Essays in Idleness

At year-end, we pay off our debts (in Japan, traditionally, as I recall), or at least acknowledge them (in other choice countries). As it appears to be year-end, I would like to thank the many people who’ve been kind to me, this last twelvemonth, and in particular those who have sent donations since Black Friday. I have received better than I deserved, once again, and haven’t thanked all of you individually. This is a shocking oversight on my part, and sadly typical of this Idler. Be assured, however, that I notice every cheque or electronic ping, mutter a blessing upon its sender, and contrive to deposit, if not always promptly.

Several recklessly kind individuals sent me hundreds of dollars. Many sent beautiful cards with donations, and I have arranged them in a fine Christmas display. They are a real encouragement to me; a reminder that I have sincere friends, and gentle readers scattered through this world. It is a world that certainly looks bleak, at the moment, but sometimes appearances may be deceiving.

May Our Lord smile upon our fitful labours, and draw us towards a bottomless faith; may Our Lady touch our hearts and open them; and may the angelic host reflect the Love that moves the stars. For everything old is new once again, as it was in the beginning, world without end.

Dystopia and Utopia are really the same place. It is simply viewed through different temporal perspectives. Utopia is invariably in the future, whereas Dystopia happens now. But the belief that they are different places is among the Utopian fantasies. “Heaven” might be mentioned as a variation on the Utopian theme, except, it works the other way. For Heaven is divine territory, out of earthly reach. Utopias are earthly parodies of some Heaven that we have imagined. They descend into Dystopias, as Utopias are achieved.

Note: I am not saying this is a trend, or tendency. It happens every time. The promises of revolutionary politics always end that way. So many of the misrepresentations and falsehoods that gird us round in the daily news, are the consequence of an aspiration to reach Utopia; or once we have got there, they pretend that it is nice. It was necessary to discourage those who were in the way of progress; but upon arrival, opponents of the revolution must be vigorously suppressed.

This is how I know that in the West, Utopia has been achieved — the way it was in, for instance, the Soviet Union after 1917. It is by observing Dystopia, descending everywhere. We have moved from the “propaganda” phase into the “realization” phase of our Utopian revolution.

Of course there is still plenty of propaganda. In places like the mass-media, and throughout our captured institutions, there is basically nothing but. Notwithstanding, the “dreamers” have been transformed into “activists,” or replaced by them, as needed. For the time has come when progressives stop making demands, and start enforcing them. Woke up and smell the coffee, as it were. (“The lockdown must continue until resistance ends.”)

Still, we are in the early stages of the revolution. In Russian terms, the old government has been overthrown, but the Mensheviks have yet to be replaced by the Bolsheviks. And even when the Bolsheviks take over, things will not outwardly change right away. A time must be allotted to “defending the revolution,” against opponents who are still visible. The priority, for progressives, must be to defeat them before they do the things that would help them gather allies. The equivalent of a civil war must come first.

History never repeats itself precisely, as everybody knows. The waves in its channels are all brand-new waves. The game is always scoreless, at kickoff. Who knows what comes next? Nor would I predict the result, at intermission. The second half might look very different, and the fourth quarter might prove very exciting.

Moreover, Americans are different from Russians, and had much deeper traditions of liberty. They aren’t fully accustomed to being pushed around by apparatchiks. American serfs were free to choose new fates. Europeans, likewise, although they drive smaller cars. According, at least, to one school of thought, even Europeans can be pushed only so far. I haven’t seen any evidence for this, but I am willing to entertain the possibility.

Will a slave revolt follow, among people who weren’t slaves? And who suddenly remember prosperity and freedom? We’ll see how it all works out. Certainly I hope the revolution will be extinguished.

But to my mind, people are unreliable. So we’d better petition God.

The expression, “unintended consequences,” is a charitable dodge. It is what old-fashioned, polite, civic-minded people say about the fallout from progressive social policies. It implies that their authors have overlooked something, or made some innocent mistake. For unfortunately, the policies do the exact opposite of what was promised. Surely the “reformers” didn’t mean to force decent, reasonable people to do things that any decent, reasonable person would consider to be satanic. Yet somehow, that was the result.

By contrast, these reformers despise the tactics of the bourgeois. Rather than argue, they prefer to drown out their opponents with slogans. Rather than coherently reply, they characterize any asking questions as “fascist,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “hate criminals,” &c. Those who have exposed scandals are personally smeared, slandered, doxxed. This isn’t new. It is the way the Left has always “debated,” going back long before Lenin. Once they have the police working for them, opponents get the knock in the middle of the night.

There are, incidentally, two kinds of “reform,” corresponding to the two political persuasions. One happens without planning, and is an organic response to things no longer working properly. Try, in good faith, to make the old system work, and it will subtly change. The “problems” fix themselves, when they are allowed to. The other kind is “reform” according to a theory. A huge, mostly imaginary “problem” is created, so a “solution” may be imposed. Every tool must be applied, to get everyone onside for the task: fake news, fake science, fake history, and miscellaneous fakery. For as every godless person knows, “the end justifies the means.”

Luckier than most, raised in “liberal” environments, I was able to discern this from an early age. By chance I acquired many friends who were refugees from Communist (especially Soviet-occupied) countries. But it was not just that. Having been trained counter-culturally, by non-conformist “classically liberal” teachers, and also having learnt to read for myself, I was already fairly alert. The clincher for me was a native disposition, not only to think independently, but to resist being a putz. It was not in my nature to assume that the enemies of real liberalism (which requires honesty) had good intentions. Reason, and experiment, demonstrated that they had not.

For instance, I early realized that leftwing factions formed a Party of Privilege. Every policy they advanced favoured individuals with relatively more wealth and power, against individuals with less. Unions were a good example. They represented the better-paid. The labour laws they advocated were designed to exclude the young and the poor from labour-market competition. They secured the allegiance of thuggish union members through crassly self-interested schemes. They opposed legitimate rewards for labour; for skill and hard work. Instead they enforced universal mediocrity, and punished intelligent enterprise. Legitimate labour interests, once represented by cooperative and self-managing guilds, were replaced by the interests of (untalented) union organizers.

