Scrooge got it right

New York

Boy, oh boy! The Christmas double-issues come quickly now. Once upon a time the run-up to the holidays was unending, with non-stop parties up to the final explosion on New Year’s Eve. No longer. Now Christmases come and go quicker than you can say tempus fugit, which in a way is better for Mankind’s fallen condition. Just last week I read that a mob of shoppers had trampled the first woman in line for a DVD sale and knocked her unconscious. The woman’s sister said that the crazed shoppers had ‘walked over her like a herd of elephants’. But, as one Washington pundit noted, ‘elephants do not behave that way to others of their species, even when they’re stampeding…’ Oh well, elephants, thank God, trample on DVDs, rather than on each other, which proves that human nature is regressing, and fast. Mind you, I haven’t the foggiest what a DVD is, but I suspect it’s something useless some greedy clown has invented in order to put more people in hock. Who would have thought that Ebenezer Scrooge got it right all along. Christmas nowadays is one long orgy of shopping by brain-dead plebs eager to show they’ve arrived. Better to be raped by a hundred Transylvanian lepers than get caught in a post-Christmas sale at a large department store in London or Noo Yawk.

Mind you, I don’t know what’s worse. Pleb shopping or the pleb obsession with celebrity. The latter has gone ballistic in the Bagel. Celebrity-watching in America is being compared to some sort of inbred version of Britain’s royal-watching. I’ll take the latter any day, not that I find what Prince Andrew, say, does all day very exciting (watch videos, hit golf balls and say stupid things), but simply because he’s less unpleasant to look at than the mutants who pass for celebrities today.