Essays in Idleness

Consider, if thou wilt, gentle reader, the Baptistry I was designing with my coffee this morning. It is in the form of an octagonal glasshouse, or conservatory, seventy feet wide, with the baptismal font at the “epicentre,” within the floral pavilion. The rim of the font is at ground level, surrounded by a sunken circle of flagstones; the eight roughly triangular flowerbeds thus tilt inward towards this, gently down. There are four footpaths, intersecting upon the flagstones, dividing the flowerbeds into pairs; these paths themselves descend in gentle steps. Directly above that central font, a small “Pantheonic” hole cuts through the glass roof, through which a dove might fly. (Little rain will spray through, as the Pantheon architects in Rome knew; and excess heat may rise through the hole, as through a chimney.)

The whole structure, upon a stone foundation barely proud of the ground, is itself fairly low, so not to compete with the height of the parish church it is out front of, or with its Giotto-esque, externally-tiled bell tower (an earlier project). As my Baptistry is filled with flowers, not trees, it need not be extravagantly high. From the church tower it appears to be the face of a spreading kaleidoscope; yet from the grain fields, it is often invisible.

But the sun glints upon the angles, as it moves across the sky, making it a sundial, that can be read sideways.

I have added what I think a lovely, curved glass, fern-escorted tunnel, extending the key footpath to the porch of that church. Along it, the faithful may pass warmly towards the font, when snow is falling at Easter. Too, the matching passages, extending in the other three cardinal directions, inscribing a crucifix. The intention is to emphasize the quadrilateral, within the octagonal, as if they were the channels of a charbagh, or Persian garden.

My planting scheme, for the flowerbeds, is too complex to describe. Suffice, that as I tour it in my mind’s eye, my attention rests on hyacinth; on columbine, cyclamen, lady’s bed-straw; on lily-of-the-valley. There is a string of pale carnations, representing the Rosary, and towards an outer point of the glasshouse, a tiny isolated patch of hyssop.

Nor will I get into my novelty of irrigation, in capillaries detained or fed by small pools, from which eye-resting grasses and rushes are growing. Or the sprinkle of stones through the flowerbeds, on which the church gardener may knowingly step. Frankly, I think that I have tried to pack too much into my composition.

*

The jackhammerers on my building have been replaced by what sound to be fencing giants, clanking immense metal pipes incessantly together. Still no new balconies have appeared on Castle Maynard, after four months, but the shelves surviving from the old ones are looking somewhat neater.

I find that designing ecclesiastical buildings with my coffee — or later, with my tea — is the antidote to interminable urban reconstruction. Let me pretend that I am working through one of the noisier phases in my own (imaginary) projects. This seems an appropriate form of raw idleness, and supplies me with my own sacred architecture, at a time when real churches are closed to me.

But there are idle alternatives. A diligent, Mass-attending friend with nine children was just told by his priest that he, his wife, and they — with their collective allergy to muzzles — are now permanently banned from the old forms of Christian sacrifice. The new Batflu worship demands bold excommunications, such as the Catholic Church never had the guts to apply, even to monsters of heresy such as Trudeau or Biden.

An idler, too, at heart — gentleman, scholar — my friend came up with something else to occupy his fanciful moments. He wonders how many times that priest would bounce, if he kicked him as hard as he wanted to.

*

UPDATE. In the revision of my Baptistry design, late last night when I couldn’t sleep, I deleted the “curved-glass, fern escorted” tunnel, leading from glasshouse to the porch of my parish church. This looked too much like clutter. Instead, I placed a twenty-four foot open square, between the two portals, that congregants will simply have to walk across, even when it is snowing. (Of course the lads will have swept it clear.) It struck me that Canadians, for instance, should be robust enough to endure our winter cold, for about five Roman paces.

Having erased that, I slept soundly.

A little girl, whose formal education has barely started, may know more about computers and Artificial Intelligence than the world’s leading experts, whose post-graduate degrees continue to accumulate.

