On the Marches of Europe

In eastern Austria, the rugged Alps subside into green and pleasant hills; and at the frontier, these hills give way to the great Hungarian Plain. Today these hills are a picture of bucolic serenity, a lovely landscape of cozy valleys, tidy villages, sun-dappled forests, and smiling fields. But for more than a thousand years, they were a fatal frontier, a battered and bloody borderland on the ragged marches of Europe.

Know Your Barbarians

Men raise monuments to remind themselves of things that should not be forgotten. Our word monument comes from the Latin monere, which means to remind; and as G. K. Chesterton told us, we men are ever in need of reminding. Take away our monuments and we become creatures of the present, a rootless, amnesiac breed.

Guest Post: Why Johnny Can’t Speak German

The following article was written by a young man who is a friend of the Orthosphere.  And he’s something more than a great friend to me.  Here he tells how he was awakened to some defects in the American school system, a loss of innocence that can never come too soon.

This morning I was mooching free internet in a coffee shop in downtown Graz, which is a city in the southeastern part of Austria. While ordering my drink, I realized that, after three years of high school German, while receiving fairly high grades, I still had extreme difficulty ordering coffee.

Vandals High and Vandals Low

Every few years we Smiths travel to Austria to visit my wife’s family and take in the sights. Since my German is wretched, my wife focuses on the visiting and I focus on the sights. I mention these facts because this happens to be one of those years.

Surprise, Surprise

It appears that Professor Woke has been, as we predicted, found to have been openly open to the idea that killing whites may play a part in the correction of racial injustice. This is, at least, the inference an ungenerous mind could draw from recordings made in his classes (here). Once again, you heard it first at the Orthosphere.

“Of course, university administrators are today making a great show of being flabbergasted, appalled, astounded, and disgusted by Curry’s “rhetoric that was filled with hate.” And yet they all very recently agreed to tenure Dr. Curry for publishing articles and teaching classes that, I am fairly certain, expressed precisely the same opinions.”

The Poetry of Circumstance

I spent much of yesterday truant in the Bedai Hills, my truancy partly owing to a mood resembling that of Tennyson’s prophet when he said,

I am wearied of our city, son, and I go

To spend my one last year among the hills.

Brazos is a Fit and Fatal Name

Seven miles down the road, a bridge spans a river.  It’s a big, muddy, moody river—although nothing like so moody as it used to be.

The President and Professor Woke

I recently had occasion to mock the program of a “mini-conference” in our Department of Philosophy, which promised us lectures on “the black penis” as “the organ of non-being” and “institutional anti-Black misandry” (here).  The moving force behind that conference was, very likely, Dr. Tommy Curry, an associate professor who specializes in Critical Race Theory, Africana Philosophy, Anti-Colonial Economic Thought, Colonial Sexuality Studies, etc.  Dr. Curry is this morning squirming under the bright lights of official censure for comments he made in a radio interview nearly five years ago. 

Vagaries of Welcome

Welcome, Basil, my friend!  Come, take thy place on the settle
Close by the chimney-side, which is always empty without thee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, 1847

We give voice to an oxymoron when we say that “anyone is welcome,” for the word “anyone” does not comport with the word “welcome.”  Welcome is simply not the sort of thing that we can say to anyone, since the word bears discrimination in its bones.

“Adversity’s Sweet Milk,” or the “Lumber of the Schools”

When Shakespeare described philosophy as “adversity’s sweet milk,” I believe he must have had a premonition of an upcoming “mini-conference” in our Department of Philosophy.