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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, fife'n'drum version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, this is your eclectically genial host John Derbyshire with news of the hour. This week's show is actually less eclectic than usual. This has been a great week for patriotic immigration reformers and I want to give the topic full coverage. The newsmaker here has of course been Donald Trump, so I shall start with him. |
02 — A candidate proposes patriotic immigration reform! Listen to this, quotes: Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first — not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change. Here are the three core principles of real immigration reform: Those quotes are from Donald Trump's position paper on immigration policy, published last weekend. Let me say that again, just so you get it: A serious candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination next year has put out a position paper calling for the enforcement of federal laws, and for the federal government to place the interests of American citizens before the interests of foreigners. Glory, hallelujah! What is truly amazing here is that anyone is amazed to hear such plain, basic principles of national sovereignty stated frankly by a political candidate. Mind the borders; enforce the laws; put your own citizens first. As Mark Krikorian said in a fine column over at the Center for Immigration Studies, quote: The three principles the paper offers wouldn't even have to be articulated in a healthier society; of course immigration policy must be based exclusively on the interests of We the People of the United States, not wealthy donors, not corporations, not union bosses, not big-city politicians, and not foreign citizens. Their articulation is nonetheless useful as a way to flush out libertarian and leftist opponents of American sovereignty. End quote. Those of us who have been writing and saying these same things for a decade or more are whooping and hollering and throwing our hats in the air. At last there is a candidate, an actual credible presidential candidate, who gets it! Donald Trump has single-handedly upset the applecart of official blather about immigration, the style of diction that Steve Sailer has called, quote, "comically mercenary fraud covered up by pious cant." The apples are rolling all over the street now, and the faithful minions of Chambers of Commerce racketeers, foreign governments, globalist bankers, and ethnic lobbyists are scurrying and squealing all over trying to get them back in the cart. Speaking as a political observer, this is the most fun I've had for ages. More popcorn! |
03 — Immigration comes out of the shadows. If patriotic immigration reform has a hero in Donald Trump, it also has a heroine. That would of course be Ann Coulter. Ann's book ¡Adiós, America! has been soaring through the bestseller lists. It debuted June 21st at number two on the New York Times hardback nonfiction list; eight weeks later it's still at number sixteen. That's a simply wonderful showing for a book that lays out in detail, with full supporting references, all the stupidity and dishonesty of our immigration system, displaying it all to public view. To take one small example at random, from a hundred I could have taken: You know how politicians come up on your TV screen, look you straight in the eye, and tell you that they support amnesty for illegal aliens but only if the alien pays a fine, pays back taxes, and learns English? Well, that's all bogus. As soon as Congress passes amnesty, all those conditions will be dropped. How do we know this? Because we already had one amnesty: IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. IRCA had those fees, those fines, those requirements to pay back taxes, and, yes, a requirement that the alien — and here I quote from the actual text of the IRCA law, Title II, Section (b), subsection (1), item (D), paragraph (i), quote: (I) meets the requirements of section 312 (relating to minimal understanding of ordinary English and a knowledge and understanding of the history and government of the United States), or (II) is satisfactorily pursuing a course of study (recognized by the Attorney General) to achieve such an understanding of English and such a knowledge and understanding of the history and government of the United States. End quote. What happened to those requirements? Let Ann tell us. ¡Adiós, America!, page 44, quote: The last amnesty was loaded up with fines, fees, back taxes, and English lessons for illegal aliens. Let's review how that panned out: English-language requirement — dropped by the INS; fines — dropped by the INS; fees — waived by the INS; back taxes — dropped by the IRS. End quote. That politician promising you those conditions and requirements for amnesty is lying, lying, lying. The conditions and the requirements will all be waived as soon as the amnesty program goes into effect, just as happened with IRCA thirty years ago. They are bogus, bogus, bogus. I urge you to read Ann's book if you haven't already done so. For those of us who've been toiling for years in these vineyards, it's wonderful to see the topic getting front page exposure at last. I can claim to be a fifteen-year veteran of patriotic immigration reform. That's how long ago I published my first article at VDARE.com. Peter Brimelow was pruning the vines eight years before that with his ground-breaking cover article "Time to Rethink Immigration" in the issue of National Review dated June 22nd 1992. Nothing in Ann's book is new to us; indeed, we flatter ourselves that she got some of her facts from reading us, along with other sites exposing the current sham, sites like Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. Immigration has been a niche interest, though; and those of us trying to bring it to the political front burner have been working … how shall I put it? … ah … in the shadows, as respectable opinion has for decades deemed any criticism of immigration policy to be motivated by malice and cruelty. Now the ice is breaking at last. A lot of the credit for that goes to Ann Coulter. Thank you, Ma'am. |
