The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
As Dr. Fleming has noted to you already, there have been some technological mishaps that prevented episode recording while he was in Italy. We are back to recording this week and will get caught up, but we also wanted you to know about a benefit that is available to Charter Members for free and a la carte to those of other membership levels: transcripts. If you look at the drop down menu for podcasts on the main page you will see “Transcripts.” Click there to find some selected transcripts to various episodes. Charter Members receive one new transcript per month...
Dear Fellow Travelers and Readers: We finally returned from Europe Monday afternoon. The flight was uneventful and, mirabile dictu, so was our entry into the United States. They finally have the ID processing machines in working order so all the zeks can get through the system with less trouble. As I looked at the line, I wondered if Purgatory entailed as much rigmarole and waiting. We spent three days in Holland, in a village outside of Amsterdam, visiting our friends Michael and Koosje Guravage. Michael, as some of you may recall, has traveled several times with us and is now...
The Salem witch trials of the 1690’s have entered school textbooks as an episode of mass hysteria, an instance of the sort of fundamentalist extremism that today we associate with militant Islam. The very fact that this episode – culminating as it did in a modest score of hangings – so stands out in the landscape of history as to have become a byword for vengeful ignorance only underscores the abiding tolerance of European civilization and its North American dilation. This does not mean, however, that the civilization in question was ever free from the herd instinct, which in the...
How do liberals expect to grab our guns? That’s one thing they never explain when, after an incident like the shooting at the Texas church, they start calling for gun control. They’ll advance things like Dianne Feinstein’s 1994-2004 ban on “assault weapons” – which aren’t a real category, just a cosmetic description of mean-looking rifles. Her ban didn’t work anyway. Or they’ll call for a ban on gun sales at gun shows. Or registering all weapons. But the only thing that really would have an effect is something the gun controllers really want, but almost never mention: full confiscation. Liberals...
Conservatism is a very elastic term, so big that it was stretched, by rent-seeking leaders of Conservative organizations in the 1990’s, into a big tent. There are liberal Conservatives who care only about the illusion of free markets and freedom of choice, Neoconservatives who are democratist Jacobins and soft-core Marxists, and even “traditionalist” Conservatives, who do not entirely reject the classical tradition, the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and the wisdom of the past. If the word “conservative” were to mean anything—these days, it really doesn’t—it would have to include a healthy respect for tradition. Otherwise, the accusation that Conservatives...
Why doesn’t the Trump Administration just repeat Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts? The Gipper proposed a 33% tax cut on practically all taxes. He negotiated with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, and settled for 29%. The top rate dropped to 50% from 70% of income, with lower incomes given similar cuts. Reagan made one mistake: Most of the tax cuts were delayed until 1983, supposedly to grab more from taxpayers for a year to “pay” for the tax cuts. But all that did was delay economic investment for a year, as companies and persons waited...
I was under the weather last week, and besides I thought the gentle reader might use a week’s rest from my compulsive ratiocination, so I did not post. Weather is a big factor the closer one gets to Africa. The sirocco arrives here bearing a fine sand dust from the Sahara that gets in everywhere, but worse than that, it makes one feel like a lemon squeezed dry, moscio, as the locals say, meaning flaccid, limp, flabby. After a day or two, one finds oneself yearning for Siberia and the bracing touch of the bora. Sirocco makes people grumpy, irritable,...
Europe went off daylight savings time this morning, and America follows suit next week. I suppose this means we are still trying to catch up with Old Europe. The twice a year time change inevitably unleashes a pack of feral economists snapping at the heels and howling criticisms of the inefficiency of savings times and all the hours of work lost to the plantations of international capitalism. Being economists—or, what is almost worse, business writers—they enjoy the high privilege of always missing the point. If it is true that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the...
I have not intentionally abandoned our readers these past few weeks, but I made the unwise decision to leave my laptop at home and rely on my wife’s iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard plus my iPhone. The keyboard never worked, my iPhone fell to a hard floor and is worthless, and access even to the iPad has been a bit limited. We have enjoyed our week on a farm outside Spello and with Mark Beesley and our son Garret we have visited—in addition to Spello—Gubbio, Bevagna, Montefalco, Lago Trasimeno, and Spoleto. Mark has done all the driving, which has made...
Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic is a recent publication of Shotwell Publishing, LLC, co-founded by the author, Paul C. Graham, and Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, Professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina. Mr. Graham holds an M.A. in philosophy from the University of South Carolina. He is also an experienced editor, research scholar and writer of numerous articles which have appeared in publications such as the Simms Review and The Palmetto Partisan. Confederaphobia appropriates the weapons of the enemy – cultural Marxists, leftists, liberals, their fellow travelers and useful idiots such as those masquerading as “conservatives,” and...
