Lady in White

The Duchesse d’Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Via Vive la Reine.

As for Thérèse, the long-cherished wish of Artois was fulfilled, for she consented to purchase a new gown for the occasion. In the dawn glow of her chamber at Hartwell, her ladies had breathed forth their admiration at seeing this princess swathed in softly shimmering folds of oriental silk, a flowing, voile shawl trimmed with silk tassels, high kid gloves and satin slippers, all in purest white. The double band of pearls which bound her head and chestnut coils, the white plumes, the ivory fan, and the nosegay of camellias, accented the simple elegance, modest grandeur, and self-effacing majesty of her slender form. ~from Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

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Defending Hereditary Titles

 From Tatler:

Charles Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, is the latest member of his family to sit in the House of Lords, a tradition that has passed through the generations from father to son for 900 years. He will also be the last.

The passing of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill this March finalised the abolishment of peers who inherit their titles through their family, a process that began in 1999, under the last Labour Government. As he prepares to step away from the role, the Earl of Devon has lamented the loss of ‘collective memory’ in British politics. 

 

‘A country that forgets its history forgets its responsibilities,’ Courtenay told Channel 4 News. The Earl, who argued that he provides Parliament with a valuable connection to the past because his ancestors fought in the Crusades, added: ‘Having members in one chamber of your Parliament who have that collective memory that goes back centuries allows you as a government, as a Parliament as it were to retain that memory.’ (Read more.)

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The Hector’s Veto

 From The New Criterion:

In contemporary Western society, taking offense (and encouraging others to do so) appears to have become a major pastime. Increasingly few people seem simply to reflect silently on odious behavior when they witness it, or are inclined simply to put it down to ignorance and move on. The required response has become, to use a popular modern term, “performative.” Making it clear to the world that one is graphically offended by anything approaching racial unpleasantness and certain other modern taboos—many of them bred of identity politics of one sort or another—has now become something of a social necessity. It was interesting to note, at the time of the death of George Floyd in 2020, how many of those (around the world) who sought to use this regrettable event for political purposes were white, middle-class people who have never been at the receiving end of racial abuse of any sort in their lives. Some such people who expressed outrage did so, we must be sure, from fellow feeling about the needless death of another human being, some out of guilt at their “white privilege,” but some, unfortunately, because they saw this man’s death as a political opportunity to entice others, of all ethnicities, into a coalition of grievance against the established order.

Only a brute would dispute the ignorance and vileness of overtly racist behavior or attempt to condone it, and society rightly deplores it. But the treatment of this justified taboo has advanced to an extreme degree: to behave as a racist, even without causing physical harm or material loss, has become one of the worst acts in which anyone in Western society can engage. Society always used to punish those who breached taboos by straightforward disapproval or ostracism—in Britain until the 1950s, for examples, divorcées were not welcome in royal circles, because the Established Church disapproved of divorce (remember Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson) and the monarch was the Supreme Governor of that church. But now, ostracism and disdain are not enough; legal remedies are demanded against perpetrators. Why has social vindictiveness reached this pitch? There have been indisputable outrages in which people are injured or die in attacks in which the motivation is plainly the assailant’s hatred of them on account of their race. That, though, is not the sole reason for the taboo’s elevation to a criminal act. In certain parts of society, offensiveness can be and is weaponized by those with political causes to pursue.

The practice of virtue signaling, if perhaps not the virtue signaler, is in its ubiquity relatively new. There is a class of person who covets approbation from his or her peers by pointing to breaches of a taboo and publicly shaming the person who has breached it. These types have always existed—one came across them at school—but now they abound and are encouraged in their quest. Such people do not always by accident come across language or conduct that offends them: they go and look for it, in keeping with taking offense having become something of a pastime. They also look for it in order to exploit it, or to attempt to exploit it, for political reasons. The strategy includes the need to persuade others less alert than themselves that they, too, should be offended. And no one can claim credit from their peers as a virtue signaler more rapidly and comprehensively than someone who has identified anything that might qualify as “racist” behavior. It is not merely a taboo now, it is a bludgeon; it can be career-ending and reputation-wrecking. The more terminal the damage the virtue signaler can inflict on the alleged racist, the more worthy of respect (in the world of virtue signaling) that person is. Winning esteem in the world of virtue signalers brings deep satisfaction to the politically motivated and the self-righteous. In addition to using this tried and tested reason for vilification, the community is always on the lookout for new taboos, or acts or language that can become taboo, to expand the repertoire. (Read more.)

