Upperclass Twit of the Year

I've got to concur with Wonkette on this one. The Washington Post featured a first person story on the tsunami from Michael Dobbs, who was vacationing on his own private island in the area at the time. His humor and apparent inability to comprehend the magnitude of the situation was not in the best taste:

There were 15 of us gathered around the dinner table, from four continents, celebrating Christmas on a fantasy private island in the Indian Ocean -- with nothing but sea separating us from the South Pole, the Seychelles and Sumatra.



We handed out presents, ate turkey and Brussels sprouts hand-carried from distant lands, drank a lot of wine and champagne, wore funny paper hats and read silly jokes from Christmas crackers. Hoots of laughter greeted my brother Geoffrey as he instructed us how to slice the Stilton cheese he had brought with him from England. On no account must the Stilton be dug into with a spoon, he insisted.



. . .



The first few hours after the disaster seem almost unreal. My brother was worried about his other properties along the coast -- and we were all in a kind of trance. At one point, a helicopter hovered overhead, looking for survivors. "What they don't know is that we are all down here, eating Stilton," cracked one of the Aussies. Shortly afterward, another Australian girl began suffering excruciating stomach pains, and was taken by car to Colombo, where she was operated on for a burst appendix. (Our most serious casualty, she is now recovering in Sydney.) The Aussies all had cell phones, which soon came alive with text messages from Perth and Bangkok and Los Angeles. "Merry Christmas, I am on my yacht eating prawns and drinking champagne," read one of the messages. "Sure beats our uneventful Christmas," read another.



. . .



We had succumbed so greatly to the charms of life on Taprobane that we found it difficult to tear ourselves away. But by Monday, it became obvious that we would have to leave: There was no water or electricity, and the Christmas leftovers were getting rancid."

The charms of post-tsunami Taprobane were magnificent until you ran out of stilton and champagne. Nice.



The paper then featured an open chat with him online, and he again came off as quite full of himself. Someone asked if he'd considered his story came off as more than insipid, given the vast poverty just outside the gates of his own private paradise.



I liked Wonkette's translation of his response:

Dobbs says	Dobbs means
You are right in pointing to the huge contrast between our experiences and the experiences of many other people, including most of the local population.	I am ignoring your question.
Like many natural disasters, this one took the biggest toll on the weakest and poorest sectors of the community, particularly children and women.	Or so I've heard.
In today's article and one I wrote on the day of the tsunami, however, I tried to describe what it was like to experience the tsunami from the vantage point of one middle-class American family.	I believe that your average American family owns its own island. I am a complete fuckwad.
I and other Post reporters have done our best to describe the experiences of those who were less fortunate.	We did have to eat Stilton without spoons, you know.

Twit.