There’s a face which appears on our screens at this time of the year, and it so unusual as to be startling.
It is that of a girl – pretty, young, joyful – sitting on someone’s shoulders in a crowd, her eyes sparkling as she sings along to a song being played on a stage before her.
She is Glasto Girl, and she is simply wildly, deliriously happy.
That happiness feels strange in these anguished times, like a throwback to some distant, innocent time in the past. It’s not druggy, or mocking, or ironic, or partisan in any way.
It is just happy.
Where does she come from, Glasto Girl? And, more importantly, where does she go to during the rest of the year? For those of us who see much of the outside world through a screen, she seems like a mirage – a brief, passing miracle of ordinariness.
I was thinking about that when through the computer screen came another Glastonbury act – an enraged, long-haired guy strutting about the stage spouting hate-filled political views, cursing a record executive he used to work for – ‘that bald cunt,’ as he described him – and then leading the crowd in another singalong chant.
It went ‘Death to the IDF!’ And the audience joined in.
Hang on, what was happening here? Where had Glasto Girl gone? Was she somewhere else, enjoying a happy glass of wine, or smoking a happy spliff, or strumming a happy guitar by a happy campfire, or making happy love with her partner in her little tent?
Or is it possible that she was still in front of the stage, still chanting – but now for death and violence?
There’s something odd and unsettling going on here. The veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson has asked whether people, if they had, as he had, seen young teenage boys writhing in agony after their knees had been shot, would think twice before calling their group ‘Kneecap’.
Violence has become gamified. Hatred has a catchy beat. When young men slaughtered and brutalised festival-goers, they were playing to that soundtrack. So were young soldiers shooting at those trying to get food for their families. The reality of what they were doing had somewhere along the line become lost in the video playing in their minds. The bloody, agonising reality of the cruelty of one human to another had been dulled and anaesthetised.
It was just another fiction, in which they were the heroes, a song to which they were all singing along.