04 — Comprehensive bogosity reform. It's not just the IRCA conditions that are bogus, and it's not just with illegal immigration that we have problems. Bogosity has seeped into every nook and cranny of the legal immigration system. Taking U.S. visas, including settlement visas, as economic objects for which there is a demand and a supply, both the demand side — the demand by foreigners for entry to the U.S.A. — and the supply side — the administration of our immigration laws and procedures — both sides are deeply corrupted. The supply side gets most of the publicity because it happens here, or in our consulates and embassies abroad, under laws legislated by the congresscritters we vote for and administered by our relatives, friends, and neighbors. The demand side needs looking at too, though. There is a blithe reliance throughout the immigration apparatus on what foreigners say to immigration officers, and on supporting documents they provide on smudged, wrinkled forms printed in obscure languages and stamped for authenticity by underpaid provincial clerks in Laos or Ecuador or Senegal. For example: Obviously we don't want to accept for settlement in the U.S.A. a person who has a criminal record in his home country; but how do we know? If we ask him, of course he'll say he doesn't. If we press him for documentary evidence, we're making ourselves hostage to the efficiency and incorruptibility of Third World government clerks. Speaking as a person who has lived in the Third World, believe me, you don't want to do that. Never mind the Third World, in fact. Administrative procedures even in the First World can be perfunctory. Twenty-nine years ago I married a citizen of the People's Republic of China. The authorities in her home town insisted that, before they'd license the marriage, I had to show proof I wasn't currently married. (There was a widespread belief in China at that time that foreign males who wanted to wed Chinese females were married men just looking to acquire concubines.) At the time I was a British citizen living in New York. I went to the British Consul on Third Avenue and explained the situation. "No worries," said the Consul, "I'll have a letter typed up. Do you mind waiting?" That's the level of authenticity you get from a British consular official. Can you imagine how things go with the Laotian, Ecuadorian, or Senegalese equivalents? The system is bogus all through, on the sending side and the receiving side. Some proportion of visas issued are genuine, but it's a small and dwindling proportion. As Ann Coulter amply documents, high proportions of people given refugee visas are not refugees; people admitted on family reunification visas are not family members; guest workers displace Americans who are just as qualified — indeed, in some recent cases, American workers have had to train their foreign replacements as a condition of getting their severance packages. The entire immigration system is a lie. It's bogus, bogus, bogus. To quote the title of Chapter 14 in Ann Coulter's book: Every Single Immigration Category Is a Fraud. Returning to illegal immigration, it's the same with politicians' promises to attach conditions and restrictions on amnesty. As happened with IRCA, the conditions and restrictions will blow away like leaves in the wind as soon as the politicians have delivered what the cheap-labor lobbies and ethnic agitators want from them. Solution: A moratorium on all settlement above a low ceiling — I suggest ten thousand a year — for really compelling cases. Rigorous border security and visa control. Compulsory, universal E-verify. An end to birthright citizenship. In short, the Trump plan. |
05 — Coulter v. the goodwhites. Let's take a glance at how the new openness on immigration is affecting the course of the Cold Civil War — that everlasting conflict between wise, moral, progressive goodwhites on one side, and dumb, evil, reactionary, gap-toothed redneck hillbilly badwhites on the other side, with minorities conscripted in to feed the horses and dig field latrines when necessary. For illustrative purposes here we can take the June 19th airing of Real Time with Bill Maher, a political talk show hosted by, of course, Bill Maher. Maher is one of the smirkers, along with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. He's a champion of the goodwhites. His smirk, in fact his entire demeanor, says to badwhites: "I see through your lies and pretense. You claim to be religious and patriotic, but I'm too smart for you. Your religion and your patriotism are just cover for the real interests of your wealthy puppet-masters. If we goodwhites don't keep hard at work exposing you and keeping you off balance, you'll be reinstating slavery, massacring Indians, persecuting Jews, and invading Poland first chance you get." Something like that. Well, June 19th Ann's book was just out and Maher had her on the show to talk about it. To feed the horses he'd shipped in some colored folk: A fat, angry-looking black woman, and Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, a Latino — or as he