Essays in Idleness

A discussion on some email thread, this evening, on the presidency of William Henry Harrison. This lasted for thirty-one days, in 1841, before Mr Harrison succumbed to something like the Batflu. The question posed was, will Joe Biden, now declared president of the same country by its meejah, and by vote-counters in cities like Philadelphia, serve longer?

The correspondent was referring to the 25th Amendment of the Natted States Constitution, which, as Nancy Pelosi likes to point out, empowers Congress to replace a President if — in the august opinion of several Very Important Persons — he is unable to get up in the morning. This would complete the coup by which Commie-La Harris, the well-known California harridan, is raised to “legitimate” totalitarian power.

My guess was that, with the assistance of modern medical technology, Mr Biden could serve a full term.

Note, in order to replace him, a vote of two-thirds is needed, in both houses of Congress. But the Republicans, even after the ballot-stuffing is concluded, will retain at least one-third in both, and could thus defeat the measure. Moreover Mr Biden, being projectively comatose, would be unable to reverse this by Executive Order. Then, by keeping him on life support, over the subsequent forty-seven months, Ms Commie-La is prevented from assuming his office.

In passing I should like to say a nice word for the late President Harrison. He was not only elected to the highest office in America, but was the last British subject to attain it (having been born in the Thirteen Colonies). Surely that is worth a salute.

As things play out in my fertile imagination, Mr Biden comes to a good end. He wakes, after a year or two in his coma, having been miraculously transformed into a faithful Catholic, and resumes his duties to general applause — rather as Pope Benedict might resume his office, although that would require the unfortunate demise of some fellow from Argentina. Still, the sudden obviation of all the Argentine bulls and appointments, would help me to contain my grief.

In the American case, I can’t help thinking that simply confirming the re-election of Donald Trump, would be a better route to a happy destination. All that is required is for the Supreme Court to disallow post-election voting. The downside, of course, would be rioting in the streets, but hey, they have the National Guard for that. And the worst damage would only occur in cities like Philadelphia.

A couple of starlings, alighted on the remains of my balconata, are giving their “take” on current events. I cannot quite make out what they are saying, but from this distance, their views sound harsh. Though possibly I am reading too much into their remarks. Perhaps they are only giving their opinion on the cosmetic “makeover” of this building, being performed to the music of jackhammers. (The volume of this noise has been slightly reduced, since needed construction materials failed to arrive from Red China.)

So perhaps I will give my own views on The Election instead. Or not: for my own points will mostly repeat those already made in media that the “mainstream” are blacking out (a tactic that usually backfires), and are censored or warning-flagged on social media.

Trump failed to win beyond the margin of fraud, and so his vote is being cancelled in the citadels of political corruption: cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, &c, where massive ballot-drops (approximately 100 percent Biden) can be performed, and protected by unambiguously Democrat-serving judges as the Republican lawsuits pile in. The media howl, that opposing fraud is “undemocratic,” and as one wit observed, this won’t be over until 131 percent of the vote has been counted.

This is nothing new, unless we consider the scale. Kennedy was able to steal the 1960 presidential election by ballot-stuffing in Chicago and Texas, and Nixon was too much the gentleman to object. (But what if Trump proves not to be a gentleman, in a streetfight with half of America behind him?)

For many years, Democrats were able to hold the South by lynching blacks and enforcing Jim Crow. With “civil rights,” changing demographics, and the wealth that comes from taxing capitalism, this strategy changed to buying minorities off. It is still in effect, in the form of “identity politics,” but must change again soon with the times.

Trump has increased the Republican vote-share in every “race and gender” category, except white males. Among those “white supremacists,” his share slipped by five percent.

After well over a generation of replacing news with progressive “narratives,” the meejah have understandably lost track of what is happening around them. Even their “human interest” stories, sports coverage, Hollywood and so forth, is now so heavily trampled under ideological strutting, that it can appeal only to those who already agree. Their practice of choosing between demonstrable truths, and demonstrable lies, according to which better fits the narrative (“political correctness”) has already cost most newspapers their existence, and is beginning to tell against the Googlesearch imperium, Twitters, Facebooks, and You-Boobs of Big Tech.

