The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
II Let’s start with the one piece submitted in response to my challenge. This comes from my former managing editor, Kate Dalton Boyer, who is still harboring some dark feelings about her former boss’s sloppy office. Doggerel for TF I know a man named Thomas, his desk will give you pause. If one inquires the reason: “Tace!” he’ll say. “Because.” Beneath a Mac his thesis (of Grecian poetry) is propping up his keyboard and in danger from his tea. The office door won’t open –review books in the way– it seems another forty-two have just arrived today. The lamp’s a...
olitics III.9-12 [1284b-1288b] In this final section of Politics III, Aristotle comes to grips with the systems of government ruled by one man. He begins [9] by surveying the various types of legitimate monarchy: the constitutional monarchy of the Spartans, where the power of the kings was determined by law and limited largely to military affairs, barbarian monarchies in which the kings act much as tyrants do but rule willing subjects and maintain inherited laws and traditions. One sign of their lawfulness is their use of domestic rather than foreign bodyguards. Aristotle is clear that while barbarians would tolerate such...
Julian Assange did his best to spoil the Hillary-fest being held in the renamed City of Sisterly love. No sooner had Wikileaks released the DNC emails confirming the active collaboration of party leaders with the Clinton campaign than the state media attempted to divert attention from the fact of what the hacked hacks had actually done to ruin the Sanders campaign. This is all part of a Putin plot to elect Donald Trump. Why, it’s an outrage when one country tries to rig political outcomes in another. I could not agree more, which is why American administrations have never involved...
This is my forty-eighth post in this space–a panoply variegated enough for a whole Well-Tempered Clavier of distempered musings – and some of my readers may have noted that not once did I review or commend a book. This is because the industry that produces books, which were once significant events, each with a claim to absolute uniqueness or at the very least to qualified originality, now functions like the writer of Melania Trump’s address to the Republican convention. Plagiarism long ago ceased to be an intellectual crime, yet it remained a niche product, like tales of the supernatural or...
Our November book is comparatively short: Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus. This is Sophocles last play that we know of: He wrote it as an old man, who—according to tradition—was being sued by his own sons, who wanted to prove the old man non compos mentis. It is something like Sophocles’ King Lear, but instead of concentrating on ingratitude. the Greek poet gives us an image of filial piety in his daughters and in the aged protagonist he depicts a man transformed by suffering and filled with gratitude toward the Athenians who gave him hospitality. This is a play about loyalty,...
Christian Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge. Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation. Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will. Moral understanding of crime and punishment has certainly moved on since the writing of the Pentateuch, but if Christ was serious that he came not to overturn but to fulfill the law, then we cannot begin anywhere else, if we wish...
In early 2015, well before Donald Trump was a blip on the radar screen, a friend asked me to contribute an article to a Constitution Party newsletter. I happily obliged. The article was entitled “Needed: a Real Country Party,” but, because of the nature of the venue, it was never made available for wide public viewing. I am currently working on an update of that article because I believe it helps explain why Donald Trump and Trumpism have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams (or nightmares) of the political and pundit class. Because of the momentous nature of the Trump...
This piece comes from 1982, two years before moving to Rockford as Managing Editor of the magazine I would soon serve as Editor. It is a slightly revised version of a review of Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. The editors were so alarmed by the implicit rejection of classical liberalism that they felt it necessary to run the usual “Michael Novak is a genius..” counterpoint along side it. Capitalism must be dead at last. Its demise has been predicted so many times—by Marx and his disciples, by fascists, and even by true believers like the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham—that many of...
This just in: A bizarre incident took place this week in Munich. Out of the blue, a typical German teenager quit spending his money on drugs and night clubs and decided to spend his free time and surplus cash on helping elderly people in a retirement home. No one knows what motivated this eccentric behavior. The young man had no known connections with any political movement advocating charity or welfare. Found in his bedroom were various non-denominational pamphlets on how to practice charity. All that is know of him is that he was brought up in the Catholic Church and...
When several people asked me what I thought of the Republican Convention in Cleveland, I had to answer truthfully that I had paid very little attention to the quadrennial shenanigans. Much of my time, this past week, was devoted to driving my broken-legged wife to medical appointments, the most serious of which was the three hour operation that took place yesterday. The doctors are proclaiming a tactical victory, but recovery time is now being measured in terms of months rather than weeks, which puts our October program in Greece on hold. When I did have time to turn on the...
