Essays in Idleness

If I may be boastful for a moment, and I may, it was glorious to remember Roger Smith, although I could not be present at his coffee shop tribute in the dark interior of mountainous British Columbia recently. This dear companion of my childhood and youth left a musical and meteorological legacy among those lucky enough to know him, and not among those unlucky ones not touched, for instance, by his mirth. I think of the Kanlogian literary and hymnological tradition, launched from the abbreviation for “Kan I use logarithms?” in a high school math test. It came into being just a few years after Elvis, and I still sing it to myself:

You can hear everything through the air vents,
Especially if you’re eating from a gourd,
But if you don’t give praise to Batman
You’ll be eaten by the Armadillo Hordes …

Alas, few will grasp the metaphysical depth. It explains, for instance, Donald Trump, whom we both could appreciate as an explosively vulgar and transformative character, whether or not a divine gift to the world. In the manner of Batman, he has seized upon our political reality, and sought our praise, although it has not been forthcoming from the progressive constituency. And truly, they will be consumed by the armadillos.

Yet look closely, and one will see that Trump is of no religious significance whatever. Even the faithful, of several confessions, do not waste their time on him during liturgical acts, and largely ignore him in their preces privatae. This, because he is, more or less exclusively, just a political phenomenon or agency.

If one is Latin-Mass Catholic, or Greek Orthodox (the two forms of worship that are theologically sound), one will notice something that the world does not. The victory of Left or Right, the trends in politics, have little or no influence upon the religious environment. There is only an effect vice versa: as genuine religion expands, politics reciprocally contracts.  The contemporary disappearance of Christianity from our habits and thoughts, will not be affected by who leads in the polls, or has won the latest election.

All politics could go to Hell, and it would not even make the papers in Heaven.