Essays in Idleness

It would appear that there is no shortage of water on this planet. I have travelled broadly, and can assure gentle reader that this is so. Very well, I have not crossed the Sahara, but neither have I rowed up the Amazon where, I hear, everything is damp. These things balance out. There don’t seem to be any waterspouts, spinning our precious water into outer space. I’d be alarmed if there were. But no, it appears the water is staying. When I read the works of our environmentalcases, who tell me there is a shortage of water, I must fight the temptation to say: “Thou fool!”

This is not Venus, or Mars. I am prepared to believe there are water shortages there; and perhaps worse on Mercury, to say nothing of the Moon. Moreover, our water comes (overwhelmingly: again, I have checked) in convenient liquid form. True, much of it is salted; but that is a problem we can cope with. Verily, we’ve been coping for some time, and as the population of soi-disant Sapiens increases, we have increasing brain-power to address such tasks. Let me not bore gentle reader with the latest I have read in the popular science journals.

For this is my point. The good Lord placed us in our orbit, just so. In innumerable other ways, He made this planet suitable for human habitation. (See: Isaiah.) And then He put us here. (The whole story is told at the beginning of Genesis, in words that were comprehensible to the ancient Hebrews, and remain so even to me.) Our advancement to the anthropic cosmological principle is just scientific details; the whole thing fits together better the more we look.

I was a conservationist as long as I can remember. That’s not the same thing as an environmentalcase. Built into my assumptions about the world, even before I consciously “believed in God,” was the notion that the universe is big, and that the point of conservation was to make things better for the people who live in this tiny place. The planet — Gaia, or however you want to personify it — can take care of itself. (Or herself, as I prefer.) She is not within our power to abuse. Problems only arise when she is apparently abusing us, and in that case, the solution seems invariably to be, quit being stupid.

We shouldn’t do a thing for Gaia. We should only do things for ourselves. Sometimes, as in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and so forth, this involved megaprojects, and sometimes it might still. But day to day, the rule “adapt or die” is sufficient instruction to be getting on with.

As gentle reader may guess, I am working towards a subtlety. In fact, I have already revealed it. The world is for us, not us for the world. We are in the world, not of it, as Christ and various predecessors stated; or at least hinted, in their seasons. What the world “owes” us she has long since paid; what we owe the world is, arguably, our children. (Not killing them is, to my mind, an important conservation point.)

Glancing through this Tutti Frutti document, or whatever the label was on what was discharged from the Vatican the other day, I am appalled. My own Holy Father gets the order backwards. He seems to think that we owe the world something. He really should clarify that we do not.

Only three weeks left, until America dissolves in chaos. We should enjoy them while we can. A time will come, when we remember these as happy days. Remember when all we had to deal with was lockdowns and bat-muzzles? When people were obsessed by some passing virus from Communist China? When they felt safe to fetch milk from the corner store? Before the Dem-wits packed the Supreme Court with socialist nutjobs, the way Chavez did in Venezuela? Or alternatively, Trump published his Executive Order, giving Associate Justice Clarence Thomas five votes?

In Canada, where complacency is our national sport, we celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday. I hope this will be revived in years to come, when the Yankee refugee invasion is a thing of the past. I was able to obtain a roastable ham, from my Serbian butcher, in less than nine minutes. (That is my limit for muzzle-wearing.) For days I will be living off the slices!

Life is good.

And this morning I realized that the jackhammers hush the shrieking madwoman across the street. It would seem the authorities have given her a new medication. The poor lady can keep it up for ten hours, now, instead of just six or seven, as before. I say “poor” because, although she is an irritation to the neighbourhood, she cannot be enjoying herself, either. (Another miracle of psychotropic drugs!)

So maybe not her, but the rest of us have a lot to be thankful for. Today, we only credit Nanny State, but there was a time when God came into it. And a plentiful harvest was good news, even if it might drive commodity prices down, and disturb the futures markets. As gentle reader may know, however, I entertain the most eccentric economic views, essentially opposed to capitalism as well as socialism, and eager to restore the Higher Feudalism, where the chief motivations were hunger, and joy.

