Category: Fleming

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A Life / Fleming

23 Nov, 2016

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

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In Search of a Vocation I have never felt entirely comfortable in my own time.  Most men who have passed the age of seventy, as I have, have lived long enough to seem, and not just to others, fossils from another geological age.  I have felt that way not only recently but already as a boy, and when I read Booth Tarkington, his world appeared quite normal.  It was MGM musicals, Frank Sinatra, and the YMCA that struck me as bizarre.  Even later, when I was trying my best to ape the avant-garde—reading without pleasure the artless productions of the...

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Autodidact / Fleming

22 Nov, 2016

A Diatribe Against “Scholarship” from Arthur Machen

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In “A Secret Glory,” the Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen describes the foibles of his hero Meyrick, who is forever condemning institutions that fail to live up to the high standards he has set for them.  At first, as a student, I must confess, I shared young Meyrick’s contempt for mere pedantry, though I knew pedants like Douglas Young, Brooks Otis, TRS Broughton, and Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones among others, who (like B.L. Gildersleeve) were scholars in both senses.  I learned too late, however, that even the mere pedants stand head and shoulders above the toad-licking poseurs–Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists–who now infest the humanities....

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

22 Nov, 2016

Gary Keillor vs. the Yahoos

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Desperate to get his name into the news, Garrison Keillor is now posing as a political pundit.  We now live in two nations, civilized Christian people who voted for Hillary and the yahoos who voted for Trump “Broadway shows will now feel obliged to give lectures on diversity to any prominent Trumpist in the audience. Trumpists will explain, as one woman did, “Voting for him was the only way I could say that I exist.” (People who shoot up theaters may feel the same way.) The Trump faction will boycott chamber music concerts, wine tastings, lectures on Byzantine art and poetry...

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Fleming / Free Content

21 Nov, 2016

Debunking the Sanctuary Movement–30 Years Ago, Part I

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This Perspective from January 1986 analyzed the budding sanctuary movement and dissected its entirely bogus spiritual, moral and constitutional foundations.  It infuriated Richard John Neuhaus, who at that time led the movement to silence an irritating political heretic.  I was naive and did not yet realize how much so-called conservatives hate the truth, whenever it conflicts with the short-term goals of their little movement. “Shelter from the Storm” The trial of 12 sanctuary workers in Tucson has heated up an issue which is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980’s. The movement, whose members...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

19 Nov, 2016

When Will We Ever Learn

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Mike Pence went to the hottest show on Broadway-a leftist/revolutionary travesty of Alexander Hamilton and, he found himself insulted and attacked by the cast.  He must have been shocked to discover that leftists  are never honorable.  Don’t like the Catholic Church?  Then rape and murder nuns and blow up churches.  Don’t like the Czar?  Murder his family.  Don’t like the way people in Florida and Alabama voted in a presidential election?   Tear up Portland and Los Angeles, where they voted your way. The left has never played by any rules but its own, and those are the simple rules...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Fleming

15 Nov, 2016

Jerks, Chapter 2: Taxonomy

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In the new millennium, the Americans acting badly are at heart spoiled children who have never learned what it would mean to grow up.  100 years ago, this type was already developing, and Booth Tarkington describes some of these characters in his fiction—the Penrod stories, Little Orvie, and, most effectively, the character of Georgie Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons.  Georgie was a spoiled rich kid, who despised his social inferiors as riff-raff, but hard times eventually taught him how to be a man. Georgie had been spoiled by a doting mother and aunt, but most boys had to undergo the...

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A Life / Fleming

15 Nov, 2016

A Life in Shreds and Patches: A Brief Justification

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An Entirely Unnecessary but Fortunately Brief Preface A man who presumes to share stories of his life with strangers, so I have always thought, has probably mistaken his self conceit for a general opinion of his own importance.  In celebrating his own experiences he is also telling his fellow men, “Forget about your petty little lives and make way for the Great Panjandrum!” I agree with Samuel Johnson, that every man’s life is worthy of a biography, but the great Cham said nothing of autobiography.  I might think “How wonderful if we could read the memoirs of Miltiades or a...

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Fleming / On the House

12 Nov, 2016

Momentum

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Three recent pieces, two from America and one Italian, cite the work of the humble president of this little organization, in other words me. The first American–in the geographical sense–piece is by Peter Brimelow on his highly esteemed website VDare: http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-american-conservative-movement-has-ended-the-american-right-goes-on                                                                                                                      ...

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Feature / Fleming

8 Nov, 2016

Jerks 1: Land of the Free, Home of the Jerk, Part E

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The rot goes deeper than weakness and social dependency.  These same anti-socialist refugees still wore blue jeans—the official uniform of the proletariat—and professed egalitarian contempt for all those fripperies of dress and manners some relics of bourgeois society still clung to in the West.  I am speaking of the America of two decades ago.  Today, if I had to produce a single word to express the salient quality of modern Americans, it would be something like “shamelessness” or “impudence.”  Even elderly people no longer refrain from talking in Church, and their kids never quit screaming during the services.  Afterwards, at...

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Fleming

7 Nov, 2016

The Political Lessons of Polybius for 2016, Part I

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Before going further in Polybius’ analysis of the “Libyan War,”  what lessons have we learned so far? First there is the lesson that Machiavelli tried in vain to teach the Italians of his day:  Mercenaries–people who serve in the military for pay and benefits and not out of loyalty to their own people–cannot be trusted.  They are working for their own benefit and not for their country’s.  A few years ago, my sons and I were assaulted by a group of angry black soldiers just back from the Middle East.  “We fightin’ fo you freedom, MFers!”  Of course we have many...