The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Growing up, my only training in the martial arts was the experience of getting beaten up by older boys until I learned how to inflict pain even when losing a fight. It was a useful lesson, and just as useful was my intuitive understanding of the basic principle of judo, which (so I have been told) is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be...
I knew Tom Farr when we were undergraduates at Hillsdale College in the mid-1970s, then young conservatives in Washington in the mid-1980s. He is a fine man without a prejudiced bone in his body. It’s so unfair he’s being publicly trashed for being a “racist” after he was appointed to be a district judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina and received the highest recommendation from the American Bar Association.
“In an instant I had my lifelong foe by the throat. After so many years of waiting and longing, he was mine at last. I tore him to shreds and fragments. I rent the fragments to bits. I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering. At last, and forever, my Conscience was dead! I was a free man! I turned upon my poor aunt, who was almost petrified with terror, and shouted: ‘Out of this house with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before...
People like to give names to periods. During the span from 1968 to 2018, numerous events happened: the end of the Cold War, the rise of the computers and so on. But one thing now stands out: demographic collapse in almost every country. So I’m calling it the Paul Ehrlich Half-Century because 1968 was the year his book “The Population Bomb” was published by the Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, whose publicists had a flair for marketing. The paperbook version included a lit bomb on the cover, along with the subheadings: “Population Control or Race to Oblivion?” And, in shouting...
Another impression I took home after that fortnight in London was of being trapped in an elevator of the 1980’s. This is really a new thing in the city most people associate with reserve, politeness, and tranquility, that one is everywhere and at all hours surrounded with “music.” Needless to say, it’s not music at all, but a cousin of what during my American years I heard played in elevators, shopping malls, and offices of the more vicious kind of dentist. I read recently that the American original was called Muzak because its inventor had been so taken with Kodak...
A paragraph from an irresponsible rant on the murder of a Saudi journalist. …. It is quite possible that the murder took place exactly as the press, claiming the CIA as the ultimate source, has described it. On the other hand, there is no reason to believe anyone in the media, whether Jim Acosta or Sean Hannity, and after the past few years it is pretty clear we have no reason to believe the FBI, and if the FBI is specializing in political propaganda, can the CIA–the agency that appears to have engaged in massive drug smuggling in order to...
While I was in London, an old friend of mine and I had what can be described as an emotional misunderstanding, and since then I’ve thought of little else. Particularly in view of the fact that had it not been for this friend’s nearly infinite kindness to me over the years, I probably wouldn’t be here now writing about it, or about anything else for that matter. So I could do worse, I figured, than to extrapolate the misunderstanding and extract a moral out of its reflective depths. The moral is that modern civilization has compromised sentiment. In about the...
Suppose someone like Mike Pence or Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh were to say–as a transparent comment on the effeminate and race obsessed Barack Obama–that he could not grapple with serious issues because people of his sort are “confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues,” all Hell would break loose. And rightly so, because it is quite wrong to reduce political issues to amateur psychologizing or to find base irrational motives for other people’s arguments. Only children–the word Vladimir Putin used to describe Obama and Ms Clinton–talk this way. But when Obama uses the same words in a transparent...
First, a Digression on What The Greeks Mean To Us The ancient Greeks are among are most significant ancestors or, at least, godfathers. They are one of those mirrors we hold up in order to contemplate our own faces, which we inevitably confuse with theirs. Christians have often read their own darkest impulses into Greek mythology and “idolatry.” (A passing thought: Did St. Paul or St. Jerome really believe educated Greeks worshipped statues made by human hands?) Romantic poets found the dynamic imagination they were trying to cultivate, and since Nietzsche some have found justification for their own chaotic passions...
In the time of Christ and his Apostles, it was enough to accept Christ–that is, the promised Messiah–and Him crucified, but it is a thoroughly human trait to draw conclusions, which are then treated as first principles. In the Golden Age of the American republic, many, perhaps most Americans believed in liberty, both in the sense of political independence and in the sense of moral and social freedom. If a man had a skill by which he could earn money, then–subject to legal, moral and social constraints–he could expect to practice that trade. Then wise guys came long and raised...