But there is, arguably, reason to hope, even in that world. Technology tends to get out of the hands, of those smugly installed as its masters, and just as little Apple ate the lunch of big IBM, the future will surprise them. This does not mean it will be a better future, however. Machine versus machine is not edifying. It tends to end in the victory of machines.

What interests me, is the future for little creatures in our High Tech world. I am thinking specifically of men and women. How much autonomy will they be allowed? (They are too small to simply take it by force.) But might the trend be reversed in which our freedom is constantly diminished? By unexpected developments? Which?

Perhaps that was what the starlings were nattering about. I can’t really say, however, for both of them have now flown off.

And so: The Peeple have spoken. They couldn’t make up their minds, however, so now it is the lawyers’ turn. May the best lawyer win. And may what he gets be a surprise, BIGLY.

My CDIC (Chief Displaced Irish Correspondent) forwards this excellent analysis from Twitter:

“The vast majority of marine life is concentrated near the coasts of continents, because these are the places where the ocean floor gets exposed to sunlight. The rest of the ocean is called ‘The Floatover’, by smug self-important fish, polyps, pinnipeds, cetaceans, crustaceans, &c.”

On the subject of data, I’m against it. Thanks to the “Internet Closet” in this building, I’m on a data diet at present. (It’s almost as if one of the jackhammers had an accident.) Everything went down just before NSM election results started coming in. Verily, God is merciful. My computer and email now “flicker” unpredictably, but the telephone is a dead loss. And, “blogging will be light” until (the horror, the horror) things come up again.

As gentle reader will know, I’m in favour of keeping everything in the closet. Or, everything nasty, at least. Any Democrats I find can go in there, too.

Who knows what will be the result of today’s general election, south of the border? I certainly don’t, and it is the first in my short life for which I have no idea. I correctly guessed the winner of the last fourteen such elections, going back to 1964 (when I was eleven years old). For most, it wasn’t very difficult, although all I had was information from the newspapers, and some native common sense. Perhaps I was lucky, if one may call it that. Or, “privileged,” to have any brains at all. Today, I am persuaded that my luck has run out.

As recently as March, I assumed that Mr Trump would win an overwhelming landslide: something like Nixon’s in 1972, or Reagan’s in 1984. People do not generally vote against their wallets, and the behaviour of Democrats, especially in the House, might trigger a landslide there, too. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was already in full force, but I could remember the Bush-Hitler and Ray-Gun derangements on the Left. These did not spread among those not flirting with mental illness. The Democrat Party could be counted upon, to be wrong on all the major issues, but moderately so. It wasn’t actually dangerous to vote for them, as it is now.

I had also been through the “revolutions” of 1968 and forward, and watched them burn out. As a young man I had been distressed by the Vietnam anti-war, and the damage it had done to the superpower on which we depend for our freedom and security. It was also fading into the past, and at the fall of the Berlin Wall I naively supposed that socialism was defeated. The 21st century looked brighter than the 20th had been. Now I know better.

While things might look grim at the moment — imagine if what is becoming a demonic party actually won? if someone like Kamala Harris actually became president? — they look worse, as we glance ahead. What makes this election so discouraging is that it could be decided by a rising generation that has been crap-indoctrinated in our schools, “informed” by poisonously deceitful mass media, and further disoriented by all-but-universal social media.

They are a tremendous, and growing force — of low-information, high-malice voters. One looks at the mouth-parts of an “AOC” and realizes that, indeed, she is the voice of the future, unless God intercedes. And we have given Him little reason to do so.

Should Trump nevertheless win, against an opposition that is so yuge, it would most likely be the last hurrah for an America, now turned against itself. For even those who support him are, in the main, voting only to keep their wallets.

