Tea at Trianon: HillBilly Elegy: Disney Edition

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

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

HillBilly Elegy: Disney Edition

From Peachy Keenan:

The all-American caste system is how Disney World makes its money. This is the caste system that propelled Donald Trump into the White House and made J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, a bestseller, before propelling him into the White House.
This is not about liking communism, or about destroying the rich. It’s fine to be rich; I hope you are! (If you are, please consider becoming a Founding subscriber to this newsletter. Really, you should.)
This is about what it means today to be middle class vs. what it used to mean. Disneyland was $20 when I was in high school. You could get a pretty comfy seat with room for your legs in Coach on an airplane. You could do all the things: buy a house, get a car, pay for college.
The problem is not the rich. It’s not the price of luxury goods being too high or about inflation or eggs. It’s about the degradation of something that used to be pretty great into something that’s now barely tolerable but costs much more. You used to be able to use free FastPasses to fit in all the rides you wanted to do in your one precious day at the park.
Now it’ll cost you hundreds PER RIDE to skip the line.
But it’s much, much worse than that.
The new wrinkle—brought to us by the diabolical supervillains at the management consulting firms who help Disney shave every possible cent off its customers—is that you can actually get the very same product or service you USED to get five or ten years ago! No problem! You just need to pay us a few thousand more to get it.
They made the baseline experience much more uncomfortable and they upsell you just to make it usable again. (Read more.)