Should we be surprised that when the Glastonbury music festival recently ended, the attendees left behind a sea of trash and filth? Isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that these attendees are the same Western youth who loudly proclaim their concern for the environment and their outrage at its supposed despoilation?

Dalrymple notes their resemblance to the Dickens character Mrs. Jellyby, who expressed concern for people and events far away while ignoring the problems around her, and to Marie Antoinette, who played the part of shepherdess and proletarian:

Incidentally, in their imitation of the proles (which they think virtuous), they demonstrate how they really conceive of them: vulgar, dirty, coarse, and foulmouthed. Genuine proletarians are, or at least once were, not at all like this—not en masse, not as the lumpenintelligentsia now is.