As ever, I am proposing not to write a book, simply noting obvious things. Once one discards the commonplace idea that “reformers” are misinformed or stupid, the world makes more sense. Assume, rather, that they fully intend the consequences of their actions, even when their ineptitude defeats their own plot.

Power wants more power. This reality extends beyond the moment. That power corrupts, was known before Lord Acton, as well as that it corrupts more and more — even before the 20th century had raised the background tragedy of fallen man to murderous, high-tech farce. Never imagine the man who takes your freedom in a “crisis,” plans to give it back once the “crisis” is over. This applies, ultimately, to both Left and Right.

But when a man starts from a position that is dishonest, he may achieve material evils much faster. Being “liberal,” “leftist,” and “progressive,” gives him a significant head start.

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TODAY — did you remember to mark it down? — is the eight hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the murder of the saint, Thomas à Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral, at the suggestion of King Henry II. It was an event that reverberated across all Europe, all Christendom; and it echoes still. I must have been asleep at the switch. Happily, I am reminded by Mr Donald J. Trump:

“On this day, we celebrate and revere Becket’s courageous stand for religious liberty, and we reaffirm our call to end religious persecution worldwide. …

“A society without religion cannot prosper. A nation without faith cannot endure — because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.”

According to a recent survey, 30 percent of women under the age of twenty-five now identify as “LGBT.” That is, three in ten. To advise a young man not to take one as a girlfriend, would be moot.

The young people I know have been aging. Their elders have been aging along with them, and adjusting to changes in the world. Assigning some arbitrary boundary to “the young” — say, persons under twenty-five — I am more puzzled by the generation that begat them. The same people have become stranger. Backing up another generation, into my own quadrant, I am farther out to sea. So many who were “coming of age” half a century ago — perhaps as “hippies,” yet still clinging to bourgeois aspirations — now seem to have lived no lives at all. “We,” shall we call us, were never very sure what we wanted (a spouse? a home? a career? children, perhaps?) — and what we weren’t sure of was often kicked away. Now we have more money than we ever had; or less. But what we bought for whatever we had now seems frivolous, worthless.

And there is no looking down. The stilts we walked on are tottering.

To my reflections, “too dark” for some gentle readers, there are innumerable exceptions. I have friends from all generations, whom I find entirely adequate. Those “values” I was raised in, and those I came to embrace, have not disappeared. Among those younger, in the last fortnight or so, I have been in harmonious contact with several families in which I count six or more children; and since the Batflu at least, all of them home-schooled. In the main, these kids seem bright, alert, happy, promising; it is hard to imagine they will all screw up. Though a tiny minority, some will carry what their parents carried: Hope, in the Catholic, Christian sense. There will still be some women and men. “Others,” of course, are not reproducing.

But for the moment, I notice that these friends all agree that the world has gone mad, and that life requires them to fight with it; and sometimes even to hide.

One gets a glimpse of “Herod the Great” from Josephus, and other ancient sources. Rome’s client in Judaea, at the time of Christ’s birth, was megalomaniac, paranoid, sadistic, sanguinary. He was the model for an “oriental despot.” Macrobius said it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son, in light of the number he killed and how he killed them. Greeks, generally, Romans, and Jews, speak not well of him.

This is the man, in the Book of Matthew, who ordered the slaughter of all male children under the age of two, in Bethlehem and environs. He was looking for Jesus. Divinely warned, Mary and Joseph, with the infant Jesus, fled into Egypt. They returned when Herod had “passed on.”

In truth, there cannot have been more than a few dozen babies to kill, around Bethlehem; hardly worth mentioning, to the ancient historians. In addition to murdering, for instance, a wife and three sons, Herod ordered greater massacres whimsically; and taxed his surviving subjects into penury. The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is a souvenir of his Second Temple; the Haram platform is essentially his peons’ work. Well, he created a lot of employment, building monuments to himself.

The Massacre of the Innocents is thus quite plausible. It would have been among Herod’s more modest “executive orders.” Children have often been thought expendable, as abortionists continue to think today; this was “just a few dead.” The efforts that anti-Biblical scholars have put into proving the whole thing “a myth,” suggests to me how desperate they are. Indeed, every scholar who denies Christ, also denies the veracity of this story.

Matthew invokes Rachel, weeping for her children — “and would not be comforted because they are not.” This echoes down the ages from so many Rachels.

These slaughtered children of Bethlehem are, in point of time, the first Christian martyrs. In Church liturgy they unambiguously died for Christ.

But to a modern, progressive mind, this is absolutely mindless. For if God is good, why did he allow such a thing to happen? Why does he allow massacres to this day, piled higher than Tamurlaine’s highest heap of skulls? Why has He allowed countless millions of abortions? Why did He not intervene in Herod’s “lifestyle options,” and why won’t He intervene in ours?

The Holy Innocents are a key to this mystery. Today we ask them to pray for us.

[Recycled from my first Christmas Idleblog, somewhat condensed.]

*

In the words of the modern carol, “All we want for Christmas is some extra-strength Tylenol,” and sure enough, our little sister brought some up to the High Doganate, “on Christmas Day in the morning.” Since then, the quality of life has much improved up here. We specified acetaminophen, and neither aspirin nor ibuprofen, since in our understanding the former alone would be of any use in masking the symptoms of a viral influenza. (Disclaimer: if you are taking medical advice from this website, you may already be beyond help.)

After just one gramme, the fever seemed abating, and the headache had almost disappeared. Nearly three grammes later (at intervals, not all at once, you fool!) I feel almost well enough to run out and catch pneumonia.

