Listen, I’ve got a lot of time for most of the Lasts: Exit to Brooklyn, Tycoon, Picture Show. Even of the Summer Wine, as a means of vicious self-punishment for a hangover that doesn’t lift all Sunday. I love of the Mohicans, in both formats.
But apart from Tango in Paris – let’s leave it for another column – the one I can’t get my head around is “the last acceptable prejudice”. I say “the one”, but one of the various questionable things about “the last acceptable prejudice” is that there are just so many of it. A brisk sleigh ride through the Google search results for the last acceptable prejudice reveals quite remarkable levels of dispute as to what it might actually be.
“Laughing at dwarfism is the last acceptable prejudice,” runs one hit from the Independent. “Accents,” intones the Economist, “the last acceptable prejudice.” Elsewhere, anti-Catholicism is widely credited as the last acceptable prejudice. However, the last religious prejudice stakes is nothing if not hotly contested, because the more general anti-Christianity seems to be gaining on anti-Catholicism, and all comers would be wise to work on the basis that they will end up in a photo finish with antisemitism and Islamophobia, both frequently given Last Acceptable status.
Disablism has been called the last acceptable prejudice; sexism is judged it bi-weekly; homophobia, generally or in places such as football, has also been nominated. Ageism regularly stakes a claim, as does fat-shaming, and even something called thin-shaming. In a comment piece earlier this year, a Travellers’ Times journalist declared: “It’s time to end ‘the last acceptable racism’,” which is against Gypsies and Travellers. All three forms of class hatred are the last acceptable one – hatred of the working class, hatred of the posh and hatred of the middle class.
Following the publication of her committee’s report into trans discrimination earlier this year, Maria Miller MP argued that transgender people “are the last group of people in our society who endure overt unchallenged prejudice”. Someone omitted to inform the authors of multiple versions of “Mental illness: the last acceptable stereotype?”, while another publication wanted to know “Why is ginger bullying one of the last acceptable prejudices?”.
Redheads were eased out by rednecks in the Conservative Review in October, which inquired rhetorically about “the last acceptable leftwing slur?”. “Is bias against the wealthy the last acceptable prejudice?” someone else has demanded. The headline affixed to my colleague Simon Jenkins’s hugely enjoyable column on this website this very week suggested that “Pale, stale males are the last group it’s OK to vilify”.
Perhaps, to settle the matter, these prejudices need to compete in a knockout competition. Then again, maybe the US election was that knockout competition – a sort of World Cup of Last Acceptable Prejudices, in which the metaphorical Germans win again.
Before we proceed any further, let us concur that all prejudices are bad – amirite, kids? – with obvious exceptions, such as ones against Sting or Formula One. Even so, I do think people might be a little bit more upbeat when they decide to deem something the last acceptable prejudice. Whichever one it is supposed to be, surely having just the one left would be quite a good result.
With the best will in the world, though, I don’t feel we’re there yet. In fact, I envy anyone who can get to the end of 2016, survey the state of play, and conclude that only one acceptable prejudice – whatever it may be – remains. Perhaps it’s a failure of the imagination in me, but I don’t feel there’s been a great whittling down, a great streamlining, a great sloughing-off of prejudices. Prejudices seem to have had an absolute belter of a year.
In fact, they’ve done so well that calling anything the last acceptable prejudice feels like you’ve gone just that bit too early – a bit like Francis Fukuyama did when he called The End of History in 1992.
In one sense, it makes excellent business sense – in a world of economic uncertainties, we must concede that the last acceptable prejudice industry is booming. As Fukuyama well knows, this kind of gutsy call is an absolute commission generator. Every time some apparently epochal event happens, from 9/11 to the continued rise of non-liberal-democracy powers such as China and Russia, he is called up and asked to write an article explaining why he is still right and history has still ended.
Has he done this year’s one yet? I’d like to bookmark it to read on New Year’s Eve with an intravenously administered martini. (I’m anticipating something quite equivocal. On the one hand, Russians are being retroactively stripped of various Olympic medals. On the other, recent cyber events have put a question mark over the final scoreline of the cold war. Swings and roundabouts, innit?)
As for the rise of the notion of the last acceptable prejudice, it feels increasingly unstoppable. Prejudice against its use seems to be the last absolutely unacceptable prejudice.
Even so, whenever I hear the concept get a non-ironic run-out, I am really only reminded of the blinkered outrage and affront exhibited by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, in the scene where he’s explaining that Ray Liotta’s going to need to come along and make up a foursome date night with the best friend of the girl he’s trying to bang, because “she’s prejudiced against Italians”. “Fucking believe that?” he explodes. “In this day and age. What the fuck is this world coming to? A Jew broad, prejudiced against Italians.”
Quite what this thoughtful type of identity politics is achieving is a matter of debate. Can it be unconnected with events regarded as less cheering in this tumultuous upheaval of a year? It was JM Barrie whose Peter Pan claimed that every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies”, there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
Given you’re nothing these days unless you’re making some huge call, I’ll conclude with one of my own. Hyde’s theorem posits that every time someone says, “Ooh, that’s the last acceptable prejudice, isn’t it?”, a major musical or cultural icon somewhere falls down dead. In light of rapidly depleting stocks, do let’s consider reining in the practice as we approach 2017.