I learned today, from several sources, that my former assistant Matthew Rarey has died. Mat was still a young man. I have no idea, at this point, what happened, but he had been very troubled in recent years. He yearned for the best, and if he often fell short, he was hardly different from the rest of us. I’ll write more later, perhaps, since Mat kept in constant touch with me.
In the current tempest in a teapot over Bill O’Reilly’s allegedly indecent behavior toward women, no one seems willing to state the obvious: The fellow–by no means a man–is both a bully and a toady, the embodiment of the lying conservative journalism at FOX. This is a corrected and improved version of a Perspective published long long ago in 2001. Some celebrities seem born with a natural star-power that radiates from them like an angelic halo. Alcibiades, so it is said, had this kind of “charisma,” to make himself adored even by people who disliked him. To be a...
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...
To understand what Johnson was doing in his moral essays, we have to know something of the revolution he was opposing: the philosophies of abstraction that were taking hold in his lifetime. Since the 18th century at least, we have been asked to identify ourselves and our duty with all of humanity and its needs, and to take a dim view of any lesser loyalties to kith and kin, religion and country. Although these ideas of universal charity and duty are usually identified with Christianity, they derive not from the Bible directly or from Christian theology, but from the attempts...
In recent times, Samuel Johnson is remembered primarily for his quips, retorts, and for Boswell’s portrayal of his ferocious character. Johnson’s prose style and flashes of brilliance are enough to win over most readers who take any pleasure in English literature. My own particular interest, however, is in this moral philosophy, which can be traced in essays that appeared in The Rambler, The Idler, his review of Soame Jennyings, and in his one novel, Rasselas. To anticipate my general conclusion, I should say at the beginning that, although he developed his ethical thought in occasional essays and fiction, he was...
Art is a noble human attempt to make beauty and sense out of human experience. “The Arts” are an ignoble scam by which no-talent bums force the taxpayers to subsidize their indolence. I received an email today from a friend who has done good work in one of the more popular arts. He is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, but he was calling upon his friends to “do what we can to reverse this ill advised decision before it is too late.” My distinguished friend’s argument is that the Trump administration will be “throwing away an opportunity to move the culture and...
I hates the Constitution, This Great Republic too “That’s unconstitutional!” Hardly a day goes by that we do not hear some proposal of the Trump administration denounced as a violation of the Constitution. It is beginning to appear that NPR and other organs of the revolutionary left cannot invoke Trump’s name without throwing in “unconstitutional,” something in the way that “swift-footed” always precedes Achilles. A good example of this rhetorical tactic is the headline Unamericans for Disunity (or is it Americans United ?) put on their latest propaganda screed: “AU Continues The Legal Fight Against President Trump’s Unconstitutional Muslim Ban.” Counting...
“Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone” Reading those lines from “the Garden,” an incautious reader might imagine that the poet—Andrew Marvell—did not limit his Puritan tendencies to theology and politics but hated womankind with the fury of a John Knox. In fact, Marvell was a woman-loving man who wrote several of the best erotic (I don’t mean dirty!) poems in English. God bless him: He was only a hypocrite. Marvell’s lines came to mind when I read news of the feminist plans to mark today’s international celebration of women by refusing to go to work. At first...
Students at the University of Michigan have taken the lead in the Left’s campaign to criminalize White People. Following a string of student movements at other leading institutions devoted to the debasement of learning, non-white students at Michigan are demanding their own “permanent designated space on central campus for Black students and students of color to organize and do social justice work.” This comes on the heels of the construction of a $10 million Black Student Center, which is insufficient proof of Michigan’s commitment to genocide. With the predictable knee-jerk that is the hallmark of their movement, American conservatives are...
