The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
What’s next, a thoughtful reader was asking in reply to my musings last week, a ban on cotton? Well, since toilet paper had been put forward the week before last as a candidate for the ban, I suppose cotton is not that far afield, but I would argue that books is something we need to look at more urgently. And not just new books, either. The burning of libraries, private as well as public, would surely send a powerful signal to paper producers all over the world to stop despoiling our natural habitat, at the same time providing vegan workshops...
The problem with Warren—and with so many other celebrity racists—is not what they say or do but what they take for granted. That poor white female who became an NAACP leader wanted desperately to be Black just as much as Warren wanted to be Indian. Why?
When people vote their pocketbooks, as they often do, they are giving some color to Marx’s more down-to-earth definition of ideology as a set of ideas concocted to advance the interests of a social class. The creed of classical liberalism—low taxes, free trade, individual liberty–is the ideology of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, while socialism is the ideology of those who expect to be dependent upon government largesse: schoolteachers, promiscuous young women, and the politicians and public servants, who have so nobly given up brilliant careers in the private sector because they wished to serve the people. No one claims the ideal...
What the GOP needs, “Conservatives” tell us, is a sharper ideological focus that will give greater prominence to the vast reservoir of “Conservative” “ideas.” If only the “Conservatives” were simply joking, if only they were entirely cynical about the war of words between the two parties, one might have some hope for a restoration of political sanity in this poor country.
Several conservative commentators have noted how the Mainstream Media have given more attention to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in blackface in college yearbook three decades ago than to his proposal to allow infanticide. It also was creepy how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo led cheering legislators as they passed a radical abortion law, which reminded me of Pandemonium in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And...
“If you want to become an optimist and really understand life,” thought Chekhov, “stop believing the things that are said or written about it and just try seeing it for yourself.” As I’m down with the ‘flu, and all I’m seeing at the moment are the wooden posts and canopy of my Chinese opium bed, it’s a little difficult to understand just how optimism has wormed its way into that sentence. In the morning my near and dear crowd around the bed like bearded worthies in Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, reproaching me for past crimes against health...
AOC is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, my favorite Democrat. She’s the Democrats’ id. In Freudian terms, “The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality.” As they said in the Freudian Sixties: Let it all hang out. That’s why so many Democrats are endorsing her Green New Deal, best seen in her FAQ here. Adam Schiff took time off from looking for the non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election to endorse it, “I have long believed that our country needs an Apollo Project-like commitment to tackle climate change and lead our transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.” Republicans have...
TJF: I’ve mentioned to you my Uncle Dan who once lived in New Orleans and was a leading expert on port facilities. You’ve been to New Orleans and have spent time in Louisiana. On the one hand, no two places could be more different than Northern Wisconsin and Southern Louisiana. On the other hand, your Southern experiences seem to have been fruitful. . . AVB: I’ve set stories in Superior and Natchitoches, Louisiana, where my wife and I lived when I taught at Northwestern State. One Superior-Natchitoches story appeared in the South Carolina Review, one in New Orleans Review. The...
When I was a child, custom required small children to nap for an hour in the afternoon, the Quiet Hour being the accepted euphemism for these postprandial outings in the poppy field. The rather surprisingly bourgeois practice was also mandatory in Soviet kindergartens, in young pioneer camps, in short, wherever parents, older siblings, or staff wanted to regain a life of their own for at least a portion of the day. Here in Italy I often think back on that Soviet version of the siesta, which sheds light on a whole variety of goings-on in a country that in so...
Dixit Dominus is one of the works Handel composed during his sojourn in Italy. It is a youthful, virtuosic work for five soloists, five-part choir and orchestra (I have performed it with choir and it was exhilarating as well as mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting). This setting of the vesper Psalm 110 (109 Vulgate) runs a gamut of Baroque moods, from melodious to poignant, from fiery to tranquil.