Indeed my first thought, is that we should start a charity, to ship Tylenol to the Middle Ages. Maybe include some penicillin and basic antibiotics in the care packages; with instructions for their use in easy, colloquial Latin. We’ve all heard dark stories about mediæval medicine. So why don’t we do something practical to help?

Already I imagine the wiseacre query of some insufferable progressive. “How you gonna send that, by Pur-o-lator?” How wantonly these people expose their own ignorance. The courier companies only serve current addresses. Mediæval Man is removed from us in time. Therefore Purolator can’t reach him. But that shouldn’t defeat an unwearying Yankee optimism. Instead, we could try digging down to the appropriate archaeological stratum, then leaving the boxes in conspicuous places. Common sense would supply locations: say, the medical schools at Parma, Padua, Bologna, Montpelier, Paris, or Oxford.

*

Perhaps, had our ancestors been more robust, we could have avoided modernity altogether; and stood a little better against other rude invaders, such as those plague-bearing Mongols.

For one of the little ironies of historical fact (as opposed to historical theories, which are just glib) is that nomadic barbarians often show a quicker understanding of “empirical science” than more civilized peoples, whose practised decency obstructs their “vision.” Indeed, it is because we are becoming nomadic barbarians ourselves, once again, that we are “following the science” better and better. Back in the day, we had “the greatest public health disaster in history.” It was called the Black Plague.

I refer to the Mongol siege of the Genoese trading colony of Caffa, in Crimea — in its heyday among the most cosmopolitan cities on earth. It welcomed alike Genoese and Venetians, Greeks and Armenians, Jews and Muslims from all over; even visitors from far Ethiopia, and Cathay. Too, every sort of Turk and Tartar who wandered the lonely Steppe. On his good days, the city enjoyed the contractual protection of the Khan of the Golden Horde, who derived considerable profit from it. On his bad days, however, it did not enjoy this.

To my backward, reactionary, and roughly mediæval mind — unshared with contemporary historical scholars — Caffa’s problems really began with a moral, as opposed to physical, “issue.” The city had a very prosperous slave market, which dealt mostly in Turkic slaves, sold chiefly to the Mameluke Sultans for use as soldiers. From a Genoese or Venetian point of view, this was all to the good, not only remunerative in itself but beneficent, since otherwise the Sultan would be enslaving Christians.

The Mameluke soldier slave, selected for his height and virility, enjoyed a fairly good life. As the Sultan’s henchman he had the right to bear arms, and show contempt to the general population, on behalf of the Sultan. (The despot’s first act is to withdraw the subject’s right to bear arms; for a half-armed subject is twice as obedient, and an unarmed one, entirely so.)

Slavery is intrinsically wrong, of course, but in this case expanding free trade also turned out to be a bad move, strategically. For it began to make the Mongols unhappy. They were indifferent when the slavers were capturing their own enemies, perhaps even mildly approving. But soon enough it came round to their friends being captured and led away. (Poor Italians probably couldn’t tell the difference.) And no Khan of the Golden Horde is remembered by history for his phlegmatic disposition.

Sultan happy, Khan unhappy, was moreover a bad formula, for the Sultan could offer little protection from an irritated Khan. Indeed, those free traders, in the 14th century, had to rely on a distantly stretched Italian navy. Not that this navy should be scorned: for contrary to the general understanding, Italian “marines” did a number on the Mongols several times, while operating far from home. Indeed, they lifted the first Mongol siege of Caffa at a cost of more than 15,000 lives, almost all of them Mongolian.

It was, however, the Mongols’ second siege that counted. Learning from Round One that they would need to up the ante, they suddenly re-appeared in 1345, in the usual Mongol way, from everywhere. They were as ever travelling fairly light, with quite brilliant equine manoeuvres. But the one, incredibly unlikely, flaw in such a large subscription of horsemen, announced itself. For at least one of the contributing exotic tribes was carrying the bacillus for the Bubonic Plague, which now began spreading through their entire ranks, initially to the joy of the besieged within Caffa.

As we hinted above, the native cunning of the barbarian is more use, in grasping the implications of new “science and technology,” than is the reasoning of civilized man, whose judgement is diffused by prudence. He cannot match the “noble savage” for ruthlessness. The Mongols quite spontaneously grasped the principles of biological warfare. They began catapulting the bodies of their own dead and dying over the city walls.

It was not long before Caffa was losing the battle of attrition. Survivors of the Plague began evacuating voluntarily, even as the Mongols were losing interest in their siege. Those Italian ships that had come to supply food to the besieged, were now carrying the Christians back to their home ports: to Venice, and Genoa, and all over Europe.

We have for instance the remarkable account of Gabriele de’ Mussi of the homecoming at Piacenza, where the Plague exploded instantly upon the travellers’ return. It includes an account of the cause, crisp enough to satisfy any epidemiologist. It uses apocalyptic language in a convincing way, and adds a touching lament on behalf of distant foreigners: “the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Medes, Kurds, Armenians, Cilicians, Georgians, Mesopotamians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Saracens, and Greeks — for almost all the East has been affected.” (Gentle reader will note that the world news was more complete back then.)

*

To the mediæval mind, a Plague on such a scale must surely involve Divine Judgement. We retain the apocalyptic words, but their content has been discarded. We read these and accuse our ancestors of superstition. Yet they were hardly unaware of proximate cause, and had long understood the principle of infection. They could be quite attentive to the hard factuals, when they were seriously interested. All men have always been.

It is just that, being more humble and broad-minded than we have been (since the Enlightenment), they did not exclude the possibility of Divine Wrath. Nor the hope, should that be the cause, that they might still do something to assuage it; such as, earnestly repent of very real and terrible sins. They were certainly not so completely lacking in intelligence and dignity to run about shrieking, “Why why why?”

