The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
More than any election in my lifetime – and I remember the 1964 Goldwater bid when I was nine – this one has been nothing but one revolting development after another. One reason is this election has been going on since this time four years ago. Just before the November 2016 plebiscite, Hillary and her minions ginned up the Russia Hoax as a guarantee against Trump’s possible victory. At the time I wrote on this very site that it was impossible for the Russians to rig our election because it’s too complex. That turned out to be the case, as...
If Martin Luther King Jr. is considered The American Hero, and the civil rights movement viewed as the ultimate expression or spring board of everything good about America…. Then it is only logical that a reexamination of people like Southerner, three-time elected Governor George Wallace is considered, and written about in a different way to counter it
I hardly ever read introductions to classic works of English or American fiction; however, the farther removed we are a literary tradition, the more we may feel the need of a little preliminary exposition. The Athenian poet Sophocles was born a few years after 500 B.C. and would have been about thirteen years old when Xerxes led the Persian army into Greece and burned the temples on the Athenian acropolis.
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.