I noticed this while the little girl was speaking, evidently into a camera and microphone in her kindergarten class. Her teachers and the “AI” experts were doing experiments on her, and on her classmates. Some other professionals were making a documentary. The children were told to “play,” with heavily monitored equipment, to show the experts how their brains work. This wee thing — incorrigibly white and blonde — gave a voluntary aside. I sensed a future Idleposter.

She was defending the continued biological existence of her best friend. Already over-familiar with a variety of gizmos from school and home, she observed that one must use different gizmos to do different things. And as there are lots of things to do, one acquires many gizmos. She was on the verge of discovering the aesthetic concept of “clutter.”

Though only five years old (or possibly six or seven), she was already wearing that look on her face, that we associate with another series of tests. More equipment! We must all be tested. Or so I discerned (accurately?) from a moment when her face was presented, in high resolution, close up. She looked somewhat complexified.

Whereas, her best friend was singular. She could do everything. The two of them together could do everything, plus. And while they probably couldn’t do anything as well as a specialized machine — for instance they couldn’t tell you how many seconds there are in a year, or leap year — she implied, Who needs to know? She would need another machine, anyway, for the next function, after hearing this answer from the talking gizmo, to a question that her best friend hadn’t meant to ask.

But her best friend was good for everything. She wouldn’t have to be replaced. The little girl could just keep her best friend, day after day. No need to install a more efficient model.

Depending on one’s core outlook — determined by the algorithms at Google — one might be hopeful about this revelation from a post-millennial child; or alternatively, frustrated. Their machines can tell which you are, and will feed you videos to confirm your bias. (For instance, videos on how to build an off-grid log cabin in the northern wilderness. And on how to make a successful YouTube documentary about it.)

Yes, the little girl may continue to exist, and her best friend might, too, even after the current phase in the Age of Biological Infection. (The documentary must have been made before the Batflu; no one was wearing muzzles yet, even in the segments shot in China.) Will she be able to hold on to her profound and searing insight?

Or will she turn out like me, watching idiot documentaries on the Internet late at night? Or tapping on a keyboard first thing the next day?

Now, the “AI” experts will guffaw at my examples. We won’t have these things much longer, after all. Soon, the sensors embedded in our household appliances will know everything we want, and supply the goods immediately (or at least order them for rapid delivery), while extracting payment from our electronic bank. Even before we ask!

My (hypothetical) toaster will compose and upload an Idlepost, every day at precisely seven o’clock, using the advanced language-search tools and missing-word fillers that Google is developing. It will even translate this into Gaelic and Estonian. As the machine already knows that I am a fascist, racist, religious zealot, and Trump-enabler, it will also know just what I would say. And then cancel it — all within a nanosecond.

I advise gentle reader not to buy a toaster.

But how long can I keep one out of the High Doganate, once Nanny State finds out? Or Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter — they’re all my “best friend,” don’t you know? Already they can correct a “wrong answer,” by an electorate of more than a hundred million.

Will the little girl still sort-of understand, when they have finished programming her?

Picture this scene. My correspondent is reporting from what I call Funcouver, in Brutish Columbia, but I have heard of something similar in Toronto.

A private baptism is being celebrated, on a Massless Sunday in Advent. There are eight people in the large church: the priest, an assistant, and six immediate family. Less immediate family and friends were told to stay away, in obedience to the Batflu Regulations. No singing allowed; everyone sanitized and bat-muzzled. It’s not like a Costco or a Walmart, where hundreds are permitted to spread their germs, while pressing towards the cashpoints. (God save them.) There is music, there: Christmas shopping music, piped in.

Suddenly a ninth person enters this church, running towards the Sanctuary. She is shrieking, and hysterical. She suspected something was going on in the church, and lo, something was. She demands that it be stopped right away. “You are killing people!” she shouts, while vapouring in their faces.

Why bother explaining the Regulations to her? She won’t hear. The woman is obviously batshit insane. But as a representative member of the “Covid-concerned” public, she will have to be accommodated, somehow.

Perhaps the doors could be locked, as they will be at my parish church, to keep the unwanted out, including the parish congregation, for the duration of — today’s item — a small private funeral.

