Essays in Idleness

Forty trillion dollars — an amount the U.S. national debt now exceeds — would not have struck me as a plausible number in the days when one lousy million would have been enough for an extravagant couple to retire on. To call it sustainable may be a fond little accountant’s irony. Bankers, and insurance adjusters, are notorious for telling jokes about bankruptcies, but this amount, in trillions — now rapidly ballooning with compound interest and fresh, reckless spending — seldom rises to the amusing. For no one is terribly concerned, as they might be by fouls in women’s basketball.

The Democrats, Republicans, and others among the unambiguously deranged, are incapable of grasping the concept that even government debts are potentially important, and must be repaid, to avoid the real costs of a default, which will not be just a number.

We don’t make jokes about mass murder, either, or not unless we are progressively left. But a single generation after 9/11, when Muslim-hijacked aeroplanes were flown directly into New York City skyscrapers, the New York municipal government is in the hands of a freely-elected, and provocatively Muslim, administration. Believe this if you dare.

To be fair, all of the American Founding Fathers agreed that democracy could never work, and shouldn’t be tried as a form of government; for “the people” are just too crazy. True, one may find some sane voters, but they are always too small a minority.

The great pleasure of immobility, while some consciousness remains, and until the tax department catches up with you, is that you may read, more or less without interruption. Unfortunately, some of what you read may be what you wrote yourself in the past, and this can be an embarrassment.

For one discovers that one’s longest dithering philosophical essays could have been expressed in fewer words:

“From the impossibility of confining numbers to the constant and uniform prosecution of a common interest, arises the difficulty of securing subjects against the encroachment of governours. Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant …”

Note from the spellings, that this is from Doctor Johnson in The Adventurer.

I have fallen in love with Sophie Cunningham, even though she is a basketball star (I loathe basketball), and more than six feet tall (which is surely excessive, for a girl). She excels also in every other sport, beats the boys when they let her play with them, and can dance and sing and drink. Alas, I wouldn’t stand a chance with her, for I understand that she despises shorter men. (But politely.)

Sophie is fearless, and honest, and true, as everyone must have noticed by now. Yet as magnificently as she may sing “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” in Mizzou or wherever she came from, she is quite thrillingly, remarkably non-violent. And yet she plays for Idaho in the women’s professional basketball league. Or maybe it is Indiana.

Well, something that starts with “I.” This is a bloodsport, in which the women are all trying to kill one another.

It is that way throughout women’s athletics. For instance, though only if you have the stomach for it, I invite you to check out women’s field hockey. The girls are vicious, wherever they are playing — in Canada, England, Holland, Italy, Pakistan. Put a stick in a woman’s hands and, regardless of her ethnicity, she will immediately try to clobber another woman. I have seen this with my own eyes in each of these countries.

As Stephen Leacock wrote, men may be too crooked even for business; but women are, even for war, too violent.

My mysterious South Australian correspondent, writing from a location precisely north of the absolute South Pole, shares these comments from the esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and, as it were, just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. …

“How much naivety — venerable, childlike, and boundlessly stupid naivety — there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above. … ”

This is from the 58th aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil, which began with a defence of idleness. How merrily he kicks away “the little presumptuous dwarf, and man of the mob, the brisk handyman of ideas, … of modern ideas!”

Grouse are “adapted” not merely to an environment, but also to being grouse. There is something remarkably grouse-like in their overall design, many constituent parts, and in each of their responses to stimuli. They even seem to know that they are grouse; to be contented with that identity, willing to live and even die in the condition of being grouse.

One may make no sense whatever if one takes them to be something else. They will persist in being grouse-like, and in point of fact grouse, even if we try to persuade them that they are cockatoos.

Some other creature may invade their peculiar environmental niche; might even do so successfully. The grouse will respond to that invasion implacably, as grouse. They will under no circumstances attempt to transform or metamorphose themselves in reaction to such an existential crisis. Indeed, they will not consider such a proposition. It is always strictly fight or flight, on unambiguously grouse terms.

They will, if shot by a hunter, even taste like grouse.

Should they flee, it will be to the sort of territory that they find agreeable to themselves, as grouse. They will even go in search of such locations, should that prove necessary. But finding no such territory, they would frankly rather starve than cease being grouse.

It would take a miracle for a grouse to develop or “evolve” some new characteristic. For as I’ve said, it would never occur to the grouse themselves. More likely it would occur to the Grouse Angel — the being assigned by God to look out for grouse interests. Yet even in such a case, the new character would emerge from the underlying grouse-ness of the former character, and appear as an extension of the grouse repertoire. It would be all of a piece with their ontology.