Consider: frequent private bathing, showering and washing especially hands and feet, were customary throughout the Middle Ages, in continuity from the ancient world. The old Roman systems of urban and rural sanitation had been, whenever possible, carefully restored; then gradually extended and improved upon. Episcopal condemnation of public bathing is often cited to refute this. It does nothing of the sort: for it was directed expressly against moral vices. Those fusty old bishops were acutely aware of what went on in bath houses — and of diseases spread not “through the water” but from sexual promiscuity.

It was rather in the Reformation era (on both Protestant and Catholic sides) that attention to washing was displaced by fastidious perfuming, and bathing went out of fashion. This, thanks to the early modern superstition that water, alone, could carry infections through the pores. Hence, at least partially, the reason for the frequent reappearance of devastating epidemics through the 17th century and beyond. Hence, as we have begun to establish from cumulative searching through parish records (we have Mormons to thank for much of this), the curious fact that life expectancy was substantially higher in the High Middle Ages than it ever was again until quite recent times. For as my mommy, a nurse, used to say, “Baby no wash, baby get sick.”

Mediaeval man was not nearly so stupid, nor superstitious, as we hold him to have been. His capacity for reasoning, in his circumstances, greatly exceeded our own in ours. Nor did he narrowly limit himself to making inferences based on “I feel.” Too, mediaeval man benefited tremendously from respect for his predecessors, and those of foreign cultures, unlike today. For as soon as we meet a furriner of any sort, we start lecturing him on how to acquire the bacillus of “progress.”

We remain, for instance, intellectually encumbered by a tremendous weight of foolish and malicious sectarian propaganda, adapted from Reformation pamphlets to our present irreligious need — which is to show how superior we are to our God-fearing ancestors. It still reduces our capacity to learn elementary things, that are not sectarian; to believe embarrassing, and totally implausible stuff, such as Darwinism. Our self-confidence, when buying into rubbish, is founded upon moronically false ideas about the past, such as “men believed the world was flat,” or “they had no idea of gravity,” or “they argued about how many angels would fit on the head of a pin,” or, “they thought they were at the centre of the universe” — when actually they thought they were at the bottom of it (except for Hell). They were entirely free of that chronological vanity that attributes every boon to some spooky “spirit of progress,” and hails itself in tireless fits of self-congratulation.

Mediæval man inherited astrological, alchemical, herbal, and other quackeries (along with things not quack) from their own pagan ancestors, including especially ancient Romans and Greeks; then sifted for the efficacious over long tracts of time. Their notions of the Four Humours were derived from Hippocrates, and Galen, and many other classical sources towards which they were, perhaps, too credulously respectful. They were open to Arabic and Oriental influences, not from osmosis but from conscious study. (This is why the motherlode of mediæval Islamic science and learning must now be sought in European libraries, where so much of it was preserved from destruction.) To error and prejudice they were, like all men, necessarily prone, but on nothing like our modern scale.

*

Our modern medical faculties descend from such medical schools as I mentioned above. Anatomy was studied with (Church-permitted) human dissections, and methods of surgery were advanced thereby. The use of clove and other herbal oils with anaesthetic properties was commonplace, along with methods of dressing and sterilizing wounds — whether or not on the correct germ theory. Monastic physic gardens were constantly exploring the properties and possibilities of medicinal herbs — goldmines of useful information lost and too often still awaiting rediscovery.

But beyond this the whole culture of medicine — the teaching colleges (in which it took ten years to become a doctor), the specialized hospitals and hospices for such as cripples and the blind, those for sick children, for women, for the elderly and infirm, for those afflicted with various chronic diseases; asylums for the mad, and for lepers; alms houses scattered everywhere; the dispensaries and surgeries for the poor which also distributed food and clothing to them; the networks of itinerant medical specialists; the guild systems to enforce quality controls — from where does gentle reader think all these things came?

Hint: all are from our own (intensely Catholic) Middle Ages.

Dead right, my dears! All without exception from that despised Mediaeval Church; and from her idle and corrupt clergy; her crazy brooding monks and nuns; and from her unique, scary dark theological notion that the universe makes sense. And from frightening, authoritarian popes — such as Innocent III, who at the dawn of the 13th century launched a “crusade” to provide every little town throughout Christendom, no matter how remote, with its own clinic (as distinct from “hospitals” for pilgrims, which themselves provided medical assistance, and other charitable care). Towns of a size that would be dismissed as villages today, some with towering cathedrals.

And all of this carried on the income of the great monastic houses, and by grand bequests and donations, and by guild and municipal charity and pride, and by voluntary labour, and by little old widows and grannies dropping their wee copper mites into small tiny boxes, and lighting candles for their beloved, in Purgatory — and yes, a portion through modest but compulsory tithes, waived for paupers. Compare: our sprawling Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

For as I once had to explain, to an aggressively anti-Christian television hostess:

“Have you ever noticed, Mademoiselle Sunshine, that more than half the hospitals in this fine secular burg were named after some Saint?”

(For some reason, she never invited me back.)

The city of Florence, population around 70,000 on the eve of the Black Death, had more than two dozen specialized hospitals. Three-quarters of these Florentines perished all the same (fun facts that happened to burn into my brain many summers ago while reading Boccaccio, and Villani). Too, from a long fascination with old city plans, I may confidently tell gentle reader that, wherever he wants to go in the later Middle Ages — to London, to Paris, to Naples, to Milan — that he will find eleemosynary institutions thicker on the ground than they are today. This remained true, incidentally, to the eve of the Great War in 1914 — a much greater concentration of “welfare dives,” conventual establishments, schools, colleges, and every other sort of humane institution, supported privately at a loss.

*

I am not restricted to defending the honour of mediæval man, though, nor interested in the view that his Middle Ages resembled Heaven at any point over their duration of more than a thousand years. The best we could say, for most of this long period, is that it formed a civilization that was morally, aesthetically, intellectually, and spiritually, superior to ours. But perhaps even better Christendoms are possible.

