Westerns Episode 14: Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Dr. Fleming looks at a film adaptation of a novel that he has enjoyed and finds it wanting across the board.Homework for our next episode, 1993’s Tombstone.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Sandra Day O’Connor, R.I.P.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with much help from pro-lifers. They expected him to appoint U.S. Supreme Court justices who would overturn the anti-constitutional Roe v. Wade decision, which had aborted all state laws, including those that had legalized abortion.
The Best Revenge, Thanksgiving Dinner
In this brief episode, Dr. Fleming explains a method he recently used to deliver some of the best turkey breast he’s ever had. He also holds forth on green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and pecan pie.
Wednesday’s Child: The Waiting Room
The gentle reader, I’m quite certain of it, is long grown tired of my adventures in the dentist’s chair. But the naked man – or the man with lice, in another version of the Russian proverb – keeps on about the bathhouse, as “thou talkest of what ails thee.” And so I square up for yet another round of self-indulgence and self-pity, an indifferent hand to begin with, but downright embarrassing when played once too often.
The Latin of the Latin Mass, II: The Problem With English
When the Novus Ordo was imposed by the Vatican hierarchy, the biggest losers were probably the English-speakers. As everyone knows, the official version of the NO Mass is in Latin, and the translation into English was not only poorly and ineffectively written but it was filled with errors, some of which, I suppose (to give the plotters the benefit of the doubt) was simply the result of their own poor English.
The Latin of the Mass, I
Latin has been the language of the Western Church for roughly 1500 years, but it has also been the language of western Christendom, by which I mean the Christian civilization that incorporated the best of the Greek and Latin pagan traditions, Christianized them, and created that great glory we call the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, but which we should call the Christian Age, the age of Dante and St. Thomas.
Wednesday’s Child: Product Placement
In the 1975 Soviet film classic An Irony of Fate, or Did you Have a Nice Bath, two principal characters exchange New Year’s gifts. The man gives his fiancée a bottle of “French perfume,” while she presents him with another contraband import, an electric shaver “with the floating heads.” The exchange was not meant to condone black marketeering or to condemn conspicuous consumption, as the epoch to which the film belonged had been a continuation of Khrushchev’s “thaw.” It was meant to show that the characters’ extravagance is lovingly reciprocal.
Islamophilia, the American Dream
Many Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, have been astonished by the upsurge of support for Islam in general and Hamas in particular among leftists and members of the LGBT& “community.” “Don’t they know that Islam subjugates women, imposes severe penalties for all deviant behavior, and is intolerant of sexual diversity?
Nikki Haley Wants to Gulag Hamilton, Madison and Jay
The Central Regime Establishment now is pushing Nikki Haley as the alternative to Trump. Ron DeSantis has fallen from favor for not doing well in the polls, not backing the Ukraine War, and not being charismatic. Ed Kilgore in the New Yorker is typical, “Haley Is on the Brink of Croaking DeSantis.”
Wednesday’s Child: The Useful Idiot
Like many other people, ever since he became a household name I thought Elon Musk an idiot. An idiot, mind you, can be a successful entrepreneur, even at times a good husband or father, and outwardly in all respects he seems a perfectly ordinary fellow, but if you listen to him for just a few moments you realize that this kind of dimness cannot be hid under a bushel.