says, La-THEEEN-o — supremacist, who is on record as saying, quote: "I have only one loyalty, and that's to the immigrant community." Maher went for the race angle at the first opportunity. The fondest conceit of the goodwhites is that they are free of all racial prejudice, while badwhites are seething with animosity, yearning to bring back lynching and Jim Crow. [Clip: Ann: We didn't used to take people just because they lived within walking distance. We used to have an immigration policy where we would choose the best in the world, and that was changed … The studio audience loved that. They cheered and applauded. Just for the record, I am very reliably informed that the studio audience at a Bill Maher show is whiter than a Bernie Sanders rally. In fact the audience for the June 19th show actually was a Bernie Sanders rally: Maher had had Sanders on earlier for a one-on-one interview. Further for the record, Bill Maher lives in Beverly Hills, California, whose population is 78.5 percent white and only 2.5 percent black. Perhaps President Obama's Fair Housing Initiative will even things out there. Congressman Gutiérrez pointed out that a million Latinos — I beg your pardon, La-THEEEN-os — come of age in the U.S.A. every year; to which Ann responded, so do four million whites. That's what we badwhites call a hatefact, and you could see that Ann's brow was dark with hatred as she uttered it. It is, none the less, something the Republican National Committee might want to ponder as they scrape Sheldon Adelson's shoe polish off their tongues. The black lady then got to speak. [Clip: I think one of the things we have to do in this country is to stop lying. (Applause.) We were earlier talking and touched on the issue of slavery …] I make that 7.12 seconds of talk, including a pause for audience applause, before the black lady mentioned slavery. That shows extraordinary restraint on her part, for which I think we should congratulate her. She went on to argue that today's mass Third World immigration is a modern equivalent of slavery, run by selfish corporate elites seeking cheap labor. Since Ann makes a similar argument in her book, many times over, the black lady was revealing that she hadn't actually read the book she'd been invited on prime-time TV to discuss; or, if she had read it, she had utterly failed to understand what she read. The thought crossing Bill Maher's mind at this point had to be: "Sheesh, you just can't get good help nowadays." Let's hope the black lady is at this point back to digging field latrines, which I'm sure she does very well. Congressman Gutiérrez is no doubt back pursuing his one and only loyalty, whipping up La Raza against the hated gringos. Hey, Congressman: To judge from that studio audience, not even you hate white people as much as goodwhite people hate themselves and their ancestors. You can watch the whole clip for yourself on YouTube, and I urge you to do so. I call it a clear victory for us badwhites; which is pretty sensational, as there was only one of us there and a whole studio packed with goodwhites. Long odds; but not too long for Ann, bless her. |
06 — An H-1B memoir. Just one more segment here on legal immigration. I quoted the true and illuminating title of Chapter 14 in Ann Coulter's book: Every Single Immigration Category Is a Fraud. Yes it is. This hasn't always been the case, though — at least, not to anything like the current degree. If you don't mind, I'm going to lapse into personal memoir here to show what I mean. Thirty years ago, in October 1985, I came to the U.S.A. from England on an H-1 guest-worker visa. (The H-1 had not yet speciated into the H-1B and H-1C; that happened in 1990.) The financial deregulation of the Reagan years had woken Wall Street investment banks from their dogmatic slumbers. They were updating their computerized trading systems as fast as they could, and needed experienced programmers and systems analysts. I was an independent consultant working in London, six-month or one-year contracts that I got through an agency. One day my agent called and asked if I would do a contract in New York. I said I didn't see why not, if the fee was right. I was single, living in a rented apartment. It made no difference to me where I worked. There wasn't even a novelty factor to pull me: I'd lived in New York for five years in the 1970s. It was just another contract. The agent got me an interview, the interview went well, the New York firm hired me and got me a visa, an H-1. They hired a bunch of other Brits, too. We all went over together in a batch, sat through the orientation drills together, got to know each other. The deal was for a one-year contract. If the firm liked your work, they'd extend your visa up to the limit, which for an H-1 was six years. If you thought you might want to settle permanently in the U.S.A., they'd sponsor you for a green card. I'm pretty sure we didn't displace any American workers. The cubes and desks we were assigned were new, not vacated by previous workers. In fact the firm was struggling to find space for us, parking people in storage rooms and corridors at Five World Trade Center. For sure no Americans were assigned to train us on pain of losing their severance packages. Our compensation was competitive for that time and place: I got $44 thousand a year that first year — pretty good, for that work in that time and place. When the visa extension and green card stuff got going, I spent time with the company lawyers handling it all: They kept telling me that it was all conditional on them properly advertising for and not being able to find American workers, as per government