The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Chapter One (Part A) Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. He came to with a jolt, like someone regaining consciousness after being knocked on the head, but he kept his eyes shut, trying to remember what he had witnessed in the night. He had overslept again. Worn out from too much traveling in dreams, he was not ready to face another day. The visions of the night had exhausted him, but he could not recall any details. In the part of his mind that held the what, where, and...
Ched P. Rayson writes from the Iron Range. He is largely a recluse, who has published nothing under his own name. The first section of chapter one of this “fantasy” is being posted with open access to everyone. The next section will be restricted to subscribers, the third to paying subscribers. We have not decided how to treat the rest of it, but there may be additional fees. Eventually, the plan is to produce an ebook with possibly a print edition.
In some perverse way I’m hoping that our editor will put up today’s post without reading it, because few things are more irritating to a savant than a layman on the prowl in his field of expertise. Instinctively he reaches for the shotgun loaded with rock salt to teach the trespasser a lesson. I’ve only ever had a year of Latin in adolescence, but living as I do in a country whose language, in Byron’s phrase, is “that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth / And sounds as if it should be writ on...
The media are speculating that Mitt Romney will become the “next” John McCain, a thorn in President Trump’s side, assuming the former Massachusetts governor is elected to the U.S. Senate from Utah this November. It may seem so. Although Trump contributed to Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, and just endorsed his Senate bid, Romney blasted Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, and has done so recently as well. “With McCain’s retreat, some turn to Romney to carry his torch,” intoned the Washington Post on February 15. “Romney took to Twitter, for instance, to lash out at Trump last month after The...
“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” –Will Rogers Despite what the humorist said, since FDR’s election in 1932 Democrats have been able to cobble together enough factional groups to form winning coalitions fairly often, beginning with their 20-year run, 1932-52, when they grabbed the presidency and both houses of Congress. They have been aided by the squabbles in the Republican Party and its presidents’ penchant for betraying their own base, something Democratic presidents do less often to their base. In the industrial era, the Democrats’ main power base has been the...
I hate to sound like a bonehead movement conservative, but….I find it hard to believe anything I see in the news, which in my case consists mostly of the headlines of The Daily Mail. I don’t mean I think the writers and editors are lying. I just find it hard to believe that anyone could make the stupid comments that inspire the headlines, that a writer would find them worth repeating, that an editor who did not work for his middle school newsletter would print them, and, finally, that anyone would take the trouble to click on the headline and...
Orestes puts his case to Menelaus. His uncle owes Agamemnon for all he did in launching an expedition to regain Menelaus’ wife. After all, Orestes is not asking Menelaus to kill his own daughter to fulfill his duty—a look back at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and forward to Orestes’ plot to kidnap Hermione. In what should be a clinching argument for a normal Greek, Orestes points out that if he and Electra die, so does the line of Agamemnon. Menelaus (682 ff) agrees—up to a point—that kinsmen should endure each others’ misfortunes/evils, but only if the god gives...
Dr. Fleming and Rex Scott have their Disagreements From Under the Rubble. Original Air Date: February 15, 2018 Show Run Time: 33 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Rex Scott The Fleming Foundation · From Under the Rubble, Episode 20: Disagreements From Under the Rubble℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2018. All Rights are Reserved.
I used to mistrust Boris Nemtsov, suspecting him of being a sanctioned opposition figurehead, until he was publicly executed on Putin’s orders. It’s quite amazing what martyrdom does for a man’s reputation. After the Nemtsov assassination I switched my mistrust to Alexei Navalny, who, gallingly, persisted in living as though to show that he cared nothing for my opinion of him. Yet a recent investigation published by Navalny’s foundation (FBK, or “Fight Against Corruption”) is so delightfully boisterous – so adventurous in delving into subjects no ordinary politician would touch with a bargepole – it has persuaded me that I...
The Orestes, performed in 408, is one of Euripides’ last surviving plays–the poet died only two years later. It was very popular in the Hellenistic and Byzantine eras, much cited and taught in schools. It is a vivid melodrama (in the modern not the ancient sense), but it is also a profound and difficult meditation on the meaning of friendship. One caveat before I make a few remarks on the play. Though Euripides was, in the following centuries, the most popular writer of tragedies, I have always rated him distinctly third compared with his predecessors, Aeschylus and Sophocles. I...
