Essays in Idleness

As a proponent of Idleness I may not be well placed to rant against Complacency. But gentle reader must be made to allow the possibility that no inconsistency pertains. For, my love, you must see that the terms are applied to quite different waminals (as my blessed younger son, when little, used to call “things”). The Idle are so with respect to the interior spiritual life, of prayer and contemplation, in which we stray from the vexations of this world. One might, from that spiritual angle, describe this as an extremely active Idleness, but let us not split hairs.

For when it comes to waminals, as my beloved Sengai liked to point out (Japanese Zen abbot, 1750–1837), there are a million hairs in the coat of each lion; and on the head of each hair, a million lions dancing. (He is often very Catholic.)

Things are, and likely will remain as they are, externally, where one may endure with the grace of detachment. Yet the moral order is such that we must sometimes intervene in exterior events — for instance, by making food and eating it. Too, there are instances when we are called to witness to some basic truths, or Truth. I could make a longer list, bridging these two examples.

What we have around us in our world today (and possibly throughout the historical past) is Complacency without Idleness.

Our contemporaries — not all of them, of course, but an overwhelming majority — just want a quiet life, easy money, and good health ending with a painless death in their sleep. (I wouldn’t mind this, myself.) And for all I know, there may be people who score all three. But this is not what Jesus promised to his followers.

It is an open question, however, whether such a victory is good or bad luck. I would close the question by saying, from what I can see, that it is bad luck, in the main; and worse to crave what no other waminals will satisfy.

Victory in that trifecta will not come through prayer; for that is not the sort of thing for which prayers are answered. And while grace is conferred upon us by the divine — so often and, I should think if we could see it, always, in answer to our prayers — it cannot be “earned,” either. For I have had too much experience of grace conferred despite my silence, and complacency, and manifest unworthiness. The trick here is only to notice: first, that in the longer view of waminals, we often or always get better than we asked. Second, that a certain Idleness or detachment is required, to begin to discern how things are, in this vale of tears.

Sometimes, a violent painful death may be a good thing. And here I do not mean for others; for it is easy enough to see who else needs hanging. Rather, sometimes it might be better for us, in that long view of things, to enter the Purgatorial fire a little ahead of our bodily translation. (We ourselves cannot know, finally, what is for the best.)

Christ, we might note, did not choose an easy life, and neither did he find a “nice” way of dying. That he did not devote his life to getting rich, will perhaps also be conceded. (Nor in Scripture nor Tradition do we find Him whining that others got rich on Him.)

He did good works, too, according to his means. (Hence the miracles.)

To witness to the Truth — in so many ways, in so many situations — is not to be “an innocent bystander.” We are not to give evidence in some celestial court of law. We are instead to hear the evidence against us, where the only judge will be Christ Himself; and in the recollection of all our crimes, we will hear whether He still wants to know us.

I think this is important. I think that Complacency is among the easiest crimes. But what down here is easy, may not be so in the world to come.

When a Muslim loses his cultural moorings, he becomes a murderous psycho. When a Christian loses his cultural moorings, he becomes a suicidal putz. I think this helps explain a few things in the news.

Actually, it is a bit of an overstatement. In reality, most of either religion, in the course of losing their moorings and the use of their minds, become merely sad cases. And that makes a third, “silent majority” post-religious group: the spiritually numbed Consumers, of whatever has been well-advertised. It includes, too, mentally vagrant former Jews, Buddhists, Animists, &c. They may count for zero as “involved” human individuals, but are easily manipulated in the mass; so long as the manipulation does not require of them any serious beliefs, constructive will, or character.

I suppose, on this chart, some hardened Atheists should be acknowledged. But they, too, are to be distinguished between the real ones — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and so forth — and the great horde of gentle “agnostics,” whom we may file with the Consumers. Disoriented Muslims have anyway replaced the hardened Atheists in our Western annals of “cool.”

It is for this reason I’m inclined, albeit in an ironical way, to flatter the Islamic terrorists. They have, even by the teachings of Islam, gone rather beyond their remit. But at some level, a man must be sincerely wilful, to slaughter his fellows while crying, Allahu Akhbar! … Or even to storm the “German-looking” women in the Cologne railway station.

And note, if he blow himself up, it is expressly to the end of blowing up others. It isn’t “suicide” in the received sense, which Islam fulsomely condemns. It is rather more impersonal. As T.G. Masaryk pointed out (well before Durkheim), “Suicide is the ultimate subjective act; murder is the ultimate objective act.” If these be the terms, I would have to count a suicide bombing as “objective.”

Nor, one might argue, is it rape or sexual assault, in the old sense — what the young “refugee” lads are doing in Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Rotterdam, Bradford, Glasgow, Marseilles, Turin, and so forth, as far under the media radar as our liberal media can keep it. (But through the Internet grapevine, I think I must have seen reports from every West European city, by now.) The assailants have in common that they are all technically Muslim, and that the attacks are almost invariably performed by feral groups: something between five and thirty assailants per female target. Yet I’d be the first to declare that they are not strict, traditionalist Muslims, but “post-religious” come off the Shariah hinge — not yet quite so far as the suicide bombers, yet on the same side of the doorway.

This is proving something exceptionally hard to police. It is a melding together of psychopathy with consumerism. No member of the bang-gang acts on his own impulse. As if answering an advertisement, each simply “buys in.”

It is “post-Islam” in a peculiarly democratic, Westernized form. It is like our old hippie phenomenon, but with a new conception of “free love.”

One could easily say too much, write too much. My old hero, Thomas Ernest Hulme, who died young in the Great War, warned me against this when I was quite young. In the book Speculations (1924), which Herbert Read scrabbled together from Hulme’s loose papers published here and there, and notebooks published nowhere, I found an extremely clear and, in retrospect, somewhat simplistic account of an attitude towards the world which Hulme identified with Pascal. It provided an “epiphany” to me: a manifestation of something. It “showed” to me something I thought I already knew, but did not know.

Here follows the passage that I was reading, in of all places the Victoria and Albert Museum’s art library, some forty years ago, precisely. I may have quoted it before, in which case it is re-quoted. It comes from draught papers on, “Humanism and the Religious Attitude,” written in a style intentionally vulgar. (Hulme, a big man from Staffordshire, like Samuel Johnson before him, hated jargon, and cant, and miserable small lies. And large ones.)

