Tea at Trianon: Are Smells Racist?

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

Thursday, January 2, 2025

Are Smells Racist?

From Right Flank:

Reading Shakespeare under a Marxist lens–Shakespeare knew nothing about Marx because Marx had yet to be born–is absurd. Absurdity is an absence of meaning. It would be like attempting to fix a 1947 Ford pickup using 2024 Tesla parts. Barthes may as well have titled the essay “The Death of Western Civilization.” With the death of the author, God dies too. Where there is no truth, anything goes. Satan, no matter Milton’s intent in Paradise Lost, becomes a hero to whom many a college student willingly signs over their soul. Maybe that’s why “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country,” and The New Yorker pronounced the English major as good as dead in 2023. (Read more.)