The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
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.
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?
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.”
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.
By all means, the US and the UN should brand Hamas a terrorist organization, but who knows what can of–not worms but rattlesnakes–we might open up.
I watched on Fox News some of the Saturday pro-Palestinian protest in Washington, D.C. It reminded me of the left-wing demonstrations I reported on 40 years ago when I was a journalist there. Most marches then were against Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup. One of the marcher groups was Women Strike for Peace, founded by far-left Rep. Bella Abzug, remembered for wearing colorful hats.
As to the debate, so-called, the best comment came from Vivek Ramaswamy when he blasted the NBC moderators for perpetrating the Russia Hoax for three years. He should have stormed off the stage. If he had, that would be the only thing anybody remembered.
The smell of burned cheese and cheap frying oil overhanging a street, such as Palermo’s savagely pedestrianized Via Maqueda, signals the presence of the mass tourist. The tourist is both predator and prey, the collective criminal and the collective victim of his crime. He is here on Sicily to pursue happiness, but instead has it rudely imposed on him by people whose idea of a transient’s happiness is their own enrichment.
In this first episode of the final era in our Westerns series (1990-present) we will look at Dances with Wolves. Does Dances represent a breakthrough in Western film or just the complete breakdown of the American mind? Homework for next meeting: Last of the Mohicans.
If I were a Jewish American or an Arab American, I would naturally be inclined to a one-sided view of the current conflict, but I would, nonetheless, insist on putting the interest and justice of the American people and their government first. Unfortunately, I see very little evidence that either Jewish-Americans and Arab-Americans have even a sense of dual loyalty.
