Herbert And The Watermelon Of Doom
“Watermelon” they shout, and the “they” in question are idiots. But there is perhaps just a nugget, nay a kernel, perhaps a smidgeon or even a grain of truth in that insult what “they” so easily hurl.
It’s a good term, is “Watermelon”. For those who aren’t in the know it is used by some to describe an old-style socialist who masquerades as an environmentalist in order to surreptitiously campaign for their sneaky statist goals; they are green on the outside, red on the inside, geddit? And they will exist, such folk; no doubt the term can be accurately applied to some knackered comrades who have surmised that the best route to achieving their dream of getting government to muck everything up is by going in via the green back door, just as during the ‘eighties the Labour party enjoyed a rapid conversion from being a broadly anti- into a broadly pro-EU party in order to palm continental-style social policies into Britain under the noses of the Thatcher government.
But I think such things can be overstated. I reckon most environmentalists are naturally of a more leftist bent in the first place, for whatever reason. It is just the way things are, and I don’t pretend to understand why, but some issues do seem to exhibit some strange, almost symbiotic relationship with a particular political wing for no obvious reason. While lefties tend to be more environmentally conscious, righties are seemingly more likely to be anti-abortion. This makes no sense as far as I am concerned, but as we have seen this week there is evidence all around.
But if we at least acknowledge that some people are genuine Watermelons, that they are not just greens who happen to be red but socialists who feel that the best way to advance their cause is by posing as environmentalists, then where is the balance, the yin to the yang, that equal but opposite reaction; or perhaps the even greater reaction? In other words, where is the term to describe what is for me a far more likely scenario; of someone who is a free-market anti-government type who opposes environmentalism instinctively, not because of the science (such people are rarely scientists) but simply because the response to climate change implies a reliance on government action that they simply cannot countenance? They are the mirror of Watermelons in that while they may pose as honest brokers simply putting an alternative view to all that shrieking global warming propaganda, in reality they will grab hold of any rogue paper going that shows that there isn’t a problem, so to loudly pronounce that all is well and government can stay in its box, as their dogma demands. Their creed of minimal state intervention has no answers to the problems raised by concerns such as climate change, and so it must be denied for its own sake.
In the interests of fairness then we need an antonym for Watermelon, but what should it be? Cantaloupe? Dry Lemon? I reckon a nice acronym would do; TWiTs, perhaps, although I can’t think what those initials would stand for. But this surely cannot be beyond us, and once we have solved this problem and identified the Watermelons’ natural enemy then perhaps we can think of a moniker for those (other?) people who, whilst complaining about the welfare and nanny states and the dependency culture they have spawned breeding feckless scroungers who expect the state to wait on them hand and foot, then object that they themselves are far too busy to even sort their own fucking rubbish into a few simple piles prior to collection for recycling and want the council to come along and do it all for them. Because they’re out there too; I just know it.
The Obscurer 