The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Trump’s term in the White House seems to have given Americans a respite from self-congratulatory meditations about being on the “right side” of history. The Obama White House seems to have used the term upwards of two dozen times, according to the American Presidency Project, but Trump has both refrained from such presumptions himself and struck enough fear in the hearts of positivists to get them to shut up about it: at least temporarily
Horace’s satire was a sly commentary on his life among the great, as close friend to Maecenas, the wealthy advisor to Augustus. In the first part of this imitation, Pope imagines his friend Dean Swift, a confidant of the Tory ministers, going over the same complaints about fame and influence. Then, when he comes to Horace’s famous fable of the two mice, he makes a stab at pretending it is composed by his friend Matthew Prior–also an important political advisor and diplomat, who wrote more homely verse. Rather than make a detailed commentary on the poem, I’ll be happy to...
Mr. Van Zant and Mr. Wilson have been talking about light fiction in The Forum. I posted this little bit, which they would probably miss.
What is paleoconservatism? I should have put the question in the past tense, but, in deference to the true believers who collect hula hoops, and 8-track tape players, we can pretend there is still some sort of active movement going by that name. Like many political labels—Whig and Tory, Rebel and Yankee—the word “paleoconservative” would seem to be an insult.
Allen Wilson The Greek search for universal order and principles doubtlessly also led them to make the innovation which they are known to have made with the alphabet, the vowel letter. It made logical sense to make such an innovation, and I wonder if their development of it was connected with their development of grammar and logic. Hesiod’s moral understanding of the universe seems to indicate a mindset which in future times would be capable of adopting the Christian moral understanding, and also refine that understanding using the tools which that mindset had already produced: logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. Ken...
What do we do? My friends and I have been talking about it for a long time, especially out here in California, which is way farther down the road to ruin than the rest of America. Although usually voting Republican since my first election in 1974, I long avoided joining the Party, except for brief periods to vote in the primaries for Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul. I prized being an “independent,” especially as I was a journalist. But in early 2015 I permanently jointed the Republican Party, to my friends quoting Rhett Butler, “Why? Maybe it’s because I’ve always...
I finished rereading The Man in the High Castle. I found the character development and plotting a bit muddled and, while I had remembered a subtle metaphysic that would justify and make interesting the alternate time track, it was not worked out in the book, though, judging from Dick’s other books, he had developed a coherent theory in his mind. My verdict: Enjoyable, far from a waste of time, but needed a second or third revision. We’re continuing our rather spotty reading of Gibbon, but it is as great a pleasure as the previous times, perhaps even more because reading Gibbon’s...
In 21st-Century America, there are precious few mediums through which the issue of race can be addressed with even a modicum of rationality. One of the few means still available is the thorough, well-researched work produced by historians. Perhaps the only reason this avenue is still available to us at all is because those whom you would expect to participate in protests over its content do not usually spend the required time for reading books or truly studying history.
Whenever I happen to see archival footage, which is usually in biopics, of twentieth-century musical titans, composers like Rachmaninov or Britten, I have the irrepressible sensation that actually these people belong in the nineteenth century and that their moving and speaking presence in the twenty-first is a clever trick, something like the tricolor celluloid screen my grandmother attached to the giant water-filled lens in front of her black-and-white Soviet-made TV to create the illusion of it being a modern color set. The translucent screen made the top, where the sky might be in a film, seem blue, the bottom was...
Rochester was a Restoration rake, suicidal in his excesses, and excessive in his cynicism. Much of his thought consists of the fag-ends of the French literature he picked up during the nightmare years of the regicidal commonwealth. His deathbed conversion has done little to improve his general reputation, but I am tempted to compare him with other poets of despairing disbelief, Baudelaire and Lou Reed. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, might have said of himself, one of Lou Reed’s lines: “Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.” Please don’t go looking for the source of the line, because decent people should be offended.
