The Decline of English

     I spent yesterday evening making up for a hectic, busy Mother's Day weekend by watching the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" with my dear momma.  Being a charter member of the New Patriarchy, I haven't read the book and quite innocently assumed that all the fuss about Austen's literary genius was more disingenuous feminist propaganda aimed at elevating a slightly above-average novelist above what an honest appraisal of her abilities would support.
     If the film is any indication of the strength of the book, I must admit that I am very impressed.  The book/film's setting among the landed gentry in southwestern England around the turn of the 19th century was interesting to me, and I decided before popping the DVD in that I would grin and bear it all if I could draw any of the same parallels that David Hackett Fischer found between the displaced Cavalier aristocracy of colonial and antebellum Virginia and their ancestral home in the English southwest in his book (highly, highly recommended by me), "Albion's Seed".  What a surprise!  It is all there, the manor homes, the beautiful, overgrown estates, the servants, the carriages, the lethargic master/patriarch, and of course, ballrooms and militarism. 
     The only thing I found disturbing about the film (which apparently doesn't stray far from the dialogue of the book) is the graceful manner of speech that everyone, from the dour and aristocratic Mr. Darcy on down to the stiff Mr. Collins and the silliest of teenage girls display throughout.  Contrasting this elegance with my own limited vocabulary and degraded manner of speech was very disturbing.  How did it come to this? 
     It reminded me of a Civil War course I took in my riotously entertaining years in college where I was fortunate enough to be able to read letters that Confederate and Union footsoldiers sent to their families and loved ones from the front lines.  The fact that the common infantryman on either side normally had an 8th grade education (at best) destroyed everything I had been taught up to that point about "progress" and the perfectibility of mankind through compulsory (gubmint) education.  These men wielded the English language on a level that surpassed all of my *professors*, to say nothing of the drooling imbeciles who filled the desks in class.  How on earth could I honestly believe that we, as a nation and a civilization, are headed anywhere but the scrapheap of a third-world banana republic when bachelor's degrees are given to people who (comparatively) cannot even form a coherent thought on paper? 

     The late Joseph Sobran summed it all up years ago when he opined, "In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college."

     Rent the movie and let the depression set in.  You might finish it with a strange, entirely new desire for a top hat and riding boots, however, so be forewarned.  And enjoy the primeval beauty of Kiera Knightly and Rosumund Pike, if nothing else.  Hope springs eternal.