Essays in Idleness

Unlike the Vatican, one tries to avoid political topics in Holy Week, and generally to conceal one’s more aggressive opinions. But with the Iran war in progress, and with it perhaps the best prospect of annihilating psychotic Islam since Pope Urban II agreed with Alexios Komnenos (to invade and take back the Holy Land, March 1095), it is hard to shut up. There were problems, during that First Crusade, and even during the defence of Europe by Charles Martel, but one has to start somewhere, and it is important to persist.

Among the chiefmost modern problems for us, is that the secular media of “Christendom” have overwhelmingly betrayed. This, as I have argued, is the case since the later XVIIIth century, although seldom as vulgar and maliciously as now. Indeed, from the BBC to the Wicked Paedia, they are unambiguously on the other side, and too, shameless liars. They rattle on and on about the wreckage in Gaza, where the Israelis do not intentionally execute civilians, while holding their silence (for instance) on the five hundred thousand Christians who have been massacred by Muslims, in Nigeria alone. President Trump would be, I think, clever to ignore the media, except when he can do them some crippling injury. For as William Blake observed, in a Proverb, “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” Or more explicitly, “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.” We, or should I say he, is at war, simultaneously with the Mullahs and the “Democrats.”

There will be casualties, such as among my readers; someone goes hysterical whenever I uncap my pen. It is the Age of Bafflegab, as my papa used to say, and anyone who writes will find that he has alienated a few more former allies, when he drifts into the truth.

As the pope was speaking, to my ears and the gallery of ears, through the Internet this morning, I felt I did not disagree with him, so much as I could not understand what he was saying. Yes, we Christians are in favour of peace, as a general rule; and opposed to violence, as Christ Himself rebuked the person who used a sword to resist the officer arresting Him. But as a further reading of the Bible, even on this Palm Sunday, would reveal, the opposition to violence is not the end of the story. The account is more complex than even an American pope, or president, will understand, though I do not accuse either of insincerity or dishonesty. It is, strangely enough, a judgement to be made “case-by-case,” on whether to be violent. Christ Himself, in the Temple, took out the whip when violence was called for.

Similarly, on “disownership.” We have been trained, indiscreetly, about owning things, by the socialists who have put themselves in charge of our education systems. Agreed, we only own things while we are biologically alive, and even by hereditary law, as Isaeus could tell you, it is touch-and-go whether your successors may claim anything that belongs instead to the cosmos and always will. You may, for instance, claim to own the water, personally or through your estate, but the water can evaporate. By convention we recognize the private ownership of things we never made (which is everything), and it is up to us to own and protect what is ours, or to give it away. Only in the most extreme circumstances is it up to the civil power to take it: your life for instance; or however much cash the State feels it is entitled to impound for your protection. It goes without saying that I am opposed to most demands of the political protection racket, but I think they may reasonably lay claim to perhaps one dollar in ten, so long as they continue to provide the services that States like Canada no longer provide.

Rather than argue for the precise amount and who should be exempted, I take it for granted that what you own you own. Civilization requires you to acknowledge this. But in charity, it is your call what you choose to give away: it is not for the government, or other gang of thugs. It is, or rather should be, an entirely voluntary act, and it will be, if the world is to remain peaceful.

The same for everything else that is owned, in addition to money; one’s freedom for instance. … Javid Shah!

If you wait long enough, most of the world will come around to your “point of view” (or “POV” to cite the standard abbreviation), on the largest and most important things. Even the belief in God — that there is one, that He is not dead — has come to be lazily subscribed by whatever proportion of the population constitutes an insuperable majority. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, &c — the main articulations of satanic atheism — have become much more dead than God, although their mechanisms and tenets continue to be used by very evil people. For practical purposes, the chief one is the principle of non-ownership.