As I’ve argued before, the Catholic Church has made a very foolish, catastrophic mistake, by bending over to the Batflu Stasi. She should have behaved more like that hysterical woman: “How dare you try this on!”

For the anti-Catholic bigots, including those in civil authority, are enjoying their power through the “crisis”; and those with an elementary understanding of human nature, know that they will prolong it, indefinitely if they can. They have now shown their hand, definitively. They will order lockdowns and muzzles in all future public health “crises,” and more imaginative commands, when they think of them. Their pet epidemiologists will oblige.

Not the Catholic Church alone, but everybody, should be responding with civil disobedience. (Why let Antifa have all the fun?) For it is a responsibility, indeed a solemn duty, to refuse cooperation with tyranny and evil. Surrendering to it should never have been an option.

By leaving this so late, we are going to have a mess, and possibly a violent one. For the civil authorities — the bureaucratic swamp, ever more filling with Left and Progressive sludge — have once again discovered that they can sucker the general public efficiently, through fear.

If they told the sheeple to “Vote Communist,” it would never work. But scare them with Plague stories and fantasies through Mass Media — lies, damned lies, and statistics — and they fall obsequiously into line.

Better still: they will do your work for you.

It is a flaw of these Essays in Idleness, that I try to say too much in each Idlepost. Just now, I tried to dock yesterday’s prolixities, when I realized that covering the Pacific Ocean with discarded plastic drinking bottles was not actually germane to the issue of poverty in the slums of São Paulo, and that I should have been content with getting the tilde right. Often, like a Democrat, I am guilty of exactly what I accuse others of doing.

So today I turn over a new leaf, yet again, as I do every day. I will try to make a simple point, then give up.

This point will be about the Chinese, whom I very much admired for three thousand years, but have been down on since the ‘forties. Note, this is not entirely their fault, but I was just looking at some stock footage, of vast numbers in the PRC, marching lockstep in expensive gear, with tanks, missile carriers, and other vehicles that (were I a superpower) I would be more discreet about advertising. On the instructions of a certain Mao Tse-tung — a gentleman who outdid Stalin and Hitler if we rank by body count — they bought into the postmodern in a crass and vulgar way.

On their good days, Trump and the Yankees are much more spiritual, and only the Batflu Stasi go about closing churches. But now I’m getting into the weeds, and will be mentioning “Fang Fang” if I’m not careful.

What impressed me about the Chinese, and satellite cultures of the Orient, was their genius for material simplicity. No matter how extensive their Forbidden Quarters and Palaces, or long their Great Walls and Canals, everything would have clarity from close up, and use goods and ingredients chastely, without the slightest aggravating hint of overkill.

The sails on a Chinese junk will be my example. Rather than burden them with over-heavy cloth, against the fearsome gusts of the oceanic breezes, they simply made them easy to patch. Their fully-battened balanced lugsails hung one sail to a mast, which leaned forward so they would not snag. Should the wind be fully howling, they could be taken right off and rolled securely. Those masts being set centre-deck, the rudders were to starboard, and could be raised in chocks when the vessel came ashore. The flat-bottomed hulls were divided into compartments so they wouldn’t fill with water all at one time, and the boat needed no keel, let alone a false one. These holds separated incompatible cargoes. The family who owned the junk could live permanently aboard, in cabins to the more tranquil aft, above deck.

But now they have replaced them all, with our awkward oversized metal clunkers, that require noisy smoking oil-sucking engines and might sink if they are violated with a single hole.

I could go on. Don’t get me started on the extraordinary peace embodied in the shapes of Song dynasty clay pots, or the purity conducted through ancient Chinese brush strokes. We were Promethean, they were not; but now they have come over to our darkest side.

(I have shortened this tedious thing.)

*

“Poverty,” someone noticed, is quite “relative.” It cannot possibly be an absolute evil — the way œconomists misleadingly present it. One can be poor in the country, and hardly anyone will notice, whereas in the city, social workers might break in. Moreover, the ratio of police to acres is much higher in the town, so you really should think twice before shooting them.

