Did You Know...

Theodore Dalrymple notes the tragic end of childhood in England, and the end of judgment that has enabled it:

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d’être.

Dalrymple is the great secular Jeremiah of England; no one else has so clearly named the evils that infest it. Not only does he see the symptoms, but the doctor diagnoses the disease: statism, Marxism, a glorification of loutishness, and a hostility to the faith and traditions which once made England great.

I watch her decline the way one would watch a parent with Alzheimer’s: here is a great country (where I once lived) that gave us John Locke, Edmund Burke, George Washington, that gave us our hymns, our literature, our ideas of freedom, our very language, and she is slipping into a useless dotage, unable to stir herself though enemies threaten.

A terror cell caught with details of bomb-making and suicide vests may have been plotting to attack the Queen and members of the Royal family, it can be disclosed.

The cell, which included Britain’s youngest ever terrorist, arrested on his way home from his GCSE chemistry exam, was found with information about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh along with the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the Earl of Wessex and the Princess Royal.

There was another fellow long ago who wrote eloquently of the plight of children in England. Sad to say many of the social reforms that culminated in Dalrymple’s moral desert started in reaction to the poetry of William Blake:

Youth of delight! come hither
And see the opening morn,
Image of Truth new-born.
Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason,
Dark disputes and artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze;
Tangled roots perplex her ways;
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead;
And feel–they know not what but care;
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.

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{Post by See-Dubya, written on my own time, on my own computer.}