Play Pagan Games, Win Pagan Prizes

I’ll be brief. It is late Wednesday night and I am feeling unusually bloodthirsty. To be fair, I’m normally as mild as a cable rerun of the old CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, so any amount of anger is unusual for me. But tonight I am contemplating Neolithic forms of retributive justice, and — what’s more — have been since this morning when news first broke about two climate protesters in the United Kingdom who massively defaced Stonehenge with orange spray paint. The damage is immense, well beyond nontrivial. (The group responsible claims it will “wash off,” but it has not in the past — this is a structure that cannot be powerwashed, for rather obvious reasons — and they have destroyed the mosses and lichens which adorned its surface regardless.) Why am I so angry? It’s not just because they hail from the same strain of insufferably self-righteous youth fanatics as those useless caperers who leapt onto the field of Nationals Park last week in the middle of the Congressional Baseball Game, though there is a spiritual relationship.

You may recall my reaction to that debacle. Our morons here in America were part of a group called “Climate Defiance.” Understand, however, that they are a mere imitation of the O.G. European climate crazies, who have been carrying on — shutting down German mines and tossing primavera sauce at priceless works of Western art — for years now, practically since the days when this current crop of college-kid climate apocalypticists were still in braces and Skechers. And so these two defacers of civilization who ruined Stonehenge came from Britain’s infamous radical climate-vandalism group “Just Stop Oil.” (Their name alone — alone! — tells you both how mindlessly maximalist and bizarrely flippant their demands are.) Their demand is that the United Kingdom commit economic and demographic suicide by the year 2030 by ending use of all fossil fuels, which is not going to happen, and is a terrible strategic blunder anyway as Rishi Sunak already has a clear plan in place to get them there much sooner than that.

So no, I am not angry at the climate protesters because I fear their political plans — which cannot be implemented, will not work, and are unnecessary in any event. I am instead angry — authentically enraged — to see such blind, theological self-regard channeled into the defacement of mankind’s common inheritance just so they can climb their own private Maslovian pyramid of self-actualization. In fact, I would like to see these people try to really put their money where their mouth is next time: Go try and defecate atop the Great Pyramid of Giza — see if you even survive to trial! (You have to top yourselves, right?)

These people first shrieked at us, and then in their cultic obsession, escalated tactics. Now they have defaced and disgraced one of the most mysterious and hauntingly impressive sites of the entire Neolithic world. (Stonehenge is literally a UNESCO World Heritage site.) So I want you to forgive me for having covered ground that Andrew Follett just did, with both urgency and eloquence, earlier this afternoon, but he was polite where I mean to be rude. He offered a sober warning about how the new breed of eco-vandals operates and why these people will not desist, rather escalate.

But as for me? I’m seeing a bit of red right now, myself. I look at those two preeningly smugly self-assured vandal savages, sitting there cross-legged on the ground for their publicity photo shot after splashing one of the world’s most precious ancient historical sites with little more than their own vanity, and I think about dealing with them the way the folks who built Stonehenge might have. Have you heard of this fun comedy I saw a few years ago called Midsommar? The ending offers some suggestions! Or how about The Wicker Man? And this time, let’s not spare the bees.