Author: Thomas Fleming (Thomas Fleming)

The 60th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education is being celebrated today with far more pomp than has accompanied Independence Day celebrations in recent years. Not surprisingly, Michelle Obama took the occasion to condemn not just the growing trend of resegregation in public schools—a nasty term for neighborhood-based schools—but also the persistence...

“Race in America is always an inflammatory, volatile thing,” chirped NPR sports commentator Tom Goldman on this morning’s “Morning Edition. Goldman was sounding off to David Greene on the woes of Donald Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers, who expressed himself too candidly on matters of race in a private phone call. The word “always”...

American churches cannot make up their minds. Do they serve God or an Uncle Sam who for a long time has been looking a great deal like Mammon? On patriotic holidays the choirs sing that bloodthirsty and nonsensical anthem to war and slaughter ironically titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and pastors give sermons...

Twice a year, at least, during Christmas and Easter, some Conservative Christians must feel like the hero of “I Led Three Lives,” a 1950’s television series starring Richard Carlson. The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Herbert A. Philbrick, the American double-agent who infiltrated the Communist Party, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,”...

Eminent Domain confiscations are a direct threat to private property but perhaps even more sinister are the flagrant violations of the 4th Amendment that Americans have grown to tolerate, much as the English learned to tolerate general writs. State troopers may routinely set up roadblocks, not to search for felons when a crime has been...

The English/American household was more than a fortified building with locks and bars to keep out unwanted intruders: It was also an autonomous community, whose existence antedated the state. This was the teaching of both philosophers and jurists, who cited approvingly Cicero’s famous statement that the family was the seed-bed of the commonwealth. This was...

It was the invasion of property more than the taxes and confiscations themselves that annoyed the Americans and prepared them to resist the Stamp Act. It was not money per se, but the sacred rights of property that were at stake. If a man cannot be secure in his home, he cannot be comfortable in...

Everyone has heard the expression: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” The most memorable expression of this proverb was given by the elder William Pitt, the future Lord Chatham: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind...

The Crimean parliament’s proposal to exit the Ukriane and join the Russian Federation has raised the question of the legality and morality of secession.  Inevitably, most of the discussion is based on the short-sighted and tortured reasoning of modern and postmodern political theory. A good example is Ilya Somin’s, “Crimea and the Morality of Secession“—a...

A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying:  “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....

The politically correct are breathing a sigh of relief. A proposed piece of Kansas legislation that would permit businesses not to provide services to same-sex “married” couples has been pronounced “dead in the water.” At least we’ll be spared another round of mindless name-calling between the “libtards” and “wingnuts” who prowl the internet seeking the...

In the Netherlands, Els Borst has been found dead in her garage. A few hours earlier, the 81 year old physician and former deputy prime minister had attended a meeting of what is described by the Telegraph as her center-right political party. In the Netherlands, apparently, any party to the right of the Maoists can be...

Some Americans are wondering, “Why all the hoopla over Hollande’s courtesy call on Obama?” Is there something sinister or even serious going on? The obvious answer—and even some journalists are aware of it—is the natural affinity of two Marxist political hacks. “Dear Barack,” as Hollande now refers to the American President, would like nothing better...

When we arrived back in the States, it was Zero degrees in Chicago and Rockford. The welcome was even chillier at O’Hare’s passport control, which now has machines to which the lines of cattle–I mean travelers–are directed, in our case, by a Subcontinental who could barely speak English.   After 17 hours of travel–from the...

1 February 2014   Two news items occupied the media today. The “big” national and international story was the reversal of the reversal of Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s conviction for complicity in the sexual abuse and murder of Meredith Kercher. The outcome was almost a foregone conclusion, not because–as Americans have been saying–an American...

Rome was Rome, not only in the obvious and universal sense that, however much the city changes, it remains the urbs aeterna and not just for Catholics, but in the narrower sense that when you are in a place every year for more than a few days, it loses the exotic charm of unfamiliarity and...

I did not watch the President’s State of the Union Address. I hardly every watch such things, especially if I intend to write about them. What would be the point? The President’s boys and girls spend the previous week leaking the main talking points to the press to make sure that no one fails to...

The title is intended as a joke and not as a declaration of apostasy. The past two weeks my attention has been almost entirely absorbed, first by our Winter School program and then by an informal after-excursion to Rome with a few lingering students. I enjoy these programs, but while they are going on I...

And now, Part 2 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: Are you saying that the American people have been victimized by the elite classes that both control mass culture and the higher culture of universities and the arts?  Is the answer some sort of populist...

January 14   We’ve spent a busy two days doing nothing. Yesterday we more or less wasted the day (with Mark Beesley, Michael Guravage (who came down from Holland), George Gaudio, and the Arnetts–whom we picked up along the way) going back and forth to Florence. We had intended to gaze lovingly at the Fra...

