The Weekly Wit: Main Street edition
On renaming mountains; Eugenics, but don't call it that; and free da weed, man.
Welcome to the third edition of The Weekly Wit, a satirical review of news and culture.
Smalltown Snobbery
In his novel, Main Street, Sinclair Lewis employs a fountain pen as a surgeon would a scalpel.
Set in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, Main Street satirises Lewis’s experience growing up in small-town America during the 1910s.
No slouch or souk, Lewis unveils small-town life at its most suffocating, stubborn, cloying, and claustrophobic. Despite newcomer Carol Milford’s progressive efforts to remake conservative Gopher Prairie into a bustling hub of culture, beauty, and refinement, she ultimately fails to crack the psychological forcefield encasing the town and its proud people.
The masterful Lewis infects the reader with a conundrum: Who to side with? Milford’s motivations are understandable, and the resistance toward them is understandable, too.
Anyway, the lovely small town in which I grew up is engulfed in a kerfuffle. The mountains surrounding that idyllic little place are in the news. Rather, their name is in the news.
The Brecon Beacons National Park is to ‘reclaim’ its Welsh name. Soon, what four million annual visitors call ‘The Beacons’ will be known as Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. Its logo, a burning brazier, might be expunged from sight. This is about climate change. Or something.
The Park’s CEO, Catherine Mealing-Jones, said, “The more we looked into it the more we realised the name Brecon Beacons doesn’t make any sense. It’s a very English description of something that probably never happened. A massive carbon-burning brazier is not a good look for an environmental organisation.”
Like Carol in Main Street, Mealing-Jones represents the ‘forward-thinking’ progressive set which assumes its sensibilities are the only sensibilities worth sensing. Reader, notice again that surreptitious ‘we’—She means, ‘me and the carbon copies of me to whom I talk.’
The Guardian sent a rover to investigate. Tellingly, the reporter visited art galleries and one of the few shops with a Welsh name, to curate the correct conclusion: this is a good thing because I and people like me think it so.
To announce this move, the Park hired the actor and professional chip-shoulder, Michael Sheen. Sheen is the avatar of that curious modern progressive who masks smalltown narrowmindedness with cosmopolitan open-mindedness.
With his characteristic, studied slovenliness and buried in that theatrical, gravelly lilt, Sheen did what he does best: parade himself before a camera, and dress his anti-English persecution complex as something rather more virtuous.
Sheen’s is a one-sided obsession akin to that of a one-night stand gone awry: desperate for the attention of someone indifferent toward him at best.
President of his own fan club, he droned on and on, referencing ancient glories and reviving ancient grievances. Reader, I have the most sensitive of radars for this kind of lurid yokel bullshit. In truth, Sheen hates the English.
He may present this rebrand as ‘forward-thinking’. It’s not. Like all nationalism, it’s just a small-town grievance draped in a flag.
At least they didn’t affect my sense of irony. It appears they, the frivolous, have renamed the Beacons after the fifth-century King Brychan Brycheiniog.
Dear reader, the irony. King Brychan was Irish by birth, and so committed to his roots he married a Saxon princess, and then a Scottish princess. His offspring live in Cornwall, England.
Bougie Breeders and Baby Blockers
Scientists have unveiled a male contraceptive, striking a blow to those utterly normal people who obsess over the natal habits of strangers.
According to science, soon will come the day when men can pop a pill and avoid spending four months terrified they’ve knocked up Jenny from accounts.
For several hours, this pill will render men temporarily infertile. Apparently, the brand name is a toss-up between Babymamablocka and Nosac.
Reader, I’ve laboured under the primitive illusion that such a magic chemical was already in circulation and named ‘Wild Turkey 101.’
This news is bound to trouble a delightful couple featured in this week’s Daily Telegraph.
Simone and Malcolm Collins are two thirty-something Silicon Valley pro-natalists who task themselves with repopulating the earth.
Reader, I’m trying to find just one example in history in which someone who proclaimed their mission was to repopulate the Earth, didn’t turn out to be a complete and utter nutter whose nightmarish vision ended in bloodshed, murder, and in this case, curiously preppy eyewear.
I’m no sociologist, but all this progress is driving us all mad.
The Collinses assure the reader that they are not remotely unhinged.
But then you learn the names of their children: Torsten (lovely…) Octavian (nice…) and Titan Invictus (absolutely mental.)
I don’t know about you, reader, but Silicon Valley types with hard, Teutonic features talking about ‘breeding’ and the fineries of genetic purity, for some reason make me uncomfortable.
Free Da Weed
According to YouGov, over half of the British people think weed should be legalised.
I suspect this figure is much higher, but the problem is that, well, weed smokers aren’t exactly known for their get-up-and-go. I’d imagine half of those asked and in favour are planning to get around to thinking about answering the questionnaire.
I could not care less whether someone smokes dope. But… two things. Firstly, can they put something in it to neuter that vomity NY cab stench? Secondly, can you promise not to dredge up the tiresome fact that Joe Rogan smokes weed and he’s worth hundreds of millions?
Indeed. Ted Bundy was a promising lawyer. What is your point?
Kurt Vonnegut said that a true nightmare is waking up and finding your former classmates run the country. There’s little chance of my former classmates running the country, but they deserve an accolade.
For years, we reprobates skived the predations of our rugby teacher by hiding out down Smoker’s Lane, passing around joint after joint of the cheapest, nastiness, most satisfactory hash. We all demanded the legalisation of weed, despite knowing such an advent would strip our preoccupation of its lustre.
The rebels are now the majority. And Alexander wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
Witticism of the Week
“I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
— J.D. Salinger
What I’m Reading
The Spectator: East Germany: Not Stasiland by Victor Sebestyen
The Free Press: The College Kids Who Unionised Amazon by Mary Kay Linge
WSJ: Leave the American People Alone by Joseph Epstein
Book: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
YouTube: Academy of Ideas: Carl Jung on Overcoming Anxiety Disorders
If you missed it…
A personal note…
Thank you for reading Oxford Sour. Feel free to send this column on to like-minds. And of course, please subscribe.
With love and squalor,
Christopher
Oxford Sour
Let’s hope Jenny from Accounts is not so trusting of some guy who smiles reassuringly and says “Nothing to worry about - I’m on the pill.”
I wholeheartedly vote ‘babymamablocka’.