Now, hunger gets us closer to absolute, and naked would be a problem at these Subarctic latitudes. That is why most sensible people have always preferred the Tropics, where clothing is more optional, and the crops sprout even when you are trying to ignore them. And should that not be enough food, a coconut may roll into your way — “under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree.”

Listening, involuntarily, to a screechy radio, I heard an œconomist from the United Nations, or some other radical outfit. He had just returned from the slums of São Paulo (first class by jet, I’ll wager), and wished to report two things. The first was that the slum inhabitants do not have much money. The second was that they are morally superior to us. He sounded like our pope.

He was proposing that under some Global Reset, these slum-dwellers will get more money, so they will not be poor any more. But, assuming the truth of his second proposition, there would be a catch. They’d lose their moral superiority, I reckon. I noticed that he avoided vexing himself on this “off-narrative” detail.

Are people who win lotteries made happier? Or luck out with the latest œconomic “reform”? I venture yes, at first. But check back after a few months, and they are miserable and nattering again. The truth is that humans (like sheep) can become accustomed to any level of prosperity or good fortune, and take their advantages over the luckless for granted very soon.

This isn’t a problem anyone can fix. Certain ancestors of ours catastrophically failed to do the right thing, and we’ve all been perverse ever since. God is dealing with it.

Verily, the world burdens itself with problems whose twists are either created or imagined. The “problem of poverty” is like that. It is easily solved, by letting some people be poor.

Another is this “morally superior” thing. It is a (very Red) herring. For the poor are, on average, as obnoxious as the rich. Why not just stop denying this?

Lately my thoughts have been drifting over two species of being, namely, people and sheep; and also the crossover species, “sheeple.” These beings cross in both directions — we have the right to choose, in all modern and progressive jurisdictions — so that it is said of New Zealand, for instance, that it has a population of thirty million sheep, five million of whom think that they are people. (By comparison, Canada has an aggregate population approaching forty million, most of whom are deeply confused.)

I would refer to “natural-born” humans, except, I fear this would tease up controversy. Let me cloud the issue, rather, by mentioning some other ungulates, or claimed ungulates, such as goats, cows, and zebras. (We must respect diversity.) Myself, I always wanted to be a giraffe, on the theory that it would be hard for people to fleece me, and moreover, I might easily survive a hanging. But as I grow older, I become more complacent about the species to which I was assigned at birth, and all-round more conservative.

In the past, most sheep were conservative, too, if not reactionary. Your modern sheep tends to be more progressive, and tamer, but let it be said that there were always many sorts. In order to populate the Scottish Highlands during the Clearances, with sheep, while evicting the people, it was necessary to choose a more sociable sheep breed, along with shepherds, ditto. Both came from the Borders, and the latter could cope with being seriously outnumbered by the former. Too, they weren’t prejudiced against sheep with black faces, as the Highlanders once were. These “New Soviet Sheep” responded well to “guidance” from Border Collies, much nicer than the old Highland dogs, and could generally be counted on not to make a scene.

Whereas, the older breeds were often dangerously eccentric. They had “personalities,” forgetting sometimes that they were just sheep. They were much smaller, more agile, also wilier, and could outsmart many of their keepers. (A Lowlander stood no chance with them.) Too, they were gourmands, and would shamelessly eat out the finer grasses, to the outrage of the cattle. (Their replacements were easily satisfied with junk food.)

From my slight, passing acquaintance with a Soay, and what little I know of other ancient Highland breeds, they could be like herding cats. They were “delicate little beasts,” it says here, who demanded public housing in “sheep cotes,” and were tethered by day, if their keepers could catch them. Their fleece were very fine, but scanty. They made for exquisite tartans; but were kept mostly for their milk.

By comparison, your modern sheep gives inferior wool, but lots of it. They also do not mind so much being chopped up in the stockyards. They lack the multiple, magnificent horns, with which the old breeds could give their shepherd a hard biff, when they disagreed with him.

To be fair, their black-faced Linton successors can give a hard biff, too, and pointier, notwithstanding their pacific reputations, and the ewes sometimes show an elegant fashion sense, in their “floating graceful draperies.” Most tellingly, they adapted well to the uplands, and are willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense, like Canadians.

