The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Wednesday’s Child: Christmas with the Borgia

The identity of the Aragonese noble family associated with mafia style poisonings in Renaissance Italy – as well as with incest, larceny, and simony, among other lesser crimes – is incidental to the story here.  I can easily replace the name of Cesare Borgia with that of Claudius of Denmark, likewise known, at least to readers of Shakespeare, for murdering his brother: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules.”  Prince Hamlet, in fact, was very much on my mind when, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Alexei Navalny’s investigation into his own murder. “I...

3

Poetry: “Noel”

I received from Robert Peters this Christmas gift:  a newly discovered Christmas poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, which I am sharing with our readers.

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Cruel to Be Kind

Wisdom comes from knowledge which comes from painfully acquired information about reality—facts.  Since, as you say, you have little knowledge of the current political scene and even less of history,  your concerns do not really involve rational thought but are a reflection of depression, and unfortunately, this is a mental condition that leads the sufferer to be happy to see, as the French say, “tout en noir”, all in black.

7

The Trump Legacy

That so many Americans are interested in Presidential “legacies” and are personally and emotionally involved with “my President” and “my  “leader” is unhealthy.  After all, the President was supposed to be a Constitutional public official.   

7

Clearing the Air….

The End-of-the Worlders are going from handwringing over a possibly stolen election–please don’t tell me you know it is stolen in fact because you don’t know anything of the kind–to declaring the death of the American republic. It’s the worst sort of ditto-head approach to politics. It begins by saying, “Say, this is about the best damn country that has ever existed” and go on in the vein of Babbit’s speech to the Zenith Booster Club.

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Sophocles’ Ajax: The Struggle Over the Corpse

The end of the Ajax is a rhetorical battle over the corpse of Ajax, and, though it is a war of words, it is no less serious than the Homeric conflicts over the battle and armour of a fallen hero.  The basic antagonists are three:  Teucer, the two Atridae (who make much the same argument, though Agamemnon is more reasonable, perhaps because he is dealing with Odysseus), and Odysseus. Rather than summarize the scene, I’d like to leave it up to the readers to give their response to the following questions: First, what is the nub of each set of...