The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Germany and the rest of Western Europe are being invaded with weaponized immigration. It has become apparent that Germany, not to be confused with the Federal Republic of Germany which is an abstraction or a “firm” as those who still consider themselves Germans call it, has all but lost its soul. The objective correlative with its heritage has been broken by Nazi usurpation of much that was true and good and by the very effective supersecessionist reeducation program imposed on Germany after its defeat in WWII. Western liberalism was apparently more effective than the draconian real-existierende Sozialismus of communist East...
“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.” Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...
I was in the Metro. I looked down at the newspaper the man on my left was reading. It featured three characters. One, a Boris Johnson jumping up and screaming “F*#% Europe!” To his right a flustered and disturbed David Cameron wheels around, saying, “Trump?” To his right a French footman bows and says, in French, “No, it’s the Mayor of London…” Later that same day I was writing in a cafe and four tables over I heard snippets of a conversation in French in which the words “Boris” and “Brexit” featured prominently. It was the day after Boris had delivered...
From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends? Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light. Irina Stolyarova – such is...
The word is out from the highest bully pulpit in the land: Donald Trump will not be President. Why, because being President “is a serious job.” President Obama went on, by way of the via negativa, to define the presidency by saying: “It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing… It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.” It is pretty obvious that the President has been spending a lot of time looking at his image in the mirror, and...
Dear Readers Technology is supposed to be a tool we use. If it’s reliable, sometimes we can be shocked at its letting us down. Last week Dr. Fleming and I spent 45 minutes trying to get him properly and digitally into our virtual studio so we could record a podcast. We had performed the exact same actions just a few days earlier with absolutely zero trouble. Ah, the idiosyncrasies of our digital masters. Dr. Fleming showed remarkable patience throughout and while we could have persevered on that afternoon to try for a makeshift solution, he wisely relented, and planned a...
Here in Rome I read Midwestern news stories many hours late or, if the events took place at night, seven hours early. In the morning, while my distant neighbors were still asleep, I read about the machete-wielding maniac in Columbus, Ohio, who attacked the diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant. It was hard to get any hard facts. The one fact that stuck out was the image of the Israeli flag in the window of a restaurant named Nazareth, along with other symbols and words in Arabic. Some report did either report or conjecture that the owner had tried...
“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.” So a headline in the Financial Times. It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism. Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings. What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”? Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”? Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...
About On the House. From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing. A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix. This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away. I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine. Then, come on, do not...
I used to try to understand Italian politics. This meant I had to read the newspapers, no easy task back in the primitive times before anyone had heard of the Internet. By the late 90’s I could keep up by looking at La Repubblica online, watching RAI television broadcasts, and checking up on the new faces entering the arena in the aftermath of the communist coup known as the “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) investigation of “Tangentopoli” (bribe city). After a while, it got to be more trouble than it was worth. Who could really care which lying scoundrel beat...