This is a warning alike to people, sheep, and sheeple. Do not make yourself too adaptable, or you will all be industrially farmed.

As sage Hippocrates is said to have said, “First do no harm.”

Consider the following cure for madness. The patient is taken to the cultists of Saint Maelrubh, at his island in Loch Maree, for the bull sacrifice; then to Saint Fillan’s pool by Loch Earn, during the third phase of the moon. Rounded pebbles are placed on what’s left of a saint’s cairn. Subject is then tied behind a boat, which circumnavigates an island. Still wet, and freshly hog-tied, he is placed in a stone coffin within a ruin, to spend the night with what’s left of any saint who was dwelling there.

Gentle reader may object that this is not modern. He may characterize it as “mediæval.” He will not find such cures in a “modern” psychiatry textbook. (Actually, he will. It is called “shock treatment.”) I came to it in the course of idle lockdown reading, on my noble Highland ancestors.

Their cure for jaundice seemed worse, for those against torture. I, for one, dislike being poked with hot irons.

But “mediæval” it was not. The memoir was from the 17th century, when the Presbyterian Enlightenment had already spread. Granted, medical practices were probably different in Edinburgh; but that was not yet the self-styled “Athens of the North.”

One could fill a book — indeed, two or more — with the enormities we assign to the Middle Ages, which didn’t happen then; but instead, like the witchcraft crazes, rose in the dawn of the modern age. Much that we assume, and is taught in our schools, is just like truth, only the opposite.

The “superstitions” of the earlier centuries were different in kind. They consisted of things like missionaries blessing wells, and naming them after Christian saints, when they saw that the primitive locals had a reverence for them. The mysterious powers of which they spoke came with prayer. They brought sophisticated learning with them, in their persons, and advanced towards the Northern Star; built churches and cathedrals like starships to Orkney, Trondheim, Greenland. Each became a centre of learning, in stone.

It happens I was once reading on genuine mediæval traditions in physic, some of which lasted at least as traces in the Highlands until the century before last. We still have fragments of their materia medica, in Gaelic. Not charms, often discouraged as pagan, but many herbal remedies, which have since proved efficacious. The Highlands had once been part of a higher culture. I read somewhere of Scottish physicians, in demand abroad in the 14th century: I mention them because they were all “Gaels.” Power, as well as literacy, tipped from Highlands to Lowlands in the cusp of modernity.

The campaign to stamp out the Gaelic language, the Gaelic œconomy, and ultimately the Gaelic race, was a distinctive feature of the modern centuries. By the 19th, they were very poor and miserable, not only in Scotland — and blamed by smug urban society for what had been done to them. Yet they remained proud.

To my mind, “Protestantism” was more a consequence than a cause of the many forms of nationalism that sprouted across the West, like acne. The more remote peoples, who did not think of themselves as “nationals” but just as souls, were being everywhere homogenized, and where they tried instinctively to resist, they were evicted, exiled, eradicated. The wars were not of religion, but of politics, seizing upon religion as a weapon to consolidate the new national units. “Reformations” proceed generally by iconoclastic force.

It is the history of many dispersed peoples, who in this age of electronic gizmos, have come to identify with each other. My fascination with Gaelic music, for instance, has taken me by video recently not only to Ireland, but to France, Spain, and Appalachia.

Through five centuries, Nanny State has been unable to leave the non-conforming peoples alone. It is a tale of “land reform” after reform. And that madness, uncured, remains with us into post-Christian times.

I wrote something this morning, about bishops who will not lead their “sheeple” — into gaol when necessary — because they know the sheeple wouldn’t follow, and they would rather not go there themselves. By creeping increments, they become the “first enforcers” of the State’s fatuous Batflu regulations, barking at their beleaguered sheeple, to follow each “guidance” to the letter, then go the extra mile. I was thinking of one Cardinal Archbishop in particular, whom I watched on a video, snarling at his sheeple and their parish priests. He just plays the dog, and threatens to bite them if they don’t move faster in the stupid direction they are already going — out of the Church.

But on mature consideration, I deleted this essay. For hey, I might never be invited to his place, again.