Pericles in ancient Athens, by any standard among the greatest politicians (read Thucydides, more carefully this time); and oddly, Plato, too, in his Republic, knew what was required of a great city or πόλις. It must, as it were, believe in its own myths. There are several other qualities that are essential, that we might want to revisit if there is still time. None have much to do with any political theory. There is no abstract “democracy,” but modifications must allow freedom, and merit; as Pericles (via Thucydides) perfectly understood. Too, a long, uninterrupted history, is not merely advantageous but crucial.

Trump is no genius, according to me; although he is very quick and smart, to the cost of his enemies. He “sort-of understands” these things, however, and I pray he won’t be punished for this kernel of wisdom. Too, I pray, that the Senate will hold for the Republicans, because regardless of the presidential election result, if the Dems take the Senate they will not hesitate to remove him. Even if they can’t, they are now hell-bent in schemes to alter the Constitution, from which there would be no looking back.

They seek only power. That is what invites demonic inhabitation.

It is All Souls, today; which, if you think of it, is the opposite of Hallowe’en when, according to legend, we are visited by all the spooks and ghastlies who rise out of the graveyard. On All Souls, we go into the cemeteries, rather — to place candles on the graves of our deceased relatives; to honour them, and rekindle our love; to rekindle, too, memories of grace; and to reflect on ourselves, while we still can, in the dimming light of our forefathers. Or more precisely, we used to do this, a long time ago.

How appropriate when this happens, or would have been if it happened, on the eve of an important election. For as Edmund Burke (the oft-smeared philosopher of modern “conservatism”), wrote, society is a partnership not only of the living, but also of the dead, and those yet to be born. When we, the living, vote or do anything in view of the whole, we act on behalf of this whole.

We are not mayflies. Time is not empty, as it may seem to the smaller insects. What we do has consequences not only for ourselves, and not only for the immediate company, buzzing around us. We have been given this moment of life, and the honour of place, in the unfolding of generations. We do not have significance only to ourselves.

Those who cannot see this — currently the overwhelming majority — should never have been entrusted with the vote, or any serious responsibility. It is a tragedy that our society has degenerated to the point it has, and in that tragedy no surprise that we have real, material, spooks and ghastlies, roaming the streets in the manner of Antifa.

Yet as Christians, if we are, we know that this is only part of the immensity of Time. It will pass, as all things pass; it will end, as all things end in this world.

While we live we are deeply involved in the consequences of our actions. When we die the living actions stop, but we continue to be involved in the consequences. Or so I have observed, and would add, that it is in our interest not to go to Hell.

The election in NSM (Natted States Merica) is by now so loud that, like the jackhammers playing daily around the High Doganate, it is hard to ignore. “The whole world is watching,” as they used to say in Chicago. Not everyone has a preference (sexual or otherwise), but I have noticed that cats, dogs, and babies, are often dressed to disclose one. Sometimes it is subtle, like not wearing a bat-muzzle while eating, or going about in the state of nature, like Amy Barrett’s dog. (A fluffy chinchilla, apparently. She gave it a whistle during her Senate hearing, when asked her position on little warm puppies.)

My own circle of friends tend to be, at least nominally, Christian, and lean to the right of the political spectrum. Even my Chief Texas Correspondent was rather “NeverTrump” going into the last election. But like many others I have heard from, he did vote Trump, “reluctantly.” Most (all?) of these people now report that they would “crawl over broken glass to re-elect him.” A Trump car parade in Arizona was measured at ninety-six miles long. In Canadian terms, that would be even more kilometres. (There was a large pro-Trump rally on the streets of Montreal, which went entirely unreported in the Canadian meejah.)

Yet I know a few people on the other side, who have not yet disowned me. So far as I can detect, they hate Trump as much as others love him. That the vote comes down to Trump versus Antitrump has been observed on both sides: perhaps the last remaining thing they have in common. For I have heard even Democrats dismiss their “official” candidate (someone named “Biden”) as a corrupt, senile, incompetent mediocrity. So that revelations giving proof that he is all of these things will hardly effect their vote; hatred being such a powerful motivator. On the other side, stomping on little warm puppies wouldn’t cost Trump many votes, either.

