Essays in Idleness

The highlight in Trump’s inauguration yesterday was Carrie Underwood’s a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful.” It was of course not meant to be a cappella, but the canned orchestral backing cut out, leaving an awkward silence. This ended when Carrie advised the musical captain, “I’ll just sing it,” then carried it off in her full-lyric (almost mezzo-) soprano.

I formed a crush on this Oklahoma country singer when I first learnt about her. This was when she married an Ottawa hockey player, fifteen years ago. She had come out of the choir of a Free Will Baptist Church. (Like my Cape Breton mama, who became a Free Will Baptist at the age of five, when the congregation she belonged to collectively defected from quasi-Presbyterianism, to save their Homeville family church from the United Church lawyers, at the merger of 1925. My grandma, Annie, said she preferred these Baptists because, “They allow dancing, and the use of the human brain.”)

Carrie Underwood has generated gospel hits, including the incomparable “Jesus, Take the Wheel” (well, crossover), and the whole album, My Saviour.

She is not political, or wasn’t, even slightly, like many of Trump’s supporters now come out of the wainscotting. And they still hate politics, as I do. But when they are called, they will vote for their freedom; and will play their part, on cue. And when the technology fails, they will sing, a cappella. God bless all the Trumplings.

On the eve of what should be a memorable inauguration, I am of course expecting paradox and disaster. Surely something will happen that no one could possibly predict, and if it is news, it will almost certainly be bad, for good news is seldom published.

I don’t, however, see how anything that is nasty and disagreeable will happen. For even if Communist China invades Taiwan, or Russia launches some of its boasted hypersonic missiles randomly into a defenceless Europe, I should expect things to end fairly well. Some of the world will certainly survive, and we will simply go on, sans Russia and China. But I don’t expect either Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to be quite so stupid.

Alternatively, no one will survive, in which case, we don’t have a problem.

Moreover, there are no asteroids currently in sight, and only Los Angeles seems to be burning. Even the next Ice Age does not seem to be approaching in the immediate future, and surely, we’ve all given up waiting for global warming.

If something should happen to Trump, tomorrow, there is Vance, Musk, Hegseth, and several other reliable Trumpians. Washington could freeze over, and Hell, too (they are adjoining), but never mind. Our countdown doesn’t begin until February 16th, which is Septuagesima.

It is not optimism I am trying to show, but complacency. Those of us who would exhibit Christianity, as well, must realize there is God, and Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and that this God created the world and everything in it. He has indicated that things will not end badly. Or if they do, in our case, it will be purely personal.

A glance through the lens of the James Webb telescope should convince us that our narcissism led us astray. We should get over ourselves. Our fate is very definitely not in the stars, nor, really, in the care of any politician. The most tyrannical of them come and go, and the worst they can do is murder us. (Many, though corrupt and annoying, are in fact perfectly harmless.)

Fear not. Our fate is in the power of God, or, if He doesn’t exist, it is already decided.

One of my more controversial opinions is that Hollywood, and the film industry generally, have not told us the strict truth about the proliferation of werewolves. Their notion that people may be transformed into “lycanthropes” — a consequence I suppose of Darwin’s evolution theory — is seriously at odds with the folk tradition, and the presentation of werewolves in the classical view. These werewolves did not practice shape-shifting, nor the pre-classical therianthropy. For in those sciences, other mammals were always other mammals, and not “half-human.” Again, Darwinism is probably to blame, for it teaches that before the appearance of man, nature “evolved” an endless series of partial, “not quite” men.

Thus, in reality, werewolves are a distinct species, which, when we consult the principle of speciation, give birth only to more werewolves, and are (as it were) “programmed” to avoid hybridization. Moreover, when forced into it, the hybrid products of animals almost always prove sterile. It is thus a very inconvenient thing to be a werewolf, though positive from the family-planning point-of-view.

Indeed, there were no “werewomen,” even in Old English, which usefully accounts for very low lycanthropic reproduction rates. The term itself is among the fanciful neologisms of feminism.

But what of the werewolves who have been taking the place of people (the “Great Replacement Theory”)? I would assume a large part of our illegal immigrant population consists of convinced werewolves, but that like their other convictions, they are false. However, just because they believe in nonsense, does not mean that these immigrants (or their liberal champions) are insincere.

There has been scandal for the last decade or more in the United Kingdom, where soi-disant “werewolves” have been obsessively raping young white women, presumably in an effort to hybridize. Perhaps, if our standard for lycanthropy, or should I say lycanthropology, could be improved and corrected, these foolish imposters might be persuaded to go home.

