The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
As America goes through another paroxysm of Supreme Court mania since the death of Ruth Abortion Ginsburg, I though I’d advance a reform of the court I don’t think anyone else has devised: Make the court comprised of the chief justices of the 50 states. So the court would expand from nine to 50. And it would meet for one month every two years.
It is certainly true that we can see, in a man’s childhood and early youth, the seeds of what he was to become, but it is equally true that we can also perceive, in the final chapter of a human life, the culmination of of a life’s work, of things done and things left undone, of loves and hates, and of joys and sorrows.
f you are looking for someone to blame for the riots that destroy American cities, you might start with President Eisenhower, and his cadre of smug Republicans, who were willing to violate constitutional law and common sense in order to promote policies that made them proud of themselves. Without their high-minded social reforms, the concept of reparations would be laughed out of court and off the continent.
Our American barbarians are not, of course, anything like those sturdy tribal Germans who would, in a few centuries, discipline their own vigorous customs into something like a civilization. Our post-civilized men and women lack even the healthy instincts of the wild beast: They are more like the feral dogs who know only enough of human beings not to fear them.
I promised in my first talk to take up the question of immigration, which I regard as the most important of all. For almost 50 years your elected leaders have refused to enforce the laws regulating immigration, even though every poll ever taken shows that a majority want this done. There are now millions of people who have entered and continue to enter our country illegally—something that no civilized country has ever permitted.
This was an amazing statement by Kamala Harris: “A Harris administration, together with Joe Biden as the president of the United States – a Biden-Harris administration – will have access – provide access—to $100 billion in low-interest loans and investments for minority business owners.”
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...