Essays in Idleness

A note from my chief Irish veterinary correspondent calls my attention to the current spat between Obama/NATO and ex-Soviet/Putin, which is being conducted over many issues, some perhaps too subtle for the mass media to have catalogued. Indeed, so subtle that even I, a connoisseur of subtle conflict, would have to retreat to the foreign policy journals to make a good list. And I’m no longer willing to go that far.

But the Anakonda exercise in Poland, which ended last week after ten days of fun and war games, involving tens of thousands of NATO troops, and quite a few aeroplanes, was designed, as the Obama administration blatantly hinted, “to send a clear message” — we all know to whom. Frankly, sometimes I prefer a message to be garbled.

There is some history here. Perhaps gentle reader may recall it. As an old Cold Warrior, I remember it almost with nostalgia.

A country the physical size of Russia has a lot of “backyard,” and the country is ringed by ex-Soviet republics, many of which, if not all except Belorus, are enthusiasts for NATO. They do not wish to be “forgotten” by their historically more recent allies, and the demand for some show of force did not come primarily from USA. Perhaps our diplomats have privately asked the ex-KGB agent who rules Russia today why he thinks this would be. Or perhaps they have not thought of it. They’d be sure to get the answer that, for allied historical reasons, there are substantial Russian ethnic minorities in many of these countries, too, and that none of those have been “forgotten,” either.

Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine, could be mentioned, as examples of Russian behaviour that does not display a perfect understanding of international law pertaining to the violability of national borders. But then, the Russians could cite instances where the same was overlooked in the West. Verily, the redrawing of boundaries is an ancient practice, usually accompanied by main force, and not necessarily by chaste arguments. And often, it has gotten out of hand, as we remember from two World Wars — from which, it strikes me, we may not have learnt so much as we imagine.

Obama is often criticized, from the Right, for being flaccid in defence of American and Western interests; for appeasing enemies, and sacrificing allies. I do not think this criticism is entirely just. In my own view, which dominates this website, the problem with them has more to do with weak heads and general incompetence. Their rhetoric means almost nothing at all: it is spacey and “academic” and naïve, in the smug Harvard manner. It is not pacifist, as some of my best warmonger buddies allege. It is instead lackadaisical. The Obamanites are willing to assert American superpower, but only after events have migrated beyond their control. They vaguely understand that “the world is a dangerous place,” that “the law of the jungle” governs much of it. They do not, most certainly do not, intend surrender, even to the ayatollahs of Iran. They are, sincerely, trying to be tactical. The difficulty is that, if I may resort to a vulgar, commonplace expression, they don’t know their ass from their elbow.

Moreover, it is fair to add, the mismanagement of the Russia file goes back ninety-nine years. (Our ancestors realized that Leninism needed snuffing at birth, but in their moral and physical exhaustion after the Great War, could not summon the will to complete this task.) Through all this time there has been a misunderstanding of the nature of that country: that it is, even remains, essentially Christian. By the progressive loss of our own Western Christian sensibilities, we became unable to appreciate this fact.

Communism, and Islam, are genuine opponents. But Russians, and Muslims, are not. It is wiser to appeal to the best in them, than to the worst.

In the case of Russia, the fatuous “reset” of a simple-minded former secretary of state inspired only derisive laughter from the other side. She did not understand that change is not effected by pressing buttons, which are not connected to anything. (Indeed, as we gather from the email scandals, button pressing is not her forte.)

What for all their own flawed judgement the Bush administrators did understand, was the need for best efforts behind the scenes. Bush himself tried to befriend Putin, over a barbie at the ranch. This was part of a larger scheme to improve contact between the countries, beginning with tone. It required, behind the scenes, diplomatic acknowledgement that, strange to say, the Russians might have some plausible grievances; that there could be some merit in their analysis of the historical fallout from the Soviet collapse; that there could be some comprehension of views that the (unpleasantly aggressive, if substantially weakened) successor regime shares with most Russian people. Like us, perhaps even more so, they do want to look after their own.

Let me mention that I think Putin is vile. I think Obama is vile, too, but in much different ways. In the virtual world of the Internet, everyone may “comment” — showing that we are all pretty vile, in our respective ways.

In the world of diplomacy, however, the tradition is to keep opinions to ourselves. The task is to identify common interests, including an interest in not killing each other. This is not, as often thought, a vain activity. It beats, I think, making threats to people likely to retaliate in kind, when we have no idea what we will do if they do that.

Perhaps this, in a sentence, is what Bush understood, and Obama does not understand: That threats should never be empty. That empty threats should never be made.

Curiosity kilted the cat, or however that saying goes: I have been reading too much news again, and must cut back. This morning’s excuse was curiosity over the results of municipal elections in Italy.

It seems they went well. The progressive types were turned out of office all over, and the country’s Five Star Party, founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo a few years ago, has won 19 of the 20 cities in which its candidate stood for mayor. Starting with Virginia Raggi in Rome, many of these mayors-elect could pass for fashion models. She, for instance, will try to improve upon a record that has “Left” the city indebted to more than twice its annual revenues, and its officials enthralled to organized gangsters.

Naples was the only exception, where a mayor already deeply loathed by the Left (a tireless public prosecutor) won re-election by a landslide.

The idea of electing comedians and comedy teams to office is very attractive to the Italian national character. I have praised them for this before. It shows a maturity of understanding rare in the annals of modern democracy. Given the omnipresence today of po-faced progressive parties, the alternative cannot be po-faced “conservatives,” whom the po-faced Leftist media will methodically smear and slander, as for instance in Canada and USA. They accept that verdict, and agree to lose. Rather one needs people with a sense of humour and no political past. I suppose this is the argument for Trump; though I would argue that he takes himself quite seriously, and doesn’t see the joke at all.

