The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Part of restoring the best of what has passed is understanding where we came from. Only then can we start to put together commonsense solutions for how to go forward. Few books in today’s publishing world do this better than John Horvat II’s Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I only read this book recently, even though it has been in print since 2013. The impetus? I recently traveled to the United States to visit my parents and there were two books they had bought and sent me since...
A physiognomic peculiarity of Viktor Zolotov, who until last week and for the past 13 years had been head of Russia’s presidential bodyguard, is that he is a Doppelgänger of the man he was charged with protecting from enemies foreign and domestic. Dogs sometimes grow to look like their owners, and evidently this applies not only to old ladies’ poodles, but to guard dogs as well. The German word I’m using, incidentally, meaning a body double, is not so much pretentiousness on my part as consciousness of an historical rhyme. If Zolotov is a Putin clone, what used to be...
On an intercontinental flight these days one has dozens of options. Not only do they have the most recent movies available for your enjoyment, but classics as well. They even have classic television. I pulled up an episode from the original Man from U.N.C.L.E. (I gave it at least 15 minutes of my time). There was a documentary section that offered a film that I was particularly interested in: Palio. It’s shot mostly in Italian (with subtitles, of course) and is about the annual horse races that occur in Siena during July and August. It’s beautifully filmed and follows two different riders...
I recently described Dr. Clyde Wilson as one of the most important figures in my intellectual formation about true American history. While I met him first at a Rockford Institute event, it was at four different Abbeville Institute events that I got to hear his lectures and have many more conversations and meals with him and other unrepentant unreconstructeds. I think you might enjoy not just his company, but that of our namesake, Dr. Thomas Fleming, this summer in South Carolina. Dr. Donald Livingston, the creator and driving force behind the Abbeville Institute, has put together a great series of talks this year,...
This was my swan song, published last June (2015) George Garret used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine, The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor–which bordered on the wicked–he went through the streets of the resort town and stopped ill-dressed vacationers and said in his most polite Southern manner, “Excuse me, sir, but I am with the South Carolina Ugly Patrol, and it is my...
I was in my late 20s when I first met Dr. Clyde Wilson at a Rockford Institute event. If you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting Dr. Wilson and listening to that singular gravelly voice, you’ve known learning and gentility bound together with a ready smile, no matter how curmudgeonly he might be in other fora. I remember sitting on a porch with him on Johns Island, South Carolina, at my first Abbeville Institute event (I would go on to attend four more). I had a question related to what I then referred to as the “Battle of Antietam” (my yankee-addled...
This tribute was penned by our Okie friend Robert Reavis, who frequently comments on this site. Country singer, song writer, and middle American poet, Merle Haggard, died at his home in California this past Wednesday at age 79. To paraphrase one of his acquaintances, the blind poet Ronnie Millsap,“ his life was almost like a song but not too sad to write.” In many ways Merle Haggard was an old Ghost Rider in the Sky who had roots in Oklahoma that dried up with the dust bowl that sent his mother and father to California, where Merle was born. To be...
Sessions, not Ryan, Would be the Sensible Pick of a Brokered Convention I have long believed that there is a global power elite that manipulates the political process to its advantage. This strikes me as a “no duh” assertion. What separates me from some of my more conspiratorial brethren, is that I don’t believe this power elite is omnipotent. They cannot foresee or control for every contingency. The success of Donald Trump’s campaign is one such contingency they didn’t foresee, and the rather ham-handed way they have responded to it demonstrates that the conspiracy is not all powerful. The Powers...
A couple of days ago I briefly tuned in to Mark Levin’s radio show. He was talking about Trump and trade, making the “comparative advantage” point you might remember from Econ. 101. That if each country makes what it can most cheaply, such as America designing iPhones and China assembling them (my examples, not his), then everybody comes off better. But if we impose tariffs, then prices go up for everybody, most hurting the poor when they go to buy stuff. So Trump’s attacks on Ford for moving a plant to Mexico, which on April 5 he called an “absolute...
The fable of the grasshopper and the ant, attributed to Aesop, is seminal to Western culture with its cult of human industry. Where a Russian or an Indian finds room and reason for relying on God or fate, an Englishman or a Frenchman hearkens to the moral of the fable, which miscasts fatalism as indolence and insouciance as folly. Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers, in consequence, step aside in this culture to make room for TV’s Kardashian sisters, as even the most intimate details of one’s private life’s take on the configurations of ardent toil. The English language is largely blind to...
