Category Archive 'Obituaries'
24 Jun 2021

“Adios, Gringo!” — A John McAfee Tribute

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From Stephen L. Miller in The Spectator:

Underneath the paranoia and craziness of his last years, beneath a persona that took on what felt like a bit of a forced Hank Scorpio world supervillain act, was someone who understood the very foundations of personal liberty and freedom. As he said in the 2016 Libertarian party debate, ‘Our minds and our bodies belong to us.’ This was a basic foundational principle of his politics — a constitutional tenet that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden, nor many members of either major political party seem to grasp today. In the end, as we learned yesterday, he would rather check out altogether than have either have his freedoms curtailed by any government. …

John possessed an extraordinary emotional intelligence behind the leathery exterior. He had the soul of a poet and composer. In interviews about his latest crypto or blockchain scheme, he would veer off-topic and talk about, say, the genius of John Lennon. That was ultimately the most fascinating thing about him. It made him truly accessible in the social media age. He regularly conversed with his social media followers and responded to unsolicited podcast appearance requests, genuinely because it seemed he loved putting on a show. He had real charisma. John McAfee also built up an entire myth of himself. What was real? What wasn’t? This made him even more absurdly well-suited to the social media age. He understood the media enough to manipulate it. He once mused on Twitter that ‘A world in which dogs write poetry is more believable than the world as seen through the eyes of the media.’ That’s a great line. As old world media collides and colludes with new tech oligarchs, it has become more and more true.

McAfee understood the new tech empires because he helped build them. He would have been an invaluable ally, a lunatic suicide bomber and recruiter, in the coming information-and-techology wars, where the truth is now suppressed by YouTube, Google and Facebook as they preach about ‘false news’. This is a big deal — and McAfee understood that.

I didn’t come of age with Hunter S. Thompson, though of course like almost every other high-school kid or college student I read him. But this Thompson line immediately jumps to mind when I think of McAfee: ‘One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.’ God doesn’t make many of these guys. When he does, he never takes them back. John McAfee is beyond the great blue yonder now, aboard his eternal freedom boat to sea, a drink in hand, still searching for that great white whale to fuck.

RTWT

18 Feb 2021

Rush Limbaugh, 12 January 1951 — 17 February 2021

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Melania Trump presented Rush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Back in 2004, when Ronald Reagan died, his casket was carried in the hearse up the winding Simi Valley roads to his presidential library where the burial site was waiting. For 25 miles the narrow roads were lined with crowds of people standing in tribute to the former president. I recall one woman was holding up a large sign which bore the simple message: “Well Done.”

Rush Limbaugh was undoubtedly the greatest spokesman of Conservatism after Reagan, and I think the same sign would be equally applicable to Rush.

Ossa molliter cubent. “May the earth lay lightly on his bones.”

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Mark Steyn put it rightly, paraphrasing Rush’s favorite line: “Talent returned to God.”

08 Dec 2020

Chuck Yaeger, 1923-2020

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Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yaeger, WWII Ace and the pioneering test pilot who became the first man to break the sound barrier passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 97.

Yeager was chosen for the most dangerous and innovative test assignments because he was considered the best instinctive pilot the Air Force authorities had ever seen and because he had demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to remain calm and focused in stressful situations.

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On December 10, 1963, then Colonel Chuck Yeager flying a modified Lockheed F-104 Starfighter equipped with a liquid fuel rocket engine narrowly escaped death when his aircraft went out of control at 108,700 feet.

10 Oct 2020

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne (22 December 1923 – 4 October 2020)

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For once the Times outdoes the Telegraph in its obituary of a colorful British figure.

If you have to die, it’s nice to have so as to be memorialized like Peregrine Worsthorne.

It was said of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne that he wrote as he dressed, with style and flamboyance. His bow ties, spongebag trousers and Leander socks were combined with wavy, collar-length silver hair, giving him the appearance of an aesthete on his way to the Athenaeum Club. To complement his exhibitionist tendencies he had an amused, fluting voice and, unusually for a High Tory Fleet Street editor, he was considered something of a flaneur and a bohemian. He was also a man whose engaging recklessness was, on occasion, his undoing.