For vulgarity is not the same thing as humour. It is a dimension of comedy, but the full commedia dell-arte requires more. It must be spontaneous on several theatrical levels to occasion real surprise, and catch the po-faced off their leaden balance. It requires masks and good costumage. It requires stock gli immorati, ridiculously in love as much with themselves as with their sweethearts; fine silk dresses or alternatively the patched clothing of an impudent Colombina, with her weaponized tambourine. It requires confusions of identity, in the spirit of old Terence, and Plautus. It needs fantesche and servette (maids and serving wenches); Smerildas, Nespolas, Diamantinas.

The genius of sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte was to cast women in the women’s rôles. Elsewhere in Europe, men always played these parts: just as “Mrs Clinton” today (who is of course really a man), or “Caitlyn Jenner.” For the truth is that cross-dressing gets boring after a while; and that nothing is so shocking, now as then, as a woman playing a woman.

Plus, men who make jokes that are genuinely funny, such as some untranslatable remark Beppe Grillo tried the other day about the new Muslim mayor of London, which made all the po-faced heads explode. He has been called, repeatedly, “the most dangerous man in Europe,” for his ability to attract audiences, and make them laugh, despite being banned from Italian state television and so forth. He does not run himself, but is content with his position as backstage producer, out of his conviction that criminals should not aspire to political office. (Almost everyone in the Italian Parliament has a criminal record, many in the first degree.)

Among his most dangerous notions is that citizens should be permitted free speech, and that the power of politicians should be curtailed. This goes considerably beyond the “Brexit” position, that British politicians should be re-empowered at the expense of European ones.

We’ll see how Italy’s experiment turns out. For a preview, gentle reader might consult the page on Grillo in the Wicked Paedia: their usual po-faced hatchet job on anyone who dares to ignore the progressive agenda.

Let us hypothesize. The ordination of most Catholic priests is invalid; the Mass in Catholic churches is usually invalid; and most Catholic marriages are null.

Our pope recently uttered this last opinion, volubly, then had his minions alter the transcript from “most” to “some.” That in itself was noteworthy: for when an honest man realizes that he has said something stupid and wrong, he does not try to tamper with the transcript. Rather he withdraws or corrects the remark, explaining what was wrong with it — the way even the politician McCain did after alleging that Obama was “directly responsible” for the massacre in Orlando, when he was only indirectly responsible. For a transcript is a record of what was said, not what should have been said.

Let me thus amend my opening hypotheses. The ordination of some Catholic priests is invalid; Catholic Masses are sometimes invalid; and some Catholic marriages are invalid, too; where in each case, “some” is understood to be a frequent occurrence. Would that sound much better, coming from the living guarantor of Roman Catholic teaching?

Ah, gentle reader may object. He didn’t make the first two observations, only the third, which he then tried to soften. No, I played my own rhetorical trick, by insinuating two more observations that would follow from it, logically.

For marriage is a Sacrament, according at least to the received Catholic view in all centuries. If it is invalid — which technically it could be for some reason, such as a previous marriage by one or both of the participants, or some other obvious disqualification such as both being of the same sex — it might not be the priest’s fault. Perhaps they lied to him; perhaps they went to trouble to make the lie seem plausible. Once the investigation is concluded, it might not be necessary to have the priest defrocked. His humiliation would be sufficient to warn other priests, who might be tempted to perform marriages between characters of dubious integrity.

For some of these young priests may be wet behind the ears. They may not have “discerned” (I think this is the popular term at the moment) that the “partners” are insane, or so lacking in basic human intelligence that they are incapable of understanding what the marriage vows mean. The process for nullity exists to correct such “clerical errors.”

Or maybe, as our pope often reminds, it was one of those “shotgun weddings” — so that both girl and boy needed taking aside, and a patient quiz about their situation. Were they threatened with death if they didn’t go through with it? Did either, or both, look drugged? Were they being escorted by armed men? (Perhaps this often happens in Argentina.)

But assuming they were qualified adults, without grave impediments concealed, it is the priest who has knowingly presided over an invalid Sacrament. In which case, his orders must come under review. For all we know he has been, for instance, wantonly serving Communion to people who could not possibly be in a state of grace; who might, though nominal Catholics (perish the thought!) never have made a Confession in their whole lives. Who might be indifferent to Christ’s commandments, or even openly in rebellion against them.

For if her Sacraments are invalid, the Church herself is brought into terrible scandal. How can she claim to be the observant Bride of Christ, when she does not care what He says or does? Was her own mystical marriage somehow invalid, and were her members through twenty centuries of history simply conned into believing her defining claims, when “most” or “some” of them were fraudulent?

I am spelling all this out, incidentally, not to be funny, but by way of encouraging gentle reader to think things through. We need more of that today. I could go on spelling, but I am not writing a textbook on canon law. I am trying to draw only irresistible implications; and those explicitly in defiance of the latest ukases from the Dictatorship of Relativism. I tend not to be “merciful” in that regard. Nor do I groove upon “a mess.” I’d rather make a start on cleaning it up.

One becomes a Catholic (no one is “born that way”) by an act of faith that does, for all its unity, have an intellectual component. Words have meanings, and the words we hear in the Mass (some of us daily) may be, as elsewhere, true or false. That is why Our Saviour put us on guard against blathering, when He said answer Yea or Nay. If there are other denominations that do not take their own articles seriously, that is their problem. Ours is to speak truthfully, or confess when we have not spoken thus.

