Essays in Idleness

St Francis of Assisi had the good fortune of birth, a few centuries before he was discovered to be a communist. His patronage of “the environment,” of “ecology,” and of cute animals, was part of his “progress” away from being a Catholic saint; only posthumously did he become a fraud. The world is uncomfortably arranged, so to make the recovery of his mediaeval reputation difficult. But if one is determined, it can still be done.

In the Fifth Crusade he notoriously “crossed the line” at Damietta, Egypt, in order to preach the Gospel to Sultan Malik, as well to anyone else who happened to be listening in the Islamic camp (as we should do today). They were utterly impressed and thus finally let him through, without extravagant beatings. This happens sometimes in response to acts of humility and courage.

St Francis — and Brother Illuminatus of Arce, who should also be mentioned — had walked right in. The friars survived the initial physical beatings of the traditional Islamic “hello!” — because they were saying something unpredictable. They did not come with the message that bloodshed is wrong, or even with the bureaucratic terms of a peace treaty. Their dislike of violence could be taken for granted: no one (sane) enjoys being thrashed, and arguing the contrary is just gibberish against physical pain and death. Even dogs can make that position known by yelp and howling; and Muslims can be quite eloquent.

Instead, the Christians proposed to discuss Faith; and did this for several days before being dismissed: sent home with provisions and nice things.

I suppose one could call this “a dialogue.” But when truth is discussed in war, it is something more than a dialogue. For then truth is given a real background. We read a conversation of that sort in the Bhagavad Gita, between Arjuna and Krishna, which one might also consult. For generally there is presence of God, wherever angelic men and manly angels rise above complaint. Truth is higher, even than diplomacy.

Michaelmas is one of the chief anniversaries in “my secret life,” or my fantasy life as you might call it; except that my fantasy lives are plural. By simply presenting a curriculum vitae of one or several of these imaginary existences, I could have become a prominent Liberal or Democrat politician; but self-disgust always got in my way.

My private harvest fantasy for St Michael (patron of the archdiocese of Toronto) could be fulfilled by shooting down one of the Canada geese that are just now flying by the High Doganate, and then preparing him in my kitchen (with apple and onion stuffing). I say “him,” because I would rather aim at one of the thick-necked ganders, for they are so aggressive and annoying. A bird at Michaelmas, a bird at American Thanksgiving, and a bird at Christmas, should be my culinary custom, and by rendering their gorgeous fat I could have fine roast potatoes. Perhaps I could be raising them to purpose; though I doubt there is room in a modern apartment for a pond of adequate size, and one’s superintendent might complain about the open-door arrangements.

So I am resigned to reality. It constantly encroaches upon my secret life.

As it did in childhood, when I decided to round-out my education at Merton College in Oxford. I would have arrived for Michaelmas term, a little more than half a century ago, taking a garret under the eaves of their 13th-century Mob Quad, from which I would have had a good shot at the geese flying low and slow over the Thames River floodplain. That is how you cook them, incidentally — low and slow, after some initial violent pricking and crisping.

But even by the 1970s, Oxford had deteriorated through feminization and Marxism, to the point where I had to remove it even from my secret life. For I have standards.

“More Canadians shop at Dominion than at any other store, … and it’s mainly because of the meat!”

I encountered this ancient slogan and jingle for the first time since, I think, the 1960s, while irresponsibly “scrolling” through the Internet this morning. It was so effectively written and composed, that the tune immediately came back to me, clearing some fog out of my brain.

How distant that time, when the word “Dominion” still conveyed pride in a country, that is now post-national. The term has been systematically suppressed, by our controlling political Orcs, and the company that used it as a name for its grocery chain has been unnamed, broken up, or bankrupted (it is hard to say which). Except, apparently, in Newfoundland and Labrador, it says here.

But their slogan should have survived, for after decades of bleak veganism, meat has somehow been revived, even by the health nazis. Meat is good for you, even they now declare. It contains protein, which is all the rage. According to leading heart surgeons and nutritionists, if you eat ketotonically, you may actually outlive me. But you might not if you only eat Tim Horton’s donuts.

It is important to be, much more than to do. Indeed, doing should generally be discouraged, in most circumstances. It is important to make art, and to avoid expressing yourself, for art is not a form of knowledge, as all the idiots say. For it consists instead of making. Nor is knowledge power, when we come to that. Truth is not power, either, especially in this country.

Still, it is more honourable than lies. It has always been so, and it will always be. And it is mainly because of the meat.