Both sides identify with “the insulted and abused” (I mistranslate Dostoyevsky). As I was explaining to a meejah readership, before I was cancelled eight years ago, Obama was doing too many things to “stick it” to the Red State types, and this would breed a reaction. I thought the next president would be an “alternative” — something like Trump. And now Trump may have created the conditions for the real commies, under a brazenly cynical president, such as Kamala Harris.

The interesting thing, to me, looking on from my angle, is how much those Red State types will take before they have had enough. Radical Dems revolt violently, when they decide that they have been insulted, but then, they are revolting people. But Republicans seldom riot at all. The psychology is as different between the two sides, as the politics. The Right are inclined to behave, as you might assume from enthusiasts for law and order, in a way that is lawful and orderly. They have taken quite a bit of insulting, during the campaign (being often described as “racists” and “Nazis”), but I expect them to take a bit more: even Dems winning the election on what look like “harvested” ballots. (Though I think the Repubs are onto this, now. I read somewhere that they were out-harvesting the Dems, in sunny California.) We will see how it goes, for even what the meejah are eager to not report, surfaces in unsinkable gossip.

This is my prediction: we will be surprised by the result. It is a safe prediction, for we are generally surprised, even by what we expected.

Note: I am not saying this will end well.

We are (the present writer included) creatures of our place and time. Verily, it is our divine task to overcome this “temporality,” to escape our condition as animals, mere earthlings.

One thinks of the prisoners in camps during the war. (Any war will do.) They are creatures of the camp, yet each has a duty — not a dream, but a duty — to escape, if he can. He is not a common convict, who deserves his sentence, and has a duty to serve it out. Rather, he is the ward of an enemy who must eventually be defeated. And while he may be polite and “understanding” of his guards through the day — they might be conscripted soldiers, like him, who never chose to be camp guards; they could be “only following orders” — he will be looking for the hole in their fences and defences. I think of incidents in memoirs of captive soldiers. One must escape not only the camp, but from behind enemy lines; and with as many of one’s companions as will come.

But I am speaking by analogy of a spiritual task. Our camp accommodations may be quite pleasant; or at least more pleasant than the prospect of trekking across Siberia. We might be lazy. “There is a lion in my way,” as the sluggard says, in the Book of Proverbs. The task may seem impossible. We would need extraordinary help to spring out. In the Christian religion, Christ is that helper.

“Fear not,” He says, not only in his own Person, but throughout the Bible. Moreover it is Fear that has usually imprisoned us; at some level, perhaps, it is always fear. To be free begins (and perhaps ends) with the conquest of this terror. Not the “management” of it, but the defeat of it.

By this, I could not possibly mean that gentle reader should become a psycho, which he might do via hashish or other drugs, that suppress fear artificially. Rather we must overcome the intimidations of the world, while, in effect, plotting against it; wise as the owl of Athena.

Because we are moderns, it is hard for us to understand the simplest classical phrases. We take Christ for a kind of psychological counsellor. “Fear not” becomes the equivalent of, “don’t worry be happy.” It is part of some mundane scheme for self-improvement, like diets. But as ever with Our Saviour, the meaning is more profound.

He calls us to Freedom — to dangerous Freedom — from the temptations and exclusions of our little enclosed lives. He says, “follow me,” to Freedom, from the world.

From “the world,” I do not exclude politics. The parties of pagan “progress” are desirous of slaves. Their policies are consistently those of the plantation. Their schools are (according to me, as ever) designed to idiotize the general public,  to keep them “low information,” and thus malleable. They manipulate fear — even unreasoning fear of the Batflu — to keep the people in muzzles and chains. They seek to “guide us” in the most petty ways; and they are habitual liars. That is because “the end justifies the means,” for those without faith.

For they, too, are imprisoned by fear. And their worst fear, is that we will be unafraid.