There is God and there is you. God’s ownership is very subtle; it comes from having created Everything, or rather, everything that can be identified. That he did not create Nothing is something we can know, if we have a brain and a penchant for thinking. The most disgusting creature in nature — and we may disagree on its identity — will at least realize that it is alive. That death “has no dominion”; that there is no such thing as a dead man, only a decaying body; this can be observed.

I am curious to see even a computer wizard, specifically Steve Wozniak (who has a genuinely creative mind), grasp the capitalist implications. If you do not own something, you have nothing, or at least, not that thing. Under contemporary rules of ownership, a corporation can take away anything you have paid for. “Big Tech” in effect owns you. Google, or any other supplier, charges monthly fees directly or indirectly, which are deducted ultimately from your credit card, and can arbitrarily cancel anything that you paid for. Once anything is transferred to a cybernetic “cloud,” it belongs to them, and like a cloud, it can disappear.

Under the old arrangement, that pertained even to computer companies, you owned what you bought. Wozniak: “For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way. … It was yours.” You did not have to pay for it again and again; it was not a rental.

But the consumer, being stupid (or “braindead” as we say), is not even slightly bothered by this. He knows that our economic “progress” depends on increasing enslavement, and he buys in.

Here is a text I first encountered, and memorized in both English and French, more than half-a-century ago when I was learning French in Paris. It is by Charles Baudelaire, and in his Salon of 1846 he says this for everyone:

“If ever your idler’s curiosity has landed you in a street brawl, perhaps you will have felt the same delight as I have often felt to see a protector of the public slumbers — a policeman or a municipal guard (the real army) — thumping an incendiary. And if so, like me, you will have said in your heart: ‘Thump on, thump a little harder, thump again, beloved constable! for at this supreme thumping, I adore thee and judge thee the equal of Jupiter, the great dealer of justice! The man whom thou thumpest is an enemy of roses and of perfumes, and a maniac for utensils. He is the enemy of Watteau, the enemy of Raphael, the bitter enemy of luxury, of the fine arts and of literature, a sworn iconoclast and butcher of Venus and Apollo!’ …”

(Here I’ve used Jonathan Mayne’s touching translation.)

Of course, this rule does not apply internationally. In Islamic societies, such as Shi’ite Iran, the rôles of constable and street brawler are generally reversed, and thus one is cheering on the incendiary.

I suppose this observation makes me guilty of relativism.

It is spring, this far up in the northern hemisphere, or at least, that is what the calendar indicates. I have been shown a letter from on old friend, now somewhere in southern Siam, judging from the attached photo. I remember him as a young Ottawa boy, a spectacle of youth and energy and artistic talent (utterly unappreciated up here).

Now he is hiding under white hair, and a Bermuda shirt. He isn’t coming home soon, and reports that the word “snow” gives him post-traumatic stress disorder. His present philosophy is that one should not die, leaving any money behind in a bank, and he declares his joy in travel.

For it has been a hard winter, in terms of death, which was only sought by ancient Romans and Japanese, and Muslims of the Palestinian persuasion. The rest of us take no joy in it, and will be content to get the pain of it over with; rather we look hopefully to the life thereafter. Or perhaps I should mention the Canadian “assisted suicide” regime, which accounts for a growing proportion of our killings, and is an important addition to our deaths by bureaucracy. As I and many others have come to see, these deaths are not necessarily “institutional.” Bureaucracy also exists within individual human minds, unreachable by anything resembling joy, and interested chiefly in numbers and power: murderous kill-joys, as I think of them, who enforce all of our “safety standards.”

However, spring has arrived, and I turn away from my most recent encounter with official government thieves, and think instead of old friends who have been lost through the winter, including two of my very closest, and most beloved, whose passing still has not been assimilated; and of previous winters when many friends joined the procession of planetary flight. Indeed, I was expecting to depart, myself, this winter, but it seems that I have been reprieved.

