Essays in Idleness

Young gentleman of my acquaintance refers to the Beatles and the Stones as, “nursing home music.” I remember the undying “swing era,” in the generation of my elders, and know what he means. The music seemed fresh, once upon a time, when “we” were all young, and easily entertained. Now we are old, and it is just as easy. The popular music of my youth had more breadth than the popular music of my parents’ age. Theirs was shallow and sentimental. So was much of ours; but ours also ranged to shallow and obnoxious.

Today’s effusion is not meant as a commentary on popular music; nor even on the sadness of nursing homes, and of the poor refugees washed up there, past their sell-by dates in commercial reckoning — no longer able to buy things for themselves — but not yet eugenically disposed of, owing to the prolongation of ancient taboos. It doesn’t seem right to put old mom and dad out with organic recycling in the new green bins. We can’t remember why (biohazard, perhaps?) — but we still don’t want to do it. It’s an emotional thing.

How many of the moral principles of the past survive today as sentimental adjuncts. They are that which feeds the feeler’s “feelgood,” or helps him to avoid the “feelbad” pain. The state, we thus feebly reason, should fund homes for the aged, and animal shelters for cute abandoned puppies. Alas, mom and dad have no chance, in there, of being re-adopted.

I am in rebellion against the fake, at all levels and in every aspect of post-Christian society. This theme is carried through many of these Idleposts. I do not like cheap substitutes for goods, and sentiment is a substitute for the good of a genuine moral conviction, so powerful that it will be acted upon. I think we should “pay extra” for the real thing.

*

Those pictures of Aylan Kurdi, the little boy dead, washed up on a beach in Turkey: I don’t trust them. Not that I think they were staged, like several of the big-impact images that have come out of Palestine. From what I can make out of background accounts, the scene was real enough — the poor little boy had actually drowned, after a dinghy capsized, along with his siblings and mother. Still, I am suspicious of any media presentation that looks too good for its purpose. Not staged, but nevertheless framed, carefully.

In this case, the pictures have quickly found their way to the centre of the Canadian election campaign. Apparently the surviving father had made a refugee application to Canada through his sister here, and it was not promptly approved. Therefore the prime minister, Stephen Harper, is being held personally responsible for the little boy’s death, by Harper’s political opponents, who include most of our journalists. Knowing what kind of men these are — the calculating mindless — I am hardly surprised.

The modern, mass-man, bereft of moral or intellectual substance, is left to operate entirely on emotion. The refugee crisis is thus presented in highly loaded emotional terms. Journalists who, only a generation or two ago, would have hesitated to roll with a scene that played on emotions in such a crass way, do not hesitate today. Being incapable of moral judgement, they ethicize mechanically in these terms: “If I don’t publish this, someone else will.” (Ethics are for people who have no morals.)

Were they at least partially Christian, as most were in the past, they would reason differently. “Even if another man may benefit from this evil, I must not.” And they would join to ostracize the journalist who had seized his opportunity, to make sure he did not come out ahead on the transaction. Today, it is a tip of the hat to the quickest operator.

But of course, the great majority will “justify” the sensationalist, by emoting on cue. Readers and viewers will rise to the bait, and consequences will follow. In approximately 100 cases out of 100, some new injustice will be perpetrated, to assuage our “feelings.” In almost every case, those who were trying to deal with the issue, to the best of their limited abilities — often at personal sacrifice, and under constraints far beyond their control — will be selected as the scapegoats. And seldom will the truth be sorted out, later, for the news cycle runs on, ever on.

True justice, as opposed to fake justice, requires the taming of emotion. It requires patience, and thinking things through. It refuses to jump to conclusions, however obvious they may be at first sight. Justice, where crimes have been committed, requires minds deeply tutored in principles of natural law, not shallowly briefed in the “how to” of “fix it.” True justice, as true charity or love, will not be rushed. Moreover, it is prepared to be tested.

