Tut tut, pecksniffery and podsnappianism be damned!

My original impulse when beginning this blog was significantly motivated by a desire to preserve interesting snippets of information for myself as well as communicating interesting/informative/inspirational snippets for others to enjoy. In a spirit more of the former (though I hope reaching out to the latter) I submit this example of Dalrymples incomparable erudition:

Here, for example, is the profile of a man who has made a career of campaigning for health as a human right. I won’t mention his name because it is not my intention to be personally vindictive; but the article comes with a small photograph of him that exudes Podsnappian self-satisfaction. I couldn’t help noticing, also, that he wears a nasty dark-blue shirt with an olive green tie, as if no truly good man could dress with taste. Dressing badly, though not too badly, shows that you have more important things on your mind.

The subject of this admiring profile is said to be “quite outspoken but not too confrontational.” He gave a speech at the United Nations that, according to the man himself, “was as punchy as I can be within the rules both spoken and unspoken.” The quintessence of apparatchikism. He decided, 15 years before the article was published, that, as a human rights lawyer, “he needed to expand the traditional boundaries of his calling”—more or less to include everything. There is a kind of grandiosity about this that produces in me a similar effect as that my teachers used to produce when they had a piece of defective chalk that squeaked on the blackboard. Here is a man so perfect, so moral, so well-intentioned, so benevolent towards humanity, that he feels he has the right—no, the duty, the calling—to lay down the world’s agenda.

rights. http://takimag.com/article/a_dull_lancet_theodore_dalrymple/print#ixzz3cX62D1Bq