The Fifth of November–and Other Anniversaries
In this 11 minute podcast, Dr. Fleming and Rex take up some famous people born in early November.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Wednesday’s Child: In Memoriam
A friend of mine died last week. Maybe not a friend, more of an acquaintance, but so monumental were the man’s life and works that my desire to stand for a moment in his shadow is easily understood. These gradations of intimacy – close friend, friend, acquaintance, passing acquaintance, somebody whose book you’ve read, somebody with whom you once shared a seat in a train carriage – are actually quite tricky. It comes down to knowing a person, but when does one really know someone? Cases are a dime a dozen when fathers and sons, and even more commonly husbands...
And Now For Something Really Different
You could always turn on the radio and listen to the racist misogynist pornographic Rap, which rhymes with…, celebrated by the American Left that owns the media, or you might take a step back in time to the not so distant wicked past when men actually flirted with women, before “rape on the first date” became the rule.
Forget “The Great Books”: Read the Classics
Stop drinking the Kool Aid and brush up on your Shakespeare, Homer, and Tolkien.
Is Trump Negotiating with the Deep State?
A president in office can do only two main things; any more, and he divides his attention and gets nothing done, like Jimmy Carter, who corrected the grammar of the papers submitted to him. For example, Reagan revived the economy and stared down the Soviet Union in the Cold War Endgame. Trump’s two things are ending, or at least reducing, the foreign wars and expensive global empire; and getting control of our borders. The Deep State doesn’t want either.
The South’s Losing Strategy of Perpetual Retreat
For traditional Southerners today (and especially for those haggard souls who have somehow managed to remain unreconstructed through it all), the flag that so many of our ancestors fought and died under defending a foreign invasion is not something to be tossed aside.
Political Realism: A Greek Primer, Conclusion
Every society has its hypocrites, since most of us, to secure what we want, will sometimes pretend to be better than we are, but the Greeks were generally frank about everyday realities. Dr. Johnson was being very Greek when he told Boswell that “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”
Humpty Dumpty on the “Liberal” Arts
The “liberal arts” have come to mean the arts that turn students into liberals.
The Politics of Human Nature: Thirty Years Later
Thomas Fleming begins a podcast series in which the main themes of his first book are explored in a more conversational tone. In this 29 minute podcast he and Rex take up the origin of the book and the great fallacy that underlies almost all modern isms and ologies.
Wednesday’s Child: Yet More Loners
Gustav Mahler once said that if the public thinks a conductor’s tempo too slow, what he ought to do is to slow it down. Such, anyway, is Wednesday’s Child’s feeble justification for persisting with the theme of the past two weeks, which is the plight of the socially anomalous child East and West. The occlusive membrane separating the home from the state, if one exists and is not ruptured by intrusion of the latter, is in most cases a good thing, indeed one of the condiciones sine quibus non of child rearing. But then, of course, there are cases when...
