Just ahead of Episode Fifteen of Three Men on the Bummel, I rise on a point of personal privilege upon The Mark Steyn Club's eighth birthday: as the control-freak regulators and the woke billionaires of the Big Social cartel tighten their grip, and the glory days of the wild and free decentralised Internet of yore recede ever further into the past, I want to thank all of you who keep this l'il ol' mom'n'pop website and its various activities as part of your daily routine. And I thank you especially for all your insightful comments on our latest yarn - Three Men ion the Bummel - which have been wide-ranging and fascinating, and rather in the spirit of Jerome K Jerome himself.
After last night's episode on the late-nineteenth-century German state's micro-management of daily life, Nicola Timmerman, a Steyn Clubber from francophone Ontario, writes:
Germany sounds like a kind of Covid regime place to live at least back then. I imagine Germans had no problems with lockdowns and curfews. I wonder how many regulations are imposed in the No Go Muslim areas these days.
But that's the point, Nicola. Eighty years ago, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German High Command, was present in Berlin for the Third Reich's unconditional surrender. He was subsequently tried at Nuremberg and eventually hanged - despite being the most prominent promoter of the defence that he was "only obeying orders". Well, how did Keitel and his generation get so used to "obeying orders"? By growing up in the Kaiser's Germany. If you accept the state's right to tell you that you cannot in the privacy of your own home play your own piano after eleven at night, you are accepting not a minor regulation about a peripheral activity but the unlimited power of the state over the totality of your existence. Why be surprised when you're ordered to put Jews on eastbound trains?
In those days, Germany was unusual - by comparison with most western nations - in being hyper-regulated. Now we all are - even America. Just as in late-nineteenth-century Germany, if you accept the right of the state to tell you how many people you are permitted to see for Thanksgiving, why would you not also accept its power to deny the right to travel or work to the insufficiently jabba-jabbed? Like the Kaiser's Germany, the Covid regime did a grand job at softening us up for the horrors to come.
And with that let's proceed to Part Fifteen of my serialisation of Jerome K Jerome's classic tale. In tonight's episode, our trio have noticed an ever wider chasm between bicycling on the posters and bicycling in real life:
When one comes to think of it, few bicycles do realise the poster. On only one poster that I can recollect have I seen the rider represented as doing any work. But then this man was being pursued by a bull. In ordinary cases the object of the artist is to convince the hesitating neophyte that the sport of bicycling consists in sitting on a luxurious saddle, and being moved rapidly in the direction you wish to go by unseen heavenly powers.
Generally speaking, the rider is a lady, and then one feels that, for perfect bodily rest combined with entire freedom from mental anxiety, slumber upon a water-bed cannot compare with bicycle-riding upon a hilly road. No fairy travelling on a summer cloud could take things more easily than does the bicycle girl, according to the poster.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Episode Fifteen by clicking here and logging-in.
Earlier installments of Three Men on the Bummel can be found here - and thank you again for all your comments, thumbs up or down, on this latest serialisation. Very much appreciated. But there are plenty of other capers in this series, all laid out on our home page in a convenient Netflix-esque tile format that makes it easy for listeners to pick out their preferred audio entertainment of an evening. If you'd like to know more about The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget, for fellow fans of classic fiction and/or poetry, our Steyn Club Gift Membership.
I'll see you back here tomorrow for Episode Sixteen of Three Men on the Bummel. And, if you're one of that brave band who enjoy me in video, do check out our two most recent editions of The Mark Steyn Show.