*

Hulme:

“The whole subject has been confused by the failure to recognize the gap between the regions of vital and human things, and that of the absolute values of ethics and religion. We introduce into human things the Perfection that properly belongs only to the divine, and thus confuse both human and divine things by not clearly separating them. …

“To illustrate the position, imagine a man situated at a point in a plane, from which roads radiate in various directions. Let this be the plane of actual existence. We place Perfection where it should not be — on this human plane. As we are painfully aware that nothing actual can be perfect, we imagine the perfection to be not where we are, but some distance along one of the roads. This is the essence of all Romanticism. Most frequently, in literature at any rate, we imagine an impossible perfection along the road of sex; but anyone can name the other roads for himself. The abolition of some discipline or restriction would enable us, we imagine, to progress along one of these roads. The fundamental error is that of placing Perfection in +humanity, thus giving rise to that bastard thing Personality, and all the bunkum that follows from it.

“For the moment, however, I am not concerned with the errors introduced into human things by this confusion of regions which should be separated, but by the falsification of the divine.

“If we continue to look with satisfaction along these roads, we shall always be unable to understand the religious attitude. The necessary preliminary preparation for such an understanding is a realization that satisfaction is to be found along none of these roads.

“The effect of this necessary preparation is to force the mind back on the centre, by the closing of all roads on the plane. No ‘meaning’ can be given to the existing world, such as philosophers are accustomed to give in their last chapters. To each conclusion one asks, ‘In what way is that satisfying?’ The mind is forced back along every line in the plane, back on the centre. What is the result? To continue the rather comic metaphor, we may say the result is that which follows the snake eating its own tail, an infinite straight line perpendicular to the plane.

“In other words, you get the religious attitude; where things are separated that ought to be separated, and Perfection is not illegitimately introduced on the plane of human things.

“It is the closing of all the roads, this realization of the tragic significance of life, which makes it legitimate to call all other attitudes shallow. Such a realization has formed the basis of all the great religions, and is most conveniently remembered by the symbol of the wheel. This symbol of the futility of existence is absolutely lost to the modern world, nor can it be recovered without great difficulty.”

*

I was not yet a Christian when I read this, and would have laughed if told I was about to become one.

Would have laughed, perhaps less uproariously, had I been told I would find myself lying in a hospital among terminal cases, in four weeks’ time. For that, not Christian conversion, was the next “big thing” to happen in my little life (helping to focus me from another angle).

Moreover, as a (Catholic) Christian now, I realize that human life is not essentially tragic, nor futile. In this sense, the religions of the West differ from the religions of the East, though it could be said that they start with the same human consciousness, drawn in the passage above. But Hulme claimed only to be inditing the “preparation for” a transcendent or religious view of life. It really was a pity he died in the trenches of the Western Front. I should have liked to meet him as an old, old man.

Put another way, the penny dropped for me while I was reading that. Curiously, at the time I was also reading Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (in Meredith’s translation), from day to day in the same library. That was the prolegomena to Hulme’s prolegomena: that steam-train of Kant’s. Other “pennies from heaven” drop on other people in other ways.

What I recall most vividly, on this fortieth anniversary of the beginning of my slide into the Christian religion, was the darkness on the steps as I was leaving the Museum. I was in a state of complete bafflement, from the knowledge that I had just “lost my faith.” For my trust in Atheism had been completely shattered.

I note, in Breitbart, which I’m coming to prefer to Drudge for hard news, the report of a talk that Justice Antonin Scalia gave at a school somewhere in Louisiana. I am a great fan of Scalia, in the balance, though in moments I’ve accused him of being a wuss. He was on form at Archbishop Rummel High School, however, explaining how, in the USA Constitution, there are no restrictions on the public profession of the Christian religion. The limitation is only on the Government, which may not prefer one denomination to another. The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment is very easy to read and understand. The persistent attempts by Messrs ACLU and others to misconstrue it, in frivolous cases brought before the American courts, should therefore (to my mind) be severely punished.

But more, as Justice Scalia put it, there was always “a presumption of the benefit of religion for society.” Even that limousine liberal, Thomas Jefferson held this; and even nearing the peak of Enlightenment provocation, the American “fathers” were transparently Anglo-Scotch in their choice of “enlightened” reading; not bloodthirsty revolutionist French. They knew their society was by inclination Christian, by the standard of centuries, and were not proposing to exchange “the people” for some other of their own invention.

Natted States Merica was established as, “One Nation under God.” As Scalia says, she has honoured the (Trinitarian) God, and God has been good to her in reply. (There are several patriotic anthems to clinch this.)

To Scalia’s remarks (as reported) I would add that the authors of that First Amendment, as well as the full Constitution before, can be shown plainly to encourage the manifestation of religious faith, as the very embodiment of civic freedom. This is quite apparent to me in its construction, which protects expression of religion first, then adds free speech, free press, free assembly, free petitioning, free everything.

The whole purport is to protect the (presumably Christian) citizen against the power of a necessarily profane Government; and in the Second Amendment this is extended to free guns, or rather, the right to own and bear them. I might not myself think all this was wise — I would have argued for the Establishment of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church (probably without much success) — but I can read, and I find what was written in the First Amendment expressed succinctly. Let the atheist filth try to abrogate it.

Moreover, as an old-fashioned British Imperialist, I will take my signal from George III, whose final judgement was, in effect, “Let America be America.” (And even though, as a Jacobite, I need pay no attention to him.)

If you don’t like the States, don’t live there. If you live there, remember that their Constitution is Queen, or rather, has the Monarchical Power. President and Congress and even Supreme Court are expressly limited. If you want a “living constitution” that changes, then get a Queen and give her absolute powers. Indeed, get a whimsical one. (Well, I suppose that was what they were trying when they elected Lord Barack.)

Alas, these days, it takes a lot of words to explain very simple things to Americans. It takes even more if you have Canadians to deal with: all wet and cotton woolly up here. (We do not have even one warm bottom on our supreme bench with any sense at all.) … And the Europeans, hooo. …

But now I am straying from Scalia’s main point. The USA Constitution gave, in particular, no right to Government (federal or state) to “cram atheism down the throats of an American people that has always honoured God.” This is about as opposite to the intention of that Constitution as can be got; and needs rather more than “criticism.”

*

It is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, leading to Twelfth Night, which is by tradition, Merry. We are in liturgical error if we are not still Merry, this twelfth day in. Verily, the Christmas season extends to Candlemas, which is four weeks more. In defiance of this world, we must remain Merry. For it is no time to be dour. Even the Friday of Our Saviour’s execution, was accounted Good. But we remain till Lent in the state of, Merry, for we commemorate the coming of that Saviour into our world.

As a Christian Traditionalist (and thus unambiguously Catholic) I insist that we try harder. Prayers, too, will bring God to our aid from merrily on high. Enough of this timorous introversion in the expression of our Christian Faith. When the sort of glum idiots that Scalia is opposing stand in our way, let us merrily bulldoze through them!

“Put him into the pot for garlic,” was a nice Jacobean way to dismiss the more vexing news-mongers. Their stench would season the olla podrida.

