreme version of that is the epochal tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed in the Philippines at the fag end of World War II, who “fought” for thirty years and refused to lay down his arms.
Once the island was overtaken by Allied forces, Onoda and his comrades escaped into the jungle, where they survived on coconuts, banana peels and stolen rice.
While his peers shuffled off their mortal coil, Onoda kept fighting – despite evidence to the contrary, which he dismissed as American propaganda – and it wasn’t till 1974, nearly 30 years after he was sent to fight, that the soldier out of time laid down his arms.
One was oddly reminded of Onoda after coming across the Boston ‘lesbian bar story’ that is every product manager’s wet dream: a story published in the Boston Globe that went so viral that it led to thousands of subscriptions for what seemed a rather nondescript story but is an elegant outpost of woke America’s last bastion.
For those who don’t monitor the situation online and believe in touching grass, here’s the CliffsNotes version.
A lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, made a slight change to its Saturday-night mask policy that led to a culture war so elaborate it would have been rejected by South Park for being too obvious.
Last Ditch, a lesbian bar on record, is an “aggressively inclusive queer space” where patrons are required to wear KN95 masks in 2026. It turns nobody away for being broke and explicitly welcomes “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends”. All these admirable intentions soon encountered humanity’s oldest ideological opponent: rent.
Customers disappeared, staff couldn’t be paid and co-founder Jackie Matellian worked four jobs and lived in her truck for six months while carrying the responsibility for a $50,000 business loan. So, the bar decided to make the smallest concession to Mammon: Saturday nights would be mask-optional.
The response is exactly what you would expect if someone replaced a Pride flag with a flag of Israel.
What followed is the perfect living example of what can be called the Toaster F**** Syndrome.
For those who don’t know, the theory is simple. Pre-internet, if someone wanted to perform coitus with a piece of electrical equipment and expressed that desire, they would be told by their peers that it was imbecilic to want to f*** a toaster. But post-World Wide Web, when someone expressed that desire, they would find thousands of other individuals who would soon form a community and try and convince everyone that it was the new normal .
After the Instagram post, all the toaster f***** were out in full force.
Commenters accused the bar of ableism, eugenics and facilitating mass disability. One hoped it would be firebombed. The bar apologised on Instagram, which made it even worse because the apology graphic had no alt-text and was thus ‘triggering’ for visually impaired folks, prompting another round of accusations of ableism.
One activist called Soe Noire, who is a lesbian and uses ‘he/him’ pronouns, accused the debt-ridden founder Matellian of producing “White THEY THEM Tears”. The internet did its best, which saw Last Ditch defend Soe Noire, accuse the Globe of “abysmal journalism” and ask everyone to donate to ‘his’ Cash App and Venmo because ‘he’ was being harassed.
All this because a lesbian bar decided to relax its mask mandate for one day in 2026.
But honestly, Last Ditch Bar sounds appropriately named because it feels like a time capsule, harking back to the good ol’ days of ‘peak woke’ America.
Now, historians differ over the year when America hit ‘peak woke’, but most agree it was between 2019 and 2021, when Trump’s first term ended.
Fauci’s words on masks and everything else became the gospel truth. Everyone was listening and learning. Suggesting the lab leak theory was plausible was deemed racism. George Floyd was beatified and put on par with Martin Luther King Jr, while Black Lives Matter became the most important religion on earth. The police clearly needed to be defunded.
Read: ‘Dr’ Donald Trump, Tylenol, and why Americans don’t trust the ‘science’ anymore
It was a time when, if you sent a Slack message that read, “Guys, I am stuck in a lift”, Slack would auto-correct you and point out that “Guys” was gendered language.
