"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
I've been working on an article on President Taft, whose Summer White House on Massachusetts' North Shore from 1909-12 is recalled at a Beverly Historical Society website of interest (though you'll want to mute the music and be ready to click the infernal Tripod windows).
Meantime, three items down at this Parlor Songs page is a quite lovely waltz, "Our Good & Honest Taft," used as a campaign song in 1908. The cover art is rather nice, too.
Among the campaign songs performed by singer-songwriter Oscar Brand in this C-Span interview is "Get on a Raft with Taft" ("a chancy move," in the words of the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash, "considering he weighed as much as a small manatee").
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Catching up elsewhere…
One suspected the New York Sun would give good play to the re-staging of the Burr-Hamilton duel, and sure enough, there it was, above the fold.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely 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 just began to move in,--glittering like the morningstar, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
To read Burke's Reflections is to be struck by his prescience. Here he could be describing post-modern relativism: On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.
Elsewhere, a new biography of Napoleon is considered at the Claremont Review, just out with its summer issue.
And Random Penseur, at his new address, observes today's anniversary of the bathtub murder of Marat, which he notes is not the only reason to recall July 13.
In South Wales, a small coal and iron town tries to build new prosperity based on used books. (Via ArtsJournal)
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Telegraph Obit Blurb o' the Day: Judge Michael Hyam: Old Bailey judge and lethal spin bowler who sentenced the Duchess of York's dresser and the Soho nailbomber
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