In this week’s Takimag, our authentic doctor calls out President Macron’s awkward and undignified public embrace of a rather large judo Olympic medalist.
I confess that I am in general against all this hugging in public, which is so often a means of displaying insincerity, but on this occasion especially a simple handshake would have been far better. This was so obvious that one asks how a man as intelligent as the president of France could not, or at least did not, see it.
In his Takimag column last week, our favorite doctor describes observing the life and death struggle of a bee caught in a spider web in the French countryside.
But the world is not a vast morality play. Over-moralizing it is as foolish as under-moralizing it. There is no alternative to judgment.
In the current issue of The Critic, the doubtful doctor gets irritated reading an English newspaper’s dishonest and fearful coverage of a pro-Palestinian group’s attack on Barclays.
I think there is a menace somewhere in the country, but I could not positively say where or what it is. Perhaps it is everywhere.
Over at City Journal, our perturbed doctor explains the chaos and disorder currently reigning in English cities by referencing the premise of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
I confess that when I look at the people rioting, the youngish men, I feel almost as if they were of a different species from myself. They seem brutish, their faces bone and bristle. Their ugliness, however, is not biological or hereditary; it is an ugliness of soul, an antinomian ugliness.
In last week’s Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple continues his merciless critique of the shamelessly ‘woke’ and utterly disordered Summer Olympic Games in Paris.
But the desire not to offend, laudable as it is, cannot require people to twist their minds to accommodate obvious falsehoods and repeat them as if they were true.
In the August issue of New English Review, the good doctor recounts the murder of a radical leftist English academic (i.e., a typical Western useful idiot) in Cambodia at the hands of the mass-murdering communist regime of Pol Pot.
There can, I suppose, be few greater ironies than to be murdered by the regime which you have been defending of your own free will only an hour or two earlier.
Our distraught doctor scrutinizes the disgraceful, decadent, and degraded debacle that was the opening ceremony of the Paris Summer Olympics.
Apart from the generalized vulgarity of it, by comparison with which King Farouk had the taste of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the parody of the Last Supper by transvestites and others would have been more than enough to convince any Islamist that the West was a fruit ripe for the plucking, and many an ordinary Muslim that Islam, at least, should not, and probably could not, descend to this. Cultural decay can hardly go further.
Our concerned doctor opines on the (mostly) deleterious effects of the Summer Olympics on the denizens of the French capital.
Most of the people to whom I have talked, both in Paris and elsewhere, regarded the Games beforehand with gloom and a sense of foreboding. They thought of them as the pet project imposed on the population by a self-promoting, not to say megalomaniac, political class.
Over at Law & Liberty, our ‘democratic’ doctor weighs in on the crisis of political legitimacy in Britain and France in light of the recent elections held in the two countries. Coincidentally, just this morning I started re-reading a relatively unknown but highly thought-provoking and relevant book with the forceful title The End of Democracy, written by Christophe Buffin de Chosal.
No doubt there were many among the 40 percent who simply, or habitually, could not be bothered to cast their vote; but before the election, I heard many people who usually voted say that they would not vote this time because of their disenchantment with the political class as a whole (not that they have been exactly enchanted with it for a long time).