“We must follow The Science,” I have often heard, from blithering idjits who know nothing about science, except that those who question “The Science” must be smeared. The scientists, meanwhile, contradict each other, but this is never an issue until one strays from the party line. That is more serious, for it might shake someone’s faith in Scientism: our established religion, above friends, family, and even the state.

It is a religion that claims infallibility, based on a mystical principle called “Scientific Method,” which does not actually exist and never did, except as a popular delusion. Yet it inspires a welter of banal platitudes, also contradicting one another, as banal platitudes have always done. Unlike, for instance, the Catholic religion, in which a pope has claimed dogmatic infallibility only a couple of times, Scientism claims it every morning with its Corn Flakes, and every evening with its Pringles. It is there at the top of everyday’s world news — which, like all scientistic propaganda, isn’t “world” and isn’t “news.”

For consider, the mediaevals didn’t have newspapers and meejah to black out errant facts, or suppress errant opinions. They weren’t there to demand that everyone “Follow The Science” over hill, dale, and cliff. The mediaevals didn’t have Hollywood or Netflix, either; or modern pharmaceuticals, to pacify the mad. Things were much different.

The modern peasant believes in the pronouncements of Scientism to a far greater degree than the mediaeval peasant believed in Christian Revelation, and is far more obedient to the scientistic authorities than his ancestors ever were to pope or parish priest. Indeed, the more I read of the Dark and Middle Ages, in the West or in the East, the more I learn of times when the world was crawling with atheists and agnostics, heretics, “freethinkers” (though not quite as ridiculous as they are today).

And, too, of the usual “silent majority” of people who are “going along to get along,” as they have done in all ages. They have done this because the alternative is to think for oneself, which is very, very painful. And from fear of what happens if they step out of line, and break the overwhelming solidarity, so that they might be abandoned before scary, violent hordes. (We have Antifa, they had Viking raids.)

Friars, nuns, and theologians were always a minority, as “research scientists” are today, except that the latter are not subject to the public mockery that the former had to endure, when they were exposed as greedy, shameless, rapacious, shysters.

Our modern peasant wouldn’t dare. The moment he is in the presence of a Labcoat, he adopts a submissive posture — usually abject sycophancy — unlike his forefathers, a thousand years ago (except perhaps in the worst Oriental despotisms) when presented with a man wearing clerical robes. Nor would the cleric speak with such casual arrogance, nor pretend to that knowledge of the heavens that the scienticist just smugly announces. Nor, even in pharaonic Egypt, was he enfolded within a quaint moral order (“political correctness”) which changes from day to day, often at his whimsical suggestion.

For our ancient priest had no choice but to be comfortable with genuine variety in appearance and thought. He could not demand enforcement of official “Diversity,” while stomping on the human face.

What the priest had to back him up, in Western Christendom, was a consistent and rational Church doctrine, from which his superiors often deviated, as they do today. There were also scandals, of which many might be vaguely aware, but the mediaeval peasant no more assumed that the scandals undermined the teaching, than the modern peasant thinks that the debaucheries of Labcoats undermine “The Science.”

Among the cleverest ways of losing an audience, is to tell them about your dreams. Well, it is not always done cleverly. A still more general principle, is that things which seem interesting to you, may not interest others. The dream itself may have been quite amusing, and yet, should it require any explanation at all, the game is over.

In the days when I was allowed to speak in public — actually paid, sometimes; or offered an “honorarium” in the hope I would decline — I once tried to explain a dream. I was speaking extempore, and soon realized that I should not have started. My audience were all wearing watches. Perhaps they were looking forward to their own sleepy-time. The more polite yawned, involuntarily. Glazed eyes pleaded with me to reach a conclusion, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it. For vanity had abrogated my wits. Lord, get me out of this parish hall, I prayed. But there was no sudden, viable disturbance, such as an aeroplane crashing.

