Jenny McCarthy posts dispatches from the front lines of Britain’s class war.

The old-fashioned stereotype of a Tory used to be someone “very fat, very lazy, and very clever,” someone rather like Evelyn Waugh. But embonpoint today is looked upon in Britain, not as an indication of access to good dining and fine wine, but as a sure indicator of indiscipline and low achievement. Basically, Britain’s elite is today firmly Puritan, at least with respect to body image.

Jeremy Clarkson… wrote last week of his experiences driving the new Rolls-Royce coupé around town: “It’s been a genuinely alarming insight into the bitterness of Britain’s obese and stupid underclass.”

When he drove past a bus queue, he said, he realised that “hate is something you can touch and see and smell.”

The “obese and stupid” people at the bus stop hadn’t done anything specific, it seemed: presumably they had simply failed to light up with sufficient admiration as Clarkson coasted by in his swanky car.

Still, you don’t have to be Karl Marx to reflect that if you were waiting for a bus while fretting about the rising cost of heating the family home, the sudden appearance of Clarkson in a £296,500 vehicle might not fill the heart with unalloyed joy.

In July, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle saw a fat woman and her plump children in a supermarket.

She didn’t say or do anything discourteous, it appeared, nor did the children, but the mere glimpse of “this hag”, her “vile lardy brood” and the contents of her shopping trolley prompted the writer to a bizarre rant which culminated in the fantasy that “I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter, and on the way out I kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut.”

It is worth pointing out that while both Clarkson and Liddle are normal-looking men, neither would exactly be in line to win the Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year Award. But then middle-class fat is, for them, texturally different from underclass fat. Good things have poured into middle-class fat, you see: steak, Roquefort, red wine and a heartily robust enjoyment of life. Underclass fat, however, being composed entirely of chicken nuggets, chips and wilful idleness, is a mark of moral degeneracy.

The people who are quickest to sneer at “chavs” and the perceived physical shortcomings of the “underclass” often seem to be those most obsessed with flaunting their own “bling” and extending their unprovoked rudeness to those with far less social and financial clout. Odd, that. It does sometimes leave you wondering, though, just what the term “to behave with class” really means.

The interior-linked anti-obesity rants are hilarious.

Ross Douthat, in the Atlantic, is less than sympathetic.

You stay classy, John Edwards:

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Also, he made a point of telling Woodruff that he remained the son of a mill worker throughout the entire affair.

It looks like they won’t have Flem Snopes to kick around anymore.

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Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1958 – Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack’s shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2008 – School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1958 – Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.
2008 – Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.

Scenario: Jeffrey won’t be still in class, disrupts other students.
1958 – Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2008 – Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor’s car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1958 – Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2008 – Billy’s dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy’s sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy’s mom has affair with psychologist.

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1958 – Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2008 – Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1958 – Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, and goes to college.
2008 – Pedro’s cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro’s English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle and blows up a red ant bed.
1958 – Ants die.
2008 – BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated; Johnny’s Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1958 – In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2008 – Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

Conservatives, like Edmund Burke, have repeatedly warned that human reason employed by a contemporary intelligentsia class does not represent an authority wise or competent enough to overturn the wisdom of numberless generations and to remodel the immemorial institutions of mankind.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790:

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

When the argument against Gay Marriage is made that no greater practical impediment to formalized polygamy or incest exists than to formalized sodomy, slippery slopes are pooh pooh’d by the party of alleged progress.

Well, here you are, progressives.

The Times of London publishes memories of an agreeable relationship with her brother by an articulate and clearly well-educated citizen of modernity, who describes herself in passing as an academic.

Their incestuous relationship isn’t something she and her sibling “can share easily.” But that isn’t because there was something wrong with it, you see. It’s simply the case that their relationship was unusual and other people wouldn’t understand.

The lady academic refuses “to be made to feel guilty about it.” Incest may be “traditionally seen as bad, but in some cultures that isn’t the case.”

What really matters is that she can identify no specific utilitarian loss, and she enjoyed it.

So here we are, living in a time in which members of the sophisticated, international haute bourgeoisie are not ashamed to admit to practices normally ascribed uncomplimentarily to rural primitives.

