But here’s something else: If the Electoral College ever were replaced with a “direct democracy” – assuming it ever could work in such a massive, polyglot, multiethnic polity as this one – that would dissolve the Democratic Party itself. Dems remain steamed Hillary won the popular vote in 2016, but lost the EC to The Orange Monster; Al Gore achieved the same in 2000 in his infamous “hanging chad” loss to George W. Bush.
There is a pop singer in Russia, a young woman who goes by the name of Alsu… But no, I beg the gentle reader’s pardon, regret the intrusion, and retract the introduction. Why should his brain be burdened with yet another useless fact? Alsu, indeed! When I was a young man, still living in America, I read somewhere of an alleged poet who called himself Imamu Amiri Baraka. Forty years on, I still can’t get that ridiculous moniker out of my head and would gladly offer $100 to any hypnotist who promised to cleanse my consciousness of it. Ideally, of...
In this prologue, Dryden takes up the conventional topics of the audience’s lack of appreciation and gratitude. His clever and self-serving abuse is even more applicable today, to readers who spend hours every day reading what they imagine to be news,.while ignoring the fiction, poetry, and essays that might do them a little good–if only by raising their standards.
Should TV jerks or pranksters be held responsible when they drive someone to suicide?
“Citizen of the world,” as I have explained, was a phrase picked up from the Stoics and adopted by intellectuals like Voltaire and Adam Smith. The coupling of Adam Smith with Voltaire is bound to annoy “conservative” defenders of capitalist ideology, but a few words on his globalist tendencies may help to explain why Republicans were so quick to condemn any attempt to defend the American people from predatory multi-national corporations. Smith is frequently invoked as the godfather of the free-trade globalism advocated by both American political parties today, and although this is hardly fair to a man who wrote...
I don’t know if any Trump administration people read Fleming.Foundation. But if so, a great idea would be for the president to hold three summits with Putin in the next year: first in Washington, then in Moscow, then the culmination on the Elbe River on April 25, 2020, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Elbe Day. That’s when American and Soviet/Russian forces met on the Elbe River. It was five days before Hitler blew his Nazi brains out in the Berlin bunker. Here’s the iconic photo: Trump and Putin meeting practically over Shicklgruber’s ashes also would taunt those who continue...
Greetings once again, fellow travelers. It is my distinct pleasure to be in your company once more. Your humble guide to the history of the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches has been long absent: I’ve been finishing a dissertation, defending it, and submitting it. Now that I’ve left behind me the unenviable existence of a graduate student in the 21st century, I return to you so that we may continue on our way through the sad history of division in the Body of Christ. But before we break a new path, we ought to pause and get our...
More religion in public life? Depends on the religion, depends on the kind of government.
When a French intellectual looked in the mirror in 1600, he saw a Frenchman and a Christian where he would have liked to have seen a Greek pagan. Since the Church was still powerful, few intellectuals were as mad as Giordano Bruno, who was justly burned at the stake in 1600, for his neopagan notions. Instead, the intellectuals became sly and ironic. From Montaigne on, intellectuals began subjecting Catholic France to imaginary visitors from Latin America, Persia, and China, all of whom expressed astonishment at the silly religion, false reverence to the king, and loyalty to the great nation.
I shall leave the circumstances of my breaking the Orthodox Easter fast shrouded, like a bottle of champagne in a pretentious restaurant, in a starched napkin. Instead, the present post takes up the theme of nostalgia where I left it last week, somewhere among the trees of life.