The idea of doing some action, or of correcting something that is wrong, or in a more subtle way of adjusting radically what is imperfect (wheels missing on a carriage, for instance), is not a universal American trait, or kind of behaviour. But it does seem to be unique to this continent, and to the few places that are economically viable, elsewhere. The Americans, or rather I should say, those Americans, are subject to the world’s envy, and the world’s (incompetently) organized resistance. But people like Donald Trump never learn. That is why I adore them.

Myself, I have always preferred to do nothing, and leave things to work themselves out, on the instruction of the Chinaman, Lao Tzu. I like to be comfortable with disaster: to exhibit my poise, when everything breaks down, as they do in what Mr Trump has called “the shit-hole countries.” All my life I have been mastering this admirably useless, idle discipline. It does not require skill, only time. But it helps to be diligent in opposition to the “optimists,” the “go-getters,” and “busy-bodies” who pretend to improve things. True reaction is the ideal political solution, after all. Truth to tell, it is also the superior strategy, for in the end all the optimists will die; as often as not, from exhaustion.

Modesty and anonymity in the service of Christ is the higher calling. Persistence without optimism or pessimism; and without knowing if we have succeeded, in the end. For in this world we cannot know.

Our most recent Canadian prime minister, Mark Carnage, has been leading us away from our fragmentary “Americanism,” towards that bottomless lake of “globalism,” past the usual bodyguard of lies. It is the destination of every secular plan. Our polished, besuited central bank-governor is advancing the corporate plan. He is making many powerful new allies — such as Red China, and the bureaucracy within “the black heart of Europe.” We will all stand together, against the “controversial” Trump, as he reciprocates for our own excessive tariffs, and tariff-like “procedures.” For the moment America refuses to lie still, frustrating the attempts to administer our punishments. The beatings would have been more violent and effective, had the Trumpists not cut the budgets of so many of the Democratic Socialist NGOs, designed as they are to defeat anything like Trumpism.

But as every corrupt, worthless politician must know, and all the common scum among the electorates that serve them, Trump will soon-enough be gone. And that means they will have the chance to re-install the principles of intentional waste and kakistocracy.

Getting our freedom back from the monster of statist tyranny — from socialism in its many poisonous configurations — will require, as would any counter-revolution, a certain amount of aggressive vulgarity. We will need courage, and incidentally, more courageous statesmen like Trump.

“O my God!” was my reaction, when the news finally reached me, that morning a quarter century ago. I had a column to write that morning, but first some telephone calls to make, one of them to New York City. It was a social call I was finally returning. I found out about the Islamic terror attacks in that way, for a telephonic recording told me that all connexions to Manhattan were down at the moment. Why on earth would that be?

My then more primitive Internet service was also mostly down, and when I turned on my radio I had an interminable CBC “arts” interview to get through. (I had not previously used the radio attachment to my CD machine.) Finally, in my frustration, I found the Times of India, where, at one glance, I took in the picture of the burning Twin Towers. (After more than another hour, CBC “breaking news” was reporting that a “far right Oklahoma bomber” might be responsible.)

I, of course, was not as thick as a CBC newsroom. As at the last World Trade Centre bombing, in 1993, I knew instantly whose terrorists had done it. I was too old to believe, for instance, Mr George W. Bush’s blather about Islam being “a religion of peace.” Having been a child in Pakistan, of all places, I knew from the age of six that Islam was a religion of war. That was when I had my first opportunity to witness an “incident” near my school in Lahore. Human slaughter makes an indelible impression on young minds, though in places like Palestine it turns them into enthusiasts, in that case for killing Jews.

I had a column to write, that morning in 2001; it would be my first on 9/11. I wrote it to discourage readers from freaking out. My first worry was that Christian America would retaliate mindlessly. When an old Hindu friend, a journalistic colleague, called me later that day from the Subcontinent, his first question was, “What is wrong with the Americans?” He was genuinely puzzled that reprisals against Muslims were not happening, coast to coast.

“If that attack had happened in Delhi,” was his view, “there would have been ten thousand Muslim bodies floating face down in the Yamuna by now!”

Well, yes, I had to agree: approximately.

It does not make sense to send me money any more (if you ever did), except from the purest generosity and kindness, for I don’t think I can “perform” any more, as a commentator on various miscellaneous and mostly stupid topics, except rarely while I am not seeing double. Even the beloved Catholic Thing has had to sign off on me, and if you sent me a cheque (or check — for most come from the United States) I would currently be unable to cash it. Indeed, the evidence is that the few of my fellow Canadians who notice me, despise me as much as I despise them. Meanwhile, all my past Idleworks will continue to be available gratis, in the hope of afflicting them.

