The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
“This would be a great target to hit.” It was Tuesday, and I closed my eyes and pictured an explosion ripping through the Eurostar that was taking me from Paris to London. Done at the right time, with the proper amount of explosives, such an act could destroy or severely cripple the Chunnel, kill hundreds of travelers of dozens of nationalities, and chill rail travel for months, if not years. I opened my eyes again, and gazed at the lovely French countryside. I’m not morbid by nature, but wars, and rumors of wars, have been on my mind since November 13th....
This show tells you everything you ever wanted to know about–what else?–Bacon. Dr. Fleming interviews his son, Chef Garret Fleming (former head chef of Pig and now of Barrel in Washington DC) on the art of raising pigs, smoking and curing bacon. If only we could capture the smell on the website! He concludes with a humorous pig on the lighthearted subject of how not to kill a pig. Original Air Date: December 3, 2015 Show Run Time: 50 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming, Garret Fleming Show Host(s): James Easton The Fleming Foundation · The Best Revenge, Episode 1:...
Greece IV We had brief interchange, four hours into the trip. We stopped for lunch at Menidi on the Ambracian Gulf. We were not expecting much from Menidi. The morning had been spent on the endless drive along the superhighway, every mile under repair, from Athens to Corinth and then along the northern coast of the Peloponnesus. It is true that the road got worse and the landscape better, after we crossed the bridge across the Gulf of Corinth at Rhio. I thought about stopping at Missolonghi, where Byron had died in 1824, raising money for Greek independence...
I realize that visual observation alone, whether at its focus is human illness or social mores, is rarely conclusive when it comes to diagnostics, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I’ve got. Parting with $100 in a café here is a foregone conclusion, while in the food halls of the Galleries Lafayette two bucks will buy you a piece of chocolate measuring one cubic centimetre. And yet this city eats like Rome, with the diners, like Olympic swimmers in the final yards of the race, twisting their apoplectically speckled necks this way and that, as though coming up...
Recorded in the week following the Supreme Court “ruling” in America which was said to show that #lovewins Dr. Fleming discusses marriage from the very beginning of societal relationships, through the age of Christendom, to our present day, and how the Protestant Revolt changed the dynamic of the state’s involvement in marriage, and all that we have reaped (and continue to reap to this day) as a result. Original Air Date: December 1, 2015 Show Run Time: 1 hour 1 minute Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the...
The attack on Southern symbols has nothing to do with opposing slavery or helping black Americans. It is an attempt to eliminate an important cultural and political tradition that goes back to Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Such campaigns to eliminate historic identities are defined–and condemned–in international law as “cultural genocide.” Cultural genocide is not a technique used by free republics but by totalitarian ideological states. Even northerners who have little interest in the South should begin to understand that this attack on the South and its flag-bearing cross will inevitably be followed by overt attacks on Christianity and on America...
Cicero was one of the most important men of the Roman world. Although he ultimately failed as a statesman, as virtually every statesman does, but he only increased in stature as the years went on.
As a visit to Wallington quickly reveals, the Trevelyan notion of artistic expression was mostly satisfied by collecting dolls’ houses and preserving such family arcana as Lord Macaulay’s top hat and shaving kit. But there was one Trevelyan—admittedly a Trevelyan by marriage—who liked to move in artistic circles. Lady (Pauline) Trevelyan, née Jermyn, Sir Walter’s no doubt long-suffering wife, liked to play with the Pre-Raphaelites, and it was she who persuaded Sir Walter (who, left to himself, would have done nothing of the kind) to put a roof over the central quadrangle, and create a large central room. She...
In this, my second communication from Munich, I solemnly promised myself to steer clear of politics, notwithstanding that history looms so large in my window – modern parlance for the computer screen – it nearly obliterates thought. And so, as the president of France prepares to bend his knee to Moscow in a ludicrous pantomime of Henry IV’s Gang nach Canossa, I can only repeat Hamlet’s “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” The reason I came to Munich in the first place was to hear a recital that my wife was giving with the remarkable German...
Fox News commentators do not often make an intelligent criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy. They are usually content to point out the obvious—that Obama is misguided—while offering alternatives that would hardly work any better. Nonetheless, the neoconservative establishment was right to express outrage in February, when then-State Department spokesperson Marie Harf declared on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC program that defeating ISIS in the long-term will require addressing the “root causes” of terrorism, such as lack of jobs and poverty. This statement was palpably absurd, but it also reflected the consensus of the American and European ruling classes, a consensus that...
