Essays in Idleness

Picture this scene. My correspondent is reporting from what I call Funcouver, in Brutish Columbia, but I have heard of something similar in Toronto.

A private baptism is being celebrated, on a Massless Sunday in Advent. There are eight people in the large church: the priest, an assistant, and six immediate family. Less immediate family and friends were told to stay away, in obedience to the Batflu Regulations. No singing allowed; everyone sanitized and bat-muzzled. It’s not like a Costco or a Walmart, where hundreds are permitted to spread their germs, while pressing towards the cashpoints. (God save them.) There is music, there: Christmas shopping music, piped in.

Suddenly a ninth person enters this church, running towards the Sanctuary. She is shrieking, and hysterical. She suspected something was going on in the church, and lo, something was. She demands that it be stopped right away. “You are killing people!” she shouts, while vapouring in their faces.

Why bother explaining the Regulations to her? She won’t hear. The woman is obviously batshit insane. But as a representative member of the “Covid-concerned” public, she will have to be accommodated, somehow.

Perhaps the doors could be locked, as they will be at my parish church, to keep the unwanted out, including the parish congregation, for the duration of — today’s item — a small private funeral.

As I’ve argued before, the Catholic Church has made a very foolish, catastrophic mistake, by bending over to the Batflu Stasi. She should have behaved more like that hysterical woman: “How dare you try this on!”

For the anti-Catholic bigots, including those in civil authority, are enjoying their power through the “crisis”; and those with an elementary understanding of human nature, know that they will prolong it, indefinitely if they can. They have now shown their hand, definitively. They will order lockdowns and muzzles in all future public health “crises,” and more imaginative commands, when they think of them. Their pet epidemiologists will oblige.

Not the Catholic Church alone, but everybody, should be responding with civil disobedience. (Why let Antifa have all the fun?) For it is a responsibility, indeed a solemn duty, to refuse cooperation with tyranny and evil. Surrendering to it should never have been an option.

By leaving this so late, we are going to have a mess, and possibly a violent one. For the civil authorities — the bureaucratic swamp, ever more filling with Left and Progressive sludge — have once again discovered that they can sucker the general public efficiently, through fear.

If they told the sheeple to “Vote Communist,” it would never work. But scare them with Plague stories and fantasies through Mass Media — lies, damned lies, and statistics — and they fall obsequiously into line.

Better still: they will do your work for you.

It is a flaw of these Essays in Idleness, that I try to say too much in each Idlepost. Just now, I tried to dock yesterday’s prolixities, when I realized that covering the Pacific Ocean with discarded plastic drinking bottles was not actually germane to the issue of poverty in the slums of São Paulo, and that I should have been content with getting the tilde right. Often, like a Democrat, I am guilty of exactly what I accuse others of doing.

So today I turn over a new leaf, yet again, as I do every day. I will try to make a simple point, then give up.

This point will be about the Chinese, whom I very much admired for three thousand years, but have been down on since the ‘forties. Note, this is not entirely their fault, but I was just looking at some stock footage, of vast numbers in the PRC, marching lockstep in expensive gear, with tanks, missile carriers, and other vehicles that (were I a superpower) I would be more discreet about advertising. On the instructions of a certain Mao Tse-tung — a gentleman who outdid Stalin and Hitler if we rank by body count — they bought into the postmodern in a crass and vulgar way.

On their good days, Trump and the Yankees are much more spiritual, and only the Batflu Stasi go about closing churches. But now I’m getting into the weeds, and will be mentioning “Fang Fang” if I’m not careful.

What impressed me about the Chinese, and satellite cultures of the Orient, was their genius for material simplicity. No matter how extensive their Forbidden Quarters and Palaces, or long their Great Walls and Canals, everything would have clarity from close up, and use goods and ingredients chastely, without the slightest aggravating hint of overkill.

The sails on a Chinese junk will be my example. Rather than burden them with over-heavy cloth, against the fearsome gusts of the oceanic breezes, they simply made them easy to patch. Their fully-battened balanced lugsails hung one sail to a mast, which leaned forward so they would not snag. Should the wind be fully howling, they could be taken right off and rolled securely. Those masts being set centre-deck, the rudders were to starboard, and could be raised in chocks when the vessel came ashore. The flat-bottomed hulls were divided into compartments so they wouldn’t fill with water all at one time, and the boat needed no keel, let alone a false one. These holds separated incompatible cargoes. The family who owned the junk could live permanently aboard, in cabins to the more tranquil aft, above deck.

