Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with “youths” and “students” reducing the cradle of European civilisation to smoking ruins, the overgrown Shirley Temple of Stockholm rocked up this morning outside a school in Saint-Denis. She told the crowd, “Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us!”
The clumsy structure of the latter sentence gave me an eerie sensation of an Armageddon-themed ABBA lyric. I can picture a mournful Frida singing it over flickering firelight.
Few are the child stars, like Roddy McDowall or Bonnie Langford, who can sustain an adult career
Greta certainly gets around, doesn’t she? Her passport must be like a tattered old dollar bill. When I was a youngster, my mum was always urging me to get out of the house and “join in.” I wish Greta had been around back then, so I could have pointed to her antics and shouted “REALLY?”
But then, Greta is now beyond her pigtail years, and the ethereal vibes of the Wise Child are gone; her green gables are showing signs of mould. Few are the child stars, like Roddy McDowall or Bonnie Langford, who can sustain an adult career; what seemed jejune and sweet generally curdles, the ghost of the button-nosed cutie haunting the adult face.
Greta is now 23, which still seems very young to people of my age, but isn’t really. To her, the high days of her “How dare you!” address to the UN in 2019 must seem geological epochs ago. Back then, at the high water mark of Woke, we were all expected to gasp and genuflect before her, as if the Infant Jesus of Prague had been brought to life.
Anybody that dared to question her, or wonder why this oddly fervent brat was being feted by politicians, was met by howls of accusation – what kind of monster would so viciously attack the sacred child?
Back then, I remember thinking that Greta would go one of two ways when her developmental cycle finally kicked in. She’d either turn up on chat shows, riding on set on a Harley Davidson belching black smoke from its exhaust and wearing a Friedrich Hayek t-shirt, or she’d continue as a bog standard adult activist. Sadly, the latter turns out to be the case.
Greta remains an Armageddon obsessive. She has a terrible case of demo-itis, the condition in which a sufferer presents themself at any ruckus for any cause. It’s hard for people like me, who get edgy in crowds larger than four people, to understand this syndrome.
But not long ago I was struck by the words of the splendidly named climate activist Indigo Rumbelow, co-founder of the British environmentalist group Just Stop Oil, when she told an interviewer, “Two years ago, I went to my first mass action, protesting about the coal mining in a massive area of the Rhineland, Germany. Our group stopped a train from delivering to a power plant. We linked our arms and sat down on the train track. You have an adrenalin rush like you have never felt before.” My italics.
What a giveaway. This is the thrill of moral indignation mixed with very slight danger. (You’ll notice how such protests never go near people who might hit back.)
And we shouldn’t assume that they will necessarily grow out of this (though many do, for the simple reason that being bothered to do anything becomes tougher as the years clock up). Perhaps my favorite Extinction Rebellion event was in 2021, and consisted of grandmas and grandads with mournful expressions, who were literally dressed in sackcloth and ashes – plus French chalk in their hair and joke shop blood trickling from their gobs – holding placards reading things like BOUGHT UNNECESSARY NEW CLOTHES and OPENED NEW COAL MINE.
None of this is new. It has much in common with the dancing manias and children’s crusades of the Middle Ages. The invaluable 1957 book The Pursuit Of The Millennium by Norman Cohn – every paragraph a cracker – outlines this very common human behavior.
Now, when I have gloomy thoughts about the state of things, I just get maudlin and silent. I don’t take any joy in being a Jeremiah. But some people – like Greta – positively love it.
She is, in fact, clearly a protest obsessive, a perpetual joiner-in and turner-up to any rabble. It doesn’t matter what the putative topic of the rumble is. In fact, her focus is getting more prosaic as she ages; first climate change was going to destroy the world, then it became merely Palestine and the Middle East, and now it’s the poor standard of the upholstery in French schools. It makes you wonder what demo-crazy Greta will turn her attention to next in her quest for a high – potholes in upstate New York?
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