book-review

Insultingly Undeserved Awards

This morning finds me furious, by which I mean absolutely seething with rage. Over the last few months I’ve had my eye on a number of online sickfluencers now increasingly polluting the web with nauseating, self-pitying tripe about their supposed disabilities. It’s becoming more and more virulent, and the blatant misrepresentation of disabled peoples’ lives is becoming more and more perverse. It is clear that these people don’t have the faintest clue what life is actually like for disabled people, yet they continue to post their insulting videos online, presuming to speak for us as if they know our worlds better than we do ourselves. As I’ve said before, the whole phenomenon feels like a punch in the gut which I refuse to tolerate. One of them, a Youtuber calling herself Chronically Jenni, struck me as particularly patronising: an arrogant, self pitying young woman jumping into a powerchair and making videos about things she knows absolutely nothing about.

What has my blood boiling this morning, however, is that this girl is now bragging about winning a National Diversity Award for her work on disability representation. Quite frankly, I don’t think there could be a bigger insult to disabled people; it is akin to awarding the Black and White Minstrels an Oscar for African-American Representation. Watch her videos and you’ll be subjected to a stream of insufferably lachrymose bullshit in which people with disabilities are depicted as poor defenceless victims demanding everyone else’s pity. Hell, the first clue is in her title: no self-respecting disabled person would label themselves ‘chronic’, using an overtly medical term as a central component of their online identity.

Thus for this girl to have won this award – or at least be claiming to – really takes the biscuit. For one, there are a great, great many other disabled people on the web doing a far better job of disability representation than she does, and who have been online far longer than the laughable five years she has been calling herself disabled. Yet she is one of a growing number of online influencers identifying as disabled who think their obviously tenuous connections to the disabled community give them the right to speak for and over the rest of us. She is obviously totally ignorant of many of the political issues currently confronting the disabled community, but uses her YouTube channel to dress up and pose in powerchairs. I don’t know who decided to give her this ridiculous award, and they couldn’t insult the disabled community more if they tried.

I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about things like this, but it really feels like these ‘sickfluencers’ are attempting to rob guys like me of our voice and identity, using disability as a gimmick with which to attract online attention without really knowing anything about what they are talking about. To hear that such people are now being given awards for their insulting, condescending, gross mischaracterisations of life for disabled people really is more than I can stand.

Two plus Two

I think I have admitted here before that I’ve never been very good at maths. Even so, I am pretty certain that I know what two plus two is. That never really seemed very important, but the film I watched yesterday afternoon with John revealed just how consequential it in fact is.

We went to see Orwell: 2+2=5, a 2025 film directed by Raoul Peck, and as I wheeled out of the Curzon cinema I honestly thought I had a new favourite film. I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautiful, intriguing filmic text. To just call it a film or even a biopic would be to over simplify it. It may be about George Orwell, but it is also about much, much more. Peck juxtapositions Orwell’s writing with contemporary politics, enabling it to speak to our world. The result is phenomenally powerful, as if a voice from eighty years ago was able to accurately predict and comment on what is happening today. Freedom has become slavery, war has become peace, and ignorance has indeed become strength in a way Orwell could never have imagined but predicted with chilling precision.

Riding the Lizzie Line home last night though, I began to wonder what I was going to say about this masterpiece. It is a very cinephiliac film: that is to say, it revels in the cinematic art, referencing countless other films and reminding me what cinema is for. It made me realise how little I know about George Orwell, and made me ravenous to know more. After all, he was a contemporary of Hemingway, Fleming and Tolkien, and just as influential as all three, but I have never really studied him. This will sound like a bit of a cop-out, but I honestly don’t think confining my thoughts to a blog entry would do the film justice: I now feel the urge to go far, far deeper, exploring a writer who was clearly one of the greatest of the twentieth century, yet who I know so little about. In a way, Peck’s film whetted my appetite and made me hungry for more. It really is an astonishingly great film which I would urge everyone to watch, saying so much about both Orwell and the present; but the cool part is, it was just the beginning. It feels like it has opened up a completely new realm for me to now dive into and explore.

We may well live in a world where two plus two might soon equal five, and where everything Orwell warned us against may soon become reality; but as long as films like this are being made, and as long as we remain aware of the threat posed by Big Brother, we should be all right.

Just Exchanging A Book

It amazes me what a numpty I can be sometimes. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a James Bond-related video on Youtube, which concerned a biography of Ian Fleming which I thought sounded interesting. I have read a couple of good bios of Fleming in the past but not this one, so I determined to try to look it up. A day or so later, I set off for Waterstones in Lewisham, and put in an order for the book I was interested in. A few days after that, of course I went back to Lewisham, payed for the text and brought it home.

Truth be told I don’t read that much these days as I get too distracted by the internet, but I told myself to make the effort to read the book I had gone to that much effort to buy. It wasn’t until that point, however, that I glanced at my book shelf to see that a copy of the very same book had been there all along! At that moment I felt so infantile and stupid – I would have died of embarrassment, if anyone else had known what I had done.

Fortunately for me they didn’t, so today I was able to pop back to Lewisham and exchange the book for one I don’t have, on Hitchcock and Truffault. It’s not that I think this is particularly noteworthy or blogworthy – many people probably do similar things every day. Yet, on another level, in a way it’s pretty amazing: if I had been told as a ten or even fifteen year old that I would one day be trundling around South-East London, living independently, doing my own shopping, talking to strangers and even buying books I already had, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Every once in a while, it stuns me how differently my life has turned out to the way I always assumed it would growing up, even down to the ability to go out on my own and buy my own things. That is why I think it’s so important that I help to encourage young people in similar positions to mine. When you have a disability which effects how you communicate, you often don’t realise that you can interact with society just like anyone else.