The Weekly Wit: Terms and Conditions

Uncle Ted's grammar militancy; British kids taking the Michael; Macron upsets the permanently aggrieved.

The House at Rueil by Édouard Manet (1882)

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Welcome to The Weekly Wit, a satirical review of news and culture.

Eating One’s Cake

Last week, Ted Kaczynski, the noted ascetic, mathematical genius and bohemian scholar, passed away aged 81.

For those unfamiliar with the Unabomber, Kaczynski possessed some rather alternative views. Namely, Ted thought the industrial revolution and its consequences had been a disaster for the human race. His words, not mine.

Fearing technology would enslave us all, Uncle Ted set out to destroy industrial society and return man to his primitive state.

Ted dropped out of his professorship at Harvard to shack up in the Montana wilderness.

Between 1978 and 1995, Ted mailed homemade bombs to academics, industrialists, lobbyists, and civilians. He killed three people and maimed 23 others.

In 1996, after the longest and most expensive manhunt in history, forty F.B.I agents swarmed Ted’s rudimentary abode, ending at once the Unabomber saga.  

Ted commands fervent popularity amongst the very online extremities who too loathe modern life.  

He’s especially revered by that phalanx of fashy right-wingers who drain their days issuing lifestyle diktats and self-help slops about seed oils and some silly book called ‘Sun and Steel.’

Languished in their pre-diabetes, their sexlessness, and their decidedly unmanly ways, the volk rage against the dying of the light beer they blame for their troubles. Perhaps they admire Ted’s commitment to his beliefs, a commitment which dwarfs their own desperate, larpy little rebellion against reality.

This is the age of ‘seeing the whole person.’ So, I’ll give it a go.

Ted Kaczynski had a few admirable points. First, he convinced both the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish a 35,000-word essay called ‘Industrial Society and Its Future.’ Reader, this might be the most audacious of pitches in all of freelance-writing history. Credit where it’s due, etcetera.

Second, Ted insisted on the proper use of the idiom, ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.’ Ted rejected the common and logically fraught version: ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.’ Indeed, you can. You must have your cake if you are to eat your cake. You cannot have your cake once you’ve eaten your cake.

That turn of phrase helped F.B.I agents snare Ted. His sister-in-law read his essay, recognised the writing style, and the peculiar diction, and then grassed him up to the rozzers.

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Doubtless, Ted would have shared my disdain for TikTok.

Last week, a Belgian father faked his own death and turned up via helicopter to his own funeral.

In the Belgian city of Liege, David Baerten pulled off the ‘prank of the century’ in a bid to see who really cared about him.

After his daughter announced the ‘death’ on social media, dozens of friends and family members showed up to Baerten’s funeral. The bloke turned up in a helicopter. Classic Dave. What is he like? Etc.

Alongside a camera crew, Baerten popped out of the helicopter. “Cheers to you all. Welcome to my funeral,” he said. Incidentally, some were relieved to see him above ground.

Of course, the grand caper was streamed on TikTok to Baerten’s 165,000-strong incredulous flock—a minor detail, of course.

“What I see in my family often hurts me, I never get invited to anything. Nobody sees me. We all grew apart. I felt unappreciated,” Baerten said. “That’s why I wanted to give them a life lesson and show them that you shouldn’t wait until someone is dead to meet up with them.”

Reader, help me with this crossword answer: six letters, vulgar slang, rhymes with ‘anchor.’

Baerten went on: “This proves who really cares about me. Those who didn’t come did contact me to meet up. So, in a way, I did win.”

Yes, mate. You are a winner. A winner of this month’s Oxford Sour Lead Paint Prize.

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Cat People

Great Britain is having a normal one.

Last week, schoolchildren in Sussex dropped themselves into the soup after suggesting that their fellow classmate is not actually a cat.

Two thirteen-year-old girls at Rye College were told they ‘should go to a different school’ if they didn’t believe that a girl could identify as a cat.