regulations. I actually saw some of the advertisements in trade newspapers. In the mid-1980s, far as I could judge, the H-1 visa was on the level, not bogus. Furthermore, in that draft of people I came over with, all on H-1 visas, at least half went back. They didn't want to stay in the U.S.A. Some of them had family connections in the U.K. they were missing. Some had just wanted a one-year taste of working in New York, a brief adventure. And some just couldn't make the cultural adjustment. That last sounds a bit odd, I know. Cultural adjustment, Britain to America? Aren't we cousin nations, speaking the same language? Well … not really. George Orwell said that England has a national culture as distinct and particular as Spain's. It sure is different in key respects from America's. There is for example the British addiction to understatement and irony, "in which," — here I am quoting the 20th-century British novelist Anthony Powell, "in which all classes of this island converse," end quote. That doesn't work so well in the States. Don't take my word for it. Here's Jonathan Steinberg, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania, giving a set of lectures for the Great Courses company. This particular lecture concerns the 19th-century English novelist George Eliot. Professor Steinberg prefaces it with some remarks about British irony. Over to him. [Clip: Prof. Steinberg: Here I speak from personal experience. I was an American who lived for nearly forty years in England. I've taken it out for a spin myself a few times, and Prof. Steinberg nails it. The Englishman cherished by his friends for charm and wit can come across to Americans as a frivolous phony; the American revered by his friends as a paragon of wisdom and morality strikes Englishmen as a smug bore. This isn't always the case, of course, but there is definitely a nontrivial cultural adjustment to be made. Some people can make it; some can't; some can, but don't see why they should. Bear this kind of thing in mind when you hear about assimilation. If there are issues like that for English immigrants, imagine how it goes with immigrants from Afghanistan or Korea. Anyway, main point here: Thirty years ago the H-1 was a genuine guest-worker visa. It wasn't cheap labor; American workers weren't displaced; the laws were honestly administered; and some high proportion of visa holders went back home after their spell of work. Now the H-1 — and, as Ann says, every other visa category — is bogus, bogus, bogus. |
07 — Europe's open borders. The issues we're having here in the U.S.A. with immigration arise in part from our own folly and inattention, but also in part from a worldwide phenomenon characteristic of the present age. In a nutshell: People living in poor, dysfunctional countries have discovered how easy it is to get into rich, stable countries. With TV and smartphones they can see how good, how easy life is in the First World. Travel, if not always easy, is cheaper than ever before in human history. Most important, pretty much every Third World nation now has "seed" communities in First World countries. The advance parties have been going out since the 1960s, mainly at first to the old imperial powers like Britain, France, and Holland. They set up communities there, got jobs and citizenship, and called to the folks back in Karachi, Algiers, or Jakarta: "Hey, come on over, it's really great here! Immigration laws? Nah, don't worry, they don't enforce them much …" So now they're on the move in the hundreds of thousands and millions — soon, if nothing happens to halt the phenomenon, in the tens and hundreds of millions. Happy talkers in the West say this is no problem. We need all these vibrant young Third Worlders to boost our economy, they say. Besides, once they see the wonders of consensual democratic government, they'll get on board with it right away and make model citizens! Just being here on our territory transforms them, like pixie dust, into exemplars of constitutional wisdom and civic virtue. There is not the slightest evidence for any of that. Sure, if you have more people, you have a bigger economy. As I keep trying to explain, though: along with addition, subtraction, and multiplication, there goes division. Bangladesh has a far bigger economy than Luxembourg's. As for good government, it takes centuries to get the hang of that, and quite likely requires some genetic predisposition. As always, here I pull down my high-school copy of Taswell-Langmead's English Constitutional History, 1946 edition; the main text fills 794 pages. How many pages could you fill for a book titled Syrian Constitutional History, or Nigerian Constitutional History, or for that matter Chinese Constitutional History? Human beings live by wishful thinking, though. Most of us ignore danger until it becomes absolutely impossible to ignore it. Many English people of my parents' generation thought that Hitler was probably a decent sort of chap right up to the moment that bombs started falling on London. So today in Europe. Even with the daily pictures of boats crammed with Africans and Muslims, most Europeans are still lost in fantasies of moral obligation and Christian charity. See for example the cheerful opinion column by Charles Moore in the London Daily Telegraph the other day. The main point of the piece is that European Unity is a fiction, and that EU member states act in their own national interests, all of which is true. Moore can't resist a little immigration moralizing, though. Sample quote: Politicians speak of wanting "to make Britain a less attractive place." This is a very strange ambition. We are proud that Britain