Oh happy hour: The Jeremiahs are on the march again...!

I used to like the English columnist Jeremy Clarkson very much but the last few years he’s become a bit of an eco bore. Proving that on both far ends of any issue, only the useless and the tedious seem to gather, spoiling any kind of meaningful discussion for all sides.

Of course, on the few occassions that Clarkson is not behaving like a latter-day Cato, ending each and every speech to the Roman Senate with his trademark ‘By the way, I think that Carthage must be destroyed’, J.C. can still be very entertaining.

Only last Sunday, he was complaining about the British government, which was, yet again, wasting money and time, in its never ending campaign to keep the whole of Britain healthy & safe & bored out of its collective skull:

“Genuinely, it staggers me that with all the problems facing the nation right now, some of my tax money is being used to work out how much wine I should drink before supper. What next? An enormous Prora-style holiday camp on the east coast where smiling families in lederhosen will be ordered to do star jumps from dawn till dusk? Drinking to excess is what separates us from the Greeks. Being drunk is what separates us from the beasts.”

I was reminded of yesterday’s jeremiad by Clarkson when I read an article in one of England’s less serious newspapers - okay, a tabloid really: The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph specializes in putting out stories of a highly dubious scientific nature.

What they seem to do is half read some serious science story, latch on to its most dubious bits, paint those purple and then inflate the poor things till they are buggered up beyond recognition and belief.

Obviously, almost nothing that appears in the science section of the Telegraph has anything even remotely to do with real science (reporting) but these pieces can still be quite amusing.

They are like those ‘How about that!‘ sections that most papers now carry - with the added advantage that what is written in the science section need not even be true at all.

Anyway, I thought the following story was quite entertaining:

“Rather than curbing a man’s prowess in bed, new research from Australia claims that alcohol can actually improve sexual performance. The suggestion flies in the face of conventional thinking which insists that men who drink too much are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. The new findings are based on a study of 1,580 Australian men, carried out by Western Australia’s Keogh Institute for Medical Research and published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. It concluded that those men who drank a moderate amount of alcohol reported 30 per cent fewer problems than teetotallers.”

Now, I’m sure these new findings (such as they are) will not change the government’s attitude to alcohol. In fact, it might even harden their stance - since this adds another potential pleasure to the act of drinking.

Which is probably the most annoying aspect of this whole health & safety obsession: That you can’t help but think that those who claim to act for the good of all of us are, in fact, miserabilist spoil-sports who simply can’t stand it when other people are having fun.

Whether it’s the fanatical, total war on smokers, the drinking of alcohol or the eating of fast food, there’s always this impression that these campaigners don’t really want us to be healthy: They just want to convert us to their risk & pleasure averse faith - and, failing that, take everything that gives us pleasure away from us by force.

In that sense, I have to say that the extremists on the environmental front very much seem to be operating according to that same principle. While I am - unlike Jeremy Clarkson - not a Global Warming denier, I’m not exactly a paid up member of The Latter Day Green Church of Total Doom.

So, I do feel that, like those health & safety Nazis, a sizable number of the fanatical environmentalists simply hate it when other people seem to have the kind of fun they disapprove of.

Something tells me that, if tomorrow would bring absolute & undeniable proof that all those scientists had been wrong about Global Warming, quite a few of the more obsessed Greens would not be pleased with these good tidings at all.

Like all the fanatics who want us to lead healthy & boring lives, these environmentalists would probably plain hate it if things like cheap flights, fancy cars and other, in their eyes, almost evil assets & pursuits would prove to be absolutely harmless in environmental terms.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Global Warming will prove to be as much of a real threat as the Wizard of Oz was - but I’m quite convinced at least some of those doom sayers would actually prefer an environmental catastrophe over a scenario where consumerist pleasures would not lead all of us to ruin.

In that sense, the colour green suits the Mad Hatter’s part of the environmental movement as well as a more Calvinist black would. Not, however, the pleasant green of meadows and trees and what have you but the glaring green of poisonous envy.

(An old one but quite fitting: Enjoy...)