Author: Thomas Fleming

11

Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

18 Jan, 2016

Rome in the Year 16 AMT

By

Rome 2016 I I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had...

5

FF / Fleming

6 Jan, 2016

Ransom Notes 2

By

Dallas Shipp writes in to ask:  “You once wrote that whenever a talking head on television referred to a storm or a shooting as a ‘tragedy,’ their misuse of the word amounted to nihilism. Could you elaborate and explain your point? TJF:  I don’t recall using the word “nihilism,” but I have frequently argued against the trivializing of the word tragedy by applying it to accident victims and people who have suffered in a disaster.  The trivialization works in two directions.  First, it reduces to the word tragedy to meaning something like “terrible misfortune” or “incomprehensible suffering.”   It is...

0

Autodidact / Fleming

4 Jan, 2016

Cicero on Duty

By

In Book III of De Officiis Cicero poses a dilemma: Suppose a father were robbing a temple or digging tunnels into the treasury; should a son give information to the government?  The philosopher’s answer, according to Cicero, was: No, that would be wrong.

5

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

1 Jan, 2016

Without Apology

By

This piece is a slightly revised version of a piece I published some 16 years ago in a magazine I was then editing. “States Rights?  You can’t be serious!  What do you want to do–restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether he is a leftist at the Nation, a neoliberal at the New Republic, or a National Review minicon (or should that be “moneycon”?) looking for ways to pander and slander their way if not...

1

FF / Fleming

31 Dec, 2015

Ransom Notes, 1

By

Kellen Buckles wrote to TFF Facebook page: A friend gave me a copy of Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” and I was wondering if my time will be well spent negotiating those 1,150 pages.  Her prologue was full of intriguing ideas but I don’t want to be led astray.   TJF:  The simple answer is that it is a wonderful book, certainly the most insightful and entertaining volume on the Balkans that is available in English.  Nothing else comes close.  West does not know the language and makes historical mistakes, but her approach is humble and allows the various...

1

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 Dec, 2015

Making War on the War on the War Against Christmas

By

Everyone these days seems to have some complaint against the Christmas holiday.  You’ve heard them all by now, Muslims and Jews whining about “inclusiveness,” downtown storeowners complaining about the chainstores in the malls, and chainstores complaining about Amazon.   Small wonder people are so depressed this time of year.  Not only is the sun disappearing—and who knows if the global warmingists will ever let it return?—but everyone and his Buddhist brother has some ax to grind. The late Herbert W. Armstrong of the Worldwide Whacky Church of G-d Knows What used to do an annual radio broadcast denouncing Christmas.  Crazy...

1

Feature / Fleming

17 Dec, 2015

Annals of Trebizond IV, Facts and Fictions

By

The long reign of Alexios III  (1349-90) marks the beginning of the end of the Empire of Trebizond.   Alexios, as the result of a palace coup,  came to the throne as a boy of 11, and his youth and inexperience were an invitation to challenges of every sort:  warlords in the provinces, his own counselors and bureaucrats, and even from within the church.  The Trapezuntine elite was dominated by factions loyal either to Constantinople or to the more locally centered provincial aristocracy.  The feud between the Genoese and Venetians broke out again, when the latter were once again granted...

0

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

15 Dec, 2015

Climate Change: A Frank Conversation, Part One

By

The recent global summit on climate change—inevitably described as “historic”—was discussed and analyzed all over the media-sphere, by bloggers read only by their mothers and friends (if they have any) and  by the the most swollen talking heads on television.  Everyone was interviewed, profiled, and analyzed.  One important participant—an observer really—who escaped their attention was an obscure Italian political analyst, whose work has been studied without understanding for many years.  I had a chance to sit down with this great skeptic, and interview him on condition of anonymity.  Let’s just call him Nick O.  Before the conversation was over, we were...

2

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

11 Dec, 2015

Aliens and Seditious Acts

By

Donald Trump, as heavy-footed and inarticulate as he is, has shows himself time after time to be a man of superb political instincts.  Cut off, for most of his life, from contact with ordinary Americans, he manages, nonetheless, to display old-fashioned common sense in statements guaranteed both to delight what is fast becoming the Silent Minority and to outrage the cowards, liars, and flunkeys who dominate politics and the press. Donald’s latest stunt—and we can only hope that it is not just a stunt—is to call for a moratorium on Islamic immigration into the United States.  Of course, most sensible...