President Trump is undoubtedly a creep, but what else can one say of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton? Jack Kennedy and his disgusting brothers? Franklin Roosevelt? Lincoln, whose foul mouth around women, when he was in Congress, caused decent colleagues to shun his company?
Most Americans, hell-bent on success, do not dream of conquering nations or murdering our neighbors. Our vast ambitions are defined by bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger blonds.
In one of Douglas Addams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in it. The result is the annihilation of the self. The device was designed by a scientist who got tired of his wife telling him to put things in perspective. The nagging wife might just as well have been Adam Smith or William Godwin or any...
As a college freshman, I made friends with a high school senior who was permitted to live in our dormitory. I never learned how Gary, a Catholic high school student from Chicago, ended up in a college dorm in Charleston. Perhaps I should have asked. Whenever someone did make the mistake of asking Gary what he was doing in Charleston, he invariably answered: “I’m just waiting for a streetcar.” And, if the questioner persisted with the inevitable protest, “But there aren’t any streetcars in Charleston,” Gary responded: “That must be why it’s taking so long.” That is where many of...
Previous If you think any of this argument is overstated, just go to the library and look at the artistic masterpieces of Jacob Epstein and Andy Warhol, and, as you are reading the wit and wisdom of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, explaining the evils of Western culture, listen to some light background music from Ornette Coleman playing “between the notes” on his plastic saxophone. This was all decades ago, in the period that conservatives still celebrate as a high point of our culture, the time when “the Greatest Generation” was still ruling the planet, back before every imaginable ethnic,...
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the South at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than 10%.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your senses or government-backed science reported in the government-controled media? Coming away from the window, you pick a modern history textbook off the shelf, and you read that modern times are marked by progress. The past was a sewer of racism, sexism, bigotry and ethnic oppression, but...
The most recent offense against the religion and morality of the World Controllers was perpetrated by a German figure skater named Nicole Schott, who had the unmitigated gall to use the theme song of Schindler’s List for her routine at the Olympics. In the report I read, the writer was so busy quoting the horrified tweets that the poor dear did not even mention Ms Schott’s actual performance, the score and/or medals it received. Outrage over the cultural appropriation of Hollywood junk music was trumped by a West Coast crime writer, who was simply horrified to see someone in her...
I hate to sound like a bonehead movement conservative, but….I find it hard to believe anything I see in the news, which in my case consists mostly of the headlines of The Daily Mail. I don’t mean I think the writers and editors are lying. I just find it hard to believe that anyone could make the stupid comments that inspire the headlines, that a writer would find them worth repeating, that an editor who did not work for his middle school newsletter would print them, and, finally, that anyone would take the trouble to click on the headline and...
For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ Orestes puts his case to Menelaus. His uncle owes Agamemnon for all he did in launching an expedition to regain Menelaus’ wife. After all, Orestes is not asking Menelaus to kill his own daughter to fulfill his duty—a look back at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and forward to Orestes’ plot to kidnap Hermione. In what should be a clinching argument for a normal Greek, Orestes points out that if he and Electra die, so does the line of Agamemnon. Menelaus (682 ff) agrees—up...
For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ The Orestes, performed in 408, is one of Euripides’ last surviving plays–the poet died only two years later. It was very popular in the Hellenistic and Byzantine eras, much cited and taught in schools. It is a vivid melodrama (in the modern not the ancient sense), but it is also a profound and difficult meditation on the meaning of friendship. One caveat before I make a few remarks on the play. Though Euripides was, in the following centuries, the most popular writer of tragedies,...
