Speech is silvern, said the old proverb, but silence is golden; and notwithstanding the recent disgraceful attacks on free speech, I more often find myself longing for freedom from speech, for example on trains, than freedom of it. The banality of so much conversation, including my own, appalls me. Much conversation is not so much the expression as the suppression of thought.
Recently, I happened on another advantage of freedom, if not from speech exactly, at least the freedom from the sound of speech. I happened to see on my computer an interview with a political figure who was being interviewed on the subject of education, but with the sound turned off. It was, in a way, very revealing.
Perhaps the interviewee was speaking nothing but the plainest good sense, though, given the general ratio of bilge to common sense, I rather doubted it on purely statistical grounds. What was interesting was to observe the facial expressions of the man, from which mere sound would have been a distraction.
Clearly, he was speaking fluently, or at least without interruption. There was no hesitation or hint of doubt in his manner. I suppose this might have been because he was very well-informed on the subject, but again I rather doubted it. I would imagine that in his case, certainty and assertiveness were to him what the grin was to the Cheshire cat: It was what remained behind when all else had disappeared. He would have been as categorical questioned on any subject whatever. Certainty was his métier.
There was something more, however, something even more alarming: His certainty was obviously accompanied by hatred, as if he were attacking a person whose differing opinion were the menace of a dangerous enemy. There was no humor in what the interviewee said, only a kind of savage dogmatism.
This brought me to reflect on the nature of modern hatreds. There is no new emotion under the sun, of course, but it seems to me that hatred is now in the very air that we breathe, in a greater concentration than at any time in my life that I can remember.
Some of it seems to be almost free-floating, to preexist its object, such that when an object presents itself that can plausibly be hated, it attaches itself to it with avidity or relief. People therefore hate in disproportion to any cause, and I do not entirely exclude myself from this tendency. I find myself hating figures who have done me no personal harm, or at worst only harm in the abstract.
I am not by nature a great hater, perhaps because I am too lazy to maintain such a high-energy emotion for long: I can’t be bothered with it. When I look back on my life, as increasingly I do, I try to think of those whom I have hated, and they have been really very few. The first that comes to mind was a nurse who took a malicious delight in informing on, or bearing false witness against, those who were inferior to her in the hierarchy. She enjoyed inflicting genuine harm on them, seemingly from what Coleridge called, mistakenly in the case of Iago to which he first applied it, motiveless malignity. She liked doing harm for its own sake.
There was also a coroner, who I thought was a pompous ass, who once humiliated me in his court for no good reason, criticizing me for not spending much time with each of my patients. Of course I didn’t; I had a lot of patients to see and little time to see them in. It was not I who determined the conditions in which I worked. The coroner was merely trying to demonstrate to the relatives of the deceased (whose death was not my fault) how much he sympathized with them, and I was the means by which he did it.
For a number of years (about three), I dreamed of revenging myself on these two people—actually the only ones whose name would occur to me if I were to undergo a test of free association with the words “those whom you have hated.” For example, I thought that if I met the coroner in a social situation with his wife, which was not impossible, I would tell him to his face, in front of his wife, that he was a jumped-up, self-important ass and then leave him and her to stew in my opinion. I would never have done it in practice, and soon came to realize that it would have been a very wrong thing to do in any case. And now my hatred of him has long since dissipated completely.
But oddly enough, I now catch myself hating distant political figures, only one or two of whom are generally among the worst in the world—Kim Il-Sung, for example. Others I hate with an unreasoning hatred; they are bad, all right, but they do not approach Kim’s level of evil, nor do they affect the course of my life very much.
It is said that love makes the world go round, but I think that hatred is the far stronger force. Together with envy and resentment, to which it is closely allied, it is by far the strongest political emotion. I am aware of its destructive potential and try to control it in myself, though expunging it altogether is more difficult.
Why hatred, and so much of it, directed at figures whose defects are often more symbolic than truly destructive of one’s life (I am not talking of horribly oppressed people who have “objective” reasons for hatred, or people who have been the victims of true malignity)?
Hatred is enjoyable. Among other things, it assures the person who feels it that he is capable of generous outrage. Who has not felt the pleasures of hatred? We enjoy reading about hateful characters much more than reading about good persons, and it requires much more literary skill to make good or lovable people interesting to a reader than hateful ones. We are primed, so to speak, to hate.
No doubt evolutionists have an explanation for it: that the savannas of Africa from which mankind emerged were full of dangerous enemies whom we anthropomorphized and to whom we ascribed the worst motives. Hatred assists survival.
But why so much hatred today among those humans who, all things considered, are the most fortunate who have ever lived? Perhaps the idea that life is perfectible, and ought therefore to be perfect, has something to do with it. Since life is supposedly perfectible, an explanation must be sought for why it is not; and in a single word, the explanation is enemies, whom naturally we hate.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
The National Health Service is worshipped by the Brits, not least those who don’t have to queue up to use it.
But when you subject it to scrutiny, it soon reveals itself to be taking the most astonishing liberties.
“Our NHS,” as Brits like to call it, started very, very quietly hawking people’s medical notes in 2021—or as they put it, sharing them for research purposes.
This came as a huge shock to most people when they eventually found out, because this incredible change in their patient rights—in their basic human rights—was not publicly announced with any kind of fanfare or warning.
It was simply legally presumed that you agreed, unless you found out and specified otherwise, and as this was during the pandemic, people were a bit preoccupied.
The NHS is not just an arm of the state, it is a very strong arm. I would argue the strongest arm. It has a powerful emotional hold over people. It knows all the tricks. I don’t see it as benign, doling out “free” health care for all.
That is a romantic idea but not how it works out in practice: more like some pretty average to poor health care for some people who get to the front of the queue in time if they’re lucky, and not at all free because the bill was in their sky-high taxes. Any dealings I’ve had with it have been nightmarish, but maybe that’s just me.
In any case, most people seem to like the idea, so they go on paying for it (and not getting much of it) with their National Insurance Contributions.
When you weigh up the tax you pay, the control the NHS takes, and the odd A&E dash with a broken limb they might fix right if it’s not too busy, or cataract operation you might qualify for in your 80s if you don’t go blind before they get round to you, it’s a very poor bargain. Nevertheless, belief in the NHS persists as a sort of national religion, the only thing Brits take pride in, due to the relentless PR campaign persuading them they own it—“Our NHS.” (Very clever. People don’t like to criticize what they feel is theirs.)
Meanwhile, the control the NHS exerts over citizens is kept very much under wraps, so as not to tarnish its golden, angelic reputation.
You would only know your medical records were about to become fair game for Big Pharma if you happened to come across a very vague warning that some general practitioners’ offices put out, in an email or text to patients.
If you could then work out how to do it, you could have stopped your notes becoming unsecured by going on to the NHS central website and negotiating a very long and complex process to “Choose if your confidential patient information is used for research and planning.”
You could opt out unless you wanted your private notes, your private conversations with your doctor, used for “purposes beyond your individual care and treatment.” Who would? Seriously?
It was made clear on this website at the start of this change that there is no deadline for opting out of the NHS sharing your confidential patient information. You can make your choice at any time. The problem is, unless you knew this was happening and opted out before the start of it happening, by the time you do find out, your medical notes have kind of been let out of the bag. You can’t exactly get your confidential chats with your doctor back into the bag once the bag has been plundered, if you see what I mean.
I managed to opt out in time, and it wasn’t easy. It was one of those forms where unless you tick all the boxes, including some quite hidden ones, the change did not register.
I persevered and completed the form, much to the system’s disgust. It triggered warnings tantamount to the middle-seat threat when you book a budget airline ticket and try to select random seat allocation to avoid spending more money.
“Are you sure you wish to proceed with preventing the manufacture of essential medicines, potentially killing millions of innocent children in the third world?” That sort of thing.
I then told everyone I knew about it. My friends and family—who, to be fair to them, were coming to terms with me being an anti-vaxxer—all told me I was mad.
Then they checked it out and came back to say, actually, I was right. They couldn’t believe it. Their NHS was about to assume they agreed to their medical data being passed around.