As a commentator he could be salty, moralistic, reactionary, contrary and even, on occasion, self-contradictory, but he was rarely, if ever, boring or predictable. On Desert Island Discs in 1992 he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. His columns, meanwhile, were less formal argument than a series of assertions, often enough strikingly original and elegantly expressed, but sometimes merely silly, or so outrageous as to disturb even his most unflinchingly right-wing readers. For much of his career he longed for an editorial chair as well as a polemicist’s pulpit; when it finally came, its sweets were short-lived. …

In 1961 he became deputy editor of the newly founded Sunday Telegraph, a post he was to hold for the next 15 years (complementing Welch, who was deputy editor of the daily from 1964 to 1980). He was then associate editor until 1986.

He wrote in the first edition of the paper and, in some ways, thereafter became its personification. The values he was to espouse in his political columns for the next 36 years were not for the faint of heart: they were to include an argument that voluntary repatriation was the answer to Britain’s supposed immigration problems, for example, as well as a vigorous defence of Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia. His views on homosexualists, as he was wont to call them, could seem especially unpalatable. Despite his experience at his public school, Worsthorne castigated Roy Jenkins in one editorial for his tolerance of “queers”.

It became clear that the editorship he was waiting for would never come as long as Lord Hartwell was proprietor. Hartwell admired Worsthorne as a controversialist but did not think him staid or reliable enough for the editorial chair. There was some evidence for this view, in his professional and also in his private life. He had married in 1950 Claudia Bertrand de Colasse, a Frenchwoman previously married to an RAF officer. Yet, as he described with remarkable candour in his 1993 autobiography Tricks of Memory, it was far from a conventional marriage, and he was far from a faithful husband, with many liaisons, prolonged or casual. They had a daughter, Dominique, who is married to the potter Jim Keeling.

The Worsthornes mixed in a notably raffish set, including the journalists Henry Fairlie, George Gale and Paul Johnson and the dons Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Cowling. By some of these friends’ standards Worsthorne was temperate — an early bout of jaundice made heavy drinking impossible — but his life was chequered with comically untoward incidents. Over dinner in a Brighton restaurant, he and the late Vanessa Lawson, then the wife of Nigel Lawson, later of AJ Ayer, decided to exchange shirt and blouse while sitting at their table, an episode reported back to the proprietor by a mauvaise langue among his colleagues.

When appearing on an early-evening programme in 1973 to discuss the abrupt resignation of Lord Lambton from the government, he became the second man, after Kenneth Tynan, to use a well-known monosyllable on television, lightly remarking that the public did not “give a f***” about the affair. This brought a period of suspension from the paper’s pages.

In print, Worsthorne was almost as unpredictable. He was no dialectician, no scholar, indeed, and (despite his aspirations) no intellectual. His attempts at serious political thought were repetitious but persuasive even at column length, still more so in his one book in this vein, The Socialist Myth (1971).

But he was a wonderfully readable columnist, with a feline knack of puncturing specious arguments, of seeing through humbug with a single memorable phrase. He once argued ingeniously that the advertisements in newspapers were in a sense more truthful than the news pages. In the news, houses burn down and aircraft crash, killing and bereaving. In the ads, families live securely and happily in their homes, while flights land on time reuniting loved ones, a far more accurate reflection of everyday life. And it was Worsthorne who described the mood of the Thatcherite 1980s as “bourgeois triumphalism”, a phrase which has lasted longer than most coined by the left.

His leaders apart, Worsthorne was at his best writing Spectator diaries where he could be as irresponsible and malicious as he chose.

RTWT

10 Sep 2020

Elliott Brause 1937-2020

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Quality Wine, just to the left of Cutler’s. 1970s or 1980s photo with Broadway under construction.

A Yale friend forwarded today the New Haven Independent obituary for Elliot Brause, the genial owner of the long-time Yale community institution Quality Wine Store.

I know a good bit about wine, and I was recently reflecting just how much I learned, back in my student days, from Elliot’s selections. Really, I found myself ruefully noting, when you come right down to it, I’ve never known a better, more knowledgeable, more discerning, and more sophisticated wine merchant.

Kermit Lynch is pretty darn good, but he operates at a much more Olympian price level than Elliott used to, and Kermit (the toad!) won’t ship to Pennsylvania. There are, of course, good wine stores in New York City, but… again, for them, too, price is no particular object.