In the Natted States it was perhaps the last Christopher Columbus Day. Dr Robert Royal, my sometime boss, has written an excellent book on this topic (see here), in which he grasps that the achievement of the greatest hero of late mediaeval navigation was not to test if the world was flat (a lie put about by the pop novelist, Washington Irving), but to sail west by south-circling trade winds, then back east to Spain by the north-tending ones. This was exceedingly clever of him, and the reason he was able to die in poverty back home, rather than drowning in the Atlantic, like his predecessors. Too, he brought Christianity to wherever he landed, and quite intentionally. (He even got to Venezuela, on the fourth voyage, before Chavez and Maduro.)

Whereas, our great Canadian navigator was Sir Martin Frobisher, who celebrated our first Thanksgiving off Baffin Island. Well, actually he was an English privateer, looking for a Northwest Passage, but found a cargo of fool’s gold instead, thus inaugurating Canada’s mining industry.

Thank goodness, human sacrifice was expunged from our continent — chiefly by the Spanish — for a while. Today, of course, it is commonplace everywhere, on a scale that would surely impress the Aztecs. Thirty-three million have died from abortions since the Batflu struck, according to an official-looking estimate, compared to just a few millions from cancer and heart disease. “HIV/AIDS” has claimed a mere one-point-three million in that time, and the exaggerated numbers for “Covid-19” have finally reached one million (internationally).

Humans, like Frobisher, are easy to fool. Even the Eskimo slaves he brought home were a poor investment. They just died. But then, we all do, eventually.

The more reason we should celebrate now.

Among the first paradoxes, that I discovered as a teenager, is that the most beautiful girls are not necessarily the goodest. They might not even be the nicest. And some of them don’t even dress well.

Now that gentle reader has anticipated a misogynist rant, let me change the subject, subtly. Consider, instead, my growing realization that, in both of the sexes, there might be some tension between goodness and beauty. Looking in the mirror, I could spot some conflict. For in the most “immasculine” way (not a word, but it is needed), I was trying to tart myself up, to look “cool.” (That was then; today there is no point in trying.)

There is more conflict, for instance, between the “pretty” and the “valuable,” than one is likely to find between the good and the true. For men, too (in the narrower “gendered” sense) were often quite attractive to women, even though they were bad. Verily, the most handsome, outwardly charming, and athletically successful of my near contemporaries, struck me as perhaps the baddest. That he got at least two girls pregnant in high school, then smugly walked away, seemed to be evidence to me, in those days. Was I jealous?

The same that is true of “frat boys,” of the stereotypically worst kind, can also be true of politicians; and on the question of judgement, electorates can sometimes behave like silly girls. This I was learning through my first adventure into politics. In the event of war crimes trials, it will be discovered that, before voting age, I was campaigning for a Liberal named (Joseph Philippe) Pierre (Yves) Elliott Trudeau (initials “PET”). But while I had grown out of that, by the age of sixteen, many of my contemporaries never did grow up. Half a century later, they are capable of voting for his (adjective deleted) son.

Part of my cure was actually meeting the ur-Trudeau — the late father — during a campaign event in the Holiday Inn, at Oakville, Ont. He was short, and getting middle-aged pudgy. His eyes were rather glazed, and dreary. From close up, he was memorably unimpressive. He spoke in glib sound-bites, to no one in particular. He flirted mechanically, with the giggling girls. But he was “telegenic.” The same event I had attended was presented in the evening news, as a triumph of “Trudeaumania.” I noticed all the media cameramen had obeyed the great man’s handlers, and shot low when in his company, to make him look taller.

When he did his thoroughly-rehearsed quick dive, into the hotel swimming pool, the photographers were almost digging themselves, into the poolside concrete, to get the perfectly sycophantic pic.

Were my elder self advising through some temporal wormhole, he would counsel chastity. He would tell my younger self to reserve judgement, about girls and politicians, until coming to riper years. (Even that might not work out.) He would order me never to make commitments, casually.

Note, I would need telling only for myself, for many other lads — perhaps one in twenty in those “bad old days” — already knew that they should not be suckers. By coincidence, all of these had been raised in starchy, Christian homes.

That our world seems currently to be going to Hell — this is called, “progress” — can be explained by this “failure to launch” phenomenon. We have come to a time, that was easily predictable, when a decisive majority of (any) Western electorate think like naughty children. They make decisions that are seriously ill-advised. They are on the take, as it were; but haven’t the fondest clew what they want; or even if it is possible. They accuse those whom they (shallowly) dislike, of crimes they could not possibly have committed, to excuse their own wantonness. And thanks to democracy, the rest of us must share in what follows from their reckless, demeaning choices.