A few weeks ago, people were not alerted properly to a second phase of this process.
Another initiative, billed as nothing to worry about, was quietly alluded to by the health secretary Wes Streeting.
Just a bit of “streamlining” and “digitizing” how your medical notes are stored and accessed and by whom, he said.
Any employee within the NHS, which employs 1.5 million people, will now be able to access your notes—not just your doctor—and pass them around the entire health care system, which includes the social care system and probably intersects with welfare and policing in certain circumstances deemed health and safety or safeguarding, let’s face it.
I think we have to assume that any state operative can now have a good old poke around a person’s medical history—and mine would furnish them with plenty of juicy goings-on during my misspent youth, along with my recent vaccine hesitancy.
Mr. Streeting, 41, who underwent surgery for kidney cancer in 2021, only to find another lump in his body recently that had to be investigated, seems to have an undimmed enthusiasm for developing ever more newfangled drugs and vaccines.
He said he wants to “transform healthcare in England” by working with big tech and pharma companies to develop new treatments, saying he would get the “best possible deal” for the NHS. I bet he will. But will he get the best and, more important, the safest treatments for us—and himself?
Despite fears over breaching privacy and creating a target for hackers, our entire medical history will be readable by anyone with access to the system, and whomever they decide to leak it to.
They have promised a “cast-iron guarantee of security” for patient data. So we know the security will be rubbish.
The health secretary told The Guardian the development will mean “the NHS can work hand in hand with the life sciences sector, offering access to our large and diverse set of data.” Our data.
And without further ado, he unveiled plans for “portable medical records” giving every NHS patient all their information stored digitally in one handy place.
Handy for us, or handy for Them? And no wonder people in the States worry about American versions of public health care. Worry away, I say. Worry you’ll be tagged and counted and subjected to this shit if you’re not careful, and for what? The chance to join a queue for some free hospital treatments you might get or you might die first because the wait is so long?
Mr. Streeting said: “The revolution taking place today in science and technology will transform the way we receive healthcare.” And then he invoked the sainted socialist name of Nye Bevan to seal the deal.
All stand for the national health anthem! Sound of trumpets and moving brass-band music…
“Nye Bevan would have had no idea in 1948, but the model he created makes the NHS the best-placed healthcare system in the world to take advantage of rapid advances in data, genomics, predictive and preventative medicine.”
You’re darn right Bevan had no idea that was gonna happen…
“It allows us to introduce patient passports, so whether you’re seeing a GP or a hospital surgeon, they have your full medical history. We will be able to judge a child’s risk of disease from birth, so they can take steps to prevent it striking.”
See how he sneaked that through? They’re resurrecting a terrifying behemoth. Vaccine passports, if you remember, ran aground when enough people pointed out they were monstrous. But here we see the concept revived, slightly rebranded. Patient passports.
The way this works, I think, is that in the not-so-distant future your GP contacts you and calls you in to tell you that these are the injections you and your children will need to have this year. This is what the system is coming up with for you and your family, tailor-made for your requirements. Lucky you.
What do you mean, you don’t want it? You’ve been selected to receive it by the system! This is science. The system and the science are never wrong!
Now let’s imagine some leakage scenarios. At some point in the future all vaccinations including Covid and cancer are mandatory. Despite being called up for them, you’ve managed to simply pay a series of fines, but then your doctor loses patience with you and leaks your vaccine refusal to the police.
You’re charged, convicted, and imprisoned for two years for endangering public health, and your children are taken into care. At the end of one year you’re offered early release if you comply and have the vaccines recommended to you.
It probably won’t be that scenario. It will be another one. But I bet it will be just as scary.
As we gather this Thanksgiving, it’s easy to take abundance for granted.
Leftovers are practically guaranteed.
It wasn’t always this way.
For most of history, there were no Thanksgiving feasts. Hunger, if not starvation, was the norm.
Today, supermarkets are stocked with exotic foods from all over the world. Most of it is more affordable than ever. Even after President Joe Biden’s 8% inflation, Americans spend less than 12% of our income on food, half of what they spent 100 years ago.
Why?
Because free markets happened. Capitalism happened.
When there is rule of law and private property, and people feel secure that no thief or government will take their property, farmers find new ways to grow more on less land. Greedy entrepreneurs lower costs and deliver goods faster. Consumers have better options.
Yet today many Americans trash capitalism, demanding government “fixes” to make sure everyone gets equal amounts of this and that.
But it’s in countries with the most government intervention where there are empty store shelves and hungrier people.
In socialist Venezuela, affordable food is hard to find.
In Cuba, government was going to make everything plentiful. But people suffered so much that, to prevent starvation, the Castros broke from communist principles and rented out state-owned land to private capitalists.
Millions still go hungry around the world. The cause is rarely drought or “income inequality” or colonialism, but government control. Corruption, tariffs, political self-dealing and short-sighted regulations block food from reaching those who need it most.
This week, we celebrate the Pilgrims, who learned this lesson the hard way.
When they first landed in America, they tried communal living. The harvest was shared equally. That seemed fair.
But it failed miserably. A few Pilgrims worked hard, but others didn’t, claiming “weakness and inability,” as William Bradford, the governor of the colony, put it.
They nearly starved.
Desperate, Bradford tried another approach. “Every family,” he wrote, “was assigned a parcel of land.”
Private property! Capitalism! Suddenly, more pilgrims worked hard.
Of course they did. Now they got to keep what they made.
Bradford wrote, “It made all hands very industrious.”
He spelled out the lesson “The failure of this experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men proves the emptiness of the theory … taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community … would make a state happy and flourishing.”
Fast forward 400 years, and many Americans have forgotten what Bradford learned.
I see why socialism is popular. The idea of one big, harmonious collective feels good.
But it brings disaster.
Family dinners already have plenty of disagreements — children fight; adults bicker. Imagine what that would be like among millions of strangers.
Collectivist systems encourage dependency, stifle initiative and waste resources.
The same communal conceit that nearly starved the Pilgrims destroyed lives in the Soviet Union and led to mass starvation in China.
When everyone is forced into the same plan, most people will take as much as they can and produce as little as they can get away with.
Economists call it the “tragedy of the commons” referring to a common plot of land, controlled by, say, sheep owners. Each has an incentive to breed more sheep, which then eat the common’s grass until all of it is gone, and everyone goes hungry.
Only when the commons is divided into private property does each owner agree to limit his herd’s grazing so there will be enough for his sheep to eat tomorrow.
These same principles apply to many aspects of our lives: We thrive when individuals have a deed to their property and are confident that they can keep what they create. Then they create more.
That’s what the Pilgrims learned: Incentives matter. Capitalist ownership is what creates American abundance.
Every Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for free markets and private property.
They are the ingredients of prosperity.
This Thanksgiving, Democrats can be thankful that they have scores of deluded scribblers making excuses for Kamala Harris’ blowout loss to a man they’ve spent years calling a rapist, a convicted felon and America’s Hitler. (All I can say is, fellas, the Pulitzer Prize isn’t going to win itself.)
One point they want to make absolutely clear is: TRUMP DID NOT WIN IN A LANDSLIDE!
OK, fine, if that makes you happy, liberals.
In an interminable column in The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells spreads the good tidings that Democrats didn’t lose on account of their woke positions because they lied about their woke positions.
What do you say NOW, Trumpsters?
He proceeds to lie himself about Harris’ long-standing support for taxpayer-funded transgender operations for prisoners, claiming it was one innocent little remark she made in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire. I know the Times has nurtured and husbanded this lie, but there’s an internet, and Harris is all over it, bragging to a transgender interviewer about how, as attorney general, she made damn sure that trans prisoners in California would receive “gender-affirming” surgeries.
Wallace-Wells goes on to muse that perhaps Harris should have had a “Sister Souljah moment” on transgenders — then immediately denounces his own idea as “morally grotesque.”
Way to fake out the voters, David!
