Facts are now history

Your quiz for the week is to make the connection between the following people: fun-loving Greek hack Homer, veteran US centrist Democratic party politician Dianne Feinstein, dodgy-night-at-the-theatre president Abraham Lincoln and Middlesbrough-born peripatetic James Cook. The answer is that they are the latest individuals to have been ‘cancelled’ by the woke Taleban. Don’t worry, they’ll get around to you soon enough.

Homer is being kicked off college curricula in the USA because his character, Odysseus, had a habit of mansplaining to thick Greek women. It has always been my view that mansplaining means ‘telling someone, often a woman, something they don’t want to hear, but need to hear nonetheless’, as is that other modern excrescence, ‘gaslighting’. But still, Homer is disappearing.

Feinstein is an interesting case, being achingly liberal. A school was named after her in San Francisco but the city’s Board of Education is removing her name from the institution after having convened a panel of ‘local community’ activists to cleanse all bigots, racists and scumbags from living memory. Feinstein’s crime was that in 1984 she allowed a confederate flag to fly among a large display of flags when she was mayor of the city. A protestor pulled it down but — allegedly — Feinstein put it back. She claims she didn’t put it back, but nobody cares what she says, racist cow. They’re renaming an awful lot of schools in Frisco: that panel of maniacs did a thorough job.

Abraham Lincoln is also getting his name chiselled off some state school. Perhaps those activists believe the old Bob Monkhouse joke that on the morning of 23 September 1862 someone approached the president and said: ‘It was a wonderful thing you did yesterday, Abe, freeing the slaves.’ And Lincoln replied: ‘I freed the WHAT!?’ Or perhaps the fact that he was not in favour of black suffrage easily outweighs that declaration of emancipation.