The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
This book, a sequel to The Morality of Everyday Life, proposes a constructive alternative to the abstract ideologies that dominate both Left and Right. $30 Price for the paperback edition includes shipping and handling. Click on ad to open for details.
Among the more childish fantasies of the American Right is their obsession with Cultural Marxism. They quote Gramsci as if his second-rate and derivative writings were Holy Writ, and they boldly prophesy that once they have slain the beast of Cultural Marxism we can all get together in an orgy of American Greatness.
The first and greatest hurdle Christians have to get over is the engrained delusion that marriage is a creature of the state, which has the power to define, redefine, or even regulate this natural and divine institution.
I am going to argue a simple thesis: That the ordinary men and women who work hard, pay their taxes, take care of their children, and are trying to preserve some of what has been handed down to us a a legacy from previous generations, are not only strangers in our own land: We are the conquered subjects of a ruling elite that is made up of moral aliens who despise us and our traditions
Certainly the gentle reader is by now quite tired of the marionettes in the theater of the absurd to which our editor recently alluded in his post “America – the Picture Show.” So am I, of course. To debate with a puppet, to point out the strings that hold it aloft, to rage at the big lie at the heart of the spectacle – all this was already tedious enough twenty or thirty years ago, when the show first opened, but today it’s just a waste of breath.
This work has taken me by surprise. The Greek is far more primitive than I had anticipated, though some of the stories are told with great vividness. Ioannes appears to be something of a simpleton, but he has an unusually coherent grasp of certain of our own philosophical concepts.
The NY Times is the most pro-war paper in the country. Not only strongly boosting the current Ukraine War, but for the Gulf, Iraq and Afghan Wars. It also backed the Vietnam War in its early days; although by the late 1960s the oligarchs it serves had soured on the war, leading to the Pentagon Papers legal case the Times won…Now the Times is attacking military recruiting.
Henry VIII’s divorce was only a prelude to his subsequent divorces and remarriages–to say nothing of the judicial murders of two of the women he claimed to be his wives, and it was a symbolic beginning of the mischief, when political rulers, in pursuing their own interests, seized power not just over the church but over the institution of marriage.
For decades I have been studying the institution of marriage, and when, about a dozen years ago, conservative Republicans began agitating for laws defining and strengthening marriage, I attempted to make an argument, rooted in human history and biology and framed by the Christian tradition, that government intervention would only make matters much worse.
This is the title poem of the only volume of verse Reed published in his lifetime.