For Jesus, whose arrival in this world we will commemorate: in our hearts if outward celebration is banned, and Communion is denied to the faithful. It is hard to keep God out of the world that He made, and transcends from the beginning to the end of time. It is difficult even to smear Him, and such efforts rebound against themselves. Even crucifying Him turned out badly for the Roman State, if we take a candid view. For Jesus is still here, and the Roman State isn’t. Were I a political advisor to a Caesar, I would recommend against persecution. This on purely practical grounds. For His opponents have had a poor track record against Him, and looking back, none have prevailed. “I wouldn’t count your chances.”

From the start, Our Saviour defeated expectations. Mary’s Child resembled all babies. In particular, I note, babies are powerless. This one, born in a Bethlehem manger to a couple from out of town, was in this respect like the rest of us. Our own nativities were usually fairly humble. The choice of mother and father was not made by us. Jesus alone chooses. For the rest, whether they decide to welcome or abort us, we will not be consulted.

I am deeply moved by the story of the shepherds; of the angel who announces Him to them. It would seem that God is partial to shepherds. Out in the fields, on warm nights or cold, they have a privileged view of His starry Creation.

They were dazzled, and naturally afraid; the announcing angel told them, “Fear not.” This was the first expressly Christian command.

“Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born a Saviour.”

Our history then divides in two; into a Before and an After.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.”

That last point is vexed, or was vexed intentionally, by modern liturgists. They like to mistranslate “men of good will” to “all people” again. But the angel made an important distinction.

The Child grows. We have known a few more things about Him over the last twenty centuries or so, in this world transformed by His arrival. There is a political point that is worth making.

He is self-referential, and refers to Himself, unambiguously, as if He were God. This was as alarming to his contemporaries as it is to us. Many then, as now, thought Him a shrieking madman; although He didn’t shriek. Rather, He cultivated understatement. He did not like to show His credentials, though when necessary, through miracles, He did. He spoke in the same knowledge as the angel of Shepherds’ Field.

Why are there shepherds? Because sheep will stray. And there are wolves.

My political point is about Christ’s claims. His Kingship was, and is, and will be, “not of this world.” He actually dodges earthly kingship. He avoided arrest for the duration of His mission, but also avoided the enthusiasm of his followers. When they were on the verge of proclaiming Him a king — some Lord of Palestine — He walked away. He’d disappear from what was turning into a rally; duck into a temple or other private place. He went to some lengths to avoid misunderstanding; yet was tacked to a Cross by those who misunderstood. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Father, forgive. It will be Christmas, very soon, when we start over. May we be reborn, in You.

The lights are going out in our churches this year, all over the world, as we ready ourselves for a Midnight Mass that has been withdrawn. For unlike any Christmas we remember, the darkness will continue through Christmas morning, and all the holy days ahead; and through the primary Christmas season to Epiphany; through Candlemas, most likely, and then through Lent, to another vacated Easter. States all over have decreed that Christian worship be replaced by worship of the Batflu, as a precursor to the universal lockdown our “progressives” long for, when all human life will be permanently regulated, by them, and made unbearably grim. The Batflu itself will pass away, as every contagion before it, but it is the prospect of a “reset,” in a vast “climate change” bureaucracy, that keeps the shine in their eyes.

That every conceivable human evil may be advanced by methods of social isolation, has been this year’s “breakthrough” rediscovery, and points to its ultimate authorship, Below.

In Ontario, for instance, under a simpleton premier, almost all human interaction is banned, except that of mass-market retailing. Starting on the Feast of Stephen (December 26th), familiar visitors to our households will become liable to fines of up to 100,000 Canadian dollars, and up to one year in gaol.

While such lockdowns have been shown to have no effect whatever on the transmission of viruses already widely disseminated, wherever they have been studied, they are imposed as if they were “science,” by petty, and very sleazy, politicians. In no civilized jurisdiction had they such personal authority. But they are thrilled to discover that they can get away with it; that a public systematically misinformed, and deprived of prompt, decisive legal recourse, will obey their edicts, and thereby submit to enslavement. Throughout history, those willing to be enslaved, have been enslaved.

In Christendom, through the centuries, freedom was associated with Jesus Christ. It is no coincidence that our current batch of godless, sordid tyrants close the churches, but not the crowded “big box” stores; demanding that small and family businesses be crushed, thus expanding the market for “Amazon” and the other monsters of Big Tech. Freedom is thus abrogated by means of both “socialism,” and “monopoly capital.”

I write this in explicit reply to some of my (often otherwise kindly) correspondents, who now criticize me for being “too dark.” (Yet I do try to err on the side of smileyface, sometimes.)

Many others have written to ask for my advice. “You tell us to defy our persecutors, but when we go to a Catholic church, we find that it is closed, and there is no Mass to go to.” I don’t know what to recommend, to fellow Catholics abandoned by their Church.

Indeed, our Church has been descending into depravity for some time. The worst of it is priests who themselves do not understand what the Church IS, and are shielded by their bishops. They think of the Church as if she were a civil corporation, bound only by the rules of “organization men.” But the organization that was founded and is sustained by Christ, is not of this nature. She is rather a mystical body — once far from invisible — with clerics meant to serve her, not serve themselves.

If the light of Christmas does not come through them, Christ will find ways around them. The Hope that comes from Our Saviour is not something they can turn spigot-like on and off. If we cannot reach His Presence in His churches, then we must go underground, and sometimes suffer martyrdoms, even at the hands of fellow churchmen, for His sake. But in the face of Eternity, this is a minor inconvenience.

The Church herself will eventually join us, underground; leaving a desiccated husk on the surface, to be scattered by the winds. Christ will retrieve His Church, because, for all the betrayals, Christ abides.

“Nothing will cure the sick lion but to eat an ape.”

