Category: Fleming

3

Feature / Fleming / On the House

10 Mar, 2016

The Left’s Jihad Against the South, Part II

By

Radicalizing Anti-Southern Bigotry The Adamses and their ilk represented the conservative/Old Yankee view of the South.  There was a more radical position before the War, that slavery was a moral evil of so black a color that slaveholders and those who defended them had to be eliminated.   This was the view of John Brown, Wendell Phillips and other radical abolitionists, whose Old Testament ferocity was all the more intense among Unitarians and atheists who had lost every other shred of religion and clung only to their millenarian fantasies of a New Jerusalem, wiped clean of sin, history, and human...

1

Feature / Fleming / On the House

9 Mar, 2016

The Left’s Jihad Against the South, Part I On the House

By

This is the slightly revised and expanded text of a lecture given in March at the Abbeville Institute’s program in Charleston. I Preface My title may strike readers as a bit alarmist.  The word “Jihad” conjures up images of unwashed religious fanatics in a terrorist campaign to eliminate any religious or cultural tradition they find alien.  One thinks immediately of the Taliban wrecking Buddhist shrines, of ISIS strapping their victims to the columns of an ancient temple in Palmyra before blowing both temple and victims to  smithereens.  By contrast, the campaign to eliminate the Southern Identity is being waged by...

1

Feature / Fleming / On the House

3 Mar, 2016

Ransom Notes March 5–On the House

By

Ransom Notes  March 2 2016 Q: Several people have asked me about the Uzbek nanny in Russia who decapitated the child she was minding.  Some news stories have reported that she was distraught because her husband back in Uzbekistan had decided to take a second wife.  Other reports indicated that she was psychotic.  What really was her motivation? TJF: The answer should obvious to anyone familiar with the old Flip Wilson routine whose signature was “the devil made me do it.”  In this case the Uzbek nanny claims allah—which amounts to more or less the same thing—told her to murder...

0

Essays / Feature / Fleming / On the House

29 Feb, 2016

East is East, Part II ON THE HOUSE

By

If human experience were rmin glacier, slowly accreting facts, pebbles, and statistical debris in its course, some case might be made for writing impartial history, but most of what he call history is a conflict of wills, between leaders and nations.  Who could write an impartial account of the Crusades?  Not a faithful Catholic or Muslim, and certainly not an atheist who is “neutral” on the religious claims of the two parties: he, in fact, has the biggest ax to grind.  I prefer Hilaire Belloc or the Whig historians who never concealed their prejudices or their agenda. Once upon a time,...

1

Feature / FF / Fleming / On the House

24 Feb, 2016

On the House: East is East, and West is Wuss, Part I

By

This piece was published in a very slightly different form in 1999.  It is being offered free to our free subscribers, and I hope that they will enjoy it.  I also hope that they will see their way to joining us more fully by subscribing to the website. If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time; post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude...

5

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

17 Feb, 2016

Every Man a President

By

The word is out from the highest bully pulpit in the land:  Donald Trump will not be President.  Why, because being President “is a serious job.”   President Obama went on,  by way of the via negativa,  to define the presidency by saying: “It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing… It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.” It is pretty obvious that the President has been spending a lot of time looking at his image in the mirror, and...

1

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Feb, 2016

The Media Masseurs, Part I

By

Here in Rome I read Midwestern news stories many hours late or, if the events took place at night, seven hours early.   In the morning, while my distant neighbors were still asleep, I read about the machete-wielding maniac in Columbus, Ohio, who attacked the diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant.  It was hard to get any hard facts.  The one fact that stuck out was the image of the Israeli flag in the window of a restaurant named Nazareth, along with other symbols and words in Arabic.  Some report did either report or conjecture that the owner had tried...

3

Feature / Fleming / On the House

4 Feb, 2016

On the House: The End of the American Century

By

About On the House.  From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing.  A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix.  This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away.  I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine.  Then, come on, do not...

10

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

4 Feb, 2016

Cruz Unchained

By

I used to try to understand Italian politics.  This meant I had to read the newspapers, no easy task back in the primitive times before anyone had heard of the Internet.    By the late 90’s I could keep up by looking at La Repubblica online, watching RAI television broadcasts, and checking up on the new faces entering the arena in the aftermath of the communist coup known as the “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) investigation of “Tangentopoli” (bribe city). After a while, it got to be more trouble than it was worth.  Who could really care which lying scoundrel beat...

2

Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

2 Feb, 2016

Rome, In the Age of Muslim Terrorism, Year 16, Part 6:  Scenes from a Life

By

Kenneth Patchen, in his novel Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, created a hapless character whose greatest ambition in life was to write a Perry Mason novel.  Although an extremely ordinary man from nowheresville—Bivalve, New Jersey—and although endowed with  a quintessentially nondescript name:  Alfred Budd, it was his name that kept on landing him in bizarre adventures.  Walking down the street, some shifty character would say, “Hey bud, come here, and, thinking he was being called by name, he stopped to listen to the con.  I know how he felt.  I lived like this for decades, and when I ended up...