Elliott knew his audience and recognized that Yale undergraduates had lean purses and he skillfully filled his shelves with amazing bargains. Back then, German Rieslings were just as out of fashion as they are today, and Elliott made a point of laying in superb vintages of Qualitätsweins mit Prädikat with Spatleses and Ausleses offered for peanuts. I used to drink Schloss Eltz routinely, it was so cheap.

Even less expensive were hocks from the less prestigious Rheinpfalz region. Their prices were derisive.

It was from Elliott that I and my friends developed the habit of drinking May Wine, flavored with Woodruff (the Waldmeister) and strawberries in the Spring.

I remember, too, a particular “Quinta de Something” Port Vintage of 1940, which cost something like a piddling $7.50 a bottle back in the early 1970s. It was ambrosial.

I wish I could shop at Quality Wine today.

It was always a pleasure to do business with Elliott. He was cordial and avuncular and surrounded always by his enthusiastic corgis. If you were short of cash, Elliott would have no problem taking a check for $10 or $20 dollars over your purchase. He was essentially a member of the family and Quality Wine was a key and basic institution of Yale student life.

All that, of course, cut no mustard with the reptiles and invertebrates who operate the Yale Administration. When the greasy pols in Hartford raised back the drinking age to 21, Yale didn’t like its underclassmen having such convenient access to wine. And, in later years, Yale began making a point of micromanaging its retail rentals so as to grind out every minimal iota of higher income and status advantage.

A key part of Yale’s new strategy required wiping out all the old-time cherished and familiar retail institutions and replacing them with upmarket, high prestige, international brands whose shops would be required to remain open until 10 PM to help deter the street crime Yale had inadvertently invited via its own liberal politics.

An old news story, describes the fatal moment.

Yale’s Vice President for New Haven Affairs Bruce Alexander… gives us [the rationale behind] the act Yale has performed upon Broadway. From the article:

“Alexander said he was walking on York Street near Broadway and noticing litter and storefronts such as barbershops and liquor stores. Since Yalies went through the area on their way to the Yale Co-op, he thought it needed an upgrade.”

Yalies, you see, did not need haircuts, used books (from Whitlock’s), music (from Cutler’s), or wine (from Elliot Brause). They needed Patagonia, J. Crew, Urban Outfiteers, and Apple.

So perished our beloved Quality Wine. Elliott gracefully retired. He is remembered with affection by all who knew him.

31 Jul 2020

A Recent Casualty of the Culture Wars

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Mike Adams, 1964-2020.

Mark Steyn write a tribute to Mike Adams, an apparent recent suicide after being driven from his teaching job at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington by the Woke leftist mob.

At the time of his death Mike Adams was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington – although not a very popular one with the administration. You will generally see him described in the media as “Controversial Professor Mike Adams”, as if it’s the subject he teaches: Mike Adams, Head of the Department of Controversy. It wasn’t always so. A two-time “Faculty Member of the Year” winner at the turn of the century, Adams grew more “controversial” as the university got more “woke”. He got a book deal with Regnery (publishers of America Alone), and was quoted favorably by Rush:

What American university wants a prof who’s published by Regnery and getting raves on the Rush Limbaugh show? The Deputy Assistant Under-Deans of Diversity all frosted him out, and Adams spent seven years in a lawsuit with UNCW – which he won, but it’s still seven years of your life you’ll never get back. …

It was all scheduled to come to an end on Friday with Adams’ painfully negotiated departure and a $504,702.76 settlement. Half-a-mil sounds a lot, but it was to be paid out over five years, if the university stuck to it, and it’s not really a lot, is it, for the obliteration of any trace of your presence at the school to which you devoted your entire teaching career.

On Thursday a neighbor called 911 because Mike Adams’ car hadn’t been moved for several days and there was no answer on the telephone. Inside police found the body of a 55-year-old man with, in cop lingo, a “gsw” – gunshot wound. …

He “seemed like” a happy warrior, but who knows? It’s a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don’t agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting.