But now they have replaced them all, with our awkward oversized metal clunkers, that require noisy smoking oil-sucking engines and might sink if they are violated with a single hole.

I could go on. Don’t get me started on the extraordinary peace embodied in the shapes of Song dynasty clay pots, or the purity conducted through ancient Chinese brush strokes. We were Promethean, they were not; but now they have come over to our darkest side.

(I have shortened this tedious thing.)

*

“Poverty,” someone noticed, is quite “relative.” It cannot possibly be an absolute evil — the way œconomists misleadingly present it. One can be poor in the country, and hardly anyone will notice, whereas in the city, social workers might break in. Moreover, the ratio of police to acres is much higher in the town, so you really should think twice before shooting them.

Now, hunger gets us closer to absolute, and naked would be a problem at these Subarctic latitudes. That is why most sensible people have always preferred the Tropics, where clothing is more optional, and the crops sprout even when you are trying to ignore them. And should that not be enough food, a coconut may roll into your way — “under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree.”

Listening, involuntarily, to a screechy radio, I heard an œconomist from the United Nations, or some other radical outfit. He had just returned from the slums of São Paulo (first class by jet, I’ll wager), and wished to report two things. The first was that the slum inhabitants do not have much money. The second was that they are morally superior to us. He sounded like our pope.

He was proposing that under some Global Reset, these slum-dwellers will get more money, so they will not be poor any more. But, assuming the truth of his second proposition, there would be a catch. They’d lose their moral superiority, I reckon. I noticed that he avoided vexing himself on this “off-narrative” detail.

Are people who win lotteries made happier? Or luck out with the latest œconomic “reform”? I venture yes, at first. But check back after a few months, and they are miserable and nattering again. The truth is that humans (like sheep) can become accustomed to any level of prosperity or good fortune, and take their advantages over the luckless for granted very soon.

This isn’t a problem anyone can fix. Certain ancestors of ours catastrophically failed to do the right thing, and we’ve all been perverse ever since. God is dealing with it.

Verily, the world burdens itself with problems whose twists are either created or imagined. The “problem of poverty” is like that. It is easily solved, by letting some people be poor.

Another is this “morally superior” thing. It is a (very Red) herring. For the poor are, on average, as obnoxious as the rich. Why not just stop denying this?

Lately my thoughts have been drifting over two species of being, namely, people and sheep; and also the crossover species, “sheeple.” These beings cross in both directions — we have the right to choose, in all modern and progressive jurisdictions — so that it is said of New Zealand, for instance, that it has a population of thirty million sheep, five million of whom think that they are people. (By comparison, Canada has an aggregate population approaching forty million, most of whom are deeply confused.)

I would refer to “natural-born” humans, except, I fear this would tease up controversy. Let me cloud the issue, rather, by mentioning some other ungulates, or claimed ungulates, such as goats, cows, and zebras. (We must respect diversity.) Myself, I always wanted to be a giraffe, on the theory that it would be hard for people to fleece me, and moreover, I might easily survive a hanging. But as I grow older, I become more complacent about the species to which I was assigned at birth, and all-round more conservative.

In the past, most sheep were conservative, too, if not reactionary. Your modern sheep tends to be more progressive, and tamer, but let it be said that there were always many sorts. In order to populate the Scottish Highlands during the Clearances, with sheep, while evicting the people, it was necessary to choose a more sociable sheep breed, along with shepherds, ditto. Both came from the Borders, and the latter could cope with being seriously outnumbered by the former. Too, they weren’t prejudiced against sheep with black faces, as the Highlanders once were. These “New Soviet Sheep” responded well to “guidance” from Border Collies, much nicer than the old Highland dogs, and could generally be counted on not to make a scene.

Whereas, the older breeds were often dangerously eccentric. They had “personalities,” forgetting sometimes that they were just sheep. They were much smaller, more agile, also wilier, and could outsmart many of their keepers. (A Lowlander stood no chance with them.) Too, they were gourmands, and would shamelessly eat out the finer grasses, to the outrage of the cattle. (Their replacements were easily satisfied with junk food.)

From my slight, passing acquaintance with a Soay, and what little I know of other ancient Highland breeds, they could be like herding cats. They were “delicate little beasts,” it says here, who demanded public housing in “sheep cotes,” and were tethered by day, if their keepers could catch them. Their fleece were very fine, but scanty. They made for exquisite tartans; but were kept mostly for their milk.