The more one thinks about what our pope said, the more one flinches. When he says that one of our Sacraments is invalid, whether in “most” or “some” cases, he must explain himself. He is making an astounding assertion; an assertion which brings into question the substance of Holy Church. And he was elected to be her guardian. Decency requires him to spell out, himself, what he could possibly mean; or he brings his own validity into question, by another link in that logical chain.

It is ours to be calm, and persist in the faith; Christ will take care of it, in His own good time. We have had some very bad popes before. This one is arguably worse than those who were infamously corrupt, for they were not inclined to toy with the doctrine, nor excavate through our foundations. Pope Francis was nevertheless validly elected, just as marriages before the altar are valid, until proven otherwise. We must pray for the Church, and also for his soul, and can only hope that correction comes soon, and we can put the last few sordid years behind us.

“Downtown Orlando has no bottom. The entire city should be levelled. It is void of a single redeeming quality. It is a melting pot of third world miscreants and ghetto thugs. It is void of culture. If you live down there you do it at your own risk and at your own peril. If you go down there after dark there is seriously something wrong with you.”

An interesting POV.

It was written by some gentleman in the Florida State Attorney’s office, ninth circuit, on his Facebook page. (I have edited for spelling and style.) I gather he has been suspended under section SA09 of the office social media policy, which requires a higher standard of civic boosterism. He may be terminated, for it was his second offence. (Earlier he was carded for the expression, “crack hoes.”)

One wonders what the social media policy was in Sodom and Gomorrah. Up here in the High Doganate we don’t have one. Nobody working for us has ever been suspended for a Tweet, Instagramble, or Facebooking. True, nobody works for us, up here, but that is another issue. We allow visitors to comment freely, but request that they wait until they have left to say what they think of the place.

The gentleman, whose identity is revealed in Fox News, had more to say. He contrasted downtown Orlando with Walt Disney World which, he suggested, is much nicer. And this although, I learn, there is risk that an alligator may eat your child. The truth is I have never been to Orlando, so am in no position to make my own comparisons. I defer to e.g. Wallace Stevens, who once said that while he’d never been to Europe, he’d been “almost everywhere in Florida.” (He refers somewhere to the Sunshine State’s “venereal soil,” but I don’t think he specifically mentions Orlando.)

Given my aesthetic sensibilities, I would probably prefer downtown Orlando to Disney World. Less, you know, “Mickey Mouse.” But that hardly means the city should not be levelled. If anything, it is an argument for extending the perimeter of deconstruction.

Cities get that way when you let people into them. People need minding, and often won’t do it themselves. They need taboos more than they need tattoos. They don’t need encouragement to misbehave. In the present state of the world, the peer pressure seems to be going all the wrong way.

Turning to other news — item after item after item from across Merica and around the world — one wonders what city should not be levelled.

Well, Fallujah is being levelled again, as I write. (I was once nearly suspended myself, for proposing in a newspaper column that the USAF make it into a parking lot, and that the USACE then build a Walmart at one end. I was being facetious, but one of the complaints against me — for “advocating genocide” — was taken to the Ontario Press Council. If memory serves, I won that case, but it was a 5–4 decision. Can’t be sure of my memory, however, for there were many hundred formal complaints, during my last stint as a fishwrap copywriter.)

And now it comes to this morning’s survey, where I find no mention of even one shining city on a hill.

So I walk out on my balconata, to look over Parkdale, and I think. Is there a way to level it without damaging the trees?

Gun control seems to be fairly effective in China. One cannot trust communist statistics, but it appears the murder rate can be sustained with fists, feet, clubs, and knives. That would not exhaust the alternatives, for the reader in an encyclopaedic mood, but I would like to focus particularly on long knives, which are the weapon of choice among Muslim “separatists” (i.e. terrorists) in the People’s Republic. This morning I am reminded by the BBC of the small gang in the usual black costumage, who killed and maimed about 160 at a railway station in Kunming. (Who then got no sob demonstration at Toronto City Hall.) It was hardly the first such account I had read, and I have noticed that these attacks are not confined to the Sinkiang region, which has ethnic affiliations with Islamic Central Asia. (Kunming is itself in Yunnan.) This is something to bear in mind when weighing the risks of train against air travel, for tourists in those parts.

Personally, I’d rather be shot by an expert, or even by an amateur with a high-powered gun, but the public are seldom consulted on these matters. I am such a wimp, in my desire to omit the pain component from almost any bad experience; and I suspect many share this aversion, too. On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that the slower the death, the better for a Catholic Christian, who has the more time to repent of what may be a formidable accumulation of sin, since his last participation in the Sacrament of Reconciliation; and has a better opportunity to receive Last Rites. To say nothing of how pain can help inspire a good confession.

Among survivors, now from another point of view, gun wounds are often preferable to the alternatives. The flak from suicide vests and car bombs is especially worth avoiding, from a purely cosmetic angle. (Only the bomber himself is assured of a quick, corpse-deleting death.) In this respect, travel arrangements will often prove irrelevant; for as a friend put it, “You needn’t go to the Middle East because, thanks to open immigration, the Middle East comes to you.”

Hard cases make bad law, but they also contribute to poorly-informed public opinion. Should a poll be conducted, on how people would prefer to be murdered or maimed, the respondents will need time to think it through. They will also need better information than the mass media are likely to supply, given their fanatic obsession with guns. And again, as I often point out, our education system fails us. Children are not taught prudential reasoning, which would assist them in grasping that while one course may be bad, others may be demonstrably worse.