It is jolly to watch crowds of enthusiastic Cubans marching about, chanting “Down with Communism,” after sixty-seven years of experiencing the real thing. I say this even though I know I’m only watching through a TV-like electronic screen, the way I watched the Iranians chant “Death to America,” Israel, &c, over the last forty-seven years. These are reminders that there is a God, and that the correct place to put Communists and (“radical”) Muslims is in Hell, where all their expectations will be contradicted. I am, however, presuming on the divine by bad rhetorical habit. I do not actually know what happens to them after they are dead, except that, “The only good Communist is a dead Communist,” as my friends from Central and Eastern Europe used to say, or their equivalents in Persia of the Islamic doctrinaires. But this simply blows off steam, for rural electrification projects.

This much can be known, however: that until American voters resume their comatose stupidity, and put the Democrats back in power, it will appear that the world is changing. But, the world never changes, as I’ve now spent more than sixty years learning. I have fought the good fight against political evil, and been punished for it.

I think back to when I was nineteen, and just returned from some first-hand experiences in the Republic of Vietnam. I had been in love with a memorably good (German immigrant) girl back home, for four years, and trying to win her, by way of subtext. Suddenly, and at last, I fell for a nice, available Jewish girl, who was a talented “modern dance” student, and possibly sane. She was certainly very attractive. And then Watergate came along, and several other things, including the American abandonment of Vietnam.

The cure for my naivety, then, was listening to my adored, oppositely-sexed number, shrieking in a café. She spilt no coffee — she actually threw it at me, because I was a fascist. One of the symptoms of my fascism was my love for Israel. She had given only slight praevisus of such views in our previous conversations, but now, after only a few weeks of “relationship,” I received the whole damp load. It was poignant to be lectured on Vietnam, about which she knew nothing, when I had at least been there and become acquainted with its history. It was a passion of mine. I loved freedom, as I would have put it then, without the slightest hint of irony.

She was the victim of a “liberal” education and a “progressive” home, eheu. Even her formal dance training was of a piece with this. There were millions of these fools, then, and there have been many millions more, ever since.

“Anyone in Iran who voices a tune that aligns with the enemy has joined Tel Aviv and Netanyahu, and a shoot-to-kill order has been issued for them.” This was the instruction of Salar Abnoush, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Iran’s IRGC), several days ago. It was the most public of their many announcements to protesters, nationally.

The IRGC is a vastly staffed militia, founded officially by the unspeakable Ayatollah Khomeini, within the Iranian Revolution of 1979, though informally during the Muslim riots he inspired and directed during the previous year. The IRGC and its many affiliates do things like raping then shooting young women who are found not to be dressed in the proper Islamic manner (in a dark sack), and men and women alike for a variety of other “fashion crimes.”

Iran is gun-free, except for those in the employment of the theocratic state. It would thus serve as a model for liberal and progressive policy in the West, for the great majority of law-abiding civilians, here as there, are entirely naked, with respect to weapons. Should they decide to take action, the authorities may of course do with and to these defenceless people whatever they wish. This is why the mediaeval right to bear arms was included in the United States Constitution; for civilized men do not leave a people without the means to defend themselves, when they are being hunted down.

My chief worry is that Trump and Netanyahu will not go far enough in their intervention on behalf of the Iranian people, and will announce their victory prematurely, before the Islamo-fascists have been entirely exterminated. There are, or were, many more than a million armed functionaries in the Revolutionary regime, and short of death, the unconditional surrender of every one of them is necessary.

If they haven’t the brash masculinity to do that — to pursue the regime to extinction — Americans and Israelis must make provision for the arming of the general Iranian population. Perhaps the mass parachuting of lightweight firearms into all neighbourhoods throughout Persia would be an alternative solution; rather than walking away, as the American government has done too many times in the past. For we mustn’t ban guns until we have obviated human evil, and only God can do that.

