Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming

27 Jun, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Sweet Revenge

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NOTE:  I had decided to omit the following two chapters on individual violence– as well as a later chapter on blood feuds etc.–from this volume and to put them in a separate book.  As I worked on the later chapters, it became apparent to me that my initial outline was better. Sweet Revenge With base deceit you worked upon our feelings. Revenge is sweet, and flavors all our dealings.”   Revenge is sweet, whether anyone likes to admit it.  But even a hundred years ago, when people were more candid about the reality of aggression, audiences at productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s...

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Feature / On the House

24 Jun, 2016

Brexit Wrecks It

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As the days drew new for the vote on Brexit,  the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union seemed  unlikely.  It seemed too good to be true, even to Nigel Farage.  As the polls were closing, the UKIP leader was gloomily predicting a thin victory for the Remains. Later that evening, it was all over but for the whining of good old Dave Cameron in tears.  He just had to have this referendum to show that Britons were as suicidal as everyone else in the West.  “What”—as that noted political observer B. Bunny, Esq. would say, “a maroon.” The term Britons,...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

22 Jun, 2016

No One Ever Expects the Spanish Inquisition

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When I looked at Red Philipps’ recent piece on the NeverTrump movement, I realized how ignorant I am of the conservative zanies who populate the blogosphere.  He referred several times to one Eric Erickson.  If I had ever heard of this character, the name—so reminiscent of Swedish comic Ole Olson—had been rejected by my conscious mind as one more piece of lint it did not need.  I can already tell you who played Chester and Doc on the Gunsmoke radio  program and once read a bad book on Gandhi by another fraud of the same name.   Enough, as they...

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Autodidact / Fleming / Poetry

22 Jun, 2016

Poem(s) of the Week

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While we were at Camp Saint Christopher, I found myself gassing on, as I so often do, on a favorite theme, namely, how various disabling mental conditions, e.g., intoxication or insanity, may confer benefits in making the sufferer more open to spiritual truths a more controlled rationality will attempt to exclude.  My prime example was Saint Catherine of Siena.  When someone raised the question of old age–whether someone as decrepit as myself gained anything in spiritual wisdom to compensate for the decline in physical well-being and mental powers.  I thought of one of my favorite poems, Edmund Waller’s lines on...

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Feature / Fleming

22 Jun, 2016

Properties of Blood I.8: Spouses and Heirs, Part E

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From Kith to Kin to Commonwealth If there is one commonplace that is shared by political theorists who view human societies not as a set of abstractions but as an organism or ecosystem it is that the commonwealth is an outgrowth of the household or family.  Wherever we turn—to Aristotle or Cicero, St. Thomas or Althusius, Sir Robert Filmer or French counter-revolutionaries—we find the family at the foundation of the evolving social order. The steps of this theoretical social evolution usually echo Aristotle’s account that traces the coalescence of households into a village and villages into a city or commonwealth. ...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming / On the House

19 Jun, 2016

Autodidact: Readings for June

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By popular demand (at least three requests uttered in a diffident tone of voice), I am reintroducing some discussions of lighter works–in addition to the ongoing Aristotle–and a poem of the week. For the next few weeks, I propose to discuss three works by R.L. Stevenson:  The Wrong Box, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Dynamiter. I have been mostly absent from this site for over two weeks.  For more than a week, while I was in South Carolina attending the Abbeville Institute’s Summer School, my MacBook Air refused to turn on, and when, every few...

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Feature / Fleming

14 Jun, 2016

Diary of a Peripheral Male, Part Three of Three

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PARIS I boarded the plane in Pisa and joined the flight full of North Africans going home to Paris.  It is hard to get a waitress–I mean, professional flight attendant on board for the passengers’ safety–because one Moroccan mother seems completely unable to deal with the logistics of traveling with a baby.  It is a nice enough baby, and the mother is sweet, though her French is even less comprehensible than my own.  Not so long ago, a man’s level civilization could be measured, almost literally, by the size of his French vocabulary (never by his accent, since a good...

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

6 Jun, 2016

Travel Diary of a Peripheral Male 1999, Part Two of Three

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MILAN It is small wonder if European conservatives hate the United States.  My room at the Hotel Granduca di York is cramped, too small to fit in a practical writing desk but big enough to hold an American window on the world–a TV set.  Next door is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which holds a priceless collection of manuscripts, rare books, and paintings, but here in my room I have everything an American could need: CNN, 24 hours a day, as well as a variety of channels–Italian, French, German–all replaying episodes of Hunter, Friends, or Mad About You (that’s Dingue de Toi...