On guns, it is a little known fact that even in the Natted States Merica, where they seem rather more easily available than elsewhere, they do not account for the majority of murders. Convenient as guns may be for this purpose, if you are a Merican (according to the latest FBI statistics) you are six times more likely to be murdered with a knife; and with a rifle, only one chance in fifty. That the murder rate itself is higher than in some other countries, I will happily concede. What can we say? Mericans just like to kill each other. Banning guns won’t help. (It might be good news for the reindeer, however.)

I further note that after the Congressional “assault weapon ban” of 1994 lapsed in 2004, Mericans went out and bought an awful lot of rifles. And under the Obama, it has become an extended shopping spree. Were I a factotum in the NRA, I would recommend a special life achievement award for this President, who is perhaps the greatest promoter of gun sales to private citizens in the history of the world. Every time he fulminates on this issue, people rush out to buy more.

This is good for the economy, of course, but what has it done for the murder rate? This actually went down, after 2004, and the portion attributable to rifles declined within that decline. (Check this out yourself if you do not believe me; you might want to start here.)

A semi-automatic (and what guns aren’t, these days?) may be especially convenient for the solo criminal bent on multiple killings, and that is the sort of thing that often makes the news. But as we discover from a review of mass murders in China, even the single psycho with a long knife can run up an impressive score, if he has any proficiency. And as for suicide vests, bombs and grenadoes, well, have you heard? That they are still unavailable at Walmart?

None of this can make any difference to our contemporary liberals and progressives, because they are eye-patched and ear-plugged against any argument that confutes their simpleton slogans. Sometimes I just want to shoot them; but I don’t, because I would be loath to do anything that might improve their case.

It is hard to hesitate before calling all contemporary intellectual life a fashion statement (note the singular). I will not go so far this morning. I will only mention the temptation. And it is a temptation, to respond to fatuities presented everywhere in public life, with fatuities of one’s own. (“Resist ye not evil.”) In fact, diverse opinions are still held, and huge chunks of the population are hardly impressed by what, in the continuing absence of a more powerful term, we call political correctness.

The appearance of homogeneity — of a closed camp among the innumerable pseudo-intellectuals in media, academia, politics, law, the bureaucracies, &c — is created only by peer enforcement. There are still genuine intellectuals: men and women of real learning, capable of honesty, candour, substance, rigour, fortitude, humour, intelligent and independent thought. It is just that they are driven out of their livelihoods, whenever they are discovered.

But that is too large game, for a man with a short glass pea-shooter. Instead let me fix upon corduroy jackets.

My first, largely unintentional experiment in modern sociological research, was conducted in an Ontario high school. I wasn’t in it for long: only until the age of sixteen when I became legally entitled to leave. In the meantime I focused upon making myself obnoxious. One of my techniques was to pose as an intellectual, and come to class wearing a corduroy jacket. In retrospect, I now think that smooth velvet and a bow-tied cravat would have been more effective. But age is required, to develop imagination.

In the beginning, I was uniquely dressed. Within a few months, however, I was joined by others. The habit of jacket-wearing was spreading through the corridors of GDHS. But while I had carefully selected an olive-green jacket, as the proper tint for corduroy display, the copyists would wear beige or darker browns or ghastly light blue corduroy jackets, and sometimes they were of some other material.

This, notwithstanding one of my copyists had earlier taunted me, by my locker, for wearing a jacket at all, and accused me of being “a pointy head.” (Which was true, of course.) Kids do not wear jackets, he explained. It is simply not done. My understanding was that it had not been done, since the uniforms had come off, a couple of decades before. (I blame Hitler.) That happened to coincide with the plunge of pedagogical standards, to the absolute zero we have achieved today.

What can I say? I was delighted to establish my power as a gang-leader, but annoyed that my followers were getting their colours wrong. A corduroy jacket must be olive green. No other jacket may be in that colour. A velvet one, for instance, must be black. A blazer must be navy blue. A summer flannel jacket must be white. Tweed must be Harris. Motorcyclists must wear leather bomber jackets. My whole philosophy of jacket-wearing was forged under the pressure of events. Tuxedoes require silk lapels, and James Bond set the sartorial pattern. There is black tie, or white tie, by occasion. Should a man, however young, turn up at, say, a wedding feast, sans cummerbund, or wearing a polkadot tie, he should be told to leave. Especially if he is the groom.

My views have since been relaxed. The case seems hopeless. It becomes hard to draw a line, even at facial tattoos. I would describe our present environment as a zoo, except, the animals at least know how to dress, and even “at home” in their cages wear the correct furs, scales, feathers, &c.

It was the photo of Malcolm Muggeridge, accompanying the excellent article by Father Murray at the Thing today (here) that got me started. Muggeridge knew the right colour for corduroy; and how to look like an intellectual while sitting at a typewriter. (Note that his fingers are mischievously misaligned with its keys, as if he had confused typewriter with pianoforte.) He was not always a gentleman, but he could play it when required. (I knew his son John well, but to tell some stories would be “too much information.”)

The truth is, I have let the side down. At this very moment I am wearing flip-flops and jeans. I often feel, and ought to feel ashamed. My only excuse is Socrates, who, I gather, dressed daily in an almost provocatively sloven way, reserving finery for fine formal occasions, when he would suddenly appear as a dandy. But even the workman should be wearing his wool cap, and the butcher a tie above his bloodied apron.

For laxity is terribly contagious.

