Essays in Idleness

“My God, guard my speech from evil and my lips from deception. Before those who slander me, I will hold my tongue; I will practice humility. Open my heart to your Torah, that I may pursue Your mitzvot …”

These words, from the Shabat service, were on the “Facebook” screen from the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, when it was interrupted by an Islamic terrorist. I quickly noted them down.

The terrorist, who claims to have planted bombs in multiple locations, was armed and holding a rabbi and several other persons hostage at the time of writing. He has yet to be identified; seems to be speaking in Arabic, on behalf of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, an American-educated neuroscientist and technologist, known colloquially as “Lady al-Qaeda.” She lives, for the foreseeable future, in nearby Fort Worth Prison, having been arrested by the U.S. military after a bloody scene in Afghanistan. Various other crimes have been attributed to her. Back in her native Pakistan, she is celebrated by a large list of fans, and her release is often demanded. But she is not admired by everyone, we are assured.

I do not report news, and have no comments beyond the obvious. I only juxtapose the words of Jewish prayer against the demands, and acts, of radical Islam. These I will not even try to transcribe; suffice to say, they are numerous, ranting, and unambiguously evil.

One minor development in my Batflu experience: I have now been officially “quarantined.” We won’t go into the details, for to understand them one would have to be a simpleton, like our provincial premier, or otherwise gravely challenged. Whereas, my intellectual resources, despite cardiac setbacks, are still lively and copious enough to detect absurdity and what is called, “bullshit.” There may be a few cogent things to say about the Batflu branch of virology, but at this point in the show, two years into the howling nonsense, there is nothing that can inform debate. Anyone who says something will be immediately contradicted by a legion of mostly self-appointed “experts.”

Shut in, closed up, locked down, but not actually starved under current Ontario pandemic protocols and restrictions. In praise of my angelic little sister, she has remembered what her big fascist brother (voluntarily) eats, and fetched a fresh supply in her snazy sports car. Thus, he will spend the next few days in luxurious isolation, openly cooking. She included several state-approved, Chinese communist face masks, which will enable me to take out the garbage, even if community health officers are patrolling.

The Batflu Kerfuffle may be thought of as a dispute, within a tribe of monkeys — wearing diapers on their faces, and observing social distancing, vertically and horizontally in their trees. Most are glued to cellphones.

One could be frightened by this spectacle, but, putting the cellphone down, one could enjoy a thunderous belly laugh. Humans, in contrast to the apes, often succumb to waves of panic, and the totalitarian experiments that accompany them. On balance, most apes are calmer and more attentive (but not necessarily more courteous). They can only be alarmed when threatened by something plausible. They do not waste their time in hysteria, unless something is trying to eat them, and even then, they prefer to make their escape discreetly.

Perhaps it is because they, and most other creatures in nature, spend less time than we do, brooding over biological death — even though it might be more significant for them than for us. They seem, relatively, comfortable with it, and take more risks in the cause of loyalty. But humans, even when safe within the shell of our own stupidity, seem never to escape this anxiety thing.

There is a fortune to be made on Batflu vaccines — perhaps the most profitable department, currently, of the pharmaceutical industry. I knew this when a company executive said he thought a fourth booster would be necessary (even when some doctors said no), and looked forward to mandated boosters — every autumn in perpetuity. He is in what marketers would call an enviable position, for the government — whether Trumpian or Bidenesque — undertakes to foot the whole bill, in addition to its own bells and whistles.

We should not expect honest accounting for the cost of whole Batflu, in the many currencies of money or in the lives abridged in a thousand different ways, any more than we should expect a figure for sand molecules from the world’s beaches. If we had a number, it would defy comprehension.

Big Guvmint and Big Pharma — two of the richest and most powerful obscenities in our public life — are allied in the cause of the medicalization of society. For the cynical, it is an easy matter to assemble the supplementary moral arguments. These great agents are, they will claim, on the side of good health and longevity (against unknown agents on the other side). They are the processing bowels of science. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t know what to do with our freedom. Think how our freedoms are diminished, as Big Guvmint absorbs Big Pharma.

The very cynical judge that the medical establishment seeks, like a virus, to make everyone sick, but ideally no one die while they can still sell them medicine. It “evolves” with the times, until everyone lives well past one hundred, and can be prescribed emergency life-saving drugs from just prior to the moment of birth.

