Essays in Idleness

We should be more selective when criticizing what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” As America’s young and impressive Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, tried to explain to “media” recently, most of the waste can be plainly attributed to political interference in the weapons-buying process; to “chopping and changing” on orders for tanks, jets, missiles, &c, thus adding substantially to delays and then to cost overruns. But as usual, under progressive socialism, the people and companies that make these useful things are assigned the blame.

For, once politicians are involved, “democratically” representing the financial interests of the people who paid to get them elected, and making their own embarrassing, amateur guesses about what the technology might be good for, corruption and ignorance become the general rule.

Alas, without access to capital punishment, the courts cannot control this aspect of criminal behaviour. Let the people who know what they are doing make the craft decisions openly in freedom, and let us find, try, and hang the corrupt. I’m especially eager to see our supply of politicians whittled down.

Good government should often, and ideally, be poor but honest. The military class should seek honour, not wealth; and conquest in preference to kickbacks. We need to maintain a force that is terrifying, but cannot be terrified too easily. War, of course, can be a lot of fun, once one is committed to it (read some military memoirs!) but like any participant blood sport, its purpose should always be victory. To which end, military expenditure must be as grand and wasteful as necessary.

As they have only begun to learn in the United States (we are unteachable in Canada), as much as four dollars in every five is spent on the corrupt enrichment of interested parties. We should, however, be able to get this down to perhaps half, by ruthless efforts. Every “democratic” politician who is eliminated should save us a few million more. Government should be in the hands of those who can afford it — putting money in, not taking money out. It shouldn’t be allowed to become a “public trust.”

Ars est celare artem, as they say, or at least some of them say, though I am told with a straight face that it was just Ovid who said that, in the Ars Amatoria, or the Metamorphoses, Book X. Or Quintilian, when I looked it up in Mencken. I had thought it was Horace, in the Ars Poetica. But I cannot find it there, and now I think perhaps the source is quaint and mediaeval. Except, that this principle goes back beyond the Greeks, and is implicit throughout Herodotus, “the father of history” (and thus journalism, on a technicality). But rhetoric is not the “highest” art, as the rhetorician, Quintilian, suggests, but instead it lies behind all art, and will help us to explain why art cannot be replaced by mere accuracy, or by piling on “data,” as we do today. Rather than master the technique of an art, we create a machine to spit things out, and replace it with a machine that spits them out faster. But spitting is not art.

Journalism, or the more intelligent, later draughting of history, only becomes comprehensible when we leave things out. But knowing what is trivial, and should be removed from the account, and what is not, requires more than habitual suppression. It requires a profound opposition to what is boring. That is why virtually all journalism is boring. It simply spits out sex and violence like a machine. Moreover, there is an order in which one should tell a story with art, or a poem, or a song, or even a joke; if you don’t have it right you will spoil everything that would have been interesting, or at least, funny. The true artist must learn to shut up when he has nothing to say, let alone sing. He must be artful even in his silences.

God gave His people the faculty of discernment, although they seldom cultivate it. One makes sense of things, or must stumble about senselessly, like a liberal or a leftist. For candour is not the same thing as blather and hysteria. It requires art, not artlessness.

Should God be with us, as He must be if we have not parted from His company ourselves, we will be in that happy state promised to the prophet, Isaiah: “When thou shalt pass through the waters, I will be with thee, … and when thou shalt walk in the fire, thou shalt not be burnt.” God is speaking of His Church, even in Old Testament times, in the Christian interpretation (for Christians have always been very Jewish in this); but also we understand the promise literally, and mystically, and having political implications. And it is repeated, by Christ, when He comes down from Heaven:

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

The simplicity of this has been confusing to many. We think that God must be doing something, with His creatures; that a performance is necessary when they are helped. And when He doesn’t do anything, or anything visible and audible to us, the atheists come forward, telling us to disbelieve. (Now, disbelief is doing something, by replacing faith.) This is the curious truth: that faith requires no action. It is only bad faith that leads to complications.

All of our foolish reforms require action, and continue to summon our squalid efforts, until we abandon them and they disappear. This is why monarchy is so much closer to godliness than democracy. A good king does not do anything at all — beyond following the law he has inherited, and the ceremonies that go with them — unless he is compelled to act by “events.” (For instance, defend his nation from invasion, or civil war.) There are bad kings, of course, but not anything like as many as there are bad “popular” governments, rife with corrupt and self-serving busybodies. These are ever trying on something new and revolutionary, rather than much-needed restorations.

The law in a good kingdom is the ancient law, founded in divine justice, then tried and tested through many generations. Only the world’s vicious idiots are campaigning to write new law.

Wiarton Willie, up in Bruce County, was unable to see his shadow this morning, thus portending an early spring for Ontario. He is consulted every year at Candlemas — or, Groundhog Day, as it is known to my (very secular) fellow provincials. Punxsutawney Phil has more famously performed the same function in the American state of Pennsylvania. That Wiarton Willie has been consistently more reliable than the scientific meteorologists, is reported in all our local media, which, in turn, are notoriously unreliable.

Shubenacadie Sam in Hants County, Nova Scotia, and Fred la Marmotte in the Gaspésie of Quebec, have agreed with Willie’s projection, as have other animals including Lucy the Lobster in Canada’s Far East. Thus, I begin to suspect that all are in the pay of our perpetual Liberal government. Woodchucks out west, such as Okanagan Okie, have meanwhile suspiciously confirmed this, by expressing their dissent. Prime Minister Carney will thus assign them six more weeks of winter.

This is significant, for it has been quite brutally cold, lately — indeed, below zero on the white man’s thermometer.

As I try to explain to my critics, at least one of whom insists on reminding me that I am a member of the political “far right,” I am actually right about everything, and opposed to everything wrong. He is the opposite, as I think he should agree: Left, and wrong, in all of his judgements. He is, however, opposed to all “labels” when they are applied to himself, except for those he happens to find flattering, and thinks those he refuses to use correctly cannot possibly apply to him. But to far right people, instead, his allegations will somehow always stick, and he wanders gratuitously from one insulting term to another, and tells me to “shut up” in response to each of my refutations. Except for nominal, accidentally truthful remarks, his every statement of fact is a bare-faced lie.

This is inevitable, I would conclude, when one is in the service of Satan, the Father of Lies — as everyone on the Left has been (or Whig, as they were called in Doctor Johnson’s day). But it is boring to repeat this observation constantly. I do not like to be dull, which is why I only say it sometimes; and try not to resort to the legion of synonyms.

It is said that one should look for stupidity, rather than for evil, in an opponent, even when writing new Dunciads. Plato is sometimes mentioned as author of this “fine point,” although in my experience neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor even Xenophon, was so naïve. They realized that absolute stupidity — corresponding to “absolute zero” on our temperature scale — is also the benchmark for evil. You can’t get the one without getting the other.

Thanks to high technology, we are finally able to achieve absolute zero.