Still exceptional

Thailand is famous for many things, some of which are unmentionable in these pages. It has long been considered the perfect location for ‘winter sun’, if you are the type of person to whom a piña colada on a white sandy beach appeals. In recent years, it has become a hotspot for hypochondriacs requiring non-essential medical care and hysterics after a nip-and-tuck (pre-COVID, the health-tourism industry was thought to be growing at 14 percent a year). Home to the orchid, pad thai, the Monkey Buffet festival (what it says on the tin), the Siamese cat and the bumblebee bat, Thailand’s gentle and healing culture has earned it a reputation as a cleaner, greener land.

My grandfather Werner von Biel was born in a huge white house on the Baltic coast of eastern Germany, a few years before World War One. I never met him. He died when I was a child. My grandmother didn’t like to talk about him. She’d left him for an English soldier at the end of World War Two. Growing up in England during the Cold War, I often wondered what had become of his Junker family, the Schloss (castle) they lived in and the land they farmed. When the Berlin Wall came down I went east, in search of the fatherland my grandmother had forsaken. Thirty years later, I’m still searching. I’ve found a few curios along the way. The Schloss is still there, though my grandfather’s family no longer owns it (the Communists turned it into a school).

Back in March, around 4,000 years ago, the world was ending. Plague swept in from the east like a horde. Clam-tight lockdowns, unthinkable even days before, were announced everywhere. Who could save us? On March 18 our prayers were answered. An honor roll of Hollywood bluebloods took action. Assembled by Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, they created a video montage cover of John Lennon’s masterpiece — yes! — ‘Imagine’, which she posted — thank goodness! — on Instagram. ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Gadot’s expensive oval face, and, in a sense, she was right. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Zoë Kravitz, Norah Jones and Amy Adams: they were all in this big wet bathful of tears together.

Laramie, Wyoming The refuge of a scoundrel is always the profession — in spades — of whatever a particular society prizes above everything else. In the United States from 1776 until the 1960s, that was patriotism. Since then it has been racial equality, succeeded in recent decades by crude and unapologetic racism of the anti-white variety whose virulence appears to contradict Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department last May was accepted by the left as proof that race relations in America have worsened in recent years to attain critical mass.