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This Unconventional Swedish Country Home

 

 

From Architectural Digest:

“My mother is an artist who’s passionate about botany,” explains architect Daniel Fagerberg, who was recently tasked with fashioning an unconventional Swedish country home for her to the west of Stockholm. For this highly personal project, he wanted to honor the intricacies of the flora and fauna that his mother has “dedicated her entire life to studying,” while paying homage to the cozy, light-wooded interiors that Scandinavian cottages are known for. The resulting property is a dream home for anyone who wants to be immersed in nature, botanist or not.

 Fagerberg describes the site as a “gentle westward slope, with oak and fruit trees, overlooking a vast landscape of meadows with a dense forest as a backdrop.” The home itself is a tribute to the famous Erskine Villa, a 1963 home by architect Ralph Erskine located a few miles away. The 2,260-square-foot structure was divided into four spaces with vaulted ceilings that was originally conceived as a stucco building (the white facades were intended to serve “as a canvas on which to display botanical studies.”) After a more detailed analysis, the architects decided that a façade of wooden panels would be more appropriate, as they provide “detail and texture,” while the size of the project also grew in tandem. (Read more.)

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The Silenced Generation

 From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Are America’s college students doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist state does to its citizens? An Ivy League professor—an old-fashioned liberal who actually cares about free speech—recently warned me about what’s happening in classrooms like his.

He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class—but students are afraid to speak, not because they’re afraid of the professor but because they fear each other.

Communist regimes have tried to stamp out dissent for more than a century. Tyrants and totalitarians have always tried to sow suspicion among their subjects, turning friends, neighbors, and even family members into informers against anyone who won’t conform to the party line.

That’s the scenario in George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it’s the intention behind China’s insidious “social credit” system today. What Orwell never imagined, though, was that young men and women in a free society would one day willingly impose “political correctness” on their peers—and use the 21^st century’s decentralized social media to do it.

Students, the professor told me, are afraid to be recorded on their classmates’ cellphones talking about politics and political philosophy—the subjects he teaches—and don’t want to disagree with their fellow students about anything because the person they’re arguing with might belong to a “disadvantaged” group.

It’s not only what you say that’s dangerous, but who you say it to.

A young man getting into an argument with a young woman, or a white student with a black student, is not a “good look” on social media, and a classroom conversation runs the risk of leading to an online inquisition. Conservative students, who often have to face ostracism for their dissenting views, might be less intimidated than liberals and progressives, who aren’t used to not fitting in. (Read more.)

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Wonderland

In Victorian days, an infraction of etiquette could alienate people from each other. It did not need to be something unspeakable. Also, Prince Leopold was not Prince of Wales. But it is still an interesting account. From Marlene Wagman-Geller:

One of the strangest creatures that Alice encountered in Wonderland was the Caterpillar who inquired who she was. Her response: “I-I hardly know, sir, at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” Alice’s nonfictional counterpart was literary muse Alice Liddell.

A classic had its genesis when Alice’s father, Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ’s Church, Oxford, invited Charles Dodgson to his home. The lonely bachelor, who only lost his stutter around children, became an adored surrogate uncle to Henry’s three daughters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice. An avid photographer, Charles captured the image of the eight-year-old Alice in numerous portraits; his most well-known work showcased her as the scantily clad girl from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Beggar Maid” that contained the quotation, “This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

On July 4, 1862, Charles, along with the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell sisters for a rowboat ride along the Thames River. To entertain the youngsters, Charles made up a tale of the adventures and misadventures of a girl named Alice. Thrilled with her inclusion, Alice begged Charles to write it down as a proper book. For Christmas, he presented the ten-year-old girl with his handwritten manuscript, along with illustrations, entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. All the members of the boating party made an appearance: Alice, the protagonist, Dodgson, the dodo, the Reverend Duckworth, the duck, Lorina, the lorry, Edith, the eaglet.