Soon thereafter I discovered, to my horror, that I had been appointed the “literary executor” of a dear old friend, whose own public speaking had now terminated. His principal “posthumous” work, it turned out, was a book of dreams. For more than forty years, he had recorded every dream he could remember, and richly contextualized them, too. Then typed them up, neatly. From what I could see, there were no “highlights” to be extracted.

Lord, get me out of this, I once again prayed.

The manuscript seemed deep within the 99th centile of books that need not be published. The only possible reader was the author, and he had sadly died. On the other hand, most manuscripts seem like this. One feels sorry for the publishers when one reads them. But we are at a nadir of Western Civ.

I will not deny that God may appear in a vision to a prophet, while he is unconscious. But to the major prophets, such dreamers are likely to be false. Genuine prophets are not instructed to tell their dreams in homilies; or even help us pick our Bingo numbers. They aren’t told to flatter the people, like politicians. Rather, they must tell the people what’s what.

They tell them to wake up. Moreover, they do not tell them to wake eventually. Their alarm sounds now.

Of course, we should be “woke,” in a manner of speaking. But the truly woke are awake to their own depravity, at the root of their many habitual failures — not to some dream that is a sleep within a sleep.

Let me speak as if I were a prophet, new inspired: America, get up now!

Perhaps it could be argued, by some lunatick like me, that the world began going to hell (directly) with the discovery of perspective. It was the first fatal stroke of the “dictatorship of relativism.”

This is a notion that has been teasing me for some time (more than thirty years), and for which I have never come near to acquiring the credentials. But I’ll make my stand, secure in the knowledge that, should gentle reader dismiss everything I say, his bus won’t come any faster.

Actually, my notion began inchoately, longer ago, during arguments with my grandfather — a draughtsman, cartographer, and illuminator, who was a decided fan of High Renaissance painters (though of rather older scripts). A reactionary who truly despised “modern art,” which he compared to soup bones, he nevertheless believed in progress. But he also believed that the progress had stopped about the year 1527. Downhill from there.

He, then his son my father, were apt to teach one the rules of perspective. Whereas I, … was a difficult student from the start. I could see the relevance of perspective to geometry, as it were, but could not see its relevance to art. This was just a fly buzzing in my brain, however.

Time would pass before I was arguing with my father who, as an industrial designer, was even more cutting-edge than my grandpa. Without perspective, his whole trade would be finished. There could be no precision in design for industry, where precision is often required. The machines wouldn’t work.

That did not necessarily strike me as a bad thing. But our argument was more about plastics, on which he was expert, whereas I was “Antipla.” (That’s a kind of Antifa against plastics.) Fortunately, he was quite tolerant of opposing views — “the more absurd the better” — so I was able to live to adulthood.

My real “conversion experience” came while examining mediaeval architectural drawings. Drawn with minimal draughting equipment, without any clew about vanishing points, or even a mild instinct to foreshortening, they could be triumphantly detailed. Too, they would result in cathedrals. Rather than consider the object in any strict directional, angular view, they seemed to unroll it like a scroll.

And so did the representation of pictorial space, in the older (usually anonymous) painters — European and Other, as well as in folk art to the present day. Their innocence made their works friendlier.

Moreover, the geometrically-informed artists by whom I was mesmerized — from Giotto to Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca (this last also a brilliant mathematician) — were exceptions to prove my anti-rule. Each seemed to me (the lunatick) to balance some awareness of perspective by an heroic effort to overcome this “system” in which one object blocks our view of another in an entirely arbitrary way. They would contrive to defeat perspective, even while humouring it, by subtly “scrolling” side-to-side or upward. In this way, their figures could still be presented as if in the round, so we could begin to see behind them without being “perspected.” Distance, to them, was something to be felt, not calculated.

Today, perspective is mechanically employed, even while drawing mush.

Rapes, for instance, of Sabine Women, ought to be presented with all the faces clear, as they would be on a sarcophagus of the 5th century. The police ought to be able to round up all the “perps,” just by examining the painting. This is my principle.

