Westerns, Episode 9: El Dorado, 1966
In this episode Dr Fleming comments on the interplay between John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in a Howard Hawks film of a different era.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Dr. Fleming “Justice in Early Greece”, Excerpt from 2023 Fleming Foundation Summer Symposium Lecture. 5 min.
A 5 Minute excerpt from the Fleming Foundation Summer Seminar: How justice is corrupted by “rights.” All Lectures available now at the website store.
Wednesday’s Child: Jolly Holiday with Mary
Some years ago, I recall, a great deal of postprandial talk in England revolved around the term “nanny state.” This did not come from libertarians, anarchists, or some other political fringe, but was very much a mainstream Tory gripe. The state meddles, they complained as they passed the port to the left, it interferes and stifles.
Westerns Episode 8: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
A singular movie among John Ford’s work, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance showcases the American West and questions narratives about heroes, politics, and America itself.Homework for next episode will be to watch Howard Hawks’ El Dorado.
How the Panicked Response to 9/11 Caused Our Current Crisis – and the Possible Collapse of America
The dumb Republicans of 22 years ago didn’t heed our warning of making sure we didn’t devolve further into a full-blown police state. They didn’t see how the federal police agencies, at the time run by moderate Republicans, easily could be weaponized by liberal Democrats.
It’s Too Late To Say You’re Sorry
One year ago, Eric Adams, mayor of New York, welcomed the first busload of illegal immigrants to the Big Apple. One year later he is crying in his cider:
Robert Hickson, RIP
I have just received the sad news that my old friend Bob Hickson died recently. Bob was a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who is known to many traditional Catholics for his devotion to the Catholic tradition. Although a few years older than I am, he was my student in a summer school course in Augustan Latin literature at Chapel Hill. It was typical of Bob that his response, when I had given him some Ovid to read, was a mixture of admiration and disgust. “Why he even sneers at the emperor Augustus.” It is symptomatic of the age...
Low-trajectory Aspirations
After the fall, we each have a predominate fault driven by physiology rather than merely psychology or external circumstances. The modern personality tests only weakly address this
Wednesday’s Child: Arcadian Blues
“Today I harvested honey,” a reader has written apropos of last week’s post, and naturally I envied him the instant I read it. As an adult I always lived in and was drawn to cities, as this chimed in with my nostalgia for civilization on the wane, but the bucolic, which I had richly experienced as a child, ever beckoned the prodigal to return. Civilization is temporal, like our life itself. Nature is like our afterlife, eternally kind to some and eternally brutal to others.
