Gammon has made a come-back in Britain. Not as a dish, obviously — the pinkish pork cut was last in fashion in the 1970s, when it went through a deplorable phase of being served with pineapple rings. No, it has come back this time as a political insult.
Gammon is the way trendy young Lefties refer to jowelly middle-aged white men with flushed complexions and conservative opinions. These white men often lack university degrees, and sometimes complain about political correctness. This makes them objects of ridicule to fashionable liberals, most of whom began life with many more advantages than the men they are mocking. A compilation of various splenetic-looking, ruddy-faced, short-haired men in the audience of “Question Time,” the BBC’s flagship political show, became a popular internet meme, tagged #WallOfGammon.
Most conservatives, I’m glad to say, laughed the whole thing off. But a few got upset – or at least pretended to get upset. Gammon, they said, was a derogatory term based on people’s skin color. If that wasn’t racist, what was? And, racism aside, wasn’t there something downright unpleasant about dismissing people’s opinions on the basis of their appearance?
At that point, the more woke critics began to back-pedal, saying that gammons were in fact not working class men, but “a certain kind of golf-club bore”, which would apparently make it fine to sneer at them because it is acceptable to “punch up” rather than “punch down” — acceptable, in other words, to deride groups that are supposedly well-off or powerful.
The hipsters using the term are displaying a hypocrisy so gargantuan that you could glimpse it from space. They are, almost without exception, people who define racism, in any form, as the most abominable of crimes. To use the wrong language on ethnicity, even without intending to give offense, is worse in their eyes than neglecting your kids, fiddling your taxes, or deceiving your spouse. Fair enough. All subcultures disproportionately elevate some precepts to the status of a sacred value. But if you’re going to define categorization by color as the most monstrous of all evils, then disdaining people because of their complexion seems more than a little careless.
The “punching up” excuse doesn’t work, either. The people who deploy it invariably award themselves the sole right to determine what counts as “up”. And “punching up” somehow always seems to involve punching people whose politics are to the Right of the person doing the punching. “Gammon” is a case in point, bringing out, as it does, the snobbery that Leftists claim to abhor, but in which they positively revel when mocking manual workers with conservative views.
Still, conservatives should not respond to the Left’s hypocrisy with an equivalent hypocrisy of their own – which is, I’m afraid, what ostentatiously taking umbrage represents. As Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” put it the other day in response to l’affaire Apu, “I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended.”
Quite. The people huffing and puffing about the implied racial slur of gammon are doing precisely what they decry in their opponents, namely affecting a sense of injury that they don’t truly feel.
Tempting though it is to call out double-standards on the other side, the bigger issue here is surely the defense of free expression. The current tendency to claim to have been wounded by innocuous things has a chilling effect on our public discourse. People tiptoe around, afraid that the slightest clumsiness in their phrasing will make them the next target of the feigned outrage that drives the modern online mob.
The gammon, surely, should hold himself to a higher standard. He should behave as the heir to a great tradition, a tradition that arguably includes Winston Churchill – a plump, pink man with conservative opinions.
Yes, the gammon has been attacked down the ages. Incredibly, it turns out that Charles Dickens made a slighting reference to the “gammon tendency” in his 1838 novel Nicholas Nickelby, using the term to disparage an effusively patriotic MP. But is the gammon not also celebrated in the form of Sir John Falstaff, arguably the most inexhaustible of all Shakespeare’s characters? Did he not, in the shape of Dr. Johnson, compile the first English dictionary? Has his form, indeed, not been abstracted into that of John Bull, Britain’s fatter and redder version of Uncle Sam, the incarnation of our national spirit?
If he really wants to annoy his detractors, all the gammon needs to do is pick them up on their politically incorrect terminology. Surely, the properly woke way to refer to angry, red-faced men is as “people of choler.”