Now, your contemporary pseudo-intellectual, governed by the glib, with reasoning that is no reasoning at all, will say who am I to prescribe correctness in dress, while condemning it in political behaviour? And the answer will be a paradox, kiting far above his head. Men who dress strictly to code will express their uniqueness in other ways. Among, for instance, the strictly uniformed lads of the commendably backward British schools in Asia, which I had attended before that wretched high school, there was true variety in minds and faces.

There will always be regulation, in human affairs. But I would rather regulate dress, than thinking.

It would be fun to explain to my maternal grandmother (died 1962) how a cash machine works. Not the inside of it, of course, I have no idea what goes on in there; just the “interface.” How one inserts this card, enters this password, presses these buttons, and cash comes out in freshly-printed twenties (or fifties, if we want to go wild). She was Gaelic, she took money seriously. But she also had a cackling sense of humour, to go with her memorable candour, and I wonder if it would make her laugh. Looking at the banknotes, she would realize that it was play money.

But she, who never to my knowledge played with a television, might be more amazed by the screen. She would ask who was the little cartoon man in the bowler. I would explain that it is the icon or mascot of the RBC. She would ask, what is that? And I would say it’s the old Royal Bank, but they’re afraid to say “royal.”

“And what is that he is waving?” she would say; and I would say, “The rainbow flag.”

“And what does that represent?” she would wonder.

“It’s the symbol of the LGBTTIQQ2SA movement. It stands for: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Intersex, Questioning, Queer, 2-spirited, and Allies.”

“I see,” she would respond, dryly.

“Or else it is called, the Pride Flag. It comes out for Pride Day in Toronto. Which now lasts, according to this advertisement, from June 1st to July 3rd.”

Grandma would still be puzzled, but might comment that Pride is the queen bee in the hive of the Seven Deadly Sins. She may not have been Catholic, but she loved anything in sevens.

“Ah yes, grandma, the old PEWLGGS.” (That would be Pride, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, and Sloth.)

Now that I think of it, I might not enjoy showing my world to my maternal grandmother. She would want to know, on point after point, “What godforsaken soul came up with that idea?” She had not lived even to experience Pearson and the Elder Trudeau. She was gone years before our country was occupied by Martians.

“What godforsaken soul came up with this L, G, and following business?” By now she would be shaking her umbrella. For she came from a generation when certain things could not be abided.

“It wasn’t an individual, really, it was another ‘movement’, the DLPSFGA.”

“The wot?”

“The Democrat, Liberal, Progressive, Socialist, Feminist, and Gay Alliance.”

“You mean the communists and the perverts?” she might shout, for the elderly can be a little hard of hearing.

“Shhh, grandma, keep your voice down.”

There have been so many “sensitive” responses to the nightclub massacre in Orlando, that I should like to add an insensitive one, for the sake of variety. I note that the pundits — and every amateur politician is a talking head these days — divide roughly along party lines on whether the shooter was an Islamic fanatic, or a generic madman. This strikes me as a “both/and” proposition, rather than an “either/or.”

Yes, Florida gun laws seem a bit lax, perhaps they should be tightened. But then I held this opinion before the massacre, keeping it to myself only because it was none of my business. Perhaps I am over-Canadian, for I tend to flinch at the open sale of battlefield weapons such as the rapid-firing assault rifle this Omar Mateen was carrying. (If gentle reader would rather describe the Sig Sauer MCX as a “modern sporting rifle” he may.) I presume that, “even in America,” the citizen’s right to bear arms does not extend to, say, nuclear weapons. Reasonable men might decide upon some reasonable limits; but between the current spokesmen for the respective political parties, I do not detect much reasonable manliness; only a propensity to grandstanding.

On the other hand, should we look beyond the glare of publicity, we will find that the proportion of gun deaths attributable to these rather theatrical weapons is small. To a mind like mine, the case is not urgent; but then to a mind like mine, such questions should be dealt with both in and out of season, and better out of season when cool heads may prevail. But this is a characteristic foible of the current political order: that “urgent” matters take up so much time and space in our media-collectivized consciousness, that “important” ones are wontedly deferred.

My own prediction is, that like other shocking public events, this one will fade. The Democritters will make as much hay as they can, while it lasts in the news, but will then “move on” as their saying goes. The Republicants will spleen then forget as usual. Both would need a slaughter daily at three o’clock to keep it up. But then, as with London and the Luftwaffe, the violence itself becomes a source more of tedium and inconvenience, than real anger. The grief, once publicly expressed, is privatized. People could remain calm about it, so long as the RAF were gravelling Germany, in reply.

“Let us be clear,” as the Obama loves to say, in his station as talking-head-in-chief. Grand displays of public grieving are invariably fraudulent. Those who knew none of the victims are faking it. Those who encourage them are morally disordered.

As a customary principle of politics, whether “electoral” or “appointive,” I think it unwise to adjust legislation, or offer to adjust it, in response to behaviour by the criminally insane. This confers too much power on them. Verily, it is a mark of our present social condition that “reforms” are guided more and more by the hardest and strangest cases. (Dare I mention the word, “trans”? Was there really a continuing national crisis in the designation of toilet facilities?)

In classical Western jurisprudence, it is considered wrong to murder people, even one at a time, in a nightclub or elsewhere. This holds regardless what kind of nightclub it is, and would apply even if the nightclub were illegal. In Shariah, as currently interpreted by Jihadis, the case is more complicated, but I do not think we should vex our minds with it. I cannot think of any omission in Western law that would make nightclub massacres acceptable; or would make any other venue for murder exceptional to the general rule. The need for new law would thus be zero.