*

Europe must take the refugees in, and we, in Canada and USA, must take our share, for a very simple reason. They are there, and they are desperate, and they have washed up in our view, and we have the means to help them. No Christian who has understood the Flight into Egypt can be confused about this. Nor can we, as Christians, choose whom we want to save. Our religion is radically different from Islam; we aren’t allowed to “prioritize” our own.

(See: here.)

What I have just written goes beyond emotion. It is in the realm of duty. There are things we must do whether it makes us “feelgood,” or not. We cannot watch people perish, when it is within our ability to save their lives. We cannot let people starve and thirst, when we have food and drink enough for their succour. We cannot look away. Or rather, we must not look away, hide our heads and our wallets, or we will deservedly go to Hell. Our “feelings” on this are beside the point: this is a moral imperative.

And yet these refugees have no “rights.” Indeed, one has little of anything, when floating across the Mediterranean in an open dinghy. We have duties. The whole situation is quite opposite to that presented by the talking heads, when they try, so feebly, to reason. We do not “owe” these people citizenship or anything of the kind. They are refugees, not immigrants: we do not have an obligation to confuse these categories. They are “entitled” to be grateful for what they get; and to wait, peaceably, for legal status, wherever they have landed, according to our laws. We do, however, owe them succour. Why?

Because they are Christ, washed up at our feet; because they are the Holy Family; because they are Joseph, and Mary, with their Child, fled from Herod.

At the moment, facing millions (actual, not rhetorical millions), all we can do is feed, clothe, and shelter. For the catastrophe has happened. The opportunities for hypocrisy are huge, and we will avoid them only by acting intelligently, in good faith. Those who demand action by the state’s emergency services are wasting their breath: of course these agencies have gone into action. The question for each soul is rather, What can I do? This does not depend in any way on “collective responsibility.”

Should we want to go there, we will, as I have argued recently, look plainly at our own collective role in creating this crisis. As I explained, several days past, “we” in the West have played the most significant role, except the Daesh itself, in creating the conditions by which it has flourished. We scotched, but did not kill the serpent. I think it is morally incumbent on us, collectively, to go back in with boots unambiguously on the ground, and finish the job we started. And this, even if we don’t want to.

For the cause of the refugee crisis must be addressed, and that is the Daesh; and only by annihilating the Daesh can the crisis be eventually resolved. Alternatively, it will continue to spread. It is on our heads that we allowed it, and on our heads that it will ultimately fall.

But in addition to American, I should like to see Canadian, Hungarian, Greek, German, Swedish, French, Italian, and many other styles of boots on the ground. For the Yankees are still carrying most of the water, and they are not our servants.

Consider, gentle reader, if you will, two ink colours. One of them is black, and the other red. My fellow Catlick traddies may be familiar with the motto: “Say the Black. Do the Red.” It is on one side of our coffee mugs. (And on the other: “Or Else.”) This alludes to the Roman Missal, from the days before fatuous “options.” It was printed invariably in two colours: red and black.

Or in some Bibles, mostly Protestant, the words of Christ are printed in red. This is especially arresting when one encounters them in the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle.

In the missals, and sometimes elsewhere, the parts in red type are called “rubrics.” This is because they are in red (Latin, rubrica, for a red ochre.) They give directions. Or if you will: red is for the blood of the saints; black is penitential. For it is, The Sacrifice of the Mass.

Consider, if thou wilt, the ancient texts of Egyptian scribes, written with stylus on papyrus. One finds two colours: red, and black. The scribes used them in a similar way. This was many hundreds, thousands, of years before Christ. Fragmentary examples are still washing up, from the desert sands. Unfortunately papyrus is excessively biological; and not as permanent as parchment or rag paper. For they are only the bits inscribed upon fragments of lime and plaster that still look as if they were written yesterday. Some give liturgical texts; with, as it were, rubrics.

And in Chinese brushwork, both calligraphy and painting in monochrome, we have black, always black. But completed by the red of a seal, or seals, as a conference of ownership and authority. The black could not be so black without that small square stroke of waxen red.

Ditto in the graphic works of many other cultures, displaced from each other is space and time. We did not need to learn from anyone that black goes with red in this way. It is written into our DNA: to say the black, to do the red. Were it ever suppressed, it would be recovered.