As some Siamese Bonze once told me: “I am very rich, in things I don’t need.” He seemed, indeed, to be surrounded by treasures.

This was in the capital of what is now called Thailand. The gentleman in question, enrobed in saffron cloth, and in possession of a brass begging bowl, offered the best conversation I can recall about Buddhism with a “native speaker.” That is, he was raised in an entirely Buddhist rural environment, schooled in a village monastery through his childhood, and had become fluent in English with a disturbing Oxbridge accent. This he had acquired I’m not sure how. I forgot, or forget. Were it forty years later, one might look him up on Facebook, I suppose.

Many people are more interested in themselves than in others, as intellectual engrossments go. Let me start with what he had to say about “me” — the Westerner. His monastery, or wat, was becoming something of a hippie hotel, owing to its custom of hospitality to travellers. While not a hippie, nor an habitual wat guest, I was at the time a bit of a traveller. I was curious to hear an educated Bonze’s view on all these hirsute, dope-smoking white juveniles. It was both sympathetic, and unfavourable.

He was sympathetic to what he thought often a sincere quest for “transcendence,” but one that had got off on the wrong foot. The spiritual resources of the West were formidable, he said. They should have started their journey there. While he welcomed an appreciation of Buddhism, they did not tend to have very much, and most of what they knew was not true, but Western-hippie bosh. They were more consumers than participants in religion — by instinct, aloof in quite the wrong way — and really, if they were more serious they might have researched monasteries on the continent they came from. Here they were just voyeurs, and (I am paraphrasing, as so often), too smug and conceited to be good voyeurs. By contrast, having met several, he put in a good word for Catholic priests.

We discussed Buddhist versus Christian monasticism. There are differences in belief that can’t be whimsically bridged, he said. But large parts of the two “monastic experiences” were fairly identical, including the line that is drawn between monastery and “outside.” One doesn’t cross that line wilfully. One does not come in to shop, as it were, for spiritual trinkets.

The young Buddhist who enters the monastery intentionally, for a few months before settling into a secular career, knows he isn’t shopping. This institution, found throughout Theravada Buddhist nations, could instead provide a brief training in “the discipline of compassion” — including what it is and isn’t.

It is not a “nice feeling.” It is a discipline to be acquired, and my Bonze echoed Newman in saying (as I later realized) it begins with the art of getting out of bed in the morning.

Other acquisitions follow, some of which may prove more difficult. Let us consider, for instance, the skill with which we started: detachment from Things. We, from the West, used to be good at this. (In past centuries.) We did not so much own things, beyond kitchen utensils, as hold them in consequence of our station in life, to be passed along in due course. Now we’ve forgotten how this works. Only superficially does this mean a life of poverty. Only superficially does one give away everything one owns — although the monk must do this, to show his commitment. At a much deeper level, one must cease to crave for possessions, including that craving for immaterial things: fame and suchlike. The task is rather to be free; to escape our bondage to transient things.

But God, Heaven, Hell; angels, devils, saints. … One of the most intriguing things I remember from Montri (the name of my Bonze acquaintance), was his casual use of such terms. “Westerners think Buddhists don’t have them, that we are some sort of atheists, but look at Buddhist art.” Buddhist attitudes towards them might be inexplicably different, but there they are.

I’ve neither seen nor heard of him for decades; and he was already old, so that he is probably now dead; yet Montri remains, for me, a Catholic inspiration.

Once upon a time, in an obscure country called Canada, we had some admirable election laws. These have lapsed, unfortunately, but as an immediate “reform,” I think they should be restored.

My favourite was the “returned ballot.” An eligible voter, who looked at the list of Party candidates in his riding, and was inclined to spit, could express himself on election day. I used to do this myself, when younger, but found that the law had already gone into disuse.

One went to the queue at the polling station. (Often there’d be none.) The returning officer would look through his voter roll, find one’s name and address, and check these against one’s identification.

