The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

21 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Yes, Prime Minister

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Britain has a new prime minister by the name of Theresa May.  In and of itself this may not be reason enough for jubilation, but last week the new leader appointed a cabinet that was considerably stronger than what many, myself included, had been expecting.  No fewer than four leaders of the Leave EU movement in parliament received ministerial portfolios, most remarkably Boris Johnson, who became Foreign Secretary; David Davis was given a new post of Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union; and a similarly novel position created in the wake of the referendum, that of Secretary of...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

19 Jul, 2016

Learning to Write and Read Verse

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Several readers and friends have asked me how to read poetry, and the questions usually take the form of asking my advice on this or that book on prosody or form or the history of poetry.  I invariably reply to such requests—as I also reply to requests for “one good book” on Greek drama or the fall of Rome or ancient rhetoric, by suggesting generally that is best to form one’s taste on the “classics” that used to be approved by the wisdom of our ancestors, the cut-off being World War I. In matters of writing—poetry and rhetoric, for example—I...

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FF / Podcasts

19 Jul, 2016

Boethius Book Club, Episode 3: Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure

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One of Shakespeare’s less familiar masterpieces is Measure for Measure. This is a serious play, certainly not a comedy, and yet it ends happily without a full complement of corpses on the stage. It was written about 1605, during the same period in which he composed his greatest works. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare takes up serious moral and political questions: the nature of justice, the quality of rulers, and, perhaps most significantly, the debate over marriage that raged between, on the one hand, Catholics and Anglicans, and, on the other, Calvinists. It is not too much to say that...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Revenge, Part C

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Civilized people will never be impressed by any argument that seems to celebrate the morality of apes.  We are, after all, human beings who are, as Christians say, made in the image of God or, as Darwinists insist, the product of tens of millions of years of evolutionary progress.  It is a main thrust of philosophical liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. I can almost hear the rumblings from the professors, social workers, and other right-thinking people:  ”If you once start conceding some legitimacy...

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Feature / Phillips Red

18 Jul, 2016

Anti-Trumpers, Please Watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

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{I beg pardon from both Red Phillips and our readers for being so late in publishing this.  It arrived on a day I was preparing dinner for a few early arrivals to our Summer Symposium, which just ended Saturday night.  I was preparing the dinner–a two day project–because the chef in charge, namely my wife, had just broken and badly dislocated her ankle in several places and will have to undergo an operation this week. TJF] As a good traditional conservative, I like Westerns. If you watch a lot of Westerns you will eventually discern that many of them have a...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Betting on Winners

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  In a writer’s life it sometimes happens that no sooner does he put a thought in words than chance sends him fresh evidence to substantiate it, a kind of souvenir acknowledgement in tacit confirmation of what he had been thinking.  So it happened last week.  No sooner had I posted my musings on football than chance spirited me away to a place called Enna, a mountain townlet in the middle of Sicily, where, of all places, an international piano competition, with my wife among the jurors, was to take place.  Free lodging, free grub, and free air at temperatures...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

8 Jul, 2016

Loretta’s Lynch Law

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American political leaders are almost to a man, woman, and  all points in-between,  uneducated and literate only to the level that they can read the speeches that are written for them.  Nonetheless, it is sometimes enlightening to examine the clichés—almost all of them not simply false but counter-intuitive— with which they pepper their pronouncements. Case in point, Loretta Lynch’s sermon on the murder of five officers of the law in Dallas.  After thanking the reporters for attending, she assured the American people that “we”—whatever or whomever she means by that— “…intend to provide any assistance that we can to investigate...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

6 Jul, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Betting on Losers

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  Chess is the only sport I ever understood, recognized, and followed, because, unlike spectator sports, I thought it a complex yet coherent model of human conflict.  It was never clear to me what lesson one could glean from rugby or water polo, for instance, except that perseverance and endurance win over irresolution and apathy.  But this is like saying that it is better to be clever, rich, and healthy than stupid, poor, and sick – not much of a lesson there, as most people would probably agree. This week, however, I was watching football – soccer, a spectator sport...

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Feature / Fleming

4 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter Five: Sweet Revenge, Part B

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This Simian World Revenge and marriage, as institutionalized means of expressing love and hate, have much in common: Both are found in a variety of forms, but the forms and tendencies that converge in societies around the globe encourage us to think of them as generically human phenomena.  That is because they are, both of them, based on natural necessities and passions that have probably been instilled into the human species throughout the long course of evolution.  A mouse will fight against an attacker, whether the enemy is a rival mouse or a cat, and I have been charged by...