Category: Fleming

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Feature / Fleming

1 Mar, 2018

In Search of the Different Drummer (a postscript)

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As a college freshman, I made friends with a high school senior who was permitted to live in our dormitory.  I never learned how Gary, a Catholic high school student from Chicago, ended up in a college dorm in Charleston.  Perhaps I should have asked. Whenever someone did make the mistake of asking Gary what he was doing in Charleston, he invariably answered: “I’m just waiting for a streetcar.” And, if the questioner persisted with the inevitable protest, “But there aren’t any streetcars in Charleston,” Gary responded: “That must be why it’s taking so long.” That is where many of...

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Fleming / Free Content

28 Feb, 2018

Marching to a Different Drum, Concluded

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Previous If you think any of this argument is overstated, just go to the library and look at the artistic masterpieces of Jacob Epstein and Andy Warhol, and, as you are reading the wit and wisdom of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, explaining the evils of Western culture, listen to some light background music from Ornette Coleman playing “between the notes” on his plastic saxophone.  This was all decades ago, in the period that conservatives still celebrate as a high point of our culture, the time when “the Greatest Generation” was still ruling the planet, back before every imaginable ethnic,...

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Fleming

27 Feb, 2018

Marching to a Different Drum

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You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80.  Light breeze out of the South at five miles per hour.  Chance of rain less than 10%.”  Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour.  Which are you going to believe, your senses or government-backed science reported in the government-controled media? Coming away from the window, you pick a modern history textbook off the shelf, and you read that modern times are marked by progress.  The past was  a sewer of racism, sexism, bigotry and ethnic oppression, but...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

23 Feb, 2018

I’m So Sensitive I Could Cry

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The most recent offense against the religion and morality of the World Controllers was perpetrated by a  German figure skater named Nicole Schott, who had the unmitigated gall to use the theme song of Schindler’s List for her routine at the Olympics.  In the report I read, the writer was so busy quoting the horrified tweets that the poor dear did not even mention Ms Schott’s actual performance, the score and/or medals it received. Outrage over the cultural appropriation of Hollywood junk music was trumped by a West Coast crime writer, who was simply horrified to see someone in her...

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Fleming / Free Content

16 Feb, 2018

Blackboard Jungles

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I hate to sound like a bonehead movement conservative, but….I find it hard to believe anything I see in the news, which in my case consists mostly of the headlines of The Daily Mail.  I don’t mean I think the writers and editors are lying.  I just find it hard to believe that anyone could make the stupid comments that inspire the headlines, that a writer would find them worth repeating, that an editor who did not work for his middle school newsletter would print them, and, finally, that anyone would take the trouble to click on the headline and...

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Autodidact / Fleming

15 Feb, 2018

Orestes, Part II

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For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ Orestes puts his case to Menelaus.  His uncle owes Agamemnon for all he did in launching an expedition to regain Menelaus’ wife.  After all, Orestes is not asking Menelaus to kill his own daughter to fulfill his duty—a look back at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and forward to Orestes’ plot to kidnap Hermione. In what should be a clinching argument for a normal Greek, Orestes points out that if he and Electra die, so does the line of Agamemnon.  Menelaus (682 ff) agrees—up...

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Autodidact / Fleming

13 Feb, 2018

Euripides’ Orestes

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For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ The Orestes, performed in 408, is one of Euripides’ last surviving plays–the poet died only two years later.  It was very popular in the Hellenistic and Byzantine eras, much cited and taught in schools.   It is a vivid melodrama (in the modern not the ancient sense), but it is also a profound and difficult meditation on the meaning of friendship. One caveat before I make a few remarks on the play.  Though Euripides was, in the following centuries, the most popular writer of tragedies,...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

3 Feb, 2018

Welcome to the World of Stephen King

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Stephen King, on learning of a train crash in which Republican members of Congress were shaken up and the driver of a garbage truck was killed, tweeted: “A trainload of Republicans on their way to a pricey retreat hit a garbage truck,” King noted Thursday. “My friend Russ calls that karma.” King was immediately attacked and he later apologized for his indiscretion. If we wish to be kind, we might recall that King was a suicidal alcoholic who drank mouthwash, when he could not get real booze, and ink when he could not get mouthwash. If we probed deeper, we...

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Feature / Fleming

15 Jan, 2018

A PS on Trump’s Dirty Mouth

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When I posted my comments about Trump on Facebook, some “friends” seemed to think that I was endorsing or defending his language.  I added this clarification: I am far from accepting, much less endorsing, such speech. As an observer of political reality, though, I refuse to indulge in idle speculation about a world that no longer exists. I find very little in public life to be even minimally acceptable, from the poor English, incomprehensible reasoning, and indeceny in broadcasting to the filth of popular music to the pornography of movies and television. I do not go out to movies, even...

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Feature / Fleming

15 Jan, 2018

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Legacy of the Doctored King

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This morning my wife, who has a bad habit of following the news,  asked me about the “legacy” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I know he plagiarized his dissertation and just about every major speech or statement he made, advised soldiers to betray their country during the Vietnam War, maintained significant contacts with Communist agents, and betrayed his wife incessantly and with teenage girls.  But, to be fair, a lot of great men have had feet of clay.  What are his positive accomplishments that would be worth celebrating?” It’s not only a fair question but a valuable one.  Before...