Pause. … This is still the procedure up here. We don’t fool around when checking voter ID, or counting physical ballots, unlike in some other countries. The ballots are directly marked on physical paper, then counted manually. They must also be counted continuously, before accredited witnesses, any one of whom may howl the moment he suspects a trick. There are no super-doper voting machines, such as we apparently sell to naïve or commie foreigners. In the absence of “high tech,” the counting happens fast. We have the result from most polling stations by local midnight, and often hours before. They are quite checkable (the ballots must be preserved), and a recount is automatic if the result across the riding is too close.

The ballots themselves are hard to confound: no “down-ballot” to contend with. We don’t elect judges and dog-catchers in Canada; only Members of Parliament, one at a time. This means that when we have an election dispute, it will almost certainly not be about the count. Rather it will be over fussy and trivial campaign spending laws. Bad results must therefore be attributed only to the stupidity of the voters. Alas, that can’t be fixed.

Back to the polling station, where the electoral officer is now passing me a ballot, with a hint on how to make an X on it. I am directed to a voting stall.

But I refuse to go there. Instead, I turn earnestly to the officer and say: “I am returning this ballot.”

Chances were, even decades ago, he would be thrown into confusion. So one would explain his job to him. He was supposed to have a book, entitled “Returned Ballots.” Into this he was supposed to transcribe one’s name and address. Getting into the book was one’s only way to avoid the secret ballot. But it was important to get in, to be recorded correctly, rather than as a “spoilt ballot,” as one is counted now if one’s ballot has no X.

After voting, I would check the result, and if not even one returned ballot had been recorded, I could doubt it was legitimate.

Now comes the good part. For returned ballots were supposed to be a separate category in the election tally. It was competing with all the other candidates. If it won a plurality — more returned ballots than the leading candidate — the election was to be formally thrown out, and a by-election called, in which none of the candidates for the thrown out one were allowed to run again. Too, voters could “theoretically” do this over and over, until at least one Party chose a candidate we could stomach.

In theory, this was an excellent way for voters to “drain the swamp,” directly, by eliminating the political sleaze in successive groups. In practice — aheu —  it was never used. The political sleaze nevertheless spotted the possibility, and had it taken off the books, at both Dominion and Provincial levels. What can I say? They are sleaze.

So the first thing we must do is campaign for the return of the returned ballot, up here; and for its institution in all the other Western nations. Then the second is to impartially, but massively, campaign for its use. It could be the greatest thing since the ancient Athenian ostracon.

“Democracy,” like any form of guvmint, is built upon agreement over certain foundational myths. The “will of the people” must be consulted. They collectively speak, in mass elections, according to the myths. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” we might say: the opposite to what prevailed in more sober times, before the Enlightenment. And yet in my experience, most people do not know what they are talking about, on most topics, and on politics, foolishness is rife.

If 51 percent prefer one candidate — less if there are more candidates than two, or even with only two, after discounting spoilt ballots — the people have not spoken, any more than the coins have spoken, after you have flipped them a few million times. In reality, the tiny number who have really thought about it, are disenfranchised by the rest. If their vote shifted, it was between each and God. The reasons they give might be intelligent and salient, but the system works on one-man-one-vote. (Or did: we now dispute “man.”)

To my mind, most, if not all, elections are hung. The winners enjoy only a plurality over the losers. Even in a landslide, a third or more of the people likely voted for the losers. This is far short of a consensus.

The democratic idea can be preserved, only where the “principle” of mediocrity is sustainable. There must be general agreement to live with the winners, and good enough will for them to muddle through. Indifference is vital. Resentments must be kept within bounds.

Whoever wins, the result will be much the same. All parties offer the same sort of policies, dressed, perhaps, with a few decorative flourishes — likely to be quietly discarded, because of the expense. Life goes on, whoever wins. The division between Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, rebalances periodically, and the slogans, too, are casually exchanged. They sharpen only when tragedy is near. Tragedy itself can be seen as a sudden clarification in the usual sludge; comedy I recommend as less dangerous. There are moments when Democracy itself is threatened, because real principles have entered our swamp. Real principles are bad for Democracy.

People die one at a time, even when they are killed off simultaneously. It is at that level that differences are significant; where political partialities fall away. The votes of the dead are anyway not counted, except in the more corrupt jurisdictions. But the dead themselves are well out of any controversy that follows.

