The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
I’ve just started rereading Sophocles’ Ajax. I’m not sure why, apart from the need to keep reading Greek, but there is something that has always attracted me in the portrait of the staunch reactionary who goes mad, after being dishonored, and of his glib enemy, Odysseus, who learns humanity. (I have a strong hunch that in his depictions of Odysseus–as in his Oedipus–Sophocles is dealing with the Athenian mentality of his own day, and that scholars who see the poet’s friend Cimon in Ajax are on the right track.) If five people promise to start reading it, I’ll start a...
It is through the rituals of common meals, common worship and common work that a family discovers its identity as a family. The pleasures and opportunities, no less than the pressures of modern existence threaten this identity.
As the gentle reader may remember from previous posts, my wife is a concert pianist who, over the last few years, has been busy bringing to light the time capsule of classical music which Shostakovich left buried in Azerbaijan, largely in the form of his beloved Kara Karaev. Now Azerbaijan is at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while in Europe her concert engagements have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus. So evenings Olga and I sit in the kitchen, poor and sober, debating what can be said in appeals to potential sponsors of the recording...
In the fall of 2020, Donald Trump has taken much flak from the left for, in their estimation, his refusal to denounce “white supremacy” and the far right. The first time he ran for president, it was Trump making the same accusations in a losing effort.
This was the first of a number of “sermons,” a play on Horace’s term (sermones) for his satires plus an implied rebuke to the poet’s tendency to preach.
The Household is not just a “castle” but a little commonwealth. When Cain was expelled from his father’s polity of hearth and home, he realized that exile from the community of kinfolks was a fate at least as bad as death. ”My punishment” he declared, “is greater than I can bear….I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” The family is primarily an expression of blood-ties and the affections they engender. In a broader sense, however, the household is a model for...
Here in the Old World, there is often a lot of debate about the Electoral College anytime a US Presidential election looms, but the truth is that so few people, even in the US, really know much about it (beyond what the media tells them). Hence my European friends often ask me what the deal is and what I think about the system. The truth is that the history behind the Electoral College is pretty interesting, and gives us some insights into how America’s current form of government has traditionally tried to function.
In his book, Tye digs up the corpse of Senator Joseph McCarthy with the intent of comparing his maligned career to the current administration of Donald Trump. The Democrats, who have gone full Marxist, could find no better grave to desecrate and phantom to exorcise than that of Joseph McCarthy.
Leftists who claim to deplore consumerism, can only offer more government, while Libertarians and Classical Liberals, whose ideology of individualism began the process that culminates in Marxist-feminist-transgenderist consumerism, can promise only more servility and the degradation of the human person into an object for twisted scientific experimentation.
In 1935 there appeared, to no great acclaim, a book of essays whose title asks a question that is still of vital importance to the dwindling remnant of Americans and Europeans who wish to think for themselves: Who Owns America?