Oh yes, they had them then: “journalists.” Ben Jonson, the sparkling ingenious playwright and Recusant, then turncoat, has much to say of them. This is not only in his play, The Staple of Newes, designed to settle a few scores. There are poisoned asides in all his other plays, for the whole race of newsmen. This man of London, or city boy, presents in his verses, dramas, and masques, a vision of the City at a time when a couple of hundred thousand could generate the cultural life of a couple hundred modern cities with more than a million inhabitants, each. (But for our contemporaries, “progress” can be measured in numbers, only.)

And for sure, he presents this very specific City of London as a small town, with its lanes and taverns, shops, churches, and houses both great and small. And while it is full of newes, there is a specific market where this commodity is bought and exchanged. It is in lanes near St Paul’s Cathedral, which is to say, near where books are sold; yet it is not to be confused with the market for books. For the newes, in the generation before the corantos flourished, was still generally written by hand, by hacks in the service of patrons; and whether official or often quite unofficial, read by specific paying subscribers; and only then sometimes, read aloud to the non-literate types, who would sometimes (directly or indirectly) actually pay to listen.

The story-telling skills were more developed then. People then as now wanted to hear a story, of the life a cut above their class; it was before the fact-checkers spoilt everything. The “relaters” still had some “poetic licence”; a “licence to kill,” as it were. But elegantly, not the crass way they do it today, in lying TV docu-dramas.

A man of that age would not associate the news with print, or any other mode of conveyance. It was something in itself. Rather than image a news-sheet, or a town crier, he would think of it as words, words, and rumour. The illiterate mind loves to imagine, and dream in fecund breadth for itself; the peasant literate mind demands spoon-feeding, the same sludge as his neighbour.

The market itself became more complicated, as a profession of independent news agents sprang up, who took pride in their access to sources within all the “three religions” of sad, merry London — “the Puritan, the Protestant, and the Pontifical” — with their respective connexions abroad. And who were too cynical to remain devout in any one. (Ah, modernity.)

It took me once thirty meandering lectures to give the fondest outline of the “evolution of journalists” between then and now. (King’s College, Halifax, 1991.) Each was the rough biography of a single prized “journalist” through the intervening half-generations, from such as Nash and Dekker, Dunton and Defoe, Steele, Addison, Swift, Johnson, &c; down to such as Mencken and Muggeridge, or my token Canadians, Bourassa and Needham. Plus rambling asides on their parallel Continentals. There was an extended note on Cardinal Richelieu as journalist, I seem to recall; and a long rant in praise of my beloved Karl Kraus. (I have no text because none was ever written; the whole series was delivered extempore.)

Looking back, I see that I had it badly wrong. The men I selected (along with a woman or two) were all writers, of great talent, adapting to the periodical genre, and consistently enlarging upon its possibilities. In each half-generation, however, the real journalists were nobodies: not worth remembering, as they are truly not remembered. Flunkeys, of one kind or another; “copy boys” as we used to say. Minions, hirelings, footmen, slaves.

We have today, owing to mental depravity, little ability to distinguish a thing from its passing physical representation. Hence the “histories of journalism” that I despise, which focus entirely on the technology. This has left us in a quandary when the newes once more has changed in outward form. People like me, attached to the craft of typography, have trouble dealing with the reversion to reporting in its earlier manner, though now on a “global village” scale.

I could accuse myself thus of being a secret Statist, for the whole tradition of journal-ism — that is, the presentation of news in established periodicals — begins with the post-Reformation claims of guvmint. Every Coranto, Gazette, Diurnall, Mercury, News-Letter, with some hope of surviving, was “Published by Authority,” or pretended to be; and this in every European realm, not only in England. (Amsterdam was something of a chaotic exception.) Each enjoying the use of the Gutenberg device had a “take” on the news, and like mainstream journalism today, it was invariably the same take. Hence the royal coat-of-arms in the title of the old Times, and the papers in all the leading county towns. Then, as now, deviants from the official line were hunted down within a few issues; sent to the stocks or the Tower; or at least, “named and shamed.” (On balance, this was for the best.)

Early American papers, both royalist and revolutionary, were more lively, perhaps; though with the passage of years they became ever more stultifying, in obsequious obedience to the progressive Zeitgeist. It is like that today in Europe, too: the Zeitgeist consistently honoured in its processions, on both its Left and Right sides; Absolute Zeitgeist having replaced Absolute Monarchy.

All governments, in the time since the Reformation, when her real estate was violently seized from Holy Church, and worldly Power monopolized  by the rulers of the new Nation States, have tried to corner all the markets, too. All have attempted to spiritualize the material, in the act of appropriation. Few have been shy.

But the thing itself, newes, is only a commodity, belonging like any other in a “market” as the Jacobeans still understood; and we need no more puff the news-writers and their proprietors than we celebrate the dealers in pork-bellies, or vegetable oils. If they are interesting, it will be for some other reason, such as the adventures they get into. The buy-and-sell of anything that has been reduced to a commodity is boring, except as a means to wealth and power.

The earlier “journalism,” going back into the Middle Ages, was mostly for merchants. Great families such as the Fuggers of Augsburg, or the Medicis of Florence before them, operated widespread, international intelligence services, for their private commercial ends. Indeed, all the good news journals since that time have been business newspapers, whose subscribers have consisted of businessmen and statesmen alike, who need to know what is actually going on. The “masses,” by contrast, have always been gulls, to be entertained with mindless sensations, and thereby commercially or politically manipulated and exploited. (Perhaps I am with Chomsky, here.)

One might almost say that there is nothing new under the Sun.

Wallace Stevens said memorably that, “prose is the Official View of Being. Poetry is the unofficial view.” The former can become jokey; genuine satire is possible only in poetic verse or prose, directed to those with supple mental capacities. (Rhyming jingles count as prose in this scheme.) The progress of “journalism” itself has consisted in the elimination of poetry, and with that the descent of man into an ever darker Dark Age.

Grouse are “adapted” not only to an environment, but also to being grouse. This has been overlooked in most current researches. There is something remarkably grouse-like in their overall pattern and behaviour. They seem to know that they are grouse; to be content with that identity; willing to live, and also to die, in the condition of grouseness. Foragers of the wild will have noticed that they taste like grouse, too.

One may make no sense whatever if one takes them to be something else. They will persist in their grouse-like partialities, and in point of fact will remain distinctly, univocally, unambiguously, grouse — even if we try to persuade them that they are, say, cockatoos.

Some other creature might invade their peculiar ecological niche; might even do so successfully. The grouse will respond to that invasion, implacably, as grouse. They will, should it come to that, go down as grouse. They will under no circumstance attempt to transform or metamorphose themselves in response to such a crisis. They will not even consider such a proposition. It would be strictly fight or flight, on grouse terms.

