As related at New English Review, a recent perusal of a book of photographs of mid-20th Century Portugal caused Dalrymple to think about old-world beauty and to conclude that “in progress there is also loss”:

One of the questions that I have never been able to answer satisfactorily is why peasants the world over lose their aesthetic sense the moment they move from the country to the town, and become aficionados of kitsch.

Those who until then had an instinctive understanding of form and colour seem to care about them no longer: I have observed this in India, Africa and South America. Indeed, they not only lose their instinctive good taste but acquire instinctive bad taste to replace it.

What is the explanation for this? Is it that abundance and cheapness of acquired goods means that one no longer has to look at them with the same concentration as in conditions of relative shortage? Is it that, making almost nothing any more for oneself, one loses the appreciation of form and colour? Is it that, in the new conditions, all that belongs to the past comes to seem retrograde and associated in the mind with poverty and oppression? Is it that everything from the past – the earthenware pots, for example – come to seem almost childish by comparison with the modernity of aluminium pots and pans? Is it that life loses in intensity what it gains in extension?

After noting here that UN peacekeeping troops introduced cholera into Haiti, resulting in the deaths of 8,000 people, Dalrymple adds:

One would expect nothing else from an organisation born with original virtue. I am always intensely irritated when I fly on a certain airline that insists on collecting coins for UNICEF from its passengers as if it were thereby doing God’s work (the announcement of the collection over the public address system is always odiously self-satisfied).

UNICEF, in fact, is the organisation responsible for the largest mass poisoning in the whole of human history. It sunk thousands of wells in Bangladesh and now millions of poor Bangladeshis are suffering from chronic arsenic poison from the well-water. (It was Bangladeshi peacekeeping troops, according to the NEJM, who brought cholera to Haiti. Import your arsenic poisoning, export your cholera!).

It gets better (meaning, of course, worse). Read on to learn why the UNHCR was on strike when he tried to visit cholera-stricken refugee camps in Somalia.

All that is necessary for the triumph of unemployment is this sort of thing:

A scheme by the British government to reduce unemployment benefits of those who refuse to take jobs at a rate of pay equal to their full benefits has been overturned by the courts. The judges did not deny the right of the government to institute such a scheme; the problem with the current one, they said, was that it was instituted by ministerial fiat rather than by direction of parliament and was therefore an exercise of arbitrary power. In this, I think, they were right: a minister should not be able to alter the conditions of life of large numbers of people by the stroke of his pen and without any oversight. But those who seek the unlimited extension of trade union and government power over society regarded the ruling as an absolute triumph: they think that the more people who are dependent on government handouts the better, and this ruling went some way to maintaining, at least temporarily, such dependence.

Dalrymple fathoms a guess:

Perhaps people felt that to immunize was to interfere sacrilegiously with the course of nature, and that people, especially children, had the duty to die of infectious diseases just as Nature “intended.” Perhaps they felt that, if it worked, it would allow the survival of the unfittest. At any rate, few medical procedures have been as persistently, minutely and fervently examined for harmful effects as immunization.

Nevertheless, he notes one recent study that may embolden the anti-immunization crowd. Read it here.

The horsemeat scandal and blind beggars… They’re more related than you think. I encourage you to read this short but touching post at Dalrymple’s Hilarious Pessimist blog, hosted by Salisbury Review.

On a recent visit to Belgium, my heart swelled with patriotic pride. At last I had found a country in Western Europe that was more littered than Britain. There is hope for us yet: if, that is, not being the worst in Europe is grounds for hope.

—Dalrymple at The Hilarious Pessimist

With America moving toward legalization of marijuana in at least some states, I am increasingly involved in discussions about the wisdom of such a course. When the subject of medicinal use comes up, I am forced to concede my ignorance of marijuana’s efficacy. Dalrymple’s take:

The scientific evidence about the medical benefits of cannabis is suggestive but not conclusive, in large part because governments have placed legal obstacles in the way of proper research, but also because the smoke of marijuana contains so many compounds that need to be tested individually. But it seems that cannabis can relieve nausea (one of the most unpleasant of all symptoms when it is persistent) and some kinds of pain.

Read the piece at Pajamas Media

We missed this piece from Standpoint from last September. We might ordinarily shrug it off, but this is a review by Dalrymple of a new book by Roger Kimball, the Editor and Publisher of the New Criterion, the Publisher of Encounter Books and an art critic and social commentator. Kimball has the respect of so many of us that this brief piece provides us a real pleasure. Says Dalrymple:

Kimball’s viewpoint-which I freely admit is mine-is that there are constants in human existence which it is vain and indeed dangerous to deny, and that the task of culture is to examine the present with an eye to the eternal. Good cultural criticism, therefore, will remain of interest and value long after it was written, and I suspect that in a hundred years or more Kimball will unexpectedly delight someone as much as Bagehot or Birrell have delighted me.

It is curious that one whose field of study is ‘visual culture’ should seem to have no knowledge of modern iconography at all: but that is not his fault, rather it is a sad commentary on the state of the humanities in modern universities.

For it is perfectly obvious that ‘Kim Il Sung looking at wheat’ is not sui generis, that is to say without an iconographical tradition; on the contrary, it is totally derivative. The iconographic tradition of Communist dictators contemplating groaning plenty while the population goes short to the point of famine stretches back to Stalin stylistically and to Lenin conceptually. In how many Communist dictatorships have Dear Leaders surveyed the golden corn while their populations ate rat stew and grass soup? In how many Communist dictatorships have Dear Leaders inspected factories and provided on-the-spot-guidance, taken down in notebooks held by those leaning forward obsequiously to ensure that no word shall escape immortalization? I saw precisely the same iconography in Russia, Albania, Romania and North Korea, effortlessly and indeed unavoidably, and I am not an academic of ‘visual culture.’