We are motivated by a very simple and very strong conviction: to help Greece today is to protect our common currency but also to defend the incomes and the work of the French people tomorrow. Over and above the debates among the twenty-seven states, the solidarity of Europeans is total.
A brief summary can not do justice to Dalrymple’s new article in First Things. It is a review of the two new books by the Hitchens brothers, Christopher’s Hitch-22 and Peter’s The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. As the names imply, these are personal memoirs outlining the philosophies of the two men, and unsuprisingly to his loyal readers, Dalrymple the atheist actually finds Peter’s view more appealing. But the review is mostly an outline of the problems Dalrymple finds in Christopher’s work and character, and for anyone familiar with Christopher Hitchens, Dalrymple’s criticism seems both devastatingly accurate and highly entertaining. I could quote at length, but I wouldn’t know where to stop.
Dalrymple reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book Nomad in The Globe and Mail, and he says it is “a philosophical memoir” from “undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world”. While he finds her zealous embrace of the Enlightenment “rather too simple”, he agrees with her core contention that “a profound change in the relations between the sexes is the key to Muslim integration into Western society” and says she writes “with both modesty and great eloquence”.
The BMJ column from this week discusses the vast increase in the price of old medical books, and the last one Dalrymple mentions jogged a memory:
My favourite item, though, was In Vino Veritas: Or a Conference betwixt Chip the Cooper, and Dash the Drawer (Being both Boozy), a pamphlet of 1698. An extract to whet the appetite, as it were, explains why the English prefer the fortified wines of Portugal to the unfortified wines of France:
“They have the body, that is strength, and that now a days pleases, for our People love to have their Heads and Stomachs hot, as soon and as cheap as they can.”
Now does that remind you of anything, I wonder—for example, casualty on a Saturday night?
I remembered from reading my copy of Wine for Dummies exactly why the British began drinking Port in the first place (and no, I am not at all embarrassed to own that book, thankyouverymuch):
The British invented Port, thanks to one of their many wars with the French, when they were forced to buy Portuguese wine as an alternative to French wine. To insure that the Portuguese wines were stable enough for shipment by sea, the British had a small amount of brandy added to their finished wine, and early Port was the result. The English established their first Port house, Warre, in the city of Oporto in 1670, and several other followed.
Ironically, the French, who drove the British to Portugal, today drink three times as much Port as the British! But, of course, the French have the highest per capita consumption of wine in the world.
Update: Thanks to Jonathan for informing me that I had forgotten the link to the essay. I have added it above.
Dalrymple’s BMJ column from last week takes on an unpleasant subject: death. I found this part particularly interesting:
La Rochefoucauld believed that we couldn’t contemplate death for long because the prospect of personal extinction was too painful for us; for [Emile] Zola, however, it derived from the fact that we are too rooted in the concerns of everyday life for it to preoccupy us for long.
I wonder if these two reasons are necessarily mutually exclusive. Don’t many people nowadays occupy themselves with mundane tasks for the express purpose of avoiding deep contemplation about much of anything, death especially?
Read the column here
Writing at Pajamas Media, Dalrymple suggests that, whether intentional or not, “the apparatchik class of Europe” has taken all the right steps to re-stoke the fire of German nationalism:
If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? I suggest a three-part strategy.
First, you would replace the rock-solid German currency by one with very shaky economic foundations, against the wishes of almost the whole German population (which, of course, you would not deign to consult).
Second, you would make sure that same population paid for the gross and dishonest profligacy of the Greek government: a profligacy that was rendered possible by the adoption of the very currency that the German population did not want in the first place.
Third, you would do everything possible to ensure that the crisis will spread, last for a long time, cost a fortune in failed attempts to solve it, and fall mainly to the Germans to pay for.
Read the rest here (hat tip: Jonathan Levy)
School children playing on a littered playground while wearing knee pads: What could it mean?
In Pajamas Media Dalrymple, fed up with England’s “vulgar drunken slatterns”, proposes an inverse-burqa law.
Dalrymple took to the pages of the Globe and Mail yesterday to explain the outcome of the British election:
It had long been known that Mr. Brown, a former chancellor of the exchequer, was happier with a table of figures than with a roomful of people, but unfortunately nerdishness is not a guarantee of competence. On the contrary, he has presided over what threatens to be the greatest economic disaster in British history, caused largely by his own unfathomable incapacity.
….
You might have supposed, therefore, that the government was a target that no opposition could miss. But David Cameron, the leader of that opposition, contrived to do so. This was because he so self-evidently believed in nothing but office and could therefore criticize the government from no reasonably consistent standpoint.
I’ve been looking forward to Dalrymple’s thoughts on the Greek situation, and he offers them in a short, new piece for City Journal, in which he states much more succinctly what many of us have no doubt been thinking:
When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults… The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.
Such popular dishonesty is by no means confined to Greece. In varying degrees, most countries in the West have displayed it, Britain above all. It is perhaps an inherent problem wherever the universal franchise is unaccompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect. Greece is therefore a cradle not only of democracy, but of democratic corruption.