Should they flee, it will be to the sort of territory they find agreeable to themselves, as grouse. They will even go in search of such territory. But suppose they cannot find a suitable new abode, they would frankly rather starve than cease to be grouse. Indeed, contra Darwin, they are totally opposed to adaptation, and to liberalism of any other sort. (This is among the reasons I admire them.)

They believe in their gods; they recognize their angels. More: they trust them. Asked to evolve some new characteristic, by any other authority, they will ignore the instruction. They could never think of such a thing, themselves. More likely, such a development might occur to the grouse archangel (who would report it upward); or be discussed among the lesser grouse angels, assigned by God to look out for grouse interests on the metaphysical plane, and therefore always gravely concerned with correctly interpreting the details: the signs of the times from a grouse point-of-view

Yet even in such a case, the new character, or species, would emerge from the underlying grouseness of these creatures, and appear as an extension of the grouse repertoire. It would be all of a piece with the grouse ontology; with the beingness of grouse. For in this, as in all other angelic orders, operating within the dance of time, there is consistent, creative adherence to a living tradition.

And in this case, to the grouse tradition.

*

Now, while I may surmise all this, in my contemplation of grouseness, I must not be reckless. I must tell gentle reader, quite plainly, that I am devoid of insights into how the angelic and creaturely orders interact, beyond the fact that they do. Nor can I have much to say on the hierarchical order of the grouse angels, abstracted in themselves. In this world we chiefly discern effects, seldom causes. These latter we may often not even detect, except in the most general way, through our taxonomic studies.

That there is indeed some kind of archangel, who looks out for the grouse order at large, from prairie chickens in the south to ptarmigans in the far north of our northern hemisphere, is evident not only to sight and outward experience but more recently to studies in the sequences of mitochondrial DNA. This much is obvious.

Somewhere in the middle we have dusky grouse, ruffed grouse, sooty grouse, hazel grouse, spruce grouse, willow grouse, sage grouse, and so forth. And let me mention my Gaelic favourite of all grouse: the large, crow-black, but red chevron-browed, ground-dwelling, forest-loving, western Capercaillie — currently fighting for his life among the Scottish pines. A delicious bird, as I am given to understand.

From a general survey, we might reasonably infer the existence, on a planetary scale, of well over a hundred, perhaps two hundred specific grouse angels in the ranks beneath the grouse archangel; but that is to consider the matter too narrowly. There are the spirits of grouse past, and grouse future, as well as those now present; and I should think the angelic hierarchy extends downwards to the feudal lower angels who mind the innumerable tribes and families of each grouse species, and their respective haunts — interacting, on a practical level, with each genius loci, minding the terrain.

That the angels may sometimes clash among themselves, we may plausibly suppose; and I have sometimes suspected this to be the explanation of apparent evil in Nature herself: that the Devil despises grouse as he despises us and all the rest of Creation, and that he is doing his best to infiltrate the cosmic order at every available point: to “get at” the grouse as he so evidently tries to get at us. In some mysterious way our eldest ancestor opened the door to him, and in the course of doing so exposed the grouse also to his ministrations. This being our fault, our most grievous fault.

Notwithstanding, there would seem to be a background, and finally, an overriding harmony, which having been disturbed, is always restored, and often, that right soon.

But here things become impenetrably complicated. For angels come and go, from what we can follow of angelology. They, as we, are created, and may be reassigned. When, ultimately, God requires a new species, as part of his unfolding Plan, I should think a new messenger angel is created or assigned to assume the divine “form” of that species.

(William Blake is quite good on this.)

*

Now, all the above is from my private reflections on grouseness, only; my “theory” or “doctrine” of grouseness, as it were; and may at first seem incompatible with what is now taught in the biology departments. So be it; I think the balance of the evidence is on my side.

Among the happier celebrations of the True North Strong and Free, now falling into desuetude, is the New Year’s Levée. Invisible today, in the Greater Parkdale Area, it was still a major social Event when I lived in Kingston. The Mayor, in the chains of his office, would hold it at City Hall; and too, the Commandant at the Royal Military College (Canada’s Sandhurst, or Westpoint, across the Cataraqui River). A “very British custom,” as most Canadians would tell you; but like most everything else they believe, not true.

It is French. The term comes down from their ancient Kings, and the example they set, for all Europe, of holding conferences with their principal advisers — in their own bedrooms, upon rising each morning. (Hence the name.) Kings, you see, unlike commoners and populist tyrants, are always at work. It is not a job easy to enjoy — there is no privacy, whatever — and those who covet a throne are, today as through history, fools indeed.

The royal Governor at Quebec — in the days of New France, when Canada extended to Louisiana — also observed this custom, and made it a public occasion on the first day of each year. His officers would attend him, in full resplendent dress, with the accolades of the public at a distance.

When the British conquered Quebec, and installed a British Governor, they nevertheless maintained this custom (along with many more, happy and glorious). Indeed, Levées spread through British North America, among every class of ruler. The Governor of New York, for instance, or the Governor of Virginia, might still be hosting New Year’s Levées, were they still legitimately selected. (Actually, I’m not sure they ever did: the Internet is useless for checking such particulars.)

Full uniform, to be sure; and in the earlier days, no ladies were invited. However, as Canada “progressed” through her World Wars, there were some woman officers; and by plausible extension, spouses of the officers, both ladies and gentlemen. And other prominent citizens came; and their spouses too; and finally, their children. These days, if a Levée is held at all — by tradition about noon on the first of January — it is a Mêlée, because anyone can come. (“Democracy” gets you, one way or another; and the expense is invariably added to the tax bill.)

Well, truth to tell, “the public” were always involved. It is to this we attribute such patriotic Canadian drinks as le sang du caribou, a punch based on wine; or its Anglo equivalent, “moose milk,” based on rye whisky. The habitants and inhabitants would offer their loyal toasts from about 10 a.m. (the traditional hour to begin drinking), until close of day, whenever that would be. Pausing occasionally, of course, to sing “God Save the Queen.”

As I say, these are proudly Canadian civil customs, though going into disuse. For to the sacred, we had always added the profane.

Today, royal customs are considered “snooty.” We now have in our country, sad to say, a class of “republicans” or “nationalists” — the lowest of the low — who want to suppress every inheritance, by which our country was historically defined, and thereby reduce us all to a grim, beggary imitation of the USA — which these nationalists in turn also condemn, in their fiendish bigotry. The first custom we should restore, is therefore hanging for treason.