By comparison, your modern sheep gives inferior wool, but lots of it. They also do not mind so much being chopped up in the stockyards. They lack the multiple, magnificent horns, with which the old breeds could give their shepherd a hard biff, when they disagreed with him.

To be fair, their black-faced Linton successors can give a hard biff, too, and pointier, notwithstanding their pacific reputations, and the ewes sometimes show an elegant fashion sense, in their “floating graceful draperies.” Most tellingly, they adapted well to the uplands, and are willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense, like Canadians.

This is a warning alike to people, sheep, and sheeple. Do not make yourself too adaptable, or you will all be industrially farmed.

As sage Hippocrates is said to have said, “First do no harm.”

Consider the following cure for madness. The patient is taken to the cultists of Saint Maelrubh, at his island in Loch Maree, for the bull sacrifice; then to Saint Fillan’s pool by Loch Earn, during the third phase of the moon. Rounded pebbles are placed on what’s left of a saint’s cairn. Subject is then tied behind a boat, which circumnavigates an island. Still wet, and freshly hog-tied, he is placed in a stone coffin within a ruin, to spend the night with what’s left of any saint who was dwelling there.

Gentle reader may object that this is not modern. He may characterize it as “mediæval.” He will not find such cures in a “modern” psychiatry textbook. (Actually, he will. It is called “shock treatment.”) I came to it in the course of idle lockdown reading, on my noble Highland ancestors.

Their cure for jaundice seemed worse, for those against torture. I, for one, dislike being poked with hot irons.

But “mediæval” it was not. The memoir was from the 17th century, when the Presbyterian Enlightenment had already spread. Granted, medical practices were probably different in Edinburgh; but that was not yet the self-styled “Athens of the North.”

One could fill a book — indeed, two or more — with the enormities we assign to the Middle Ages, which didn’t happen then; but instead, like the witchcraft crazes, rose in the dawn of the modern age. Much that we assume, and is taught in our schools, is just like truth, only the opposite.

The “superstitions” of the earlier centuries were different in kind. They consisted of things like missionaries blessing wells, and naming them after Christian saints, when they saw that the primitive locals had a reverence for them. The mysterious powers of which they spoke came with prayer. They brought sophisticated learning with them, in their persons, and advanced towards the Northern Star; built churches and cathedrals like starships to Orkney, Trondheim, Greenland. Each became a centre of learning, in stone.

It happens I was once reading on genuine mediæval traditions in physic, some of which lasted at least as traces in the Highlands until the century before last. We still have fragments of their materia medica, in Gaelic. Not charms, often discouraged as pagan, but many herbal remedies, which have since proved efficacious. The Highlands had once been part of a higher culture. I read somewhere of Scottish physicians, in demand abroad in the 14th century: I mention them because they were all “Gaels.” Power, as well as literacy, tipped from Highlands to Lowlands in the cusp of modernity.

The campaign to stamp out the Gaelic language, the Gaelic œconomy, and ultimately the Gaelic race, was a distinctive feature of the modern centuries. By the 19th, they were very poor and miserable, not only in Scotland — and blamed by smug urban society for what had been done to them. Yet they remained proud.

To my mind, “Protestantism” was more a consequence than a cause of the many forms of nationalism that sprouted across the West, like acne. The more remote peoples, who did not think of themselves as “nationals” but just as souls, were being everywhere homogenized, and where they tried instinctively to resist, they were evicted, exiled, eradicated. The wars were not of religion, but of politics, seizing upon religion as a weapon to consolidate the new national units. “Reformations” proceed generally by iconoclastic force.

It is the history of many dispersed peoples, who in this age of electronic gizmos, have come to identify with each other. My fascination with Gaelic music, for instance, has taken me by video recently not only to Ireland, but to France, Spain, and Appalachia.

Through five centuries, Nanny State has been unable to leave the non-conforming peoples alone. It is a tale of “land reform” after reform. And that madness, uncured, remains with us into post-Christian times.

I wrote something this morning, about bishops who will not lead their “sheeple” — into gaol when necessary — because they know the sheeple wouldn’t follow, and they would rather not go there themselves. By creeping increments, they become the “first enforcers” of the State’s fatuous Batflu regulations, barking at their beleaguered sheeple, to follow each “guidance” to the letter, then go the extra mile. I was thinking of one Cardinal Archbishop in particular, whom I watched on a video, snarling at his sheeple and their parish priests. He just plays the dog, and threatens to bite them if they don’t move faster in the stupid direction they are already going — out of the Church.