Things are as they are, and will continue to be that way, as a wise man once suggested. He was trying to explain to a young commie (“liberal”) that, you don’t start with a plan. You start by apprehending a real situation. This, however, you have no hope of grasping, if there is some way you want things to be. Reality may include you, but its centre is infinitely outside. You do not control it. More than that: you cannot control it. (Things will happen, for which you hadn’t planned.)

You can play along with nature, which includes human nature, or you can go against it, and court disaster. Worse, you become essentially a criminal, as you take things that don’t belong to you — such as people’s independence, in the name of the Batflu, or whatever.

“I have a dream!” this Czech gentleman would suddenly exclaim, eyes (theatrically) shining. “And it’s a good one!” he would add.

Too, sometimes, he would hop into my office, proclaiming, “I am rabbit!” Or, hanging an arm from his nose, declare, “I am elephant!” Visitors to the office might fear that he was dangerously mad, but I knew better. He was the only fully sane one among us.

His point, in these latter cases, was that, paradoxically, he is not a rabbit; nor an elephant, depending on the occasion. He, and verily we, are not what we imagine. Rather we are what we are; and the more so when, thanks to self-examination, we begin to see ourselves more clearly.

For sure, the world is threatened by the dangerously mad. But these are not people who pretend to be rabbits, or even giant wolf spiders, as I once demonstrated to my smaller little boy. One might, if he wished, pretend to be something else. One might even be an actor, and play another person. But, within limits set forth in the criminal code, this is only our business. Or our director’s, if we are being paid. (They never pay us enough.)

Conversely, the dangerously mad have a rôle for you. And they seek the power to make you play it.

One of the reasons I greet the Left, with genuine and fully deserved loathing, is that they cannot comprehend this. They have a plan, “and it’s a good one.” If you get in their way, they will not only loathe you, but act upon it. They will find a way to punish you, if you hesitate. And you may get in their way, only by being who you are — a simple non-revolutionary; an attempted non-participant in their (sick little) schemes.

W. H. Auden presented this more eloquently than I shall ever do, in his poem sequence, Horae Canonicae. I am thinking especially of the section for “Vespers.” (Gentle reader should listen to it.)

Meanwhile, I shudder at the thought that Americans might be fool enough, to vote for the people who have a plan. And won’t even tell them what it is, until after the election. And could win it, only because they have succeeded in smearing the (essentially Arcadian) incumbent; and drilled all the young commies (“liberals”) to do as they say. (And they will make the adults pay their student debts.)

Now, go read my column in the Catholic Thing, if I haven’t depressed you enough this morning.

How marvellous the wind and the rain!

From my privileged window, I have been watching the menacing clouds approach from the west, promising to delete Mississauga. The rain, so far, is only a sprinkle, and I will pray for more, for torrents. The roar of the atmosphere seems to demand this: for it is suddenly tremendous. The spectacle is glorious, as in the old days when I could watch sunsets from my balconata. God, in His vocation as an artist, would never make two just the same. Each exhibited some feature of sublimity, seen never before, nor to be seen again. Praise Him. Praise Him from the belvederes and balconies.

The jackhammers have ceased. The neighbourhood is at peace, for a moment, as the jackhammerers lower their scaffolding hoists, from their self-interested desire, not to be blown off the building. The mounds of rubble, the half-demolished concrete stubs, everything — suddenly at peace. Perhaps the whole cosmic purpose of this progressive “creative destruction” was to remind me, today, what peace sounds like. It is a beautifully idle sound, when unnecessary work — work that is done only for money — is abandoned. And the modernist project, to replace everything that our ancestors built solid with the new, the cheap, the flimsy, the vile — comes to an involuntary halt.

For this modernist project is mostly “deconstruction.” In order to replace them with impermanent things, the permanent things must first be demolished. And this is, inevitably, a very noisy show, requiring jackhammers, buzzsaws, and explosives. But how magnificent: how blessed we are, when the modernist project takes a break!

Lord, in our humility we ask, that you thundering, destroy our destroyers.

One tries to avoid Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, and other filth of that sort. The challenge is often to suppress one’s curiosity, when it is being relentlessly teased. Sometimes the post might even be about you: addressed not to you, but to an electronic mob that is encouraged to form around you. Often a claim is made, which if true would “change everything,” although it is obviously not true.

