A friend sent me a book by an acquaintance of my father’s and the late dean of American radio talk shows, Barry Farber. It’s called Cocktails with Molotov and is the kind of memoir that’s difficult not to like, because in this day and age the simple and truthful voice of a person who has no agenda except to amuse the reader is a rarity.
It’s time to pick another book. I propose either a selection of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls or else Gulliver’s Travels, which I have been intermittently rereading. My wife and I have been working through Herodotus after breakfast and have at last hit Book V, where we can turn from Scythians and Libyans and read about Macedonians and Greeks on the eve of the Ionian Revolt that leads to Darius’ invasion of 490. This week I’ll be welcoming expressions of preference on any of the above.
The main problem began last May when the death of George Floyd led to widespread riots, not only in Minnesota, but across the country. Such pusillanimous politicians as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey let the rioters burn down large parts of the city. The same thing happened in Portland, Seattle and elsewhere.
The United States were in origin a confederation of American republics, ruled for the most part by their own constitutions and laws and whose member states were bound in a contract of union with very strict limits. Between 1776 and 1860, the complex and republican system was devolving–by a sort of political entropy–into a simpler system that concentrated more and more power at the top.
The Fleming Foundation’s 2021 Summer Seminar, “Saving the Remnant,” will take up what happens after a civilization falls. The civilization in question will be ancient Rome, after the collapse of the Western Empire. Topics include the Germanic invasions, the reign of Theoderic King of Italy, the last great Roman writer–Boethius, and the various attempts to preserve or restore civilization made by Boethius, Cassiodorus, the Emperor Justinian, Saint Benedict, as well as some reflections on the specter of the Roman Empire that has haunted the West down to our own time.
The seminar will be held in Rockford, Illinois July 12-16. Speakers include, in addition to myself, E, Christian Kopff, James Patrick, Charles Yost, and Christopher Check. In preparation for the Seminar, Stephen Heiner and I did a series of podcast discussions on the background.
In this second podcast, provided as preparation for the Fleming Foundation’s 2021 Summer Seminar, Dr. Fleming and Stephen Heiner discuss the failure of the Roman Empire to defend its border from peace-loving immigrants yearning to breathe free.
What Franklin and the others knew is that a republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must be engaged in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as original sin.
Just as there is the irony of fate, there are ironies of nomenclature. One such is writ large in the name of Alexei Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation.” As I pointed out in this space on a recent occasion, corruption in Russia is largely what stands between the Kremlin and world domination, as villains preoccupied with plundering the nation’s wealth have little time left for villainy.
One of the themes of my writing for Fleming Foundation is: We have to get along with the Russians. They have 6,000 nuclear bombs. We have 6,000 nuclear bombs. Be careful.
Perhaps the greatest film actor I’d never heard of until I discovered him a very few years ago.
