This astonishingly prescient insult by HL Mencken (1880–1956) is included in Matthew Parris’s new book, Scorn: The Wittiest and Wickedest Insults in Human History. Well, not exactly new, and not all the insults are witty or wicked in this “updated and expanded” version of a book that he compiled more than 20 years ago.
Parris, ex-MP, ex-press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, and prize-winning journalist who contributes to The Spectator and The Times, has attempted to protect himself from carping critics like me when he states in his introduction to the book that it is a “whimsical and quirky collection, not a comprehensive dictionary.”
He says that for a “short book” (400+ pages!), “one must leave out most” and that his “utterly and unapologetically idiosyncratic selection” includes “much that’s politically incorrect” in its “bucketful of misery and spite”.
Parris ranges over vast cultural and geographical arenas in the book, as he explores the way in which the “dark side of language” can be used to express “anger, hatred or disapprobriation”. He sees terms such as wit and put-down as part of scorn; however, many other terms came to my mind without recourse to a dictionary: bile, disdain, invective, malice, rancour, ridicule, spite, spleen, verbal venom, vitriol, scurrilous diatribe, and so on.
Parris laments the “potency of real cursing between ancient times and our own” when he says that we see “not true curses, just snarls”. I would categorise his controversially coruscating attack on Boris Johnson in The Times in March this year as way more than a snarl, as did many of the hundreds of responders to his verbal shin-kick.
I would argue that Parris should have left out much more of the book than he has, because, while many of his quotes constitute the witty or wicked insults promised in his title, many of the contemporary ones don’t. Can we assume that the scorn arises from their inclusion rather than their content?
Kanye West says:
My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.
Kim Kardashian says:
When someone asks me ‘What do you do?’ I want to say, ‘Ask my fucking bank account what I do’.
Taylor Swift hardly sounds menacing when she threatens:
If you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about it, and you won’t like it!
They could all learn from the wit of the late George Melly who, when told that the wrinkles on Mick Jagger’s face were laughter lines, said:
Surely nothing could be that funny!
Mick Jagger: a life of laughter? Mike Segar/Reuters
Parris claims that he canvassed 500 people in public or academic life to contribute jibes (including ones directed at himself) and raided many other collections and libraries to cover his cornucopia of topics.
All the usual male suspects are represented and outnumber the female contributors by at least five to one in the more than 1,000 entries: George Bernard Shaw has 18 entries, Woody Allen 9, Samuel Johnson 13, Winston Churchill 15, Noel Coward 8, Clive James 5, Christopher Hitchens 5, Mark Twain 13, and Oscar Wilde 16.
Dorothy Parker is the most cited woman with nine, though many other singular quotes by women such as Hannah Arendt, Nancy Astor, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Joan Rivers, Amy Schumer, and Gertrude Stein are included.
Pariss missed some insults that would more appropriately fit under the banner of his title than some of his inclusions. He quotes Paul Keating’s warm lettuce and soufflé put-downs, but missed Keating’s cruel jibe to the prime minister Malcolm Fraser:
You look like an Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades.
Parris quotes several of Christopher Hitchens’s cutting bon mots, but misses his scathing description of George W Bush as:
… unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
He quotes from an irate email sent in 2002 by that well-known curmudgeon Giles Coren, but this was a much milder attack than the expletive-laden missile that Giles launched on his sub-editors at The Times in 2008 when they changed the final sentence in a restaurant review by removing the indefinite article “a” in front of the final word “nosh” and thus much of the article’s punch.
Parris says in his introduction that his material encompasses the insults generated during this year’s British referendum and the American election, although he must have signed off on the manuscript several months ago; there would be piles of extra ordure that he could rummage through now, particularly relating to the American election.
He could compile an entirely new collection out of the vituperation poured by Trump and on Trump.
The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair editors and contributors were merciless in their scorn of Trump. As were Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Alec Baldwin and the Saturday Night Live crew.
Not that Trump’s vituperative contributions are exactly witty. A tweet to Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, who had consistently hounded him as “the short-fingered vulgarian” as the election campaign progressed was as follows:
Dummy Graydon Carter doesn’t like me too much… great news. He is a real loser.
In the midst of the debate around whether Australia is correctly taxing miners, Paul Cleary provides a well-researched and written account of Norway’s approach to the development of its oil resources since the 1960s in his book Trillion Dollar Baby.
