Essays in Idleness

“Please don’t read me; you are interfering with my stealth invisibility.” … (Something I just wrote to one of my more irritating detractors.) …

Worldly developments are such that, no matter what happens as Netanyahu continues to Trump, and Trump to Netanyahu the combined military forces of the Iranian Twelver fanatics, even Leftists are noticing. I’m expecting fewer Palestinian riots at Columbia, this year, and a dip in the market for keffiyehs. Even were the Iranian regime to survive, somehow, I would expect an increase in peaceful resolutions with the “religion of peace” (and terrorism).

Moreover, the American position has improved, vis-à-vis Communist China, and Taiwan is at least slightly more secure now that the Americans have shown how utterly superior their technology is to the best stuff the Chinese were able to supply Iran. And, future Western war efforts now benefit, as for instance Ukraine becomes the latest Israel-like supplier of ways and means. Pure frontline innovations are made while winning battles; and not while losing them. The immensity of Russia, and of Iran, have proven a disadvantage to their malicious rulers. (China is also immense.)

In particular, the West is gradually coming to the realization that Islam does not teach the same morals as Christianity, notwithstanding what that bank-governing moron, Mr Carney, has suggested. Nor was Christ “basically” the same as Muhammed, nor are all religions “nice” and interchangeable. Our religion, for example, is better than we are; their religion can be actually worse than them. Islam is, and always has been, a political ideology, and it has generally advanced by violence and lies — fourteen centuries of both for those who would indulge in some historical curiosity. Only now is it being universally challenged, for the Internet is carrying Islamic doubts, once too physically dangerous to assert, gratuitously around the planet.

By contrast, Christianity has nothing to fear from the truth. Whether or not you are temporally enslaved, the truth will make you free.

It is Persian Week, up here in the High Doganate: a festival of multicultural bombing. I have little to add beyond my enthusiasm, for I assume that the USAF, IDF, &c, do not need additional direction. Indeed, now every interested party, including several purely commercial investors, have satellites overflying Iran, and can follow the action in “live time.” War is “evolving,” as they say. Incredible precision is now possible, and not even much patience is necessary when selecting the exact ayatollah that you want eliminated. This is such an improvement over the days when you had to slaughter all the ayatollahs, and their servants, too.

At last, we can have wars that observe all the Aristotelian unities. This is a mixed blessing for our media of information. They get many more events to report in the first few hours, but just after, they are back in The Wasteland, filling time again, and having to make something up to keep their audience entertained. If their lie is particularly rich, they will call it an “exclusive,” and put the “breaking news” chyron on the screen. This “chyron” is the graphic device that communicates, in fewer characters than a full sentence would require: “Nothing important is happening at this hour, and you may continue going to Hell at your leisure.”

Contrariwise, were something happening, you would not be consulting a television, or computer. There may be things happening in Iran, for instance, where the Internet has been out for days.

Speaking of which, I approve of what Trump and Netanyahu are probably doing to Iran — things that should have been done, forty-seven years ago. The West needed assertion then, almost as much as now, yet our rulers were more supine. (We had Jimmy Carter, possibly the most incompetent president, of any republic, ever.) It has taken them since to rise off their buttocks, using whatever technology is available. But the imperative for violent action occurred to me (as it did to Donald Trump, incidentally) at the time. Instead, the revolutionary ayatollah, Khomeini, was allowed to displace the legitimate Shah. I thought that the CIA must be on vacation. Quite certainly, more than a million died, because of their inattention.

A question, that has been disturbing me for some time, is whether what we call for shorthand “Western Civilization” is salvageable. That it would be worth salvaging (we live in an age of gerunds, don’t we?) I take for granted. We are alive; we have to live somehow; better that it be in a higher civilization, than in barbarous filth. Alas, not everyone agrees with me on this. The great majority, even within my Church, would prefer to live in a moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual pigsty of consumerism, in which the swineherds are provided by Twisted Nanny State.

Now traditionally, pigs had extended sharp tusks, that could be death on swineherds. They still have them, but diminished in size by extended breeding, and sometimes even the wee vestigial bumps are removed, at the risk of cracking jaws. This doesn’t lead to the captive suid being perfectly contented; only to his disarmament.

(I have a theory that humans are descended from pigs, not monkeys. I don’t currently believe it, but the argument can be developed in a way that will drive the village Darwinist crazy. Note: the average pig is smarter than a monkey; and can’t be bothered climbing trees.)

But I seem to be distracting myself into zoology, rather than advancing naturalism and realism. Indeed, my self-assigned brief is for supernaturalism. My affection for (the edible, delicious) pigs is just an aside. In the end it must be said there has never been a pig civilization, and the prospect that one may emerge by the ministrations of animal rights activists is, to my mind, dim. Pigs just won’t co-operate.

The human civilizations have each required an unambiguously religious foundation. There can be no order (for good, or when it fails, for evil) that does not refer to something higher than itself. This is as true for the headhunters of Borneo (whose pigs are bearded, and should be carefully avoided in the mangrove swamps), as for the gigantic feral hybrids, without keepers, found in the Canadian wild. Among the definitions of “faith” must be that which holds the tribe, or a people, or a person together, without tyranny. When it is lost, however, everything is lost. Even the pigs tend to get unruly.

(The “red-river hogs” of the Congo swamps are an exceptionally beautiful species, incidentally, with their gorgeous orange fox-like fur, adorable whiskers, decorative black and white facial patches, and thin white stripe along spine and tail. Though as any pigmy could tell you, they are terrible yam thieves, can defend themselves even against leopards, and do not make good family pets.)

Where am I? … Faith. … Our own once unambiguously Christian civilization embraced a supernatural order. The phenomena of collection of Holy Church were not unusual, as civilizations go. What made Christianity unique was the attachment to a “He Who Is” who can actually deliver us from cosmic perils. The hand-held devices we now worship cannot do that for us.

Even at the incontestably pragmatic level: it is time we returned to something that was working. Serve God, in Christ, and He will look out for us. Serve instead some other gods, and He might not.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — Most of this was brought forward from years ago.