The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Thomas Campion was a great song-writer of the 16th and 17th centuries. Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-turned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense, Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well; Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell, Some...
In 1945, a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army wrote a letter ridiculing “the mustachioed one,” Stalin. He was arrested by the secret police and given a long sentence in the Gulag. That was Solzhenitsyn. Last week Douglass Mackey was arrested for making jokes during the 2016 election. He went under the nom de comedy Ricky Vaughn, after the character played by Charlie Sheen in Major League,”the 1989 baseball spoof. Tyrannies don’t like comedy. Vaughn’s alleged crime was putting up on Twitter suggestions that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote for her by tweeting to a specific number. Only an...
I pledge to my supporters that I shall do what I can to restore the vision of political order that inspired the drafters of the Constitution.
The press have been beating down my door and besieging me by telephone and email to find out my positions. My crack team of specialists and eggheads is preparing a package of proposals that I intend, as every good candidate does, to ignore.
I can’t say how many times I have heard some bishop or diocesan official or other representative of the pro-life movement explain solemnly that being “truly pro-life” means you won’t just be concerned about abortion. No, we also need to be committed to alleviating the plight of migrants, the homeless, Third World babies in need of adoption, those on death row, and for all I know the polar bears.
On a previous website, I used to list, periodically, what I happened to have been reading. I think it is worth reviving, but this time, I invite others to comment on the books listed and to share their own recent adventures in literacy. I am not including With Fire and Sword.
The gentle reader may recall that I was once a student at Yale. There, unforgettably, a preternaturally astute classmate named Steve (where is he now, I wonder? In a nuthouse, most likely, along with everybody else who is preternaturally astute) once buttonholed me to deliver a lecture on the architecture of the university, specifically the residential colleges, the Sterling Memorial Library, and other structures of the 1930’s.
I am not sensing a great deal of interest in this great novel, but I shall raise one question to see if it receives a response. If readers have got at least a fourth of the way through the work, they will have read the account of Pan Jan’s diplomatic journey, his capture, and his trials.
This talk was given early last year at the Immaculata Classical Academy in Louisville.
There are countless books and articles on the press: its history, its role in defining democracy, its problems, its scandals. What is hard to find is a serious discussion of the fundamental dishonesty, the trivial huckstering that characterizes even the best newspapers. I once had dinner with a distinguished European scholar, who, with a little encouragement, asked me why there was so little freedom of discussion in the United States. Was it due to the village mentality described by Tocqueville? Or was it merely the effect of the tight grip of the media oligarchy? If the latter was true, how...