The need, specifically, for new “hate laws” is zero, at most. Murder has never been an expression of affection, to any individual or group; specific hatreds have always been considered in the interpretation of motives. We have enough crimes already, without inventing redundant ones in accord with the latest fashions. The intention behind them is never exemplary of mental and moral hygiene.

Which points again to the deeper “problematic” (one tires of the misuse of this word) in politics as practised today. We not only legislate in response to the transient behaviour of the criminally insane. Worse, our legislators, though arguably sane to start with, get in the habit of indulging insanity, even within themselves.

Humanism, without foundation in sincere religious faith — whether Christian, or Jewish, or (sometimes) Islamic — will soon reflect the values of the Devil. This is a thought that has occurred often while reading, especially in the eighteenth century, when the ground was laid among intellectual elites for the more populist apostasy of the nineteenth century. By small increments, over a hundred years, even the most reasonable thinkers are detaching political thought and philosophy from its religious moorings in the tradition of the West — as if it were possible for a body to flourish and respire, without heart or lungs, but by brain and nerves only.

It is a long history: this destruction of the West, and of Christendom. It is necessarily so, for there was so much civilization to destroy; and still some of it is visible in ruins that remain inhabited.

Here I am not thinking of the French Revolution, or similar irruptions of fanatic violence. I am thinking instead of Lockes and Humes, Kants and Hegels, or even of what I was reading in the wee hours of summer cool this morning: an obscure English poet named William Diaper, writing a paraphrase of Oppian. It is an inverted Arcadian phantasy in which the mermen and fishes take the place of piping shepherds and their keep — or that is what plays over the surface of the witty couplets in a zoological catalogue of the underwater creatures, their loves and their fears and their fund of death. Diaper’s Nereides, read previously, set the taste for “piscatory eclogues.” He is a “water poet,” out of his boat and sinking in the deep.

Thus have I sung, how scaly Nations rove,
What Food they seek, what Pastures they approve;
How all the busy Wantons of the Seas
Soft Loves repeat, and form the new Increase. …

Diaper, a poor Anglican curate, rural and obscure in his own lifetime; a reliable Tory from the age of Queen Anne who never made court in London, but nevertheless shared in the eclipse of Tories after her demise — is a writer to whom we may turn to glean the first moments in what is called “the peace of the Augustans” — a strain in English literature which lies under “the Enlightenment,” and flows the other way. He died, fairly young, in 1717, happily before evidence of industry had begun to mar the English landscape, and to pollute the English streams.

He is subterranean, or submarine. His channel, like a buried river, resurfaces in pools, throughout the century, in gentle idyllic Thomson and the like, in Collins and Gray, in George Crabbe, finally gushing up through Wordsworth. He is small, but only because near the source. He has nothing to do with great thinkers and actors.

Why do I mention him? Gratuitously, for a start, for rivers must start somewhere; but also, I suppose, from what is implicit in his verses: and in the lines I quoted.

To our contemporary, “modern” mind, Nature might be a means towards the understanding of God, and could be studied by artists and scientists to that end. This argument is often tried, by our more desperate proselytizers: to seek God’s will through the supposed paradise of Nature. “The Heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands,” or so we might quote the Psalmist. But we will get him backwards.

To Diaper, as in the Psalms, it is through God that we can begin to know Nature. The precedence of God is fixed, in the mind that is, by heritage, Christian. The “peace” (the one that passeth all understanding, but extends to the Tory distaste for war) is communicated through the very animation of Nature, in her often telling beauty, by Nature’s God. It is that way around. It is not the other way.

Reverse this, and the beauty begins to disappear. Everything is for a use, and even the pursuit of God becomes “useful” — to some other end, such as restoring civilization. As even in Rome today, God becomes something that must be “applied” — not something lived, experienced and worshipped; not the final end in Himself. And once we are there — once we have taken for granted that God as everything else can be used for our purpose — it is, “Devil take the hindmost.” But he takes the foremost first.

The little archerfish, which spits jets of water, can be taught to recognize a specific human face and spit at it, according to a scientific report (wonky link, here). It helps when the face is presented in black-and-white, apparently.

Little humans can also be taught to do this. Indeed, modern politics were built upon the discovery that with enough repetition, a person can be taught to spit at anything.

“Boo, boo, bad man!” … I am quoting my late mother at a time when I was three years of age. For some reason I recall it. I do not remember, however, to whose face she was responding. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to Adlai Stevenson. I do remember that she preferred Eisenhower (though as a non-American was ineligible to vote).

Ambon damselfish can be even more personal. They can recognize each other’s faces. They may all look the same to us, but we have not their facility with light in the ultraviolet range. Seen in that, each damselfish has facial spots. It is dead easy to tell one from another. Were gentle reader an ambon damselfish, and another one was giving him grief, he could simply avoid the idiot’s company. As you would be only four inches long, and living in a coral reef, there would be plenty of places to dart in and hide. (Bad luck if the niche were occupied, already, by something that eats ambon damselfish.) I don’t think damselfish can spit, at least not as dramatically as archerfish, but I’m sure they have other ways to express their disapproval. Or trapped, perhaps, they smile and say they’re on their way to a meeting. (Can damselfish smile? Must check this.)

There is no aquarium, up here in the High Doganate at the moment, but I did keep goldfish as a child; and tried putting minnows in with them once. (Foolish experiment. Tadpoles did not thrive, either.) Alas, I had not the wit to check if my goldfish preferred Kennedy or Nixon. (Surely they would have supported Goldwater.)

