Category: Fleming

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Fleming / On the House

12 Sep, 2016

…Who Help Themselves

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This piece appeared in the first number of revamped Chronicles, in  May 1985.  Some readers found it alarming at the time.   It now seems quite moderate, though many law-and-order neoconservatives would still deplore the call for self-help.   We take too much for granted in America. Whenever we have a problem, we assume that somebody else is paid to solve it, somebody from the government. All the ancient burdens of the human flesh—poverty and envy, greed and arrogance—have been turned over to one or another bureaucratic agency.  We sleep better at night knowing that somewhere someone is busy making life...

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Feature / Fleming

12 Sep, 2016

Properties of Blood I.7: Dueling For Honor, Part A

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Defining the Duel The word duel is often used loosely to mean a fight between two men or even any competitive conflict between men or beasts.  The historian Victor Kiernan has written an entire book on European dueling without ever, apparently, figuring out what a duel actually was.  Let us begin by setting aside such metaphorical usages as “dueling egos,” “dueling banjos,” and “dueling roosters,” and restrict ourselves to violent encounters between two human antagonists, who may or may not ne accompanied by allies who may simply insure fair play or even take part in the action. If we are...

11

Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

10 Sep, 2016

Trump: The Lesser Evil

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  Hillary Clinton’s take on a large percentage of the American people is drawing fire: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right, The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” and added, “some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The other half of Trump supporters are simply stupid and depressed, and people in Hillaryland should pity them. Let’s do some quick and very rough math.  In round numbers, the country has about 280 million people, about three fourths of whom—or 210 million—are old enough to vote. ...

8

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

7 Sep, 2016

Bullying and Baloney

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Bullying is the latest great social craze in the American media. They always have some social pathology with which they terrorize the suckers who watch the news or read websites.  Back in the 1980’s and 90’s they beat the drum for teenage pregnancy and father-daughter incest.  They had to drop the former, after a few dissidents were cruel enough to point out that the term “father” turned out to include the mother’s second husband, live-in boyfriend, and any stranger in the night she happened to entertain. The increase in teenage pregnancies was real enough, but, since the cause was the sexual...

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Feature / Fleming

6 Sep, 2016

Properties of Blood I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part D

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On a more basic level, shame can be an intense feeling of embarrassment and inferiority.  Romance languages express this feeling by using derivatives from the Latin verecundia:  vergogna (Italian), verguenza (Spanish), vergogne (French).  This sense of shame is an expansive category as Julio Caro Baroja points out in his historical account of Spanish honor. “Verecundia shows itself not only as chastity and modesty, as the blush which lewd speech or actions bring to the face, but also as respect for parents and elders, which prevents one from doing certain things in their presence, and as humility, reserve, and respect for...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

5 Sep, 2016

The Chickens Come Home To Roost

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These are not really  trick questions: Question 1) What is dumber than a dumb jock? A sports fan—or sports writer—who lionizes postmodern athaletes [sic!] who are paid to slough off every quality that turns hominid apes into human beings.  Note: I am not talking about genuine athletes, who still exist–though there are not many “Olympians” among them–but sports stars, who are as insubstantial in human terms as any other media celebrity.  Televised football games are aimed at the husbands of soap opera fans, and our sports heroes are cut from the same cardboard and tinsel as Ryan Seacrest and Angelina Jolie. This past...

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Fleming / On the House

30 Aug, 2016

Writing and Reading Verse, Part IV

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Despite the timidity of readers afraid to expose their versifying to scrutiny, I shall write one or two more posts in the hope of seeing some small light dawn in the distance. Before leaving blank verse—which, as I said earlier, was easy to write poorly but hard to write well—let us look at one or two more specimens of how it can be done effectively.  Here is Milton’s description of Satan in Hell: He trusted to have equal’d the most High, If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais’d impious War in Heav’n...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Feature / Fleming

30 Aug, 2016

Jerks 0: Introduction, Part B (Conclusion)

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Jerkitude is a contagious disease:  After putting up with bullying and rudeness for a few days, we come to expect it, and we are ready to lash out in a preemptive strike against anyone who even slightly offends us.  It’s like the story of the guy whose car breaks down at night on a lonely road and finds he does not have a jack.  He starts walking down the road, imagining the warm reception he will get from a friendly farmer, but the farther he goes, the darker his thoughts become.  What if the farmer doesn’t have a jack?  What...

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Feature / Fleming

29 Aug, 2016

Properties of Blood, I.6: In Defense of Honor, Part C

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Opponents of dueling have made many valid arguments against staking life and honor on swordsmanship or marksmanship, and not all of them went so far as Twain in deriding the very notion of personal honor.   Before evaluating the arguments on both sides, we should have some understanding of what this honor is that would cause a man to risk death.  In the 21st century, honor has little meaning in vernacular English.  It can hardly be used without quotation marks or an ironic intonation of the voice.  This was not always so.  Once upon a time, one could take for...