And here, gentle reader, along with my best wishes for a Civil New Year, are answers to each question in yesterday’s Quiz. Not, I imagine, the only possible answers, but nonetheless, answers that will have to do:

*

1. Alaska Strawberries? … A facetious American expression for dried beans. I am unable to discover any special way of eating them in Alaska, though it was an Alaskan orphan named Peter Todd who taught me (at a very early age) this didactic jingle:

Beans, beans, the musical fruit;
The more you eat, the more you toot;
The more you toot, the better you feel —
So eat beans at every meal!

2. Angels on Horseback? … Grilled oysters, hooded in bacon rashers, riding on slices of toast. Replace the oysters with prunes and you have Devils on Horseback. In the test kitchen of the High Doganate today, I replace the oysters with largish snails from an oriental tin, to create yet another hors-d’oeuvre which I call, Refugees on Horseback.

3. Beef Olive? … Slices of beef wrapped round breadcrumbs, onions, and herbs, then braised, with no olives. They look like little headless birds, which the French used to serve as allouettes sans tête. The old French for “lark” was alou, which the old English transcribed as “aloes.” So when the English made roll-ups of any sort, they called them aloes of this or that. From aloes to “olives” is a short trip of the tongue. By 1615 we have Gervase Markham giving a receipt for olives of veal, as a variation on olives of mutton. (His book, The English Housewife, is a must-have on any kitchen shelf.)

4. Bombay Duck? … It does not look like, quack like, nor walk like a duck; it does not taste like a duck; but it does skim the water surface something like a duck, though on the under-side. And so we might think of it as an inverted duck; or as a reflection of a duck, but with the duck missing. It is in fact a sand-eel, called bombila in the Marathi tongue, spoken in the hinterland of Bombay (or Mumbai, or whatever they now call it). It is sometimes called bumalo in English — spelt “bummelo” in your Hobson-Jobson, and sometimes bombloe, but always Harpodon nehereus in Latin (following the Bengali, nehare). From which I propose the new misnomer, “Nehru’s harp.” The fish is often dried, cured, and salted, to make a relish for meat, and can be bought in powdered form in an Indian grocery, but fresh it might better be grilled, fried, or curried. Roasted and verily, smoked, to a rich orange over charcoal, then filleted and splayed on a bamboo splint, it may be had from the Gujarati fish-wallah on Chowpati Beach — or could be, the last time I was there. But only when dried is it, strictly speaking, Bombay Duck. My principal authority on questions of Indian cookery, the late beloved Mrs Balbir Singh, gave no recipe for Bummelo in any of its forms, and over the years this has been a source of anxiety. One hardly knows how to proceed without her wise and kindly counsel.

5. Bullock’s Heart? … Also known as the custard apple, a tropical fruit from a little tree of the genus Annona, it comes to Kensington Market most likely from Brazil or the West Indies, but grows bigger and juicier across south and east Asia. William Dampier described it in his Voyage Around the World (1699): “Full of a white soft Pulp, sweet and very pleasant, and most resembling a Custard of any thing.” Evoked in Tom Cringle’s Log as, “russet bags of cold pudding.” The fruit will be available for inspection at any Jamaican costermonger’s, I should think. The Jamaicans may call it anona, but the Malays, nona, which is also their slang for “a desirable unmarried European lady.” From Pepys’s Diary we learn to crush the pulp into heated and spiced beer, to make a concoction called, Lamb’s Wool.

6. Financière? … French haute cuisine; i.e. chicken quenelles, cock’s combs, and mushrooms, to be located in a Madeira and truffle sauce. A weapon on the field of intimidation, a reason to consult the Larousse Gastronomique, and a fun thing to watch slide into the pin-striped lap of a Bay Street strutter.

7. Fragrant Meat? … The Chinese are alleged to be behind the longest-running “man bites dog” story, and the Cantonese (as any Pékinoise will tell you), have been partial to canine flesh for centuries. You can hardly take Fido into a restaurant in Hong Kong (I was once told) without inviting a terrible misunderstanding. Do not ask the waiters to feed him in the kitchen. That the Cantonese themselves become self-conscious, at mention of this culinary bias, may be surmised from their euphemistic phrase, “fragrant meat.”

8. Golden Buck? … Put a poached egg on your Welsh Rabbit, and voila, Golden Buck, or Buck Rabbit. The Welsh Rabbit, or Rarebit for the shy, is cheese melted over buttered toast. Whether this usage was meant to be insulting, to the Taffies, no one will say. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which in older editions was a fruitful source of racial epithets, goes unaccountably easy on the Welsh, not even bothering to explain “to welch on someone.” They gave “Welsh main” as a term for a cockfight, and “Welsh mortgage” as a pledge of land with no fixed day for redemption; but “Welsh Rabbit” without hint of a sneer. (And a buck is a male rabbit, don’t you know.)

9. King Rabbit? … Jews, like Muslims, may not eat pork, according to strict religious custom, so when they do put pork on the menu, it must be misidentified. Since a rabbit’s meat can look much like a pig’s after roasting, and vice versa, restaurants in Israel settled on this name. “Rabbit” is incidentally a venerable euphemism in the war zones of the world.

10. Lassie? … The Hindi word for a shake, made usually from yoghurt, and which becomes a meal with chopped blanched almonds. I like it best the Calcutta way, the curd quite sugared, then salted, then mixed with fresh milk, and poured over crushed ice made from the delicious local tapwater. (Of course, it’s the ice that will kill you; the milk came safely out of a goat.) The Chinese do it with soya milk, but do not be alarmed.

11. Love in Disguise? … A calf’s heart wrapped in minced veal, rolled in crushed vermicelli, then baked. The Victorians, who loved offal almost as much as they loved euphemisms, often substituted “love” for a heart. The result of this preparation is a foetid monstrosity, instead of which I would volunteer for a Haggis. One must dig into it like a cardiac surgeon.

12. Maid of Honour? … A small, almond-flavoured tart, shaped as a fishing dory, supposedly invented by Anne Boleyn while lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Now Henry VIII, who married Catherine first, supposedly gave the tarts their name, while gobbling them in his characteristic manner.

13. Polecat Pie? … An old English pie made from bacon, onions, and apples. The more common name, Fidget Pie, comes from fitchet, a diminutive of fitch, the old word for a polecat. The pie in question comes out of the oven brown and black, so that it seems a polecat had been sleeping in there.

14. Prairie Oyster? … The well-known hangover cure is a raw egg, moistened with some sherry in a short glass, then swallowed whole (except the glass). It would anyway make no sense to plan more than one gulp. But out West, where they hardly need hangover cures (half the people are teetotal and the other half stay drunk), everyone needs to know that a Prairie Oyster is what the French call rognons blancs (“white kidneys”) — apparently, calf’s testicles.

