In the spring edition of City Journal, our loyal doctor pens a penetrating eulogy in honor of the duty-bound and graceful Queen Elizabeth, while contrasting her with her self-absorbed grandson, Prince Harry.

After so long a period, she came to seem almost immortal, her presence taken for granted, as one takes a phenomenon of nature for granted. Toward the end of her life, however, when it became clear that she must die in the not-distant future, a number of people I know—my neighbors and others—expressed anxiety at the thought of her death: for when we have lived for so long with a seemingly fixed point, its removal, even if it is distant from us, is unsettling. For those grown old during her reign, change seemed unlikely to be for the better and chaos more than possible, given that so little goes uncontested these days.

Over at Quadrant, our sympathetic doctor stops by the local store in his Parisian neighborhood and encounters human tragedy of varying degrees.

On this occasion, I had also gone to the checkout with only two items: a punnet of raspberries and a bottle of vodka. I know what I should have concluded had I been him: that I was an alcoholic who flavoured his vodka with raspberries. But he would have been mistaken: I am, in fact, a moderate drinker, which is to say that I know many people who drink far more.

In his weekly Takimag column, our hopeful doctor points to a rare example of a book publisher not relenting in the face of the usual progressive pseudo-intellectual protest party.

On the pretext of protecting eggshell sensitivities, they want to prevent discussion of contentious matters and enforce their own views as an unassailable orthodoxy. I suspect (though I cannot prove) that this is because, at some level of what one must call their minds, they are only too aware that their views and careers are built on a foundation of shifting sands.

The good doctor is given the arduous task of having to review a sloppily-written book defending the increasingly nasty woke cancel culture.

No book is completely without value, though it may not have the value that the author ascribes to it. This book is valuable as a window on the soul of those who allow resentment to dominate reason. This is a permanent, but dangerous, temptation of mankind.

Our favorite doctor returns to First Things for the June/July print edition with a book review of the newly translated diaries of Franz Kafka.

If the translation of a single, not very complex sentence can give rise to such differences in meaning, imagine the cumulative effects of different translations over an entire book! When we say that something is Kafkaesque, do we refer to Kafka or to translations of Kafka—or, if they coincide sufficiently, to both?

Over at The Critic, the skeptical doctor gets irritated listening to a typical British train announcement regarding another delay.

Why this wording, so obviously weaselly? The apology is no apology. It is an attempt to downplay the unhappiness caused to actual real living breathing people, and to pretend instead that the damage is done to something inanimate or intangible. 

Our humorous doctor has fun satirizing the absurdities of the modern progressive obsession with equality in this week’s Takimag.

The safest course these days is in any case to refrain from laughter, because jokes are always upsetting to someone, because the composition of human beings is 60 percent water and 40 percent eggshell.

The dissenting doctor castigates the absurd and unjust California proposal to pay “reparations” to people of African descent who have never been slaves, mostly by people whose ancestors had never owned slaves.

In the first place, the proposal is deeply racist. It treats people not as individuals equal under the law but as members of a group, in this case, a racial group. It’s no better to claim that a person has a right to “reparations” by virtue of belonging to a racial group than that a person should be de jure denied access to a benefit for the same reason.

…

Countries and civilizations aren’t killed: They rot to death from within or commit suicide. They do so by tearing themselves apart or by questioning their right even to exist.