The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
What do we do? My friends and I have been talking about it for a long time, especially out here in California, which is way farther down the road to ruin than the rest of America. Although usually voting Republican since my first election in 1974, I long avoided joining the Party, except for brief periods to vote in the primaries for Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul. I prized being an “independent,” especially as I was a journalist. But in early 2015 I permanently jointed the Republican Party, to my friends quoting Rhett Butler, “Why? Maybe it’s because I’ve always...
I finished rereading The Man in the High Castle. I found the character development and plotting a bit muddled and, while I had remembered a subtle metaphysic that would justify and make interesting the alternate time track, it was not worked out in the book, though, judging from Dick’s other books, he had developed a coherent theory in his mind. My verdict: Enjoyable, far from a waste of time, but needed a second or third revision. We’re continuing our rather spotty reading of Gibbon, but it is as great a pleasure as the previous times, perhaps even more because reading Gibbon’s...
In 21st-Century America, there are precious few mediums through which the issue of race can be addressed with even a modicum of rationality. One of the few means still available is the thorough, well-researched work produced by historians. Perhaps the only reason this avenue is still available to us at all is because those whom you would expect to participate in protests over its content do not usually spend the required time for reading books or truly studying history.
Whenever I happen to see archival footage, which is usually in biopics, of twentieth-century musical titans, composers like Rachmaninov or Britten, I have the irrepressible sensation that actually these people belong in the nineteenth century and that their moving and speaking presence in the twenty-first is a clever trick, something like the tricolor celluloid screen my grandmother attached to the giant water-filled lens in front of her black-and-white Soviet-made TV to create the illusion of it being a modern color set. The translucent screen made the top, where the sky might be in a film, seem blue, the bottom was...
Rochester was a Restoration rake, suicidal in his excesses, and excessive in his cynicism. Much of his thought consists of the fag-ends of the French literature he picked up during the nightmare years of the regicidal commonwealth. His deathbed conversion has done little to improve his general reputation, but I am tempted to compare him with other poets of despairing disbelief, Baudelaire and Lou Reed. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, might have said of himself, one of Lou Reed’s lines: “Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.” Please don’t go looking for the source of the line, because decent people should be offended.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Alexander Hamilton called the Supreme Court “the least dangerous branch” in Federalist 78. They key was Marbury v. Madison, which Alexander Bickel and others showed was based on dubious jurisprudence. But that case gave the court almost unlimited power to change the Constitution. A lawyer friend of mine told me his constitutional law professor taught the budding young Clarence Darrows, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” And in almost every case, the court follows what the Establishment Elite tell it to do. Joe Sobran used to point out how...
While I still hope to pen some reflections on this past summer’s Shakespeare Symposium, today’s post is purely practical in nature: announcing the sale of the complete set of those talks which many of you had the pleasure of hearing in person this year, but also the Cicero set of 2018. Charter Members have access to all of these recordings (Cicero here and Shakespeare here) as part of their membership, but everyone else has to pay, though the prices we are offering are quite reasonable! Each Cicero lecture is available for $6 each, or you can get all 11 for...
Donald Trump, after plunging the world into poverty, misery, violence, and bigotry, is now using his evil powers to create storms that will destroy the goddess Gaia. This is truly the Clash of the Titans. Be on the look-out for the sequel, as the Evil Trump takes on Satan himself, defeats his master, and rules the universe.
Though I’ve been his loyal customer for the better part of a decade, our butcher regards me with suspicion. I see it in his eyes, as he looks away in the general direction of pork loin. They remind me of the eyes of a local pharmacist, in my adolescence in Moscow, from whom I used to buy potassium permanganate by the gross.
Why the immigration debate has been poisoned by cowardly pragmatists who avoid all the real issues… Podcast exclusive to Gold and Charter Members. Please Subscribe or Login for access.