But, we know there are no slippery slopes, and one couldn’t possibly suppose that parent-child incest could ever be described affirmatively or even ambiguously, could one?

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Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Dennis Prager remembers the good old days, when we baby boomers were kids, and America was still a free country and Americans were basically sane.

With the important exception of racial discrimination — which was already dying a natural death when I was young — it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.

When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one’s illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a “hostile work environment” or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another’s sexual orientation.

Yale students are intended to talk about sex a lot during a biannual week-long crotch-gazing series of lectures and seminars scheduled to coincide with Valentine’s Day, but few are likely to find a week-long promotion of sex toys, condoms, and the personal careers of a bunch of porn stars and geriatric sex gurus very interesting. Yale undergraduates are likely to think that the idea of people the age of those professional sex counselors actually having sex is really gross.

The Yale Daily News took only a flaccid interest:

Porn stars, sex-toy connoisseurs and condom manufacturers are among the characters descending on the Elm City for an unorthodox Valentine’s Day celebration.

Following Sex Week at Yale’s kick-off comedy show on Sunday, students delved deeper into the eight-day series of events Monday afternoon when Pepper Schwartz GRD ’74 mixed comedy and counseling to address common mistakes in beliefs about sex and love.

Over 100 students attended the event “Myths & Misconceptions about Sex and Relationships,” during which sociologist, professor, author and former Glamour magazine columnist Schwartz informed and entertained the crowd by discussing 13 common misunderstandings about sex. The topics ranged from female anatomy to sexual orientation to marital sex and were addressed from both biological and cultural perspectives.

Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, is the author of 14 books and over 40 articles on sex, love and relationships and creator of the Personality Profiler test used by Perfectmatch.com.

She began her lecture by declaring that sex “is not a natural act” but rather one based on complex cultural pressures and individual beliefs and preferences. Her goal, she said, is to address those parts of human sexuality and interaction that are commonly misunderstood.

Ironically, the conservative Yale Free Press found itself obliged to advise Michelle Malkin‘s commenters to chill out. The event is just one of countless fringe activities occurring during the academic year which the typical Yalie dismisses with a raised eyebrow.

The magazine, distributed free on campus.

Sex Week home page

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Speaking as stuffy old alumn, I do wonder exactly why the Yale Administration allows the university to be exploited by this unsavory species of commercial enterprise. I suppose Richard Levin is too busy running around saving the planet to provide any direction on good taste.

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Hat tip to Jake McGuire.

Following up a link this morning I arrived at (Gawd help us!) a pagan blog, forsooth! which did justify its existence however by delivering up this delectable item:

Quotation heard on a bus by Peregrine:

Gothling 2, sulking: “I did everything right out of the Necronomicon, and the candles didn’t even flicker. I don’t get it.

In Germany, trompe d’oiel advertising on delivery trucks is used to atttract the attention of consumers.

But Japanese girls attract other kinds of attention with skirts silkscreened with trompe d’oeil images of lady’s undergarments.

Hat tips to Karen Myers and Frank Dobbs.

The Master of Calhoun was filled with indignation when a showering couple’s private activities flooded one of the college bathrooms, and is demanding that undergraduate aqueous trysts cease in Calhoun forthwith. Fiercely fueled with righteous wrath, he proceeded to bombard the residential college’s entire undergraduate population with an angry email, which was promptly leaked to the AP:

A randy couple’s frolic in a shower at one of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges prompted a professor to issue an e-mail of protest, which in turn has sparked debate on the Internet.

Yale officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the e-mail was sent Jan. 30 by Professor Jonathan Holloway, master of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges at the Ivy League university.

About 330 students received the e-mail from Holloway, who runs Calhoun as master. He referred comment to Yale’s public affairs department.

His e-mail warns against “intimate activity” in the showers, “especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygienic state.

“Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall,” the e-mail stated, referring to the nickname for college residents. “Last night, the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasurable and exciting for you, but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.”

The note, first reported Friday by the New Haven Register, ended with a warning to the frolicking couple: “I really don’t want to explore this matter any further, as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let’s not go there.”