But on mature consideration, I deleted this essay. For hey, I might never be invited to his place, again.

As some Siamese Bonze once told me: “I am very rich, in things I don’t need.” He seemed, indeed, to be surrounded by treasures.

This was in the capital of what is now called Thailand. The gentleman in question, enrobed in saffron cloth, and in possession of a brass begging bowl, offered the best conversation I can recall about Buddhism with a “native speaker.” That is, he was raised in an entirely Buddhist rural environment, schooled in a village monastery through his childhood, and had become fluent in English with a disturbing Oxbridge accent. This he had acquired I’m not sure how. I forgot, or forget. Were it forty years later, one might look him up on Facebook, I suppose.

Many people are more interested in themselves than in others, as intellectual engrossments go. Let me start with what he had to say about “me” — the Westerner. His monastery, or wat, was becoming something of a hippie hotel, owing to its custom of hospitality to travellers. While not a hippie, nor an habitual wat guest, I was at the time a bit of a traveller. I was curious to hear an educated Bonze’s view on all these hirsute, dope-smoking white juveniles. It was both sympathetic, and unfavourable.

He was sympathetic to what he thought often a sincere quest for “transcendence,” but one that had got off on the wrong foot. The spiritual resources of the West were formidable, he said. They should have started their journey there. While he welcomed an appreciation of Buddhism, they did not tend to have very much, and most of what they knew was not true, but Western-hippie bosh. They were more consumers than participants in religion — by instinct, aloof in quite the wrong way — and really, if they were more serious they might have researched monasteries on the continent they came from. Here they were just voyeurs, and (I am paraphrasing, as so often), too smug and conceited to be good voyeurs. By contrast, having met several, he put in a good word for Catholic priests.

We discussed Buddhist versus Christian monasticism. There are differences in belief that can’t be whimsically bridged, he said. But large parts of the two “monastic experiences” were fairly identical, including the line that is drawn between monastery and “outside.” One doesn’t cross that line wilfully. One does not come in to shop, as it were, for spiritual trinkets.

The young Buddhist who enters the monastery intentionally, for a few months before settling into a secular career, knows he isn’t shopping. This institution, found throughout Theravada Buddhist nations, could instead provide a brief training in “the discipline of compassion” — including what it is and isn’t.

It is not a “nice feeling.” It is a discipline to be acquired, and my Bonze echoed Newman in saying (as I later realized) it begins with the art of getting out of bed in the morning.

Other acquisitions follow, some of which may prove more difficult. Let us consider, for instance, the skill with which we started: detachment from Things. We, from the West, used to be good at this. (In past centuries.) We did not so much own things, beyond kitchen utensils, as hold them in consequence of our station in life, to be passed along in due course. Now we’ve forgotten how this works. Only superficially does this mean a life of poverty. Only superficially does one give away everything one owns — although the monk must do this, to show his commitment. At a much deeper level, one must cease to crave for possessions, including that craving for immaterial things: fame and suchlike. The task is rather to be free; to escape our bondage to transient things.

But God, Heaven, Hell; angels, devils, saints. … One of the most intriguing things I remember from Montri (the name of my Bonze acquaintance), was his casual use of such terms. “Westerners think Buddhists don’t have them, that we are some sort of atheists, but look at Buddhist art.” Buddhist attitudes towards them might be inexplicably different, but there they are.

I’ve neither seen nor heard of him for decades; and he was already old, so that he is probably now dead; yet Montri remains, for me, a Catholic inspiration.

Once upon a time, in an obscure country called Canada, we had some admirable election laws. These have lapsed, unfortunately, but as an immediate “reform,” I think they should be restored.

My favourite was the “returned ballot.” An eligible voter, who looked at the list of Party candidates in his riding, and was inclined to spit, could express himself on election day. I used to do this myself, when younger, but found that the law had already gone into disuse.

One went to the queue at the polling station. (Often there’d be none.) The returning officer would look through his voter roll, find one’s name and address, and check these against one’s identification.