15. Rock Salmon? … Among British fishmongers in the hungry ‘thirties, Rock Salmon became the generic name for dogfish, wolffish, and other seafood, not previously believed to be edible by humans. Rock Eel was also foisted, and in America the term Rock Lobster was applied to crayfish. Needless to say, these are all delicious, but the Anglo-Saxonish peoples are prissy, and need to be starved for their own good.

16. Scotch Woodcock? … By analogy to Welsh Rabbit, Scotch Woodcock is scrambled eggs on toast, “somewhat enlivened” by anchovy paste. I suppose some Welshman named it.

17. Shoofly Pie? …  A squall of sugar, flour, and crumbled butter over a bed of molasses, which naturally attracts flies. Its Pennsylvania Dutch origin suggests that “shoofly” may be a corruption of some forgotten German word. But I prefer to think it commemorates the flies. In his American Language — all three wonderful volumes — H.L. Mencken celebrates the American genius for non-retentive expressions, in contrast to the traditional English viscidity.

18. Spotted Dick? … The huge, cylindrical, sweet suet pudding, with delightful class associations from old British television series. It is studded with currants and Smyrna raisins, and has nothing to do with the perils of concupiscence. It might nevertheless be attributed to French letters, in the sense that it came to England by the writings of that literary chef, Alexis Soyer. A “dick” was a plain pudding, becoming a “treacle dick” when covered with sweet sauce. The alternative name, Spotted Dog, is explained by the Victorian use of “dog” for plum pudding; and “spotted” merely connotes marly.

19. Toad-in-the-Hole? … Sausage cooked in a thick batter. The idea of concealing savoury substances thus, goes back at least to the Romans, as I know at first hand, having tried to make a Pisam Farsilem from the instructions given in Book V of Apicius (his Artis Magiricae). It was layers of minced spiced meats, and pine kernels, in a pease-batter casing; and it came out of my oven like a huge, crumbling torpedo. I thought it excellent eating, but my interpretation of the recipe was subsequently exposed as a bit of a sham by a former Latin mistress — who pointed to several fairly grave grammatical confusions by return of post. Still, given the Roman propensity to eat stuffed dormice, and other “small cattle,” their gustatory enthusiasm for the variety of God’s creatures, and incurable weakness for a practical joke, I shouldn’t be surprised if a Roman original did have a toad inside, and possibly a live one.

20. Zuppa Inglese? … It is interesting to learn what foreigners think “the Anglo-Saxons” are eating; and instructive, for we don’t always know. I once purchased a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the street market of the rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, with French-only cooking suggestions on the back. (This would have been 1973, my summer of shameful memory.) In the bottom right corner was their recipe for petit déjeuner anglais. I gathered it was some sort of cruel joke, as the instructions were something like, “stir corn flakes and some bacon with milk, sugar, orange juice, and ketchup, in a bowl with a corkscrew, and eat without attention.” The Italians are more charitable, and the Italian idea of an English soup is much like the English idea of a trifle. It is a sponge cake, steeped in licker, but with ricotta to replace the custard, and it was adapted by Neapolitan pastrycooks in the century just before last.

We are approaching the end of the Civil Year, I have it on authority. In the once holy but now frivolous space between Christmas and “New Year’s” (really the Octave of the Nativity), and on the eve of the eve of MMXVI, I am resolved to provide something light and insubstantial.

You see, I was rooting in a closet for some other book, or books, and fell instead upon The Diner’s Dictionary, by John Ayto (Oxford, 1993). And tucked inside it were my notes for “a culinary quiz,” which I vaguely recall having administered to the upstairs customers of the late lamented Beverley Tavern, in Queen Street West, twenty years ago.

My plan is to transcribe them.

Each of the twenty dishes listed below has a misleading name. Some are euphemisms, some dysphemisms, some imaginative similes, and so forth. None are quite what they say. In each case gentle reader (or auditor, as was formerly the case) must answer: What is it really?

And as it is so wet to give the answers upside down at the foot of the page; and as there is anyway nor foot nor page in the Internet; I will reserve the answers until tomorrow. But by way of false encouragement, I will meanwhile provide for each question, an irritating little clue.

*

1. Alaska Strawberries? … (The answer is musical.)
2. Angels on Horseback? … (As opposed to Devils.)
3. Beef Olive? … (Something of a lark.)
4. Bombay Duck? … (Was it just a reflection?)
5. Bullock’s Heart? … (An ingredient in Lamb’s Wool.)
6. Financière? … (You might say they’re eating crow.)
7. Fragrant Meat? … (Don’t ask the waiter.)
8. Golden Buck? … (Or, Buck Rabbit.)
9. King Rabbit? … (Hot to trot.)
10. Lassie? … (Not another Chinese delicacy.)
11. Love in Disguise? … (But other reasons to blush.)
12. Maid of Honour? … (Anne Boleyn was the maid.)
13. Polecat Pie? … (More properly, Fidget Pie.)
14. Prairie Oyster? … (Not a cure for hangover.)
15. Rock Salmon? … (Close relative to Rock Eel.)
16. Scotch Woodcock? … (Inspired by the Welsh.)
17. Shoofly Pie? … (If Pennsylvania Dutch don’t bother you.)
18. Spotted Dick? … (To say nothing of the dog.)
19. Toad-in-the-Hole? … (You could try pigeons.)
20. Zuppa Inglese? … (Yes it translates, “English soup.”)

[Made once again a few little “improvements” to this essay, overnight.]

*

Men are easier to brainwash than women. This, anyway, has been my experience through the last six decades or so. We (men) have this marvellous ability to “compartmentalize,” as persons of both sexes have observed. We can, as Mozart perfectly exemplified, “do this as if that isn’t happening.” Our strength is also our weakness, however.

This is why, really, only women can write novels. For the writer of a novel must remember everything that is going on at once, the way women do. She cannot forget, in one scene, what is happening in another, any more than she can forget what each of her children is up to, including the big one to whom she is apparently married.

Playwrights (always men) have it charted out, and thus may go back and fix things that held still in their absence. One need not live with a play, the way one lives with a novel. Yet if it’s not on the chart, they will write howlers. Take Shakespeare, for instance, in his play, Hamlet, whose protagonist is a university lad of twenty, if that. Suddenly he becomes thirty in the arithmetic of the gravedigger’s scene. (Had his wife been with him in London, poor Will would not have made mistakes like this.)

Now, a woman can be thirty in the afternoon, and twenty in the evening, but knows, in at least the one case, that she is lying. Verily, I have sometimes thought, that it is this freedom from delusion — this ability to remember one is lying, and why — in which the superiority of women consists. (Or consisted, prior to circa 1962.)

