I am a simple man of simple tastes. I don’t want much from life. I’d like to remain healthy. I’d like to be happy. But, more than anything, I’d give everything I’ve got to never see another politician dab again as long as I live.
“But, Stu,” some of you will be asking, what is dabbing, exactly?” The fact that you even asked this means that you are a good and true person of sensible persuasion, and that we can be friends. Dabbing – you sweet, beautiful, uninitiated fool – is a dance move where you simultaneously point diagonally above you with both arms while hiding your head in the crook of your elbow. Imagine if Usain Bolt, in the midst of celebrating another world record, suddenly clocked a spooky ghost that he wanted to hide from. In a nutshell, that is dabbing.
If you’re a kid, and you dab, then you are forgiven. After all, this is a youthful dance move with roots in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene and, besides, kids buy into any dumb old crap. Four years ago, the kids who are dabbing now would have been doing the Harlem Shake. Five years ago, they’d have been planking. Eleven years ago, they’d have been getting out of moving cars and dancing on the bonnet. Kids are essentially stupid, but it’s OK because that’s sort of what kids are for.
No, my beef is with grownups. My beef is with grownups who have something to gain from awkwardly adopting youth culture in the ill-advised belief that it will somehow leverage their credentials. Admittedly, dabbing doesn’t mark the start of this – a decade ago, Gordon Brown managed to talk about Arctic Monkeys so clumsily that it made him sound like he was reading the phrase “Arctic Monkeys” written phonetically in Esperanto in miniature with mascara on a wet napkin – and yet something about this seems especially craven.
It was horribly out of place a year ago when Hillary Clinton – then plumbing the unknown depths of her “How do you do, fellow kids?” campaign strategy – kickstarted this ridiculous trend by dabbing on the Ellen DeGeneres show, with all the enthusiasm she’d later put into grimly solitary post-election woodland trudges.
But at least, for all her shall-we-do-the-Bartman-next insincerity, Clinton has the honour of being a dabbing pioneer. In a perfect world, all other figures of authority should have seen how humiliated Clinton looked to be forced to do this and sworn off dabbing for ever. And yet, 14 months later, it’s still happening.
Less than a month ago, in the House of Commons, Tom Watson chose to congratulate Jeremy Corbyn on an impassioned pro-NHS speech by blundering into a dab of such dismal proportions that he ended up looking as if he was smelling his own armpits to see if he could get away with wearing his shirt for two days running. “Did I do a dab?” he coyly asked afterwards. The words, “Sorry if that makes me too much of a rebel for you, babe,” lingered unsaid at the back of his throat.
Even Justin Trudeau has been dabbing. There’s a photo of him from two an a half weeks ago, dabbing next to a policeman, who also happened to be dabbing. Justin Trudeau, for crying out loud. He’s supposed to be the platonic leftwing ideal, the one bright spot in a world growing ever more depressing by the minute. And yet here he is, a millimetre away from biting his top lip and swinging his baseball cap around the wrong way like someone’s dad chaperoning a school disco.
Clearly, there are two issues with this. The first is that dabbing has too low a threshold. There isn’t any risk in it. All you really have to do is touch your nose to the inside of your elbow. That’s it, which means it automatically loses any currency it may have ever enjoyed. As awful as it was, at least the mannequin challenge required you to be able to stand still for a prolonged length of time. The Harlem Shake could only be properly deployed if the participant was willing to utterly reject any semblance of dignity. But dabbing only takes a microsecond. Any idiot could do it. Most of them already have. Hopefully, as a deterrent, the next hip-hop-derived dance fad will involve setting your hair on fire or licking a doormat, or anything that will give politicians some amount of pause before they blunder into it like a stunned circus bear.
More importantly, you’ll notice that none of the baddies are dabbing. Donald Trump, in any of his prolonged lunacy, never felt the need to appeal to a nonexistent youth vote by dabbing. Theresa May didn’t dab on the steps on 10 Downing Street after receiving royal assent to trigger article 50. George Osborne didn’t end his first speech as editor of the London Evening Standard by running around the newsroom dabbing to How Fast Can You Count It by Skippa Da Flippa in front of the bewildered staff as if his life depended on it. No, dabbing is something that purely our people do.
You’ll notice, of course, that the baddies all now occupy the main positions of power. Am I suggesting that they only won because they didn’t stoop to dabbing in public as if they were trend-fixated nimrods? That’s not for me to say, although it is very clearly true. Either way, let this be the end of it.