Rhodesia, Virginia, and the Anglo-Norman Spirit of Excellence: How to Embody It to Retake America

Virginia, Rhodesia, and The Charge Before Us: My Speech for the OGC East Coast Forum

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! This past weekend, I had the pleasure of giving a speech and fielding questions at the Old Glory Club’s East Coast Forum. One error I made was that I spoke far too quickly. So that those who were there and those who missed it can read in perhaps a bit more detail than could be gleaned, given my failures in pacing and enunciation, I’ve reprinted a slightly longer version of the speech given here. It is on excellence, and the importance of style in embodying it. As this article began life as a speech, it is probably more pleasant to listen to than read. I have done an audio version for paid subscribers, which anyone can become for just a few dollars a month, and the OGC will be putting up an audio version of the original speech sometime soon. Enjoy! As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

Listen to the audio version of this speech—which is better than reading it—here:

[Audio] Our Civilizational Spirit of Anglo-Norman Excellence, and How You Can Embody It

Today’s speech will be about excellence and how to wield it against our enemies.

One of my favorite stories from the Old World, one that comes from the waning days of that vanished civilization, is of the earl—one of ancient lineage, who’d come across with William, or so the story went—who approached Lloyd George, a corrupt and democratic rogue known for selling peerage titles to his plutocratic friends, and berated the then-Prime Minister for doing so. Lloyd George, attempting to put this furious patrician on the back foot, angrily asked what his ancestors had done to “earn” their titles and lands. Nonplussed, the earl informed Lloyd George that they had gotten them “with the battleaxe, sir, with the battleaxe.”

That story is, of course, fun for a great many reasons. Who doesn’t like to see the haute bourgeoisie flustered and the bureaucracy that supports it embarrassed—or preferably defenestrated? But it is also important, for it gets to something else: the Anglo-Norman spirit of eternal excellence, and what such an attitude wrought.

For who was it that compelled Albion to rule a quarter of our temporal home? Surely not the swamp-living Britons that Caesar’s legions crushed. Nor was it the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes: as Thomas Carlyle notes in Volume I of his History of Frederick the Great, they were the mere clay that formed what eventually became a great and world-spanning people.

It was the Normans who sculpted them into something great, providing the burning soul and spine of steel necessary to hurl that island of belching barbarians into something greater. Something hierarchical, ordered, and above all else, focused on excellence. Had the Normans never arrived, they might still be belching in their longhalls. When formed and “drilled,” as Carlyle puts it, by the Normans, they soon rose to unrivaled heights of glory.

Interestingly, there is a story of an old Norman earl doing to one of the Plantagenets, I think Longshanks, much what the more modern earl did to Lloyd George: the king was demanding a new tax to fund some war, reviving the legal fiction that all domains descended from the king and demanding his nobles prove their title to the lands and pay a new fee to hold them. Many of the newer and lesser barons did so, preferring safety in their possessions to standing up for their rights. Then an old earl, a grizzled veteran of countless campaigns, entered the chamber. When asked to produce his title, he gripped a weather-worn and battle-beaten old sword. “This is my title,” came the refrain, his steely eyes holding not even a glimmer of weakness. The king backed down. No new fee was paid. Such is our heritage, such are the men who drilled the Anglo-Saxons.

Those they spawned dominated the world.

The North knew no prince but a Percy. Lords Clive and Cornwallis brought the gem of the Raj into their majesty’s crown as the Royal Scots Greys—led by a son of the duke of Beaufort—brought Bonnie’s pretensions to a crashing end at Waterloo. Sir James Brooke did what no other white man was ever able and became an Oriental king of a hereditary line, the White Rajah of Sarawak. We had the Maxim gun and they did not at Omdurman, and at the other end of the Dark Continent, it was Major Gonville Bromhead, a youngest son in an ancient and noble military line, who defeated the impis at Rorke’s Drift.

But of all the Anglo-Norman world’s accomplishments, two stand out as particularly notable examples of human excellence of nations of thoroughbreds: the Virginians and the Rhodesians.

It was Virginians who first build America and then most of a century later fought to the end against a dark and foreboding tyranny that was overtaking it: Anglo-Norman General Lee and his Scots-Irish sidekick General Stonewall Jackson humiliated Unionist forces against seemingly insurmountable odds time and time again as that dashing last of the Cavaliers, a modern day Prince Rupert with a flamboyant feather in his cap, Virginia’s deboinaire son JEB Stuart, mortified McClellan by riding entirely around him in one of the few great feats of American cavalry. Back on the Dark Continent a century later, Rhodesia—the last land of Anglo excellence, one known as more British than the British—took the last stand for excellence, hierarchy, and distinction in a world bowing before the false god of equality.