I do not like to cheat anybody, even Communists or Muslims. So they may read me at their leisure.

This is because I am a convinced “Christianist,” who necessarily follows some eccentric doctrines. I think, for instance, that all contrary beliefs, without religious faith, are worthless, and potentially quite evil. Strangers may have been raised with alternative sincere beliefs, for instance Theravada Buddhist under the Pali canon, but as for the majority of liberals, leftists, socialists, progressives, … “for me, you may hang ’em, or drown ’em.” … (May God protect us from these atheist savages!)

The most superlative protection comes through making art. It is the natural expression (additional to prayer) of faith in action. The greatest threats come through bureaucrats and bureaucracies. I am for creative freedom, and voluntary acts, and against taxmen and oppressors.

But as I will continue to mumble my opposition to them, as long as I am able, please, some-time readers, pray for me.

Still moving, now that I have been slightly jostled by the by-election results, up here in “Canada,” where the Liberals have swept ridings in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec. They won by insuperable margins, after Carney intentionally picked a fight with Trump, again. Using such devices, his party has been able to laughably misrule our country for many, many years.

There are thirty-eight members of the OECD, and Canada is in dead last place. Yet still these low-intelligence mediocrities continue to win elections, just by telling lies.

An erstwhile Czech immigrant, and dear friend, who has returned to old Europe, notes, “I believe by losing the connexion to its real history it has in effect lost the right to call itself Canada. Perhaps it should now be called New Canada to distinguish it from what its people lived by, up to say the 1960s–1970s.”

Forty trillion dollars — an amount the U.S. national debt now exceeds — would not have struck me as a plausible number in the days when one lousy million would have been enough for an extravagant couple to retire on. To call it sustainable may be a fond little accountant’s irony. Bankers, and insurance adjusters, are notorious for telling jokes about bankruptcies, but this amount, in trillions — now rapidly ballooning with compound interest and fresh, reckless spending — seldom rises to the amusing. For no one is terribly concerned, as they might be by fouls in women’s basketball.

The Democrats, Republicans, and others among the unambiguously deranged, are incapable of grasping the concept that even government debts are potentially important, and must be repaid, to avoid the real costs of a default, which will not be just a number.

We don’t make jokes about mass murder, either, or not unless we are progressively left. But a single generation after 9/11, when Muslim-hijacked aeroplanes were flown directly into New York City skyscrapers, the New York municipal government is in the hands of a freely-elected, and provocatively Muslim, administration. Believe this if you dare.

To be fair, all of the American Founding Fathers agreed that democracy could never work, and shouldn’t be tried as a form of government; for “the people” are just too crazy. True, one may find some sane voters, but they are always too small a minority.

The great pleasure of immobility, while some consciousness remains, and until the tax department catches up with you, is that you may read, more or less without interruption. Unfortunately, some of what you read may be what you wrote yourself in the past, and this can be an embarrassment.

For one discovers that one’s longest dithering philosophical essays could have been expressed in fewer words:

“From the impossibility of confining numbers to the constant and uniform prosecution of a common interest, arises the difficulty of securing subjects against the encroachment of governours. Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant …”

Note from the spellings, that this is from Doctor Johnson in The Adventurer.

I have fallen in love with Sophie Cunningham, even though she is a basketball star (I loathe basketball), and more than six feet tall (which is surely excessive, for a girl). She excels also in every other sport, beats the boys when they let her play with them, and can dance and sing and drink. Alas, I wouldn’t stand a chance with her, for I understand that she despises shorter men. (But politely.)

Sophie is fearless, and honest, and true, as everyone must have noticed by now. Yet as magnificently as she may sing “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” in Mizzou or wherever she came from, she is quite thrillingly, remarkably non-violent. And yet she plays for Idaho in the women’s professional basketball league. Or maybe it is Indiana.

Well, something that starts with “I.” This is a bloodsport, in which the women are all trying to kill one another.

It is that way throughout women’s athletics. For instance, though only if you have the stomach for it, I invite you to check out women’s field hockey. The girls are vicious, wherever they are playing — in Canada, England, Holland, Italy, Pakistan. Put a stick in a woman’s hands and, regardless of her ethnicity, she will immediately try to clobber another woman. I have seen this with my own eyes in each of these countries.

