The age of outrage is upon us. Umbrage is taken easily, insults given just as freely, leaving us in a self-perpetuating loop of indignation. Feeling offended, slighted, or thoroughly pissed off about something? Well someone else is going to feel offended, slighted or thoroughly pissed off with you for feeling that. Disagree with me? Well you must be a bigot. If not, a snowflake. There is little oxygen left for the majority of us who are muddling along, sometimes getting it wrong, hoping and trying to get it right.
You’ll be familiar, of course, with Roald Dahl Gate, involving Puffin’s sensitivity readers who had either deleted or amended language deemed to be potentially offensive or discriminatory. To say that knickers (or, non-gender specific undergarments, as the eye-rollers would have you believe a sensitivity reader would make me write) duly got into a twist would be an understatement. Salman Rushdie tweeted: ‘Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’ The Prime Minister’s spokesman said works of fiction should be ‘preserved and not airbrushed’. Even the former PM Boris Johnson blathered on last week about Augustus Gloop and the Oompa-Loompas, and why Britain was a wonderful country because people got to call him a wanker. The clapback has been so loud that Puffin announced in February that it would be releasing a ‘Classic’ Dahl collection under the Penguin banner, ‘offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvellous stories’, Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s, said in a statement.