Else, we will need a “Children’s Crusade,” to spare white girls from unwanted attention. Or a “Reconquista,” to convert these supposed werewolves back into Christians, as they were before the “Werewolf Conquest.”

Amy Chua, Yale perfesser of law, who tutored both J. D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as numerous Supreme Court clerks, was more-or-less unpersoned at the height of the Obama monstrosities. She had written a “beuk” (we reserve Scottish pronunciation for this word) entitled, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which had got her almost run out of Yale. Also, death threats — an absolutely commonplace tactic of leftists, progressives, and other filth.

(I remember the Ottawa police asking me — their very first question — “What did you write that made your critics so angry?” Later, by coincidence, I was run out of the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post.)

Mrs Chua stood accused of telling her daughters to get straight A’s in school, and to play the piano and violin. She is worse than a beneficiary of White Privilege, for she is also beautiful and has squint eyes. Her husband, another Yale perfesser (Jed Rubenfeld. constitutional law), was investigated for two years then prosecuted on (obviously) false charges. On top of his other sins, he is Jewish.

Curiously, both Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. were triggered by this remarkable teacher, who exhibits Nietzsche’s response to trauma. (“Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”)

Mr and Mrs Rubenfeld also co-authored a delightful, useful book on certain ethnic groups in the United States. It is entitled The Triple Package, and is on three common traits that make, for instance, Indian and Cuban immigrants, and Mormons, as well as Chinese and Jews, so disproportionately successful once they settle there. Also, in my experience, the Maltese. (Hint: they make their kids get straight A’s, and play the piano and violin.)

Amy and Jed will be among the vice president’s honoured guests at the inauguration next week of Mr Donald J. Trump. He will become president, again!

“Happy days are here again.”

My attention is directed this morning (by Niall Ferguson) to a letter from John Adams, sent to Mercy Otis Warren in January, 1776. Mr Adams calls Monarchy the “genteelest and most fashionable” government, should the American colonies go mad, and decide upon sovereign independence. Then he recommends a Republic, himself.

Not all the colonies went with him; indeed what became Canada retained Monarchy but got rid of slavery, instead. However, we might still be willing to annex the USA as our eleventh province — or at least those parts with natural resources — after finding a new name for it. (Alas, “Green-land,” which might please the ecologists, has already been taken.)

Mr Adams concedes that a Monarchy would more likely make him rich. …

“It would produce so much Taste and Politeness, so much Elegance in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, so much Musick and Dancing, so much Fencing and Skaiting; so much Cards and Backgammon; so much Horse Racing and Cock fighting; so many Balls and Assemblies; so many Plays and Concerts that the very Imagination of them makes me feel vain, light, frivolous, and insignificant.”

Whereas, a Republic would produce the stoical and spartan virtues, together with a terrible excess of Politics. We may see that, from even this great American Patriot’s analysis, it would be grim.

How wise we were, to remain Playful and Loyalist!

I notice that the American “surgeon general” wants to put cancer warnings on all bottles of alcohol (to be sold in the “free market”). This would of course be accompanied by punitive new “health taxes.” As usual, the “science” behind this is false, and moderate drinking, especially of wine and ale, has been shown to improve health and increase longevity in many studies. Morbid alcoholism causes health problems, however.

We have now sixty years of false information in support of many product bans, and we have come to assume that Nanny State — which always has its own interests at heart, and never those of the public — must desecrate the packaging for all the most popular comestibles.

One of my little boys once showed enterprise by supplying sets of fake, stick-on labels to be sold in corner stores, which he designed and computer-printed himself. His talent for typography made me quite proud. These appliqués exactly matched the cigarette labels the Canadian guvmint had “mandated,” but read, i.e., “Cigarettes cause eating disorders in fish,” and, “Sex while smoking can lead to pregnancy,” and more simply, “Have another!” … It was much more profitable than lemonade stands; I am trying to remember why he stopped.

A clever lad, of independent mind, he was also a campaigner for child labour.

But we will need a new generation of health messages, for the public authorities like to waste our money by ordering the capitalists to alter the design of their warnings, constantly, to make them more alarming and repulsive. I’m sure they have large departments for this, employing many otherwise unemployable people, to extend their social welfare budgets and discourage trade.

I was thinking they could design one for surgeons general. It would read, “Being hanged from a lamp-post can endanger your health.”

Like other useless old men, I find myself celebrating anniversaries that do not command the attention of the world, for I am surrounded, increasingly, by the dead. For instance, today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of my father — who took his leave from this world about sixteen years ago. I am, like every surviving son of every father, more and more alone with him; and he, in his way, more and more alone with me. This is because I knew him as he was, before the world began to become unrecognizable.

