"I Hope Jesus Wants SOMEBODY For a Sunbeam" Edition
Hello,
It is raining here. It rained all May. It's rained all June. It is predicted to rain even into July. Normally, when it rains Poles like to dust off a little joke about the weather making me and other Englishmen “feel at home”. These jokes withered and died last month when they realised that it was hot in Britain.
But I refuse to let the weather drown my spirits! 2020 is a rock that we must push, with Sisyphean strength, up the hill of life before it rolls straight down the slope to the bottom again. A little rain to cool us off? I welcome it! What more can you throw at us, huh?
I have read a lot this week (I could hardly have had a picnic, after all…) and much of what I have read has been interesting, so here is a parade of recommendations that I hope will satisfy the prose-hungry reader.
Obligatory shilling. This week I wrote an article for Spectator USA about how conservatives talk too much about “cancel culture” and do too little.
I wrote an essay for the new magazine Athwart about deathmatch wrestling and the nature of pain in the modern world.
I also wrote about, well, rain, and enjoying bad experiences, for pain subscribers to this platform.
Reason and rage. For Tablet, Jacob Siegel explores “argument by commandment.” “Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason.”
Elite overproduction. Ed West writes a typically brisk, deceptively rich essay about Peter Turchin's insights into “the socially dangerous situation where too many people are chasing too few elite places in society.”
Freeing philosophy. Joseph Keegin writes movingly about philosophy, alienation and the need for “learning and wondering [to] be suffused once more through the entire grain of human life, freed from its confinement within the time of the school-day and the gray walls of the classroom.”
Red in tooth and paw. The excellent Mary Harrington discusses our domesticated view of nature and how it serves neither humans nor animals.
The arbitrary dies. In Jacobite, Jacob Phillips writes of when a Traveller camp was established in London's Docklands, and reflects on the nature of obedience, and authority, and “that around which things cohere.” Whether or not you agree, it is a powerful and interesting piece.
Why was Britain rich? Sam Ashworth-Hayes ably dismisses the lie that British wealth was founded on the slave trade.
British values. A riotously and righteously funny satire of the management of public opinion by Herbalis.
That cheap simulation of virtue. Peter Hitchens writes about the fit of iconoclasm in Britain for First Things and includes this great line: “what do we gain by throwing [these statues] down? Only that cheap simulation of virtue, which comes from damning sins we have no mind to, while committing the ones we are inclined to.”
Democrats and demographics. Helen Andrews discusses about how immigration pushed, and pushes, the US leftwards.
Honoring Clint Eastwood. Titus Techera celebrates the actor and director, who “knows that men need strife in order to strive and thus become serious.” Titus includes this sideswipe: “Even in our most exalted formalities, we seem to be led as conservatives by contempt for the only people who can get the ideas we cherish across to very large audiences. We reject the arts and the work of imagination, as though they were nothing compared to business and managers, but then we turn around to complain that there’s no patriotism left and we don’t know our history.”
Is that enough? It is enough. For now.
Have a lovely week,
Ben