Praising Democratic phonies like Sen. Jon Ossoff for “pointedly disavow[ing]” a slew of Harris’ clearly held positions, like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police and abolishing ICE, Wallace-Wells argues, “it is really hard to see which if any supposedly toxic left-wing positions made their way into public policy or even campaign ads or speeches on the trail.”
Yes, exactly. Democrats’ positions are so toxic that smart Democratic politicians are forced to repudiate them. (Something Kamala never did.) That illustrates the toxicity of wokeness; it does not contradict it.
But Wallace-Wells can’t understand why Americans “continued to associate a social-justice agenda with Democrats, if so few of them have been publicly pushing those positions over the past five years.”
[Waving my hand frantically.]
Let’s take a look at the Democrats’ official 2024 party platform! It’s difficult to claim the voters were confused about what the Democrats stand for when party’s written declaration of what it stands for begins with a “Land Acknowledgement” about how we stole our land from the Indians:
“We honor the communities native to this continent, and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history” — and more such glop, for three more paragraphs. (How about you guys acknowledge the half-sheet of paper you wasted writing this stupid land thing?)
Has any group of people ever hated their own country as much as Democrats hate our country? This week, we’ll get rafts of these “We Suck” histories in honor of Thanksgiving, as media outlets, schools and universities publish their horseshit versions of our country’s past.
Take the Smithsonian Institution’s “Everyone’s history matters: The Wampanoag Indian Thanksgiving story deserves to be known”:
“The spirit of amity of the first Thanksgiving evaporated” [on account of the settlers’] “fear, xenophobia and self-righteousness … [F]ew English bothered to learn the Algonquin languages. … Resentment among sons and daughters [of the Indigenous] who had seen their fathers humiliated, threatened and robbed of their heritage could not be contained.” (Worst of all, they forgot the mini-marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole.)
That was written in 2017 by Lindsay McVay, a midwit senior at Central Florida University, who now goes by “They/Them” as “Global Communications Specialist” for Planned Parenthood. It remains on the website of one of our most esteemed national institutions and appears near the top of any Google search for “the true history of Thanksgiving.”
Sounds like Lindsay hates her own sex, live babies and America, so, really, who better to comment on our history?
I ask again: Has any group of people ever hated the accomplishments of their own ancestors as much as liberals hate our Founding Fathers? (Possible explanation: Perhaps their ancestors weren’t America’s Founding Fathers — another problem with mass immigration.)
For example, there are lots of political parties in Israel, many of them quite liberal, but it’s inconceivable that any would begin their party platform with an “acknowledgement … that our country was built on Palestinian homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Palestinians people throughout history blah, blah blah …”
Does the Israeli Smithsonian have a write-up of the Israelis’ “fear, xenophobia and self-righteousness,” or the “sons and daughters [of Palestinians] who had seen their fathers humiliated, threatened and robbed of their heritage”?
Even when the superseding culture is not manifestly superior to the culture it replaced, as Israel and America’s are, do the winners anywhere else spend centuries apologizing to the losers? Do the Zulus in South Africa “acknowledge” that they’re living on land they stole from the Ndwandwe and Dutch? Do the Red Chinese begin party meetings with groveling apologies to Chiang Kai-Shek?
It’s like a guy wins you over from your old boyfriend and you’re now happily married, but for the rest of your lives, before you have sex, he has to read an acknowledgement: “We honor your previous boyfriends and recognize that our marriage was built on the foreshortened romances with [Jack, Joe, insert names of ex-boyfriends here].”
It’s perfectly obvious that the Democratic Party is full of deeply disturbed individuals. This Thanksgiving, the rest of us can be thankful that voters noticed. In a landslide.
“We are entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.” So wrote some bald-faced phonies in The New York Times, but they would, wouldn’t they? I find the idea that a parent once gave a word processor to a son or daughter who now writes for the Times one of the most shocking cases of child abuse. Everything that has to do with the Times nowadays is abusive, especially where facts and the truth are concerned. Unleashing entirely fabricated stories has now become a specialty for the paper, the latest being one that headlines Trump’s win was a squeaker. I often wonder what goes through a hack’s mind when ordered to blatantly lie.
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times hacks who put out hard left propaganda until earlier this month are now contemplating the importance of hearing from both sides. Not so The Noo Yawk Times or The Noo Yawker. Bagelites hate Trump and working Americans, hence the puppets at the helm of these two cesspools have ordered nonstop loathing to seep from their pages. On the idiot box, MSNBC and CNN viewership is in free fall, but I know my hacks. I would say 90 percent of journalists are lefties, hence they’ll be back to their old lies before you can say “Russian collusion.”
One CNN female hack reported how she saw “fellow reporters crying and hugging in the hallways….” Does anyone really believe that the crying jags will cease once Trump begins to govern? The crying jag will become the lying game, c’est tout, as they say in the land of cheese. The good news is that the media landscape is quite different from how it was when I was a fresh-eyed columnist learning the ropes. It is filled with more options, hence the audiences who have departed will not be coming back anytime soon. The lefties have only themselves to blame because, as a wise man who should never have gone to the theater once said, you can’t fool all the people all of the time.
The latest wailing by the media is regarding Trump’s promise to carry out “mass deportations.” Although most Americans recognize that there is nothing at all offensive about the idea of removing those who have entered illegally, the media see it as sacrilege and a Trump-induced horror. The hand-wringing by the hacks makes one want to throw up. One CNN female fantasizes about having the military open fire on her as she shields illegal immigrants. Is this journalism?
And then there is the irresistibly abominable Netanyahu, lauded as the greatest leader since Napoleon by the pro-Israel media over here. Netanyahu, labeled a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, has called the arrest warrant anti-Semitic. So what else is new? Any criticism of Israel since October 7, 2023, is instantly labeled anti-Semitism, and the ploy is working. It is hard to criticize the slaughter—in fact, the genocide—going on in Gaza and on the West Bank as I write, when the response is an accusation of anti-Semitism.
Yet the plain fact is that after the Hamas outrage of October 7, 2023, the Israelis have had more than their pound of flesh; they’ve had ten tons of it and more—unless you change the moral standing of genocide, that is. The numbers are horrendous. If 17,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, the 33,000 other dead are women, children, and old men. In the West Bank hundreds of Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli settlers, and of course in Beirut, where numbers of dead, wounded, and crippled for life are impossible to number correctly. But mentioning the innocents who have died is now deemed anti-Semitic by Israel’s backers in the American media and universities.
Then there is the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, with Gaza a prime example. More than 200 mostly Arab journalists have been killed in the fighting, numbers that cannot be verified but, even if true, are ignored by the world’s media. So, am I correct in asking what the hell is going on? Is the Israeli lobby so powerful that the only voices against genocide are those of Muslim Americans? Israel’s lobby, working closely with Washington insiders such as Albright, Kagan, Abrams, Feith, and so on, has led Uncle Sam to fight wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon, yet any voice disputing the need for American blood to be shed in these places is immediately suspected of anti-Semitism and shut off.
It is no coincidence that since Netanyahu became prime minister, Uncle Sam has gone on a warpath in the Middle East and Africa. The Dutch have finally shown some gumption and declared that they will arrest him if he lands anywhere in Europe, but the Dutch are dreaming. Neither the Germans nor the Italians will, and the Hungarians have even invited him for a state visit. I love Viktor Orban, but someone must have put something mind-altering in his goulash. Mark my words: If Netanyahu ever ends up behind bars, the killing of innocents will suddenly drop like the proverbial lead balloon, and Uncle Sam will stop going to war in faraway places.
Your opinion of the hit movie Wicked: Part 1, a 160-minute extrapolation of the 90-minute opening act of the Broadway musical Wicked, depends upon your answer to the question: When it comes to Wicked, can there be too much of a good thing?
Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the freshman year in sorcery school of the rivals Glinda, the Good Witch, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, has made approaching $1.7 billion just in Times Square since opening in 2003. Evidently, a lot of people really like it, the more of it the better, and they can’t wait for the film of the second act next Thanksgiving.
Then again, a lot of people (many of them straight men) think a little Wicked goes a long way.
