Let’s Go Through That Bizarre Sky Views Article About Millennials, Shall We?

I am sorry to announce that Sky News ran this today from their new section, "Sky Views".

Get

a fucking look

at this headline

you pansy

mother

fuckers

You know what we're going to do, don't you. We are going to do what millennials – with our iPads, and our Starbucks, and our doomed future – are wont to do. We're going to dive into this, paragraph by paragraph, and bathe in it like a rich pool of milk.

And so:

Okay, a fine enough opening. I mean, invoking Auden is a bit trite, but it's OK enough I sup—

Ah, you see what Foreign Affairs editor Sam Kiley has done here, is he has driven the car of this content quite placidly up until now, quite calmly – it's a brisk day for a lovely drive – and then for some reason at this exact moment his mind has cracked neatly in two and he has slammed it into reverse and started slaloming at high speed through traffic, and now he's burning the brakes with smoke and tire rubber screeching everywhere, and he has pulled this thing into what's known in the trade as "a complete fucking U-turn", this possibly the most deranged "four paragraph intro, one paragraph record scratch" ever in  history. Just to get this on the record: Sam Kiley thinks Britain has gone to the dogs now because it mourned a policeman who died in a terrorist attack.

A lot of people ask me if that is a self-attributed pull quote stretched over a photo of a war explosion – they cannot believe their eyes, the people; they are rubbing them and rubbing them again and hoping that they can blink them into some sort of state of clarity and sense – but I am afraid to say that yes, yes it is: yes, that is a self-attributed pull quote over a photo of an explosion. Look, you can do it with anything:

Let's not dwell on every word of the piece but:

… good? It's… a good thing? That thousands of people don't have to die? To protect our country? I'm… quite happy about that? That's what anti-terror organisations and police forces are for? That's why it's good not to be at war? So people don't regularly die?

I mean, skipping lightly over the "Britain was better when good old fashioned miners were led by their sooty dumb noses by middle-class Eton youths" class rhetoric nonsense (whatever happened to miners, I wonder? Wonder what happened. To mines. And where the miners are today. What happened w/ that? Can someone look it up?), I've always found this weird stiff-upper-lip fetishisation of Good Old Fashioned British Repressed Emotion to be quite strange, especially coming from – and listen, I hate to do this, but this whole article is "a barrel of fish" and literally any human being with reading comprehension is "a machine gun", so I know this is an obvious one and I do feel quite bad doing it, but do I really want to sit here and take a lecture on how Britain used to be full of hard lads and how millennials are all piss-weak babies from a guy who– oh, what's this, Wikipedia?

You gonna make me do this? Okay:

BRITAIN USED TO BE MADE OF STERNER STUFF. BRITISH OAK. BRITISH GRANITE. BRITISH STEEL. ALSO MIME LADS WHO DROPPED OUT OF THE ARMY.

SAM KILEY MY DUDE DO NOT FUCKING COME FOR ME AND MY CREW WHILE WEARING A BERET AND SILENTLY PRETENDING YOU ARE LOCKED IN A FUCKING BOX

Two things: unless you're literally working on a farm right now, this second, somehow filing copy from a farm, that you work on, don't project this idea that it's the only honest work going, and that the only work British youths – who, in their droves, live in cities, which do not necessarily have farms in them – should shoot for, according to your East Anglian farm mates – who might be a bit biased, I don't know – is farm work. But ignore that for now, because my main criticism of this paragraph is this: have you ever seen a pothole in your life?

Have you ever seen an adult human body?

How big does a pothole have to be for an adult human body to be an appropriate filler for it?

Anyway, we're building up to this paragraph, which I should probably warn you about with one of those content notes that so enrages Kiley and his ilk: TW this paragraph starts "No one wants to see a return to sexual abuse…", does a fucking doughnut around the word "but" in there and then squeals out the other end with what can basically be paraphrased as "but it didn't do the Empire any harm!", so choose whether you want to read it based on that:

Hold on, it's probably better if I write this one over an explosion, isn't it:

I mean, barely worth saying, but if you think millennials are the entitled generation just because they have Facebook, and that everything has been an easy glide from there, I'm gonna have to hold up a solemn palm and stop you there: this isn't a moan, but we are the first generation to be promised everything and have it yanked up beneath us before we could get it ("Get ahead!" we were told. "Go to university! It's the only way to get on! And you are destined to get on! Also university costs £35,000 minimum now and only qualifies you for office work. Sorry you thought you were too special, after years of us telling you you were special. Also every single house costs a million pounds and is already owned by an old Russian dude who doesn't even live in it. Wow! Entitled much!"), and now we are living in the sort of sand-and-dust aftermath of a recession many of us graduated into, and nobody has anywhere to live and we'll probably all be working until our eighties anyway, and none of the old people who own and rule everything have the good grace to die, so this is the way of it, now, I suppose, so needless to say: we know what it's like to get bashed and play on; there are other ways to learn that lesson beyond the systematic sexual abuse you seem to be arguing for??????

There are, Sam Kiley tells us, only three jobs in the world: farmer, African despot, maid.

The spanking is a curious one, too, because as far as I can make out, it's clear that Sam Kiley actually does want to spank millennials in a fun and kinky way, because otherwise why would he mention spanking millennials? It makes no sense. And so we must draw the inevitable conclusion: Sam Kiley wants to spank-fuck the thing he hates the most, young entitled people. Being mad at millennials but also very much wanting to paw their smooth young bottoms is all very "twist at the end of American Beauty", isn't it. Oh, Sam.

"Britain's problem is that it isn't a bombed-to-shit war zone" is a very tepid take, on the whole. Again, I hate to be "that guy", but I'm quite glad I don't have to bury my dead and sweep my streets a few blocks from a combat zone. Maybe that's just me! Maybe that's my millennial entitlement peeking through again!

Reminder that the "curling up and sucking our thumbs" behaviour referenced here is that time that Britain held a funeral for a police officer who was stabbed, the holding of which was apparently the wussiest display of societal decay since the end of the Second World War.

And here, right on the gasps of this one, you've got the I've-got-word-count-coming-up-and-still-don't-know-what-I'm-saying ending to end all I've-got-word-count-coming-up-and-still-don't-know-what-I'm-saying endings:

•  Sam Kiley left the army halfway through university so probably not one to talk about its reformative effect on young people. Private Mime, report for duty! Stop pretending to fire the gun and fire the gun! Fire the fucking gun, Sam!
• The last period of subscription known as National Service ended four years before Kiley was born, so quite why he knows that this and this alone is what's good for Britain's wet, funeral-holding youth is a bit beyond me, seeing as he never experienced it and didn't grow up with anyone who experienced it and has, for his entire life, lived in a world where it has been deemed non-essential. I really don't know why public schoolboys think an outmoded system of padding army numbers that was last relevant literally 50 years ago is the be all and end all;
• This is all very "Ah I'm afraid the only way to stop millennials from wanting things is to send them to die in a war that we – public school and Oxford PPE graduates, one and all – started for no reason. GIBRALTAR!" isn't it;
• I am hereby ending every article where I don't know what in the fuck I'm going on about with a call-and-response section that ends in "National Service". It's not a solution. Making millennials join the army solves literally nothing.

And so on that note: what is the best way to stop Sam Kiley from writing mad frothing wet-for-the-empire let's-start-with-public-school-and-fuedalism screeds about absolutely f u c k i n g n o t h i n g ever again? Say it with me:

Say it with me, everyone:

Everyone who thinks funerals are good, say it with me:

Come on, millennials, scream it with me now:

National. Service.

@joelgolby