Cleary ties together a number of threads that are surprisingly relevant for many of our current policy debates. The book focuses on the establishment of a regulatory and institutional framework to ensure that the owners of the natural resources – the country’s citizens, both current and future – benefit appropriately from them.
The unfolding of Norway’s story is very different from our own recent experience with the latest mining boom. For example, while Norway reduced the central government debt from 36% of GDP in 2003 to 21% of GDP in 2013, we increased our central government debt from 24% to 38% of GDP in the same period.
While the Australian economy has certainly benefited from the mineral boom, Cleary makes the point that at the end of it we “owe the world A$1 trillion”. He contrasts this against Norway, with a sovereign fund that “is on track to hit A$1 trillion in 2020”.
Norway’s success is attributed to three key elements. First, a tax regime that includes a super profit tax, which has generated substantial revenue for the government.
Second, the design of a sovereign fund that began to accumulate once the government started to generate surpluses and that was invested exclusively outside Norway. Because of this, it increased in value as the local currency appreciated as a result of the increase in oil prices. Also, it to some extent dampened the appreciation of the currency and the associated impact on the non-oil sectors of the economy.
Finally, withdrawals from the fund were limited to a fixed percentage, which has to some extent been about the average real return from the fund.
There are also other subplots in the book, weaved into the overall narrative, that serve as lessons for Australia. For example, Cleary stresses the importance of the link between universities and industry: “unlike the UK, Norway shifted almost overnight from geology courses about rocks and minerals to petroleum geology and engineering”. But he does not explain what made Norwegian universities more responsive than their United Kingdom counterparts.
Despite Australia’s own mining boom, I am only aware of less than a handful of courses in Australia that are dedicated explicitly to the economics of mining rather than more general courses on natural resources economics.
Other threads include the key role played by the public sector bureaucracy “that had a long tradition of dealing with powerful foreign interests”. A part of this was the importance of making the regulatory and taxation regimes robust enough to “drive a stake through the heart of tax minimisation by multinational companies”.
Another thread relates to the tension between profits and safety. Prior to the introduction of effective regulation in Norway, companies disregarded safety concerns at the expense of human life. Cleary describes a particular callous episode where, ten days after the Kielland platform disaster of March 1980 where 123 workers died, Phillips sought and secured approval from the regulator to release a large quantity of drilling mud into the sea, making the task of recovering bodies even more challenging.
Perhaps the side story that I enjoyed the most was that of Farouk Al-Kasim, an Iraqi Petroleum geologist who migrated to Norway in 1968 and became an employee of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. As a migrant myself who strives to make a positive contribution to my adopted country, I can only dream of one day being as successful as Al-Kasim who added “a conservative A$50 billion in revenue to the coffers of the Norwegian treasury.”
Cleary also highlights some potential pitfalls in Norway’s success story. For example, Cleary discusses Norway’s attitude towards pursuing oil exploration in the Artic Region and its impact on the environment.
He also argues that the rise of political populism, including anti-immigration and a narrow type of nationalism, has increased the pressure to ease some of the constraints that have worked to ensure the success of Norway’s sovereign fund. In particular, while populism can lead to the relaxation of the limits on fund withdrawals (in order to increase government coffers), a narrow nationalistic view may work to ease the requirement to invest outside Norway and instead use the fund to support investment in domestic infrastructure.
In principle, domestic investment may yield higher returns than investing abroad, but it can also lead to pork barrelling, among other problems. In addition to this, requiring investments to be exclusively outside Norway has worked well in hedging exchange rate risk.
Ultimately, it will not be possible for Norway to avoid the challenges that arise from the combination of higher government expenditure, resulting from the increasing demands of the welfare state and of the ageing population, and the fact that oil and gas production (and revenues) have already peaked. However, Norway’s successful sovereign fund will go a long away towards meeting these challenges.
All in all, Trillion Dollar Baby makes a very good read, and arguably a must read for natural resources policy wonks. There is much to consider even if you don’t agree with the lessons that Cleary outlines in the book’s afterword.
We should revisit Australia’s mining tax to prepare for future commodities price rises that will follow the economic growth of other large developing economies such as India. We should also reconsider the wisdom of setting up a sovereign fund that invests exclusively in foreign assets.
My own take from the book is that although it will be challenging in the current policy environment to develop a sound natural resource policies, we should not give up on a tax on profits to replace output taxes such as royalties. Australians should also continue to have the conversations and lay the ground work to ensure that we are ready to implement better policies when the opportunity arises.
At the BookShelf 
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