Here is Part 1 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: What has happened to the United States?  Observers in and outside of America have been commenting on America’s decline, both as a world power and as an inspiration and model for other countries.  Within living...

January 10   Last night we had a good seafood dinner at La Buca. This was our second seafood dinner, since the night before we had gone to my old favorite, Il Nuraghe, and dined well on fish–in defiance of the Trip Advisor food mavens, who are forever complaining about how stodgy and 1970’s the...

January 8   I first came to Pisa in 1988. Christian Kopff had persuaded me to apply to make a joint-presentation of work that grew out of my dissertation on the colometry of Aeschylus.  Feel free to skip this tedious pedantic digression:   What is colometry? Perhaps it is better not to ask, but, properly...

Epiphany   It was a relief to come to Pisa, though the train trip was enlivened by a pair of Africans vendors, returning to Cascina, shouting their native language into their cellphones. I politely signaled to one of them by putting by finger to my lips. He turned his shouting to me and informed me...

January 4, 2014   The trip to Florence took a long and unpleasant day. It was cold the day we left, and there was so much snow it required a bit of nerve just to drive to my office to pick up a few things I had forgotten. We caught the bus to O’Hare an...

January is not the best time of year to live in Tuscany–though August, with its swarms of tourists, may be worse.  Pisa is hardly any warmer than Florence, but to me it seems warmer, perhaps because of the proximity to the Tyrrhenian Sea.  It is also true that when I got up this morning, the...

Beatitudes, Not Platitudes   According to one interpretation of the scene, Judas went away from this encounter disgruntled with Jesus’ failure to lead a social revolution.   It is certainly true that Jesus’ answer remains a powerful rebuke to those who would confound the gospel with one or another form of state-imposed socialism. The poor,...

Pope Francis has been under attack from many directions.  Perhaps some day his enemies–most of which are self-described traditionalist (as opposed to traditional) Catholics–will find some dirt to stick on the poor man, but so far they appear to be missing their target by more than a mile.   The most ridiculous charge–made among others...

  De mortuis nihil nisi bonum is a good rule to follow, especially when the dead person is a stranger in land one has never visited.  I am perfectly happy to believe all the nice things said about Mr. Mandela’s character by his friends, colleagues, and admirers.  Nonetheless, it is not clear to me that a...

  What a week it has been for the ambulance-chasing media!  Anticipated highs in their schedule were  anniversaries of the Gettysburg address and the Kennedy assassination.  What that pair really should be remembered for are cheap rhetoric to camouflage mass murder and cheap idealism to camouflage not just the libido dominandi but plain old raw libido.   I well...

  I don’t put much stock in attempts to date Paul’s epistles, but he must have been writing under one of two less than splendid rulers, the chuckle-headed Claudius and the egomaniacal Nero, who would burn the Christians.  People of Paul’s social station were not going to meet the Emperor, and it would have been...

  This part two of a series.  If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I.  I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man.  In Part III, I’ll...

  Part I: What it Is Obamacare’s enrollment fiasco has provided endless opportunities for pointless blather from the unwashed masses of the American “right.”  Talkshow celebrities and the delicate young men who blog for magazine websites cannot contain their outrage.  One of them yesterday, the editor of an actual print magazine of moderately large circulation,...

A Federal judge in Austin (Lee Yeakel–or is it yokel) has struck down provisions in Texas’ new abortion law requiring abortionists to have hospital privileges within 30 miles of their murder site.  Right-to-lifers are angry, but, really, the judge has a point:  Why should we care about the life and health of these latter-day Medeas...

  Caught red-handed spying on the private life of Angela Merkel, the Obama administration and its supporters in both parties have chanted the same responses: “Allies always spy on each other,” and “our monitoring activities in Europe have thwarted terrorist attacks.”  True enough, but as everyone knows, politicians only tell the truth when it serves...

  Timothy Broglio is Archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services.  Early this year, he attracted a great deal of media attention, mostly negative, for a letter he issued condemning the Obama’ administration for requiring Catholic institutions to include contraception in its insurance coverage.  An adroit diplomatist, Broglio reached a compromise with the Pentagon, and...

  John Kerry has pinned his case for killing Syrian civilians on an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy,” a 20-something researcher who turns out to be a propagandist for the Syrian opposition without the sacred Ph.D from Georgetown that got her a job at a propaganda mill masquerading...

And a point. Everyone I know is asking me why we are going to bomb Syria. There is a rarely a simple answer to such questions, but if we look closely at the would-be bombers–the leaders of Turkey and France for example, perhaps we can gain some insight. The latest coalition of the willing might...