Battersea Power Station, London

Source: Bigstock

NEW YORK—I am seriously thinking of visiting a shrink (just kidding) as I now have definite proof that I am crazy: Instead of remaining in England and going to Badminton for the duke of Beaufort’s 70th birthday bash, and catching a glimpse of the love of my life, Iona McLaren, I find myself in a rotten place where a small headline in the New York Post announces “16 shot in one bloody night.” All I can say is the Bagel’s salad days are over. The streets are awash with homeless druggies who are violent and perform their functions right in the open, even on Park Avenue; random violence in the subways is an everyday happening, while unhinged wackos shout at women and children when they’re not attacking them. So commonplace are shootings that a man who killed 10 people and wounded 29 last May in the subway is no longer even mentioned. Creeps attack mostly women or the aged in all five boroughs, and if they’re arrested are immediately let go following recent no-bail laws.

And yet here I am, instead of being at Badminton, a Bagel bum, braving loons all day and night in a crappy city, and for what? Why leave a peaceful London full of friends to come over here and have to look over my shoulder as I walk the streets? Once upon a time walking up and down Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues was a pleasure. They were packed with beautiful women dressed to the nines doing their shopping and whatever else women used to do before #MeToo turned them into aggressive harridans. Now they also look different, tights making them resemble female Soviet shot-putters of the ’50s.

Never mind. There are lessons to be learned from all this carnage. The mayor, whose name is Adams, is an improvement over the last one, but that’s like saying being eaten by a shark is better than being dragged underwater and chewed up slowly by a crocodile. Instead of fighting the war on out-of-control crime, Adams has turned the city into a vast welcoming mat for foreign migrants who have slipped into Texas and New Mexico. At last count 2 million have come into the States this year alone, 4 million since Biden took over. And you thought Britain was in trouble with only thousands having crossed.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that if you have more criminals on the street, you have more crime. Bail reform in 2020 allowed 2,000 career criminals and repeat offenders out of the pokey and into polite society. So what do you think happened? Duh! Crime went through the roof, into double and triple digits. As I write, a 61-year-old heroic female firefighter, a mother who risked her life back on 9/11, was stabbed to death while lunching by a man she’s never seen before and for absolutely no reason. Murdering a heroic firefighter-paramedic and a mother to boot has to be the most egregious of crimes, but the killer’s mental health is bound to be brought up by some do-gooder, and BS like “He was a good son” is certain to be mentioned. I’m so sick and tired of do-gooders and the excuses they come up with for people who belong in the gas chamber, I find myself praying for those do-gooders to suffer the fate of those same victims.

Then we have the toxic notion that borders are illegitimate, as are boundaries, and national sovereignty itself a racist construct. This is both in the U.S. and the U.K. Who and what are we? That’s an easy one, the Bagel Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC. And, of course, that nice guy in the White House who spoke so movingly after the recent state funeral in London about what a great queen Marie Antoinette was and how he’ll miss her.

My, things have certainly changed. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, argued that the inferior American environment produced regressive species of humans. He claimed that in America nature was weaker and less active and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions. The number of species was fewer and the animals much smaller. In the same text, he portrayed the continent’s Indigenous people as backward and indolent: “He is more timid and cowardly, has no vitality, and no activity of mind.”

Unfortunately for the count, he presented his case in the presence of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson at a dinner party in Passy. A playful Franklin, sitting with the rest of the Yanks on one side of the table, asked the Frogs sitting on the other side to stand up at the same time as the Americans. The latter towered over the Frogs, who all looked like shrimps.

Poor Comte de Buffon. He was no fool, but he was 250 years too early. If only he were around today, his theory of species and people being backward and indolent would raise the hackles of the woke but would deserve a Nobel Prize. Franklin and Jefferson were Brits who died Americans, both were close to six feet tall, and their oversize brains we certainly could use today. But Buffon was no buffoon. He had foreseen what Noo Yawkers would look like today: short, round, squat, brown, bandy-legged, squashed, mentally retarded by watching too much trash TV and listening to rap, unable to utter a sentence without using the F-word.