On the third hand, if you aren’t very familiar with the current platinum age of Broadway, seeing the movie version of Wicked can be a cheap way to familiarize yourself with a representative 21st-century musical.
Broadway was very near the center of American popular culture for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. But then Broadway musicals declined, along with Times Square, then roared back into unimagined prosperity in this century.
Wicked is now the second-highest-grossing (behind only The Lion King) and fourth-longest-running Broadway play at 8,168 performances, triple what My Fair Lady could manage from 1956 to 1962 during Broadway’s golden age.
There are good reasons people pay three digits to see shows on Broadway. (Wicked’s average ticket price is $159.) The amount of high-priced effort put into entertaining you in person is probably greater on Broadway than anywhere else in the world other than, say, the Salzburg opera festival. Wicked, for instance, costs about $100,000 per performance to put on (but it has lately been averaging over $300,000 in ticket revenue). Of course, union stagehands in Manhattan’s Local-1 can make more than a half million per year, but they do quite the job flying the Wicked Witch around the stage on her broom while she belts out “Defying Gravity.”
Interestingly, Wicked is representative of a trend toward mass-market Broadway shows aiming for distinctive demographic niches: in this case, girls and gays. Big-budget cultural products used to work to keep both sexes entertained. But now we tend to see more specialization, such as the current Wicked vs. Gladiator II or last year’s Barbie vs. Oppenheimer.
The original Wizard of Oz, for instance, was essentially a girl’s movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy. But it also featured three famous male comic-relief characters—the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion—so little boys, who tend to be deplorably sexist, stayed interested.
Later, over the decades, gay men culturally appropriated The Wizard of Oz, calling themselves “friends of Dorothy.” The Stonewall Riot that conventionally marks the beginning of the Gay Lib era was just hours after Judy Garland’s funeral, when emotions were running high. Some say that the gay pride rainbow flag was adopted as a tribute to the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
And yet, as far as I can tell, The Wizard of Oz probably had no more gay subtext than the average film of its time and much less than some (e.g., Laura).
Class trips to New York for eighth and twelfth graders are both a big market in themselves for musicals, and an important mechanism for making fans for life. So, many shows, such as Wicked, are aimed at adolescents. (Thus, this film about going off to college is rated a mild PG, and is suitable for children old enough to not be terrified of witches.)
In turn, this has led to the creation of boy musicals like the South Park guys’ Book of Mormon and Hamilton, the fourth- and fifth-highest-grossers ever. My guess is that Hamilton started out as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s well-intentioned attempt to create the perfect musical for class trips, one that history teacher chaperones would endorse and boys would enjoy. (The girls and gay boys could be expected to be thrilled by any Broadway musical, even one about founding fathers debating economic policy.) It’s not Miranda’s fault that rich grown-up Obama voters then went embarrassingly nuts over Hamilton.
In contrast to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked has two female leads and little in the way of a comic-relief character, male or female. It has a romantic interest for the girls to fight over, a prince who is likable and cool, but he’s more witty than funny.
Jeff Goldblum is low-key amusing as the Wizard of Oz, but he got me thinking that with AI the movie now could have made happen the original 1939 conception of casting the great W.C. Fields as the Wizard. These days, younger people seem to have barely heard of Fields, but if he’d come on at the end of Oz, his fame would be immortal.
The basic idea of Wicked, derived from gay Catholic children’s author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel about the origin of evil, is that one frenemy (Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz) is born blonde and thus privileged like Billie Burke, while the other (Elphaba, based on L. Frank Baum’s three initials) is born green and thus is oppressed by society for not being the pretty one. So who can blame Elphaba for becoming Margaret Hamilton’s socially constructed Wicked Witch of the West?
The original 2003 Broadway musical cast blonde cutie-pie Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and the tall, Jewish, pretty actress Idina Menzel as green Elphaba.
In contrast, in 2021, at the peak of the George Floyd racial reckoning, the movie producers thought it a timely idea to cast Cynthia Erivo, an aging plain-Jane Nigerian-Briton with a face made for viewing from the cheap seats, as the green girl. But by 2024, this brainstorm (green and black!) has turned out a little too on the nose in the ethnic aggrievement department. (Italian-American pop star Ariana Grande plays the amusing Glinda in the manner of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde.)
Speaking of noses, the filmmakers didn’t dare mess with Erivo’s standard short, wide Nigerian nose, so she doesn’t look at all like a European conception of a pointy-nosed witch.
Beyond the nose, the essence of witchiness is a face that looks attractive when young but isn’t likely to age well: Think of Sarah Jessica Parker in 1991’s L.A. Story or Madonna in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan. Madonna looked plenty sexy then, but you also couldn’t help noticing that without pervasive plastic surgery there would come a time when the only role she’d be suitable for is fattening up Hansel for dinner.
Similarly, Menzel looked nice in 2003. But in her cameo in this movie, her strong jaw now stands out alarmingly, confirming the appropriateness of her casting back then.
Erivo, in contrast, has that black-don’t-crack look where it’s hard to tell whether she is 30 or 60. (I was pleased to see that black jazz genius Miles Davis vindicated my observation in his autobiography that it’s hard to tell how old black people are.) Trying to play a college freshman, the 37-year-old Erivo looks like your standard chip-on-her-shoulder black middle manageress. I kept expecting another student to try to touch her hair and then for her to file a complaint with the campus DEI department.
While some groups must be represented (for example, even the disabled are represented in Wicked by wheelchair-bound actress Marissa Bode as Elphaba’s sister, the witch who will get crushed by Dorothy’s falling house), others (such as the dwarves and midgets who played the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz) are never to be shown in our brave new world of representation for some but not for others.
The entertainment industry used to employ a lot of little people—a half century ago, I was at a San Fernando Valley park when about 100 dwarves and midgets showed up for what was evidently a big softball game on their social calendar. But now, huge-budget movies like Disney’s recent live-action Snow White and Wicked consider it politically inappropriate to depict little people. (Albinos are another group that you might think would qualify for diversity privileges; but they don’t either.)
To head off criticism, Wicked gave the leading dwarf in the acting business, Peter Dinklage, an offscreen role as the voice of a politically persecuted talking goat. (Don’t ask about this subplot.)
Instead, while we are assured by director John M. Chu that Munchkins now come in all sizes and colors, they seem to be portrayed as slightly shorter on average, like Asian-Americans. The main Munchkin character, fellow student Boq, is carefully depicted to be three or four inches shorter than the WASPy Prince, his rival for the hand of the tiny popular blonde Glinda. I suspect Chu, who is remarkably heterosexual for being the director of Wicked (he has a wife and five kids), is projecting upon the Munchkins his own high school days in Palo Alto, Calif., which Steven Spielberg found oppressive, as he pointed out at length in The Fabelmans sixty years later, due to having to compete for girls with tall gentile boys.
The score was composed by Stephen Schwartz, who previously had a couple of Broadway hits in the early-1970s hippie era with Godspell and Pippin. Wicked’s musical style is generic post-rock Broadway orchestral music. Even though Wicked has been a money machine for 21 years, I didn’t recognize any of the melodies. Back in Broadway’s 1950s golden age, hit musicals’ catchiest numbers were quickly hustled onto the radio, so that by the time a typical audience member got around to seeing the show a year into its run, he’d been hearing songs from it for months; hence, he was inclined to leave the theater humming some of the better-known tunes. But the last song I can recall making it past rock radio’s anti-Broadway barrier was Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” a half century ago. So now it’s quite feasible for somebody like me who doesn’t go out of my way to sample new show tunes to be utterly oblivious to the Wicked soundtrack even after two decades.
Ergo, that’s a long way round of saying that the music appeared to be fine, but that’s all I got out of it.
Wicked is an extreme example of what theater kids have obsessed over during the past couple of decades. Ultimately, however, despite their tendency toward current ideologies’ neuroses, I’m on the side of the theater kids and their life-affirming Let’s Put On a Show urge rather than Cancel Culture and their animus against life.
The thing that made Kamala’s cackle so irritating was that she’d do it when nobody else in the room was laughing. “I know, right? It’s hilarious, RIGHT? Guh-GLACK-guh-GLACKLE!” but nobody else was with her on the joke.