What does he mean by threatening public embarassment, do you suppose? Email number 2 names names? Email number 3 includes .jpg’s?

Dan Gelertner ’09 thinks there’s trouble right here in Elm City. His fellow Calhoun undergraduates are sinking into the depths of degradation.

Maybe he could start a boys’ band.

I can remember some sophomores from Calhoun (I think it was) being expelled back in the 1960s as the result of being caught showering with a date. But in the early 1970s, Yale bathroom doors often featured interchangeable signs, reading “Male Inside,” “Female Inside,” or “Couple Inside.” I don’t remember any couples causing a flood, however. What could they possibly have been doing?

The 2007 Calhoun Shower Scandal is pretty tame stuff, I can tell you, compared to great Yale sex scandals of days gone by. Older Yalemen will remember the “Calhoun Suzy” affair of the late 1950s? early 1960s? in which a very naughty, and decidedly underage, townie took up residence in the then-uncoeducated residential college, providing horizontal refreshment to large numbers of undergraduates. The Suzy story ended unhappily with the arrival of the New Haven police, and the premature termination of some promising Yale careers.

In reality, a man’s suit of good material and tailoring, which fits properly, is not only comfortable, but actively pleasurable.

And, moreover, not everyone subscribes to the supine viewpoint that comfort outranks all other possible considerations.

In Rostand’s play, the gallant Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance, compares his existential stance of personal independence favorably to his personal choice of a decidedly uncomfortable Spanish ruff collar.

Cyrano to Le Bret:

–Vous, la molle amitié dont vous vous entourez,
Ressemble à ces grands cols d’Italie, ajourés
Et flottants, dans lesquels votre cou s’effémine:
On y est plus à l’aise. . .et de moins haute mine,
Car le front n’ayant pas de maintien ni de loi,
S’abandonne à pencher dans tous les sens. Mais moi,
La Haine, chaque jour, me tuyaute et m’apprête
La fraise dont l’empois force à lever la tête;
Chaque ennemi de plus est un nouveau godron
Qui m’ajoute une gêne, et m’ajoute un rayon:
Car, pareille en tous points à la fraise espagnole,
La Haine est un carcan, mais c’est une auréole !

(Brian Hooker translation:)

You —
Good nature all around you, soft and warm —

You are like those Italians, in great cowls
Comfortable and loose — Your chin sinks down
Into the folds, your shoulders droop. But I —
The Spanish ruff I wear around my throat
Is like a ring of enemies; hard, proud,
Each point another pride, another thorn —
So that I hold myself erect perforce
Wearing the hatred of the common herd
Haughtily, the harsh collar of Old Spain,
At once a fetter and — a halo!

–Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 2, Scene 2.

Mark Cuban (undoubtedly a resident of California) speaks out on behalf of the permanently infantilized.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

A bit over a year ago (22 Nov 2005), the New York Sun was reporting on the spread of Naked Parties from Yale (and possibly Brown) to Columbia.

But the earliest public report probably appeared in the novel Chloe Does Yale published in March of 2004 by then Yale Senior (Timothy Dwight) Natalie Krinsky.

Today’s Times reports that the fad for naked parties was created in 1995 by the Yale Pundits, an undergraduate society which in earlier days contented itself with jokes and champagne-and-lobster lunches on the library steps.

The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus houses, neglected rooms in classroom buildings and even small libraries on campus.

“It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

News of Yale’s contribution to modern undergraduate social life has spread all the way to Scotland. The Scotsman.

While one campus source at Yale… says naked parties are “the No1” thing to do before graduation, students who attend the six to eight parties held each year say it can be a life-changing experience, far from the “frat-house” bawdiness portrayed in films such as Animal House…

Another Yale student, who did not want his name to become known by campus authorities – which do not try to stop the parties but do not encourage them – said: “Part of it is just the mystique of not knowing where you’re going. It’s become a hip thing to do.”

The events are magnets for social-climbers at other top academic institutions, including Columbia, MIT and Brown.

A better history, and a first person account from a Yale coed, appeared in the Yale Herald back in March of last year.