The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
In Les Visiteurs, one of my favorite movies of all time – I once showed it to Dr. Fleming, who said, after an astonished pause, that “this is the most reactionary film I’ve ever seen” – there is a moment when the hero, a medieval knight who has stumbled into the twentieth century, is being shown the Larousse encyclopedia entry on his illustrious family. “Who is this?” he asks about a descendant of his who lived in the eighteenth century. “Oh, he was a famous revolutionary.” And what does that mean, the knight persists. “He wanted to kill the king.”...
Pletho had concealed his growing attachment to what he thought was the old religion of the Greeks, though it was in fact NeoPlatonic Neopaganism, but some part of his explicitly pagan work The Laws came to the attention of his more Orthodox friends. However the last fragment of the Roman Empire had more on its hands in the 1450’s than a brilliant pagan
I see in the online news that the actress Diana Rigg, Dame Diana since 1994, died a couple of days ago at eighty-two. She became famous in America playing Emma Peel in 1965–67 in a British spy show called The Avengers.
I think I listened to this on an Audibe book the second night in the hospital. A real cheerer-upper, as Holden Caulfield would say Alfred. Lord Tennyson From “The Lotos-Eaters”) Hateful is the dark-blue sky, Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea. Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labor be? Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? And things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we...
Most recipients of this message will know that I have been held in durance vile, for the past six days, as a prisoner of the International Medical-Industrial Complex. Yesterday after the lunch I did not eat, I returned home from Swedish-American Hospital. Please no jokes about “Da Swedish Surgeon.” Miracle of miracles I am walking—slowly and briefly— around the ground floor of the house, using only walker or cane. I even ate a breakfast of one half an English muffin, with yoghurt cheese, a glass of grapefruit juice, a small fruit cup, and my first cup of coffee since last...
September must be allegory month, and fittingly one of the films now the talk of the Venice Film Festival is an offering from the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky entitled “Dear Comrades.” Its subject is the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov-on-Don, in 1962, and in fairness it ought to be said that a 2012 TV miniseries, entitled “Once Upon a Time in Rostov,” had done that subject ample justice, notwithstanding that it was made in the first year of what will enter history books as Putin’s Terror. But Konchalovsky regards himself as an artist, and hence...
Dr. Fleming talks about the history of immigration and the current crisis in this 39:20 lecture.
I’m sure you’re heard the totally fake news about Trump supposedly insulting American troops, calling them “losers” and “suckers” Scott Adams totally refutes them on many points on his Friday podcast, starting at 27:00, calling it the “Losers and Suckers Hoax.” But he also notes this hoax will be devastatingly effective against Trump, as were the previous Fine People Hoax and the Russia Collusion Hoax. But I think this latest massive lie will unleash Trump to improvise a total war on Biden and the Democrats. Campaigns can be rough, such as LBJ’s 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad, implying Republican Barry Goldwater,...
“No matter how totalitarian is Putin,” one of our readers has asked in response to last week’s post, “is there any other way to keep Russia from falling into the hegemonic abyss represented by our deracinated Western leaders?” The question, to me, is hardly new, at least when raised rhetorically.
To produce the tough and resolute men who create, sustain, and defend civilization requires a discipline that more resembles Parris Island than the Fantasy Island schooling in America that leaves no whim unfulfilled, no vicious tendency unstimulated. Imposing academic rigor and tough discipline may be the most difficult challenge faced by home-schooling parents, even those less indulgent than Michel’s father. None of us, probably, has had the success we planned for.