From a comedy perspective, it’s fine to laugh at a joke that the audience didn’t appreciate. Dennis Miller did that to perfection on Weekend Update, often smiling and proffering a dismissive “ha-haaaa” when a joke bombed, as if to say, “Hey, I thought it was a good gag even if you didn’t.”
What you can’t do, what kills the room, is if you try to strong-arm audience members into laughing at something they found unworthy of laughter. Stopping your set cold to go, “It’s funny, right? I mean, it’s hilarious, right? LET’S LAUGH NOW, RIGHT?”
Kamala reminds me of a character I created during my improv days: the comedian who’s all crowdwork and no jokes. Just pointing at the front row and going, “He knows what I’m talking about, amiright? She’s like, ‘Nuh-uh,’ but he’s like, ‘Oh yeah,’” and that’s the entire routine.
Komedy Kamala needs to believe that the room is laughing with her even when it isn’t. Whereas skilled comics, from Norm Macdonald to David Letterman to Johnny Carson, understood that you should never be in denial when a joke bombs—embrace it, forge a new joke from the failure—Kamala has to believe that she’s always killing it.
What else would you expect from an empty pantsuit who got where she is by giving out blowjobs? Kamala has a history of going to dinner with horny powerful men who pretend to like her jokes because that’s the easiest way to bed a bimbo.
Flatter her. Make her think she’s funny. Because if you don’t, the bimbo might say, “Wait, you don’t think I’m brilliantly hilarious? Hold on…are you just buying me dinner because you want the BJ?”
Kamala, having been humored throughout her life, can never accept that the room is not laughing along. She’s not psychologically capable of that epiphany. It would destroy her. Say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but she grudgingly accepts that many people dislike her. Hell, she’s thrived on that knowledge; adversarialism excites her. And that’s because her marriage is adversarial. She knows what her hillbilly whoremonger husband is all about, and that combative dynamic informs her actions.
But Kamala really does think the entire room is joining her laughter, even if there’s not a sound but her own guh-glackle-huh-GLACKLE!
To again relate this to comedy, Paul F. Tompkins is a leftist comedian who mercilessly patrols his colleagues to prevent any offense to trannies or other “protected” groups (Tompkins claims that censorship improves comedy). Tompkins is a talented guy; for me, Mr. Show is, along with SCTV, one of those “I know every routine by heart” iconoclastic examples of sketch work at its best. But Tompkins doesn’t want you to make fun of trannies. When the ugly dude in a dress wrecks the GameStop while screaming, “CALL ME MA’AM,” Tompkins needs to make sure that you know there’s no comedy gold to be mined. And he’ll fuck you up bad if you disagree.
Problem is, Tompkins, good leftist that he is, can’t think of himself as a bully or a censor.
Because good leftists are supposed to be against such things.
So, when he gives interviews on why jokes about trannies must not be allowed, he disingenuously phrases the matter as, “The audience has evolved. They don’t like jokes about our delicate transgender flowers. Therefore the absence of tranny jokes at comedy clubs has nothing to do with me or anyone else forcing that situation; the audience as a whole has moved beyond wanting to hear ‘hateful’ comedy.”
That’s bullshit, of course. As Dave Chappelle and others have ably demonstrated, there’s definitely an audience for tranny jokes. But like Kamala, Tompkins cannot face the reality that he’s browbeating, cudgeling the audience. He can only sleep at night thinking that the audience is with him.
This is the sickness. Reversed, but the same. Kamala forcing an audience that doesn’t want to laugh to laugh, Tompkins forcing an audience that wants to laugh to not laugh. And both delusionals are unwilling to admit that they’re ascribing organicity to something they themselves are artificially effectuating.
Which brings us to Newsom.
In June 2019, Newsom gave an online “state of the state” address. I wrote about it at the time. Because it was, what’s that word I compulsively overuse? Oh, right—“instructive.”
The gist of the address was that California in 2019 is no longer the California of the 1990s, the California that passed the tough-on-crime Three Strikes ballot proposition in a landslide (72 percent to 28 percent), the anti-illegal immigration Proposition 187 in a landslide (60 percent to 40 percent), and an Affirmative Action ban (not as much of a landslide—55 percent/45 percent—but there were a lot more blacks in CA in the ’90s).
In his address, Newsom declared that California has evolved from those days. Just like how comedy audiences no longer like humor at the expense of trannies, and how that happened organically and not because of bullies like Paul Tompkins forcing the change. Californians, Newsom cheerfully informed us, had moved past the “tough on crime, tough on Affirmative Action” days of the 1990s, and it happened completely on its own, and not because of engineering by the party that controls this one-party state and the verminous media that skews the information flow.
Newsom was cackling, and he thought the room was with him.
How many times have I hectored you people about the dangers of reality detachment? You don’t listen to me when I criticize rightists for doing it, but maybe you’ll get the point when I give you some leftist examples. Harris had convinced herself that the world was laughing with her, and where is she now?
Blowing Anthony Weiner in a Walmart parking lot (just a guess).
And Newsom? His 2019 “We’ve evolved from tough on crime/no Affirmative Action” fantasy has proved to be just that—a fantasy. In 2020 the Affirmative Action ban was renewed with overwhelming approval (a wider margin than in 1996—57 percent to 43 percent). San Francisco’s murderous Soros-backed DA was booted in 2022; L.A. and Alameda County’s murderous Soros-backed DAs were booted this month. The entire state voted to end Soros’ Proposition 47, the measure that decriminalized theft, in a landslide (the Prop. 47 reversal won 71 percent to 29 percent, carrying every county in the state…unheard of).
Even among California’s beans, Trump won 43 percent, as he did nationally.
May I put that in context for you? Eisenhower in 1952 got a mere 36 percent of the Jewish vote. More beans voted for a guy who they were told will put them in camps than Jews voted for a guy who for real got them out of camps.
Instructive, no?
In his arrogant 2019 address, Newsom was wrong on two counts. First, the tough-on-crime and anti–Affirmative Action voters are still here. Hated by the press, hated by the party in charge, but California has not “evolved,” any more than audiences have “evolved” to where they think Sam Brinton isn’t worthy of mockery.
Second, not only has the California electorate not “evolved,” but—from Newsom’s perspective—it’s gotten worse. Blacks have fled; the state’s down to 5 percent black (the California black vote for Trump was one. No, not one percent; one guy—Jimmy Walker, and that was only because Trump promised to make him Secretary of Dyn-o-Mite). Oygenflaygin Ashkenazis in L.A. County have been displaced by the virile and conservative Persians and the insane but right-leaning Orthodox.
And our beans? 43 percent for Trump isn’t bad, especially considering that there was zero local GOP outreach because our state GOP is run by imbeciles with the brainpower of Gilbert Grape’s brother and the dynamism of Gilbert Grape’s mother.
Newsom thought the room was laughing with him, but it wasn’t. Indeed, it had turned hostile, yet he remained detached from that reality. Conversely, there are a lot of Latinos who’d like to laugh along with the GOP, but the GOP is detached from reality too, in a different way. Newsom (like Kamala) is the comedian who thinks they’re killing when they’re not. The CA GOP is the comedian who has killer material but neither the confidence nor competence to make use of it.
When I hector the right, I get a lot of negative feedback. But the reason I hector is that you guys need to snap out of the bullshit that enthralls you. For example, have you ever asked yourselves, in 2014 when Soros enlisted Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich to lobby for the theft-decriminalization proposition, why he did that?
Why, in a blue state, did Soros have to hire Gingrich and Paul to be his bagmen?
Maybe some of you should stop obsessing over Alex Jones as he sleuths out the crisis-midgets Obama hired to fake Sandy Hook and spend a few minutes trying to sleuth out real-world mysteries.
Because the real world is actually super interesting if you give it a chance!
Soros partnered with Gingrich (a religious social conservative) and Paul (a libertarian conservative) because he realized that California had not “evolved” from the 1990s—the tough-on-crime mentality still existed—so he had to “take out” a demographic that could defeat his ballot measure.
