Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

[T]he age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

— Edmund Burke

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.

Via Theo.

One of my left-wing classmates this morning was blaming the federal credit downgrade on the Tea Party, describing Tea Party-ers as worse than 19th century Know Nothings and referring to them as “Talibanic zealots.” He attacked the patriotism of the Tea Party movement, and predicted that the American masses would wake up when the New Deal safety net began to unravel. All this, he said, made his stomach churn.

I replied:

It is grotesque in the extreme to find political Philistines, oblivious to the philosophic foundations and the Constitutional intent of the founders of their own country, a group of reactionary ideologues clinging to outdated, historically-refuted late-19th-century Utopian visions of heaven on earth and equality of economic results between the provident and the reckless, the educated and the uneducable, the law-abiding and the criminal, the industrious and the idle achieved by the rule of scientism through the medium of socialism and collectivist statism, referring to people with a far more sophisticated and accurate understanding of economics, political philosophy, and America history as primitive zealots.

With a very special kind of irony, we find today all the patriots who stabbed their own contemporaries fighting for freedom overseas in the back, the same people who waved North Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…,” the patriots who are always telling us how disgraceful American history was until they came along, now waving the flag and demanding that we support their fiscal excesses out of patriotism.

The safety net constructed since collectivism’s heyday in America is already unraveling. It was always a Ponzi scheme and it has arrived at the inevitable endpoint of all such schemes. Demographics is no longer working on its side. It was only in the imaginations of ideologues that all this was ever permanently sustainable. Reality has refuted the left’s theories again.

You can pray aloud and whistle in the dark and spout this kind of nonsense about the masses “awakening” to agree with your own insanity, but the reality is that the apolitical, pragmatic mass portion of the country has already had its rude awakening. They elected the second leftist president in our adult lifetimes, and his regime has succeeded in surpassing the debacle of his predecessor. What you are going to get is a landslide election that will consign Obama, the democrat party, and the welfare entitlement state to the rubbish-heap of history to repose discarded beside the rest of the entire collection of intellectual dead ends and political mistakes. Well might your stomach churn.

Cartoon via Theo.

Hat tip to Theo.

click to enlarge

Via Theo.

It turns out that the Vassar cartoon sent in by one of our commenters really was set in the 1930s after all.

The source turns out to be a collection of cartoons humorously depicting college life at Vassar by Jean Anderson (1912?-1994) Class of 1933 and (the better documented) Anne Thorburn Cleveland (1916-2009), Class of 1937, published in 1942.
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Anderson and Cleveland published a second collection together, titled Everything Correlates, in 1946. The two 1940s booklets were probably republished as The Educated Woman in Cartoon and Caption in 1960.

Anderson was a classmate at Vassar of Mary McCarthy, who supplied her own version of life at Vassar in her succèss de scandale novel The Group

I remember a classical mural ornamenting “the Madonna of the Smoking Room” Lakey’s suite, featuring the other seven members of the group, attending the goddess Lakey, drawn by the intelligent and witty Helena. I have always assumed that Helena, the detached observer, was intended to represent McCarthy herself, but perhaps I’ve always been wrong. McCarthy’s classmate Jean Anderson, it seems, had just such a talent for cartoon murals.
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Murals of college life by Jean Anderson still ornament Vassar’s Alumnae House pub (Vassar College: An Architectural Tour, 2004)
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Cleveland went on to contribute cartoons to Ladies’ Home Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines, and published a book of cartoons from the perspective of an American residing in post-war Japan, but eventually abandoned her professional career. She wound up living in Oregon where she created a commune.

Anne Cleveland Oregonian obituary

Comics Reporter obituary

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Anderson worked as a librarian at Vassar for a number of years, then suddenly resolved on a complete redirection, attended medical school, and became an obstetrician and a pioneer champion of the Lamaze method. She practiced in Manhattan in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, then relocated permanently to Amherst, Massachusetts. Dr. Anderson proudly kept copies of her cartoon collections available to entertain patients in her waiting room.

Cleveland and Anderson remembered by Vassar Miscellany News in the year of Cleveland’s death.
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Blogger Shaenon K. Gentry, Vassar 2000, has published several articles on the Cleveland-Anderson cartoons. Gentry, for some reason, fails to notice that Anderson signs her cartoons, and tends to produce the better work. The Gentry articles talk predominantly about Anne Cleveland.

21 July 2006

25 July 2006

29 August 2008