Category: Free Content

This is a slightly revised version of my brief tribute delivered on Sunday, April 2, 2017 at a memorial gathering in Rockford the Mendelsohn Club.  Frank Schier was for many years the editor and publisher of the local weekly The Rock River Times.   My name is Tom Fleming, and I was for many years Frank Schier’s friend, sparring partner, and occasionally punching bag.  We once hosted a television show that must hold the record for the smallest audience, and for a brief period, I wrote restaurant reviews for his newspaper.  Perhaps that fact will be recorded on my own...

Rasselas is probably Dr. Johnson’s most accessible piece of moral philosophy.  Since we shall be posting a podcast on the work, the treatment here can be quite limited.  Rasselas is a sort of a picaresque novel that tells the story of a young Abyssinian prince who, with his sister and mentor, leave the Happy Valley, an earthly paradise where the prince, his sisters, and their companions and attendants, enjoy every possible comfort and pleasure.  Rasselas, however, is not happy but is  possessed of what seems to be a romantic delusion that he should desire something.  He imagines that there is...

Part III Socrates:  Well then, Xanthippe, now  that we have silenced this childish ruffian–would that we could do the same to Anna and all her teachers and disciples–we can talk like adults.  We are not random strangers, we Athenians, but fellow citizens in a commonwealth founded by the goddess Athena and the earthborn king  Erechtheus and unified by Poseidon’s son, the hero Theseus.  The bones of heroes are buried on our territory, and their spirits and the ghosts of our ancestors watch over us, but more important than these heroes and ghosts are the nomoi, the traditional laws and customs...

Joe Biden–or was it Neil Kinnock?–has told Donald Trump to “grow up” and accept the verdict of his administration’s intelligence commissars.   Is this the same Joe Biden who has not been content to make  fool of himself at every point in his career  and then, as vice president, by his shenanigans dragged the whole country into disrepute?  This is the poor fool who actually stooped to plagiarizing the platitudes of  socialist Neil Kinnock, and then offered his defense that it was staffers who were responsible–the staffers who put the words into his mouth he was incapable of writing himself. VP...

The extreme case of false individualism is the libertarian sect, rooted in the teachings of Ayn Rand,  known as Objectivism.  Only in America, I sometimes think, could a political movement be based on a writer of pop fiction.  The thinness of Rand’s erudition is matched only by the banality of her imagination, which ran to most of the clichés of soft pornography.  I never got farther than a few chapters into Atlas Shrugged, but I did once manage to finish The Fountainhead, and even though I skimmed it rather quickly, my gag reflex was hard to suppress.  In her defense,...

This mysterious work, when it was discovered in the late 20th century, was attributed to Plato, but in view of the philosopher’s appearance in the dialogue, that identification is as suspect as everything about the work.  The scholar and translator, who says he discovered the text in the ruins of a Calabrian monastery, claims the Greek original was destroyed in a fire.  Even if the tale is true, it is hard to know what to make of the translation, which makes anachronistic literary references and uses late 20th century expressions for which it is hard to imagine Greek equivalents.  Nonetheless,...