Three years later, under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Charles published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Queen Victoria was so taken with the book she asked him to include her name in any future’s book’s dedication. A century later, The Beatles placed Charles’ image on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper album between Marlene Dietrich and T. E. Lawrence. Captain Robert Falcon Scott took the novel along on his Antarctic expedition.

The demise of wonderland arrived when Mrs. Liddell, an enraged Red Queen, gave her variation of, “Off with his head!” Something upset her to such an extent that she forbid Charles to have any contact with her family. She consigned all his letters to Alice to her fireplace. The end of their relationship was enough to wipe the grin off the Cheshire Cat. What the mama saw has never been made public—the Liddells remained mum. After Charles’ death, his family destroyed the pages of his diary concerning his banishment. The enigma surrounding Charles: was he a Nabokov who did more with Alice than talk about cabbages and kings? Was he merely an odd man who only felt comfortable in the world of childhood innocence? The truth lay in Charles’ own looking glass. (Read more.)

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My Little Sister

Today is her birthday. She's sixty!

 

Happy Birthday, Andrea!

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Do GOP Voters Recognize How Trump Saved Them From Trans Barbarism?

 From Chronicles:

Two years after the Biden-Harris Administration hijacked Easter Sunday to push transgender ideology, President Donald J. Trump delivered a decisive blow against one of the most destructive social and political experiments in modern American history.

The Biden-Harris agenda wrought indescribable harm, but this Easter season, the nation witnessed not just policy reversals but also the forceful, unapologetic reclamation of sanity. Trump ended the Democrats’ “Transgender for Everybody” agenda that treated biological sex as optional, children as experiments, and women’s rights as collateral damage.

Trump banned federal funding, sponsorship, or promotion of the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors. He protected children from irreversible physical and psychological damage, ordering agencies to cut funds from institutions involved in these practices.

More than three dozen health systems, including Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Children’s Minnesota, Denver Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and NYU Langone, then announced they would stop or suspend child mutilation programs.

These concrete results followed directly from executive resolve. If returned to power, Democrats will undo every one of them. Their woke base demands it. Republicans cannot afford to forget this reality as the midterms approach.

Trump further dismantled indoctrination in schools.

His administration terminated federal support for transgender ideology and its attendant so-called equity curricula. States now face clear notice: remove such content or lose funding. Parents regained ground against an un-American, and arguably inhuman, assault on their rights and their children’s minds.

This action exposed the galling hypocrisy of Democrats who claimed to champion families while funding confusion and erasure of biological truth. (Read more.)

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Ray Bradbury, American Individualist

 From Modern Age:

Did this opposition to liberal attacks on free speech indicate that Bradbury had embraced conservatism or libertarianism? In fact, he may not have moved to the right politically so much as the ground beneath his feet had shifted. Bradbury had been voicing concerns about free speech since his 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles, which also features book-burning: “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe?” says the character William Stendhal. “He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. . . . He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned.” The politically correct censorship started small and then grew: “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures.” And it was based not on pure ideals but on fear: “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.” 

Stendhal continues, “Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air.” For Bradbury, censorship wasn’t just about proscribing certain kinds of speech but about hobbling the imagination. “So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose—oh, what a wailing!—and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!” 

Bradbury continued to develop the theme of the violent effects of censorship in the name of lofty ideas in Fahrenheit 451. There, authors were seen as a threat to the leveling pressures of mass democracy. The novel’s Captain Beatty puts it like this: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.” The death of literary culture “didn’t come from the Government down,” Beatty says. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.” (Read more.)

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