Like his father before him, my father was “radically liberal.” Papa’s adult life began in a uniform, flying sorties in Spitfires against Hitler; grandpa’s began in the mud-fields of France (though happily elevated on a horse), against the Kaiser. Mine I speak about too much, but it was not heroic like theirs. Perhaps only men can understand this: that you cannot be a man until you have risked your life. Nor can you be a good man until you have risked everything in a noble cause.

Papa’s, and also grandpa’s life, as artist, was also fraught with difficulties, which are put in the way of every honest man.

In contrast to the “neo,” or modern, who lives more spontaneously, for comfort.

I wrote, “radically liberal,” but here, too, I am using terms that cannot be understood today. Canada, and the other English-speaking countries, grew up in defiance of the socialist and totalitarian principles that guided many of our neighbours. Our instinct was always to freedom — even, if necessary, from each other. Only very recently in history was this instinct — expressed across a range from moderately liberal to reasonably conservative — compromised, and progressively suppressed. (We exist for the government, now.)

One speaks with the dead, in reverence, through silence. My sense is that papa is still listening.

Alice Weidel, the federal leader of Germany’s “far-right” AfD, has approximately the same policy prescriptions as Donald Trump. Chiefly they are to return to the bourgeois habits that used to make free market states prosperous. But she subscribes to these in mainland Europe, which has been easily spooked since the Nazis offered policies that were not bourgeois.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as the far-right poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote in Burnt Norton, now the better part of a century ago. (He was arguably plagiarizing the far-right German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)

One could recommend that my readers look her up on YouBoob, or better search for print, and form their own opinion on this Frau Weidel. (Who speaks English, and Chinese, fluently.)

Compare her, for instance, to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who rose to power as the prosecutor protecting Muslim “grooming gangs,” and now puts people in gaol who protest on behalf of their rape and murder victims. The idea that Mr Starmer should have a rôle in the government of a civilized country, is as absurd as the idea that the 14-year-old narcissist who has ruled Canada, or the 82-year-old senescent who has ruled the United States, are respectable members of the human race.

The remarkable “coalition” of Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, Kennedy, Vance, &c, &c — which includes several prominent Democrats now awarded the title “far-right” by America’s utterly worthless media — may be about to change the atmosphere, even in the black heart of the Dark Continent (Europe). None of these new Yankee brooms is as unambiguously vicious as the “statesmen” they are replacing.

But it will be difficult for them. The truth is that politics are often controlled by the lowest of the low, as today. The most successful of our power-mad “elites” tend to be very evil, and free only with nasty smears for their opponents. That, and public ignorance, are the secrets by which Liberals, Democrats, and other Socialists continue to win elections, and to increase the massive accumulation of criminal incompetents in their bureaucracies — where any hint of ability or even honesty will be punished.

Looking forward, I am not optimistic. But one should be open to the unexpected, in this God-created world.

I wake this morning, at last, “free, white, and twenty-one,” for it is the twenty-first anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church. This occurred on Wednesday, the last day of anno MMIII, and I was the late Father Jonathan Robinson’s catechumen.

One is not born Catholic, though I was myself born free, white, and with other markers of identity and privilege. For instance, I was born male, according to the doctor who delivered me, and to my mother, who was present at the time. As one of more than a billion (human) males alive at that moment, I could not reasonably invest pride in being male, and was generally too young for anything but what Alfred North Whitehead identified as the buzzing, “the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact,” now out of the womb although previously inside it.

“It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.”

And in a certain sense, so is the going to Church. When conversion happens to those of riper years, as I was, it is normally intentional, thus taking one beyond Lucretius, although I am uncertain whether anyone ever got beyond Whitehead.

In my case, it came after a delay of three hundred twenty-and-a-half months, for I had largely accepted the Roman faith on Maundy Thursday, 1976, while crossing the Thames on the Hungerford Bridge. Crossing the Tiber was the consequence of some additional thought and prayer.

Christ came to save us, in more ways than we can possibly imagine. One of those ways is through the working out of the “fact” of Jesus in the history of ideas. The finest minds of early Christendom were Greek minds, very impressive in themselves. Much that was Greek, especially much that was Platonic, was imported into Christianity in the first centuries; but even more impressive was what was turned out. The whole ancient idea of God was turned inside out, and through the many centuries since, we have been invisibly benefiting from this mental exercise. Let me try to explain.

Origen is one of the Fathers of the Church, who lived c.185 to c.254; a man from Alexandria who also preached itinerantly in the Holy Land. He is among the more controversial figures, I think less for what he thought and wrote himself, than for what many of his followers and admirers thought and wrote in his wake, taking his more speculative thoughts too far, or misunderstanding them. He was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, and there has been some stigma associated with his name ever since.

