The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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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...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

9 Oct, 2015

John Kasich’s Bible

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Governor Kasich has finally got himself into the news.   Falling asleep in the debate did not work.so now he turns to that last refuge of corrupt Republican: religion.  Accused of pandering for votes by supporting socialized medicine, he offers to give his critics free copies of the Bible. Looks like this is one more cause of a good Catholic boy who has followed the papacy into  non-revolutionary socialism. This is one we cannot blame on Pope Francis or Paul VI or even on Leo XIII.  Kasich abandoned  the Catholic Church for materialist hedonism, and when he found he needed some...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

7 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: The Three Consuls

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  In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

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Brownlow / Essays

5 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part I

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It is not so long since any time historians wanted to explain something—the wealth of medieval Europe, the disappearance of bubonic plague, the Reformation—they would trot out the middle classes as the uncaused cause of all effects.  Others—the more prophetically-minded—took a gloomier view of the middle classes, and attributed all the things they disliked to them.   Bad taste in art, for instance.  How does one explain that?  Or the general stodginess and frumpiness of all those people commuting into work on the train in the morning?  Their refusal to be impressed by free-verse poetry, twelve-tone music, and abstract expressionism? ...

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Best Revenge / Fleming

2 Oct, 2015

On Secund Thawt: The Grammar of Dating

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Good grammar is said to be all the rage on dating sites.  This story would be good news, had it been reported anywhere but in the Wall Street Journal, whose columnists and editors do not appear to know the difference between grammar and spelling.  They lead the story with a young man who was put off by a potential date who  wrote him a confirmation of their first meeting: “I’ll see you their.”  Poor Mr. Cohen—a chump more interested in spelling than romance.  The young lady has made a fortunate escape.  One is almost tempted to agree with the Columbia University...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

30 Sep, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: The Electric Stradivari

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If I were asked to devise a novel “ontological proof” of God’s existence, in the tradition of St. Anselm and the rest of that crowd, I would probably begin by pointing out the difference between the price of a yard of cashmere tweed and a yard of blue denim.  Hierarchies exist and, despite society’s attempts to erode or invert them, are demonstrable and immutable, which suggests that some kind of apogee of the natural order of things must exist in its turn. Though our society seeks to level the field, so that a fur must now be qualified as “real”...

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Autodidact / FF / Fleming / Reading Lists

29 Sep, 2015

The Autodidact’s Reading List, I: The Ancient Greeks

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Part One:  The Greeks Pre-Classical Homer    The  Iliad and the Odyssey   There are many translations and imitations.  For plain prose by good scholars, there is Lang, Leaf, and Myers for the Iliad and Butcher and Lang for the Odyssey.  George Chapman’s translations and Alexander Pope’s Iliad are important works of English verse.  T.E. Lawrence’s Odyssey is a readable narrative. Iliad I: Iliad II There are several Autodidact essays and podcasts on Homer, e.g. https://fleming.foundation/2022/01/the-autodidact-homer/  and  https://fleming.foundation/2016/12/boethius-book-club-episode-10-the-odyssey/. You can find many others simply by searching “Homer.”  Many are free podcasts, and other, more polished lectures, are for sale. The Homeric...

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Autodidact / Fleming

29 Sep, 2015

Sophocles’ Oedipus III

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Jocaste once again reassures Oedipus  that religion is bunk.  Even if the servant changes his story about the number of Laius’s killers, “he will never prove that the killing of Laius was as predicted, namely that he would be killed by my son as Apollo prophesied.”   Thus the second witness is not crucial to the story.  Oedipus here also makes an important slip: It is not just oracle-mongers who are not to be trusted, but the god himself.