Pause. … This is still the procedure up here. We don’t fool around when checking voter ID, or counting physical ballots, unlike in some other countries. The ballots are directly marked on physical paper, then counted manually. They must also be counted continuously, before accredited witnesses, any one of whom may howl the moment he suspects a trick. There are no super-doper voting machines, such as we apparently sell to naïve or commie foreigners. In the absence of “high tech,” the counting happens fast. We have the result from most polling stations by local midnight, and often hours before. They are quite checkable (the ballots must be preserved), and a recount is automatic if the result across the riding is too close.

The ballots themselves are hard to confound: no “down-ballot” to contend with. We don’t elect judges and dog-catchers in Canada; only Members of Parliament, one at a time. This means that when we have an election dispute, it will almost certainly not be about the count. Rather it will be over fussy and trivial campaign spending laws. Bad results must therefore be attributed only to the stupidity of the voters. Alas, that can’t be fixed.

Back to the polling station, where the electoral officer is now passing me a ballot, with a hint on how to make an X on it. I am directed to a voting stall.

But I refuse to go there. Instead, I turn earnestly to the officer and say: “I am returning this ballot.”

Chances were, even decades ago, he would be thrown into confusion. So one would explain his job to him. He was supposed to have a book, entitled “Returned Ballots.” Into this he was supposed to transcribe one’s name and address. Getting into the book was one’s only way to avoid the secret ballot. But it was important to get in, to be recorded correctly, rather than as a “spoilt ballot,” as one is counted now if one’s ballot has no X.

After voting, I would check the result, and if not even one returned ballot had been recorded, I could doubt it was legitimate.

Now comes the good part. For returned ballots were supposed to be a separate category in the election tally. It was competing with all the other candidates. If it won a plurality — more returned ballots than the leading candidate — the election was to be formally thrown out, and a by-election called, in which none of the candidates for the thrown out one were allowed to run again. Too, voters could “theoretically” do this over and over, until at least one Party chose a candidate we could stomach.

In theory, this was an excellent way for voters to “drain the swamp,” directly, by eliminating the political sleaze in successive groups. In practice — aheu —  it was never used. The political sleaze nevertheless spotted the possibility, and had it taken off the books, at both Dominion and Provincial levels. What can I say? They are sleaze.

So the first thing we must do is campaign for the return of the returned ballot, up here; and for its institution in all the other Western nations. Then the second is to impartially, but massively, campaign for its use. It could be the greatest thing since the ancient Athenian ostracon.

“Democracy,” like any form of guvmint, is built upon agreement over certain foundational myths. The “will of the people” must be consulted. They collectively speak, in mass elections, according to the myths. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” we might say: the opposite to what prevailed in more sober times, before the Enlightenment. And yet in my experience, most people do not know what they are talking about, on most topics, and on politics, foolishness is rife.

If 51 percent prefer one candidate — less if there are more candidates than two, or even with only two, after discounting spoilt ballots — the people have not spoken, any more than the coins have spoken, after you have flipped them a few million times. In reality, the tiny number who have really thought about it, are disenfranchised by the rest. If their vote shifted, it was between each and God. The reasons they give might be intelligent and salient, but the system works on one-man-one-vote. (Or did: we now dispute “man.”)

To my mind, most, if not all, elections are hung. The winners enjoy only a plurality over the losers. Even in a landslide, a third or more of the people likely voted for the losers. This is far short of a consensus.

The democratic idea can be preserved, only where the “principle” of mediocrity is sustainable. There must be general agreement to live with the winners, and good enough will for them to muddle through. Indifference is vital. Resentments must be kept within bounds.

Whoever wins, the result will be much the same. All parties offer the same sort of policies, dressed, perhaps, with a few decorative flourishes — likely to be quietly discarded, because of the expense. Life goes on, whoever wins. The division between Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, rebalances periodically, and the slogans, too, are casually exchanged. They sharpen only when tragedy is near. Tragedy itself can be seen as a sudden clarification in the usual sludge; comedy I recommend as less dangerous. There are moments when Democracy itself is threatened, because real principles have entered our swamp. Real principles are bad for Democracy.

People die one at a time, even when they are killed off simultaneously. It is at that level that differences are significant; where political partialities fall away. The votes of the dead are anyway not counted, except in the more corrupt jurisdictions. But the dead themselves are well out of any controversy that follows.

