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As everyone knows, snobbery is nothing but bad manners passing itself off as good taste. Past American society dames were terrible snobs, until they met their French and British counterparts, who put them in their place. I’m not going to mention any names because most of them are dead, but looking around me up here in the Alps I’ve seen some new horrors, money snobs who promise to make the older type look like nuns.
Mind you, I’m quite snobby myself when it comes to nouveaux-riches with bad manners. As Yogi Berra remarked: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” What I see here in Gstaad is a classless society, where the locals are proud to be called peasants while new arrivals feel confused at the lack of an upside-down social structure. This is good old Helvetia, where a farmer is more appreciated than a banker, and I particularly like it in the summer when the wife cuts the grass while the hubby rides the tractor. The richest local is a friend of mine, and he got started as a ski instructor. He also conquered Everest, but has remained the same — unassuming as hell and as pleasant as he was when he was teaching spoiled brats how to turn around a mogul.
He also got me out of a jam when, thirty years ago, I decided to build the largest chalet in the region and had the architects drill a hole on a mountainside that could fit the village of Gstaad inside it. But I didn’t like the location, fifteen klicks west of Gstaad, which meant thirty kilometers in the morning to lunch at the Eagle, and another thirty at night to go drinking at the GreenGo. After I’d changed my mind, the mess I had created was given a name, Taki’s Hole, and people would actually visit the place and say terrible things about it. Then Marcel Bach came to the rescue. He built an enormous apartment complex and sold every inch of it to eager newcomers to the region, while simultaneously flogging a brand-new chalet in the Oberport, the hill above the Palace Hotel, to yours truly. The Oberport may have been very chic, but some of the people who moved in after me were more cesspool than class. Suddenly “Palataki” was surrounded by structures overlooking my garden, so once again it was time for hasty migration.
The road to the Palace was blocked for a long time when a Canadian named Stroll moved in and ordered something resembling Taki’s Hole. Yet again, Marcel came to the rescue. He sold my place for an enormous sum by splitting it into three apartments and selling it to a man from Monte Carlo whose name could not appear anywhere, especially on a legal document. I took the moolah and ran.
Mind you, this is Switzerland, and real estate speculation is a no-no. One cannot sell and keep the profit unless one’s lived in the place that’s been sold for many years. If this weren’t the case, Gstaad would be buzzing with sharks with even worse manners than those already here. Then Marcel outdid himself by finding the best yet, a chalet-farm on a hill with only Roger Moore’s place below me and a private road to boot. I’ve now been here for six years and it will be my last residence. I refer to the Oberport as the Gaza Strip due to overcrowding, and my hill as Shangri-La.
Yes, Gstaad is now overbuilt and at times overcrowded, and yes, some of the people here belong behind bars — the principal behind a new club is a sociopath who was a prime feeder for Bernie Madoff — and yet the place works, especially off-season. It works because of the locals. Unlike their British cousins, Swiss people work hard and do not needlessly go on strike for higher wages. There are no politically motivated strikes, and Swiss workers, especially civil servants, do not work from home.
And another thing. One does not get the feeling here that one gets in Britain, of envy mixed with loathing for someone better off. And one certainly doesn’t have the impression of a nation that simply doesn’t work, as one does in America, where 81 percent of citizens agree that the place is dysfunctional. Well, uncontrolled immigration has turned Americans into a people with nothing in common with one another — not history, language, culture, faith or ancestors. But the Swiss have three to four different languages, and certainly different backgrounds, and it somehow works. That’s because they are nine million whereas there are 330 million Americans — and rising.
Actually, I think it’s something else. In the States the left has taken over Big Tech, Big Business, universities and the media. It is almost like a giant Stasi that ensures conformity to wokeness and to the power elite in DC. A one-party press does not a happy people make. The Swiss are not right-wingers, but neither are they, after 700 years, about to lose their independence to extreme left-wing ideologues.
The unelected commissars of the EU have been pressuring the Swiss for years, trying to tie them down with treaties that would deprive them of their liberties. The Swiss are resisting. The only Swiss law I disagree with is the one that applies only in crowded apartment buildings and punishes (with a fine) loud cries of sexual ecstasy after 10:30 p.m.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2023 World edition.
