Black Swan (bookstore) vs Red Hen (restaurant)
[ by Charles Cameron — a parallelism post, more than one about free speech and civility ]
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Lexington, VA, and Richmond, VA, the logos:
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A neatly observed opposition, more or less a natural DoubleQUote, between the Black Swan incident where a fellow customer assaulted Steve Bannon verbally in a bookstore and the restaurant incident where the owner of the Red Hen restaurant ejected Sarah Huckabee Sanders, saying her views did not conform to the ethic — or should that be ethos — of the restaurant:
THE OPPOSITE OF THE RED HEN: The owner of a Richmond book store asked a woman to leave after she confronted STEVE BANNON. “Bookshops are all about ideas & tolerating different opinions & not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening." https://t.co/hHn4wd4CQa
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) July 8, 2018
Now from a purely amateur natural history perspective, in a match between a black swan and a red hen, muy money is on the swan every time, as I trust Nassim Nicholas Taleb would agree. And Nabokov too, for that matter.
From a popular consumer interest perspective, if the match is bookstore vs restaurant, restaurant wins hands down — but I’d go with bookstore, especially if it’s a used bookstore..
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As to civility vs freedom of expression, thank God I’m not a cop or a judge — I require both. And that’s certainly a paradox, and probably a koan our society will have to face one of these days.
Steve Bannon as a person I find intriguing to the point of sympathy, because he’s read many of the oddball authors I have, though my resulting observations come out of left field, and his out of right..
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But none of that is what ultimately draws me to this post, it’s the delicious double parallelism of red vs black, swan vs hen.
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I’ve been wondering, putting together this post, whether the bookstore is named for NN Taleb’s celebrated book, or for the wildly popular ballet film of thet name:
Btw, Vogelgesang is birdsong: hen cluck, swan song.