It is wrong to murder them, I think. This I would give, or would have given, as an example of consensus. (The matter became clouded by Roe v. Wade.) Our laws once rested on overwhelming consensus: thou shalt not kill, steal, bust marriages, worship strange gods, &c. These commandments were beyond “principle”; they were existential. Now, they can be overturned by vote. This was once imaginable only for petty and transient regulations; but the distinction between petty and serious has been lost.

We have “a threat to Democracy,” say the pundits. I don’t say that here, but only because I never believed in any of the democratic myths. At least, once I outgrew childhood.

There is something to be said for genius. Perhaps I should leave the saying of it to someone else. But as I am the only writer in the High Doganate, I’ll have a go. Consider Bertolt Brecht.

My German, which peaked about 1968, and has since been in decline, remains nevertheless unable to conceal from me the sheer, stupid genius of that man. I added the qualifier — “stupid” — to clarify that genius isn’t always wise. It is a gift from God, that we are apt to mismanage. Indeed, I won’t name a person I am currently thinking about, who has what I would call a genius for stupidity. He goes about being stupid so ingeniously, he leaves me with respiratory issues.

And yet, there is truth in him. A less controversial example would be Auden, or even Stevens, or Pound, to start running through my “rolidex” of great modern poets, in English. In poems, but also in essays, they utter absurdities that are brilliantly true, unknowingly. Or so I am convinced. I’m not going to write that book, however.

Since the world is now festering in politics, I was going to stick with Brecht for my example, political to his dirty fingernails, poet more than playwright, and always poet in his plays. Master of the double-irony, he hits triples, too, without even trying. (I would flatter Neruda in the same way.) A diligent commie at heart, he writes mottoes that could be used by libertarians — but ironically, because he is redefining freedom. While doing so, he then sounds accidentally “Tory,” or “feudal” in the Continental manner. But then he advances to the baseball equivalent of a home run. He exposes the satanic intention at the heart of his own revolutionary creed — unintentionally, I surely think.

Take this quite famous excerpt from his poem, Die Lösung (“The Solution”), written apparently to regret the East German uprising in 1953. A Communist Party hack said that the people “had forfeited the confidence of the government.” (A Brechtian irony, but completely unintentional.) “They could only win it back with increased work quotas,” this hack suggested. Brecht observed:

“Would it not in that case be simpler, for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another?”

He tours the bases with this savagely misleading satirical stroke, thus ending at home plate where he began. What may have looked a fluke to some, was meant all along. He was never trying to hit easy singles, if I may strain my baseball analogy even further. He was always trying to change the rules of the game. This is exactly the strategy Communists will pursue, and similarly, all “progressives.” Their intention from the outset is not merely to “get elected,” like any normal political party, riddled as it will be with concessions to what the people seem to want. It is from the beginning to alter society — like devils, using any means available.

We lost sight of that as the Cold War “progressed,” beyond plain old-fashioned Stalinism. We began to accept ideologues as “just another option” — as they established and promoted new brands of secularism, feminism, environmentalism, “anti-racism,” &c. These things can’t be advanced by government policy, or will fail, unless the people themselves can be altered. A monopoly of legislative power goes without saying: that is always the prize in politics, Left or Right. But the progressive seeks a monopoly forever; what the Leninists, even before the Stalinists, called the novy sovetsky chelovek, the “New Soviet Man.”

Even to seize raw political power, they always meant to cheat. That’s why e.g. Nancy Pelosi began playing with new mail-in balloting arrangements, the moment she recovered the House speakership, long before she could seize on the Batflu for her excuse. (Curiously, Trump was among the few who saw what was coming. Brecht would have admired “his ability to think crudely.”)

This is why progressives focus on infiltrating cultural institutions, including of course the institutions for voting, rather than on, say, staging a military coup. For such coups are superficial. They change only the government, and that only for a time. Indeed, most generals are unimaginative people, who seize power in defence of some threatened status quo. The revolutionist wants to change that status quo. He wants to change what human beings are.

A pity, to my mind, that he is succeeding.

Ebony is a wood that is very strong, very hard, and very black. It grows most famously in Africa, very slowly. Count me among the many neurotics who have flinched when they heard the term, not for any of its qualities, but from being told ebony is an Endangered Species. (The Diospyrus genus, if you must know.)

Information becomes vague and unreliable, whenever politics draws near. Yet the assertion is plausible. This wood is expensive, and hard to come by, like elephant tusks. Adventurers are reported to risk their lives, smuggling ebony logs from the remaining forests of Madagascar. One African country after another gets cleaned out of it, according to the activists. It is possible the activists are right. (Sometimes.)

