In his The Epoch Times column, our favorite doctor pens a penetrating piece on the standard leftist, politically-correct ideology running amok in British academia.
The most important tenet, perhaps, in the drive for totalitarian social engineering of the proto-Stalinist variety is that all differences in desirable—or at least desired—outcomes between identifiable groups, even in the most open society, can only arise from injustice or the exercise of illicit influence by the already powerful.
Theodore Dalrymple lampoons the 21st-century eating habits of the British masses in his March Quadrant essay.
Nor is his mother, whose only acquaintance with an oven is of the microwave variety, likely to buy sardines however cheap they might be. You can lead a British woman to a kitchen, but you can’t make her cook.
The dubious doctor comments on the absurd story of a Welsh town councillor suspended from his party for calling a female politician belonging to another party a cow in a secret recording from last year.
The situation is made all the worse in the modern world by the speed with which what is morally absurd or unthinkable becomes morally obligatory, so that one has to consider not only what is unsayable now, but what might become unsayable in five or 10 years’ time.
In his weekly Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple excoriates Mrs. Clinton, Meghan Markle, and Herr Freud all in one delightful piece of incisive critique.
Mrs. Clinton, who knows a thing or two about phoniness, praised Meghan Markle’s decision to speak of her “mental health” before tens of millions of her very closest counselors. Mrs. Clinton said it was brave of her, but brave was not the word for it; exhibitionist would have been better, together, perhaps, with scheming, opportunist, histrionic, self-serving, egotistical, and shallow, amongst other things. If there were a Nobel Prize for self-pity, Ms. Markle would have been a strong contender—rather like Mrs. Clinton herself.
In the March issue of New Criterion, our skeptical doctor examines the literary output of Charles Hamilton, with particular focus on his most famous character, Billy Bunter.
Orwell’s argument is a deeply philistine one. It is our present unpleasant and conflictual identitarian politics ab ovo. It suggests that literature should not so much take us out of ourselves, or allow us to enter into something of which we have no direct experience, but should be about ourselves and our own lives. It should be relevant to what we already know, namely our own experience, in which it should thereby enfold and enclose us.
Over at The Critic, the good doctor recounts a recent incident with his unresponsive printer. This may not be the most earth-shattering of events, but I think most of us here would happily read Theodore Dalrymple describing buttering his toast in the morning.
Why not just say, The printer failed to print your document? This might suggest a mechanical or other breakdown. The wording used, by contrast, suggests that I should feel sorry for my printer for having placed unreasonable demands on and expected too much of it. No wonder the printer is feeling stressed out.
Our favorite doctor makes his return to the City Journal with an article on the discreditable politics of Covid-19 vaccinations in the European Union.
The whole unedifying story demonstrates the lengths of dishonesty to which a political class is willing to go to save face (and possibly its own jobs)—but more interestingly, perhaps, the extent to which populations remain willing to look to that political class for guidance in making decisions. I confess to being surprised.
The dubious doctor discusses apartheid of the old, South African form and considers the new politically correct, racialist, marxist, cultural apartheid of the current age.
That her poem should be translated only by a person of the same skin color and attributes as she, however, strikes at the very notion of a common humanity. It suggests that one’s brains and emotions subsist in, or are at least dependent on, one’s skin color.
The skeptical doctor reviews a new book on the end of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty over at Law & Liberty.
He thought that he had both the right and the duty, genuinely for the sake of his country, to rule rather than reign, but while he had the ideas of an autocrat, he also had those of an ordinary decent person who baulked at the shedding of much blood, the only way, in the end, that he could have preserved his throne (and possibly not even then).
The pertinent title of this week’s Theodore Dalrymple Takimag column says it all.
However, something very strange has happened to many of the lizards on my terrace in France: They have turned black, which a high proportion of them now are. At first I thought I must be imagining it, but further observation established the point quite clearly.