For every day, as from desert sands, babies emerge from their mothers’ wombs, already knowing the red and the black. It is hard-wired. You could not remove it without killing the child.

The red need not be glossy and sparkling. In fact, as every capable graphic artist knows in his bones, it should be toned down: matt, and earthy; ochre, not bright. Drill sergeants to the contrary, orders should never be screamed. Instead, they should be quietly obeyed.

I was myself first mesmerized by the typographical beauty of the red and the black, as a child with a newspaper. It was a copy of Die Zeit, borrowed from a neighbour. A teaser along the top of the front page, above the title, was in earth red. So were the kickers: short words or phrases above the headings, denoting topics. If memory serves, there was, too, a one-point line rule across four columns, separating a long feature article from shorter articles above. The memory is a little hazy; I must have been quite young at the time. But how vividly I remember the thrill, the deep existential thrill, of this earth red. For in consequence, the whole page was dancing.

Similarly, the red excise stamp, like a Chinese seal, on any ancient copy of The Times. It was a brilliant device, from the revenue officials. The page would look empty, so grey, without it. Everyone would want to pay the tax.

Today, I think, I would criticize the layout, not of The Times in the 1790s, but of Die Zeit in the 1960s  — for too much red. “One should sow with the hand, not with the whole sack,” as the poetess Corinna explained, to the young Pindar.

But, as Corinna would readily agree, no red would be too little.

Did you know? That Canada is not only the world’s leading exporter, but now the leading producer, of lentils? That we grow more than half-again the crop of all India? Verily, three-eighths of the whole planet’s ongoing supply?

What a fool I’ve been, never to have noticed a single lentil bush growing in an Ontario field — was my first thought upon encountering this fascinating piece of statistical information.

But then it all fell into place. Ninety-six per cent of Canada’s lentils are grown in the fine Province of Saskatchewan, which I was myself raised to think of as 60 million acres of wheat. But no! Nearly half of that farm space today is other crops, including, too, 99 percent of Canada’s “gram,” or chickpeas.

Canada; or more precisely, Saskatchewan; or more precisely, a certain Murad Al-Katib, is now the major player in the world trade for lentils, chickpeas, various other pulses and beans. Note that definite article.

In anno 2001, none of us were growing lentils. (I’m still not.) And yet, then as now, much of Saskatchewan was as close to ideal lentil-growing territory as the planet could offer. (Except for the short growing season.) And — trust me, I’ve been around — a lot of that planet takes lentils with its rice or chapatis. (High protein content; delicious even before spicing; tremendous variety, and culinary range. Drought-resistant. High yield with machines, and higher still with human hands.)

For it was in 2001 that Mr Al-Katib — descendant of refugees, like the rest of us — started up as “Saskcan Pulse Trading.” This was in a room in the basement of his house. He had himself for an employee, and a very pregnant wife (twins), who wasn’t speaking to him after he quit a well-paid government job. “The love of my life,” as he still speaks, unabashedly and with a face-grabbing sincerity, of this ’Chewanian girl, Michelle.

But she is speaking to him now.

I love a love story. Murad was fat, and foreign, and had a big mouth, at the front of some class in the University of Saskatchewan. Michelle hated him on sight. But she was for Murad his muse. Eventually they worked out their differences; and he credits her for everything he’s achieved.

He had this clever idea, you see: “Feed. The. World.” And a trading connexion in Turkey he had chosen to trust. (You have to trust people sometimes.)

I like to shunt like this, from statistics to some little human story that is at the root of it all, like Adam and Eve. I was once a hack business journalist. This story was gold, I couldn’t resist it.

*

And now for the segue. Syria contains much rich, traditional, prime lentil-growing territory. It could feed itself with twenty million people, even under an unpleasant dictator. The farmers for the most part ignored him and got on with it. But the Daesh they cannot ignore.

