When the Bye Bye makes the moral

I have long been a fan of Bye Bye.

When the Bye Bye makes the moral

I have long been a fan of Bye Bye.

At 11 p.m. on December 31, all of Quebec stopped to take stock of a year spent together.

Tradition

It was a real vector of collective cohesion, a formidable tradition.

Some editions have become true classics.

But the formula got stuck.

I will be told that the debate on the Bye bye is another tradition. It's not false.

But something deeper is also at play. We saw it last Saturday.

Let's just say it: little by little, the Bye bye stopped being humorously interested in the year of Quebec society. He talks less about Quebec society and the world than about Quebec television, which has become self-referential. It is enough to not be up to date on our TV series to not understand much at the end of the year review. The artistic community believes it speaks to Quebec society, but first speaks to itself. It works with inside jokes.

But even more, this small community feels more and more invested with a moralizing mission. From one year to the next, he seems to want to resume the function of the priests of yesteryear, telling us what to think, and what not to think.

We know the song: Quebec would be racist, minorities would be dominated, the conservatives would be imbeciles, and so on.

Of course, there is the annual concession to political incorrectness, to take account, too, of popular sensibility. This year was the sketch about the censorship of an old episode of Daughters of Caleb by Netflix. All the stupidity of the time was there, and was brilliantly denounced. As if all of a sudden, our artists came out of the politically correct catechism to joke, making fun of what they adore publicly if not full-time.

But that was the exception, not the rule.

I have a guess.

The artists, deep down, are torn.

On the one hand, they know what slogans they have to repeat in order to function in their community, to obtain subsidies, to be able to work, quite simply. Their environment, let's not forget, is the most conformist there is.

However, I do not exclude that some actors or comedians really adhere to woke nonsense. Perhaps by dint of giving pledges to the system, they convert to it, and then are zealous to make it known in the media.

Conformism

On the other side, several artists are suffocating.

Those who frequent our art colony outside working hours will hear many of its eminent figures say how tired they are of their environment.

A filmmaker will whisper how tired he is of being excluded from a considerable number of grants because he has the bad taste of being white.

Such a novelist will confess her exasperation at the generalized suspicion cast on the relations between men and women, as if the desire between the sexes was irreducibly linked to the “culture of rape”.

But the main thing remains: on December 31, Quebecers gathered in front of their televisions were treated to a moral lesson that was not even funny.

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