The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Let us first and briefly consider several character portrayals before going on in the next stage to speak of the political dimensions. I’ll pass over our young hero, who is a somewhat more violent version than Scott’s most heroic characters and look at the variety of tough men portrayed: Chelmnitski, Bogun, Tugai Bey the Tartar chief, Zagloba and the Prince. Chelmnitsk is the pivot of the action. He is the soul of the rebellion and the personification of the Ukrainian Cossacks. The wrong he has suffered from the Polish elite–whose leaders he understands very well–have given him, at least in...
I used to consider the practice of what is absurdly called “Daylight Saving Time” to be the premiere example of the gullibility of mankind. Then came the reaction to Covid (or, as we call it in Alabama, “The Rona”). Covid coyly told DST, “Hold my beer.” To borrow from Forrest Gump, I’m not a smart man. I do not claim to be a medical expert, or a scientist, or a physician. I believe the virus is a real thing. I consider myself neither a conspiracy theorist nor a coincidence theorist. But God did give me a brain, with which I...
You’re probably read some things about Rush Limbaugh, who died on February 17 at age 70. I hope you’ll indulge a little perspective from someone in the conservative commentary business from Rush’s beginning as a national figure until now. In 1987, President Reagan got rid of the unfair Fairness Doctrine, which mandated “equal time” for political commentary on TV and radio. That especially hurt conservatives. The first to benefit from the action was Rush, who moved in 1988 from a Sacramento gig to New York City and national broadcasting. But he always kept references to his California days in his...
Enactment of plank #2 leads ineluctably to #3: Declare the 14th Amendment invalid. Forrest McDonald and Raul Berger (among other historians and scholars) have shown that the 14th Amendment was both passed illegally—a bare majority was deemed sufficient, the votes of Southern states were coerced, and new states were admitted in order to gain ratification—and misconstrued to cover a wide variety of privileges not anticipated (and specifically repudiated) by the authors, such as the rights to vote and hold office. Since the Amendment was never enacted legally, all court decisions and Federal laws based in conformity or in expansion of...
In a better world than this, the 10th Amendment to the Constitution would not have been necessary? Why? Because no honest lawyer or politician could have justified the Federal government’s arrogation of powers not enumerated in the document itself.
I used to laugh at snowbirds who let a little bad weather drive them out of their homes to the dismal housing tracts that have destroyed Florida, but I can no longer take it.
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell. But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical.
“Conservatives are waxing wroth over a New York City high school principal who sent anti-white racist materials to parents in which a scale of “whiteness was outlined ranging from Uncle Tom Whiteys labelled “White Abolitionists” to the downright evil “White Supremacists” by way of varying shades of collaboration or resistance to America’s entrenched racist regime.
The Trump Show Trial coincided with my finishing Stephen Kotkin’s “Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power.” The monumental book ends with two events: Stalin deciding that Marxist principles dictated finally collectivizing agriculture, which led to 7 million deaths in the Holodomor. And the Shakhty Trial of mine workers, which Uncle Joe – as American liberals lovingly called him – used to shock any objectors to collectivization into submission.
Very early in the history of movies, Sweden produced a couple of directors of the first rank, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, both of whom were brought to Hollywood, where each made a handful of features with major stars, most notably including Great Garbo, who came to America with Stiller, who had discovered her.