My father was of the opinion, when I was little, that if I would have a shower I would “feel like a million dollars.” I did not believe him, but was willing to try the experiment. I was a dutiful child. In truth, I did not want a million dollars that badly, and anyway, it was in the time of Diefenbaker, when the Canadian dollar (“Diefenbucks”) was thought to be overvalued. Also, it was winter. Papa preferred cold showers. Surely some discount should be applied, for all-round discomfort. After all, to feel like a million dollars is less likely when one is cold and shivering.

“A million dollars” was, in light of these qualifications, and more that I could enumerate, to be taken as just a phrase. It was that kind of phrase known as a cliché, and therefore to be avoided in sophisticated adult conversation. There was a suggestion of vulgarity about it, as if one might stoop to pick up a million dollars, if it was found lying in the street. I once stooped to pick up a dollar bill that I found abandoned (on a sidewalk), but that was exceptional: I was a child.

The idea of “a million dollars” came back to me just now, while consulting a news website. I shouldn’t wish to embarrass the proprietors by revealing which one. It happened that every single advertisement at the bottom of the scroll mentioned “a million dollars,” in one connection or another. Two asked, I suppose not rhetorically, if a million dollars would be adequate for one’s retirement, another if it would at least be useful, and several more sported investment opportunities.

I am distantly aware, from life in the big city, that a million dollars will hardly buy a house, though perhaps it will purchase a flashy car. You could also perhaps pay the plumber, should you discover that your shower had run dry. In general, if you somehow earn a million dollars, then you will owe two million in taxes.

Everyone has met her, I gather, because there is a flash of recognition in every face when her name is mentioned. My own memory of her goes back to the ‘sixties. She was the original Valley Girl — from whatever valley — eloquent, indeed musical, in an illiterate, innumerate way. She was not unkindly; but neither was she intentionally generous or obliging; neither saintly, nor ruthless. One could enjoy the whole afternoon with her, and be sure to accomplish nothing at all. Not even sin.

She was by nature a friend of a friend — many times removed, and then many times multiplied — upon herself, without being conspicuously selfish. The world was filled with the Creamcheeses — after Frank Zappa invented the first one. (Did each contain a rib of Frank Zappa?) They were “immortalish,” from that day to this. They were legion.

“Always a freak, never a hippie.”

The remark applies to Mr Zappa, not Miss Creamcheese. It was his proud declaration, that he would never be a hippie. He went so far as to not take drugs — except those that could be classified as food, such as aspirin and cigarettes. He was an innocent, a fanatic innocent, for he believed in the United States Constitution, and was a faithful composer of quasi-classical tunes. Marvellously free, he was — of romantic notions. Little to conflict with his honesty. He had strange liberal tendencies, but all of them, completely out-of-date.

He found his fame, with an absent mind. He rose to it carelessly. It was his pleasure to become Suzy Creamcheese in reverse. He was a non-rock star.

But this Essay is entirely about Suzy Creamcheese, considered in the abstract. I look back to a time before she ever became a Valley Girl. Her origin was equally American and European, and her nationality was unimportant. She simply was, and her existence gave comfort, to those without wants. And she persists.

The “millennium bug” is back to plague those who own computers — who, as these Essays are broadcast only on the Web, must include some of my readers. The problem is a product of the cybernetic mindset, which feels compelled to reduce whatever it touches to jargon, abbreviations, and “protocols.”

As clocks passed midnight for the New Year, this latest glitch appeared. It could not be fixed immediately, because the computer techies at the Microsoft corporation, and myriad others, didn’t see it coming. The company’s system for dating and thus prioritizing its anti-malware programs did not become more incomprehensible than it ever was. But it slipped over its 31-bit space allowance, and thus went poof.

Customers must now instal a new system, but first, the techies have to invent it. Meanwhile, emails pile up invisibly and irretrievably, and those attempting “workarounds” are exposed to the malware.

Many of the world’s problems, I have concluded, were not given to me to solve. Being shut down by a corporate decree, or a viral disease, or a moronic computer glitch, is no worse than death; and having these problems solved, by anyone, is little better: for they condemn us to go back to work, picking cybernetic cotton.

Except, better than death, is to watch the scenes of chaos, after the experts get their way. And besides, if you are charitable, you might volunteer to help some of the experts’ other victims.

