Is woke cool?

No two generations share the same cool. My parent´s generation was defined by the two- Martini lunch. Mine had “Hair” (the musical but also lots of it, underarm or overhead) smoked anything, legal or not, protested against everything and made great music.

Then came Heavy Metal, Punk, piercings, and Madonna, followed by tattoos, retro vintage and Björk.

We all know if we were once cool, but are we woke?

Woke is defined as someone who is sensitive and in sync with today’s social awareness, be it about race, gender or any other form of discrimination; it’s grounded more on lifestyle than inclusion which is a shame. You, kind reader, are better off dead if not inclusive. Woke culture is the new cool. It derives from black slang “to be awake” hence “woke”. It now has a much broader scope and wants to do away with all differences of all kind, the type of solution that inevitably ends in silliness. The UK voted to ban skirts in all state schools and they (more about this later) have to wear pants, non-hugging non sex-revealing non fashionable pants; pants plain and straight, no pun intended. Pants cannot be brown, but also cannot be “brown-brown” because of racial innuendo.

In this post-kale world (kale is the veggie of choice for woke people) you cannot say “green with envy” because ecologists can take offense. Back to pants: a forward thinking haberdasher proposed selling pants with no pockets since they not all have hands. True. The trendy woke was born in America and where else than in California which is Wokeland – and rhymes with Disneyland.

Latin America has woken up (again no pun intended) to the benefits of woke and it’s become the political trend du jour. Argentina (South Wokeland) made it mandatory for the Central Bank to use “todes” which is the political equivalent to the gender-free of the singular they now included in the Merriam-Webster and the Oxford dictionary. Some of this is woke-oriented, some is just plain cozying up to your political base; it makes for grotesque grammar and also difficult to place without sounding very confused.

Last week they (Argentina) celebrated the Day of the Child here in South Wokeland. A friend encouraged me to “find the inner child in you”, I told her my inner child is now a teenager and makes my life miserable. It all started with Mother’s Day a dangerous idea that would soon spawn Father’s Day, Secretary´s Day, Working man’s (or Working they?), Teacher’s Day, Friend’s Day, Lawyer’s Day, Pet Day (yep) and Teacher’s Day (if you ask me it’s all just an excuse not to go to work). I don’t see why we don’t have Plumber’s Day since it is way tougher to plunge you hand into a clogged toilet than teach a class of 8-year olds, and carries the might of urgency.

Woke’s icons are first Meghan the Woke Princess, who hails from California and thus is very touchy-feely. I shudder at the thought of Meg coyly hugging her Royal in-laws and rendering them wooden with embarrassment; everybody knows the Royals have always practiced social distancing.

The second is high priestess Gwyneth Paltrow, a once-Oscar-winning star now a bit long in the tooth, who opted to become Hollywood’s guru, founded Goop and made gazillions selling smoke the likes of “Nourish your Internal Self”, “Manage your thoughts”, “Banish White food” (racist?) to bored Hollywood wives. She proposes 10k cruises that include “transformative sessions for the body, the mind and the soul”, a bargain at that price.

She launched her latest product early this year. It is a scented candle with the evocative name “This smells like my vagina”. It sold out. Still I don’t think I would buy it since it is not clear to me if it smells like GP’s -as she prefers to be known- burning bush, or mine. I am sure we do not smell the same (more like vanilla/ chocolate but that could be racist too).

Also it could make our guests wonder what we are up to in the kitchen.