The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Additional Summer School 2023 Readings, Updated 06/06
Passages Added from Plato and Aristotle. In addition to the assigned readings, the following passages and fragments will be referred to. More will be added in the coming days. P
Westerns, Episode 6
In this final episode of the 1929-1959 era, Dr. Fleming and Stephen discuss 1958’s Buchanan Rides Alone and just how endearing a smiling stranger in town can be. Homework for next episode: watch Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. To see the Taylor Hackford video Dr. Fleming refers to, click here.
Wednesday’s Child: Call Signs
Celeste Dell’Anna, interior designer of genius and my friend of thirty years, is coming to visit us today from Milan, where he lives.
Memorial Day 2023: Democrats Letting VA Hospitals Decay Again
If you want to see what’s really going on in America, go to a major Veterans Administration hospital. Since Covid, you can’t go inside unless you have business there. But walk around outside and go by the entrance.
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Venice
This time around my impression of the town where I had spent four waterlogged years was altogether baleful. Now I was here as a stranger, and this made immersion in the tourist miasma, which locals are trained and equipped to evade, unavoidable and humiliating.
Rereading Homer’s Iliad, Book II
Instead of meeting with a massive protest, there is a stampede to the ships that is stopped, just in time by wiser heads. Old Nestor advises him to muster the troops according to tribes (phyla) and clans (phretres)
Chronicles of Wasted Time: White Lite
I am a little tired of hearing white Republicans complaining about reparations. Most of them supported discriminatory wealth transfer programs and did little or nothing to oppose affirmative action.
Poetry: Robert Browning
My father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
“What do you read about?”
“The siege of Troy.”
“What is a siege, and what is Troy?”
Wednesday’s Child: The Jaws of Defeat
Only the eyes make us feel more vulnerable, more exposed to harm and subject to deterioration, than our teeth. But the eyes at least have eyelids, whereas our teeth stand naked and afraid before every grain of sand, every cherry pit, and every year that passes. Were they of flesh and blood, they would tremble in fear whenever we opened our mouths.
America–A Captive Nation. A Regime of Privilege
The Lincolnian Regime governed the United States, roughly speaking, from 1860 to 1932, when it was transformed by left-wing Fascists into the New Deal Regime, which endured down to about 1960, when FDR’s national-socialist apparatus was rechanneled into a system whose primary beneficiaries were specially designated minorities.
The Wrongs of Rights
