TOO GOOD TO CHECK: What Abba can teach Greta Thunberg.
When Greta Thunberg set sail with a 51-vessel flotilla from Barcelona last month, she no doubt knew that her attempts to “break the illegal siege of Gaza” would face pushback. But she might not have expected to be serenaded with Abba songs on the high seas.
Greta and her activists claim that Israeli drones hacked their radios just off the coast of Crete, blasting the Swedish band’s 1980 hit Lay All Your Love On Me through the speakers.
Putting aside how much of this is true or not, and whether a flotilla of activists is the answer to the Israel-Gaza war, I, for one, am very glad that Greta got the chance to listen to some Abba. They may have some good advice for her current predicament.
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The first time you heard Dancing Queen maybe you were at a wedding, a school disco or a basement karaoke parlour after one too many drinks. You probably threw your hands in the air, you were “having the time of your life”.
But at some point, in all our lives, we start to see the sadness of the song. Because Dancing Queen isn’t about the youthful dancer having a great time of it. It’s about the singer, watching from afar.
The singer sees everyone “digging the dancing queen”. But it’s not her. Maybe it was once, but now she’s been replaced by a younger, more exciting up and comer. It’s an elegiac paean to life’s tragedies, culminating in an uplifting acceptance that yes, maybe you can’t always be the dancing queen, but you can still enjoy the disco.
I get the impression that Greta hasn’t quite swallowed this pill yet. Hauled out of obscurity and into fame when she was still a child, she can’t quite let go. Maybe this is why she’s pivoted causes: moving on from wind turbines and donning herself in a Keffiyeh as the spotlight shifted.
Why it’s as if, “The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself” or something.
UPDATE: Great moments in tolerance for diversity: “Greta Thunberg’s flotilla bound for Gaza has descended into chaos after pro-Palestine activists quit the convoy when they learnt LGBTQ+ campaigners were on board, it has been claimed…Between the defections, the meltdowns, and now Israel’s disco-level trolling, Greta’s Gaza cruise is looking less like a ‘humanitarian mission’ and more like a floating farce.”