See the picture and spit. Look at another and convey indifference. But what if the poor fish is presented with only two pictures, and wants to spit at both?

“Clear sky this morning. A nice Lake breeze.”

I often think this would make a good column, or rather, a sufficient column to get the Comments going. By the third comment, someone would attack Pope Francis; or Trump, or Obama, or Hillary, or Justin; and we’d be off to the races. (See my venture this morning at Catholic Thing, here.)

Another possible column would be the Conrad epigraph before T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” which I now use for my title. Or for that matter, the second epigraph, “A penny for the Old Guy,” might turn readers’ attention to my PayPal link.

To be fair, one may learn a lot from Comments, directly or (more often) indirectly. This morning it was a reference to Dr Paul Kurtz, self-appointed doyen of the Secular Humanists, former perfesser in the State University of New York (about which the less said the better). On checking his entry in the Wicked Paedia, I learn that he died in 2012. This was on the 20th of October, if anyone wants to celebrate it.

Somehow I missed that news, and here we are forty-five moons later, in a world where someone else must be the doyen of the Secular Humanists. But there is another sense in which we may think of all human decease as occurring in a simultaneity of death and resurrection, on the Day of Judgement. In that view, the story remains topical.

*

The original Mistah Kurtz (in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness) was an ivory trader, somewhere up the River Congo. As the beuk seems to have been assigned to everyone who attended a North American college through the baby boom, and later, I needn’t reprise the plot. I don’t think Conrad himself ever thought it such an important work. The question of why it was found so significant by the mediocrities in American academia would make the better doctoral thesis, I should think; but then we might stray into sociology, which gives mediocrity a bad name.

When I came to the novella myself, entirely of my own volition — I have 98.6 degrees, but only in Fahrenheit — I was fascinated chiefly by such information as it could provide on the history of the ivory trade. I have always loved ivory, though not always approved the uses to which it is put.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against rhinoceros horn, the casks of hornbills, walrus morse, the ribs of dugongs, narwhal spikes, hippopotamus canines, the dental extensions of wild boars and sperm whales, or any tusks, horns, or antlers. All are suitable materials for art. And I will admit that Plaster of Paris presents the longitudinal lines along which an artist may carve to advantage, although it is inconveniently flammable. But the ivory from elephant tusks is best; and as the Chinese discovered, by the Sung dynasty, the elephants from Central and East Africa concede an ivory more noble even than those of India and South-east Asia.

The colouring is sublime: creamier than the Indian; or from where Mistah Kurtz was harvesting in the jungles, a brown above that of any pigment soil. A rose tint appears from out of the bamboo forests; and as I am given to understand, the tusks from farther west in Africa, which at first glance seem too brightly white again, develop with age chromatic values of engaging subtlety.

The working of ivory takes great skill. The dental enamel must be removed with care, and the obdurate rind sawed through with stiff blades thoughtfully lubricated. The Chinese at Suchou, the Japanese at Nara, found that a complex regime of heating and cooling could be employed to prevent any sort of cracking.

Having no personal experience of this craft, I will not presume further to describe: it is enough to say that elephant ivory makes the finest imaginable scrimshaw, and should be delivered into the hands of the most capable artists as a treasure of great price. Unfortunately, such artists may be as extinct as some magnificent elephant species. (The fossil ivory of mammoths draws our attention to a terrible loss.)

Yet we must not exclude revivals.

It follows that the cultivation of elephants for their tusks (as sheep for their wool, or deer for their hides, or goats for their milk and meat) should itself be conducted with skill and refinement. I am persuaded by some accounts that the poachers who now dominate the trade, thanks to what governments have arbitrarily made illegal, show little propensity to connoisseurship.

Lately I was utterly appalled to read that the Kenyan government is again burning ivory captured from the poachers. The scene was the more ludicrous because ivory does not easily burn. It takes jet oil and a week to reduce one of these ivory pyramids to ashes. It is political theatre that, far from reducing the demand, increases the price of illegal ivory, thus inspiring poachers to ever more heroic efforts against species whose numbers are running low. (The USA authorities now pulverize the ivory instead. On the instigation of the infernal United Nations, most of the countries of this world have now joined in these incomprehensible acts of destruction.)

But there is no room for gloom. The finest of all ivories is yet to be seen. In the face of all the world’s disorder, we must diligently pray, eventually to see it.

Should beer be allowed in tins? It is a question of concern in the High Doganate just now, with some lads coming over tomorrow night. With my eye to ethnicity, I obtained some tins from the local licker store. One of the brands was Swedish: mislabelled to my mind as a bière forte. It made me think only of Archbishop Forte, the one who rewrites Synod documents. Not a happy association.

A Swedish palaeographer was among my guests. (Now the blighter has cancelled.) I’m sure he could have warned me, against anything that comes out of Vimmerby. They haven’t had monks there in centuries. On tasting I find this beverage to be soapy and oily and bland, with a shy (but not affectionate) mule-kick at the end. I had laid in several of those tins. Guess I will have to drink them myself. But I was looking forward to making the Swede drink them.

It tasted tinny, too, but this is because I began sipping it from the tin. Of course it tastes tinny, with your tongue and lips on the metal. The aluminum is lined, as I understand; it cannot taste tinny poured into a large, properly glazed, ceramic mug. (Thick white porcelain is ideal, Imperial pint size or larger.) A glass bottle, straight from a dark fridge, might be preferable for the direct imbiber, but only because glass is so chemically neutral.

