"Leonardo Was Overrated."

Talk about hataz. I was idling in Sainsbury's –– by the way, why is everybody suddenly calling Sainsbury's "Sainsbury"? –– and when I was finished looking at the Lego and the crisps multi-packs I wandered to the magazine racks. Why are there about twenty magazines about "coarse" carp fishing?

A real impulse buy –– don't you want

to read about "perch on worms"?

When we were moving our stuff into my current residence, I was talking to the movers. I had boxes marked "statuary" and "brickettes" –– and I very sheepishly admitted that they actually contained Star Wars figures and Lego kits. One of the movers was just eighteen and had only started tentatively watching the Star Wars films. I was counseling him about navigating the prequels ("the one with the long scene in the library is good") without going into slagging off Jar Jar Binks too harshly. Why bother after all. And the "gaffer" of the bunch said, "I hate Star Wars." Then unprompted, and defiantly, he added, "I also hate football."

"Whaddaya like then," I asked. 

I willed him to say "Silver age Phantom Stranger comics."

He said, "Angling."

I guess there is an underground of this –– like Trump voters and neo-Nazis. You never meet them maybe, except in Didcot car parks, but they are out there and they are multiplying. 

Is this already a joke?

Should I even be commenting?

That is not my subject. My subject ––  as I started to say –– is those hataz who do everybody down out of bitterness and self-disgust at their own awful failure at the game of life. Like the readers of All About History magazine, who take some solace in the suggestion that Leonardo was "not all that":

Fuck Leonardo, his flawed inventions and his abandoned art! 

So what if he invented helicopters in the sixteenth century.

I wonder what appetite this cover article serves: "There's a real demand out there to see the Western canon dragged down and beaten up by mediocrities and hacks."

"Next issue: Was Shakespeare a total dunce?"