The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

21 Jan, 2016

Rome AMT 16 Part 2

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Rome AMT 16 Part 2 What do I say about Rome, after a brief visit of three and a half days, that has not been said before by everyone including myself?  What could be more tedious than one of those breathless travel pieces written by visitors to famous places who have faithfully followed their master Rick Steves or The Blue Guide?  If only the gushers would adopt the blank-screen strategy I have recommended, and look at Rome with the fresh eyes of a Martian visitor!  But no, they have to say something significant, which means, in the end, they get...

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

20 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: The Pursuit of Convenience

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  The story may be apocryphal, but a friend told me the other day that the inventor, for lack of a better word, of the cylindrical paper sachet by means of which coffee bars where cappuccinos cost $5 dispense granulated sugar–thus distinguishing themselves from ordinary coffee bars, where the said sachets are in the more traditional shape of rectangles–took his own life. The man killed himself because he had grown disillusioned, not with mankind generally, but with the small portion of it that was using his invention; apparently, he had envisioned coffee or tea drinkers breaking the sachets in half...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

18 Jan, 2016

Rome in the Year 16 AMT

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Rome 2016 I I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had...

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

13 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: A Terminal Moraine

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  Last week little brave Norway woke up to the news, sprung on her by the national TV2 channel, that Einar Gerhardsen, who had been her duly elected and much respected Prime Minister no less than three times–in 1945-51, then once more in 1955-63, and again in 1963-65–was, until his death in 1987, a KGB agent.  Recruited along with two members of his cabinet following a state visit to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, thenceforth the august statesman, affectionately known to his countrymen as the “Landsfaderen,” or father of modern Norway, would answer to the code name “Jan.”  In fact, Gerhardsen was...

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FF / Podcasts / Transcripts

12 Jan, 2016

Christianity and Classical Culture, Episode 2: Immigration

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What is the Christian Tradition regarding immigration? How is that tradition related to the way the ancients saw this issue? What’s a responsible and realistic way to examine this important issue in today’s postmodern soup? Dr. Fleming takes on this timeless issue which is on the minds of many, not just in America, but in Europe as well. Original Air Date: January 12, 2016 Show Run Time: 47 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner Transcript available now for Charter Subscribers and a la carte purchase. Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation....

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FF / Fleming

6 Jan, 2016

Ransom Notes 2

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Dallas Shipp writes in to ask:  “You once wrote that whenever a talking head on television referred to a storm or a shooting as a ‘tragedy,’ their misuse of the word amounted to nihilism. Could you elaborate and explain your point? TJF:  I don’t recall using the word “nihilism,” but I have frequently argued against the trivializing of the word tragedy by applying it to accident victims and people who have suffered in a disaster.  The trivialization works in two directions.  First, it reduces to the word tragedy to meaning something like “terrible misfortune” or “incomprehensible suffering.”   It is...

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Feature / Peters

6 Jan, 2016

Dissolving the German People by Robert Peters

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Das Volk hat das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt. Wäre es da nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung löste das Volk auf und wählte ein anderes? The preamble of this piece is the last line from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Die Lösung” (“The Solution”), written by the disillusioned Marxist after the failure of the Workers Uprising on 17 July 1953 and the communist government’s response to that uprising.  The title of the poem suggests an objective correlative with the Nazi term “Die Endlösung” (“The Final Solution”), “The Holocaust” in contemporary parlance.  The term also applies, perhaps more appropriately for this piece, to the...

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

6 Jan, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Summing Up and Down

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  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...

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Autodidact / Fleming

4 Jan, 2016

Cicero on Duty

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In Book III of De Officiis Cicero poses a dilemma: Suppose a father were robbing a temple or digging tunnels into the treasury; should a son give information to the government?  The philosopher’s answer, according to Cicero, was: No, that would be wrong.

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

1 Jan, 2016

Without Apology

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This piece is a slightly revised version of a piece I published some 16 years ago in a magazine I was then editing. “States Rights?  You can’t be serious!  What do you want to do–restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether he is a leftist at the Nation, a neoliberal at the New Republic, or a National Review minicon (or should that be “moneycon”?) looking for ways to pander and slander their way if not...