Tea at Trianon: In Praise of 'The Karate Kid'

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, August 18, 2024

In Praise of 'The Karate Kid'

From Spencer Klavan at Rejoice Evermore:

In other words, the confrontation is set up not as a face-off between two ideals of manhood—the good and retiring sweetheart versus the evil alpha male—but between the noble and the corrupted version of one kind of man, the red-blooded American kind. Danny scores higher than Johnny on the good guy scale, but he has to confront the hard truth that Johnny simply has more physical power: he is bigger, stronger, better trained. The movie is about those brute realities of being a man, and how Danny’s going to deal with them.
At first, he cowers. It’s only after a couple beatings that Danny starts to sulk and cringe through the halls of school, desperate to evade the facts of his situation. If there’s a kind of wimp that Danny might become, it’s not the sensitive bookworm but the resentful loner, darkly brooding over the unfairness of life and plotting twisted forms of revenge. Not Bastian Bux from The Neverending Story but Dostoevsky’s seething underground man.
Instead, of course, Danny meets Nariyoshi Miyagi of Okinawa. Predictably, in the braindead race criticism of Current Year America, Mr. Miyagi has gone down as a perverse stereotype of “the perpetual foreigner who exists to serve the whiteness that surrounds him.” Nonsense. Miyagi is a richly layered tragic hero, and the movie’s finest achievement is how patiently, even reverently it approaches the heart of his story. (Read more.)