is attractive. Countries that are forced to build walls to keep people out are much better than those that build walls to keep them in. That last sentence is also true; except that the walls are not getting built, and Moore, who could be using his valuable space in a prestigious newspaper to sound the alarm, prefers to give that space over to moralistic preening. I've known Charles Moore for years. He was my editor at the Spectator when I was writing for them in the 1980s. He's an intelligent conservative, much more likely than most commentators to give you a sensible opinion on anything. Yet he is blithe about the hordes of blacks and Muslims who have already taken over London, and whose fellow-countrymen are massing on the shores of the Mediterranean and the English Channel to join the communities already planted in Britain. It's hard to see any good outcome to this. My best guess is that Europe is lost. The native populations are retreating in guilt and fear, just as Raspail foretold in The Camp of the Saints. Fifty years from now the British Prime Minister will be some black despot in a robe, carrying a fly whisk, handing out the nation's wealth to his wives and nephews and cousins, while remnants of the native population cower in fear in their gated communities, kept alive on sufferance so that some semblance of economic activity can continue. It'll be South Africa in other words. A vast historical tragedy is unfolding in Europe. We can only watch, and grieve. |
08 — The spectrum of adultery. The other day I was at lunch with a friend in a New York City restaurant. It was a nice lunch, and good to renew the acquaintance with my friend. My attention kept getting distracted, though, by a couple at a neighboring table — a corner table — a man and a woman both well-dressed and professional-looking, ages around forty. I couldn't hear anything they said, and of course wouldn't have listened if I could; but there was something about their bearing and manner to each other that screamed adultery. Somehow they just gave off vibes of furtiveness and guilt. I can't pin down any more precisely than that what made me think so, but I'd have bet a fair sum of money there was adultery going on there. Hey, nobody's business but their own, and I'm not passing any judgments. It just seemed a bit quaint and anachronistic, like a 1940s movie — Brief Encounter, perhaps. The topic of adultery came back to me, though, when I was going through the news sources later in the week. It seems there is this website named Ashley Madison where people can go to arrange an adulterous liaison. "Life is short. Have an affair," says the subheading on the title page. You are then invited to choose from a drop-down list: Attached Male seeking Females So I guess it's not just for adultery; but that's what the site is famous for. It's pretty popular: Thirty-six million people world-wide have registered with their names, addresses, credit card details and sexual fantasies. Well, the news story is that an anonymous group of hackers calling themselves The Impact Team got into the site, stole ten gigabytes of data, and made it public. They say they did it because the site is a fraud, drawing advertising revenue from gullible males, who — according to the hackers — are 90 to 95 percent of the site's users, the females registered being mostly fake names. They want Ashley Madison users to prosecute the website's proprietors and claim damages. It all seems a bit odd to me. Why does A care that B is being taken for a dummy? Whatever: The dump of Ashley Madison data has caused worldwide panic among married people — and yes, it seems to be mostly men — who registered hoping to end up in an adulterous affair. I'm sure this tells us something about the times we live in, but I can't quite figure out what. I had better unmask myself here as a hopelessly married guy who has no interest in adultery. To be perfectly frank, I don't know how people find the time. If you ask me for an overall moral judgment on adultery, I guess I'd offer the conventional answer that since family life is the foundation of civilization, and since adultery is disruptive of family life, I'm against it in a general way. That said, I've seen enough of the world to know that there is a spectrum of attitudes couples can have towards each other's adulteries. Dr Johnson said that marriage is a league at last of friendship, not of love. I think that's as true as any general statement about life ever is. It implies that the varieties of marriage are as wide as the varieties of friendship, which is pretty wide. I know couples whose marriage would be utterly and fatally destroyed by a partner's adultery. I know other couples who'd greet news about their partner's adultery with a shrug and a smile. I don't think I know any totally open marriages, but I've read enough literary biographies to know that they happen, and can be stable and enduring. In cases where one partner loses interest in sex but the other doesn't, adultery is probably a better alternative than divorce. Even the element of deceit, which is where I think most of us would say the real moral turpitude lies, even that can be taken different ways by different people. I recall a female acquaintance of mine, sensible, well-educated, and attractive, married twenty years, whose husband's work takes him away from home a lot, saying: "I don't care what he does, so long as I don't find out." As I said, a spectrum of attitudes, with the possibility, at least, of lasting, stable marriages at every point on the spectrum — along with, at most points, the other possibility of rancorous separation. Things used to