Madagascar’s ebony is one species. There is also Gaboon Ebony, Ceylon Ebony, Mun Ebony, Macassar Ebony, &c. As the names suggest, it is also found outside Africa, in species native to its various locations, throughout the tropical mapamonde. All grow slowly. There is Wenge, in exactly the places our ebony first came from in West Africa, though it is Something Else; there was Blackwood among the ancient Egyptians; there is “Peruvian Walnut.” These latter are from species unrelated to ebony, but look much the same, and will freak out your customs inspector just as nicely.

Price, alone, keeps consumption down, to small decorative uses. I have never built a log cabin of ebony, or anything like, and I speculate that no one else has, either. Verily, I haven’t built one even of pine, but don’t tell anyone. (People might doubt my patriotism.) In the cause of truth, I will admit that I have never attempted even to do a decorative ebony inlay, though I’m not opposed to others trying it. My woodworking skills would not suffice.

But I do own a small wooden Crucifix from Egypt, inlaid with nacre (mother-of-pearl). It is mounted on a kitchen cabinet, right in my face, when I am washing the dishes. How I came by it is a memorable story, so being an Idler, I will tell it right away.

A girl named Mariam was an accountant in an old, “colonial,” Cairo hotel, wherein I was camped. A Copt, who spoke Arabic but not a word of English, or rather three or four words only, she held the stopwatch while I transmitted my handwritten “copy” through the Windsor Hotel fax machine, to a newspaper back in the West. (This was once high tech.) She was calm, patiently precise and careful, as we dealt with the vagaries of Egypt’s telephone system. She was also very beautiful. It was when I attempted conversation I learnt that two of her English words were, “No speak.” My Arabic being worse than her English, we communicated by gestures and pointing.

Impressed by the small but magnificent Cross, always on her neck, I once pointed to that, and drew from her the most radiant smile; as if to say, “Yes, I am a Christian.” This made a psychic bond.

But a time came, after a month, when I was checking out of the hotel, and moving on to the next city. I was packed; a taxi was waiting to take me to an aeroplane. I stumbled down the stairs (which, in the Windsor Hotel, wrapped around a glorious cage elevator), to the office where Mariam worked. But she wasn’t there. I had wanted to say good-bye.

Down one last flight, to the tiny foyer on the ground floor, I imagined a patter of footsteps behind me. As I got to the taxi, and finished loading, Mariam herself stepped out of the shadows. She was clutching this inlaid Coptic Crucifix; slightly larger than the one she was wearing. As ever, she said nothing, but pressed this Cross into my hands. And then she ran away.

The wood, on which the nacre is inlaid, is a thin ply of black, like ebony.

Did you know? Ebony is an Endangered Species.

Since getting canned from my teaching gigue; and to the Great Harvest, losing a couple of my more generous benefactors; I have thought I might be a little less shy, when begging for donations this year. As gentle readers of longstanding will know, Black Friday is the one day when I beg overtly. Though I will allow readers to fill my hat at any time of their choosing.

On the cost side, too, if one is anti-blogging, one needs to be prepared for the Cancel Culture. Because I stay simple and low-tech, and do not contend for a mass audience, I am not a priority for the demons. But I’ve noticed more than one of my fellows, using the same modest software, has been “invited to find another server” recently. And I’d thought that they were fairly low-priority, too. Should I suddenly disappear, I will endeavour to re-materialize elsewhere in hyperspace, with the same name and title.

No point in protesting, if or when that happens: for the Cancel Culturati do not listen to an argument. They are absolutely ruthless.

Still, the daily cost of my Idleposting operation is small, and actually dwarfed by my living expenses which, except for “big city” rent, are also very small. And let me say that, compared to the millions in the poorest countries, being further reduced to penury and starvation, from the manipulation of the Batflu “crisis” by our fat-country progressives, I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

The theft of the Natted States election has made a huge difference all over our wee planet. Not only are they celebrating in Tehran and Peking, but the Deep State class feels more secure everywhere. They are fitting themselves out with new designer jackboots, and not only the Little Sisters of the Poor will be feeling their shiny new cleats. Antifa and BLM are just psychotic schoolchildren: the real Enemy wears Prada.

