Thursday, February 16, 2012
Theodore Dalrymple - time to quit
Talking of misanthropic sods who've jumped the shark, I'll be happy never to read another cut-and-paste rant about the decline of the British by Theodore Dalrymple again. Yet another torrent of over-familiar bile in The Spectator the other week. Of course horrible people are horrible, but most people, contra Anthony Daniels (TD's real name) are not even remotely horrible, including many who have tattoos.
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5 comments:
hmmm, agreed, he's now placed firmly in the Melanie Philips, Mark Steyn and Peter Hitchens folder...
Hmmm, disagree. Sitting in Spain last summer watching London burn, I refused to think of myself as a right-wing freak by believing, not for the first time, that the conventions and truths I had grown up with, had been eroded and finally smashed by the liberal intelligentsia so despised by Dalrymple. He spent years at the rockface trying to understand (and help) the underclasses, and he has already taken your advice Brit and quit these septic (thank you Marina) Isles.
Dalrymple despises the white underclass in the same way that old, jaded schoolteachers despise children, but never acknowledges it is no more meaningful to say that they're 'what Britain is' than to claim it's all fox-hunting toffs. Both are minorities that inspire disproportionate fear and loathing amongst some middle-class commenters.
Per Peter Hitchens, although you know he's always going to end up blaming the 1960s, at least he varies in what it is he blames on them. The last 5 or 6 Dalrymple pieces I've read have been indistinguishable. He's played out.
Oh and if anyone wants to come along now and tell me that I live in a 'cossetted middle class area', I don't.
As a member of the "white underclass" I am moved to say 'twas ever thus' and chuckle at my Hogarth Pikchur Buk.
OSM
England is a cosseted middle-class area. (Hmmm, good opening for an article....)
As for Dalrymple, it's simply impossible to bemoan the new English degeneracy while living in France.
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