Tea at Trianon: The American Inquisition

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

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

The American Inquisition

From the Aspen Times:

"We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country."

So said Sen. Barack Obama in 2005.

For the past 30 years, candidates have campaigned with statements such as this, but now that we have a president who is actually walking the talk that got him elected, all that people writing in and to this paper know how to do is brand him as the new Hitler, Kirstjen Nielsen as the new Himmler, ICE as the new Gestapo, and Melania as the new Marie Antoinette. People like me, of course, constitute a "cult."

Surely some of us are smarter than this. Columnist Alison Margo, for example, regularly writes insightful, self-effacing, and wickedly funny commentary. But then periodically she slips a gear and slides into Trump-is-Hitler mode, claiming that motherhood and her Jewish heritage compel her to this conclusion — history and logic be damned.

Does she not recognize that if there's a new Kristallnacht underway, it's being conducted by throngs who cheer Robert DeNiro and condone Peter Fonda (for whom kidnapping and casting Barron Trump into a pit of pedophiles is the proper response to separating parents from children at the border), who want to see "pigs in a blanket, frying like bacon," who harass Republican officials outside of their homes and restaurants, where owners refuse to serve them?

Do not she and other exemplars of Godwin's Law (concerning the probability that a given discourse will compare someone to Hitler) recognize that Americans are polling as being more upbeat about "the way things are going" than at any time since 2005, when Sen. Obama made the above statement?

Whatever. Now we see Jimmy Fallon apologizing all over himself for having once mussed Donald Trump's hair and made him look human — lest Fallon find himself part of the first auto-da-fe'. Other heretics may not slip the noose or pyre so easily. See you at the Place de la Concorde. (Read more.)