Never call the Devil stupid.
Also, try to be as bright as the Devil if you want to defeat him.
Newsom got lost in reality detachment, wrongly thinking that his state no longer had the balls of thirty years ago. He also didn’t realize that, demographically, the state had moved past 1994 in a way that is very bad for his agenda (fewer blacks, fewer Woody Allen nebbishes, more Persians), while what he thought was good for his agenda (more beans) may not turn out to be so.
The defining moment of the 2024 election came two days before the 5th, when Harris was asked if she supported the reversal of Soros’ theft-decriminalization law.
And Harris refused to offer an opinion.
Harris, a Californian and the state’s former top lawwoman, wouldn’t offer an opinion on a defining matter of criminal justice.
Two days before the election, the illusion of the room laughing along failed. She froze on stage because she was confronted with a complexity: Her pollsters told her that the anti-Soros measure was going to win in a landslide…so support it. But her left flank—and Gingrich—told her that if she supported re-criminalizing crime, she’d lose the black vote (yes, “conservative” Gingrich advised Harris to side with Soros).
A simple question—do you support the re-criminalization of theft in your home state?—stymied Harris.
In her final 48 hours of public life, she finally came to terms with the fact that a joke either kills or bombs, and crowdwork alone can’t change that.
It was the day the cackle died.
Bye-bye, Miss Jamaican Mumbai.
Children can sometimes be very cruel—but also very inventive.
When I was a schoolboy myself during the 1990s, there was a performatively “suicidal” girl who constantly used to make millimeter-deep scratches in her wrist with a compass, thereby supposedly aiming to bleed to death very, very slowly indeed, perhaps even over the course of several consecutive academic terms. For this she gained no sympathy, merely the immortal nickname of “The Girl With Two Slits.” Our teachers seemed unbothered when they found out; the English department even handed out a special Certificate of Achievement to the boy who had thought up the unkind moniker on grounds of sheer verbal dexterity.
In any case, the Batman-villain-like label didn’t do Two-Slits any harm. She merely progressed on to staging deranged public acts of “phantom pregnancy” on the school field by lying down on the grass and arching her belly up, screaming and groaning loudly, before pushing out various random schoolbag items like a pencil case from inside her knickers as a new “baby” (I often wondered who the father could have been?) every dinnertime instead, so it is hardly as if the constant verbal persecution pushed her into a state of severe psychological instability and distress or anything.
Black Sheep Matter
By the time I was attending university in the early 2000s, I began to scent early winds of invective-based change. Viewing a documentary about a supposed increase in anti-Muslim “racism” across the nation in the wake of 9/11, I was amused to find the most severe reaction the hyperventilating presenter could discover was that some unknown youths had defaced a library book by writing the words “Paki girls have smelly minges” on the inside front cover with a Biro.
Rather than the intended horror and white shame this was supposed to instill, this pathetic info in fact only elicited one main response in my late-teenage self: How do we know it wasn’t intended as a compliment? Some people might like that kind of thing.
As a schoolboy, my own teachers had openly laughed at our harsh nicknames for one another. As a university student, actual national television documentaries were now being made about random infants informing one another in writing that their bits smelled like herring. What precisely had gone so horribly wrong in the interim?
In 1997, Tony Blair had been unwisely summoned from Gehenna by the British public at the voting booth, after which his left-wing New Labour Cabinet had introduced a whole raft of new hate-crime laws so ineptly framed that, in 2005, even Blair himself faced potential police prosecution after shouting the words “Fucking Welsh!” at a TV set following an irritating minor electoral setback in the principality one day, on the inflated grounds of “inciting racial hatred.”
By 2024, so far had the “hate-crime” foot rot set in that one member of the public was being investigated for calling another Welshman a “sheep shagger,” as per the Celts’ standard derogatory national stereotype. Again, when I was at school, we used to joke that, whilst the Welsh word for “cow” was buwch, and for “pig” was mochyn, for “sheep” it was leisure centwr. It never crossed our minds we might one day potentially be prosecuted for the fact. And then the cwnt named Blwr arrived…
Intentionally or otherwise, the New Labour Thought Police had unleashed a judicial monster—which is why, in mid-November this year, it suddenly emerged that supposedly overworked and underfunded U.K. police forces had been investigating schoolchildren as young as 9 for incredible trivia like calling one classmate a “retard” or saying another girl smelled “like fish.” Thank God the thought-criminals didn’t say she stank “like Paki girls’ minges” instead; they would have been transported to Australia in chains without trial immediately.
Non-Crime and Punishment
How in the name of Almighty Zeus can it now suddenly be considered a “crime” for small trainee humans to call one another hurty names in the classroom? The short answer is “It isn’t”…but the Great British Police Force can still investigate you for such things nonetheless. U.K. law today “enjoys” the truly Orwellian concept of a Non-Crime Hate Incident (NCHI), a “crime” that isn’t a crime, but has to be investigated as if it is, even though it isn’t. Introduced by the National College of Policing in 2014 under an alleged “Conservative” government (i.e., a continuity Blairite one in sheep shagger’s clothing), around 13,200 literal non-offenses were recorded on adults’ and children’s permanent legal records between June 2023 and 2024, even though they represent nothing actually illegal.
As you can’t (yet) officially be arrested and imprisoned for an NCHI, having the fact that you haven’t actually committed a crime placed upon your criminal record may initially sound like the judicial equivalent of a symptomless coma, i.e., a matter of zero consequence. Yet this is not so. Future employers can access such records should you apply for a sensitive job requiring a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check, like becoming a police officer, say. If the HR department accesses your CRB file and finds that, in 2006, you once called a horse gay, for example (a real case of post-Blair alleged “homophobic abuse”), then they will probably consider you to be a hateful Nazi and refuse to employ you. Thus, we have the Kafkaesque situation of someone barred from becoming a police officer on the grounds that they haven’t actually committed any crimes.
Meanwhile, various applicants who have committed actual crimes, even outright sexual misdemeanors like displaying their naked erections to drive-through restaurant staff, have been accepted into the police force no questions asked, and then gone on to abuse their position of uniformed trust to abduct, rape, and murder women before burning their remains down into adiposal ash. Ah, but they never said anyone smelled of fish or accused someone of riding a homosexual horse, did they? At first glance, this may seem as if today’s benign British bobby considers “hate crimes,” whatever such quasi-fictions even are, as serious as actual real crimes. At second glance, you will find that this is quite true.
According to Ben-Julian Harrington, the Chief of Essex Police Force, acts of “hate speech” are every bit as serious as being stabbed or raped, something that rather suggests he himself has never suffered deep bodily penetration by either method—although I’m sure it could easily be arranged, if only he moves to the English county of Wiltshire. In 2022, Wiltshire Police sprang into immediate action after one child called another, much more diddy, child a “leprechaun” in the street. Meanwhile, only 0.7 percent of reported rape cases in Wiltshire resulted in a charge or summons, the lowest in the entire country. Things have now gotten so bad that whenever an actual leprechaun is raped in Wiltshire, he or she is left with no option but to investigate personally by offering up a pot of gold for any information on relevant suspects.
It Is So, ’Cos I Say So
Non-Crime Hate Incidents spawned ultimately from the 1993 killing of a black Londoner named Stephen Lawrence, the first known murder in all of British history. As detectives didn’t manage to catch his killers by the very stroke of cockcrow, the entirety of British society was deemed to be irredeemably institutionally racist and a special witch-hunt inquiry called the Macpherson Report introduced the utterly mental idea that a “hate crime” was whatever its supposed victims claimed it to be (unless they were white, obviously). When NCHIs were introduced in 2014, this same notion was incorporated into official police guidance thus:
The victim [not complainant, do note—the “guilt” of the “perpetrator” is already automatically presumed] does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief [that someone has committed a “hate crime” against them], and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required.