Their world is now gone. A few flickers remain, but we battered remnants of the world that was once ascendant and glorious but now lies buried under a mountain of mud, are in a new world and stare the great evil that created it in the face.

What is it we face? What must we defeat if the ruins of our vanished civilization are to be restored to their former splendor?

Radical egalitarianism. Totalizing equality. Race communism. The belief that hierarchy is evil, excellence execrable, that civilization ought be torn asunder in the name of equity, and, most of all, that the ugly and deformed of spirit, the spiteful and resentful, ought rule above all.

It is the ideology of Mugabe and those who supported him. It is the ideology of the Holodomor, it is the spirit behind the Soviets peeling the white skin off the hands of the former Guards officers to mock in their pain the uniformed, white gloved excellence of aesthetics and spirit for which they were once known as they served the Tsars. It is the ideology of Philippe Égalité, the Duc d’Orléans who was integral to France’s Bioleninist revolution, a man who Carlyle says had every deadly sin written upon his boil-encrusted face.

That then, is our choice. Will we allow the deadly sins of Egalite to succeed in destroying our world? Shall Mount Vernon be turned into Section 8 housing and the great cities of our ancestors turned into favelas, the epitome of Égalité? Or shall we be the other force about which Carlyle wrote, the spine of steel that forms the moldable clay of a people who are potentially great but currently reclined upon the idol of indolence in “potbellied equanimity”?

The latter, of course. But the way to do so at present is not, I think, “with the battle axe, sir, with the battle axe”. It is rather, to set an example of excellence that others will be drawn to and follow. How to do so is best shown by Virginia in its Golden Age and Rhodesia before the spiritual heirs of Phillipe Egalite destroyed it, the two great expressions of the Anglo-Norman spirit of excellence.

The Old Dominion

Take the Old Dominion in the days of yore, that flickering period of hierarchy in America that Clifford Dowdey—perhaps the greatest historian of Dixie’s Heart after Douglas Southall Freeman—calls The Golden Age.

This land of cavaliers and tobacco fields was not an equal society. It was, after all, a land of master and slave. Of great lords on magnificent latifundia. Of manor homes in the new world, riders atop blooded horses, men of talent and drive whose lines acquired vast domains in the space of a few generations. Of men who, despite being caricatured as toddy-swilling, sporting-obsessed, and debt-ridden “Massas” of legend, were really quite superior to their average men.

Just think of the crucible in which they were formed. On the muddy, mosquito-ridden shoals of Jamestown, two sorts of men arrived: starving Londoners in need of any sort of work, and down-on-their-luck gentlemen who were so delusional about what they’d find in the New World that they even brought starch for the ruffles in their shirts! That went as could be expected, and everyone died.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Year after year, successively smarter—or at least better adapted—sorts arrived. And out of the crucible of starvation and Indians, the generation that propagated the Golden Age—Golden, not Gilded—of the Old Dominion was formed. The Carters, the Lees, the Randolphs, the Byrds, the Harrisons.

They acquired the wilderness and tamed it, in so doing creating the plantation system that soon spread across the country and turned the South into a land full of farms far more productive than the North—generally by a margin of 50% or so—and full of the wealthiest states. It was their drive, their innovation, their system built by blood, sweat, and tears that enabled that.

They led men in battle against the Indians and revolutionaries, built huge and powerful trading operations in the rude wilds, and made themselves independent of the predatory London merchants. They were respected by their yeomen fellows, and so elected as a semi-hereditary elite to represent the state in the Burgesses in Williamsburg. An aristocracy chosen at every election, think of that…what collection of bloodlines now could lay claim to such distinction?! None.

And most of all, they didn’t just tame the wilderness, they civilized it. In the space of a mere couple generations, they went from raising tobacco while living in huts just a few steps above nature to building fabulous country seats that represented their solidity and power and rooted them to the land in the New World in an adaptation of the gentry’s habits in England. Carriages soon crossed dismal forests, merchant tenders alighted on shores never before visited but by a canoe, and soon blooded racehorses with lineages far more ancient than those of their owners raced in sight of splendorous manor homes supported by an adapted version of the feudal order.

