Tea at Trianon: Who Would Have Known…?

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

Sunday, January 27, 2019

Who Would Have Known…?

From Dr. Esolen at Crisis:

Drag queen story-time is quite the rage these days. What makes librarians and schoolteachers fall over themselves in a cloud of lavender, gushing over transvestite men who reduce the female sex to a caricature, I have no idea. Sometimes I do not understand at all our women today. The unnamed woman in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a Christian girl with whom the “patient” falls in love, is a danger to Screwtape and Wormwood because she has a woman’s immediate grasp of reality, and a healthy sense of the absurd, making it difficult to turn her head with philosophical and social fads. It is quite the contrary case when it comes to ours, it seems.

Or maybe it is simply that this fad—the homosexual one—does not visit the female sex with the same array of deadly diseases and the same depth of moral depravity and so they do not take it seriously. It is a far greater danger to the boy, and nobody gives him and his plight the time of day. Or maybe it is the single or divorced woman’s vengeance upon the sex that has hurt her, so that when her son, having grown up without a father for most of his life, declares to her that he is gay, she is not entirely displeased. Maybe it is ressentiment. Maybe it is the latest enthusiasm, as temperance once was. Women will have to explain this to me.

I cannot imagine any librarian thirty years ago, not even the most “liberal” in the land, retaining her job after having a man in drag come and encourage young people in his favorite degeneracy. What changed? What have we learned since then that would cause us to change our minds? (Read more.)