be a lot more strict. Among the 19th-century European bourgeoisie they were very strict indeed. That must have been trying for persons inclined to adultery, but it was a boon to lovers of good books, as we got at least three great novels out of it, each in a different European language: in French, Flaubert's Madame Bovary; in Russian, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; and in German, Fontane's Effi Briest. The adulterous wives in all three books come to a sticky end; the husbands survive, but not happily. As Effi Briest's husband memorably says, reflecting on it all: Mein Leben ist verpfuscht — "My life is messed up." As traditionalist as I mostly am, I think that on balance today's wider spectrum of marriage modes generates less human misery than the bourgeois norms of 150 years ago, less chance of one's life ending up verpfuscht. |
09 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: The movie sensation of the week is Straight Outta Compton, a dramatized documentary about a black rap group in California. Believe it or not, I felt a mild stir of interest when I saw the name of that movie. I did an interview with Maureen O'Connor at the goodwhite website Gawker.com in 2012. At one point she asked me about my musical preferences, quote: Are there any black American rap artists you like? Personally I always thought NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" had a good outlook on authority. Also pro-gun. End quote. I should explain that NWA is the name of the rap group the movie is about. I replied that, quote, "My musical tastes don't venture far from opera," and we dropped the topic. Always curious about goodwhite fads, though, I looked up "Straight Outta Compton" — which at that point was just a song, not a movie — I looked it up on the internet. Sample lyrics: Shoot a motherfucker in a minute Well, the lyricist does seem to have grasped the essentials of rhyme. That aside, this is not stuff I want to engage with. I like civilization: science, art, mathematics, music. This is not civilization: This is the barking of wild animals. I am of course aware that wild animals exist. At this very point in time, I'm sure, herds of caribou are migrating across the tundra and panthers are stalking small primates through the jungle. These just aren't things I'm interested in. So no, I won't be seeing the movie. Item: From the New York Post, America's Newspaper of Record, August 17th, headline: Ex-lover says Donald Trump was great in bed. That ex-lover is a certain Sandra Taylor, now 48 years old, who went on three dates with Trump two or three decades ago. Lisped Ms Taylor to the New York Post, quote: Omigosh, he was great. I think he'd be a terrific President. End lisp. You may laugh, but these things matter. Sarah Palin probably got further in politics than she would otherwise have done because so many of us saw her as a fertility goddess. For serious students of politics, a copy of The Golden Bough is not out of place on one's bookshelf. And for the political effect that a sexually assertive male has on female voters, consider the following fact. The Nineteenth Amendment, giving all women the vote, was ratified in August 1920. The first Presidential election after that ratification came in November that year. The winner of that election was … yes, Warren Harding. By a landslide. I'm just sayin' … Item: Finally, a passing sigh and a tear for 31-year-old Mr Linton Galleymore of Plymouth in Devon, over in the Mother Country. Mr Galleymore, who was actually South African by birth, went to join the Choir Invisible on August 4th after falling off a railroad bridge in South London. Mr Galleymore had achieved a modest measure of fame in Plymouth for balancing upside-down in public places with his head in a bucket. He had been doing this since 2009, and apparently making a decent living at it. In a world where automation is rapidly taking away all the real jobs, I think we should honor the memory of Mr Galleymore as a pioneer in making a living for himself by doing something with no social utility whatsoever: balancing upside down with his head in a bucket. Quote from his brother, Keegan Galleymore, quote: He was the Bucket Man and a loving brother and very good man, who was not only hard working, but a well-educated South African-born human being. End quote. We should all hope for such a sincere, heartfelt tribute after we have … kicked the bucket. |
10 — Signoff. That's all I have for you this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and thanks also for the emails. Here I offer my periodic apology for not answering all my emails. It's just not possible, though I do my honest best. My promise, as before, is that every email not rude or illiterate gets read and pondered, even if not answered; and good ideas, interesting facts, and clever jokes get shamelessly plagiarized. Now a snippet of music to see us out. Let's take adultery as our theme. Although I have no personal interest in adultery I do, as regular listeners know, have an interest in 19th- and early 20th-century popular music. Here's a song from a hundred years ago. The title of the song is "Parted," and I believe it must surely be the greatest adultery lyric ever written. The singer here is Peter Dawson — who, according to his biographer John Vose, was even more of a stick-in-the-mud marriage-wise than your humble Radio Derb host. The same can-not be said of the lyricist, the impossibly talented, prolific, and adulterous Frederic Weatherly, who also wrote "Danny Boy," along with three thousand or so other songs. More from Radio Derb next week. |
[Music clip: Peter Dawson, "Parted."]