Compare, if you will, a gentleman of seventy whom I watched trying to charm an attractive young lady, the other day. A very intelligent man, I should say, and rich, and well-educated, too. Yet he had genuinely forgotten his age, along with the fact that he is married. It was not just vanity. The male ability to compartmentalize came into it.

Of course, gentle reader may attempt to refute me by citing examples of feminine men, and masculine women. One ingenuous soul once tried to argue, for instance, that Marcel Proust was a man. How silly. George Eliot, maybe, but not Proust. Then he thought of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, whom he proposed as novelists. Switching from catcher to umpire, I had to declare a strike-out, for while both these Russian fellows were men, they hardly wrote novels. They wrote tracts, the way men do. These merely resembled novels.

No: as Lady Murasaki is my witness, only women can write novels. Or should be allowed to.

Men are single-minded, as everyone knows, and this is the reason we are so easy to brainwash. All we require is a little torture. Women, by contrast, cannot be defeated by torture, for as will be seen from the argument above, they have won before it starts. They will say whatever you want, but never believe it. Whereas, a man will actually believe what the lash has been explaining, just as if it were true, and his previous beliefs had been proved unsound. Hence the success of the liberal “science” of Behaviourism.

“Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances,” Auden observed, “and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.” (Now, Auden was that exceptional thing, a woman who could write poetry.)

But of course, a good brain-washer does not need to use torture — unless we count telly and the Internet as torture devices. The behaviourist simply lets you know which views are not accepted, and which must be repeated to get along in life. A woman will play along, in a smiling way, knowing she’s been asked to talk nonsense. But a man, in his simplicity, may try to resist. And when he breaks, he breaks. He may look like he is just playing along, but actually his whole brain is being overwritten. Which in turn is why only men can take “the news” seriously. They have been deranged by it.

An example comes to hand in the person of a man who has refused to surrender. It was sent me by a dear woman friend. His name is Tyson Fury (I have not made this up), and he is a heavyweight boxing champion. A man’s man, if I ever saw one.

He is now under investigation in England for “hate crimes.” This is because he expressed Catholic views on sodomy, and perhaps some other matters, such as abortion, and paedophilia. Then topped it off by affirming Christ. And, as if that were not enough, he also slighted His Earthly Highness, Prince Satan. Under interrogation, Mr Fury has told his interlocutors to go speak with the Pope in Rome, who has the same views (he thinks). To my knowledge, he (Fury) still hasn’t cracked. Count one pugilist round for sanity.

The lady who sent me this admires him, as I do, but put that aside. She called attention to a statement from the police, instead:

“At 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday we received a report of a hate crime following comments made about homosexuality on the Victoria Derbyshire programme. … As with all allegations of hate crime, we are taking the matter extremely seriously and will be attending the victim’s address to take a statement in due course.”

This is side-slap funny. At least, it is hard to suppress convulsive laughter when one finds the complainant is preparing some sort of “victim impact statement” — on the basis of having seen Mr Fury on TV. Meanwhile, we are told, some one hundred and thirty thousand lunes and lunettes have signed a petition against him. (Though from what I know, that is only a small sampling of their number in England.)

Now, the police spokesman was presented as a woman, which may seem to damage my theory. But we can hardly know for sure these days: perhaps it was a male officer, cross-dressing. Or an actual woman, and therefore speaking tongue-in-cheek (the “in due course” tends to suggest this.) Or then again she might be one of those post-1962 women, which is to say, not really a woman at all but rather, one of the lunettes.

Through brainwashing we have come to such confusion. For as I’ve learnt, sometimes to my cost, the straight-face isn’t necessarily deadpan any more. Often these “spokespersons” for authority have no sense of humour at all — having become so mentally and spiritually vacated that, while what they say is technically insane, they aren’t aware of it. Moreover, the disease is passed down the ranks, by order, and everyone below says the same thing, too, sans any outward sign of intelligence.

I call this phenomenon, “CMI,” which stands for, “compulsory mental illness.” It is a very male phenomenon. It occurs when the mind is impinged upon by torture, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, and the male inability to hold two thoughts in mind simultaneously — such as, “yes, alas, I have to say this, and yes, of course, it is fluffed batfeathers in a pillow of shrivelled gossamer” — has the effect of suppressing lucidity altogether.

We (in the sense of, “I”) have complained before of the failure of large conurbations (“cities”) to turn off their lights at night so that residents may observe astronomical spectacles. As a concession to human weakness, perhaps lights could be permitted indoors behind black-out curtains. Or if the masses won’t co-operate, just turn off the electrical mains at source. I realize not everyone was enchanted by the spectacle of a Christmas full moon; or waits for the clouds to part on an especially narrow first crescent. But no reason they should spoil it for us. My patience with democracy has been running thin; and thinner for all these resentful, moaning expressions of consumerist “human rights.” Civility requires their selective suppression.

I have other complaints, as gentle reader may have noticed from time to time. Hardly know where to start with them. And yet a bright note, under the overcast today. (With promise, finally, of first snow.)

For it is the Christmas season, when no one is working very hard, and surely motorized transport could be stopped, entirely. It is more or less stopped today, due to a happy coalescence of events and trends. As Christmas fell on Friday, and the workday after that is a statutory holiday — today, Monday, is a quiet time. In years past, the masses would be out for the “Boxing Day Sales.” But in year present, they’ve all gone over to Amazon and Fedex, so have no reason to go out at all. (Soon, we are promised, drones will deliver all our wants and needs.)

One almost feels for the retailers, so lonely in their masonry shops, with nought to do but revise their sticker prices downward; and the franchisers of the food service industry, dawdling as “the people” microwave their Christmas leftovers. But more, I am enjoying the quiet.

Until the robots have fully unmanned the production lines, and the computerization of accounts is completed to the elimination of all “human resources,” some people will still have to get up for “jobs.” But if the popular science magazines can be trusted, the true Age of Leisure is at hand. “Artificial intelligence” will take care of all particulars, and we can lie back on our biotic fannies before our home entertainment centres with programmable hookah-like feeding tubes. It strikes me that already a sizable proportion of society is under a form of cradle-to-grave palliative care. Blaring noise and glaring flashes may be an irritant, but statistics reveal these people are incapable of reproducing themselves, and we have only to wait them out patiently.

I am reminded of a friend’s argument for putting down the ill and enfeebled family cat. “She already sleeps twenty-three hours a day,” he told his pouting, pro-life children. “What’s an extra hour?”

Among popular fallacies is the belief in some sort of demographic End Time, by which poor immigrants from low-tech cultures with high birth rates move in to replace us, appropriating all our home entertainment and food processing units. According to this discouraging view, they are attracted chiefly by our technology and risk-free, “safety net” welfare state. “Eurabia” is that imagined future, after we have all been unplugged.

