> >
> > Carl Remick quoted Joe Conason:
> >
> > > Maybe someday we?ll see a revival of the
> > >kind of conservatism that once valued social solidarity along with
> > >enterprise, and demanded responsibility as the price of privilege.
> >
>
>Carl, I'm not sure what "conservatism" you are speaking of. Since most
>of the poets and novelists I studied over the years were conservatives,
>I'm fairly well acquainted with several conservative traditions. May I
>say that all of them I know of were red in tooth and claw.
Maybe he's thinking of Cobbett, a Tory celebrated by no less than E.P. Thompson for his attacks on the dark Satanic mills and the brutality of turn of the (18th) century English life. But socail soilidarity conservatism depends on an aristocracy, which we never had. What we call conservatism here is what everyone else calls classical liberalism, and Thatcher was its classic representative. "There is no such thing as society."
>To appreciate this representative of responsibility and valuing of
>social solidarity you need to be acquainted with the terror and
>repression visited on the English rural population during the 16th
>century.
>
>Once in a while a representative of this responsible conservatism let's
>the truth sneak out in a terrifying line or two:
>
> Mean while declining from the Noon of Day,
> The Sun obliquely shoots his burning Ray;
> The hungry judges soon the the Sentence sign,
> And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine. . . .
> (Rape of the Lock III, 19-22)
Well, this is eighteenth century, when enclosure is completed.
>
Or, it occurs to me, you can get the (unpleasant) flavor
>of it all by reading Agatha Christie mysteries. In the 19th & 20th
>centuries that "responsible conservatism" gets entangled with some
>really nasty (but oh so genteel) racism. Read Dorothy Sayers. She is
>just as unpleasant as Christie but writes a hell of a lot better.
>
However, she's aggressively anti-anti-Semitic, which counts for something. Lord Peter's ditsy friend the financial wizard marries a Jew, or is it one of his (sympathetic) police inspectors. But she's very much a snob and pevenu; one of the nastier bits is the culprit in my favorite bopoks of her, Gaudy Night, with a wonderful and sharply drawn if rather sentimentalized picture of an imaginary Oxford women's college, accurate within its limitations (based on my experience of Kings' (Cambridge), 60 years later--but I won't tell, it would spoil the mystery.
jks
jks
_________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com