GSTAAD—When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early ’20s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in cool places like Deauville and Baden-Baden. I thought of the deserted summer Riviera and how marvelous the place must have been when people like Picasso and Hemingway joined forces with Cole and Gerald and launched the resort to end all resorts. No longer. The place is now an overcrowded hellhole, expensive, dirty, and dangerous, but not to worry. If the recent heat waves continue and the temperatures keep climbing, soon we’ll be right back where we started from, except this time it will be Sylt in northern Germany for the have-a-lot elites, and the boiling Riviera, southern Italy, and Spain for the have-a-lot-less peons. (Orkney instead of Mykonos.)
This has to be good news for my Swiss friends here in Gstaad, who always worry about the lack of snow and lack of height of their winter wonderland, only 3,300 feet. “You will be known as a summer resort,” I tell the perennial worriers, “all it takes is a bit of role reversal.” And they’ll have a longer season, too, four months as opposed to two in the old days. They’re funny, the Swiss, known as dullards because they lack Italian fire and Spanish passion, but what would we do without them? They are models of good deportment where racial matters are concerned, and their manners are impeccable, formal but polite to strangers, whatever their creed or color may be. Europe may be a sitting duck for an Islamic attack after Kabul’s demise, but walking down Gstaad’s main street last week, it was anything but. A Gulf Arab was window-shopping accompanied by five totally covered females, if they were of that sex. They could have been anyone, Hamid Karzai, Ashraf Ghani, perhaps even Imran Khan, yet no one paid any attention.
There are no “Kill Cops” spray-paints as there are in America here, no fraying social fabric, no rioting for riot’s sake, no extinction rebellion bulls—. There is no animosity toward one another, yet the Swiss speak four different languages, German, French, Italian, and Romansch. The tribalism that exasperates and fuels mistrust in other countries does not exist here, and most of the crimes committed are by foreigners.
Mind you, the Swiss practice direct democracy and are not led by feckless central elites who shrug their shoulders as their borders are overrun. The unelected mini-Napoleons in Brussels, who long ago pulled a fast one on Europe, have tried everything to force the Swiss to give up their independence, but to no avail. In France, Italy, and Germany, race has created a chasm that only obese screen addicts who have been housebound for years have failed to notice. Not so over here. Woke virtue-signaling masquerading as morality holds no ground up here in the mountains. Gruff peasants like their own kind, yet the veneer of conventional sociability endures. This should be a breeding ground for fighting among races and creeds, yet it is not. Moola is the great pacifier. In fact, all Swiss are implicitly enlisted in a common cause: that of making money.