No phase of communications technology, since Gutenberg and his wretched printing press — which put all the educated scribes out of business, and made “fake news” available to all men — is so irredeemably toxic as our present phase — although there is promise that things will get worse. Yet as ever with “progress,” there are good things, too: tiny wee good things, floating in the stench and sludge. (In my naiveté, perhaps, I aspire to be one of those things.) The hounds of progress call attention to the little gleaming bits, whenever they can spot them. But the “net” damage, to our social and spiritual peace — to simple goodness and our capacity to think straight — is on an astounding scale.

Consider, if you will, the following “tweet” by a gentleman who signs himself “Pope Francis” — called to my attention by an Idlepost reader:

“Let us dream, as a single human family, as fellow travellers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all.”

Perhaps the pope’s account was hacked, but as the sentiment expressed is quite typical, I’m inclined to think it was genuine. My correspondent points to what we might call “the problem”:

“This is straightforward, clear apostasy — not on one particular point of doctrine, but on the entire Gospel and Magisterium.”

Yet it is only one dose of the poison that is administered hourly, not only from the Vatican, and not only from Church functionaries around the world. And when prominent nominal Catholics, such as Joe Biden, can call faithful believers (alike Christian, Jew, and Muslim) “the dregs of society,” and extol the faithless glib — he doesn’t expect bishops to contradict him. Where are we when he, like the pope in Rome, can even claim to be Catholic, as opposed to dress-up Catholics seeking personal advancement?

Is it any wonder that, according to plausible surveys, clear majorities of Catholics in North America, and in each of the European countries, are willing to accept such things as abortion and euthanasia “on demand”? Or casually acknowledge the redefinition of “family,” from what it had been, time out of mind? Or are further willing to vote for parties that advance these causes? It is not that they are confused by political slogans, although they often are. They have been taught wicked lies by those they think are in authority.

This is more significant than the depravities in which our more liberal clergy are frequently caught. The abortions and suicides might happen anyway, in our present “cancel culture,” or “culture of death”; but turning the moral order upside down, perpetuates the darkness.

How are Christians to behave, when they are radically disinformed about Church teaching? Which is Christ’s teaching, now largely unheard.

Up here in the High Doganate, we are connoisseurs of instant noodles, and other sorts of “junk,” but tending towards the “comfort food” of everybody’s ancestors — who had to work in the fields and needed to pile on the carbohydrates. Of course, they had women to help them, in their daily chores, unlike the “gender-free” modern men, with whom I try not to be acquainted. Women who know how to cook “comfort food” were, previously, a gift of God. (The beer we could brew ourselves.) One could have children with them, and everything. But now I am wandering off topic.

Carbohydrates are the ingredients that make you not feel hungry, and their omission  from trendy diets helps to explain why, fat or thin, the average urban fashionista looks gaunt, as if he might have cancer. Nevertheless, my own consumption of these carbohydrates is not just to avoid that modern look. (See here.) My immediate object is to avoid fainting, when dashing out on the street to get away from the jackhammers. (Vide ante.)

Spaghettini might seem Italy’s answer to the Oriental invasion of instant noodles. It boils very fast. Like other Italian contrivances, however, it was invented long before any question was asked. But inquire, and one learns the Hebrews were doing it long even before the Italians (see Talmud); and the Wicked Paedia prattles about Berbers, so maybe the Romans took it from north Africa, while delending the Carthaginians. I am not a food historian, incidentally. Too, I sometimes break dried spaghetti stricks in two, which is probably against the law in Italy.

What can you make, quickly, with four or fewer ingredients, none of which is meat? I ask this question of myself more often on Fridays; but it is Monday morning, and I am already eager to get away from the jackhammers.

Now, in the High Doganate, we observe white trash principles of ingredient-counting. This is to honour the denizens of the “hurricane alley” down Georgia’s east coast. (That Natted State doesn’t even have a west coast.) Anything that comes out of a can or bottle counts as one ingredient down there, and “oleo” isn’t counted. (They fry like the French, but instead of butter, they use margarine, which is much cheaper.) I love the term, “white trash,” by the way; it is almost as much fun as “Paki.” The former, alone, once gave a nervous breakdown to a colleague on a newspaper I worked for. It leaves the woke, generally, in hysteria and confusion. (From childhood in Lahore, I consider myself a Paki, though not really an authentic one.)