“Please don’t read me; you are interfering with my stealth invisibility.” … (Something I just wrote to one of my more irritating detractors.) …

Worldly developments are such that, no matter what happens as Netanyahu continues to Trump, and Trump to Netanyahu the combined military forces of the Iranian Twelver fanatics, even Leftists are noticing. I’m expecting fewer Palestinian riots at Columbia, this year, and a dip in the market for keffiyehs. Even were the Iranian regime to survive, somehow, I would expect an increase in peaceful resolutions with the “religion of peace” (and terrorism).

Moreover, the American position has improved, vis-à-vis Communist China, and Taiwan is at least slightly more secure now that the Americans have shown how utterly superior their technology is to the best stuff the Chinese were able to supply Iran. And, future Western war efforts now benefit, as for instance Ukraine becomes the latest Israel-like supplier of ways and means. Pure frontline innovations are made while winning battles; and not while losing them. The immensity of Russia, and of Iran, have proven a disadvantage to their malicious rulers. (China is also immense.)

In particular, the West is gradually coming to the realization that Islam does not teach the same morals as Christianity, notwithstanding what that bank-governing moron, Mr Carney, has suggested. Nor was Christ “basically” the same as Muhammed, nor are all religions “nice” and interchangeable. Our religion, for example, is better than we are; their religion can be actually worse than them. Islam is, and always has been, a political ideology, and it has generally advanced by violence and lies — fourteen centuries of both for those who would indulge in some historical curiosity. Only now is it being universally challenged, for the Internet is carrying Islamic doubts, once too physically dangerous to assert, gratuitously around the planet.

By contrast, Christianity has nothing to fear from the truth. Whether or not you are temporally enslaved, the truth will make you free.

It is Persian Week, up here in the High Doganate: a festival of multicultural bombing. I have little to add beyond my enthusiasm, for I assume that the USAF, IDF, &c, do not need additional direction. Indeed, now every interested party, including several purely commercial investors, have satellites overflying Iran, and can follow the action in “live time.” War is “evolving,” as they say. Incredible precision is now possible, and not even much patience is necessary when selecting the exact ayatollah that you want eliminated. This is such an improvement over the days when you had to slaughter all the ayatollahs, and their servants, too.

At last, we can have wars that observe all the Aristotelian unities. This is a mixed blessing for our media of information. They get many more events to report in the first few hours, but just after, they are back in The Wasteland, filling time again, and having to make something up to keep their audience entertained. If their lie is particularly rich, they will call it an “exclusive,” and put the “breaking news” chyron on the screen. This “chyron” is the graphic device that communicates, in fewer characters than a full sentence would require: “Nothing important is happening at this hour, and you may continue going to Hell at your leisure.”

Contrariwise, were something happening, you would not be consulting a television, or computer. There may be things happening in Iran, for instance, where the Internet has been out for days.

Speaking of which, I approve of what Trump and Netanyahu are probably doing to Iran — things that should have been done, forty-seven years ago. The West needed assertion then, almost as much as now, yet our rulers were more supine. (We had Jimmy Carter, possibly the most incompetent president, of any republic, ever.) It has taken them since to rise off their buttocks, using whatever technology is available. But the imperative for violent action occurred to me (as it did to Donald Trump, incidentally) at the time. Instead, the revolutionary ayatollah, Khomeini, was allowed to displace the legitimate Shah. I thought that the CIA must be on vacation. Quite certainly, more than a million died, because of their inattention.

A question, that has been disturbing me for some time, is whether what we call for shorthand “Western Civilization” is salvageable. That it would be worth salvaging (we live in an age of gerunds, don’t we?) I take for granted. We are alive; we have to live somehow; better that it be in a higher civilization, than in barbarous filth. Alas, not everyone agrees with me on this. The great majority, even within my Church, would prefer to live in a moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual pigsty of consumerism, in which the swineherds are provided by Twisted Nanny State.

Now traditionally, pigs had extended sharp tusks, that could be death on swineherds. They still have them, but diminished in size by extended breeding, and sometimes even the wee vestigial bumps are removed, at the risk of cracking jaws. This doesn’t lead to the captive suid being perfectly contented; only to his disarmament.

