The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Any honest evaluation of US foreign policy over the past 50 years would lead to one conclusion: Any effort to build a stable regime friendly to US interests will have to construct its programs on a population that has some understanding of the West and some institutions—religious or cultural—compatible with our own. On this basis, we can appreciate at least one of the reasons why we have chosen Israel, for all the troubles this special relationship has cost us, to be the focus of our influence in the Middle East: Israel is a European colony in the Arab and Muslim...
I am often at a loss when challenged on my conclusion that diversity, in the world we inhabit today, is a synonym of conformity. My opponents in the argument make me feel like a conspiracy theorist, someone who has some truths to impart but needs a better broom to sweep them back from under the carpet and into the light of day. It’s not that he doesn’t have the facts, it’s that the facts are too many. What I want, I have often thought, is an illustration, a “meme” as is now fashionable to say, something with the simplicity of...
Bernie Sanders and other socialists keep pushing Medicare for All; meaning anyone without medical insurance, even those younger than 65, could sign up for what currently is a system for geezers, including me in a year. The reason is obvious: Medicare is a popular program in which seniors generally can choose their own doctors, and which provides mostly comprehensive care, albeit often needing supplemental plans. But if they want to expand government-provided health care, why don’t Bernie and the comrades instead expand the already existing, comprehensive medical system, by far the major activity of the Veterans Administration, which already even...
“The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!” I can’t bear to bring children into this world, much less spare the time to bring them up.
Over the years, much of our critique of American imperialism was made on the level of principle: Preemptive wars, inherently wrong in themselves, would eventually justify the militarization of American life and the final destruction of our constitutional order. Reconstruction abroad, we argued, would inevitably justify reconstruction at home.
“I have never been so keyed up!” I think I won’t be very far from the truth if I say that what most Americans know of Royal Ascot is Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of this line in My Fair Lady, in 1964 the most expensive film ever made. Remember? “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here, ev’ryone who should be here is here,” she gavottes, At the gate are all the horses Waiting for the cue to fly away. What a gripping, absolutely ripping Moment at the Ascot op’ning day! When I lived in England, I never missed a day...
Ruling elites, which historically collect 10-15% in duties and fees, now confiscate 50% or more of the income of hardworking men and women, robbing them of their time and their power over their lives.
Like so many modern American males, the Marquis de Sade was incapable of taking pleasure in the ordinary things of life. Morally and intellectually feeble, he wallowed in fantasies of sexual violence. The history of civilization might be written as a series of social inventions for the proper application of violence: boxing matches, duels, warfare. When civilizations die, men cannot fall back on the killer instincts of barbarians who control their violence. They are like the jackdaws studied by Konrad Lorenz: Not genetically programmed to fight and kill, they do not have the ritual off-switch to stop violence, once it...
CSPAN coverage of the House of Representatives may soon replace Comedy Central. Within a short 24 hour period, House Democrats proposed giving the vote to illegal aliens and refused to condemn outrageous statements made by Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar. Born in Mogadishu, where she spent her early years, Omar and her family were granted refugee status by an American government whose kindness exceeded its wisdom. Omar was brought up in the most ridiculous state of the American Union—Minnesota—where she eventually became a policy fellow at the Hubert Humphrey School of extraterrestrial Marxism, “community nutrition educator” at the state’s parody-university,...
Young Nietzsche declared that tragedy was born from the spirit of music, but this proposition – as in the case of most nineteenth-century paradox mongers – may also be safely read in reverse. Surely one can argue that music was born from the spirit of tragedy? In fact, in an essay written a year earlier than The Birth of Tragedy, this is just what Nietzsche himself seems to have argued. Anyway, my wife, who is a musician, agrees, which is why she told Mario’s father that what the boy needed was to be better acquainted with the idea of tragedy....