Too, I can tout glass bottles because the opening at the top is small. The opening at the top of a mug is much wider. Anything that slows my beer consumption is to be commended. “Sip, taste, appreciate, swallow,” was what my papa said to do. Not: “suck and swallow.”

Now, the problem with bottles, as opposed to tins, or barrels, is light. Beer bottles are traditionally dark for a reason. The ultraviolet murders a beer, and can do so quickly. One may discover this for oneself by drinking on some tropical beach, while acquiring a sunburn. By the bottom of the glass the beer is not only warmer. It tastes different: it is “skunked.” Not by the heat but by the light, according to my (frankly inadequate) chemical understanding.

This makes tins better than bottles for the storage of beer. And barrels better than tins, if they are the right sort of barrels. But I have limited this discussion to tins.

Aluminum is light in weight, eminently recyclable, and charitable in the sense that you put the empties out in Parkdale and the rubby-dubs fetch them from the trash. I think they may get a dime for each tin, and they are lighter to carry than glass bottles. So remember: the more you drink, the more charitable you are; and tins instead of bottles show regard for the poor.

(I’m a bit vague on whether the recycle award is cancelled if you crush them.)

*

I see Mrs Klingon has won New Joisey and Californicata, and with the help of all her “superdelegates” has now clinched the Natted States Democrat nomination. (Did you know that she is a woman?) In view of my remarks yesterday, I feel some sort of congratulation is in order. We might think of her as the last of the old-school politicians, whose forte was lying and hypocrisy. Much worse will follow, surely. A time will come when we’ll look back on America’s Weimar period with nostalgia.

Appreciate what you have while you still have it, that’s what I say. Look not to the future, for the future is Unknown. God made it that way, to accommodate our freedom, to preserve our sanity, should we so wish.

Hitler (one cannot mention him without the subliterates mouthing, “Reductio ad Hitlerum!” — not realizing that they are quoting Leo Strauss) was the great enabler. He gave cover to all lesser evils, including the greater of the lesser ones; and thereby retired all the prattling politicians from the Age of Hypocrisy, which he closed. Now all the baddies seemed good, by comparison, and everyone needed a baddie of his own, or they would get one assigned from Berlin.

The Age of Hypocrisy re-opened, of course, with Hitler’s death, when political discourse again softened. (Hypocrisy is the padding on the madhouse walls.) But for a twelve-year run in Germany, and shorter periods wherever their shadow fell, Hitler’s Nazis erased hypocrisy.

This is what Karl Kraus meant, when he said that the Nazis had left him speechless. For decades he had exposed the lies and deceitful posturing not only of politicians in the German-speaking world, but among their immense supporting cast of journalists and fashion-seeking intellectuals. He was the greater-than-Orwell who strode to the defence of the German language, when it was wickedly abused. He identified the new “smelly little orthodoxies” as they crawled from under the rocks of Western Civ — the squalid, unexamined premisses that led by increments to the slaughterhouse of Total War. He was not, even slightly, a revolutionist; he had no argument against anyone’s wealth or status, even his own. Rather, through savage satirical humour, with language untranslatably precise, impinging constantly upon the poetic, he undressed the false.

He had seen the First World War coming, in the malice spreading through the language; in the smugness that fogged perception; in the lies that people told each other, to preserve their amour-propre; in the jingo that lurked beneath the genteel. After, he saw worse.

Popular perceptions of him are wrong. As we learn from the vast and fatiguing biography of Edward Timms (it fills time that could be spent learning German), Kraus hardly stopped writing as the Second World War approached. Timms thought he gave up hope; I think Kraus merely ceased to be heard, by anyone. All his warnings had been ignored; everything he feared was being realized. (The people get so bored with prophets.) But Kraus had, I think, diligently turned his guns to the rear, to attack speech that was now no longer posturing, but explicit and crude. (The Nazis, even when speaking figuratively, chose euphemisms that any moron could decode.) But subtle precision is no use against a blunderbuss, which in the end only bigger weapons can destroy.

My sense is that we are once again coming to the end of lies and hypocrisy. The political class has delivered us once more, by increments. Trump and Sanders say things that are plain; in Europe, too, we have candidates who mean what they say. What they say is blather, and frequently unhinged, and not lying but indifferent to fact. It is sincere, however. “The people are angry,” and the new class of politician will play to that anger. It is a matter beyond any passing question of public policy. The people are angry about everything the “old politics” delivered, with their help. They want punishment, they want action. It is no elite rebellion: they want what is coming good and hard.

Trump and company are no Hitlers. This is what I mean by, “Hitler has them covered.” They are functioning today in an environment that parallels The Thirties in its de-moralization (note the hyphen), but is farther advanced. So many things then were still unthinkable, outside Party ranks in Germany and Russia. Now we are living in a time when the value of a human life can be more easily disregarded; in which survival depends on sentimentality alone. (As my friend Denyse O’Leary puts it, “On the eve of euthanasia, we are all the foetus now.”) Human decency has been “redefined,” and all the classical “rights” inverted. (Read the swinish Comment threads on almost any website.)

“Pause, take stock, think through what you are doing.” … What, today, would be the prospect for a politician who said such a thing? … Who said, “We must consider the likely consequences of every legislative action, including each ‘no brainer’ with what’s left of our brains. If there is something to fix, we must fix it carefully.”

For that is not the yammer people want from politicians: no more of this shuffling and avoidance. No more “say one thing and do another.” No more trying to hold the fort together, until the cavalry arrives. The cavalry has arrived!

The traditional restraints on malicious imbecility have been systematically removed; and this time it will take much less than a Hitler.