The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
I can still vividly recall my semester in Rome many years ago. Among the books we had brought to study that spring was Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I had purchased the beautifully bound Liberty Fund edition (from which I’ll quote below) and couldn’t wait to plumb these two essays that Dr. Pieper had written in the aftermath of World War II, a time in which, it might easily be thought, leisure was the last thing on anyone’s mind. While I remember enjoying Leisure, his ideas were not aimed at (and thus did not then entirely take hold...
One of the minor annoyances of growing old is the uncomfortable feeling that that less time we have left, the faster it seems to be going by. In a dying civilization the annoyance is aggravated by the constant awareness of how rapidly downhill everything is headed.
Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
Having spent a month machine-gunning the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms,” now the Democratic Party is taking a bead on the First Amendment right to “freedom of the press.” The Party is suing President Trump, Russia and Wikileaks over the bogus Russian interference in the 2016 election. As I have written on Fleming Foundation from the start of this nonsense in late 2016, the Russians couldn’t possibly have influenced the election’s outcome because it’s too difficult to figure out how to do it, even for Americans, let alone Muscovites. President Trump can defend himself and the Russians...
I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics. They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located–they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country. They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another–a girl I had known in graduate school–a...
Frank Brownlow’s post of a few days ago has made me want to continue the discussion it began, but the truth is, it ain’t simple. I’m at a disadvantage, because Dr. Brownlow’s is an eagle’s eye view of the paradox of culture under totalitarianism, whereas what I want to respond with is a worm’s eye view of the underlying evidentiary base
To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
In the 50s and 60s both sides, left and right offered some resistance to the triumph of what we can call, in contrast to the true, the good, and the beautiful, the untrue, the bad, and the ugly. Oddly enough, the liberal-left put up a surprisingly good fight, something hard to believe these days when NPR punctuates its news broadcasts with rap music.
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Taxes are an infamously good way to discourage whatever they tax. For this reason and others, the income tax and the property tax are especially bad ideas, for they discourage both work and ownership, along with mandating that all forms of work and property produce a minimal amount of cash.
