The Satirical Retrospective 2022

No public discussion this year has felt as present as the one about topics such as inclusion, gender-appropriate language, wokeness, cancel culture and the like. Doing a satirical review in this field might be a bit of a risk, but then again maybe someone will just find it funny. And quite honestly, the year was loaded with such serious and difficult topics, I at least have to get a little silly in between. Bear with me. So here we go:

Tagesanzeiger of January 14: Helen Mirren should not be allowed to play Golda Meir because she is not Jewish (Helen Mirren, not Golda Meir). Isn't that actually the job of an actress, to portray something that doesn't necessarily have to be her?...How absurd can this get? Is a doctor only allowed to operate on a tumor if he himself has once had cancer? That's about as plausible as "I once had burnout, and now I coach people with burnout." As if burnout had any correlation with coaching competence. Honestly.

Female Leadership 1: Sunday's paper reports on the first female to lead a colony of Japanese macaques and to stay in that position. The article asks how this animal does that, and the reader has hope. The answer: she beats up male numbers one and two and subsequently behaves like a male sending out signs of superiority...Well, for us humans, that might not be the real solution yet. Okay, in Shakespeare's time female roles were played by men and not by Helen Mirren.

And no, that was not a disrespectful reference to Helen Mirren's age, but enough about her.

Female Leadership 2, also Sunday’s paper. The Ceo of the boutique business school Rochester Bern reports that her team wanted to set up a course for "female leadership", but then decided against it because her team realized that such a course would be discriminatory, since there would never be a course for "male leadership". This logic is somehow plausible, but then it is also somehow strange. What about anti-aggression courses for men? Or with e-bike courses for seniors? Or are there any protests from patients who complain that certain pills can only be taken by epileptics? They don't go out on the streets and chant "Why aren't we allowed to take those, too?"

All right, this is getting a bit absurd now, but still: how is one supposed to know his way between tailor-made and equal treatment?

Despite all the linguistic attentiveness, some bizarre formulations caught the eye this year:

• Headline on SRF Sport online about the Southwest Swiss Wrestling Festival in Visp: "The first pairings are underway"...well...isn't that a bit of a public nuisance, in front of so many...pardon.
• A proctologist reports how other people are suddenly uncomfortable when he mentions his profession, and then says he "slipped into it." Then I was uncomfortably touched...maybe he should just tweak the wording a bit in anticipation of the next cocktail party.

And then there's SRF online on December 2: "Musk blocks Kanye West on Twitter." That's exactly the problem: Elon Musk decides things like that. If things with a potentially significant impact on society and politics are increasingly being decided by individual socially handicapped private persons, then we have already landed in a somewhat strange field. Maybe a course "Twit Leadership“? Stay tuned I say.

Happy New Year.