I must say I do find this incredible:
Theodore Dalrymple, having drawn his knowledge of humanity from his work as a psychiatrist in a prison and an inner city hospital, writes of a posh literary dinner:
On my right sat a man in his late sixties, intelligent and cultivated, who had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC and who had spent much of his career in the United States. He said that for the last ten years he had read with interest my weekly dispatches—printed in a rival, conservative publication—depicting the spiritual, cultural, emotional, and moral chaos of modern urban life, and had always wanted to meet me to ask me a simple question: Did I make it all up?
The appalling cultural wasteland of modern Britain with its sick tabloid culture that cannot but produce the humans Dalrymple records- & its 'educated' upper echelons utterly removed from the realities below...And this is the nation 'spreading democracy' a;omg with that other temple of vacuity, the US; God help the democratised.
ReplyDeleteWell, Anonymous, your anger and misanthropy hardly seem attractive alternatived.
ReplyDeletei remember telling one of my university tutors, in Durham, about a street altercation where some racist youths had shouted "you Paki bastard!" at me, and jostled me a bit. She was horrified and said, of the quiet residential street where it had happened, "isn't that a bad area?"
ReplyDelete"Um, no, not really," i replied.
She'd lived in Durham at least a decade but had no idea how commonplace violent incidents were in the city. i guess we see what we want to see. At least she didn't ask if i'd "made it all up"!