“END WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE!”
According to legend, these words were emblazoned upon a sign at a booth taking signatures for a petition at a Lilith Fair, a popular summer concert series featuring female musicians. A comedian had set up the scam in order to demonstrate the alarming ignorance of the American electorate. The story goes that he collected hundreds of signatures, and no one was the wiser.
Read this essay at Catholic World Report.
I don’t like where we are headed. We’re running out of goods to reject or destroy. We’re almost at the point of no return.
Read this essay at Crisis Magazine.
“The king is dead! Long live the king!” These words have been used in both history and literature as a powerful means of reassurance. The populace is reassured that even in the face of crisis represented by the death of a king, there is an orderly transition of power: one king follows another, without interruption. (Whether the populace should find such an announcement reassuring is another question.) In neither history nor literature can I find this declaration: “The empire is dead! Long live the empire!” Why this lack, this lacuna, even though empires rise and fall and are succeeded by other empires in their turn? This question is on my mind as I watch in real time what I believe is the accelerating decline and impending demise of the American empire.
Read this essay at New Oxford Review.
It seems to me that the similarities between August 1914 and August 2022 are all disturbing: venal and clumsy politicians, states clashing as they rise and fall, an overconfidence in human wisdom and an underestimation of human vulnerability.
Read this essay at Crisis Magazine.
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