The American academy is bonkers and has reared monsters. …

Pushing back can be initially exhilarating – and then just awfully wearing and soul-crushing: “I’m with you one hundred per cent, of course. But please don’t mention I said so…” “Oh, we had a lovely time at the Smiths’. Surprised not to see you there…” It is possible, I suppose, that Mike Adams was the victim of a homicide rather than the ultimate self-cancelation: Certainly there are plenty on Twitter and Facebook who would like to kill him, or at least cheer on any chap who would. …

And yet, if the facts are as they appear, a tireless and apparently “happy warrior” – exhausted by a decade of litigation, threats, boycotts, ostracization and more – found himself sitting alone – and all he heard in the deafening silence of the “silent majority” was his own isolation and despair. A terrible end for a brave man. Rest in peace.

RTWT

13 Jun 2020

Jean Raspail, 5 July 1926 — 13 June 2020

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Jean Raspail is best known in the United States for The Camp of the Saints (1973), a dystopian novel predicting Europe being overwhelmed by massive Third World immigration.

He was philosophically a Catholic traditionalist, whose novels were written in explicit opposition to both Liberalism and Communism.

Despite his literary stature, he was denied membership in the French Academy in 2000.

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Louis de Bourbon, Duc d’Anjou, Legitimate heir to the throne of France, writes:

    C’est avec une grande émotion que j’apprends le rappel à Dieu de Jean Raspail. Fidèle jusqu’au bout à l’Eglise et à la France.

    Sa personnalité et son panache nous manqueront.

    Que le Père éternel le reçoive auprès de lui et qu’il rejoigne tous les preux qui ont contribué à la gloire et à l’honneur de notre chère Patrie.

translated:

    It is with deep emotion that I commend to God the soul of Jean Raspail. Faithful to the end to the Church and to France.

    We will miss his personality and panache.

    May the eternal Father receive him and unite him with all the brave who have contributed to the glory and honor of our dear fatherland.

27 Apr 2020

Remembering Peter Beard

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Everyone is doing Peter Beard obituaries. Here is a good one by Elsa Cau from Les Grandes Ducs. (translated from the French.)

Socialite and partygoer, artist, photographer, friend of all, lady’s man, Peter Beard was a passionate and brilliant personality with many parts. He died last Sunday at the age of 80 [JDZ: Actually, Peter Beard was found dead April 19th at the age of 82, having disappeared from his Montauk house on March 31st.] leaving behind a completed oeuvre, an ode to freedom in all its forms, the self-portrait – in selected pieces – of someone wild and real.

We all know the moments. Those perfect moments, the storied instant with a good alignment of the planets, of their ideal conjunction. Put the same people in the same place, at the same time, and hold your breath, and you will still never get the same moment again. In That Summer (2017), the voiceovers of Peter Beard and Lee Radziwill tell us about such an absolute moment.

It was the Summer of 1972. In the photographer’s house in Montauk, their feet in the water, they are all there, smiling, radiant: Andy Warhol, the friend with whom Beard had so much artistic interaction since the 1960s; Mick Jagger, whom he had just followed on tour for two months with the Rolling Stones for the eponymous magazine, and his wife Bianca; the tormented and flamboyant writer Truman Capote, whom he met at the same time; the sisters Lee Radziwill – an old love, a friend until the end – and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

The almost eighty-year-old photographer lovingly flipped through the pages of the album in his studio in Montauk where he was still working until the end. “Accidents are very important,” he whispered.

And accidents seems to have played a key role in the turbulent existence of Peter Beard. He was born in 1938 of blue American blood (the grandson of railroad tycoon James Jerome Hill) in New York. He was given as a child a camera which would never leave him, and which gave him his obsession with capturing those around him and his observations. A few private schools, a Yale art degree later [JDZ: actually, he was Yale Class of 1961, but never bothered to graduate.], and he’s was free as air.

While still a student, he started working for Vogue. At 17, he traveled for the first time to Africa: it was love at first sight – aren’t these things always an accident? He returned there regularly. It was just then, in the early 1960s, that Peter Beard became friends with Karen Blixen (authoress of Out of Africa, published under her pen name Isak Dinesen), so much so that he purchased land bordering her former farm in Kenya.

What does the youth do when he is beautiful, radiant, and rich? He lives, he loves. Peter Beard excelled at both and everyone who frequented his society has captivated memories of the man. From Studio 54 to the wilds of Kenya, Beard was one of those who feel at ease everywhere, bond with everyone with a smile, a joke, or a dance, and better, can draw you into sharing their own passions.