As Stephen Leacock wrote, men may be too crooked even for business; but women are, even for war, too violent.

My mysterious South Australian correspondent, writing from a location precisely north of the absolute South Pole, shares these comments from the esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and, as it were, just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. …

“How much naivety — venerable, childlike, and boundlessly stupid naivety — there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above. … ”

This is from the 58th aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil, which began with a defence of idleness. How merrily he kicks away “the little presumptuous dwarf, and man of the mob, the brisk handyman of ideas, … of modern ideas!”

Grouse are “adapted” not merely to an environment, but also to being grouse. There is something remarkably grouse-like in their overall design, many constituent parts, and in each of their responses to stimuli. They even seem to know that they are grouse; to be contented with that identity, willing to live and even die in the condition of being grouse.

One may make no sense whatever if one takes them to be something else. They will persist in being grouse-like, and in point of fact grouse, even if we try to persuade them that they are cockatoos.

Some other creature may invade their peculiar environmental niche; might even do so successfully. The grouse will respond to that invasion implacably, as grouse. They will under no circumstances attempt to transform or metamorphose themselves in reaction to such an existential crisis. Indeed, they will not consider such a proposition. It is always strictly fight or flight, on unambiguously grouse terms.

They will, if shot by a hunter, even taste like grouse.

Should they flee, it will be to the sort of territory that they find agreeable to themselves, as grouse. They will even go in search of such locations, should that prove necessary. But finding no such territory, they would frankly rather starve than cease being grouse.

It would take a miracle for a grouse to develop or “evolve” some new characteristic. For as I’ve said, it would never occur to the grouse themselves. More likely it would occur to the Grouse Angel — the being assigned by God to look out for grouse interests. Yet even in such a case, the new character would emerge from the underlying grouse-ness of the former character, and appear as an extension of the grouse repertoire. It would be all of a piece with their ontology.

It is some time since I tried to read Polybius (c.202–120 B..C.), the ancient historian. It was a memorably difficult, and fairly rewarding experience, which I kept mostly to myself. Part of the difficulty was from the man’s style. Though a Hellenistic Greek, he gives a good and admiring account of the Roman Empire that had emerged, and was still emerging, in the second century before Christ, and I was fortunately provided with the six little green volumes of Paton’s Loeb edition (with English translation en face), published just over a century ago. I say fortunate, for otherwise I would have been reading the Penguin, or some other mass-market paperback which is livelier and smoother and quicker-paced, as well as thoroughly unreliable. But if you haven’t mastered Greek or Latin, and do not intend ever to do so, you do not deserve anything better.

Only the first five of the forty books of Polybius survive in their entirety. Happily, the most enlightening passages are in the incomplete Book Six, which tells how Rome blended monarchical, aristocratic, and even democratic elements, and how this came to be.

Polybius is notorious for his asides, on matters from geography to constitutional law to biographies and seemingly irrelevant events (though possibly relevant if you have been following). The paperback translations typically make these intentional digressions into random footnotes in unreadably small type, or discard them entirely, lest they interfere with “the flow.” A modern may diligently read every page, and not realize at the end that he hasn’t read Polybius. Usually, he has just read the puff-piece on the back cover, and has anyway such limited intelligence and imagination that it hardly matters. However, the materials exist if he wants to study Polybius seriously, and these have not been pulped yet, in the more respectable academic libraries.

There is some kerfuffle at the moment about Anthropic and other “artificial intelligence” companies, buying up second-hand books, quite literally by the million, and feeding them into machines which chop off their spines then mechanically flip the severed pages, taking pictures that are sometimes in focus, before shredding everything that it has used. The pictures are then electronically manipulated to some mysterious cybernetic purpose, and may be spat back at paying customers, in various packages at elevated prices. (This is why it is so convenient for them to ignore copyrights.)

The machines do not benefit from this experience, because they lack intelligence, or indeed, consciousness. Verily, you have to be an “AI” executive even to attempt the evil this implies.

Too, you may be ignoring various other minute particulars, besides copyright laws, although you can always buy a “progressive” judge.

Balance this against the windfall profits of all the second-hand bookstores, who may now sell all the worthless junk that had been accumulating on their backroom shelves. At last, bookselling is profitable again!

For almost all modern printed matter is typographically rude, ugly, and worthless as the texts it encodes. You won’t find much published after 1970, if you visit the High Doganate: I lack the space to keep garbage. Readers apparently agree with me, because there is little evidence that even students read anything with the slightest attention. They have machines to do the reading for them.