Poor Theodore Dalrymple is finding that everyone around him seems to be actively imposing their questionable music choices on him no matter how he tries to decline the offer:
Whenever I try to escape pop music relayed in public places at high volume — which is often, though considerably less often with success — the thought comes into my mind that the harnessing of electricity was a disaster, if not for humanity, at least for civilization if good taste be part of that much-derided entity.
Modern pop music is to the West what speeches by North Korea’s greatest scientist, composer of operas, huntsman, industrial chemist, engineer, poet, agronomist, philosopher, economist, military strategist — in short, its present leader — are to North Korea, namely inescapable. If I were an absolute dictator, which fortunately for me among others I am not, I would forbid the public relay of such music under pain of death by deprivation of sleep.
Unnecessary noise should be regarded in the same way as cigarette smoke now is, a pollutant that infringes the rights of anyone subjected involuntarily to it. My sensitivity to cigarette smoke, incidentally, is now very acute: The other day, in the open street, there was a man sitting on a low wall smoking a cigarette a few yards from me, and I began to cough. This was not merely a psychosomatic reaction; I began to cough before I saw the source of what caused me to do so.
I must have grown up in a world that smelt like an ashtray, so great was the proportion of the population that smoked, but I did not notice it, any more than I noticed the air itself. Every curtain, every carpet, must have been saturated with such smoke, now stale, to say nothing of the fug created by cigarettes under current use. I remember the days when you could smoke on trains and airplanes. At the back of the cabin of the planes were the seats for smokers, not separated off from the rest of the fuselage, and if you were a nonsmoker such as I, you were often (so it seemed) allocated the row just in front of the first of the smokers’ seats, such that you might as well have been in the midst of them. Cigarette smoke on flights was as inescapable as crying babies now seem to be.
I heartily agree with both sentiments, i.e. the loud pop music and the smoking. I recall the rueful comment by my next-seat neighbour on a trans-Atlantic flight, one row before the smokers, that a nonsmoking area in a plane was as effective as a non-urinating area in a swimming pool.
Comment by J.Arimathea — May 21, 2024 @ 03:26
When my wife and I were first dating, restaurants in the Toronto area had just been required to provide “non smoking” accommodations to their customers. It was quite common to find the non smoking table (sometimes as few as a single table for two) to be surrounded by smoking tables (as if the little plastic placard with a No Smoking pictogram had magical air filtering qualities).
Comment by Nicholas — May 21, 2024 @ 10:49