A young Muslim in Calcutta once told me, on learning I was from Canada, that he aspired to become a Canadian himself.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because Canada is a country with excellent facilities,” he explained, in a stage Indian accent even better than my own.

I reflected on the attraction of our Culture of Death. Specifically, I thought, within a generation or two, in possession of our “excellent facilities,” his kind would also be dying out. In the end, only the wind would be singing through our old wires.

Our new federal government, led by the Trudeau child — who apparently needs two nannies — came to power on the promise of legalized marijuana. But as the people who elected him were already dopeheads, I don’t see how anything will change. The removal of their last possible source of anxiety may well reduce anxieties for the rest of us.

As a Christian, I see wonderful opportunities. Why don’t we find a few people who are still awake, and start a counter-culture? Right in the middle of this one, as it were: simply manoeuvring around all the psychic stiffs. For I think we may have reached the point where the silent majority are unable to stop us.

“The revolution” begins, the hippies once believed, with Dr Timothy Leary’s prescription, that we “turn on, tune in, drop out.” But his drugs were just another form of technology, or passive home entertainment. Comes the counter-revolution, we do the precise opposite: turn off, tune out, and drop back into human civilization.

I imagine this as a vast do-it-yourself project, centred on churches where we learn again to sing, and homes where we teach once more the classical virtues.

Stop writing and uploading for a day, I was told by my advisers before I ever started, and you have lost half your audience. Do it for two days and you have lost another half. As I now intend to disappear through four days, from this electronic aether, it follows that I must bid adieu to fifteen-sixteenths of my gentle readers, aheu!

The experts also told me that pictures are not optional; that nothing can sell without “sex appeal”; that links must be plentiful, to get links back; that the typography absolutely must be garish; and that fundraising appeals should be conducted in as serious and unsubtle a manner as a tinsmith repeating his mallet blows. (“Never make a joke near the cashpoint,” is an old axiom of the marketing men.)

Moreover, upon suppressing Comments, as I did in the middle of last year, I was told, Male ulciscitur dedecus sibi illatum, qui amputat nasum suum.

Or as the more sanguinary trouvères put it: Qui son nez cope deshonore son vis.

And I was told to avoid Latin and, probably, mediaeval French as well.

Indeed, it has occurred to at least one gentle reader — and he not even a Christian — that I might be entirely dispensable.

Notwithstanding certain Catholic proclivities, these Idleposts are not meant to substitute for attendance at the Mass. Always go there, by preference. Often I allude to the cycle of Feasts and Fasts, but do not do that in a systematic way. Your missal will provide, I hope, the missing details; and your Rosary, the missing thoughts. And while it is true I tend to moralize, lay-sermonize, preach and whistle, I am a very distant cousin to the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. I wear no clerical collar. Never trust me on doctrine, or anything else on which your life might depend. I have, after all, barely a tenth-grade education, and that not from a very impressive school.

I am, superadditionally, highly suspicious of the medium in which I am operating. While I cannot say it is all bad, I think well over 99 percent of it needs editing to the point of eradication. (Up from 98 percent, in print.) Who will trust the untrusting?

All I know is that if you aren’t right with Jesus, you aren’t right at all. … (So if you aren’t planning to spend perpetuity burning in Hell, best to go queue at the Confessional.)

And all this by way of wishing any remaining gentle readers a very Merry Christmas, with families gathered round; and the smile of the Christ Child upon each of you and yours; and on me as I desist from blathering until some time on Monday (should God will).

I was going to name Santa Claus in my heading, then thought, it would give too much comfort to the Sultan of Brunei. You may now get five years in gaol for celebrating Christmas in that oil satrapy, if your Muslim neighbours can see you doing it. This includes Santa displays. The theory behind the latest edict is more reasonable than first appears. The Sultan clearly holds the Islamic religion to be so profoundly flawed, that any exposure to an alternative will endanger a Muslim’s faith.

Thus my frivolous desire to float in the Seventh Fleet, with Stars-of-Bethlehem on the masts, and Santas lining the decks. (Perhaps this was not worth mentioning.) The Marines could conduct them to shore in their landing craft, with gifts for all the children in the Sultanate.

Brunei is majority Muslim, but it is not an overwhelming majority. Native Christians, and Chinese of several religions (intentionally undercounted in the census, as in Indonesia) do most of the work; members of the established Shafi’i sect of Sunni Islam live off the fat, or rather oil of the land. “Guest workers” come, mostly from India and the Philippines.

My knowledge of the place is seriously dated; but even decades ago there were petty little laws and regulations to keep non-Shafi’is in their place, and to prevent Muslims generally from being exposed — to Christianity in particular. Since 1990, the laws have multiplied. The government now calls itself Melayu Islam Beraja, which is to say, a “Malay Islamic Monarchy.” Housing, schools, mosques are provided through this government from the oil revenues, and the state funds aggressive Islamic proselytizing. Non-Muslims, however, pay their own way. The latest law, to suppress Christmas, seems to have caught brief media attention, though only as light humour. In Brunei it is illegal to teach anything about the Christian faith, in principle even to Christians. A couple of dozen churches exist, but are tightly regulated.

*

So it is not Santa, but Tinker Bell I’m going after today. It will be seen by my fact-checkers that I know precious little about her, having encountered her only in Peter Pan, a play that repelled me even in childhood. The Disney version is “after my time.” As I recall, this Tinker Bell sprinkles fairy dust about — in envelopes and drinks I have suspected — and is by turns gratuitously spiteful and vindictive, or saccharine kind. I’ve known many like her. The association with shopping-mall Christmas is perhaps on my part pure speculation. But I’ve noticed a lot of fairy dust in there, and the angels on the trees (if any) tend to resemble pixies, with wands, just like Tinker Bell. If I knew a sympathetic imam, I might ask him for a fatwah on her. Santa Claus goes to the cliff edge of my Lockean tolerance. Tinker Bell flitters beyond it.

Ah, “Christmas” — in the current entirely commercialized and therefore stickily sentimentalized sense — comes but once a year. Thank God. Count me with Scrooge, before his conversion; indeed, I blame Dickens for inspiring the Victorian retail trade. The sound of (carefully “secularized”) tape-loop carols in a store actually drives me back out into the cold. Where one can at least smoke and bray, “Bah! Humbug!”

*

But thanks to a British reader (the razor-sharp Mrs S, now Lady N), my attention has been directed to the most wonderful piece on “the meaning of Christmas” I have seen in many years. It appeared quietly, Sunday morning, among the blogs in the National Catholic Register, and is by beloved Monsignor Charles Pope. I positively command all my gentle readers to peruse it. The title is also admirable: “Christmas Isn’t Candy Canes — It’s D-Day in the War Against Satan.” That is surely enough of a spoiler; go read the thing, here.