Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming

18 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Revenge, Part C

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Civilized people will never be impressed by any argument that seems to celebrate the morality of apes.  We are, after all, human beings who are, as Christians say, made in the image of God or, as Darwinists insist, the product of tens of millions of years of evolutionary progress.  It is a main thrust of philosophical liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. I can almost hear the rumblings from the professors, social workers, and other right-thinking people:  ”If you once start conceding some legitimacy...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

8 Jul, 2016

Loretta’s Lynch Law

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American political leaders are almost to a man, woman, and  all points in-between,  uneducated and literate only to the level that they can read the speeches that are written for them.  Nonetheless, it is sometimes enlightening to examine the clichés—almost all of them not simply false but counter-intuitive— with which they pepper their pronouncements. Case in point, Loretta Lynch’s sermon on the murder of five officers of the law in Dallas.  After thanking the reporters for attending, she assured the American people that “we”—whatever or whomever she means by that— “…intend to provide any assistance that we can to investigate...

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Feature / Fleming

4 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter Five: Sweet Revenge, Part B

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This Simian World Revenge and marriage, as institutionalized means of expressing love and hate, have much in common: Both are found in a variety of forms, but the forms and tendencies that converge in societies around the globe encourage us to think of them as generically human phenomena.  That is because they are, both of them, based on natural necessities and passions that have probably been instilled into the human species throughout the long course of evolution.  A mouse will fight against an attacker, whether the enemy is a rival mouse or a cat, and I have been charged by...

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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...