Backwards Ran The Civilization, Until Reeled The Mind

(With apologies to Wolcott Gibbs for the above headline.)

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, Gabriel Malor looks at the loony hippy Brits of Glastonbury, England, beginning with this Fox News item on their tinfoil hat fear of the town’s Wi-Fi network:

“This place is not appropriate for a Wi-Fi trial,” resident Linda Taylor tells the local Fosse Way magazine. “People are complaining of headaches, tingling skin among other symptoms. This makes me wonder what is it doing to the children.”

“I don’t want my son exposed to risk 24 hours a day, including at his primary school, which is within the Wi-Fi zone,” yoga teacher Natalie Fee tells London’s Telegraph. “I would be failing in my duty as a parent if I did.”

“I have given a number of [orgone crystal hippie] generators to shops in the High Street and hidden others in bushes in the immediate vicinity of the antennae. That way you can bring back the balance,” Matt Todd told the Telegraph. “The science hasn’t really got into the mainstream because the government won’t make decisions which will affect big business, even if it concerns everyone’s health.”

“The pulsed microwaves feed the pineal gland with false information,” local Jacqui Roberts tells the Western Daily Press. “Melatonin fights the free radicals and cancer-producing cells.

As Malor writes, “In other words, some of the dumbest people ever to walk the face of the Earth”:

They live in a country of near-universal literacy. They have been provided with more opportunity for education than the majority of people alive today and the vast majority of people who have ever lived. The internet gives them access to more information than has been or ever will be stored in libraries. And still: dumber than a box of rocks.

In the latest issue of City Journal, the great Theodore Dalrymple has a superb article on “The Quivering Upper Lip: The British character: from self-restraint to self-indulgence.” His first book was titled Life At the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass–and yet one is always astonished at just how far down, out and backwards civilization can ultimately go.

Tangentially Related: Mary Katharine Ham adds, “If you’re concerned about the dwindling vital signs of Western culture in Britain, pull out the defibrilator, stat.”