The ancient seat of the Lees is a prime example of this. Look up Stratford Hall. It was one of the first great country manors in America, and it looks like it. It sits atop the land, brooding. It’s a pretty building, in its own way, but it’s no Chatsworth. Instead, it is a proper manor home for the new lords on the frontier, sitting like a brick-built fort, exuding the family’s rootedness and permanence in a continent defined by migration. They were here to stay, and would drill the woods into order and refinement.

And that they did, as the home’s name was itself a testament to: even after the fortune in Virginia tobacco was made, they maintained their place in the new world rather than retreating to the purchased Stratford estate back in England. They were Americans now, and their Anglo-Norman line would bring English cultural wealth and civilizational refinement to the wilds of a promising new world.

Such is the attitude that built Virginny, a place different than any other. Its men became, as the age of settlement turned into the Golden Age of the Old Dominion, noted for their Gravitas, and for being unique from their cousins in the new and old worlds. They brought learning and refinement in a way the Scots-Irish did not, but later mimicked—Andrew Jackson was but a lawyer until he established himself as a Virginia-style planter at the Hermitage, for example—and brought vigorous activity across all realms—including the economic sphere—in a way their six-bottle men, rent-collecting cousins across the pond, largely did not (though some, like Coke of Norfolk, did). Yet further, the nature of their land of sprawling latifundia, of feudalism, of aristocracy, of refinement mixed with roughness, brought a habit of command, as Henry Adams called it when he met a Lee, in a manner their Yankee neighbors lacked.

Importantly, that Virginia was not discovered or born but bred, like a thoroughbred on their stud farms. Creating the Golden Age took not just time and money, but cultivation, like a great orchard or garden. Those men in the Burgesses, elected year after year by tenants and yeomen who respected them, cultivated themselves as they refined the world.

They did not just read Plutarch and Livy, but they brought Classical ideals to life, becoming stern republican aristocrats like those of old. They brought the frock coat, the tricorn, the top boots, and the waistcoat to a land that had forever been populated but by savages clothed in loincloths. Year after year, they cultivated their minds, chiseled their bodies, and shaped their world by acting and directing action much as the architects who designed their manor homes brought refinement and grace, in addition to permanence and power, to what had been a rude and untamed land.

And with that, they brought noblesse oblige, that critical ingredient of true nobility. As historian Carl Bridenbaugh noted:

“Noblesse oblige was as much a part of the creed of the Chesapeake gentry as it was of the old regime in France. The inferior and middling sort of people generally found the owner of the big estate courteous, kind, and the fair and understanding judge on the quorum, ready to extend a helping hand before his aid was sought. A gentleman knew his neighbors of every rank and called them by name. Above all, the leading planters were imbued with the belief that they constituted a class whose obligations to serve and to govern well must be fulfilled in return for the privileges which were their birthright.”

Such is the attitude out of which Virginia blossomed and became the greatest state in the Union. When they spent their years and years of hacking order out of a new and untamed world, they were not just building fortunes or merely existing, but serving as frontier barons who built, refined, and maintained a new civilization that was as brilliantly beautiful as it was successful.

It was their unique civilization, one so beloved and successful that an entire region followed in their footsteps and built a feudal world of chivalric order and greatness, which could imprint their face and spirit upon the new nation, and guide it for decades.

Four of the First Five presidents were Virginians. The writer of the Constitution and the anti-federalists who opposed it and drew concessions were Virginians. The Supreme Court that interpreted it was led by a Virginian of old family. He who bought a third of the continent for a few million dollars was a Virginian, and the two sent to explore it were as well…on and on it could go. When liberty reigned triumphant, it was men defined by John Randolph of Roanoake – “I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality”– who reigned triumphant and safeguarded it.

Why Virginia?

There were, of course, great men across the new land. Those tiresome but brilliant Adamses from Braintree, Hamilton in New York, and a smattering of others up and down the coast. But the patroons of New York were never leaders; who today thinks of the Livingstons or Van Renselaers?

Great as were the sacrifices of all, the Old Dominion remained the blossomed flower of the Confederacy. Much as the Burgesses was controlled by the branching lines of just a few families back in the days of King Carter and Richard Lee, or the early Republic by the Virginia Dynasty—that collection of greats who grew up within but a few dozen miles of each other—it was Stuart, Jackson, and Robert E Lee who represented the best the Confederacy had to offer all those centuries on.

