Belmont

The Belmont Club:

I'm finally getting around to doing what I should have done a while ago. I'm adding the Belmot Club to the top of the "Other Halls" list. Wretchard's is some of the best thinking out there on Iraq and elsewhere, and his analysis has been excellent at least since the start of the siege of Fallujah. I have mostly posted links to the things he writes with which I disagree, but it's worth noting that all of what he says is of high value.

Today he has several pieces that are worthwhile. I especially liked the reference to Greenmantle. I read Greenmantle while living in the People's Republic of China. The PRC pretty much bans English-language fiction written more recently than a century ago. As a result, during my time there I read a lot of classics that I hadn't gotten around to before--Moby Dick, Greenmantle and The Thirty-Nine Steps, the Arabian Nights, some of Shakespeare, and a lot of other things too. It was extremely valuable being cut off from popular culture for so long.

Greenmantle is a candid look at the mindset of First-World-War Britian. It was written by a fellow, John Buchan, who was the Tom Clancy of his day. It's filled with what John Derbyshire calls "the same mixture of disgust, paternalism, and respect that one finds in Kipling -- that was, in fact, normal among thoughtful, humane Englishmen at the height of the Empire." At first it strikes a modern American as ugly, encompassed as we are in a culture that forbids expression of disgust for cultural differences. Perhaps because I encountered it while living myself in a foreign nation, dealing each day with the clash of cultures, I came to appreciate what was indeed humane and valuable in that attitude. It's almost a necessary stance, if you're going to be able to deal respectfully with people whose culture includes and encourages things your own finds repulsive--including, especially, the treatment of women.