Jules Léotard

Source: Wikimedia Commons

GSTAAD—“He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.” As everyone knows, life’s unfair, but this is ridiculous. An American daredevil falls out of an airplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute and manages to land on a postage-stamp-size net without a scratch. The poor little Greek boy falls off a balcony ten to fifteen feet high, lands on gravel, and breaks many bones in his body.

Being encased in plaster is similar to living under a strict dictatorship—North Korea, for example. There’s no crime, no muggings, but as far as doing what comes naturally, fuhgeddaboudit. Self-doubt and cultural pessimism are twinned to physical immobility and pain. Radical multiculturalists imply that the Western way of life produces hate and social inequities. Are they all encased in plaster, or is their brain in a cast?

Modern society provides economic affluence and equality of opportunity, yet is systematically deprecated and vilified by its direct beneficiaries. I watched these ludicrous Black Lives Matter publicity seekers being reverentially interviewed by TV journalists, and witnessed the Big Lie going into action. Not a single hack asked about or pointed out the fact that it’s the large racial difference in criminal offending, not racism, that is the cause for the disproportionate amount of incarcerated blacks. British cops have killed two men in 2016, yet the protesters are acting as if thousands have been massacred in cold blood. Pretty soon we will have a war on cops as they have on the other side of the ocean. And not a single American police officer has been found guilty by mostly black juries, yet still the Black Lives Matter hustlers are getting their daily headlines.

Being immobile makes one think too much. For example, if a novelist had written back in the ’60s about a German chancellor and a Luxembourg petty official flooding Europe with migrants from Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East and turning the old continent into a modern Babel, it would have been sold as science fiction. Yet it has happened, and Merkel, the old East German apparatchik, has the gall to still be preaching to us about brotherhood and all that crap. If she and Juncker had any decency they would have both resigned and exiled themselves to some leper colony down south, but I will be changing gender before that happens.

Instead of immediately shutting down any mosque and jailing any imam who preaches violence against the host nation, we have “academics” and lefty hacks defending their liberties, liberties that would cost them their lives if practiced back home. Such are the joys of radical multiculturalism imposed on us while we slept. I remember going to visit Paul Johnson immediately following the fall of communism and we agreed that the left would never admit defeat but find another way to undermine our freedoms. Sure enough, that is when PC came around with a vengeance.

Mind you, it’s not all gloom, although an American friend telephoned to tell me that hard hats on building sites no longer whistle at pretty girls over there. This is the worst news since the surrender at Stalingrad; what is this world coming to? This week I had dinner with Peter and Lara Livanos, who live nearby. They have four children, two boys and two girls, and I had my two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, along. Theodora Livanos, age 14, had just returned from the Balkan Equestrian Games, where she won three gold medals for Greece and was a major contributor to my country coming in first. (We beat the dreaded Turks, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, and so on.)

During dinner I asked to see the video of her victory on her white stallion, but she declined. Her parents then showed me, as the Greek flag went up and the national anthem echoed around the stadium, and it was so moving I almost did a girlie thing. How does a 14-year-old daughter of a billionaire be so self-assured that she does not care to harp on her victories? Victories as badly needed in broken Greece as controls are on the Greco-Turkish border.

I’ll tell you how. Her parents—her mother is a Brit—brought her up in the old-fashioned way, normally. None of that bullshit that goes on in the Gulf, with Maseratis being given to those ghastly-looking desert rats when they’re still in their cribs. Theodora is living proof that very rich parents do not necessarily mean a dysfunctional family. She made us Greeks proud, and she also looks the part: tall, fair, and beautiful. And speaking of sport, this is the real Olympic spirit. Qatar has bought a whole team of foreigners for tens of millions, and is fielding a handball team in Rio that is made up of French, Bosnian Serbs, and Swedes, now all competing for Qatar, a gas-rich kleptocracy that couldn’t produce an athlete even if the populace stopped sleeping with their camels. Yet Qatar will most likely win a gold medal in these rotten-to-the-core Olympics thanks to their ill-gotten lucre. Poor Pierre de Coubertin, where are you now that we need you most?!