In the early 1960s, Beard met Dali. The two men laughed at the same pranks and quickly become friends. Around the same time, Francis Bacon became impressed by the photographs of Peter Beard published in The End of the Game, documenting the gradual disappearance of elephants, hippos and rhinos in Africa. The two men met, appreciate one another, and became close friends. These were only two examples among so many friends, there were so many.

Love, too. After his first marriage to Minnie Cushing, a pretty socialite friend and assistant to Oscar de La Renta, which lasted three years, the handsome photographer went on to so many conquests that they became clichés. Minnie still left her mark: six months without sleep, a short stay in a psychiatric hospital after an overdose of barbiturates, but then he was back on his feet. A minor incident! Candice Bergen, Barbara Allen the Warholian muse, Carole Bouquet in her James Bond period, the model Cheryl Tiegs to whom he was married for a few years, Nejma, his last wife, his unfailing support (who turned a blind eye to his other liaisons), the list goes on.

And they are also animals, essentially, Beard’s women (one recalls Iman, that he was the first to discover and use as a model), it is that which he loved, that he photographed, and which inspires him. Stretched, elongated, hanging from liana vines next to antelopes, cheetahs or giraffes, with intense gazes and the deportment of queens, they are just as fundamental to his photographic work as the animals themselves. Since the early 1970s, moreover, he had united his two passions with a mixture of modified photographs, writings and collages.

But ultimately, these two passions were one: that of life. Whether he was in some remote four corner of the world, charged by an elephant (he was almost killed in 1996), being a party animal in New York, or serene and rested in his house in Montauk, he immortalized the life he observes, excitement and wildness, happiness and injustice.

“Without memory, there is no life,” said Lee Radziwill in her aged, smoky voice. In 1972, the troop of friends had gone out to scout to film Big and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, respectively aunt and cousin of Lee and Jackie, American socialites, singer and dancer gently crossed out.

In their large, almost ruin of a house in the Hamptons, where they lived surrounded by cats, the gang of friends gathered for the summer running after lost time and listening to the eccentric stories of the amazing life of the two women. Stories from a bygone era, from the glorious Hamptons to the grand mansions where one was entertained and from a New York of glitter and madness, which foreshadowed the classic of the American documentary: Gray Gardens (1975).

A stroll through an era forgotten by a band of young and carefree troublemakers, in the same way that generations of lovers will stroll for a long time, together, in the pictures of Peter Beard in search of a bygone era.

Original in French here.

23 Apr 2020

The Legendary Peter Beard

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A particularly famous photograph by Peter Beard (characteristically individualized) shows Beard writing in his journal from inside the jaws (of a freshly deceased) crocodile. Apparently, there was a price for the photo. The croc went into rigor mortis, its jaws tightened and the camp servants had a lot of difficulty getting the suffering Beard out from between the now painfully clamped jaws.

From the lack of comments on the previous postings about Peter Beard, I take it that many readers are unacquainted with the works and colorful career of that illustrious writer, photographer, adventurer, and womanizer. I figured I ought to do something about that.

When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in my residential college (Berkeley), there was a strikingly handsome upperclassman who had a considerable physical resemblance to Peter Beard (Silliman ’61). This fellow had parked outside the college on Elm Street a new bright red Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider, which he had received as a gift from a female admirer. While most of us worked summers on Construction or other disagreeable jobs, this particular escapee from Valhalla raised his annual Yale tuition by working as a gigolo on the French Riviera. He was always happy to tell the rest of us all about it, and he always suggested firmly that we really ought to go and do likewise. Of course, just ask yourself: how many undergraduate males look like Peter Beard?

In Outside, Roger Pinckney XI, gave Peter Beard a proper send-off.

Peter Beard was a hard man to peg. A photographer of wildlife and beautiful women, a writer, an ethnologist, explorer, hunter, naturalist, conservationist, ladies man, married man, wise man. Good work if you can get it. But if you’ve ever seen the video of him being trampled by an elephant, you might want to add “fool” to that considerable list. But however you cut it, you’ll run dry of adjectives long before you ever had Peter Beard nailed down.

RTWT

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A 1996 article in Vanity Fair by Leslie Bennetts may be the fullest collection of “Half Tarzan, Half Byron” stories.