They were chosen one last time to lead, as their ancestors had been so many times before, and did so with great honor: even if it was Forrest who got there “the firstest with the mostest”, it was Stuart did so with yellow-gloved, plumed dash like the latter day Prince Rupert he was…and with proper grammar befitting a gentleman officer.

Why? Because of what they represented. Others existed, Virginians commanded. They were, as such, the flowers of a civilization in its spring.

Who would not want to be they? They surely wanted to be they. When that brilliant Jefferson arrived at the Continental Congress as a young man, he brought not just rhetoric but perfect social graces, immaculate dress in the Virginia style—formal but with a cultivated, frontier touch of rakishness about it—and a wonderful sense of how to win over those who mattered. He thus wrote our Declaration. Meanwhile, debonair gentleman Benjamin Harrison V of the great Berkeley Plantation guided the revolutionaries along in the Continental Congress. Similarly, Washington was a man out of the very pages of Plutarch, the image of perfection as a stern and patrician republican ideal who was as handsome and strong as he was sharp and naturally superior. Lee brought a quiet dignity, a natural habit of authority, and was the beau ideal of the Southern Gentleman.

Such is what the Virginians were: a group who could and would command, and led by the example of their personal excellence.

Virginia, in short, was America’s greatest attempt at aristocracy. It was not equal. It was republican rather than democratic. And it represented aristocracy in the truest sense—rule by the best—as its men were the best. They knew how to carry themselves with dignity, build and maintain great estates that supported them in doing so, perpetuate political prominence even as we entered the age of democracy, and set a standard of cavalier excellence that others recognized as superior and was so enchanting that they attempted to emulate it. That is Virginia’s legacy: one of unvarnished excellence, and its great results well applied.

Rhodesia

The same is true as well of my other favorite subject: the Rhodesians.

Much as in Virginia, the land the British South African Company built was something different, something exceptional.

This was true from the beginning. The Pioneer Column that Rhodes assembled was not composed of the rogues of empire, nor was it led by some dissipated scallywag. Rather, it was led by Courtney Selous, the greatest hunter and adventurer of his era, a man who lives on in literature as Alan Quartermain. The Pioneer Column he led was composed of men noted for their relatively high levels of education, lack of freebooter elements, and great capabilities at perseverance and settlement. This wasn’t Kenya, where the dissipated drunkards of England’s elite drank away their disappointment. Nor was it a land of criminals like Australia or my native state of Georgia. No, it was something different from the beginning.

They marched into a land that, much like ours before Jamestown, was stuck in the Stone Age until their arrival. No structures bigger than a hut, other than a few ruins. No notable agriculture of note, man-made infrastructure to speak of, or any of the other hallmarks of rising above mere existence…or even to it. Immense resources lay beneath the feet of those few smatterings of natives that lived there, and they would never have known it had it not been for Rhodes’ men.

All of that changed in just a few years. Before the 19^th century was out, they sunk vast mines, raised huge herds of cattle, built roads and railways, turned virgin land into horizon-spanning fields of grain and tobacco, and created a new civilization, one that became “more British than the British” as their native Albion decayed in the throes of race communism.

As Ron Morkel, descendant of a settler who, without even the help of the BSAC, built first a fortune in gold mines and then a second in a farming empire, puts it in his Rhodesia: From Beginning to End:

Even enemies of the white Rhodesian farmers agree that they were some of the most efficient and productive farmers anywhere in the world. These white farms were developed by the sweat and ingenuity of the farmers, aided by black labor. He had not only to know his cattle and crops but made tremendous financial investments . . . Dams were built for watering livestock, and variously sized irrigation projects brought water for crops . . . white-owned farms became highly efficient and productive farmland.

Not unlike the cavalier planters of the Old Dominion, eh?