There is however a partial solution to the botheration of modernity. It is to give up on progress, now that it has revealed itself as unmistakably demonic.

To do anything worthwhile, or well, requires time, and space. The progressives demand that we make everything smaller and faster, and quite unfixable: warp-speed interplanetary rocket rides, and little wee implants to control us.

But the world is large, and moving fast enough. By ignoring the experts, we can be happy.

Should witches be strangled and burned?

The question had not been raised for a while, but the issue once again rises to the surface of at least the Scottish consciousness, since a legislative campaign began to pardon various condemned witches (or, “karens,” to use the fashionable term; “buidseach” the Gaelic). As typically in Caledonia (which is like Canada in this respect), little thought has gone into the management of witchcraft since the Witchcraft Act was abrogated, by the united Parliament of England and Scotland in 1736.

This Witchcraft Act had been formally introduced by the Parliament of independent Scotland in 1563. It became illegal not only to be a witch, but to consult with witches. I try to bear this latter point in mind, in case the act or something like it is ever revived, for it was once quite common across the north of Europe. The great age of witch-hunting was the Reformation, and as a potential Catholic victim, I try to remain alert to “Protestant,” “Progressive,” and “Scientific” trends. Certainly, the handling of the Batflu epidemic by progressive western governments serves as a warning that nothing is finally off the table.

Myself, I don’t “believe” in witches, or rather, do not subscribe to conventional ideas about them. That there may be “something in it” seems possible, as there is something in many other Protestant beliefs; and it is true that I have subscribed to “the supernatural” as part of my Catholic Faith. But certain supernatural propositions (not in the Catechism) strike me as superstitious, and most pop demonology fits into this category.

Nevertheless, if the majority in any society wants to believe in witches, and to torture and murder the candidates they accuse, who am I to oppose democracy? Within a century or two they may change their minds, and now disbelief in witchcraft will be pursued with the same glibness and self-interest with which witchcraft trials proceeded before.

“Going along to get along,” in this matter and all similar, is the mark of the well-instructed citizen, who stays on top of the news.

Actually, I’m boasting emptily, and somewhat sarcastically, for my actual position is now that of a reactionary Catholic. Half my ancestors were Presbyterian, however. Many of them were lovely people, and of those who weren’t, many of them were male. Don’t ask me for my views on Scottish independence.

Perhaps I should mention that my fortnightly column in the Catholic Thing has resumed, and with luck, it will stay resumed. Today happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of my reception in the Catholic Church (the last day of 2003), and I seized upon this coincidence to recall it.

Tomorrow is 2022. Why shouldn’t I believe this? The evidence is mounting, though I have learnt to distrust almost everything that comes from official sources.

There is nothing new, certainly nothing exciting, in my view of controversial matters. For when the brain-fog of illness disperses, I find that I am pretty much the same. I am still a Royalist in politics, a Classicist in literature and art, and a Catholic in religion; and I still need leisure and space to explain each of these terms. My abstract sense of “loyalty” is to such propositions as these. It is more difficult now than in the past, to be loyal, for the modern person is raised and “educated” in perfect ignorance of civilizing principles. To some degree, it is not his fault that he can’t understand them.

My gentle reader will note, that I didn’t mention “freedom” in my short-list of very desirable, commonplace things. This is not because I neglect it, or fail to see its necessity. But I refer only to higher societies: the lower are conducted by violence and bullying.

To my mind, it should not be necessary to specify that “men” (a term that includes women) will enjoy considerable freedom within the order that grows from civilized laws. The individual liberties need not be spelled out too exactly, because telling the citizen what he is free to do has the effect of limiting his freedom. It will always be greater than any legislator can imagine, and by making excessive laws he abridges.

Yet it is order, not freedom, that is hard to supply; for a dictatorship is a disorder. It is held together only by compulsion, and it disintegrates when the compulsion is relaxed. “The Left” do not realize that, all the violence and bullying they advocate, to achieve their programmes, will not last. It will fall apart when they lose their zeal, and leave behind only a memory of unpleasantness.

Bureaucracy is the primary method for bullying in societies today. It is thought to be a “necessary evil,” although it is an evil, unambiguously. It comes as a rhetorical trick, with “democracy,” along with other imponderables, such as “fairness.”  Our political judgement is vitiated by a vocabulary that is a slurry of vague, but loaded, terms. These words, which may or may not have meant something in the historical past, now only serve as gravelly mud-balls.

