Tea at Trianon: Food Lines in South Africa

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Food Lines in South Africa

From the New York Post:

South Africa has marshaled huge resources towards preventing its poor from starving because of COVID-19, but undocumented citizens and stranded migrants face hunger as they slip through the net, aid workers say. Some 11,000 families waited for charity food parcels on Wednesday in a queue stretching for several kilometers (about 4 miles) outside South Africa’s capital Pretoria, with some lining up from 4 am. Aid workers estimated more than half of those waiting for the third distribution this month were migrants. President Cyril Ramaphosa has been praised for trying to mitigate the impact of the two-month-old coronavirus shutdown on the country’s most vulnerable, setting aside 50 billion rand ($2.78 billion) for social grants for the poor, who on one measure make up half of Africa’s most industrialized country. (Read more.)