Now, as what we call the “Renaissance” degenerated into projecting everything onto a grid pattern (I have an irrational dislike for Vermeer), we were on our way to snapshot photography. And photography is the opposite of an art. We live now in an age of “pics,” and worse, movies. Not accidentally it is also an age of pornography.

This is of course a very large topic, or would be if we took life seriously. Confident that no one will understand what I have just written, I should return to it frequently.

Perhaps I was the only viewer watching the taxi-meter during the latest soi-disant “debate” in Natted States. I attribute this to all my Caledonian ancestors, on my mama’s side, currently spinning in their respective graves. Or, more precisely, the Scandihoovians who de- and then re- populated Caledonia’s outer islands, probably as a consequence of trying to learn the Gaelic. (In the end they got it, though.)

These ancestors also eventually learnt to count, and that proved to be a great “game changer.” Murder may be in the nature of Scotland’s outer tribes, but extravagance certainly is not.

As the candidates in this “reality show” were speaking, I was toting up their proposed damage. What would their flowery promises cost, to do things like change the world’s climate, or eliminate carbon from our daily lives? A trillion here and a trillion there, as the saying goes. It all adds up.

The candidate on the epistle side of the “debating” stage was, as ever, the more profligate. Each of his generous proposals would cost a trillion or more; usually a few trillion, or many. Plus, there were details that caught my attention, such as a scheme to make all the capitalists pay a minimum wage that would sink them, coupled with a scheme to bail them all out from being sunk. The candidate himself, who struck me as slow-witted, did not seem aware of his joke. Later he proposed to phase out the oil industry.

On the gospel side, the other candidate, who has by his instigations already blown through enough trillions to finance several foreign wars, just trying to fight some virus from China, came across as the fiscal conservative. None of his proposals exceeded the GDP of a large European country.

Granted, this is a little-known fact, but plagues can’t be stopped. This was known before the latest one landed, but has apparently been forgotten. One just has to endure them. Modern medicine may reduce the death toll here, while increasing it there, but hey. Almost all who are infected were following social distancing protocols, and have always been doing so, for the last four millennia, at least. But plagues were designed to sprint around and through them.

Designed, I said. By whom?

Well, I cannot blame the Communist Party of China for any of those which began prior to Saturday, 23rd July, 1921.

But let us not be distracted by mortality. Back to counting money.

As I hinted, I may be the only non-member of a red-state Merican country club who still watches the bills mounting. And I do this even though it gives me pain. I was raised with the idea that frugality is a virtue.

And so, my advice to Merican friends remains: “Vote Trump. He will be slightly cheaper.”

“I was just joking,” says the politician not known for his sense of humour, when caught out with some appalling statement, not in the least funny. Owing to my foolish attention to politics, I have heard this many times.

Yet I appreciate, even from my most irritating enemies, some attempt at dry humour; as I was indicating in that Catholic Thing today (see here). For instance, I once smiled when a very irritating gentleman, asked if he was trying to be funny, replied: “No, I was being psychopathic.”

Keep that up, and I might begin to like him. As it turned out in the moment however, his self-deprecatory dryness did not win the day. For my even more irritating ally then humourlessly attacked him for “admitting” that he was a psycho.

Reagan, of beloved memory, could be rather good at this. He had a mind so simple, that he could perceive contradictions. Example, in answer to a journalist who asked if he was trying to start a nuclear war:

“Why would I want to start a nuclear war, when I am having so much fun oppressing the poor?”

To raise the temperature a bit, I like to bring Christ into it. According to me, Our Lord could be very dry. I cited just two examples in my Thing column, but I hold that it is worth reading through the Gospels again, to find more. If one is lazy, look in one of those Protestant red-letter editions, so that you may go directly to the quotes. But it is worth reading the set-ups, too (in the black letters), for the authors and “compilers” of our Bible could also indulge in subtleties of expression.