My own ancestors had a lively disposition towards “responsible government.” The idea was that its officers, when in power, should be held personally responsible for their acts. They were not an anonymous bureaucracy; they were not shielded.

People are always dying, and I regret it, although if I had or took a more complete view, of the parts of men that are not strictly biological, I might achieve the “higher complacency.” Ted Byfield is the latest to “pass.” Any who don’t know who he was should bloody well find out. I am somewhat weighted with unnecessary grief.

Searching for some words to remember him, I was surprised to find I had already written them. They were in an email I sent to a friend out west, many years ago. The recipient, Brett Fawcett, quotes it in his own eulogy of this fine man. Allow me to plagiarize myself:

“Mr Byfield seems to me, looking back, as a crank. I mean that as a florid compliment: a beautiful crank, totally sincere, wise in ways ultimately unworldly, & naive in a way almost saintly. From my first sight of him, I adored him, & trusted his judgement to be truly lucid & courageous & informed & independent — all the crank qualities. Also, unmanageable. I am not, & could never become an Eastern Christian, & we argued about that. I realized it suited him, exactly: that he was mentally Byzantine. I don’t mean that in the cheap sense of ‘complex,’ but nearly the opposite. He does not seem ‘logical’ in the Western Christian way. He has an extraordinary ability to take things at face value. His view of Christ is beautiful: almost extra-theological. His view of Islam is (so far as I follow) simple, too. He entirely lacks pretension, & keeps his attention fixed on the obvious, on continuities. He can utterly condemn Islam & its violence without real malice.”

Goodness gracious: I get out of hospital just after Easter, and suddenly it is Christmas. Little, almost nothing, seems to have happened in the interval; thanks to mind-baffling anaesthetic drugs, much seemed to be happening just before. But like most illusions, it can be explained. I stepped out, and into, an environment that had been heavily medicalized; which is as agnostic as most medical people; and on the outside, we are all in nearly perpetual “lockdown.” Our lives have been appropriated by the lockdown bureaucrats.

I was quite amazed, both before and after my medical internment, at how willing, indeed eager, the Ontario population is to be “guided.” The same is in evidence almost everywhere else. The modern man chooses safety over freedom, every time, and it is no surprise he gets no safety in the bargain. His anxieties and his isolation (he has no real family or friends, no religious direction); his ignorance and superstition; make him a natural target for manipulation. Those who seek power are his natural controllers, like ants with aphids. Trying to defeat them with rational arguments will always prove a waste of time, for democracy has provided that the idiots who rule us are the ones we have selected to rule.

Not everyone is included in my dismissal; I only refer to “Modern” men (of both sexes), which is to say, almost everyone. I try not to be too inclusive, however, to limit sin. For we were told to love all of our neighbours and enemies, and we should do our best.

Our fate is not hopeless, if there is God; and if it is the God who sent Christ, out of Himself, to redeem us. Christmas — the occasion and its meaning — serves as a more powerful refutation of the evil argument. Like love, it goes beyond the rational. We are to fear not, and to replenish the joyful — in defiance of the “Grinch” of scientism and modernity. This can be done by anyone, with Faith (which involves a bit of stomach). We needn’t stay aboard the handcart or motorboat to Hell, there are protocols for getting off. Instruction is soon coming, from Bethlehem.

A Merry Christmas to all my readers.

*

I owe thanks to many kindly correspondents who have sent Christmas cards and other notes of encouragement, and even generous donations to my idle cause. Many of these communications were anonymous, and even some that weren’t I haven’t acknowledged. Most splendid are those who uplift me in prayer. Forgive my many ludicrous failures.

I am no more capable of providing an etymology for “keb hoose” than any of the sages I have consulted; I think of it as a wee Scots hospital for edible ungulates. I do care a great deal for sheep, and let me mention lambs. This will be evident to my loyal readers since I wrote, “Sheep may safely graze,” in a west-Canadian agricultural magazine, a couple of decades back.

The article under this title was written in praise of mutton, which I adore; but it is apparently no longer available, in sad countries like Canada, unless you raise it yourself. Our sheep, which survive lambdom, may safely graze, if they continue to sprout wool. I have, incidentally, no idea what statist regulations govern mutton production, and am for the moment not interested.

