The Big Speech: Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Cow's Revenge

The late Henry Fairlie was a British born essayist who wrote in the New Republic. A man of biting wit, he wrote the following essay, which is one of my favorites:

The Idiocy of Urban Life Or The Cow's Revenge.

Interesting reading, and a lot of interesting commentary in the article.

Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Co...

I mentioned the late Henry Fairlie's essay The Idiocy of Urban Life in a post here the other day, and found that when I'd earlier linked it in, I'd done so another one of my blogs.

The way I work the blogs now days has changed a bit.  Originally, this blog was strictly limited to historical topics, with a focus on the turn of the prior century and changes that have occurred from them to now.  It still is, but it's also where I generally post any other topic that I want to babble about.  That wasn't the case at first.  Now, I would have posted Fairlie's comments here, so I will do so. Above is a like to my earlier Holscher's Hub post.  Here's a direct link to Fairlie's Essay:

The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Cow's Revenge.

Fairlie was a British-born author who wrote for The New Republic.  He had a brilliant satiric whit.  This article was actually a reply to an article that had appeared only shortly before in The New Republic and which took for its title a phrase used by Karl Marx about rural life, in which Marx complained about "the idiocy of rural life."  No matter how you feel about cities, Fairlie's essay is simply too good to be ignored and raises many thought-provoking points.

As for Marx, Marx seems to have lumped, in a juvenile fashion, anything that cut against his views as dumb, deluded or dangerous, a rather juvenile approach to thought, and not worthy of intellectual endeavors.  It's amazing, in that context, that anyone ever took him seriously.

How long is your work commute, door to door? - ABA Journal

How long is your work commute, door to door? - ABA Journal

I meant to post this item awhile back, but it is an interesting query.

According to The Idiocy of Urban Life, the classic essay by The New Republic's Henrie Fairlie, the average 19th Century industrial worker had a seven mile, walking, commute to work. At that time, and up until at least the 1920s, people who lived in the center of cities were more well to do than those who lived on the city's margins, with some extremely notable exceptions, as that allowed the richer to walk to their offices and to city services more readily, while the poorer had to hike.  Now, of course, the reverse is true.

I think my commute is about three miles long, and in the summer I do it by bicycle, weather and schedule allowing.  I've known, however, friends of mine who had very long urban commutes indeed.  And even here I've known people who drove 30 miles one way every day to go to work, something that would have been inconceivable before widespread ownership of the automobile.