Totally agree, Reo. The guy's brilliant.

I've always said that my two big "discoveries" in terms of authors since 9-11 where VDH and Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a medical doctor who used to work at a prison in London (which perhaps explains both his experience with the lower classes and his cynical view of life in Britain). I have a feeling that someday Dalrymple is going to be viewed in much the same light as Orwell is -- a genius who was unappreciated in his time.

Check out his books Life At the Bottom and Our Culture,What's Left of It. Just don't read them if you're already feeling cranky and depressed, because these books will not improve your mood.

Someone sent that to me yesterday and I lost it! Thanks posting it It is a long read, but WELL worth it.

Excellent writing about a disturbing topic.

Yeah, I've been all over it today, too. Lileks is my Rovian master. When he puts up a link, I have to follow his bidding. He featured it in the Bleat this morning. My (shamelessly link-whoring) take:

http://www.colossusblog.com/mt/archives/001213.html

Yeah, I read that too. It takes a real effort to fuck things up as badly as the French have done. Let's give them that; they've worked hard to get where they are today.

Thoroughly depressing, but thanks for the link. I can't face the Suicide Bombers article just yet - perhaps tomorrow.

Actually, a spiritual forbear of this article is Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London. It takes a lot of the gloss off La Cite De La Lumiere.

From the article...

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them.

Come on! You KNOW that you can at least sympathize with that sentiment.

Just kidding of course....

Monty,

Me too, then.

The Frivolity of Evil (by Dalrymple) is one of the best, if not the best essay I have ever read.

As mentioned, here I think, I met VDH at LAX. Neat.

And yes, they both have emerged as two of the most cogent writers since 9/11.

Dalrymple really is the king of the clear-eyed discomforting observation.

What's so interesting about the slum-kiddies of France is that they're actually not much like the radicalized Muslims of Britain or the Netherlands. They wouldn't fit in a muslim country at all. With their baggy clothes, cell phones and rap music, they're more like the listless, uncivilized gangbangers of American ghettoes. They take on the "muslim" identity in a superficial way because it's all they've got to latch on to, but it's really just a prop to facilitate their ego-driven machismic chest-thumping.

They're truly barbarians in the most fundamental sesne of the word.

I met VDH at LAX. Neat.

A couple of minutes with a guy whose brain you want to completely drain? I think my head might have exploded before I got past, "So, where ya headin'?" I have to be a serious dork -- or maybe it's one of those man-crushes.

Thoughts on the also smarter-than-I Dalrymple essay follow.

The crystalizing moment early on:

Could it be that only they [three elderly interlopers in the attempted vandalism of parking meters by Rumanian youths] had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?

Well, yes, there is that. But how about, "It's someone else's problem?" Nothing really moral about it. When you grow up in a welfare state, virtue is farmed out to the government. Personal virtue becomes more a matter of voting for the "enlightened" positions and making the appropriate noises. Mere preening, really. Only the people who predated that corruption felt personally compelled to do something even at the risk of their own safety.

He sees it from the other side. The lead in: Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives

Followed by the money: It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident. The rest expands on the theme, including the attraction of islamofascism. Prescient? Sure. Better than I would have done, I'm sure. But not as impressive as a pre-9/11 take would have been and I'm not always so smart.

He's laser-lucid. The essay works well for our own myth-driven products of the wefare state and seem terribly on target for the Muslem and Arab world. But the system has corrupted the "givers" as well as the takers and, for France, the loop seems almost fatally closed. He saw the coming storm well; the paralysis of those who could otherwise deal with the disaster is the bigger story.

I've read his piece on the French immigrant underclass several times, it really elicited pity for the French which is not something I thought I could ever feel for them. Also made me grateful that the immigrants overrunning my country were Mexicans. Never thought I'd ever be grateful for that, either.

France is fucked, though. That's for sure.

the pot calls the kettle black in this case

I recommend...absolutely any book by Dalrymple, as well. He's an old passion of mine. Warning, though...he can be dark, dark, dark.

To my surprise, Dalrymple has recently moved to France. Or was planning to last I heard, anyway. He's no knee-jerk British frog hater. (Well, yes, see his Underclass for some of his observations on Britain's social woes).

Just finished the first one - off to read the second.

Very good stuff.

he (an imprisoned aspiring suicide bomber) assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy

no shit.

Dalyrimple’s a terrific essayist, and I suppose it’s a tribute to his skill that reading his stuff invariably leaves me filled with bleak, bitter hopelessness—like Andrew Sullivan, only not making such a big f’in deal about it. I loved Life at the Bottom, and I’m still looking forward to Our Culture (What’s Left of It). Basically, I’m just a glutton for punishment.

In a similar vein, has anyone read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, about British soccer hooligans? It makes it pretty clear that Anthony Burgess was a starry-eyed optimist when he wrote Clockwork Orange.

Thanks, Ace.

You, know, on days like this when I sit in my office not working, reading essays like that, I always seem reminded of Atlas Shrugged. Some form of totalitarianism or barbarianism is kicking at the door of their civilizations. I guess we have the same thing here, if you watch the Wire, but there seems to be no Kansas in Europe. No group of people who vote for law and order and all that other stuff that keeps your throat from being slit.

I recently listened to an old Reagan speech where he talked about a Cuban immigrant who says he was lucky, he had America to run to, where will we go if America turns out like Europe?

Finally, wasn't NYC like this for awhile before they started electing law and order mayors? People unwilling to stop youths who thought that wilding was just the normal course of things.

Law & Order in France? Present occurances are setting the stage for LePen in the next elections.

"Among the Thugs" is an amazing book. I've given multiple copies of it as presents.