Last summer, he and his Danish girlfriend were out in Montauk, where Beard owns the last house on Montauk Point. “Peter’s girlfriend started ragging him about all his bad habits,” Tunney recalls. “She’s this strong Danish chick with a spandex suit on, and she said, ‘Peter, you smoke, you drink, you drug, you stay up all night—and you’re almost 60 years old! You need to start taking care of yourself. You should go running, like me—five miles a day!’ ”

So Beard, wearing his usual dusty African sandals, obligingly accompanied her on a run. Tunney expected him to last about five minutes. “An hour later, the girlfriend comes back, dripping,” Tunney reports. “I said, ‘Where’s Peter?’ ”

“He loved it,” she gasped. “He said he just wanted to keep going.”

RTWT

10 Mar 2020

Max von Sydow Finally Lost (aetatis 90)

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Ann Althouse did a nice tribute.

HT: Bird Dog.

13 Jan 2020

Sir Roger Scruton, born February 27 1944, died January 12 2020

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I thought the Telegraph did not really do him justice.

Sir Roger Scruton, who has died aged 75, was a philosopher and academic variously identified as “one of the nearest things Britain has to a public intellectual”, Britain’s favourite “token reactionary” (his own description), and even “the thinking man’s skinhead”.

As one of the most contentious figures in British public life, Scruton operated as an academic, journalist and prolific writer, and a lightning rod for abuse and criticism from the political Left. He was regularly shouted down in universities and prevented from speaking, yet he enjoyed a reputation as a first-class professional philosopher among academics of all political persuasions.

Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, teacher at Birkbeck College (part of London University with a tradition of a working-class intake), editor of the ultra-Conservative Salisbury Review, and enthusiastic fox hunter. He used to ride to hounds wearing Enoch Powell’s old hunting clothes, although the jacket split the first time he used it.

RTWT

Roger Scruton was a nearly unique personality: academic philosopher, public intellectual, adversarial lightning-rod to establishment culture, aesthetician, and Sportsman!

He wrote gracefully and was horrifyingly prolific. His books discuss, among other subjects, Philosophy, Conservatism, Religion, Architecture, Art, Wine, the Decline of the West, and Fox Hunting. I like Scruton very well, and even I’m not sure how many books he wrote.

He stopped hunting last February at the age of 75. In July:

    Returning to London, I finally get to see the rheumatologist with whom I have booked an appointment. He talks of my lecture on Parsifal, at which he asked that forgotten question. And he delicately suggests, as a matter of some urgency, a CT scan. Alarmed by what he finds, he puts me in the hands of an oncologist who, concluding that otherwise I may be dead from cancer within a week, sets to work on me at once.

The current regime of chemo and so on obviously failed. Molliter ossa cubent! [“May the earth lay lightly on his bones.” — Ovid.]

28 Oct 2019

Nathaniel Holmes Morison III, Virginia Gentleman, d. October 10th, 2019

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Nat Morison, heir to Welbourne and uncrowned king of Northern Virginia Horse Country, passed away October 10th, aetatis 83.

He was a proud graduate of the University of Virginia who looked suspiciously at people tainted by association with such Yankee schools as Yale and Harvard.

His tastes were naturally antiquarian. After all, he ate his breakfast daily at the same table where George Washington (a regular guest at Welbourne) made notes for the Constitutional Convention of 1787. One window of his house’s second floor features a never-completed inscription by the “Gallant Pelham,” who was interrupted while writing with his diamond ring on the glass in 1862 with a call to arms.

Nat Morison commonly followed the practice notoriously associated with British peers of dressing with decided flair in century old suits and ties, and shirts, and even shoes, inherited from generations of gentleman ancestors.

His colorful eccentricity and his passionate aversion to change inspired the affectionate tribute of a 2004 film comedy, Crazy like a Fox, in which an impecunious 8th generation Virginia aristocrat loses his stately Virginia manse to a couple of crass Yankee speculators (named Sherman, no less) and then proceeds to wage a guerilla war of resistance.

Virginia and the world are duller places without Nat Morison.

Molliter ossa cubent!


Richard Roberts, Middleburg huntsman, formerly huntsman for the Piedmont Fox Hounds, blows “Gone Away” for Nat.

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