The line comes from Marianne Moore, I think; a Presbyterian from Missouri. It drifted into mind, while I was trying to think of something else. My memory is often sound, and if it is now, I used to rather adore this poet. On the one hand, she was crystalline: sharp and precise. On the other, she could be whimsical — a masculine quality — and at the same time both brutal and light. The line I quoted above exhibits this. She was probably against sacrificing apes to sick lions, but could be ambiguous. She could be very stiff and formal, while utterly sabotaging stiffness and formality. Too, she wore a tricorn hat, when making public appearances.

Miss Moore lived two lives, sequentially; first as a modernist poet, then as a college campus celebrity. That is the usual order. Today, one may become a college celebrity without ever having been poetic, but only for fifteen minutes. A Republican and enthusiast for Herbert Hoover, she was never in danger of becoming a cult. Her much-applauded passing interest in the suffragist movement was a feature of juvenile life at Bryn Mawr (circa 1900). Looking for later hints of feminism is one of those games that academics play, in order to distract themselves from the verse, and its contagious beauty.

In which, to my mind, she was on the “Tower Bridge” between Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens: up high, but lower than either peak. For I continue to believe that Pound and Stevens were our two magisterial poets in English, in the twentieth century. I say “bridge” because Miss Moore could almost combine virtues from both towering poets; though being closer to the Stevens side. Her attitude towards Pound, when he was incarcerated in the St Elizabeth asylum as an alternative to hanging him for his wartime pro-Mussolini broadcasts, was just right. She stiffly disapproved of his anti-Semitism and Fascism. But she visited him regularly.

Someone should put together an anthology of female Presbyterian mystics. I think of our Canadian contributor, the late sublime Margaret Avison. While there was little theological presence in any of Miss Moore’s earlier poems, and less through her unfortunate rewrites near the end, it seemed to me that religion, and in the form of a recessive Holy Spirit, sparkled deep within her drollness.

And look, I have found her (1951) Collected Poems, still extant among my books. And I have just looked it up. The quote with which I started did come from Marianne Moore. Thank God because, if it hadn’t, I would have had to write a whole new Idleblog.

The great majority of the world’s population is dead. Even the statisticians concede this. Counting only the last fifty thousand years, they suggest, more than 108 billion of us have been born. (More precisely, 108,760,543,790, as of 1st July 2019; presumably at midnight GMT.) Yet only seven-point-seven billion are still alive. Every week, another couple of million “pass,” as we say, using a sporting metaphor.

Among the demographic experts, there is no agreement on how many remain unborn.

There is also the vexed question, of how abortions are to be counted. I would think they are a “force multiplier” on the side of death, to use the language of the Pentagon. But count them dead, and a feminist may have a spittle-flecked nutter. Should we then count them as never having died?

I get my figures from the PRG, incidentally. (This is the meejah-beloved Population Reference Bureau, not to be confused with the People’s Republic of Batfluvia.) If one attentively reads their claims, however, one learns that “99 percent” of the accumulated people never provided reliable census information. And thus we get some insight into their methods.

Notwithstanding, just think of all those people: a sum of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. (And then there are those harder to categorize, like Joe Biden.) The plurality of the deceased must by now have reached landslide proportions, no matter how hard we, the living, have tried to resist.

While, in apparent defiance of the pope, I think Filipinas and others should “breed like rabbits,” I must confess it is an uphill struggle. Within less than a century most of our children will have died, too. The toll keeps outpacing our most diligent efforts to “level the playing field.”

Indeed, when the pundits in the fever swamps declare that we’re all going to die, or even that only one or two billion will go down (thanks to Trump or whoever), I respond with a yawning, “So what?”

Statistically, that’s like putting down a cat. (“The thing sleeps twenty-three hours a day already. What’s an extra hour?”)

I say the recent Natted States election was fraudulently stolen, and might refer to thousands of affidavits, forensic analyses of machines, and the probabilities against novel, startling voting patterns. But that is the weak argument.

For while I admit that a few million dead Mericans were in fact allowed to vote, the great majority weren’t. Some hundreds of millions of valid Merican citizens — both native-born and naturalized — were thus denied the franchise. And while we don’t know how long that country is going to last, let us charitably add several hundred million unborn — just arrogantly “cancelled.”

We say democracy is “one man one vote,” but even after adding women, the shortfall is appalling. And not even all the living voted. What about that?

As the great majority are, or rather were, extremely “conservative” — by any current standard — the results were more than a little skewed. And more, when one considers that the great majority in the future will be more than a little reactionary, too. (Long have I argued that the Republican Party dangles, way too far out on the Left.)

Tradition. Legitimacy. A constant Moral Order. Hereditary continuities. Violent opposition to any kind of change. Surely, every “democrat” in spirit will endorse these principles; and if some radical nihilist Supreme Court won’t throw out the election, the rest of us should.

Pretend, gentle reader, that you are the Batflu. Maybe you don’t want to be, but that doesn’t matter, for we are doing one of those mental exercises. Really, you are the opposing general — “surgeon-general” if you will — and the final intention is to defeat our enemy. But in the course of winning, we must consider things from the enemy’s point-of-view. We try to anticipate what he will be doing, to defeat us.

Now, the virus also has tactics and strategy. He is a bit like a communist invader, in the sense that he does not care about casualties. He is happy to sacrifice all his troops, to swamp just one position; and if he loses them all without taking it, he just moves on to the next one. Viruses do not get sentimental about life and death. And because they can suddenly multiply, exponentially as it were, when the micro-microclimate is favourable, they don’t worry about shortage of troops. Fire ants and termites are also like this, although on a much bigger scale. They are more sophisticated, too, but still they operate on essentially commie principles: by piling on.