And, much as the bringing of steadily applied excellence in Virginia first made it the greatest among non-equals in the American state, Rhodesia stood as a testament to what great men could accomplish when left to their own devices, left able to create the world anew in their image, and it was a splendorous one. Morkel notes:

From the time that Britain formally established the government of Rhodesia, and for eighty years thereafter, the land was a white-ruled colony and did seem to be a Garden of Eden in many respects. It was the pride of southern Africa. In those eighty years, the industrious government developed an infrastructure of railways, roads, cities, farms, and mines. Commerce and law flourished, the population had access to hospitals and schools, and game reserves teemed with life. There was so much food that the world considered Rhodesia the breadbasket of southern Africa, exporting tons upon tons of grain, beef, and cash crops. There were ample jobs in agriculture, mining, industry, and tourism. Rhodesia was self-sufficient…

And that applied to more than just economic life. Salisbury and Bulawayo were great cities that rose out of nothing, and soon were defined by their being clean, safe, and pleasant oases of life in the first world in the heart of darkness. Rhodesia’s medical system was one of, if not the, best on the continent. Its road and rail infrastructure were top-notch. The IQ of the White Rhodesians was estimated to be around 107—the highest of any white group. Even its dogs—the famous Rhodesian Ridgeback—was the perfect blend of domestic perfection and ruthless animal spirit: it was the dog that could play well with kids, or protect them from either lions or terrorists.

Then, of course, there is the Rhodesian military and fighting spirit. It performed well before the Bush War—Rhodesian RAF pilots like Ian Smith were widely regarded as the best in the empire during the Second World War, for example—but it came into its own when the stakes were existential.

Its tier one units were never defeated, and racked up inimitable battlefield victories in which small bands killed thousands of the enemy at small cost time, and time again. Operations Eland and Gatling, Dingo and Snoopy, stand as testaments to the magnitude of the Rhodesian spirit and the prowess of its fighters.

So too do the countless small actions in which they were engaged: many of the RLI troopers involved in the Fire Force missions—missions in which they would parachute into enemy territory after jumping out of planes as close to the nap of the earth as possible, seemingly just above the treetops—did so not just every day, but half a dozen times or more a day, every day, for weeks on end, wrapping up a firefight only to get a new parachute and jump again.

That is Anglo excellence, the personification of the Anglo-Norman spirit in the body of a nation.

They did so not for a militarized world like Sparta in which every moment revolved around returning with your shield or on it, nor as slaves at the whim of a totalitarian regime forcing them to march into the jaws of death with machine guns at their backs. No, they were citizen soldiers for a modern instantiation of Virginia in its golden age in all the best ways. Because it was right. Because it was what their honor compelled them to do, and so they did it.

And who led them in such an hour? Ian Smith. A suit-wearing, landed gentleman as remarkable for his courage in the Second World War as for his wise leadership. Much as Washington was “one of Plutarch’s men” in his personification of republican patrician excellence, Ian Smith was such a man in our day. He could outwit and outdebate cretins William F Buckley. He was as well respected by the great planters of his land, men like the Duke of Montrose, as by the African chiefs who supported him unanimously in embarking upon independence. Renowned as the most perfect gentleman not just by his fellow farmers, as incredible men like Rory Duncan have told me, but by even black city club attendants in South Africa whose paths crossed his, a successful planter and a remarkable politician, Ian Smith was exceptional, and in that characterized his country.

Like Virginia, his was not an equal land, nor a particularly democratic one. No, it was a land of deserved hierarchy. Of personal and national excellence. Of honor. It was the last blossoming flower of genteel Anglo civilization, and it bloomed with befitting brilliance.

Act It Out

What is the lesson from that? Is it merely that we must fight to the bitter end, or preferably toward a world remaking victory over them like that won at Hastings by the Normans who molded us into these examples of greatness? No, though of course we must remember to thank them for creating a new world of builders rather than belchers.

No, it is that they are remembered as they are because they cultivated themselves with a sense of urgency, intentionality, and dedication.

When George Washington wrote his book about developing one’s social manners, when he pored over the pages of Plutarch, when he remounted horse after horse while instinctively taking the lead in the Battle of Braddock’s Field, he was developing himself into precisely the sort of gentleman others would follow. When he tested the dozens of different soil types on his estate to tailor the crops grown to them, built a fishing fleet, engaged in early industry, acquired vast tracks of land, and all the rest of his wealth-building, he was building a base of stable income that could support him in being a cultured, dignified gentleman with political and military ambitions. He could always outcompete any of his fellows on the sporting field, could put away Madeira with the best of them, and was always even more immaculately attired than those similarly dignity-conscious contemporaries of his, just as he was always more coldly aloof, stern, and distinguished. If he wasn’t as brilliant as his unequaled contemporaries, he trained his mind well enough and remained well read enough to grasp their Biblical and classical illusions, understand any argument made, choose far better policies than most of his contemporaries—particularly Hamilton and Jefferson—would have if left to their own devices, and rely on his examples from Plutarch to set a Cincinnatus-like example for how an American leader ought to behave.

