The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Fleming / On the House

4 Jan, 2017

The Xanthippe, Part 2

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Part II Xanthippe is saved by the noisy entrance of a semi-intoxicated young man . Xanthippe: “Why, it’s Pheidippides, that new student of yours at the Phrontisterion.  What does he want?  I hope he’s come to pay his bills.” Socrates:  You know I do  not charge for my instruction.  The sophists take money, because they claim to be able to teach their students how to succeed.  I only want my young friends to understand, and who would pay for that? Xanthippe:  Some of them, at least, bring me presents—good wine and oil for dressins greens, not that lamp oil you...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

2 Jan, 2017

Travel Diary I: Through Mordor in a Taurus or Getting There is Not Half the Fun

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We set out on our unheroic journey on a cold Friday, December 30.  It is a thousand mile trip, from Northern Illinois to Sullivan’s Island, and, if one were to judge from what can be seen from the interstate highway system, there is not much in that thousand linear miles that cannot be reduced to a numerical grid of I-39, I-64, I-75, I-40, I-26 intersected by identical lodging, food, and gas opportunities. Entering into the grid is something like an adventure in dystopian time travel—an episode of Startrek, perhaps where Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and all the other noble agents of...

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Feature / On the House

29 Dec, 2016

The Year 2016

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Shostakovich, our last monumental composer–before the light of the ability to write more than ditties flickered out of our civilization – used years for two of his symphonies. Symphony No. 11 was The Year 1905, for that year’s Russian Revolution. And Symphony No. 12 was The Year 1917, dedicated to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. (The links lead to YouTubes of performances of the works, if you’re inclined to listen. I did writing this.) The Year 2016 was such a year. I’ll highlight three monumental events: Brexit, Trump’s victory and the coalescing effort to stop Pope Francis from scratching adultery...

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Fleming / Free Content

28 Dec, 2016

The Xanthippe, A Lost Dialogue, Part I (Free)

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This mysterious work, when it was discovered in the late 20th century, was attributed to Plato, but in view of the philosopher’s appearance in the dialogue, that identification is as suspect as everything about the work.  The scholar and translator, who says he discovered the text in the ruins of a Calabrian monastery, claims the Greek original was destroyed in a fire.  Even if the tale is true, it is hard to know what to make of the translation, which makes anachronistic literary references and uses late 20th century expressions for which it is hard to imagine Greek equivalents.  Nonetheless,...

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Free Content

28 Dec, 2016

Wednesday’s Child:  The Technicolor Dreamcoat (Free)

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Truth may be stranger than fiction, especially in places where the writers ain’t all they’re cracked up to be, but these days, I swear, even apparently random facts seem to be running away with themselves in the land of Gogol. I have made two posts, one in April and one in October, highlighting the creation in Russia of the equivalent of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), called the National Guard (Rosgvardia), and speculating on the likely function of this 350,000-strong presidential private army.  Recent developments bear out my speculation.  Last week a senior Rosgvardia commander, Aleksandr Maul, made a statement that swept...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

27 Dec, 2016

Neocons Freak Out (Free)

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One of the pleasures of the impending Trump presidency is watching the neocons freak out, as we said in the 1960s. One of the biggest freak outs is by Charles Krauthammer, top columnist at the old CIA in-house organ, the Washington Post. Like almost all neocons, he’s really just a warmongering liberal. In his case, he even wrote speeches for Mondale, afterword moving slightly up from Mondaleism. In his most recent column, “Aleppo and American decline,” he wrote, “The fall of Aleppo just weeks before Barack Obama leaves office is a fitting stamp on his Middle East policy of retreat...

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Free Content / Peters

26 Dec, 2016

When Christmas Was Coming! (Free)

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When Christmas was coming, Mama would start collecting medium-sized boxes which she would later decorate with bright Christmas paper for the purpose of taking food as a gift – a canned ham, some fruit, some nuts and some homemade candy- to the numerous “shut-ins” in and around Pollock. When Christmas was coming, out would come the reserve box of Christmas cards which were chosen, filled out, and stamped at the dining table some pre-Christmas night after supper. I usually chose a card for a particular person or family; Mama filled it out and addressed the envelope, and Daddy would break...

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Feature / Fleming

25 Dec, 2016

Keeping Christmas, Part II: How the (Conservative) Grinches Stole Christmas

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  …And replaced it with commercial nostalgia. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was still a comfortable feeling about Christmas and Easter.  True, they were being undermined by hardworking non-Christian retailers who preferred to hawk Santa and the Easter Bunny rather than proclaim the birth and resurrection of the Savior their ancestors rejected, and one of my pieces in The Southern Partisan took up the commercial sacrilege we had to endure twice a year.  Some friends, Christian as well as Jews, were annoyed, but perhaps in these benighted times they will think better of their response.  When I find...

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A Life / Feature / Fleming

24 Dec, 2016

Keeping Christmas, Part I: Even Atheists Can Celebrate

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This is a detached fragment of A Life in Shreds and Patches. As a cynical youth, I used to listen to Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio.  Armstrong was a bona fide American kook: an anti-sabbatarian British Israelite—from Iowa, naturally—and an autodidact who read copiously and recklessly to find evidence to fit his surrealistic theories about the Bible and human history.  Armstrong hated Christmas, so every Christmas he devoted one of the episodes of his radio program, The World Tomorrow, to the evils of Christmas—the crimes, depressions, drug overdoses, and—above all suicides—that he would cite and recite with glee to...

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FF / Podcasts

21 Dec, 2016

Boethius Book Club, Episode 10: The Odyssey

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This month’s selection is The Odyssey. Our first discussion one year ago, you will recall, took up the books devoted to Telemachus. The discussion was quite good but limited. Although everyone probably has read the Odyssey more than once, and I know that many reread the whole thing for last August’s meeting, we shall be concentrating mainly on the opening of Book I, Books V-VIII, XI, and XIII-XXIV. In this next installment, we shall take up the character and homecoming of Odysseus and explore more deeply the Homeric view of man, the gods, and justice. We might even engage in...