So did Shakespeare and Dante; even Goethe. This is among the reasons their works have also remained in print. Or here is a student assignment. Read Homer’s Odyssey, and write me an essay on the topic of “ninnies.” (Hint: the word isn’t Greek. You will have to consider translations.)

I have sometimes thought it would be fun to go out drinking with Homer. (Having recently been cancelled as a “Lit” teacher, I don’t get to ask students ridiculous questions any more.)

But returning, foolishly, to politics, I wonder if we are looking for reforms in all the wrong places. Most political policies and proposals strike me as abnormally stupid, as might appear if we thought them through. Worse, I suspect that they are cynically designed to appeal to an audience that is intellectually feeble. Things are said that might sound plausible at first, but on Housman’s “four minutes’ thought,” could be exposed as unlikely. Fortunately for the politicians, no one seems to have the time at his disposal. For, as Housman continued,  “thinking is hard, and four minutes is a long time.”

I hope that last paragraph sounded sufficiently elitist and condescending. Often I wish that all of God’s children were snobs. That, rather than becoming angry, when they realize that they have been lied to, they would from the beginning have turned up their noses.

But as a compromise, I recommend civilized discourse. Let the politician sometimes say things with a smile, and a wink. Or better yet, without. For he should not use a bludgeon, but prefer sharp witty knives. This, I believe, would change even his godforsaken policies, for the better. For he would make fewer suggestions that were merely shamefully dumb.

Did you know? That, “Racism is the creation of white people”?

Of course you did, if you are young, woke, and poorly educated, like the white woman who is now the British Library’s Chief Librarian. (“Liz Jolly.”) Her statement, in a video to staff last summer, promoting her Decolonizing Working Group, though perfectly acceptable to Guardian subscribers, was mocked by several African and Asiatic scholars who have depended upon that library’s resources over the years. Noting that history is more complicated than Ms Jolly was ever told, they criticized her as “pig ignorant,” &c.

But her explicitly racist “anti-racist” programme proceeds, with aggressive “anti-racist” exhibitions, new “anti-racist” signage, and so forth. The demand to de-acquisition authors who do not reinforce the current ideological stereotypes has not yet gathered to full force, but has started.

The capture of essentially all major cultural institutions by unhinged political fanatics with daddy issues, is among the signs of our times. Those who resist are driven out of employment; those who accede have a lock on the splendidly-paid positions, for which beleaguered taxpayers are billed. The consequences to Western Civ are not trifling.

Perhaps I am unfair to single out just the one career arts bureaucrat, when there are thousands to choose from. I may even be prejudiced, not only against white people like Ms Jolly, but against those of the scheduled races who have cooperated in trashing the institutional heritage of the Big Wen.

For London was my Athens, back in the day, and I take these things personally. My British Museum Library ticket was among my most cherished possessions, and the old Reading Room among my favourite haunts. I am now so old that I can remember when such places were ruled, and staffed, by respectably boring establishment types with Oxbridge degrees.

Yet this is the very class that has suborned itself to the Revolution. It still works on old boy and girl networks, and has become dramatically more smug. But now it dismantles what its ancestors built. The fish-rot starts at the head of British society, as it has in Canada, and throughout America and Europe.

The odd thing, about this morning’s intemperate effusion, is that I meant to write an Idlepost defending printed books. It was only because I was looking something up on the Internet that I tripped into this recent egregious scandal, in what we might call the swamp life of the mind.

For a new generation of reactionaries, old printed books can provide a way to preserve the culture and knowledge now being systematically “re-curated” (i.e. censored and physically destroyed) everywhere I look.

But of course I meant small private libraries, that will have to be hidden from public view, and guarded against electronic penetration; not the extravagant starchitectural wonders that pass for “highbrow” among people who never formed the habit of reading.

Too, as in Aldous Huxley, and the age of Homer, we should be memorizing our most treasured works for the dark age to come. Intelligent schooling, even rote learning must, like the Catholic Church, survive underground. It is a task from which much good might emerge. Or at the least, it will give us something to do, while we await the Apocalypse.