Looking back over the æons to around January of this past year, it strikes me that we already knew these things, from many centuries of experience with contagions. We already knew, for instance, that facemasks give little or no protection, and that ordering social distance is mostly a waste of time. (Scared people do it without being told.) Both also do significant collateral damage, entirely to our side. Still, we can understand “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” given fears that the enemy might overwhelm our hospitals in the first wave of his “Pearl Harbour” attack, with all of our defences unready. But it should have been abandoned, after fifteen days.

We already knew that such enemies come in waves; that this type, like any conventional northern-hemisphere flu, lazes through the summer but gets back to disciplined aggression in the fall. We knew all about “herd immunity”; still know all about it, although the information is suppressed. The Batflu seems rather better informed, however. His (rather naïve) attempts to “evolve” in the available time, show he sometimes panics.

But in the Batflu’s view, our defences are inadequate, when not laughable. We can hardly evolve as a species so quickly, whenever switching to defence, although we do have some biochemical tricks up our sleeve. Our immune systems are not the predictable force that most meejah take them for (being, typically, more stupid than a virus), and are constantly adjusting their repelling techniques. Like any defencemen, however, they sometimes blow it.

Yet, there will always be drugs — hydroxychloroquine was just a start — that can be utilized experimentally, to give our immunities the upper hand. Indeed, I suspect a Batflu fifth column, in the form of “progressive” politicians, who immediately went to work sabotaging our most promising defences. They opposed intelligent experiment, with the immense stockpile of drugs we already have. They held out for a vaccine, thinking that would take forever. But now that, against the odds, thanks to crazy pro-active men like Trump, we have a growing selection of vaccine-like remedies, they are determined to sabotage those.

To the Batflu, vaccines might seem a setback, but optimism is not restricted to our side. Until herd immunity is achieved, there will still be a vast selection of targets, and he continues to hunt them down. He doesn’t need passports, as the leftists like to say (they also encourage illegal immigration), and could get around even without cars and aeroplanes, if a little slower on the long-hauls. Verily, should one care to check statistics, they get around quickest in the most locked-down environments, probably along paths created by the lockdowns themselves.

For if I may be forgiven for stereotyping them, that’s what all viruses are like. They are opportunistic, and there are always opportunities. By blocking one, we open another, and the Batflu is indifferent to our choices. He may be diffused into harmlessness in a large rally. He may strike like a cobra in a confined space. But like an uneducated cobra, he may strike and miss.

We’ll get to herd immunity sooner or later, as ever. Dragging it out isn’t very clever.

Truly, there is no way to manage a Batflu, and only our vanity says we’re in control. Try Vitamin D if you are paranoid. It might work and it might not, but won’t hurt you much if it doesn’t. Whereas, facial masks turn half the population into Karens. (Tell me about it!) This causes long-term social effects, including despair and œconomic ruin.

And they spread pimples, too.

In my last Thing column of the year (here) I review the year 2020, in my pessimistic way. Yes, it has been fairly bad; but next year could be much worse; and a time may come when we look back on “the first year of the Batflu” with nostalgia; as a time of candy and roses.

Perhaps I should mention why I call it “the Batflu.” At least one correspondent thinks it is because I am racist, and “have a problem” with bats. But he fails to discriminate between bats and viruses, between the Chinese generally, and the Communist devils who rule them. He thinks I mean one, if he thinks at all — when I mean the other. Not being any sort of bigot, to my knowledge, and not even wanting to be one, my practice is to ignore people like him, except when they can be used as illustrations.

Our “speech codes,” which are unambiguously vicious, are designed to trip up anyone not parroting a progressive party line. The natural iteration of a communist ideology is that one is guilty, from the moment one is accused — no matter how obviously the accusation is ridiculous. This is not a new thing, however. It is a method that has been used, throughout recorded history, by those in whom the moral stench is overwhelming; who demand heresy trials, even for unbelievers. It is the casual and humourless use of epithets such as “racist” that marks a person as something worse, and beyond the reach of any civilized disputation. He is what Glenn Reynolds calls “a garbage person,” or what Pope Benedict characterized as “filth.”

In my use of the word, “Batflu,” I mean something beyond the current, wildly overstated, viral outbreaks. My reference is to the whole syndrome (fine Greek word) in which it is one component. Yes, people may die from the virus, and many more get sick. Many, many more test positive and show no serious symptoms, or no symptoms at all. And many, many, many were effectively immune, from the outset. But no one is immune to the political machinations, in which fear of a disease is cultivated to delete our freedoms.

Like the counting machines used to advance fraud in elections, it is a phenomenon that ultimately crosses party lines. Anyone might use that technology, once they see that it works. And those who are evil will not hesitate to use it, for as the Devil ever whispers: “The end justifies the means.”

Unfortunately, at this time, our society is so broken by the spread of falsities, that it is hard for any simple, honest man to espy the rhetorical tricks, cast everywhere to ensnare him. While he is on his guard against one set of lies, he succumbs to another. He lets things pass, because there are too many to stop. And if he is a coward, he accommodates the lies, in his longing for a quiet life.

For much more than any virus from a batcave, or Wuhan, he fears what will happen if he does not wear the mask; how he will be fingered and ostracized. As we have seen from the rank hypocrisy of well-known politicians, partying in defiance of their own illicit commands, even they do not believe the horseshit they are preaching; they only calculate what they can get away with. (Sometimes, happily, they calculate wrong.)

My point is that the real “pandemic” is the by-product of a war, seemingly perpetual, between Truth and the Lie. The side of Truth is currently losing badly, and a temptation to surrender is always there. But in my view, we are in need of escalation.

Speak the Truth. There is no price too high.

With apologies to Alison Balsom, OBE, who probably never wished to get involved in Yankee politics, I love a fine Baroque C-trumpet. And that is a service Mister Trump has been providing, over here in the trans-pelagic realm. By this I don’t mean that he plays the instrument (quite wonderfully, like that Balsom lady), but that he IS one.