Four million Syrian refugees in transit, currently, according to UN statistics — a scale that now well exceeds that of Rwanda in 1994. A very high proportion of them are Christian, and the overall numbers are rising at more than 100,000 per month. Gentle reader may have noticed that their attempts to get into Europe currently dominate the European news headlines. Sympathy for them — which was huge when they were a sentimental abstraction — is now declining rapidly. The proposal to “send them home” is being expressed, politically, with ever increasing candour.

Libya is the other principal source of refugees, at the moment — people risking their lives, quite recklessly, to get out of a country that the Western world decided to mess with on progressive principles, just a few years ago. We congratulated ourselves on the success of their “Arab Spring,” and declared that democracy had triumphed again. (All the liberals still speaking to me were gloating about how cleverly Obama had pulled off getting rid of Gaddafi.)

The number of Middle Eastern countries vomiting refugees will itself continue to rise. Though by the time it includes all of them, the phenomenon is likely to be concealed by the fact of another planetary war. For things are getting seriously out of hand, and the list of flashpoints in the tinder is growing.

It is a point I was reaching for, these last two days. The United States and allies could still go in with military, to bring Islamism to a conclusion, starting with its Sunni apparatus and form — as President Bush was attempting in light of 9/11. Alas, like Churchill, he was “ahead of his time.” (Murad Al-Katib also likes to quote Churchill.)

Or we can sit back and watch, dropping a few bombs meticulously here and there, to prove that we are not totally indifferent; and performing the occasional drone assassination. This has not retarded the spread of the Daesh; but in theory it was supposed to. (Liberalism is all about theories.)

We got a taste of what would be involved, in Afghanistan and Iraq, before our electorates came to their decisive, “no thank you.” Indeed, there is seldom thanks for good deeds, as military veterans across the USA are once again discovering. As to Vietnam, they were sent into the fire, for a cause that their masters would soon abandon. And yesterday’s heroes, with all their traumatic disorders, become as welcome back home as Syrian refugees. (Kipling once wrote a poignant poem on this.)

True, this is how the world works — its way from one catastrophe to another. That is why we put our faith in God, and not in men.

Air, sea, and ground military action, for all its horror, remains the only practicable solution to, among other things, the refugee crisis, so far as I can see. It is like stopping Hitler in the 1930s; or stopping Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, et cetera. It won’t be done with peace talks. Or perhaps we are hoping that, for instance, the Ayatollahs and their nuclear missiles will, like the Soviets, eventually fade away. Forgetting, perhaps, that they are crazier than the Soviets, and actually banking on Armageddon in their stated beliefs, having vowed to annihilate another six million Jews. Et cetera.

And just wait until Nigeria is emptying out.

For the moment, the choice is between going right in with boots on, to defeat the common enemy at source (we could still wipe out the Daesh without nuclear weapons); and continuing to absorb millions upon millions of refugees — among whom are many who will take their war to us.

We think we have stepped out of it. We haven’t, and we can’t. We have instead broadly surrendered influence over our own fate.

For serious military action — the kind that won’t relent till victory — is now unthinkable. We tried that, got bored, and slightly bruised; then walked away.

One might almost say it is a principle of democracy, to take unnecessary action, every day. But when it comes to necessary action, we leave it until there will be hecatombs and vast, unimaginable destruction.

Something, anyway, to chew with the lentils.

“I was returning on a flight from Vancouver, and as we waited to taxi onto the runway, I looked about at the other passengers. Not a one of them (excluding me) was looking up. They were all looking down at their cellphones/PDAs, busily processing innumerable bits of useless information. I say ‘useless’ because, as a former Canadian Forces military intelligence officer, I understand the distinctions between information, knowledge, and truth (wisdom) — in ascending order. Truly we live in a world looking down.”

This is why we need military intelligence; for an occasional “heads up.”

For some reason, having to do with “Afghoon” and “Raq,” and my own former employment as a hack journalist, I have made the acquaintance of various gentlemen over the years, who work in “signals.” The one in email quoted above now goes back some distance; he recently resurfaced. What I love about that trade, is the requirement it puts upon its practitioners to keep their wits about them.

