Chimps' Tea Party

In the middle of the twentieth century a popular spectacle was the chimps’ tea party, indeed such an event was deemed a worthy way to welcome to Thirsk its very first proper supermarket, FineFare, around 1968. I know, I was there. Chimps in human clothes - the very idea! Of course such anthropomorphism may well be frowned on today, or no doubt deemed ‘racist’ by those whose own heightened race-crime awareness is only barely supressing their own guilty attitudes towards difference. We’re all a bit racist, but only whites can go to prison for it; so some protest rather too loudly about it, in my view.

Anyway, thinking of the chimps put me in mind of Prince Charles and his willingness to don the garb of whichever bunch of natives he is feeling uncomfortable in the company of in this week’s photo op. Oh he’s a great one for dressing up is Charlie. He’s been doing his Sheikh of Araby again lately, but in the past he has – far too readily – slipped into all manner of garish comedy costumes, presumably to abase himself by way of apology for being born an embarrassment. The clown prince; one can only hope his antics have been deliberate distractions to smokescreen the insertion of special forces in order to destabilise rogue regimes. I really can’t think of any other justification for such global idiocy. Long live the Queen, I say.

But here’s the thing; while our travelling circus performers gleefully black up, don the motley and ape the locals, why do we never see, say, African chieftains or Arab princes adopting a nice business suit to face the cameras? Sheikh Abu Bin Mufti should surely shed the dishdasha and gutra and - at least for the photo op - adopt a style suited to our climate and customs. If a suit is maybe too formal how about a nice vest and jeans, perhaps, accessorised with a can of Stella? Or if you want to be down with the kids you could always throw on a keffiyeh as a nice ironic gesture.

But no, it’s only we who do the dressing up. Why? Why do we so readily strike a pose of humility and possible humiliation when such courtesies would never be extended in our direction? And so to the point. Yesterday the religion of a million blown-to-pieces staged a demonstration against civilisation. Seriously, if their prophet means more to them than life itself the only thing they demonstrate is that they fail to meet any rational criteria for being granted human rights.

A chimp in a dress

Their thin-skinned response to the freedoms they enjoy here is to deny those freedoms to anybody not similarly indoctrinated with their blind and joyless faith. We should treat them with the utter contempt they deserve and freely display towards us. Their reasoning, although ‘reason’ is far too dignified a description, is little above what you can see displayed by an average group of primates and falls short of the test of civilised humanity. Their demands should forever fall on deaf ears, for what we saw at the cenotaph was nothing more than chattering chimps wearing comedy clothes.