Global Warning

3 January 2009

Reading an account by the historian John Waller of the Dancing Plague in Alsace in 1518 recently, I could not help but notice the interesting but perhaps incomplete parallels with our own time.

This does not mean, of course, that it is social: for while surrounded by thousands of others, each person is enclosed in his own solipsistic bubble of trance.

Some, of course, do not wait for the weekends to enter their trance-like state. Everywhere in the country you encounter feral British morons driving their cars, low on the ground and with engines tuned to make an intimidating growling noise, their primitive rhythmic music vibrating the ground in a radius of 100 yards, as they peer sightlessly ahead of them with dim, world-hating ferocity.

What is the distress from which it is escaping, the uniform army of egotists that comprises British youth? Like the mediaeval dancers, who knew that they were sinful and therefore their afflictions were God’s judgment upon them, so British youth is aware of its own worthlessness, and it dimly apprehends that the economic wrath to come is thoroughly deserved. They ward off their thoughts with pseudo-ecstasy.

Is there any cure? The mediaevals got it right. They hauled the sufferers off to a shrine dedicated to St Vitus (the St Vitus of St Vitus’s dance), where they promptly got better.

Therefore, I call upon the government to engage upon a crash building programme of shrines to St Vitus everywhere in the country, combined with a programme of compulsory attendance for young Britons. It is a damned sight more rational, and of course much cheaper, than anything else the government is likely to do.