The Lord has told me I should have £40million wings
Until this week, I must confess, I’d never heard of Jesse Duplantis. Now that I have, however, I’m extremely glad. Mr Duplantis is the American televangelist who has urged Christians to give generously to an urgent cause. Namely: to buy him a private jet.
The particular private jet he’s set his heart on will cost $54 million (about £40 million). But Mr Duplantis has been at pains to reassure worshippers that the purchase is essential. “It has nothing to do with [being] luxurious,” he informed an interviewer, nobly. He simply needs the private jet to help him “preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ”. That’s all.
Inevitably, of course, critics will scoff. But if they trouble themselves to consult the scriptures, they will see that Mr Duplantis’s plan has clear biblical precedent. Let us not forget how Mary, heavy with child, travelled to Bethlehem in the back seat of Joseph’s limited-edition Bugatti Veyron. And how on arrival, when they found that there was no room at the inn, they instead checked in to a five-star suite at the local Mandarin Oriental.
Christ Himself, meanwhile, was unequivocal in his teachings about wealth and avarice – as we know from Matthew 19:23. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man enters into the kingdom of heaven all the time. Come on. Of course he does. And so he should. Quite frankly, it’s high time we stopped bashing people just for being successful. Our wealthcreators deserve to be celebrated. I’m so sick of the politics of envy.”
In this light, it seems to me, Mr Duplantis is doing a wonderful job of embodying Christ’s message. Let us keep him, and his humble plea, in our prayers tonight. Blessed are the poor. But even more blessed are the owners of $54 million private jets.
As excuses go, it’s not the most convincing. This week Roseanne, the American sitcom, was abruptly cancelled after its star and creator, Roseanne Barr, likened a black woman to a character from Planet of the Apes. At first, Ms Barr conceded that her remark was “in bad taste”. Yet later, bizarrely, she suggested that she’d made it because she was under the influence of Ambien, a brand of medication for insomnia. In response, Sanofi – the company that makes Ambien – released a beautifully deadpan statement. “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects,” it read, “racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
If nothing else, Ms Barr’s desperate scramble for mitigation shows how the world has changed. At least she knew she needed mitigation, however nonsensical. It’s progress, of a kind.
The other evening, I happened to be flicking through a book of old newspaper stories, titled The Thirties: A Chronicle of the Decade. In those days, I need hardly add, people who made racist remarks tended to be rather less anxious to scrabble around for an excuse afterwards. My eye was caught by a story published in July 1935 about the aristocrat Unity Mitford, then aged 21. Miss Mitford, reported the headline matter-of-factly, had made a public announcement: she was an antisemite. The announcement couldn’t have been any more explicit. Indeed, she’d chosen to make it in a letter to Der Stürmer, the Nazi-supporting German newspaper.
“The English have no notion of the Jewish danger,” she’d written. “Our worst Jews only work behind the scenes. We hope, however, that we will soon win against the world enemy, in spite of all its cunning. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews!”
In case readers were still unclear as to her position, Miss Mitford had added a helpful postscript. “Please publish my whole name,” she said. “I want everyone to know that I am a Jew hater.”
If she was on any medication when she wrote that, she didn’t mention it.
There are any number of modern trends that I would never have predicted. But the one I find most baffling is this: the rise of the “incels”. Incel – in case you haven’t come across the term before – is short for “involuntary celibate”. It means a young man who wants desperately to sleep with a young woman – any young woman – but can’t.
Hardly, of course, a new phenomenon. What’s new is the incels’ attitude. They don’t think of themselves as losers. They think of themselves as victims. Victims of a cruel social injustice. They’re convinced that their rights – that is, their rights to sleep with women – are being unfairly denied them.
When I was a teenager, back in the 1990s, I couldn’t get a girlfriend either. Loads of us couldn’t. But at least we had the decency to be embarrassed about it. So embarrassed, in fact, that we’d pretend that actually we did have a girlfriend. You just wouldn’t know her, because she went to another school. Obviously we weren’t fooling anyone. Better to lie, though, than to blame your own failings with girls on girls themselves. Which is what incels do.
In reality, we knew perfectly well why we couldn’t get a girlfriend. It was our fault. It wasn’t because we were spotty or weedy or physically unattractive, although of course we were all those things. And it wasn’t because of feminism, as incels seem to think. It was because we were socially incompetent. We were hopeless at talking to girls. That was all. We’d have stood a much better chance of attracting a girl if we’d had any idea how to talk to one without making complete idiots of ourselves.
Today’s incels, however, seem incapable of blaming themselves for their own problems. Which leaves them in a strange bind. Their self-esteem, clearly, is very low.
Yet at the same time it’s also too high.