The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
For something like a decade I’ve referred to America’s Rancid Ruling Elite – RRE. Ruling elites are supposed to protect their people, giving them at least reasonable leadership, as well as cultural splendor. In return, they get to run things and enjoy a lot of money and prestige. Ours do the opposite: They parasite off the rest of us while attacking us. Ultimately, it’s self-defeating, as they will end up like the French and Russian elites of 1789 and 1917, headed for the guillotine or the gulag. No decent elite would have allowed the Mueller farce to begin, let alone...
This is the actual conclusion to the series. The editor mistakenly reposted part 3 yesterday.
I often think that when the devil was designing his snares, he fretted about the most basic things like increased efficiency, ease of operation, and mass appeal.
A podcast conversation with Thomas Fleming and Frank Brownlow
Whether it is merely a temporary aberration, a ray of hope, or purely a method of getting new music (that might actually be performed) published, a number of composers over the last decades have returned to some semblance of tonality and melody. Few things divert my mind and heart from the ugliness of current politics and popular culture better than the beauty of creation during high summer or excellent music. These two poems, on summery themes, and the musical settings of them I have selected may momentarily lift you from the drudgery. Gwyneth Walker is a Vermont composer who resides...
This morning at breakfast, my wife asked me what Piers Morgan meant in calling Donald Trump a Fascist. Without having read—or even intending to read the column—I was able to state with total conviction.
“Nothing.”
Donald Trump has put his big foot, once again, into his bigger mouth. He must be crazy, telling immigrants to go back where they came from, just because they openly declare their hatred for the country that has taken them in. Even Trump’s American friend in the UK, Piers Morgan, has called him on the carpet.
Now to Agrigento, nay, to the selfsame hallowed spot where our Foundation’s eponymous helmsman passed the better part of last winter. The annual weekend of mulberry picking was upon us, with tubs of pure grain spirit wherever you looked – the better to preserve the foragers’ prize in the cold months to come – and white shirts splattered with the fruit’s arterial blood, crimson as the famous Kensington Gore stage prop. As the day’s harvest was jarred and dinner drew near, a remarkable spectacle unfolded. The people in a house next door harbor a multitude of cats – perhaps as...
In his novel Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy. Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition. This is a late reflection of the tradition of Romantic heroism that usually ends disastrously in fiction. Remember Julien Sorel? Raskolnikov? What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel. Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the...
We’re far enough along in the election process to sum up what the Democratic Party candidates stand for: Foreign Policy. Except for Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang (sort of) and Bernie Sanders, all the candidates want a return to the globalist, interventionist policies that reigned before Trump. Especially indicative was their rejection – again excepting those three – of Trump meeting with Korean Boss Kim Jong at the DMZ. Typical was Elizabeth Warren’s war whoop, “Our President shouldn’t be squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator. Instead, we should be dealing with North...