Yet the greatest of Church thinkers keep returning to Origen, and have been thrilled by him, for there is no greater mind at work in the early centuries after Christ — not even Augustine in the West, or Chrysostom in the East. And the thinking of Origen can never be contained, for he was a light in the minds of Jerome, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose. He was the intellectual source of so much that became orthodoxy.

And he is coming back again, partly through the happy chance of the discovery of lost works in the Egyptian desert, and partly through the re-discovery of him by modern thinkers, such as one of my own heroes, Hans Urs von Balthasar. There were large advances in our understanding of Origen through the latter half of the XXth century, and I think more may follow in this XXIst.

But the book I shall refer to now, Contra Celsum, has been around all along. It is Origen’s defence of Christianity against a philosophical attack by Celsus, a learned and decent Greek-speaking pagan. Much of what Celsus has to say would pass as perfectly modern and “liberal” — Celsus likes the high standard of Christian morality, and he is attracted to the idea of the Logos. But he doesn’t believe Christ is “the Son of the Father,” he is put off by all the miracles he finds in the Gospels, and by much of the tone. He thinks the Christians themselves are small-minded and intolerant. He fears them in the same way a modern “liberal” fears those “born again” — people who refuse to fit in to the progressive secular society around them.

We’ve heard all that before, what is more interesting in Celsus’s objection to the Incarnation and Resurrection, for it is not the modern one. (Curiously enough, it closely resembles the Muslim critique of claims for Jesus — for the Muslims remain very close to the ancient Greeks in their theology.) Celsus is scandalized by the whole idea of “God the Son,” in principle. For to his Greek mind, the most obvious attribute of God is his self-sufficiency. He can’t fathom the idea of a God who would intentionally make himself vulnerable.

If God came down to earth as Christ, for whatever purpose — prophet, spy, saviour, you name it — then fine, Celsus could handle that. But if Christ is God, he must act like God, he must act the way “everyone knows” God acts — Omnipotently. He might be hiding out for a while, for sport, pretending to be a flesh-and-blood man and travelling incognito. Fair enough.

But no, this God exposes himself in a manger. He makes a show of his powerlessness, which ends in getting himself crucified. This can’t make any sense; God could not possibly have got himself into a fix like that, for if someone threatened to crucify God, “we all know,” God would be angry! And being God, he could surely blow away Pontius Pilate, and the whole Roman army for that matter. The real God humiliates his enemies, he doesn’t get humiliated.

It’s worse than that, for this “Christ” has not come for the sake of the righteous, but for the sinners. He even admits it! The real God would have come to help those who are prudent and pure, who have clean hands, who are free of evil. Celsus actually reads the Gospel parables and finds them sick, sick, sick. He screams: “You are trying to tell me it is an evil thing not to have sinned? What kind of crackpot are you?”

Now, Origen responds. He understands exactly where Celsus is coming from. He knows “how this all looks” to the traditional Greek mind, for after all Origen had one himself, and had gone to great pains to twist free of it. He knows there is nothing insincere in Celsus, that his opponent is expressing a genuine revulsion for what he considers to be perverse.

At the most dramatic moment (in Book IV) Origen makes his stand. He tells Celsus that he cannot understand Christ because he can only understand a love that seeks its own “eudaemonia,” its own well-being and self-sufficiency. But Christ’s love is revealed in his very humiliation, in his very dependency. It is a moment when Origen throws off the shackles of Platonism, and invites the other pagans to do it, too. But many won’t, can’t, because they are trapped in the ancient worldview.

This is what is so profound in the Christian message; not Christ’s strength but his weakness. It is the root of the sympathy we are invited to feel for people who are sinners, and for people who are not like us. It shatters the ancient morality of “us versus them.” It is the very source of what we mean by “enlightened,” even those of us who are post-Christian.

It arrives with the Christ child, upsetting all received ideas about God. It is the significence of the babe in the crèche at Bethlehem. It is what the angels are announcing to the shepherds as they bide their flocks. Through this extraordinary act of self-humiliation, we are suddenly in the presence of the Glory of God.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I wrote this piece for Christmas, many years ago, and a dear reader now sends it to me as an old newspaper clipping. Good exercise, re-typing. Surely it is out of copyright by now.

It is foolish to declaim against “sentimentality” at Christmas, as I often do. Declaim, if you will, against false sentimentality, or even against the cheap, but not against sentiment itself, though it is sometimes noisy. When it is true, it is normally silent, and may be spookily and profoundly silent. But “gushing” or “corny” do not make it untrue. What is good commands sentiment in men with chests, has always done, and will always.