It is wrong to murder them, I think. This I would give, or would have given, as an example of consensus. (The matter became clouded by Roe v. Wade.) Our laws once rested on overwhelming consensus: thou shalt not kill, steal, bust marriages, worship strange gods, &c. These commandments were beyond “principle”; they were existential. Now, they can be overturned by vote. This was once imaginable only for petty and transient regulations; but the distinction between petty and serious has been lost.

We have “a threat to Democracy,” say the pundits. I don’t say that here, but only because I never believed in any of the democratic myths. At least, once I outgrew childhood.

There is something to be said for genius. Perhaps I should leave the saying of it to someone else. But as I am the only writer in the High Doganate, I’ll have a go. Consider Bertolt Brecht.

My German, which peaked about 1968, and has since been in decline, remains nevertheless unable to conceal from me the sheer, stupid genius of that man. I added the qualifier — “stupid” — to clarify that genius isn’t always wise. It is a gift from God, that we are apt to mismanage. Indeed, I won’t name a person I am currently thinking about, who has what I would call a genius for stupidity. He goes about being stupid so ingeniously, he leaves me with respiratory issues.

And yet, there is truth in him. A less controversial example would be Auden, or even Stevens, or Pound, to start running through my “rolidex” of great modern poets, in English. In poems, but also in essays, they utter absurdities that are brilliantly true, unknowingly. Or so I am convinced. I’m not going to write that book, however.

Since the world is now festering in politics, I was going to stick with Brecht for my example, political to his dirty fingernails, poet more than playwright, and always poet in his plays. Master of the double-irony, he hits triples, too, without even trying. (I would flatter Neruda in the same way.) A diligent commie at heart, he writes mottoes that could be used by libertarians — but ironically, because he is redefining freedom. While doing so, he then sounds accidentally “Tory,” or “feudal” in the Continental manner. But then he advances to the baseball equivalent of a home run. He exposes the satanic intention at the heart of his own revolutionary creed — unintentionally, I surely think.

Take this quite famous excerpt from his poem, Die Lösung (“The Solution”), written apparently to regret the East German uprising in 1953. A Communist Party hack said that the people “had forfeited the confidence of the government.” (A Brechtian irony, but completely unintentional.) “They could only win it back with increased work quotas,” this hack suggested. Brecht observed:

“Would it not in that case be simpler, for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another?”

He tours the bases with this savagely misleading satirical stroke, thus ending at home plate where he began. What may have looked a fluke to some, was meant all along. He was never trying to hit easy singles, if I may strain my baseball analogy even further. He was always trying to change the rules of the game. This is exactly the strategy Communists will pursue, and similarly, all “progressives.” Their intention from the outset is not merely to “get elected,” like any normal political party, riddled as it will be with concessions to what the people seem to want. It is from the beginning to alter society — like devils, using any means available.

We lost sight of that as the Cold War “progressed,” beyond plain old-fashioned Stalinism. We began to accept ideologues as “just another option” — as they established and promoted new brands of secularism, feminism, environmentalism, “anti-racism,” &c. These things can’t be advanced by government policy, or will fail, unless the people themselves can be altered. A monopoly of legislative power goes without saying: that is always the prize in politics, Left or Right. But the progressive seeks a monopoly forever; what the Leninists, even before the Stalinists, called the novy sovetsky chelovek, the “New Soviet Man.”

Even to seize raw political power, they always meant to cheat. That’s why e.g. Nancy Pelosi began playing with new mail-in balloting arrangements, the moment she recovered the House speakership, long before she could seize on the Batflu for her excuse. (Curiously, Trump was among the few who saw what was coming. Brecht would have admired “his ability to think crudely.”)

This is why progressives focus on infiltrating cultural institutions, including of course the institutions for voting, rather than on, say, staging a military coup. For such coups are superficial. They change only the government, and that only for a time. Indeed, most generals are unimaginative people, who seize power in defence of some threatened status quo. The revolutionist wants to change that status quo. He wants to change what human beings are.

A pity, to my mind, that he is succeeding.