Evidence is “not required”? Allowing anyone, even crazy people, to self-diagnose their own hate crimes is every bit as open to abuse as allowing perverts to self-diagnose their own imaginary genders. This is why Britain now has cases like a Welsh lesbian couple (both human, no ewes involved) reporting to cops that a dead rat on their doorstep had been left there by the local SS Anti-Lesbo Brigade, even though the area was full of rats anyway, as it was in Wales—the sapphists said it looked “placed.” If so, maybe a cat was responsible? Maybe, but who is to say the cat itself was not a homophobe? Under NCHI laws, if you wanted to self-perceive that, the police could not contest it.
In Surrey, another NCHI was lodged by a couple who had been thrown out of a pub toilet for bumming each other—one participant was transgender, so their ejection was perceived to be “hate-related” rather than simply hygiene-related. Jokes, too, can result in a permanent black mark upon your record: One citizen received an NCHI for asking if a Chinese meal came “with bats” as an aperitif.
People are too easily offended these days. Earlier this month, a pint-size, Welsh-born lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hopeless University named Erin Pritchard announced success in her vital campaign to force a pub at the other end of the country to change its name from “The Midget,” this apparently being “freak show language” and “disablist hate speech.” This was despite the establishment being named not after any actual dwarf, but a brand of sports car that had once been manufactured locally, the MG Midget, as indicated by a large image of said vehicle on its sign, and the entire pub having a related novelty motorcar theme. Maybe Prof. Pritchard is blind as well as tiny?
“When I was in Holyhead, this woman came up to me and said her daughter found people like me hilarious, and would I dress up like Hello Kitty for her daughter,” Pritchard once complained. How old was the child in question? Three? Four? Give her an NCHI registered against her name for life, too!
That’s No Alabi
Contemporary U.K. hate-crime law really is a true charter for the professionally paranoid and the perpetually put-out. Also this month, a married London teacher, Eniola Alabi, brought a case against her employers for “anti-marriage discrimination” after they accidentally wrote her name as “Miss” not “Mrs.” on some envelopes. This was part of a concerted campaign against her, Alabi burbled, as she had received poor assessments of her teaching from bigoted managers who had supposedly been “controlling her computer remotely,” causing it to crash “in order to hinder her work.”
Placed before an employment tribunal, such claims were thrown out as untrue: Had Mrs. Alabi (better get that right or she’ll sue me) simply lodged an NCHI against her head teacher, it would have remained on the head’s criminal record forever, even though deliberately addressing someone as if she were unmarried obviously isn’t a crime, and her boss hadn’t even done so anyway. Why have we systematically trained ghouls like this up to become so oversensitive? Personally, I would gleefully frame any letter accidentally addressed to me as “Mr. Steven Fucker.” In fact, I regularly send myself such items, thereby making me the victim of my own invented hate crimes, just like Jussie Smollett.
And what’s so wrong with hate, anyway? Hate is a perfectly natural human emotion. I certainly hate all the cretinous politicians, lefty campaigners, and compliant policemen responsible for this current sad state of affairs. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they’re all a bunch of retarded, unmarried, sheep-shagging Welsh leprechauns with big gay horses, and whose two-slitted, disabled Pakistani midget genitals smell very strongly of fish. And it really shouldn’t be a crime for me to openly say so, no matter what the present U.K. government may think.
Fortunately for me, it technically isn’t.
The Week’s Most Wobbling, Bobbling, and Gobble-Gobbling Headlines
INDIANS SQUAWED…
Has anyone ever done an IQ comparison between the Bering Strait nomads who settled the frozen north versus the Injuns who kept moving south hoping to find warmer climes? Because in theory one would expect the Eskimo blubber-eaters who reached Alaska and said, “We’re good here; it’s probably colder everywhere else,” to be even more cognitively limited than the redmen who wisely kept going south to settle fertile lands and die of the flu.
“Hey, squaw, this heap happy land! Much sun, many buffalo. We live good here.”
(Squaw coughs.)
“Well, we’re f*cked.”
That epic battle of the IQs would resemble a softball game between Fragile X and Prader-Willi; there are only losers.
Indeed, these “great people” who preferred smoking leaves to having an Iron Age have left behind little of value except the names white men homaged to make everything from states to butter sound quaint and noble.
Count on California to erase even that lamentable legacy. Last week the state that saw its politics trounced nationally on Nov. 5 decided to take its anger out on words, ordering the renaming of anything in the state that contains “appropriated” Native American verbiage.
Because of course the best way to honor the state’s “indigenous” people is to erase them. After all, when you get genocided by the sniffles, it really is in everyone’s best interest that the rest of us forget you ever existed.
On the other hand, considering that the renaming is being done by a panel of blacks, the Natives might wish Newsom had left well enough alone.
Starting Jan. 1, Squaw Valley will become “Drunk-Ass Mexican-Lookin’ Bitch Valley,” Arapaho Hills will become “I Rape a Ho Hills,” and Cherokee Springs will become “You Crazy? I Ain’t Goin’ Near No Water” Springs.
Ugh.
…AND THAWED
Turning to a different type of Injun, India is on average one of the warmest nations on earth. It’s even said that during a typical Delhi summer you can fry a turd on the sidewalk.
Yes, you can probably fry an egg as well, but Indians don’t eat eggs due to confusion over which edible farm animal they worship as a god.
“Rajnesh, what are we not supposed to eat? Cows or chickens?”
“Uh, I think it’s cod.”
“Well, crap, there goes my Long John Silver’s gift card.”
You’d think that a people from a warm climate would know better than to attempt to illegally enter America via a border that was too cold even for Eskimos.
Oh wait, Indians are people who, on their wedding night, prefer burning their brides to sleeping with them.
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious they wouldn’t know better.
According to an AP piece last week, illegal immigrants from India are freezing to death being smuggled into the U.S. from Manitoba.
And the culprit? Once again, falling into the category of “you’ll think it’s a joke but it isn’t,” the name of the human trafficker who’s been taking the money of Indian nationals and letting them freeze to death in the tundra is Harshkumar Patel.
If you’re going to put your life in the hands of a human trafficker, why choose Harshkumar over Softkumar? Hell, even Mildkumar would be a better option.
According to the AP, the Manitoba/Minnesota border is littered with the corpses of border-jumping Punjabis frozen solid like the fish sticks they’re not sure if they can eat without angering their ten-armed hippo deity.
Worse still, the Mumbaicicles are poisoning the local predatory wildlife, as timber wolves have difficulty processing curry.
Harshkumar was arrested last week by Canadian officials. He’s officially changed his name to Repentantkumar. Trudeau’s readying the pardon as we speak.
GUARDIANS OF THE EX-LAXY
The Guardian, the iconic far-left British newspaper, has announced that it will no longer post on X (formerly Twitter until Musk bought it and replaced the name with the closest letter in the alphabet to a swastika).
According to The Guardian’s editorial staff, the paper will boycott the site because it’s become too “right wing.” Fair enough; in the Guardian stylebook, it’s only permissible to say “kill all Jews” if the phrase is followed by “ali akbar FREE GAZA” instead of “groyp groyp replacement theory Frankist baby-eaters!”
The Guardian had more than 27 million Twitter followers. No word on where these thirsty-for-news souls will go now that their favorite newspaper has abandoned them, but Keith Olbermann is said to be jockeying for the position, if by “position” one means that he’ll stop compulsively self-pleasuring to Elie Mystal on MSNBC and return to the balcony of his top-floor Central Park-adjacent multimillion-dollar penthouse condo for more Twitter selfies viewed by a billion people who hope he jumps.
Complicating matters regarding The Guardian’s attempt at being glory-holier-than-thou is the fact that at the same time the paper announced its Twitter boycott, regular columnist Will Hutton OBE (Obscene Batsh*t Englishman) wrote an op-ed proclaiming that the inheritance tax must be increased, because “nobody should ever profit from the good fortune of those they’re related to by birth and chance.”
Well, thanks, Will. No better argument has ever been advanced against “reparations” for blacks whose ancestors may have lugged a stone during the construction of the White House or lit a cigar for Teddy Roosevelt as he screamed “bully” while mowing down actual bulls with a Gatling gun.
That damned right-winger Will Hutton…maybe OBE stands for Old Based Extremist. Perhaps The Guardian is leaving Twitter because the site’s too far left for them.
