Dead or just hiding?

According to the latest Spectator, the "young fogey" is dead and gone, like a once endangered animal now extinct, the Catamount of humanity. What is a young fogey, you ask? Quoting on a 1984 article on the species, Harry Mount relates: the Young Fogey is libertarian but not liberal. He is conservative but has no time for Mrs Margaret Thatcher and considers Mr Neil Kinnock the most personally attractive of the present party leaders. He is a scholar of Evelyn Waugh. He tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages.... He enjoys walking and travelling by train. He thinks the Times is not what it was and prefers the Daily Telegraph. He goes on: a fondness for being a gentleman, Gothic design, "Brideshead Revisited," and the "ceremony of life." Young men, rejecting over-commercialized, over marketed modern life, became spitefully retro -- where are they now, Mount laments?

Well, this is a blog (what could be more modern tech than this?) but it is also called "Doctor Curmudgeon & Co.," implying an impish "wrench in the works" attitude toward contemporary life. Let's see: stubbornly conservative, lover of Waugh and "Brideshead," a "coolly religious" RC, anti-Bauhaus, lover of language, perpetually hunting for good old-fashioned food and drink, loves trains and wrote a book on railroads, wears some tweed in winter, a dedicated bowtie man, smokes a pipe here and there. The British Young Fogey is dead? Long live the American Young Fogey! (Good Lord, I have become Russell Kirk.)

Read this fascinating article about George Orwell's "blacklist" of likely Anglo-American communist sympathizers, one that I worried would moan about his snitching on idealists and free-thinking intellectuals but does not. In fact, the author T.G. Ash makes this plain point: The list invites us to reflect again on the asymmetry of our attitudes toward Nazism and communism. Orwell liked making lists. In a London Letter to Partisan Review in 1942 he wrote, "I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over" to the Nazi side if the Germans occupied England. Suppose he had. Suppose his list of crypto-Nazis had gone to the Political Warfare Executive. Would anyone be objecting? Somehow I doubt it, but never let consistency get in the way of a cause.

Nice article here on the silliness of the gender language battles, and the hopeful turn against such silliness now taking place. Ugh, how many times do I see perfectly good student papers tying themselves in knots using the clumsy "he/she" anywhere and everywhere it can. Choose one, either is fine, both is like a placing a speedbump on the interstate and expecting a smooth ride. Choppy, tedious, and transparent, it ruins writing.