(I have a theory that humans are descended from pigs, not monkeys. I don’t currently believe it, but the argument can be developed in a way that will drive the village Darwinist crazy. Note: the average pig is smarter than a monkey; and can’t be bothered climbing trees.)

But I seem to be distracting myself into zoology, rather than advancing naturalism and realism. Indeed, my self-assigned brief is for supernaturalism. My affection for (the edible, delicious) pigs is just an aside. In the end it must be said there has never been a pig civilization, and the prospect that one may emerge by the ministrations of animal rights activists is, to my mind, dim. Pigs just won’t co-operate.

The human civilizations have each required an unambiguously religious foundation. There can be no order (for good, or when it fails, for evil) that does not refer to something higher than itself. This is as true for the headhunters of Borneo (whose pigs are bearded, and should be carefully avoided in the mangrove swamps), as for the gigantic feral hybrids, without keepers, found in the Canadian wild. Among the definitions of “faith” must be that which holds the tribe, or a people, or a person together, without tyranny. When it is lost, however, everything is lost. Even the pigs tend to get unruly.

(The “red-river hogs” of the Congo swamps are an exceptionally beautiful species, incidentally, with their gorgeous orange fox-like fur, adorable whiskers, decorative black and white facial patches, and thin white stripe along spine and tail. Though as any pigmy could tell you, they are terrible yam thieves, can defend themselves even against leopards, and do not make good family pets.)

Where am I? … Faith. … Our own once unambiguously Christian civilization embraced a supernatural order. The phenomena of collection of Holy Church were not unusual, as civilizations go. What made Christianity unique was the attachment to a “He Who Is” who can actually deliver us from cosmic perils. The hand-held devices we now worship cannot do that for us.

Even at the incontestably pragmatic level: it is time we returned to something that was working. Serve God, in Christ, and He will look out for us. Serve instead some other gods, and He might not.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — Most of this was brought forward from years ago.

As we read in Plato’s Republic, immanent reason is an expression for the eternal creative power that sustains our existence, and all existence, and is the “unhypothetical principle” (the anhypotheton) needing no more proof than the mathematical axioms. It is thus the starting point for the study of goodness, truth, and beauty; for the dialectical process, as it were.

I learnt of it from Roger Smith, or “Raj,” as I called him, in the mid-‘sixties in Georgetown, Ontario, when and where I was terribly young. Raj would speak to anyone who was interested, and thus to me, even though he was five years older — which, at the time, was a lot. The most intelligent person in the town, quite obviously, he was the valedictorian at our high school. (And got into trouble by telling home truths about our school and education system in the course of his valedictory speech.)

Too, he was the local weatherman, who taught me all about “meteorology,” when I minded his station, and kept the daily record, after he went off to university to study physics. Raj, I continually discovered, was a good and honest person, utterly reliable and incorruptible. I confirmed this when gathering matter for a (controversial) thesis he wrote on “urban heat islands.” His work also prepared me to realize, much later, that our various climate emergencies should be taken with a truckload of salt. Raj was very wittily dismissive of cranks, and the whole meteorological establishment were cranks.

Raj also owned a car, for polite rally driving, and a lovely, albeit fiberglass, canoe. With this we explored many rivers, until we wrecked it approaching Mattawa, Ontario — while attempting some difficult whitewater to avoid a five-mile portage. Typically, Raj was not bothered by the loss (which was my fault, as usual). A fanatic sportsman, through this and many other adventures, he was also the best goalie in pick-up hockey games over Dewdney’s frozen pond in Glen Williams.

And he played … on his harpsichord, the musica universalis, out of Purcell.

But his work in theoretical meteorology, including how the strong magneto-radiation belts around Jupiter and several other planets in our solar system interact with earth’s, and create moving tracks in our upper atmosphere. These are predictable — making it possible to guess weather systems, that consequently proceed through our lower atmosphere, a very long time in advance. But all this got for Raj was into more serious trouble. It put his illustrious thesis adviser’s nose out of joint, because it was too original, and was the first of his many conflicts with scientific orthodoxy. Indeed, it made him, if possible, more rightwing than I am.