So here I will suggest a Catholicized version of instant noodles. I’ve got it down to four ingredients or less. First, you need a good bottle of tomato pesto, from your Eye-talian grocer: that’s ingredient number one. Then, boil your spaghettini (about three minutes, and drain). Finally, stir together with too much of the pesto, and add generous dollops of (Canadian-manufactured) thick sour cream. My inner Paki demands that I add a wee spoonful of Naga pickle to this, even though it didn’t come from West Paki, rather from Bangladesh. But I am open-minded. Naga peppers are not for white people, I have observed; but hey, neither am I.

In less time than in takes me to put on a bat muzzle, I have an unambiguously delicious meal. That done, let me run into the street, for the jackhammers are starting up again.

____________

ITEM. I was going to write about the pope’s latest socialist encyclical today, but on mature consideration, perhaps it was best that I didn’t. It is more than 100 pages, and I’m told, incoherent even in the original Spanish. In the olden time, encyclicals were short and to the point, and what made them even better, they were Christian. The popes didn’t obsessively quote themselves, instead of Scripture; or try to avoid the word “Christ.” Good thing I didn’t allow myself to go on and on about this.

I do hope Mister Trump lives, and that he recovers fully. I do not mean this as a nice sentiment, for he is not in my circle of family and friends, so as a personal matter, I couldn’t care less. That’s not what our relationship is about. I try not to form emotional attachments to pixels on my computer screen. I view historical characters through a different lens. I rate them below characters in literature and art, as portals of experience and consciousness. And I put friends and family, even, below God. If this makes me, in the modern tabloid view, mean and insensitive, very well. Let me reach for my Browning.

Trump is, for the moment, historically useful. The moment must, inevitably, pass, but I don’t think he has completed his job yet. Those who say that the man is a vulgar oaf, might as well be complaining about Constantine. He could be “insensitive,” too; and probably worse than Trump who, according to my information, doesn’t drink or swear. (From a bitch who went to CNN, we learn that Melania swears, however.) Well, I was never on the town with Constantine, or for that matter, with another Roman emperor; I have no idea whether any of Geoffrey Monmouth’s stories are true. (He says Constantine was the successor to King Arthur. Other historians beg to differ.)

But the Constantine who founded Constantinople, arrived at a low point in Christian history, and left us at a high point. He broke the logjam of persecution, that had been turning our elites inwards, into hypocrites and heresiarchs. There were many later setbacks, but after Constantine, the lethal “political correctness” of the pagan Roman state was done for. Julian the Apostate could not bring it back. I do hope this Constantine died, after his own Batflu, truly in the bosom of the Church, but as a Christian I must hope this for everybody.

To my mind (and it is the only mind in the High Doganate, at least until tea), the significance of Constantine is not, as received from standard references, that he conquered, or changed the regime of the formerly anti-Christian empire of Rome. It was that by his conquests, he broke the logjam; cut the noose around all Christian enterprise west of Persia. (Or, Sassania, if you insist.) Now, Trump by comparison has a rather more modest task, but he has confronted our own “cancel culture.”

Is Trump a White Supremacist? Am I? Are you, gentle reader? It is worth pausing, to consider briefly what any accuser might mean by this. The conclusion must then be, that he has an ulterior motive, for the question itself is (if I may use current jargon) batshit insane. That is what we’re up against, now — people who will say anything — and we need Trump to do lasting damage to what we laughingly call the “deep state.” He cannot eliminate evil, of course; that’s “above his pay grade.” But at the moment we need him to do as much damage as possible, to an enemy that grows daily more explicitly Satanic.

“My pen is my harp and my lyre; my books [library] are my garden and my orchard.” Perhaps gentle reader has seen this on a sentimental greeting card. I did once, according to my memory; and the compacted, architectural idea of a “lyre garden” sometimes visits me in dreams. The words originate with Yehudah Halevi, poet and physician from the Hebrew “golden age,” in Iberia nearly one thousand years ago.

