Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 25 August 2007

The historian Sir Lewis Namier once said that in a drop of dew could be seen all the colours of the rainbow, presumably as a reply to those who accused him of writing more and more about less and less.

The historian Sir Lewis Namier once said that in a drop of dew could be seen all the colours of the rainbow, presumably as a reply to those who accused him of writing more and more about less and less. However, it is definitely true that in the smallest interactions can be seen the temper of the times: in our case, the bad temper of the times.

I was waiting for my wife in a car park in France recently when I noticed that the car next to me was British. In the car, door open, was a little boy of eight or nine. He was extremely handsome, and had a heart- melting smile.

While his parents went shopping — for fast food as it turned out — he had been entrusted to the care of a man, evidently the friend of his parents, of about 40 and of quite transcendent vulgarity. I am not now referring to the charming seaside postcard vulgarity of Donald McGill; rather, I am talking of something infinitely more malign. His vulgarity was aggressive, vehement and triumphal, from his flower patterned beer-belly-bulging shorts to his Rottweiler face. No one can help being ugly, of course, but no one need look like an attack dog.

His was the kind of vulgarity that is not merely the absence of refinement, but a positive contempt for refinement. Indeed, it was a principled, ideological vulgarity; and, as its bearer, he was a true modern representative of his country.

He took out a sweet, unwrapped it, opened his mouth wide enough to dislocate his jaw, and then, in front of the child, screwed the wrapper into a ball and threw it on to the ground as if trying to bomb it.

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