Roger Smith died this week, while removing snow, near Trail, B.C.; where he had settled into obscurity with a loyal wife and family, after another five decades of being my life-long friend, and much else.

Well, as Raj once said, “You’ve got to die somehow, & shouldn’t be too picky.”

Should Canada, and Greenland, join the United States? I am still inclined to say, no. Instead, Canada should be devolved, or split, into faux-sovereign provinces, themselves further split where they are over-large. (I think Prince Edward Island is the only province whose area we got right.) Southern Ontario, for instance, could be divided into at least five of these new “sovereignties,” with capitals in Ottawa, Kingston, Orillia, Parkdale, and “London” (Forest City), &c. I do not have opinions on how northern Ontario or Greenland ought to be dissected, but I’m fairly clear on independence for Cape Breton. Indeed, neither do I have an opinion about how snow should be cleared from this municipality; only that someone ought to do it, and that the (socialist) City of Toronto, “administered” by Olivia Chow-Chow, ought not to be involved.

But rather as, in the British Empire, many territories became “protectorates” of the United Kingdom, these post-Canadian and Greenlandic states should become protectorates of the United States, on the model of Guam and American Samoa (though perhaps with our own symbolic duchies and monarchies). We would pay perhaps 5 percent of our GDP to the States to provide us with defence, under an Iron Dome, and in turn they could provide us with some employment. This makes sense because, traditionally, Canadians made good soldiers, and will make them again once our governments are collapsed.

The advantages for us could be many and profound. While it is not always good to be a small nation, especially when one is over-burdened with natural resources, it is better if one has a powerful protector. I call this the “Lyle Winfield effect”; for once my aggressive schoolmates understood that Lyle was my personal enforcer, they began to leave me alone.

Rather than ambassadors, the Americans could send us lieutenant-governors, which we would of course pronounce “leftenant” governors, who could host each of our New Year’s Levées. Indeed he, or she, would have little else to do, with the termination of democracy in all of these northern realms, until other ceremonial activities were invented.

Economic improvements might be substantial. Now that the (per capita) GDP of both Canada and Greenland have fallen below that of Alabama, and will soon be overtaken by Mexico and perhaps Bolivia, too, the services of modern, progressive governments ought to be reviewed.

Surely we have tired of them by now.

In golf, a competitive sport I have managed to avoid, I gather the trick is to get the lower score, or the lowest to win the match or set a record. I will not say that this is boring. I have known people who enjoyed golf, even played it, and one of them tells me it is a glorious excuse for idleness in the fresh country air; though to be a spectator at a golf tournament, well, one should get a life. I’m sure there is an argument for baseball, as opposed to cricket, if one is a participant, outdoors. Football, of course, does not need this argument, for it has cheerleaders, for instance those attached to the Dallas Cowboys. I’ve often wondered what they will shout after Texas goes Mussulman. (Suggestion: “I slam, / You slam, / We all slam, / For Islam!”)

But once, in that ancient time before even the Idler magazine began, I had the opportunity to speak with the formidable George Grant in Halifax, where he’d been teaching. I had already been writing for the newspapers, and so, given our respective métiers, we fell into a comparison of the two “professions.” We were soon discussing: which is the lower form of human life? I of course said it was journalism, from my experience; but from his, it appeared that university professors sank lower.

Grant, with his superior intellect, quickly won the contest, however. His winning stroke was that even politicians exist on a higher moral plane, when running for public office. It is because a “professional politician” will at least keep his nose clean, and otherwise try to exhibit some commonplace, family values. This is often necessary to his deceit. He might go to further lengths by concealing such practices as fraud or adultery, until he has acquired a little charisma.

Neither journalists nor professors are obliged to do this. But professors win by obtaining tenure.