Today we call it “Muslim Spain”; and there is a great deal of academic bafflegab, dedicated to selling Muslim mediaeval tolerance — simplifying from a history immensely more complex.  The poet himself apparently said that he came from Christian territory, and came of age in Christian Toledo. He died a pilgrim to the Holy Land, then a (Christian) Crusader kingdom, and by legend at a gate of Jerusalem. (Although there is evidence for this, it is of course disputed by the perfessers.) Traces of his life could be reconstructed from worn documents and fragments that were in the genizot of a Cairo synagogue; within a little mountain of records going back to our (misnamed) “Dark Ages.” Materials from that storage house are now archived in universities around the Western world, thanks to the Imperialist 19th century.

It is curious how history is reconstructed. Marvellous things emerge from manuscript “middens” in unexpected places. Thanks to American soldiers, rooting the Taliban out of Afghan caves, treasures of other ancient synagogues were found. Their purchase by Israel’s national library represents a (discreet) avenue of trade between the two countries. The Jewish community in Afghanistan has been much reduced recently, from what it had been over fifteen centuries — to approximately zero. But as I learnt at firsthand in my rambling youff, there are Hebrew letters carved into mountain rock, north-east of Herat. These are relics from the prayers of travelling Jewish merchants, who came this way long-forgotten generations ago.

In his day, Yehudah Halevi also travelled widely. En route to Jerusalem he was encamped in the Jewish quarters of Alexandria and Cairo (then named “Fustat”) for extended periods. One did not need passports or identity cards in those days; only to risk one’s life. There were no trains or aeroplanes, yet with some determination, one could go anywhere that was known, by sea; and everywhere else with a walking stick. We seriously underestimate the cosmopolitanism of all worlds before our “modern” time.

Awakened, once again, by the jackhammers, from a dream in which I was in my lyre garden, I make my homage to this ancient Jewish sage. His works are recited by religious Jews today — much of his oeuvre is mystically religious — yet I know almost nothing about him. What an ill-spent youff!

While I love the man, I must admit Donald Trump is a bit of a savage. I’d hardly let him into a meeting of my Borborygmatic Society, and while I might follow him up a creek on a fishing expedition, my understanding is that he prefers golf. (All the real savages do.) I watched him “debate” a certain “Joe Biden” the other night, and he was true to form. It was a first round knock-out. I know the meejah didn’t tell you this, but I will, being an expert in pugilism, which I studied when I was an adolescent, for a while.

Those Lefties should listen to Michelle Obama. She understands. She said Mr Trump “did it on purpose.” He was rude and abrasive and constantly interrupting. He has a voice and presence that is intimidating, even at Batflu distance, and he wouldn’t give that little Biden fellow an even break. He was also able to out-cancel Biden’s sparring partner, a certain “Chris Wallace,” and make him eat his “rules.”

Not everyone has a taste for this — I certainly don’t — but that’s why Mr Trump is President. The electoral public is unpredictable this year; too many things have happened that they are not used to; but if Trump wins by the landslide I expect (minus corrupt mail-in ballots), it will be because, as usual, electors vote for the strongman. This has nothing to do with policy, alas. If, for instance, one consults the history of general elections, one will find that the taller candidate almost always wins. (This is why so few women make it to the top.)

One’s commander-in-chief is one’s leader in battle. When in battles, one prefers to win. Life is a battle, get used to it, cissies.

Too, the voters like Trump (the broad majority) because he doesn’t lie, at least not that knowingly. He blusters. He says things that are simplified until they aren’t quite technically correct, and he repeats these things over and over, but they aren’t exactly lies. Whereas Mr Biden, for instance, has been telling little whoppers, and repeating those, to a complacent meejah, for as long as he has been practising politics, i.e. since before he was born. I noticed his pants igniting repeatedly, because I know some of the facts he was openly contradicting. His curriculum vitae is a string of little fibs. He also makes mistakes, that are egregious, but that’s not against the law for a politician. The point is, Biden lies smoothly, and naturally, like a good Democrat.

Moreover, Trump is an entertaining stand-up comic, and tells lots of good belly-laugh jokes, including self-deprecating ones, that humourless Lefties just can’t understand. But normal people can.

Let this not distract us from the fact that Trump is, overall, brash, crude, and a bully. Putting on my old tinfoil hat as a hack prognosticator, I think that’s why he is going to win, even though the Merican public is in a mood, or perhaps because they are. Few are so foolish as to tell a pollster, or any other “progressive,” that they intend to vote Republican — there are costs involved — but there you go. I don’t believe the polls any more than I believe the Batflu numbers. (I do believe dead people are dead, however.)