Surviving the Election, a Cheering Podcast
In the conflict between Fraud and Megalomania, sensible Americans would do well to cheer up and go about their everyday business, take a vacation, read a book…..
Author: Thomas Fleming
Sophocles’ Ajax I: Preliminary
I hardly ever read introductions to classic works of English or American fiction; however, the farther removed we are a literary tradition, the more we may feel the need of a little preliminary exposition. The Athenian poet Sophocles was born a few years after 500 B.C. and would have been about thirteen years old when Xerxes led the Persian army into Greece and burned the temples on the Athenian acropolis.
Announcement: Sophocles Lives!
I’ve just started rereading Sophocles’ Ajax. I’m not sure why, apart from the need to keep reading Greek, but there is something that has always attracted me in the portrait of the staunch reactionary who goes mad, after being dishonored, and of his glib enemy, Odysseus, who learns humanity. (I have a strong hunch that in his depictions of Odysseus–as in his Oedipus–Sophocles is dealing with the Athenian mentality of his own day, and that scholars who see the poet’s friend Cimon in Ajax are on the right track.) If five people promise to start reading it, I’ll start a...
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Conclusion
It is through the rituals of common meals, common worship and common work that a family discovers its identity as a family. The pleasures and opportunities, no less than the pressures of modern existence threaten this identity.
Poem: An Exile’s Bicentennial
This was the first of a number of “sermons,” a play on Horace’s term (sermones) for his satires plus an implied rebuke to the poet’s tendency to preach.
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Part Three
The Household is not just a “castle” but a little commonwealth. When Cain was expelled from his father’s polity of hearth and home, he realized that exile from the community of kinfolks was a fate at least as bad as death. ”My punishment” he declared, “is greater than I can bear….I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” The family is primarily an expression of blood-ties and the affections they engender. In a broader sense, however, the household is a model for...
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Part Two
Leftists who claim to deplore consumerism, can only offer more government, while Libertarians and Classical Liberals, whose ideology of individualism began the process that culminates in Marxist-feminist-transgenderist consumerism, can promise only more servility and the degradation of the human person into an object for twisted scientific experimentation.
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Introduction
In 1935 there appeared, to no great acclaim, a book of essays whose title asks a question that is still of vital importance to the dwindling remnant of Americans and Europeans who wish to think for themselves: Who Owns America?
BLM Podcast #3: Lying About Lives
If black lives really matter to the BLM movement, what about the lives of the innocent? Since Roe v Wade black babies are five times more likely to be killed in utero than white babies. Is this a concern to BLM movement, and black victims of violent crime are most frequently preyed upon by the very people championed by BLM.
