The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Best Revenge / Fleming

29 Oct, 2015

Back to the Past, Part I: Athens

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International travel has always been a chore, but in recent decades that chore has begun to equal one of the labors of Hercules. The blame lies in part to pointless security regulations and the TSA goons culled from the prisons, asylums, and housing projects from which they were recruited, in part to the airlines who, in packing fatter and fatter Americans into tighter and tighter places, have defied the laws of solid geometry, but in larger part to the travelers themselves. What people! Unwashed bodies bulging out of unwashed jeans, aging fat ladies whose decibels rise with the alcohol content...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

28 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Convertible Malarkey

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In the commotion, here and elsewhere, caused by my “Putin’s Hitler” last month, some words of doubt got misplaced – chiefly I mean readers questioning my contention, with which I had prefaced this post a week earlier, that Russia’s got money enough to burn, to say nothing of buying Crimea, if not Kiev.  I admit to certain capriciousness in my choice of Exhibit A, namely, a bill for 107,524 Euros paid by a party of young Russians lunching at a seaside restaurant in France; in the past few weeks, however, somewhat less fanciful proof has been adduced, and this I...

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Autodidact / Fleming

22 Oct, 2015

Preface to Cicero

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Cicero is, in fact, one of the most important figures in our tradition: statesman and orator,  rhetorical theorist, public philosopher, and a writer of marvelous letters that still give us a candid picture of insider politics that is unmatched to this day.

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Uncategorized

21 Oct, 2015

Dog Latin

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Habemus Oratorum Domum? Can Paul Ryan win the support of the House Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, and the Tuesday Group? If he can, forget the speakership, let’s talk sainthood, because unifying House Republicans counts as his first miracle. E.  Christian Kopff sent me this gem, written by one Jim Geraghty from the NR website.  I don’t read National Review in any form, print, internet, or the original crayon, so I don’t know who Mr. Geraghty is or if he has a whimsical turn of mind or if he is possibly fond of ridiculing the ignorance of learned languages...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

21 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Fatal Eggs

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Every once in a while a Jehovah’s Witness comes calling at the door, which is more than a little odd.  Not only because this is a squarely Catholic country, but also because here in Sicily we don’t very much like witnesses.  In fact, we usually kill them as they turn a corner, with a single blast in the face from a sawed-off shotgun. My father, who lives in New York, used a different technique. Whenever a Jehovah’s Witness, or indeed a representative of any other millenarian cult with an apocalyptic agenda, appeared at the door, he would swing it open...

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Brownlow / Essays

19 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part III: The Great Secession

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  The one absolutely essential feature of middle-class psychology is confidence.  If father ran a successful hardware store, then as long as they live his sons must treasure an understanding of the finer points of the hardware business.  If the old boy designed and built houses, they must be sure to have some grasp of the arts of brick-laying, carpentry, and plastering.  If he was a respected local attorney or solicitor, they must rejoice in the knowledge that he was the impenetrable vault of the town’s secrets. They must never allow themselves to start saying things like, “Well, the old...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

14 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: A Worldly Delusion

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Two ladies, long past the first bloom of youth and recently arrived in what Russian wits call the Age of Balzac, are scrutinizing the map of Palermo in the bar on the ground floor of my apartment building. They turn the map this way and that, like two army recruits conspiring to desert in the middle of a dense and inhospitable forest supposedly traversed by a national frontier, and from the air of anxious isolation about them I gather they are American tourists. The bar’s proprietor, Carmelo, is enthroned at the cash register not two feet away.  Nothing would be...

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Brownlow / Essays

14 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part II: War, Taxes, And Socialism

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What happened to the middles classes?  Three things happened to them: war, socialism, and what we can call, borrowing a term, the great secession. We can start with war.  All governments routinely soak their citizens or subjects to pay for their wars, and that is why the first income tax was introduced into England in 1798 to pay for the war with revolutionary France.  It was rescinded on the signing of the Peace of Amiens, but reinstated with the renewal of hostilities a year later.  A year after the Battle of Waterloo it was repealed again, in 1816.  Then the...

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Fleming / Interviews

12 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part II

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PC     Do you believe the neoconservative dominance of mainstream discourse of US foreign policy is slowly coming to an end or we simply seeing a generational shift? Also, have the neoconservatives in your judgement played a role in instigating the current crisis in Ukraine? TJF    The neoconservatives in themselves are of little or no importance.  They do not formuulate policy, they merely repeat the slogans of the Cold War Democratic Party and put a slight conservative spin.  Their great success was in making an alliance with American Evangelical Zionists, who have been taught to see the world...

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Fleming / Interviews

11 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part I

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Thomas Fleming was interviewed in August by Mike Krupa of Polonia Christiana.  For readers of Polish, the inteveiw is available here.  For those less fortunate, we have posted the original exchange in English., PC  After almost 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency, what kind of country is the United States? TJF  When Barack Obama was elected President, reaction was divided along party lines.  Democrats, especially those who belonged to ethnic minorities, expected rapid improvement in their condition and in their opportunities for advancement. They also expected a quick end to the military adventurism that had characterized his predecessor’s administrations.  Republicans, by contrast, feared...