Global Warning

Not hell, but drunkenness, is other people. This insight was vouchsafed me in the London Underground the other evening. I had just passed a notice from the Mayor of London warning passengers to be careful after a few drinks. In the previous year, it said, two people had been killed and hundreds injured after a few drinks.

I myself had had what I would call a few drinks, but I do not think I was in much danger. What the Mayor meant by a few drinks, of course, was the appalling uncontrolled drunkenness of the shameless young adults of all classes who so disfigure our capital city, many of whom would have voted for him.

We have come to expect dishonesty — of which this little lie was an example — at every level of society. The dishonesty is intellectual, moral and financial, and its root is self-interest conceived in the narrowest possible way.