At the opening of The Abolition of Man (1943), C. S. Lewis made an attack on the progressive educationists of his day, that applies to academics in all times and places. This slim book is among those which persuade me that I should not be writing, lest I distract from more necessary authors. Read at a slight angle to the commonplace, it exposes the whole scheme of the “academic left,” that would suppress everything not materially “objective.”

As Lewis grasped, by Christian faith, there is, at the root, not a contest between two potentially valid world-views. It is explicitly an invasion of the good by the evil. Yet also it is an exposure of the good, as evil can uniquely do, when the good has been lost sight of.

The concluding book of his “space trilogy” — That Hideous Strength (1945) — is in fact the great dystopian novel for our scientistic age, and not anything by “George Orwell.” It is set with invincible aptness in the university-research world, in a “Nice” institution. Lewis does not present selfishness and hypocrisy within this environment, but the agency of Satan.

Edith Carson was the wonderful old lady with a fat fluffy grey cat, who lived next door when I was a child in Georgetown, Ontario. I do not use the term “wonderful” lightly. Mrs Carson baked a constant supply of cookies and tarts, to distribute among the neighbourhood’s children. I was a notorious suck-up to old ladies, in those days. (Still am.)

Among her many eccentricities, old Mrs Carson (whose young husband had been killed in France during the First World War; his photograph was still atop her piano) was a conservationist. She did not like to waste anything, but would collect it all neatly. She was memorably opposed to the communists, who were putting fluoride in our drinking water. And most spectacularly, upon each return from the market, her bananas and melons would be cast about her lawn and garden. This was because each must touch the earth, and she couldn’t be sure each had touched it yet, given industrial picking technology.

As for the vegetables, she grew most of them herself.

Make no mistake: she was expert in all dietary issues, and the better she was informed the more controversial her views — generally in opposition to anything “new.”

We must stop obeying the communists — I agree with Mrs Carson. Their laboratory hands tell us which of many ten-thousands of poisonous additives and preservatives will (almost certainly) not kill the average, healthy person (right away), and if they are listed in microscopic type in the least visible place on the label, may be inserted inside everything.

This, however, doesn’t interest me.

What I want to know is whether the bananas have touched the earth, yet.

Recently, when indulging in automotive travel near “Idlerton,” Ontario (a misspelt place), I spotted a dairy farm. This is not something a city boy often has an opportunity to do: most of us are of course confirmed in Environmentalism, which demands total ignorance from its votaries, unlike Christianity.

I was thinking of the Greenies as I looked at the cows.

“Oh my God!” …  (Or, “OMG!” in the liturgy of the Green religion.) … “There are cows! Cows! … I think they may be farting!”

We were proceeding towards a restaurant in inner Idlerton where we would be able to order, and eat, cows — or at least the parts of them listed on their menu. This seemed the perfect solution to me. They are quite edible. Each is an immense, rippling bundle of meat — each undulating ungulate — wrapped attractively in leather. Dairy farmers might object to the capture of their animals for eating; we will need a Green argument.

Thus we should eat only those animals designated by the government for Medical Assistance In Dying.

But a “Greenie” now tells me he has a better solution to the “methane crisis,” in which he has invested. It is to feed all the world’s beeves and milchcows the synthetic enzyme inhibitor he is selling. This “technological breakthrough” promises to reduce farting, towards, though not quite to, “net zero.”

Progressive governments are now making fart-reducing additives compulsory, so this Greenie stands to make a government-assisted fortune (until other environmentalists get his product banned). Meanwhile, at least one new department can be created (per government), to re-inspect and re-approve all cattle, after measuring the fart volume of each; all will employ professional bureaucrats (which is to say, already tested), in brand-new, managerial “chains of command,” with regulations designed to “reduce global warming.”

The price of meat will be immeasurably increased, and as in approximately 100 percent of previous Green initiatives, the environment will be actually despoiled — creating possibilities for further Green interventions.

Philip Walling calls this “part of the greatest grab of wealth in history from the mass of ordinary people to a few stupendously rich internationalist oligarchs,” &c. … But really, it is just a triumph of democracy.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — People who have perhaps never been to the Prairies, and are less than three centuries old, may have difficulty understanding this article, along with most other things. For, before the arrival of the fascist White Man, the number of ruminants grazing these plains was very, very substantially greater. It was not just the bison. Many other ungulates were farting, and building up the soil. … It is a general problem with “climate change,” and other extreme forms of human stupidity: you must know something to escape the criminal operators who now control our environment. … But you don’t, and that’s why Justin and Jagmeet get elected.