We are residents of the City of Hillsdale, Michigan. Through this review we aim to give some account of ourselves and of the worthiness of our chosen home. Our bimonthly efforts will include reviews of local businesses, analyses of local politics, reports on our own husbandry, and, because we are all in some fashion students of the liberal arts and Christians besides, meditations on the first and last things.
Below you will find the minutes from our first editorial meeting.
An Attendant Lord:
We at the Hillsdale County Review are afraid that we are not “the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We worry—and in so worrying confirm—that we are post-Prufrockian Last Men whose most momentous encounter with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” already happened, as it were, in vitro Cartesiano. We believe, therefore, that to salvage ourselves we must engage head-on with Alexis de Tocqueville’s critique of the American as natural Cartesian, first by attempting to regain at least a Laschian competence in our practice of citizenship, and second, by mustering whatever we can of ancient, medieval, and modern greatness through constant and amateur reading in the poetic, political, and philosophical tradition of the West.
To that end, we adapt as our provisional code Eva Brann’s view that education in a republic should be both “temporally cosmopolitan and spatially parochial.”
Clovis:
No one bears his arms so clumsily as thou; for neither thy spear, nor thy sword, nor thy axe is ready for use.
Attendant Lord [reaching into his pack and holding up a copy of Why Liberalism Failed]:
Dost thou mean my “spiritual arms”?
[Seizing the book, Clovis cast it on the ground. When the lord had bent a little to pick it up, the king raised his hands and crushed the lord’s head with his axe.]
Another Attendant Lord:
Let us begin again.
We at the Hillsdale County Review intend to dispute the American things, but we do not mean to practice what Patrick Deneen has called “conservative hospice care,” in part because who the hell are we, and in part because we cannot decide which perspective on aboriginal American-ness is the true one:
Michael Hanby’s claim that “the American gaze upon their vast new home as potential real estate already presupposed . . . an ontological reduction of nature, a primacy of praxis, and a continual surpassing of the given.”
or Miles Smith’s “rhetoric of wonder” surrounding “the fact that Americans in the Early National Era literally hacked an impressive civilization out of a subtropical (South) and cold continental (Midwest) wilderness in a span of fifty years.”
[Clovis reaches again for his axe.]
Attendant Lord:
Ok, we’re just going to write about local things.
