The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
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...
In this episode of our regular series, Latin, Dr. Fleming reviews the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, in Latin and examines more deeply some of its sentences by looking at how they are rendered in Latin (and originally, in Greek). He then goes on to discuss the second declension, the genitive case, and begins to look at the subjunctive. He ends the episode on a fruitful tangent by exploring true and false “restoration” when it comes to languages…and art. Original Air Date: April 6, 2016 Show Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen...
In this episode of our occasional series, Foreign Affairs, Drs. Trifkovic and Fleming discuss the recent rulings regarding “war crimes” and “genocide” as applied to Radovan Karadzic and Vojislav Seselj. What is the significance of these verdicts both regionally and for greater Europe? We apologize for some cuts in Dr. Fleming’s audio which could not be repaired and for the occasional phone ring in the background. Dr. Trifkovic is in high demand! Original Air Date: April 5, 2016 Show Run Time: 52 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner The Fleming Foundation · Foreign Affairs,...
The irrepressible Donald Trump has once again embarrassed his supporters by blurting out the first silly response that floated through what passes for his mind. When Chris Matthews asked the candidate who would be punished if abortion were recriminalized, Trump did not–as he should have–refuse to discuss any hypothetical question; he did not even use the rabbinical trick of turning the tables on Matthews, asking what the hack “thought” about the matter. No, without giving the subject a moment’s thought, Trump blurted out the gaffe that has gone round the world. If abortion were made a crime, then the perpetrators—including the pregnant...
I signed off last week’s post with the observation that rehabilitation – especially the posthumous kind – is a bribe that legality slips to justice, and since then I’ve read a little of the story of St. Joan of Arc, illustrating my point rather neatly. It may be remembered that, a quarter of a century after they had burned her at the stake in the marketplace at Rouen, the woman in question was exonerated on appeal by the Inquisitor General. A quarter of a century, it seems – in other words, a generation – is how long it usually takes,...
I try to find the amusing in politics, and there was a lot of unintentional humor in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s March 23 speech before interns on Capitol Hill on the state of American politics. As commentators have noted, although not mentioning Donald Trump by name, the blathering was directly aimed at the real estate baron. Salon asked, “Can he really endorse Trump after a speech like this?” Of course he can, assuming the rt. hon. gentleman doesn’t join other Establishment pols in swiping the Republican nomination for himself or another hack. This is politics; there’s no honor. Ryan well...
