Second opinion
THERE once was a Society for the Sup- pression of Mendacity, but those who believe in Original Sin rather than in the Perfectibility of Man will not be sur- prised to learn that its successes were few and its failures many. For who can deny that lying still flourishes? Indeed, one might almost say that we live in its Gold- en Age; for we have reached the stage in which, if a politician makes an utterance with any propositional content whatever, we assume it to be a falsehood.
But while perfection is not to be looked for, let us not despair of improvement entirely. That is why I propose the foundation of a Society for the Suppression of Youth. Remove Youth and you have solved half the problems that beset humanity; for example, crime. When Youth has lost its lustre, those whom the Chinese would once have called its lickspittle lackeys and running dogs — the Clin- tons and Blairs of this world — would no longer feel obliged to pretend they had drunk of the elixir of eternal ado- lescence, and might even grow up.
Of course, not all Youth is equally bad, and I have even met some quite decent youths in my time, though rarely in Britain. And it goes without saying that we should first suppress the worst and most revolting manifestations of Youth. And since our Home Secretary, Mr Straw, seems so strongly in favour of indefinite preventive detention without trial, I think it would be useful to point out to him a class of Youth that is, virtu- ally by definition, criminal and antisocial, and therefore worthy of his administra- tive justice: that is to say, Youth with gold dentistry in its front teeth. Whenever I see the gleam of gold in a young man's mouth, I know he is a vil- lain. The stronger the gleam, the worse the crime. A full gold incisor, for exam- ple, usually means the possession of a firearm, or at the very least the wielding of a baseball bat for non-sporting pur- poses. They are always drug-dealers on a medium to large scale, these gold incisors, but are generally not without a certain sinister charm.
Youths with a front tooth merely rimmed in gold, however, are but the poor bloody infantry of crime, the suck- ers who are caught for possession with intent to supply. They are the ones who appear in the hospital having swallowed packets of cocaine or heroin in order not to be caught in possession of them by the police: a gold-rimmed tooth and a laparotomy scar being pathognomonic of a past such episode.
I walked into the ward one morning last week to find two policemen at the end of a bed. In the bed was a youth asleep, but his lips were half open. Apparently he had not managed to swal- low all the heroin-filled condoms in time and had been caught with some still in his pocket. He was destined for prison after operation.
I noticed the gleam of gold between his lips and knew he was guilty as charged. His girlfriend approached me.
`When will he be ready to leave hospi- tal, doctor?' she asked.
And her teeth, too, gleamed golden in the white light of the fluorescent tube.
Theodore Dalrymple
Mass Listeria by Theodore Dalrymple is available through The Spectator Bookshop for £8.99 post-free. Please telephone 0541 557288 quoting ref SP020.
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