Let's Read Again Like We Did Last Year ~~

      . . . . Frequently my mind fails to make sense to me. 

 How did I manage to choose Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (2019) by James Grant as the audio book to follow Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (2016) by Laura Spinney, and The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom (2020) by H. W. Brands for my workouts?

So far my great take-away is that Bagehot was not only a prototype of what we in later times tend to call a libertarian / neo liberal.  He formalized the concept, and described in detail  the necessity of a Central Bank and its functions for a stable government.  He did the same for Constitutional Monarchy. This while, though they benefit from both, the 'lower orders,' the poor, the uneducated, are incapable of understanding either economics or constitutions, and certainly lack the capacity for making political and governing decisions. Needless to say that women as a class aren't even that much of a consideration, despite his respect for the intellects of many of the women of his acquaintance, including his own mother, who also suffered serious mental illness.

This brilliant fellow, a prodigy already as a very young child, could not add or subtract. Yet his family put him in charge the family banking business, when he hated everything else including the law for which he qualified among his many other professional credentials, realizing he wouldn't be able to pull a Disraeli and move from writing to holding office and becoming Prime Minister. The family business's great fortune is that he seems to have spent more time doing anything but banking, while remaining a writing demon as to output, and a polymath in terms of what he wrote about. Naturally, due to his writing about how to run a country's finances, he got sent to India to put its finances on solid footing.  How more British and Victorian than this may we get?

Bagehot was praised for cool wit and epigrammatic style, which author Grant does his best to exhibit in his own economic writing. Nor did Bagehot stint in praise for himself in his own writing, knowing he knew what others did not, and taking knowingly contrary political positions such as favoring Louis-Philippe's coup against the election and naming himself France's ruler for life. Bagehot inevitably reminds this reader of that thoroughly self-satisfied, thoroughly knowledgeable of his own superiority, that fellow likely only Tories today recall, William F. Buckley.

On the other hand, George Eliot quite adored Bagehot as a thinker and his friend.  But no one has suggested George Eliot didn't have a strong conservative bent herself -- except for herself, of course.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Things do roll on, don't they. The period's royalties arrived, and so did spring, while winter, hopefully, is now departed for months.  El V got his second dose of Pfizer this afternoon.  He's currently lying down, but he generally feels sleepy before dinner so it probably means nothing.  I am making dinner, looking forward to my second dose of Moderna late Friday afternoon, and after dinner, I'm particularly looking forward to the HBO Max premiere of  the 4-part Exterminate All the Brutes.

In ‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ Raoul Peck Takes Aim at White Supremacy

After the success of “I Am Not Your Negro,” HBO gave Peck carte blanche for his next big project. What resulted is a sweeping meditation on colonialism and the nature of truth itself. ... New York Times

Raoul Peck’s four-hour documentary for HBO is a dizzying retelling of the course of colonialism, slavery and genocide. ... New York Times

"....a Radical Masterpiece About White Supremacy, Violence and the History of the West" ... Time

This exploration of the "origin story of white supremacy" features two Revelators who have had deep effect on both el V's and my historical researches and formation of our historical perspective:  

" .... It takes its title from Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist’s ruminative 1992 book about his travels through postcolonial Africa, which in turn wrestles with the source of the quote “exterminate all the brutes”: Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness. Peck also draws heavily on historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History. In each episode, he credits himself as having made the series “together with” all three scholars, even though Trouillot died in 2012 and Lindqvist in 2019."

Seeing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz involved in this already highly praised non-dramatic, history series, feels particularly personal since she accepted on our behalf and read our "Thank you very much for this honor" for the 2016 American Book Award for The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry, as we weren't able to make it out to California for the event.  But it's particularly satisfying because Dunbar-Ortiz is a true pioneer of this kind of work.  When she began, it didn't exist, within or without academia.  Now, because of hers and others devoting their lives to inventing a methodology to study and recover history that has been both disappeared and denied, to see her, at her age, receiving this kind of recognition is truly exciting.

A quote from Michel-Rolph Trouillot is at the top of this Fox Home blog, as it has since the beginning.