Theodore Dalrymple delivers a Global Warning
It has been shown conclusively that people who listen to the news or read a newspaper at breakfast are more miserable than those who wisely maintain themselves in ignorance.
Unfortunately, help for the former is not at hand: one of the main stories in the newspapers recently was that antidepressants do not work for the vast majority of people. Of course, I always knew this: misery is the natural and inescapable condition of man. That is why the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once wrote a paper in the Lancet proposing that happiness be classified as a disease. Not only is it statistically aberrant, but it leads to disastrous consequences (proposals of marriage, for example) and is grossly inappropriate to man’s true situation.
Anyway, why should I need to know, as I read in the paper the other morning, that three off-duty policemen were lynched in a small town in Bolivia, in an act of democratic, or perhaps I should say demotic, justice? Actually, the story affected me way the smell of the madeleine affected Proust: it brought back a flood of memories of my visits to Bolivia.
Those were the days of coups — golpes, to be exact — and hyperinflation when it took longer to pay for a meal than to eat it. I changed $50 at a bank and had to return to my lodging to fetch a bag to carry away all the pesos. Those were the salad days of Thomas de la Rue and Company.
You didn’t have to wait long for a coup to come. The one while I was there was almost as violent as a democratic election in Africa, and the leader of it is now serving a 30-year jail sentence.
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