Given an extremely rough ride by the (“fake news”) meejah through four years, and appalling treatment by fake intellectuals and genuine grunge, he is still triumphantly, trumpistically, delivering his prize solos, with their distinctive phrasings, tone colourings, and delightful shifts of key. I would compare his music to Purcell’s, but can’t quite get there because I first gag.

What a waste that he became President, one might think, when he was capable of so much more. But no, I disagree. He became the trumpet of beleaguered Merican Liberty in office, and will continue to Trump-thump as he steps away.

My own conversion happened the night of the 2016 election. I had started out “Never Trump,” but Hillary Clinton was able to convince me that he was worth a try. It was when I found myself shouting at a laptop: “Call Michigan! Call Michigan for gawdsake!” I realized that I was now on his side.

Soon I found that his “enemy list” was exquisite. The élan with which he’d tweet back, caught them by surprise. Abortionists would call him a baby-killer; euthanasiacs would say he kills grannies. Pornographers would call him vulgar. Rioting thugs would condemn his violence. Democrats would start impeachment proceedings, due to rumours that he’d put ketchup on a steak, while those accusing him of hate crimes would froth at the mouth. He was compared to Hitler, Göring, Eichmann, &c — as they had done with Bush. But Bush was able to win a second term, by just ignoring them.

Whereas, Trump’s vote improved in all quarters in the election of 2020, except among the non-existent, and in Dominion counting machines. His efforts to get the court system to do anything about that, predictably failed. Merican elections are notoriously sloppy, and the judicial system is parti pris; it was hardly the first election Democrats had stolen — although it set some sort of record for audacity.

I have, incidentally, never thought that violence is the worst thing that can happen. No, losing the war is much worse.

But things are looking up. The Anti-Trump candidate, a senile political lifer named Biden, now becomes the weakest president since before even Carter; the smerfball for his disputatious allies. The Republicans, who unexpectedly held the Senate, and nearly took the House, even after any news unfavourable to their opponents had been “covered, with a pillow,” in the usual meejah way, will have an easy job revenging themselves, as the Democrats try to refill the foetid Potomac swamp. It will be fun to watch their humiliations, from a “conservative” point-of-view, as they are eaten by their own pet alligators.

To this day, I find it hard to believe that Merica could vote for such an idiot as Biden, and am relieved that they really did not. Kamala Biden & Co should inspire a thrilling swing in the next polls, assisted by technology, as the Republicans master the vote-harvesting art, and the many other skills for cheating.

Gentle reader will know that I am no fan of democracy; nor of the corruption that democracy engenders. I think it would have been more honest, had Trump done a Franco, and simply called in the troops. But as we may be saddled with a democratic farce for a few years more, let us hope for the next best thing.

“What goes around comes around,” according to some political maestro, and from what I can see, things will be coming around pretty hard.

“Blow up the trumpet in Zion,” I say.

Lilies come in many kinds, and so came even before they were bred by horticulturalists, long before horticulturalists themselves were ever bred; and being idle, through the ages, they would neither toil nor spin. Yet all are united, in being symbols of Our Lady.

That symbolism is both simple, and complex. It begins, in art, when the angel, Gabriel, presents a lily to the Virgin, at the Annunciation. And her Son, in art, presents a spray of lilies, to a virgin Saint, in what I sometimes think of as “little annunciations.” These are symbols, too, but as I was recently insisting, we lost the ability to make sense of symbols, in the northern nominalist cultures, five centuries ago. This was when our “reformers” decreed that they were “just” symbols — dead, instead of living, things.

Being no horticulturalist myself, I often struggle to tell one lily from another. The lily-of-the-valley, I know, is our symbol through Advent; and within it, of the Immaculate Conception we might have celebrated last week, as this week we step out of its Octave. To Protestants, as to degenerated Catholics, it must humbly be explained that this feast occurs precisely nine months before the Nativity of Mary, who was, herself, immaculately conceived.

All will call this a dogma of the Church, whether they agree with it or not; but I think our conception of a dogma was also overturned, five centuries ago. Like the True Cross that was, in the title of that feast, “invented,” it is not something that someone made up, but something that was memorably discovered (when the pilgrim Saint Helena was desperately looking for it, in AD 326).

The Devil’s whole strategy here, is to supplant a Thing with an Hypothesis. By teaching us to speak of things — as if they were “beliefs,” in competition with each other — he scored twice. First, by clouding us with doubt and confusion; second, by making all faith seem like tyranny — as if it were something that the Church tries to impose. It was a way for people to become atheist, while (falsely) claiming that they are merely sceptical; thus a way to make atheism commonplace. It was proposed as a “middle way” between receiving, and refusing, Christ; when there will never be a “third option.” It was the birth of “relativism,” in our current, progressive sense; of the Lie on which the modern world is founded.

But I still insist, that a lily is a Thing; just as that Church, founded by Christ, is a Thing; and what we call Faith, in its many dimensions, is a Thing — like reality, but more real.

And was Solomon in all his glory arrayed as one of these? In the Song of Solomon, the “Canticle of Canticles,” this is all resolved. Christ, as ever, is referring back as He refers forward, in this human world that began with the first man, and the first woman, and indeed their first child. From a scientific viewpoint, it necessarily did, for species are discerned by the fact of reproduction. For species are not immortal; they must start somewhere.

And those who have seen the unfolding in spring of that lily-of-the-valley — in the purity of its scent and of its whiteness — have partaken of that mysterious divine eros, manifested in the Creation; before it was corrupted.

But through these lilies, it is constantly restored.

*

MEANWHILE, I see from the Washing Tun Post, that Joe Biden will “redefine” the Catholic faith for us (by turning the discussion away from hard things like abortions, towards niceness to illegal immigrants, &c). … Is he more Catholic than the pope? … Possibly; but I still think he should check the Catechism, which, like the Bible, contradicts him on every point. Perhaps his wife could read it to him, since apparently she has a Doctorate in Education. At least, I’ve been told that some of them can read.