The difficulty with mutton is that it is unmodern. It takes some five years for the meat to mature wisely, on the living animal. Three will do, for a glib feast, but as the Victorians explained, there is no reward for impatience. A third cull comes after seven, or perhaps eight years; and the hanging of the carcass is a long and untidy affair. Getting the time wrong is a mistake one must pay for.

In my lapsed journalistic rôle as a “Gimcrack Gourmand,” I once annoyed the supermarket readership with a selection of delicious, exotic mutton recipes, gleaned from Egypt, India, and the distant Oxonian past. My point was, at least by intention, that the world is choking with things not worth having, and would benefit from something that is.

Whereas, lamb passes through the rotating knives of the streamlined abattoir very quickly. You don’t have to feed the little creature much, before selling it to the butcher, and he (the lamb) makes acceptable eating if one is easily bored. By contrast, a full-grown sheep, bred for mutton, could have a much longer and more thoughtful life, previous to its one bad day. Modernity, I have often noted, is not good for animals.

The sheep in the hills of Scotland were placed there by enterprising liberals, to replace the human population of, e.g., my ancestors. I can’t entirely blame them, for many of these people were hard to get along with, but I am nevertheless opposed to genocide in all of its forms.

Reading among the papers in my High Doganate (where I do not need a proof of vaccination), I learn that death was also an inconvenience in past centuries. What happens when a lamb dies, leaving his bereaved mother with time on her trotters, and a surplus of milk?

Ewes are possessive of their lambs, and not favourable to having them replaced. But the old shepherds would solve both problems by skinning the dead lamb, and covering a live, milk-hungry orphan with the hide. The ewe, with her intense sense of smell (rams are even smellier), would gradually come round to feeding the orphan, instead of head-butting it.

The deodorant industry was also founded on this insight, according to my typescript source. But it was a Lowlander who wrote this, so I do not insist that you believe it.

We face another Christmas without mutton. This is all very well if my reader is a vegan, but as a Christian I can only lament.

A lady (I swear), among my more radically Christian friends, is fond of declaring: “The end is not near.” She says the tragedy of our age is that the End Of Times will not come, to this generation. We will have to cope, somehow. She repeats this to anyone who will listen; for as the liberals say, “If it saves just one life, the exercise will have been worthwhile.”

Indeed, to the liberal mindset, it is often necessary to kill many thousands, or perhaps millions, in the (unlikely, but possible) attempt to save the physical life of just one person. The rhetorical trick is completed by suppressing all discussion of the costs of their mission, usually with the argument that it is immoral to dicker over costs when they are trying to save lives. Eventually, however, these costs mount until the least perceptive involuntarily perceives it, and society “moves on” to consider the next attractively packaged, progressive imposture.

The task of “saving just one life” from the new Omicron variant of the Batflu is now accelerating. Here in Ontario, as elsewhere, the medical and political authorities are flashing their latest restrictions, that will close out the lives of many; pausing only for applause. That their previous interventions had a “net zero” effect on the infection, hospitalization, and death rates has been statistically obvious through nearly two years. The Batflu “pandemic” follows its own natural course, regardless of political directives, as did every epidemic in the past — but incredible additional damage is done by the whims of the bureaucrats. The authorities are mindless and arrogant, like all previous authorities, though ours have reached a new plane of sublimity; their opponents are ruthlessly censored, as ever in the past; and the bulk of the population remains as fearful as it is poorly informed. The media of publicity are entirely on the side of the criminal class, which, unsurprisingly, leads most governments.

Perhaps this was not always so. But the evidence that it wasn’t has been stifled. That part of our history that is noble is suppressed, and that which is ignoble is now taught obsessively in our schools. Some get rich, some are ruined, when they come out, but there is no departure from reductive materialism.

“We the people” … have to ride it out. In time, and we can hope not a long one, the true facts behind the Batflu will be known, for they will be impossible to hide. Ditto, for “global warming” and the other massive swindles, deceptions, and schemes which are the ringers of our times: they depend on too many demonstrable lies to last forever. Their departure will make room for new lunatic political aspirations, but we can be reasonably sure that each must eventually go away. Our fears will graduate into boredom. Indeed, we hardly noticed when the greatest frauds of the past finally evaporated.

Against this prospect, we must sink or rise.