Decades of defeat | The Spectator

The language of lounging around

At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been in the Strada Nuova that morning. ‘What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?’ replied Madame de Ventadour. ‘Our life is a lounge from the cradle to the grave.’ How true. The observation comes in Bulwer Lytton’s novel Ernest Maltravers (1837). I was put in mind of lounging by video conferencing, which allows conferees to attend to their visible top half while wearing lounge pants below. I wasn’t too sure what lounge pants were. I don’t wear them and my husband certainly doesn’t.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The importance of formality

Over the past six decades Homo sapiens occidens has grown progressively more informal in matters of clothes, language, speech, manners and social behavior to the point where, having lost any form whatever, it has devolved into Homo slobus, and democracy into slobocracy. This departure from formality has occurred across every class of society and every occupational and social category — politics, corporate business and finance largely excepted — including what remains of high society, private schools and clubs, and the churches. The lockdowns that followed from the pandemic contributed immeasurably to an already precipitous momentum.

Bill Kauffman

Rules for anarchists

Anarchists have gotten a black eye over the past year, what with the antisocial cretins of antifa laying claim to a name that befits them as illy as ‘artist’ does Hunter Biden. It’s reminiscent of the late 19th century, when the A-word, which accurately described promising ventures in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, was besmirched — and how! — by the disturbed Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo, thereby casting a serious pall over the Queen City’s Pan-American Exposition and escorting into the White House the bloodlusting Teddy Roosevelt, whom novelist Henry Blake Fuller derided as the ‘Megaphone of Mars’. American anarchism has always been a literary conceit more than a political (or anti-political) program.

Life