Military, not civilian, intelligence is useful. The civilian agencies quickly fill with the Ivy League types. They worship their own brains, their own genius for “analysis,” their own imagined superiority and “aboveness” — which is why they’re invariably looking down, missing the forest for the root causes. Like all the self-important people in Business Class, they process innumerable bits of useless information.

(Make me President of your country, USAmericans, and I will shut down the CIA almost as quickly as I shut down the Environmental Protection Agency. For that matter, everything with an acronym, that I can find.)

Whereas, in military, especially when a war’s on, we have people oriented to finding out what is going on. And often, too, somehow finding a way to explain it to their civilian bosses, especially the politicians, conditioned by everything they’ve read in their papers, which is more or less uniformly false. I could tell some wonderful stories about encounters of this sort, between intelligence briefers and prominent politicians; “Annals of clewlessness” might be the title. But really I should not.

*

My effusion yesterday, touching on Iraq, seems to have drawn a few retired out of the woodwork. Some others could not see the point of it, and one complained that I did not mention God. But trust me, He’s always in the plot, somewhere. Indeed, the only character legitimately above it.

Overnight, I added a paragraph of parenthesis, to make my retrospect clearer. My views on that War (which has yet to be over) were and remain not quite identical with those of anyone else. I was gung-ho for the Invasion, then increasingly appalled by the follow through. But I did not agree with the people who thought our side should have made a quick exit after knocking off Saddam. I thought the attempt to “rebuild Iraq as a democracy” was ludicrous; that it was hearts-and-minds back to Vietnam. That part could certainly have been omitted, at a savings of a few hundred billion.

The Americans had done the people of Iraq enough of a favour by destroying the tyranny; let the Iraqis get on with the task of creating the next one in their own good time. Better yet, divide it into three countries, the way Joe Biden suggested; smaller, more homogenous tyrannies being better than larger and more ethnically various (usually). No objection to distributing food, water, and the odd candy bar. But we had not the stomach for old-fashioned Imperialism; nor should have bitten more than we could chew.

With the media satisfied, by a good quick war, and taking advantage of their short attention span, the next phase should have been mopping up, strictly. Arrogance, partly, was preventing Team USA from seeing at first that more needed doing, especially along the road from Baghdad to Damascus. The Daesh were already functioning in places like Fallujah, and it would be a considerable task to track and kill them all. … (Semper fi!)

And the less publicity for this, the better. People back home would not want to know what it takes to eliminate the sort of force that gloats over video executions. It might ruin their breakfasts.

Do not embed journalists. As the British in Malaya and Borneo, who defeated a Communist insurgency using modest commando resources — while the Americans were busy losing Vietnam, with half-a-million troops, to say nothing of the aeroplanes — the last place you want the modern journalist is in a war. Let the armchair specialists write the history, after the event. Let them say what you did wrong, after you have defeated the enemy.

Vietnam was a formative experience for me (I was there in the early 1970s). Very young, and unsure of myself, I was astounded by the bureaucratic scale of the U.S. enterprise. It impressed me in one way, and then in another: I had never seen anything so counter-productive. Nor could I believe, till I’d had a good taste, how malicious and untruthful my fellow journalists could be, filing stories from the rumours they had told each other in the safety of the Saigon bars. Or taking what they’d been told at the “Five o’clock Follies” (the daily official press briefing at MACV), and simply inverting it.

An essential component of military intelligence, is distinguishing friend from foe. American military intelligence had somehow failed to notice that the journalists were working for the other side.

*

God does come into this. At the frontiers of every civilization, there are savages to be dealt with. Christian civilization is unique, in our belief that these people may somehow be converted: Christianized, by untiring missionary labour, over time. But Western Christendom, at least, was never in confusion about the hard, underlying fact of barbarism. We are up against men who murder, rape, and enslave. This must be stopped. You don’t stop it by talking about it.

To the point, Western Christendom did not survive wave after wave of Islamic conquest by “turning the other cheek” in surrender. One does not adopt a superior moral posture, for oneself, while the innocent are being slaughtered. One adopts, rather, the spirit of the Crusades. We turn to Jesus for the shriving of our souls, then follow Saint Michael into battle.