Jeanne Jugan, who founded the Little Sisters nearly two centuries ago, to bring relief especially to the abandoned elderly, at first in France and Spain, was canonized a saint under Pope Benedict in 2009. Under his successor, your Peter’s Pence are going to make e.g. a film on Rocketman; to play the London real estate market; and to bribe criminals in Australia to bring false sex charges against the bishop who was trying to clean up Vatican finances. Perhaps I should mention that, as a backward and reactionary Catholic, I do not approve of these things.

Yet far be it from thought to suggest that gentle reader send his spare cash to me, instead. For I will continue writing whether he sends a donation, or not; whereas, my rivals might shut down if they were no longer paid.

Moreover, you may find not only Catholic orthodoxy, but a vastly richer field of sanity and genius, in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, to say nothing of Dante and Shakespeare. By comparison, the Essays in Idleness are quite redundant. And since their author is still, inconveniently, alive, he alone is in need of ready money.

God bless you all, incidentally — richer or poorer, profligate or skint. And as ever, fear not. Things will, eventually, sort themselves out, or be sorted, by that “invisible hand” — who never restricted Himself to œconomics.

It is Merican Thanksgiving. With any luck, no one will be reading me, today. (No one in Canada reads me, anyway.) I can say things that are irresponsible, for a change.

According to pollsters, two-in-five Mericans will be celebrating their holiday today, in gatherings of family and friends, just as if they were allowed to do so under the Merican Constitution. (Whose guarantees of freedom never mentioned public health.) Whereas, the other three-in-five will be making themselves as miserable as possible, in obedience to the Batflu authorities. Some will commit suicide, on purpose; others less intentionally with their opioids; but fewer in total than the population of, say, Appalachia. Most will observe social distancing to the end, even if they die without their medical muzzles on.

Pollsters have lately been making their numbers up, for focused political purposes, but still, I have no reason to question their 40/60 estimates. It does seem to me that, these days, 60 percent of Mericans are just like Canadians.

Traditionally, we didn’t kill ourselves so frequently up here. Partly, this was because we have a smaller population; and partly because we have socialized medicine, so our guvmint does it for us. You’d think we’d kill ourselves less frequently, owing to the distraction of trying to stay warm. But no, our death rates have been tracking Greenland’s. And Greenland tracks those of Scandihoovia and Fennoscumland.  Not enough Vitamin D.

*

Somehow I have wandered off my intended topic, which was outdoor dining. So let’s get back on-message.

Canada is not into outdoor dining. Too many polar bears. Well, they are into outdoor dining, but the humans only began to emulate them recently. Note that we never dine on them, or hardly ever, and would prefer that they not dine on us. Like good Canadians, we should negotiate. But it is hard to reason with a polar bear: a white supremacist if I ever saw one.

In our cities, if one can call them that, there are few polar bears, and those are usually arrested, and locked down in zoos. But Canadians never used to eat anything outside, except perhaps hot dogs. The idea of starting a café arrived from Europe, in 1963. That revolutionary Toronto courtyard was called “Lothian Mews.” It has since been demolished. One reached it through an alleyway, that made it easier to intercept polar bears.

My papa took me in there when I was a kid. It was the next best thing to leaving for Europe. I was introduced to “coffee.” In my advanced age, I would order schnitzel from the Coffee Mill — with coffee — after it relocated a few doors away. I would hang out with sophisticated friends, from Europe. That was where I used to jaw-jaw with my dear friend George Jonas, and discuss the imperfections of Canada, among other places. Since he died, I had not been in. Another reason was, it had closed, permanently.

The mistress of this joint was, like George, Hungarian. She was one Martha von Heczey. She died last year, as I just learnt, shedding a tear, for she was a magnificent woman. Her secret, in business and in life, was Never Change. Alas, now she has changed, into a dead person. Her husband, a magnificent man, walked his pet cheetah around the neighbourhood on a leash (look it up: I’m not lying). He died earlier. Circus-trained, I assumed he kept the cheetah against polar bears. But he was very tall, and large, and muscular; he could have fended for himself.

Now, fashion crazes work, for capitalism, and in the last half-century a lot of people began to eat on sidewalks. Not on the sidewalks themselves, I should explain, but on tables set along them. The Batflu Stasi are putting an end to this practice, lest any little businesses survive, but I daresay it would resume if they would go away. (Feeding them to hungry polar bears is a thought that has crossed my mind.)

Meanwhile, we must eat our schnitzels, or our turkeys for that matter, quietly inside and out of view.