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Thomas Fleming is the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and president of The Rockford Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Morality of Everyday Life.
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Articles and Posts by Thomas Fleming:

  • Unpatriotic Liars(0)

    Here is poor David Frum pretending to have second thoughts about the Iraq War for which he shilled.  Obviously, the only people who are capable of having  second thoughts had to have first thoughts, and there is no sign that Frum has ever done anything but pound a keyboard and recycle other people’s lies.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/18/the-speechwriter-inside-the-bush-administration-during-the-iraq-war.html

    The friend who sent me the link queried: “Lemme see.  To whom does he NOT apologize?”

    A halfway decent person who had worked for a propaganda regime responsible for so much devastation would have trouble sleeping at night.  Be assured:  Frum gets ten hours of untroubled sleep every night.  For neoconservatives, unconciousness is always just minutes away.

     

  • Wyatt Earp turns 165(42)

    Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero.

  • No Left-Wing Christians(0)

    Does the Left-Wing Christian really exist?  I think not, if we mean someone who equates leftism with Christianity.  People like Garry Wills are not now and probably have never been Christian in any meaningful sense of the term.

    They simply put a veneer of Christian imagery on the banalities they have picked up from Marxist professors.  I would say there are whole denominations–the United Church of Christ, for example–of which this can be said.

    There are, of course, Christians who swallow the lies of the Left, just as there are Christians who have swallowed the lies of every dominant political class, whether the lies are derive from capitalism or from monarchical absolutism.  I would say, however, that the monarchist lies have some congruity with a Christian view of God the Father, and that the lies of capitalism are consistent with a Christian insistence on moral liberty.  Leftism, being a revolution against the created order and human nature is far more destructive, but I agree for the sake of argument that an otherwise good Christian might be taken in by Leftism.

    That having been granted, there is no quarter to be given people who insist on cloaking their leftism–Marxist, feminist, homosexualist, one-worldist, environmentalist, vegetarian–in Christian garb.

  • Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men C—Women and Men(1)

    I said at the beginning that man is a mammalian species. From this one simple fact flow many important consequences for the human race. As the word mammal indicates, our females nurse their young, which requires diversification of the roles played by males and females, but even those words males and females tell us something.

  • Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men B(16)

    Let us begin by refusing to set aside the facts.  The human species is, in material terms, mammalian, a fact that stipulates rather different roles  Males rule, hunt, and kill; females submit, gather food (though among some predators they also hunt), and nurture children.  Homines sapientes are not just mammals but primates whose closest living relatives are chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons.  While it would be nice to have closer kinship with  gibbons than with the chimpanzees.  Gibbons form couples and, while they defend their territory, were considered by Chinese Taoists to be the gentlemen of the woods.  Chimps, as we knew, are sexually promiscuous, violent, greedy, and quarrelsome.  They are about as charming as baboons.  Watching them in the zoo, we become decidedly uncomfortable, especially if we have  teenage boys of our own or seen film footage of a Chicago flash mob.

    A number of pop anthropologists (Robert Ardrey, Fox and Tiger, followed by George Gilder) pushed a thesis of human natural violence by comparing us with baboons.  This is simply not legitimate.  Baboons, langurs, macaques are not that closely related to us, and their sometimes tight and violent social structures, dominated by thugs, can be explained as an evolutionary response to environment.  Chimpanzees are more varied in behavior, more inclined toward problem-solving, more fluid in their hierarchies.  Chimpanzee children require more prolonged care, some of the responsibility for which devolves upon aunts and even on male members of the tribe.

    Jane Goodall began her work with rather unrealistic assumptions about the nonviolent nature of chimpanzees, but when she had a baby, she realized that her inquisitive charges looked on the baby less as a specimen to observe than meat on the table.   Chimps cannot seem to get enough meat to eat and have to be satisfied, much of the time, with vegetable substitutes.  Nonetheless, they have an all-too human craving for meat and will do almost anything to get it, including snatch human babies from their mothers’ arms.

    A side-note:  We big-brained apes have a constant craving for meat and salt, both hard to procure in the wild, and both necessary for neurological development. To hunt game, we need bursts of energy, which can be stimulated by sugary foods–fruits and honey.  And since the biggest game we primates play is competitive reproduction, everything is slanted toward having as much sex as we can with females who will raise our offspring.  In this sense, the life of urban welfare dependent males today is natural, if atavistic.  Cramming their bodies with McDonald’s junk washed down by high fructose soft drinks, fighting violent turf wars accompanied by chants more savage than we have heard from any ape (rap), and endlessly fornicating with females.  It is the American dream.

    To be continued

  • Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men A(12)

    I have been arguing for decades that any conservative point of view, to be usable or even defensible, has to be grounded in an understanding of human nature derived from observation of man’s nature and history.  In an age where a Church may dictate morality, this understanding may be less necessary, though it must be said that Thomas Aquinas’ arguments are rooted in Aristotle’s methods and observations.  Whatever the justification Christians may once have had for ignoring the material realities of the big-brained apes that we live among and are, the Darwinian revolution consigned all that rubbishy speculations to the dustbin.

  • Back to the Stone Age II E(37)

    What is the alternative to respect for responsible authority?  If we assume that all foods, recreations, forms of music, and manners of life are equal, then Liberals are right to demand social, political, and tax neutrality on traditional sauerkraut and on every other issue that might involve government control, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and the celebration of holidays—so long as we observe the non-aggression principle.

  • Christmas: Some Caveats(35)

    I endorse enthusiastically my friend and colleague Tom Piatak’s defense of Christmas.  As a curmudgeon, however, I am inclined, this time of year, to gloomy reflections.

  • Kerry Dancing(0)

    I do hope someone will remember that I suggested that the threatened nomination of Susan Rice might have been a trick to lure gullible Republicans  (a redundant expression) into breathing a sigh of relief when she withdrew.  They are now leaping on the John Kerry bandwagon.  For the honor of the country which some of my ancestors left when they came to the good old USA, he is not Irish and his name is not Kerry.  How about a requirement for office that requires everyone to use the name of his family going back four generations?  No Albright, no Kerry, no Clinton….

  • Back to the Stone Age II G: A Trip to Alsatia(8)

    Let us develop this point a bit.  Classical liberals like to complain about federal subsidies to agriculture.  They are quite right to denounce programs whose effect is to reward agribusiness while harming smaller farming operations, as if it were the government’s business to pick the winners in advance.  But they are equally opposed to European countries like France that protect farming as an essential part of the nation’s culture.   They can only defend their position by denying even the possibility of objective value.