Essays in Idleness

The reader will understand that I am only writing this to prove (within reason) that I am still alive, and enjoying my new life as a vegetable. For this I must thank the surgeons who generously gave me a neurological condition, to replace the cardiac problem I approached them with. The stroke left me in a constant state of the dizzies, walking the streets as a common Parkdale inebriate, and forgetting things — for instance words, and names especially. Given enough time, however, specific vocables may suddenly return, and I may fill in the blanks of an abandoned composition.

A kind reviewer has told me that the result can be almost coherent, and you know, I am wilful and determined to persist.

Meanwhile, so far as I am able to judge, the world has entered a state somewhat similar to my own. I suspect even the leading statesmen wobble, when they try to walk. As the plurality of children are now aborted, and the sex of the survivors is frequently changed, and “Medical Assistance In Death” may be prescribed for the remainder, the population of the world might soon be running out.

For the transient inhabitants of this world are now obliged to “follow the science,” and the content of this science is murderously insane. We thus spill into an environmental anti-disaster, of a kind so appalling to make all the mega-disasters of the past seem merely frumpish by comparison. Ours will consist of industrial disintegration and collapse, general hypothermia, and famine, as all of our sources of energy and food are politically banned, in the general hysteria over “climate change.”

Already carbon dioxide and nitrogen are scheduled to be phased out, on the planetary scale, and I would imagine that oxygen and other objectionable gases will be added to the list. The object is “carbon neutrality” or death.

Ah well. Perhaps we will experience the contrary fashion, in the next season.

While the prophets and sages of our Christian tendency — at least the Catholic ones — tend to resist morbidity, they are nevertheless acquainted with their personal share in what we call “Original Sin.” This is, for those who have never heard of it, the Sin of Adam, our most distant paternal ancestor. It is by extension the imperfection of the human race, including Eve, our most distant maternal ancestress.

Both Adam and Eve, in the course of being evicted from their “starter home” in the Garden of Eden, understood at least vaguely why this had come about. (The Lord made it plain to them.) They had done what they had been told not to do, and not done what they had been told to do.

I was going to admit that wondering whether a modern person has heard about this is itself rather baroque, and almost a pose; but I’m not sure it is an error.

Some Internet star just asked a set of contemporary university students if they had ever heard of the Holocaust, for instance, or of several other historical events, such as Kristallnacht, or the Normandy Landings. They were utterly confused — and “blanked out,” as I sometimes do, on names. I reflected that the Bible was not published until somewhat earlier in our collective history, than World War II. But who can say it has faded with distance, when much nearer events have quite disappeared?

Of course, the students could argue that they were never taught about these events, but then, they were never taught they could be missing anything, either. They seem to have learnt, as it were, nothing about nothing.

From what I can make out from correspondence, my own readers belong to the very cream of an élite, for I’d wager they have all heard of the Bible, and even of God. Even the non-Catholics among them have been told about sin, whether or not they took the teaching seriously. For this is the modern world. As Baudelaire says, “Everyone believes in God, although nobody loves Him; no one believes in the Devil, although his smell is everywhere.”

Baudelaire is often misunderstood. He is taken as almost the inventor of modernity in the arts, whereas, his concern was to confute it.

Many centuries before, Augustine anticipated Baudelaire’s simplification, and explained that the Devil cannot be blamed for all sin. In fact men (a term which used to include the women) sometimes committed sins which they had themselves devised. (This is what made them so Original.) He was among the first to openly resist the morbidity that endangers all Christian thought, on the subject of Sin. It is almost as bad as the opposite obsession, which we might characterize as psychotic: to feel no guilt at all.

This is a Christian challenge: to contemplate sin in the lightness of one’s being, finding it deeply implanted in oneself but neither in despair nor indifference.

I was reading Baudelaire, and also his mentor, Joseph de Maistre, author of Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg — the most wonderful account of politics. These are “entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence.” (In my post-stroke neurological condition, I will not attempt to translate “entretiens.”)

They are a font of what is called Pessimism, in our post-Christian environment. For all of our worldly ambitions are — without exception — subverted by Original Sin. This universal and comprehensive subversion is the condition of our life in this world, to which, by now, we should have adapted. I, and my reader, are likewise constrained.

On the contrary, my hope in God is excited by this. It is at the root of all “spiritual optimism,” when we seek it aright.

The latest trick in what we might call “eco-commie-perv agitprop,” emerged while shaming Canadian history and traditions. I’ll touch on it in a moment. It is a product chiefly of the Indian Wars of the last few years. The White Man, and more specifically when Catholic, has been accused of massacring the Native People in 20th-century residential schools, just as he did (according to “experts”) upon coming to the continent. He then ploughs the anonymous victims into mass graves, showing his affinity to, exempli gratia, the Nazis.

This propaganda campaign, which quickly reached the tedious stage, was founded on a series of oft-repeated unambiguous lies, driven into our susceptible children in our compulsory public schools, and throughout life by such agencies as the CBC. (All our significant media are now under government control, subsidy, and watch.) White men, especially the Catholics, contaminate Canadian history by their Satanic essence, according to this malicious fantasy. Goodness and innocence can be found only in their victims, the “visible minorities” (or majorities, as the case may be). Shame is inculcated among persons exhibiting the wrong race.

I write of Canada, but something similar is happening in the United States, and has been carried to Europe on the sails of Hollywood and popular “music.” Canada is, however, an extreme example — of brazen idiocy — and even to underprivileged (all-white) rural places the message is piped in. Disharmonious voices must expect state interference, and eventual arrest.

For Canada now has political prisoners, including many who participated in the Freedom Convoy of truck drivers. Tamara Lich, a prominent organizer of this demonstration, has been gratuitously jailed, though she didn’t even try to commit a plausible crime. This week she was gaoled again, apparently for receiving a freedom medal. (Persons it was in her bail conditions not to meet may have been in the audience.) She was put out of sight for “Canada Day” (the former Dominion celebration, yesterday). This manipulation of Canadian law is, sadly, no longer unprecedented. It seems to be ordered directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Liberal Government, and the NDP flunkeys who maintain it in power, use the police to do the dirty work, paradoxically while scumming the police in their publicity. Elections cannot so far be tampered with here, as they are open to corruption in the States. But as the majority of mostly urban Canadians (including whites) are Liberal-voting zombies, it is not really necessary. Their progress continues.

The latest trick is to identify those who wave the Red Ensign — the Canadian flag before the Liberals replaced it more than half a century ago — as racists and hate-mongers. Ditto with any national symbols of the past, before the Liberal strategy of discarding our ancient and proud traditions proceeded under Mike Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. These are now openly slandered as “fascist,” along with the people who prize memory of a Canada prior to ideological dystopia. The old flag. “Its usage denotes a desire to return to Canada’s demographics before 1967, when it was predominantly white.”

The current Canadian flag will, now that it has draped trucks and bridges in the Freedom Convoy, and other “Fuck Trudeau” protests, should soon be awarded the reputation of the Confederate banner, among Democrats in USA. Then I may finally take it out and wave it.