During a ‘life education’ class, the pair said there was ‘no such thing as agender’ and: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl, and if you have a penis, you’re a boy—that’s it.”

When they queried how someone could identify as a cat, the pair were blasted for questioning their classmate’s identity.

An investigation found children at schools across the land now identify as dinosaurs and horses. Another often dons a cape and demands to be acknowledged as a moon. Another identifies as Bambi.

After the hysteria simmered, it became obvious what was going on here. And it too became obvious that this is a good thing.

Reader, these children are taking the Mickey.

When confronted with obvious nonsense held by their preachy, supposedly superior teachers, these kids cannot resist mocking them to a nub.

After all, if one can identify as whatever one wants then that includes anything one wants. For teenagers primed with mischief, this is just too good a brew not to sup on a daily basis.

And it is a promising sign. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is essential to all progress. Clearly, these kids are unafraid to think for themselves and are determined to see that which is beyond their own nose.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what almost everybody knows to be patent nonsense. As history assures us, once something becomes a laughingstock it soon dies of ridicule.

As James Thurber put it, that which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.

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Macron’s Mencken Moment

Footage of Emmanuel Macron downing a Corona beer in an impressive 17 seconds in a rugby club dressing room led to a row about boozing and toxic masculinity.

The French president necked the beer at the behest of Toulouse rugby players after they bashed La Rochelle at the Stade de France, Paris.

Macron grabs the beer and bolts it in one before slamming it down on the counter in triumph.

Of course, the same people with the same response to absolutely anything deemed Macron’s jape to be toxic masculinity.

Lapping in a Freudian foam, The Guardian said:

“The choice of Corona beer—favourite drink of the late right-wing president Jacques Chirac—led to comments about whether Macron was using it to make overtures to the right…”

Of course. That must be it. Thanks for coming in. We’ll be in touch.

Anyway, some on the progressive left are at war with spontaneity and ambiguity. Consider how these mirthless Puritans react to comedy in the same bloodless manner. Why? Comedy—messy, revealing, organic—is the antithesis of identity politics—exacting, concealing, metallic.

This dictum applies to their aversion to any form of spontaneity or joy.

Santé, Macron!

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Pretty Bubbles in the Air

Reader, this is sheer indulgence on my part. I will never ever get to write the following, so I am filling my boots.

West Ham United won their first major trophy in 43 years.

We won the Europa Conference League, scoring the winning goal in the last minute of play. The whistle blew some seven terrifying minutes later.

For the best part of a week, your humble narrator cried like a baby.

I don’t care if we lose the next 700 games or if the Earth implodes into a radioactive slurry. We are European champions. Nothing else really matters at all.

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Wit of the Week

“The best lesson we can learn from witnessing the folly of mankind is not to irritate ourselves against it.”

— William Hazlitt

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What I’m Reading

• New York Times: Biden Voters Don’t Want Biden… or Trump by multiple authors

• Robert Reich: Debunking Minimum Wage Mythology by Robert Reich

• Spectator World: Why Biden 2024 is No Sure Bet by Oliver Wiseman

• Unherd: Boris Should Destroy the Tories by Aris Roussinos

• New Statesman: The Rise of the Unabomber Right by Sohrab Ahmari

• New York Post: Gavin Newsom is Running for President by Douglas Murray

• Compact: To Fight Inequality: Empower Workers by Anthony Annett

• New Statesman: The Rise of Waterstones Dad by Gavin Jacobson

• The Baffler: Did the Fun Work? by Miya Tokumitsu

• The New Yorker: Defending the Unabomber by William Finnegan (1998)

• Book: Arguably… by Christopher Hitchens

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If you missed it…

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A personal note…

Thank you for reading Oxford Sour. Feel free to send this column on to like-minds. Follow me on Twitter. And for 20% off for one year: click the button below.

Best,
Christopher

Oxford Sour

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