High life | 11 August 2016

Gstaad

  ‘He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.’ As everyone knows, life’s unfair, but this is ridiculous. An American daredevil falls out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute and manages to land on a postage-stamp-size net without a scratch. The poor little Greek boy falls off a balcony ten to 15 feet high, lands on gravel and breaks many bones in his body. Being encased in plaster is similar to living under a strict dictatorship, North Korea, for example. There’s no crime, no muggings, but as far as doing what comes naturally, fuggetaboutit. Self-doubt and cultural pessimism are twinned to physical immobility and pain. Radical multiculturalists imply that the western way of life produces hate and social inequities. Are they all encased in plaster, or is their brain in a cast? Modern society provides economic affluence and equality of opportunity, yet is systematically deprecated and vilified by its direct beneficiaries. I watched these ludicrous Black Lives Matter publicity-seekers being reverentially interviewed by TV journalists, and witnessed the Big Lie going into action. Not a single hack asked about or pointed out the fact that it’s the racial difference in criminal offending, not racism, that is the cause for the disproportionate amount of incarcerated blacks. British cops have killed two men in 2016, yet the protesters are acting as if thousands have been massacred in cold blood. Pretty soon we will have a war on cops as they have on the other side of the ocean. Being immobile makes one think too much. For example, if a novelist had written back in the Sixties about a German Chancellor and a Luxemburg petty official flooding Europe with migrants from Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East and turning the old continent into a modern Babel, it would have been sold as science fiction.