Tea at Trianon: A Heartbreaking Endorsement of Staggering Pretense

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

Friday, January 24, 2020

A Heartbreaking Endorsement of Staggering Pretense

From The National Review:

I had no doubt whatsoever that Elizabeth Warren would get the New York Times’ endorsement. An endorsement, I should add, that may have no worth whatsoever. Hillary Clinton received it in 2008 just as Barack Obama was about to beat her in Iowa. But, through the human power of stereotyping, I knew that Elizabeth Warren would get it. Elizabeth Warren and the Times simply belong together. The age of social media is an age that teaches us to become great at rough-and-ready categorization. And Elizabeth Warren is the candidate of elite college professors and the highest wage earners in the liberal professional classes — the clerisy of our age. Of course she is the candidate of Times readers and workers.

But apparently, even though they have the job of describing “the world as it should be,” the editorial board couldn’t manage to tell you which Democrat should be the party’s nominee. At the end of their rose ceremony, they cut the flower in half. The bud goes to Elizabeth Warren, the fighter who could take on Trump, said the opinion-havers. The thorny stem goes as a co-endorsement to Amy Klobuchar, who was showered with half-compliments about her practicality. Is this like the Golden Globes, where some years they have one man as a host and in other years they hire two women for the same job? But the drama of the hour told us a lot as well. Ahead of the interviews with candidates, we were told by the deputy editor that the Times editorial board was posting questions to the candidates that they were “not being asked.” (Read more.)