Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

3 Jun, 2016

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

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An On The House Reprint from 1999 Midtlantic It has been a long day for this straight white European male.  O’Hare Airport is a sort of decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline, the gauntlet of guards at the x-ray machines none of whom is able to speak English, and everywhere the stench of the Disneyworld cuisine: pizza, hotdogs, and every few feet a McDonald’s, whose unique blend of grease, sugar, and msg is the olfactory signature tune of the New World Order. If they...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

26 May, 2016

Triumph of Democracy, the Movie

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It is a warm morning, that July 4, 1826, in Charlottesville.   As the opening credits roll, we hear the soft strains of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” which are transformed, as the camera closes in on the face of the sleeping statesman, to “Hail to the Chief” in a minor key.  Thomas Jefferson is feverish: The ex-President had a bad night, tormented by frightening visions of the future, and he wants to share the revelations with his old friend and nemesis, John Adams.  There are no telephone or telegraph lines, but the clever Jefferson had recently invented the...

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Feature / Fleming

16 May, 2016

Arm the Kurds? Are They Kidding?

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On Thursday May 19, I’ll be giving a lecture at the Irish Rose.  In putting the finishing touches on the talk, I decided to see if there had been any major candidates in the presidential race who had not succumbed to the insanity of wanting to arm the Kurds.  “Not one, no no, not one!”  Here is a little extract of the talk. In the nearly 1400 years since Mohammed began persecuting and massacring Jews and Christians, this pattern of Muslim behavior has not changed. Flash forward to end of 19th century, as Ottoman Turks were being driven out of the...

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Autodidact / Feature / On the House

15 May, 2016

Aristotle’s Politics, Book II, i-iii

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In the second book of the Politics, Aristotle takes up, classifies, and analyzes the variety of political systems, both real and theoretical.  His initial point of departure is sharing or having in common (koinonein):  Do the citizens of a commonwealth have all things, some things, or no things in common?

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

14 May, 2016

How Conservatives Lost the Bathroom War

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WARNING:  This piece includes revolting arguments, albeit expressed delicately, but revolting nonetheless. If you have ever wondered why American “Conservatives” lose virtually ever battle in which they engage, all you have to do is to listen to them attacking the presidential decree banning toilet discrimination.  I listened for a few minutes to an NPR left-right debate on the subject.  The leftist was E.J. Dionne—the broken record of the Washington Post.  I was sautéing morels and shallots for a pasta course, when I heard him announced.  It occurred to me immediately that I should have put on an old Gunsmoke radio...

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Fleming

6 May, 2016

Ransom Notes, Cinco de Mayo Plus One: GOP Deserters

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Why are so many Republicans shying away from Trump and promising to boycott the convention? Whatever the answer is, we know it has nothing to do with principles, because they don’t have any.  What they do have are paymasters. In picking a side, e.g., the global war machine to which Maddog John McCain bends the knee, or the Megachurch pseudo-Christian pastors bloated on greed and ignorance that Ted Cruz adores, or the transnational business interests that force the Republican Party to stiff the American people by bringing in cheap labor and shipping jobs off to Chinese slave-masters.  Even the hint...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

4 May, 2016

Donald Trump’s Paper Moon

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“All’s Over then.  Does truth sound bitter as one at first believes?” Yes, it must sound very bitter indeed to the leaders of the TedCruzJohnKasicMarcoRubioCarlyFiorinaJebBush Party—which is neither very old nor very grand.  They played the game according to its well-established and well-known rules, which can be boiled down to “Lie, Cheat, and Steal,” and they went down in a defeat untouched by honor or dignity.  What a pill it must have been for the Bible-thumping Cruz to take, listening to the vulgarian Trump verbally pat little Teddy on the head, predicting big things for the kid when he grows...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

2 May, 2016

Racism–and the Rose by Any Other Name OTH

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This a revision of three old pieces on the same subject: Thucydides observed, in his famous depiction of the civil war on Corfu, that political partisans change the meanings of words.   Dictionaries have become instruments of ideological oppression.  The movement began long before the end of the millennium. “We very clearly had made a mistake,” said the marketing director of Merriam-Webster, explaining her company’s decision to pull an on-line thesaurus that included “faggot” and “fruit” as synonymns for “homosexual.” While many homophiles freely use expressions like “faggot” and “fruity,” and “butch,” they reserve the right to dictate polite usage...

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Autodidact / Fleming / On the House / Poetry

30 Apr, 2016

Mr. Autodidact’s Poem(s) of the Week

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First is a sonnet by Tennyson, not one of his best, perhaps, but indicating his distaste for professional critics and men of letters: Poets and Their Bibliographies Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in the readers’ eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had roll’d you round and round...