Oobla Dee Oobla Da, Life Goes On Even Without Trump

It's time to dry our eyes, take a deep breath, and bear our burdens cheerfully.

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

18 Responses

  1. Robert Reavis says:

    Good stuff and much needed today, yesterday and tomorrow. Talking to my police officer friends I do think the civil war has already begun in parts of the country where the masses are concentrated and the murder and killings have increased in intensity. But life will go on! Thank you Rex for the hilarious match of music and for both of you for the good topics, comments and conversation.

  2. Jacob Johnson says:

    It’s funny how the celebrities always say they’re leaving for Canada and not Mexico.

  3. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    They really should go to South Africa or Zimbabwe.

  4. theAlabamian says:

    I loved the podcast and Dr. Fleming’s sense of humor. Dr. Fleming helped put things in perspective in such a way that I appreciated. What I heard was yes things are horrible with our government, our centralized nation state has been in decline “at least 100 years”. However, our situation is much like other people’s in history, our situation is not so unique that we can’t draw on the observations, experiences, and strength of the example of our ancestors in the past. Southerners he mentioned, proud to say my people, weathered horrendous evils, and we can deal with Trump’s loss (however illegitimate). Following Dr. Fleming’s advice perhaps I should read Faulkner, and other Southern authors contemporary with him. Above all Jesus is LORD, and …”life is worth the living just because HE lives”. Dr. Fleming, thank you for the uplifting, perspective guiding, informative wisdom that we all need.

  5. Vince Cornell says:

    It is still a little galling that, of all the blithering idiots out there, Joe “you know, the thing” Biden is the one who will go down in history as having garnered the most votes ever. Sometimes the sheer magnitude of the Stupidity is overwhelming. If humanity survives long enough, surely the archaeologists a thousand years from now will marvel at our times and hold us up as the benchmark for the human capacity for cowardice and ignorance and sloth.

    Life goes on, though. And I’m more thankful than ever that I don’t have cable or broadcast TV. Having to listen to a single Biden or Harris or whomever speech would be more than I could handle. At least Mr. Trump was funny with some of his Borscht Belt schtick.

  6. Robert Reavis says:

    Vince,
    Truer words were never spoken. Especially about cable TV. Conservatives are now supposedly running from Fox News to Newsmax — into the arms of professional liberals like Alan Dershowitz. Five minutes with one of Homer ‘s poems would strike a deeper blow for civilization than 5 years of listening to that kind of rot gut drivel.

  7. theAlabamian says:

    I would also like to make a point about this idea of a coming civil war, and I heard Dr. Fleming make a good point in the podcast that most of your typical Americans today would only respond violently if severely threatened. I see another of post mentioning a civil war on Facebook and I somewhat doubtful a true civil war could take place now. I agree with Dr. Fleming that most supposedly “conservative” or Trump supporting Americans will not likely get violent and I will add that I do not believe they would ever get violent in an organized, mass scale to fight a civil war. I cannot see a population who accepts/is ignorant of cultural genocide, cheers for coaches and sports teams openly supporting BLM, are more concerned with missing college football season, and allowed a fake Covid emergency to put small business in peril to put together any meaningful resistance to even approach a civil war. If anything many so called ” conservatives” will not allow any real resistance because they don’t want controversy socially, any interruption in their lives, or to be social outcast failing to adhere to the new American morality.

  8. Robert Reavis says:

    Dear Alabamian,
    Yes I agree that the war in some of our major cities is what professionals would call low intensity. Yet one must recognize the realities that more people are being killed in the streets of our cities like Chicago and Milwaukee and other areas than ever before in our brief history. Yesterday in Wisconsin a 15 year old shot eight people in a public mall it took the SWAT teams from neighboring areas 6 hours to secure the battleground. Right now the low intensity conflict is between permanent gangs and flag mobs on the streets and the thin blue line of police officers trying to keep some type of order, not public safety mind you but just some type of control of the daily and weekly conflicts that are occurring more an more regularly. We of course have become accustomed to it and therefore desensitized to its nature as a civil strife but it is there and growing or at least that is my opinion from a distance. It could recede or grow larger but it does seem to spring up on a moments notice now and more frequently than I can ever remember. I hope I am a realist and not an alarmist by noticing its growing frequency and intensity but the testimony I hear from he ‘boots on the ground” so to speak is that it is worse than we realize while the political figures who have the responsibility and authority to keep the peace are beginning to choose sides —some supporting the violence even encouraging it and opposed to quelling it while others are supporting the status quo of dealing with the low intensity conflict on a daily and weekly basis with law enforcement.

  9. Kellen Buckles says:

    Robert, amen to the Homer suggestion, or: why not AJAX?

    As for a civil war there will certainly be some shooting by the country’s worst elements (Dylan Roof, for example) but the only result will be the end of the Second Amendment. All those “cold dead hand” guys will give up their guns gladly rather than surrender their jobs, football, porn.

  10. Robert Reavis says:

    Dear Kellen,
    Yes to Ajax definitely! You are probably correct in your assessment of the rest of it too. Of course armed mobs will burn down the local police precinct when their Dear Leaders instruct them to stand down, abandon the burning fire, go home and watch the game…..

  11. andrei navrozov says:

    Good to hear you, Tom, and fine fettle. I laugh like mad when you fake-pause pretending to search for the right word.

  12. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    Andrei, we could do podcasts with you, preferably without any script but perhaps a single question to take up.

  13. andrei navrozov says:

    Tom, a disposizione per eventuali chiarimenti.

  14. Vince Cornell says:

    I know this is off topic, but the title reminded me of the White Album (which I listened to incessantly as a very young child – surely that explains a lot!). When the Beatles intentionally switched around pronouns in the Obla Dee song, were they subversively ahead of the transgender curve? Or were they so lazy they just lost track of their lyrics?

  15. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    I don’t think I understand what you mean by “Switched around pronouns.”

  16. Vince Cornell says:

    I always thought the Obla-Dee song was about a guy named Desmond marrying a girl named Molly, but as a kid the last stanza always confused me because it switched to Desmond staying at home “doing a pretty face” and then in the evenings she (I thought referring to Desmond) was singing with the band.

    But, then, as a kid I also thought Bungalow Bill was a song about a guy going hunting with his mom. I wasn’t the most sophisticated chap.

  17. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    I remember the song and the silly joke at the end, but what are the pronouns that concerned you? Apparently, John Lennon didn’t want to record it–not pretentious enough. The title comes from a Yoruba expression which mens “life goes on.” McCartney had heard it from a Ska performer he knew. The man sued for rights as co-author, though his only contribution was to use a proverbial African saying.” Imagine if any songwriter could be accused of plagiarism, for borrowing a phrase he heard. Any references to Jambalaya could be actionable. By the way, it is generally believed that Han Williams appropriated Jambalaya from the great Moon Mullican who could not acknowledge authorship of a song not recorded by his label, King Records. Anyway, no, I am quite sure Sir Paul was not anticipating gender-bending any more than Ray Davies was promoting homosexuality in “Lola”, a song he wrote after seeing his PR guy (or agent?) making time with a black man in drag. Sometimes a cigar, as a very sick and crazy man once said, is just a cigar.

  18. Robert Reavis says:

    On another note I wish that Andrei would write about an imagined conversation on what Vladimir Nabokov might have thought about Epstein’s naming his garishly audacious party jet the “Lolita Express” ……