He was, in short, training himself in how to grasp the habit of authority that his fellow Virginians so well exemplified, and to be in style and substance the sort of man who others would gladly follow. As such, it was he who not only did the most to establish our republic on its footing, but to develop what it became.

That pairing of style and substance is what makes the Virginians and Rhodesians truly exceptional. The cavalier ethos—a sense of honor and chivalry, hierarchical order and exuberant vitality—was alive and well in them and is immensely attractive. It is why we still remember them today.

Rhodesia would not be the byword for resistance to race communism were it not for its dash, for the spirit that comes with seeing those stirring pictures of smiling young men in brushstroke camo, often mounted on chargers or riding through the skies into battle on wings of eagles, the very picture of civilizational vitality.

The same is true of Virginia. Other than King Carter and perhaps a few of the early greats, in terms of income, its great men were never much more than lower gentry. Yet Robert E Lee is remembered more than any Duke, JEB Stuart is remembered with fond attachment in a way unmatched both by his wartime nemesis—George Custer—and also his Prince Rupert model, and it is George Washington who is remembered as a great statesman and stern patrician, not any of the British lords who opposed him or domestic strivers like Adams, Hamilton, and Burr who opposed him. He was what all men wished to be, and he not only knew that but used it towards virtuous ends while continually embodying it.

That is the lesson we must take. Be vibrant and vital. Be genteel and dignified. Be courteous and train to grasp the habit of authority in whatever ways you are able. Be one others want to be, and use that to lead them.

For it is not just substance that matters, though it does. It is style too, for that is a magnet and is memorable. Could you train your body to represent physical hierarchy with but a glance, with the broad shoulders of Washington or the patrician visage of Lee? Could you be more serious in your personality, dress, interactions, and ideas? For it is only serious people who are taken seriously…

Could you attend to detail in matters of dress a bit more closely—knotting the tie correctly, avoiding the symbols of the detestable managerial order, ensuring your shirt is pressed—and ride jauntily into memory like Stuart or Ian Smith, in that catching photo of him looking out over Victoria Falls. You know just the one, for it imprints itself upon the mind, as all is perfect without being neurotic.

That takes a great deal of time and effort. Cultivation is difficult and frustrating, hence why we are not all breeders of racehorses.

But it can, and must, be successful.

Our enemies despise beauty and hierarchy. They hate the well-turned-out, the beautiful, the examples of life higher than the favela. They do not hate all hierarchy, for they want to be eternally on top, but they do hate rule by those who should rule because they are better. It is why they have replaced gentility with the mob, beautiful and uncompromising Palladian and Neoclassical architecture with modernist monstrosities, and heroic statuary with visual representations of cosmic horrors. Such is life under the thumb of wretched lice like the boil-encrusted Marat, deranged and lifelong losers of John Brown’s sort, or any of their similarly malformed and misshapen—physically as well as spiritually—acolytes. Any glimpse of a natural hierarchy that rightly places them at the bottom is anathema to their twisted bodies and souls, and so it is what they seek to destroy, and what they hate above all else.

We must not let them create the global favela in the name of international equity. But to resist them we must not just fight, but represent that old earl who stood up to the Plantagenets or the Virginians and Rhodesians who fought always with honor and beauty against the encroaching hordes of equality: to be in style and substance not lesser sons of greater sires but wise stewards and creators who stand on the shoulders of bespoke-suited giants so that those generations that follow us can as well.

Slovenliness, anti-socialness, ignorance, and indolence are no virtues. Eccentrics in rags with vile habits are not the vanguard of a rightist revolution, nor are dissipated would-bes and have-beens like the failures of the debauched aristocracy that departed to Kenya anything more than sad reminders of a dead end. That sort of behavior on any count, from the proudest to the lowest, is not a vision of life others of our mind will or should follow, for it is not a vision of higher life but of some iteration of the favela and what led to it.

Be the hierarchy you wish to see in the world. Represent it in every fiber of your being, from your soul to your shoulders, your suit to your family, and ensure that style is paired with immense substance. That is what the right is and must be, what we must be. Yes it is difficult, annoying, challenging, requiring as it does constant maintenance, adaptation, and rectitude. One cannot effortlessly be a patrician, even if born to the purple. But it is what must be done. Each of us must represent the higher order of life, excellence, in all its forms. That is the charge before us.

Thank you.

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