Featherless Bipeds

Harry and Meghan's Colombian hypocrisy tour.

La Grenouillère by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1869)

Lionel Shriver's novel, Mania, asks 'What if calling someone stupid was illegal?'

Set in an alternate timeline eerily flirtatious with our own, Mania depicts a world in which intelligence and competence, those oppressive agents of the modern bête noire—contrast—provoke outraged mobs.

The Mental Parity Movement demands a Khmer-Rouge-style Year Zero. To suggest the existence of differing abilities and competencies is to be 'brain-vain.' In this final 'great civil rights fight,' stupidity is euphemised as 'alternative processing.' The mob cancels Frasier for brain vanity. After regulations prevent Pfizer from hiring qualified scientists, a toxic vaccine lays waste to millions.

The protagonist, a free-thinking academic named Pearson, cancels herself after she adds Dostoevsky's The Idiot to her class syllabus. But the book is not the offending item. The word 'idiot' is illegal. So too, is the 'D-Word.' Pearson falls foul of social services after calling her seven-year-old daughter 'dumb.' Her daughter grasses her up for this most heinous offence. For her crimes, Pearson endures a mandatory course entitled 'Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity.'

Akin to our culture, mass neurosis devours that of Mania. The citizens scour the earth for evidence of the gravest offence: cognitive bigotry.

The Mental Parity Movement even renames 'sage'—stripping the haughty herb of its sapiosexual swagger.

Mania imagines a world in which mediocrity is brilliance and where platitude is profundity. I suspect Shriver wasted little time on research. Turning on one's television furnishes a commonplace book with a bottomless wealth of material.

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This week, Harry and Meghan embarked on an unroyal tour of Colombia. On the agenda was a summit on misinformation and online harm. At this 'responsible digital future' fandango, the former soap actress and the former royal spermatozoa relayed their fears. Essentially, hordes of toothless oiks with Wi-Fi often say nasty things online.

On stage, Harry adopted the pose of the modern soothsayer. His tieless open collar oozed Sicilian ease.

Speaking in Adverb English, Harry avoided anything as threatening or as harmful as a declarative sentence. Harry talks as if everything is a question as not to arouse predators. The Prince droned on, auditioning the Californication of his mother tongue. The same mother tongue Harry's ancestors spread around the globe via what some may deign to be less than inclusive methods.

How can I put this in Mania-approved euphemism? Harry is minimally exceptional. Harry is to intelligent thought what lead pipes are to potable water.

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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex opined about online harm and social cohesion. They lamented that false information hoodwinked the recent British rioters.

'People are acting on information that isn't true!' said Harry, some thirty-nine years a resident of this earth. With the empty applause of clapping seals on his mind, Harry built to a rising crescendo: 'We are no longer debating facts.' That's the thing with minimal exceptionalism. Banality dances in the robes of profundity.

Of course, the problem of ignorant oxygen hoarders acting violently on behalf of false beliefs is hardly a fresh development. Even the Romans, history's happiest and most prosperous humans, endured fools and knaves. But Harry, the great redeemer, persevered. "It all comes down to us being able to spot the true from the fake. In an ideal world, those with positions of influence would take more responsibility." Elon Musk entered the chat.

The irony of a duke and duchess attending a conference about 'anti-colonialism and female empowerment' went unnoticed. Then again, the regal guests traffic in a thought-dissolving concept known as My Truth.

My Truth is a mental pathogen which hijacks one's critical faculties. In our age of rampant narcissism, the truth is whatever you want it to be. All else is fake news or misinformation. One side cracks an egg at the top. The other side cracks an egg at the bottom. To this demented theatre, the rest of us are slaves.

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Curiously, nobody asked Harry for his thoughts on the recent protests engulfing Bogotá and major Colombian cities. Some hundred-thousand protestors swarmed the streets to contest President Gustav Petro's pension and healthcare reforms. Perhaps they were victims of misinformation.

Perhaps the Sussexes will avoid political chatter and elect for small talk. After all, their host, vice president Francia Márquez, is a dutiful student of My Truth.

Like Harry and Meghan, Marquez has no time for the media. The Colombian press suggests Ms Marquez uses her power to enrich herself. Like Harry and Meghan, she brushes off such unhelpful chatter. 'They're always twisting my words!' she says, as she hovers above them in a government-funded Black Hawk helicopter in which she commutes to work from her plush second home in the Cauca department.

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No doubt, Harry and Meghan will enjoy the engaging company of President Petro, a former leftist guerilla. Petro is a master of My Truth.

Just last week, Petro responded to criticism of the unroyal visit, taking particular umbrage with the charge that his country is 'dangerous.'

'Dangerous countries emit co2,' he said. 'Non dangerous countries absorb co2.'

Mr Petro forgot to mention that forty percent of Colombians live in grinding poverty. Fifteen percent of them eke out a living on just $2.15 a day. The murder rate in Colombia is four times that of Great Britain. But what really matters is that Colombia is 46^th on the carbon emissions table.

Reader, I don't wish to intrude upon another's My Truth. But I'd imagine ordinary Colombians, two-thirds of whom disapprove of President Petro, have more pressing concerns. When I go to the ATM late at night, I'm not looking over my shoulder for carbon emissions. Neither, I humbly suggest, are those long-suffering Colombians.  

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