Author: Thomas Fleming

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Autodidact / Fleming / Uncategorized

17 Dec, 2017

I Promessi Sposi, Part II: Alessandro Manzoni

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Manzoni This, then, is a bit of the world in which Manzoni lived and played a prominent part.  He was born  in Milan.  His father Pietro Manzoni came from a decayed feudal family and had  had married Giulia, the daughter of the liberal legal reformer Cesare Beccaria, whose tissue of cliches on punishment continue to undermine law and order throughout the developed world. .  Her father’s daughter, Giulia ran away from Pietro with her lover in 1792 and went to live in Paris among a circle of liberal and enlightened intellectuals.  Manzoni’s early life was lived in Lombardia–in Lecco (not...

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Fleming / Free Content

11 Dec, 2017

The Pope’s Temptation

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Is anyone old enough to remember when it was not quite respectable to be in the news?   Of course, the doings of the great and the wise would have to be recorded—the birth of an heir, the discovery of a planet—but, otherwise, it  was better not to be noticed by the newspapers, which have always been properly regarded as scandal sheets.  And, of all classes of men who had to avoid notoriety, the clergy were at the top, and of all the Christian clergy, the Pope was chief among those who were wise enough to stay out of the...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Dec, 2017

A Capital Crime? Trump and Jerusalem

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“Trump has sold us out!” ”It’s all the fault of that Jewish son-in-law of his!” “This sets back the Middle East peace process by decades!” These are just a few of the more moderate exclamations I have heard in condemnation of the President’s decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel and to relocate the embassy. Perhaps they are all right, but I doubt it.  While Trump’s manifest trust in his children is a source of possible weakness, it is also one of his strongest qualities.  Jared and Ivanka Kushner have certainly played a major role in this administration, but whether...

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Autodidact / Fleming

7 Dec, 2017

Perhaps the Greatest Novel Ever Published: I promessi sposi

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The French Revolution was a source of great evil. It not only spawned the leftist revolutionary movements that dominated the past two centuries but it also gave birth to the reactionary and rightwing movements that responded to the Revolution.  Most of these responses were imperfect, corrupted either by revolutionary ideas or suffering from the temptation to run blindly in the opposite direction.  If reason misapplied is dangerous, irrationality is equally dangerous; if globalism is a menace, so is blind nationalism; if atheism and anti-Christian  bigotry have deformed the character and values of modern men and women, Catholic obscurantism and fanaticism...

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Fleming / Free Content

1 Dec, 2017

Niki Haley–Trump’s Worst Mistake

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Niki Haley is a disaster as foreign policy mouthpiece.  One might use of her what Mencken unfairly said of Bryan:  “a zany without sense or dignity.”  Of course she is a good deal more virile than South Carolina’s distinguished Senator Lindsay Graham, but that can be said of Chelsea Manning.  Butching it up for the press in difficult matters of war and peace is exactly what the United States does not need, and her recent ridiculous tirade gave the Russians one more opportunity to ridicule the cynicism–and amateurism–of the US foreign policy establishment. Serious nations do not act like North...

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Feature / Fleming

30 Nov, 2017

Stupid Thoughts

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This is a country where Joe Scarborough, who is so fake he has to lie about his Thanksgiving day, is accusing Donald Trump of insanity.  If it hadn’t been Morning Joe, it might have been Matt Laurer.  What a country. The only clever thing I have ever heard from John Podhoretz (Full disclosure: I have never met the pizza man though I did have dealings with his parents) is his remark that Trump should be impeached for forcing on our attention the moronic Lavar  Ball, who single-handedly has done more to explode the idea of racial equality than anyone since...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

30 Nov, 2017

City-State Rights, Part II: Conclusion

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The city-state is the seed-bed of civilization, but the concept seems alien to the American tradition.  Nonetheless, our cities once did possess, at least before the revolution, many of the same chartered rights enjoyed by English and European burgs.  In the Anglo-American world, the liberties of cities was defined by the charters they received either from the Crown itself or from the Royal Governor and legislature: Williamsburg, for example, was chartered in 1695, Wilmington in 1763.  Many of the older cities and towns of the Eastern Seaboard had been chartered municipal corporations, though in the decades following the revolution, the...

Fleming / On the House

27 Nov, 2017

City States Rights, Part IB (Free to all registered subscribers)

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There have been many press accounts, including Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s series of articles for the London Telegraph, on the increasingly strict censorship of opinion in Europe.  Public criticism is usually taken to be the sign of a robust society, but it is increasingly difficult to describe Islamic attacks on Jews and, in the aftermath of the recent Islamic invasion, information on the robbery, assault, rape, and murder committed by immigrants has been rigorously suppressed.  In 1995 the EU sacked economist Bernard Conolly for criticizing monetary union, and it took six years for the European Court to act on the case.  When...

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Fleming / Free Content

25 Nov, 2017

City-States Rights, Part I A (FREE)

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A version of this was presented some years ago at a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina Cities like Charleston and Siena and Edinburgh are a great deal like nations: They have their own identity celebrated in songs and stories and a peculiar slant on history.  These real cities are not merely aggregations of aliens who “dwell together, in Eliot’s phrase, “to make money from each other.”  They are enduring communities, with a common  faith and identity, that have a future only because they have a past. I have come to see that in this respect Charleston has been throughout its...

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Film / Fleming

18 Nov, 2017

Movie of the Week: Frank Capra’s Rain or Shine (1930)

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Rain or Shine (1930), directed by Frank Capra, starring Joe Cook, with Dave Chasen.  This zany classic is based on a Broadway show co-written by Maurice Marks and the character actor James Gleason.  Jo Swerling adapted it for the movies; the biggest change, apparently, being elimination of the musical numbers that the cheap producer did not wish to pay for.  (Capra went along, arguing that any film with the greatest comedian in the world had to be good.)  The film has more of a premise than a plot:  Smiley Johnson, experienced circus performer and manager, is trying to save the...