Urban youth in the UK and now in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia are slipping the reigns of order. Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something Hillaire Belloc said about our modern fascination with the barbarian:
We sit by and
watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in
the long stretches of peace we are not
afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence,
his comic inversion of our old certitudes
and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we
laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched
by large and awful faces from beyond:
and on these faces there is no smile
Indeed.
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