After all, you can’t spell “Guardian Online” without guano. And even bats are envious of the amount of that stuff that seeps from that Marxist paper.
THE LONGORIA AND THE SHORTORIA OF IT
Eva Longoria’s business card reads “At least I’m not Sofia Vergara.” Yes, America’s least favorite spicy hot annoyance has that going for her. Because of the high bar set by Vergara and Rosie Perez, Longoria’s routine of squealing “Mami papi mami papi ay yi yi” takes only the bronze in the Shrieking Bean Olympics.
Last week this monstrosity who manages to combine the accent of Ricky Ricardo with the sex appeal of Fred Mertz announced that she was fleeing the “dystopian” USA to escape Trump, taxes, and the homeless problem.
And that’s why beans are for cleaning septic tanks, not running think tanks. Longoria was a vocal supporter of lower-the-sambar presidential hopeless Kamala Harris, who wanted to turn cities over to the homeless (as she did in California) and raise taxes. So basically, Longoria’s saying, “I’m fleeing the U.S. because of Trump and the things Trump is against.”
No word on where Longoria is moving, but considering her ethnicity, it’ll likely be a place with many leaves to blow.
And if you think Longoria’s an imbecile, Korean women just said, “Hold my bingsu.” According to Politico, Korean ladies are going on a sex strike to protest violence against women and the election of Donald Trump. Apparently, these slippery slopes who vote 70 percent Democrat are upset that Asian women are being attacked in subways and on streets.
Also, these same women are upset that Republicans scored a clean sweep in an election in which they bested the Democrats who coddle and give free rein to the black criminals responsible for Asian women being attacked in subways and on streets.
Upon realizing that there’s such little connection between real-world smarts and SAT scores, Steve Sailer flew to Switzerland to use the suicide pod.
Thankfully it (once again) malfunctioned, saving Steve’s life but plunging him into an even deeper angst regarding IQ vs. real-world aptitude.
THE PERVY GAETZ
Only three weeks past the election and D.C. is already doing what it does best…eschewing issues of import in favor of tabloid prurience.
First off, Congress has its first “transgender” member (i.e., freakish sexually confused fetishist man in a wig), a Democrat named “Sarah” McBride, who looks and sounds like that Starbucks worker you just know has done something unpleasant with the biscotti. McBride, formerly McGroom, wants to be able to use the female restroom at the Capitol. Republicans object, claiming it violates the sanctity of the space. Though, to be fair, any bathroom routinely defiled by AOC’s daily burrito blasts lost its sanctity years ago.
Meanwhile Democrats are taking shots at Matt Gaetz, congressman–turned–Trump’s pick for Secretary of General Creepiness. Dems are casting aspersions regarding Gaetz’s decision to adopt a Cuban teen as his “son,” and it’s marvelously entertaining to watch conservatives, who call everyone who hangs out with boys “pedo,” biting their lips.
It’s rather like the Biggus Dickus scene in Life of Brian. They want to say something so badly, but they can’t.
Gaetz’s situation is similar, in setup if not punchline, to that of George Rose, the Tony Award-winning legendary British actor whose turn as the Major General in The Pirates of Penzance is considered the defining portrayal. Rose adopted a Dominican teen and signed over his entire estate to the boy in exchange for private “favors.” But all he got was disfavor, as the boy and his uncle burned Rose alive and sent his charred corpse over a cliff in a car to gain the inheritance.
Beans don’t burn on the grill, but sometimes beans burn you for the kill.
I am the very model of a modern major pedophile,
I’ve information memorized to make a teenage beaner smile.
I know the kings of England and I quote the fights fantastical,
But I ended up a churro charred from actions pederastical.
A few days ago, Trump dumped Gaetz.
At least it wasn’t over a cliff.
Some people keep reading matter in their lavatories, though whether for their own benefit or that of their visitors I have never been able to determine—nor have I ever asked. I suppose that it comes in handy if you’re constipated, though this is a problem from which, as yet, I have never suffered. On second thought, I daresay the constipated are otherwise too preoccupied to bother themselves with literature.
There is probably scientific research to be done on the relation between reading matter found in lavatories and the nature of the household in which it is found, because there is scientific research to be done on everything. There is a version of Parkinson’s law according to which work expands to meet the time available for its completion that relates to the academy: Research subjects expand according to the number of university students who go on to do a PhD.
All this is but an introduction to reflection on what I found recently in a friend’s lavatory when I visited his home. It was a little book titled The Wit and Wisdom of Women, a title that is significant in itself, for no one would publish a similar book with the title The Wit and Wisdom of Men. There is something either plaintive or condescending about the title, as if neither wit nor wisdom, but especially the former, were to be expected of the fair sex (or, as we must now say, the fair gender).
I regret to say that when I opened the little book of wit and wisdom my eye fell on a quotation that was neither witty nor wise. It was from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist who wrote a lot about death, identifying five stages where death is slow and announced rather than sudden and unexpected.
This was the quotation:
The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.
When I read this, I felt very much as I felt long ago when I guzzled too many rich chocolates before the curtain went up in a theater, namely queasy verging on nausea.
Which others are we supposed to love unconditionally? Kim Jong Un? The Ayatollah Khomeini? Who do we think we are, to confer our unconditional love on all and sundry?
Perhaps Kubler-Ross meant only some others—but which others, and by what criteria are we to chose whom to love unconditionally? Love, of course, is not usually a matter of choice, as many a person has found to his or her cost. Perhaps the greatest good fortune in life is to love unconditionally a person who is worthy of it; but it is a great misfortune to love unconditionally someone who is not worthy of it.
All this pales into insignificance by comparison with the nauseating idea of loving oneself unconditionally. Self-love has until recently been regarded not as a virtue, as a desideratum or a sign of good character, but as a vice, indeed as among the worst of vices.
What could unconditionally loving oneself entail? It would seem to imply that deep in one’s heart, however one actually conducted oneself, there was something lovable, indeed so lovable that it more than made up for all one’s disagreeable, bad, or vicious qualities, such as cruelty, laziness, mendacity, dishonesty, boastfulness, slyness, and so forth. Within every person, therefore, there is necessarily a pearl above price, and it is this that every person must treasure above all else. What need of goodness when one loves oneself?
Not a few vicious persons used to say to me that they could not have done the things of which they were accused because they were not the sort of things that they did, and they said this even if the record showed that they had done such things repeatedly. But in a sense, they were not straightforwardly lying, because they had absorbed the common notion that there was an inner and an outer me, the latter being unimportant by comparison with the former. This meant, of course, that nothing that the outer me did could affect the regard in which the inner me was held by the me that was neither inner nor outer, but the third me who talked about him- or herself. Loving oneself unconditionally gives one carte blanche to behave as one chooses, for such self-love is never having to say you’re sorry—or rather, never having to mean that you’re sorry when you say it.
Self-love is like self-esteem, according to this philosophy: It is something to which one has a right merely because one draws breath. But in fact, one is already lost if one even considers the question of whether one loves or esteems oneself. One is already on the royal road to egotism and self-absorption.
There are some people, no doubt, who are egotistic by nature. It would not occur to them to behave otherwise than they do. They are not as bad as people who decide to become egotistic because they have a duty to love themselves since this is the ultimate lesson that they have to learn (as Kübler-Ross puts it).
Of course, the quotation might have been torn out of context. The fault might not have been Kübler-Ross’ but the editor’s. It doesn’t really matter whose the fault was: The odious words were made to stand alone in the little book, as if they were gems of wisdom that presumably readers were intended to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
The sentiment expressed by the words no doubt will have an appeal to many, as fast food does to people who are either too lazy to cook or whom no one will cook for. The sentence is the philosophical equivalent of the Whopper.
Why do people say and listen to whoppers? It is because they obviate the need for real and possibly painful reflection, which requires the exercise of judgment and therefore runs the risk of error. Such whoppers are the fast food of the mind: They satisfy while they malnourish.
You should not love yourself or hate yourself; you should not have any attitude toward yourself at all.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
