Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Sep, 2016

Bullying and Baloney

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Bullying is the latest great social craze in the American media. They always have some social pathology with which they terrorize the suckers who watch the news or read websites.  Back in the 1980’s and 90’s they beat the drum for teenage pregnancy and father-daughter incest.  They had to drop the former, after a few dissidents were cruel enough to point out that the term “father” turned out to include the mother’s second husband, live-in boyfriend, and any stranger in the night she happened to entertain. The increase in teenage pregnancies was real enough, but, since the cause was the sexual...

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Feature / Fleming

6 Sep, 2016

Properties of Blood I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part D

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On a more basic level, shame can be an intense feeling of embarrassment and inferiority.  Romance languages express this feeling by using derivatives from the Latin verecundia:  vergogna (Italian), verguenza (Spanish), vergogne (French).  This sense of shame is an expansive category as Julio Caro Baroja points out in his historical account of Spanish honor. “Verecundia shows itself not only as chastity and modesty, as the blush which lewd speech or actions bring to the face, but also as respect for parents and elders, which prevents one from doing certain things in their presence, and as humility, reserve, and respect for...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

5 Sep, 2016

The Chickens Come Home To Roost

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These are not really  trick questions: Question 1) What is dumber than a dumb jock? A sports fan—or sports writer—who lionizes postmodern athaletes [sic!] who are paid to slough off every quality that turns hominid apes into human beings.  Note: I am not talking about genuine athletes, who still exist–though there are not many “Olympians” among them–but sports stars, who are as insubstantial in human terms as any other media celebrity.  Televised football games are aimed at the husbands of soap opera fans, and our sports heroes are cut from the same cardboard and tinsel as Ryan Seacrest and Angelina Jolie. This past...

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Fleming / On the House

30 Aug, 2016

Writing and Reading Verse, Part IV

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Despite the timidity of readers afraid to expose their versifying to scrutiny, I shall write one or two more posts in the hope of seeing some small light dawn in the distance. Before leaving blank verse—which, as I said earlier, was easy to write poorly but hard to write well—let us look at one or two more specimens of how it can be done effectively.  Here is Milton’s description of Satan in Hell: He trusted to have equal’d the most High, If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais’d impious War in Heav’n...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Feature / Fleming

30 Aug, 2016

Jerks 0: Introduction, Part B (Conclusion)

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Jerkitude is a contagious disease:  After putting up with bullying and rudeness for a few days, we come to expect it, and we are ready to lash out in a preemptive strike against anyone who even slightly offends us.  It’s like the story of the guy whose car breaks down at night on a lonely road and finds he does not have a jack.  He starts walking down the road, imagining the warm reception he will get from a friendly farmer, but the farther he goes, the darker his thoughts become.  What if the farmer doesn’t have a jack?  What...

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Feature / Fleming

29 Aug, 2016

Properties of Blood, I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part C

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Opponents of dueling have made many valid arguments against staking life and honor on swordsmanship or marksmanship, and not all of them went so far as Twain in deriding the very notion of personal honor.   Before evaluating the arguments on both sides, we should have some understanding of what this honor is that would cause a man to risk death.  In the 21st century, honor has little meaning in vernacular English.  It can hardly be used without quotation marks or an ironic intonation of the voice.  This was not always so.  Once upon a time, one could take for...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

27 Aug, 2016

The Art of Degradation, Part I

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It is a good thing that rhetoric is a lost art, because anyone with the most elementary knowledge of rhetoric would be sticking blunt objects into his ears to keep from hearing not just the politicians’ speeches but, even more, the pundit’s comments and questions. I am not referring to the bad grammar and mispronunciation of NPR newsreaders who cannot pronounce words like “tour” but invariably say “tore” or even to the effeminate and uncontrolled sing-song chanting of the TV announcers or the hilariously inaccurate diction of people who think “fraught” means something like “full of anxiety or trouble” and...

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Feature / Fleming

24 Aug, 2016

Jerks O: Introduction, Part A

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Everyone in America is constantly complaining about Jerks:  the Jerk who cut them off in traffic, the Jerks at the office who never wash their lunch dishes and leave them for their junior colleagues or overworked secretaries, the Jerk father who lets his toddlers run around screaming in the nice restaurant where you have taken your girlfriend to propose, the Jerk that pushed his airline seat back so violently that it sent your coffee flying–he’s the same Jerk who shouted for 15 minutes into his cellphone and then delayed the take-off because he would not turn it off when he...

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Feature / Fleming

22 Aug, 2016

Properties of Blood, I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part B

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The Sense of Honor I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more. Richard Lovelace’s poem “To Lucasta” used to be one of those poems that everyone had to commit to memory, and these last two lines constituted the most oft-quoted reference to the principle of honor in English literature.  Lovelace was a young man of good family, whose loyalty to his king and church first sent him to war, later put him in prison, and ultimately plunged him into poverty.  He had left Oxford with an M.A. and was about to serve under Lord Goring...