Category: Feature

1

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

4 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (4)

By

With the Pasternak centenary in 1990 came several full-length biographies of the poet, and a discussion of their merits in the literary pages.  Reviewing Christopher Barnes’s Pasternak, Peter Levi, who has no Russian, startled readers of the Independent with the theory that “Doctor Zhivago was his masterpiece, but only a poet could have written it.”  “He has some Russian,” lied Peter France, who does not have enough Russian to know he was lying, reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in The Scotsman. Reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in the Observer, Anthony Burgess, who had expended what Russian he had ever had on A Clockwork Orange,...

19

Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

2 Jan, 2017

Travel Diary I: Through Mordor in a Taurus or Getting There is Not Half the Fun

By

We set out on our unheroic journey on a cold Friday, December 30.  It is a thousand mile trip, from Northern Illinois to Sullivan’s Island, and, if one were to judge from what can be seen from the interstate highway system, there is not much in that thousand linear miles that cannot be reduced to a numerical grid of I-39, I-64, I-75, I-40, I-26 intersected by identical lodging, food, and gas opportunities. Entering into the grid is something like an adventure in dystopian time travel—an episode of Startrek, perhaps where Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and all the other noble agents of...

12

Feature / On the House

29 Dec, 2016

The Year 2016

By

Shostakovich, our last monumental composer–before the light of the ability to write more than ditties flickered out of our civilization – used years for two of his symphonies. Symphony No. 11 was The Year 1905, for that year’s Russian Revolution. And Symphony No. 12 was The Year 1917, dedicated to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. (The links lead to YouTubes of performances of the works, if you’re inclined to listen. I did writing this.) The Year 2016 was such a year. I’ll highlight three monumental events: Brexit, Trump’s victory and the coalescing effort to stop Pope Francis from scratching adultery...

19

Feature / Fleming

25 Dec, 2016

Keeping Christmas, Part II: How the (Conservative) Grinches Stole Christmas

By

  …And replaced it with commercial nostalgia. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was still a comfortable feeling about Christmas and Easter.  True, they were being undermined by hardworking non-Christian retailers who preferred to hawk Santa and the Easter Bunny rather than proclaim the birth and resurrection of the Savior their ancestors rejected, and one of my pieces in The Southern Partisan took up the commercial sacrilege we had to endure twice a year.  Some friends, Christian as well as Jews, were annoyed, but perhaps in these benighted times they will think better of their response.  When I find...

7

A Life / Feature / Fleming

24 Dec, 2016

Keeping Christmas, Part I: Even Atheists Can Celebrate

By

This is a detached fragment of A Life in Shreds and Patches. As a cynical youth, I used to listen to Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio.  Armstrong was a bona fide American kook: an anti-sabbatarian British Israelite—from Iowa, naturally—and an autodidact who read copiously and recklessly to find evidence to fit his surrealistic theories about the Bible and human history.  Armstrong hated Christmas, so every Christmas he devoted one of the episodes of his radio program, The World Tomorrow, to the evils of Christmas—the crimes, depressions, drug overdoses, and—above all suicides—that he would cite and recite with glee to...

5

Feature / Fleming

20 Dec, 2016

A Humble Request for Support

By

2016 was a pretty good year for The Fleming Foundation.  We managed to post, on average, about one piece a day on the website and we added a number of new writers, who contributed articles, editorial columns, written interviews, and podcasts. Our list of contributors now includes, in addition to Andrei Navrozov, Frank Brownlow, and myself:  John Seiler, Clyde Wilson, Roger McGrath, Srdja Trifkovic, Marco Bassani, E. Christian Kopff, Red Phillips, and Stephen Heiner.  Until November, certain complications made it difficult to publish as many other writers as I wanted, but, now that this obstacle has been eliminated, Fleming.Foundation is...

1

All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

20 Dec, 2016

Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk! Our Delusional Opponents

By

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Sun Tzu The great Chinese strategist’s words explain why Hillary and the Left lost, and still are losing. They didn’t know their enemy, nor themselves. They had no idea Trump would trounce them. And they continue to live in a world of delusion – or, as we say in psychotherapeutic America, they’re “in denial.” On the Fleming Foundation site, I wrote about the Left’s obsession with Russia here and here. Not the atheist, communist Russia of 1917-91, which the Left commonly defended, or at...

1

Feature / Fleming

19 Dec, 2016

A Life in Shreds and Patches, Chapter 1: In Search of a Vocation, Part E

By

Movies and radio programs furnished the structure and raw materials for the games we played, day after day throughout the Summer.  Somewhere we got hold of some building materials and, with a few nails and a bit of rope, constructed “horses.”  I had a particular favorite that had a red streak of heartwood which I imagined to be the mane.  We “rode” all over the neighborhood in gangs of rustlers and sheriff’s posses, endlessly forming, dissolving, and reforming alliances, each one of us imagining we were Roy or Gene or Hoppy.  And if we were not acting out our cowboy...

2

All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

16 Dec, 2016

Why the Russians Couldn’t POSSIBLY Have Helped Trump

By

  “If your opponents are digging a hole for themselves, let them,” advises “Debate, Student Edition,” a guide for high schoolers. I also remember Franklin Roosevelt said something similar, “If you opponent is committing suicide, don’t interfere.” But I can’t find the reference online. Perhaps the Russkies deleted it to sabotage the reputation of Uncle Joe’s old Yalta pal. That’s the best reason the Russkies actually didn’t interfere in our election to help Trump: They knew Hillary’s campaign was a loser and didn’t want to interfere with her slide toward oblivion. Only Hillary and her brainwashed Main Sleaze Media worshippers...

0

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

14 Dec, 2016

Wednesday’s Child:  A Samizdat of the Internet

By

My childhood reading in Russia was divided between ordinary printed books–that is to say, rectangular objects recognizable by their covers and spines–and loose paper sheaves, underground artifacts that friends of friends of friends had been disseminating and passing to friends of friends until a copy reached one friend or another of my father’s. The principal engine for the dissemination of “samizdat,” as those sheaves were called, was the typewriter, loaded with as many as six carbons, and the avowed aim of the disseminators was the collapse of the existing regime. The disseminators of those forbidden typescripts, who were known as...