Gstaad

This is the best news since the Bush-Blair duo saved us from the nuclear holocaust Saddam was about to unleash upon us. Half a

million, perhaps even one million dead Iraqis later, we were nevertheless saved with minutes to spare, so we should always believe official sources. Especially when Uncle Sam is involved.

This time the good news is not nuclear but musical. The Mostly Mozart Festival has been cancelled by New York’s Lincoln Center after 60-odd years because of rising disdain for ‘elitism and exclusivity’. Instead we have the Criminal Queerness Festival, a ‘celebration of 50 years of hip hop’, a day geared toward ‘neurodiverse audiences’, and ‘the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group’. So long and goodbye, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I read that the final two Mostly Mozart concerts were packed, but in today’s low-life, celebrity-driven woke culture disdain for great music and the miracle that is Mozart needs no excuses. Lincoln Center will probably soon be renamed George Floyd Memorial or, better yet, Black Lives Matter Hall. Once upon a time art had a responsibility to make the planet more beautiful. Mozart and thousands of others did just that. Now Damien Hirst and fellow ‘artists’ such as Snoop Dogg make the planet as ugly as those who own their art or listen to their rap music.

Wolfie, as I like to call the greatest of musical miracles, wrote six immortal operas including the Requiem, 41 symphonies, almost 50 concertos, 24 chamber works and 18 miscellaneous pieces, but is now replaced by ‘artists’ who include the F-word, the N-word and the S-word in every single women-hating, violence-praising sentence of their singularly untalented noise. Bravo, and long live the decision-makers at the Lincoln Center.

Never mind, as an eternal optimist said in Hiroshima after the blast: ‘It could get worse.’ I know it could, but cancelling Mozart in favour of the cesspool that is rap and hip hop is the equivalent to choosing Lizzo over Lily James, or one with moles, boils and warts over the divine Keira Knightley. And the irony is that no one in the packed house of the last concert dared say a word. That’s because the woke left defines what Americans can think and say nowadays.

What rankles is that aggressive minorities are imposing their ideology on the rest of us and no one is doing anything about it. ‘Rule Britannia’ and flag-waving at the Proms should be ruled sacrosanct, as Mozart should have been at the Lincoln Center. Unfortunately, as Douglas Murray wrote: ‘The growing divide between what the people want and what a small elite at the top of politics, media and finance want are two different things.’ And yet the remodelling of society in the image of a tiny minority should be science fiction, not a symptom of our weakness.

Take climate change. The media won’t report negatively about it, and our politicians would not be caught dead denying it, but except for the braindead publicity-seeking idiots who glue themselves to highways, climate change is Alice in Wonderland stuff. What I’ve noticed is the expression on the faces of those gluing themselves. It can only be compared to that caused by severe constipation, and the expression on the faces of the fuzz standing around is like the vacant stare of undertakers. Net Zero, in the meantime, is a fantasy, a Baron Munchausen joke. While unwanted electric cars are piling up everywhere, the government seems to have gone as deaf as Beethoven, sadly without a scintilla of his genius.

And while China, India and the US are spewing out good old-fashioned fumes like gangbusters, tiny Britain is determined to stop its tiny contribution to pollution in 27 years. If this were written as a comedy script it might be taken seriously, as official government policy nurses are needed and quickly.

Thirty-three million years ago, even before I began this column, the Earth transitioned to become cooler, and as a result ice sheets formed. The oceans dropped by 131ft exposing old plant matter that rotted and caused CO2 to rise. Then the Earth began to warm again and the ice melted, and this pattern – from warm to cold and back again – has been going on since before high life began, which means since time immemorial.

Back in 1939, the dustbowl days in America, droughts and high temperatures were worse. When Romans ruled the roost most of their food supplies came from Africa. Nowadays African farms are dustbowls. Long before that, half of what is now called the Land of the Free was underwater. I read somewhere that the CO2 level a million years before the Greeks and the Egyptians was so bad it made the Earth practically unlivable. So, take it from the great isotopic scientist Taki, just because the Earth’s axis tilts slightly at times there’s nothing to worry about except for those wind turbines that kill birds and murder nature’s beauty.

It all has to do with the new American trend of manifesting, the practice of thinking ‘aspirational’ thoughts in order to cosmically attract success – i.e., total bull. Aspire all you want, suckers, there is not enough electricity-generating infrastructure, and internal combustion is here to stay for the immediate future. So buy electric and stay put.