Essays in Idleness

The daily count of deaths from the Red Chinese Batflu is among the prized, scare-mongering features of our mass media. I am among those who consider these numbers to be significantly overstated, for a reason that Nikolai Gogol would understand. Each corpse is worth cash to some public authority, usually from a higher authority; and as always, finally from the taxpayers. Each also saves money for government programmes, that can be reallocated to the purchase of new votes. As the corpse providers from this virus are very old, and suffering from other life-threatening conditions, in almost every case, this statistical inflation is easy to perform. Death certificates are issued for any who died with “Covid-19,” whether or not they died from it, and more are then added of those who were never tested. Anything respiratory will do. It’s all judgement calls — on which side of the bread is buttered.

Compare if you will the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 and 1969. I was just reading a memoir, from down that memory hole. The death toll was actually higher then, than ours is now, and from within a smaller population; the victims included children and the young. Yet there were no interruptions in economic life; no public emergency theatricals; and at the height of the second wave of that scourge, we had events like Woodstock. (Those were the days, my friend.)

A neat way to correct for all our “judgement calls” might be to look at overall death rates, and see if they have risen or fallen. It is too early to get a clear view, but soon it may be too late, for vested interests will have tampered with them. All my life I have been learning to trust statistics, less — especially from those who dress in labcoats and affect that earnest look. Sometimes an exception must be considered, however. An unpredictable minority may be honest; some others might get numbers right by mistake.

But in judging the “impact” of our pandemic, my standard of comparison is the iatrogenic toll. That is, the aggregate dead from medical errors (which are of many different kinds). The number per year in USA is estimated by their respected National Academy of Medicine (who have no motive for overestimating) at well over 200,000. Their definitions are narrow; the truth could be that the doctors (and their assistants) kill off twice that. One may add another four times for abortions, which takes us to a million at least. These are all people who might have lived, had they been spared medical attention. Except the abortions, few are intentionally murdered, of course. And balancing this, I admit, lives are also saved, even in the ICUs.

So currently we are at about one-twentieth of the iatrogenic toll.

My own suspicion is that the ratio, of those killed to those saved by medical intervention, has remained fairly constant over the years, since distant antiquity. I would include witch-doctoring and the like, were I researching figures. As a general rule, I think pseudo-scientific arrogance cancels gains from technical innovations, unless we count soap and water as high-tech.

The numbers are confused by the medicalization of modern life, with its many layers of unintended consequences. People do get sick, and even die, in the state of nature; but the pre-modern means of coping with this were better. They were not made sick by constant suggestion; they had nothing like the modern states of depression, with their terrible fallout in suicide, hypochondria, and addictions.

I was not surprised to learn, years ago, that during the Saskatchewan doctors’ strike of 1962 (against the imposition of “socialized” medicine), the death rate actually fell. I will not be surprised when I learn that it did so during this pandemic, too — wherever medical treatment was denied for any other illness than the Batflu.

“Listen to the science,” the unctuous have said. I think we might live longer if we didn’t.

My Chief Michigan Birding Correspondent, who reports the arrival of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks this morning, at his black oil sunflower feeder — a week or more in advance of their usual appearance — also mentions that I have used sharp words in my Idleposts several times recently. A submarine sailor in one of his own past lives, he admits to having thrown off colourful language himself, “especially when overly fatigued by the stupidity of the overall situation.” But perhaps I have been taking the news too seriously.

Naturally, I consult the housefinches on my balconata, who must themselves be well informed, as they persist in maintaining six feet of distance from me, whether I’m proposing to feed them or not. Alas, none of them confess to having read my Idleposts lately, or having an opinion, on anything, really. Others have commented this last week — but these not housefinches but Australians. Canada’s only surviving reactionary poet (now that the other one has migrated to the States) took the contrary view, and cited the comportment of Saint Michael, when debating with the Great Serpent. (His attitude towards e.g. Justin Trudeau is less sympathetic than mine. I did not think that was possible.)

My own view is that one should try always to use the mot juste, and if that happens to be, for instance, “bullshit,” then so it goes. But my Michigander is right. One should not take the news too seriously. More often one should inquire of a grosbeak, or grosbec as the French more elegantly call them, not for his political views, but to hear his song, which has been likened to that of a robin who has taken singing lessons. I, to be honest, have never heard a grosbeak swear. On the other hand, I’ve never met a grosbeak in a submarine.

Many of these grosbeaks wear blackface, incidentally. But none is so low as, say, the Governor of Virginia.

Forty-five years since the fall of Saigon, seventy-five since the fall of Berlin, six hundred and forty since the death of Catherine of Siena — the anniversaries have been falling thick and fast this week. For an Idleblogger it has been an embarras de richesses. The first two of those events fill my head with the images of so many long dead, and perpetually beloved; and too, with so much business unfinished, that will never be finished in this world. One thing follows another, downhill, as we recall each catastrophe, and with it the miracle that some of us have lived.

An article in the New-York Post (here) brings one historical event back into view, with a bitterness I haven’t yet overcome. It is only an aside on an old photo-caption, which like so many others from the Vietnam War was, shall we say, inaccurate. Taken for a symbol, it has passed into our electronic folk memory, as one of innumerable lies it contains. I wasn’t there, of course, but I had visited that country, and once, too briefly, lived in Saigon. The (very consequential) deceit, dishonesty, and faithlessness of “the mainstream media” was among the lessons I took from my apprenticeship. My ludicrous ambition, to “correct it” some day, will never be fulfilled. But to the link: my praise to one writer who did his homework. Let me be grand and say, the truth has set him free.

It will soon be fifty years since I first attended the “Five O’Clock Follies” at “MAC-V,” where the best hamburger in South-east Asia could be obtained for the price of a chocolate bar. This press conference format — bluster and counter-bluster — has not changed in all this time. Everything in that vast sprawling compound of military administration was sprayed, swept, and polished; I always entered with wide eyes. There, and in bars along Tu-Do Street (the old rue Catinat, once an exquisite ribbon from the Cathedral down lines of fragrant tamarinds), was where I first fell in with “real professional journalists,” practising their trade.

Those I met were, by and large, pathological liars, and extremely vain. They were also coarsely disrespectful, much like our journalists today: rudely cynical and sarcastic. The only serious exceptions I came to know were a couple of religious weirdos — one a Lutheran ex-pastor from West Germany, the other a reject from a Catholic seminary in southern France. They, like me, had strayed into the field, from a misplaced sense of adventure.

At all levels, and on all sides, I was witnessing a freak show — there and wherever I wandered outside the Unreal City. I owned a reliable Nikkormat camera, that would sometimes earn me much-needed cash, but was quite unsuccessful as a print journalist. My earnest despatches, sent to newspapers on spec, were routinely “spiked” — not, I think, because I was so young (they didn’t know that), but because I kept, often unknowingly, writing things that contradicted what the New York Times and CBS were reporting.

Not only was I learning that the “mainstream” was all lies, but too, that it invariably followed an agenda. The self-appointed purpose of the press was to sabotage the American war effort. (That of the life-or-death desperate Viets was, at best, ignored.)

But then, I was deceitful, too. I was pretending to be over 18 when I was still only 17, in order to get a press pass.

War zones can be grim, but they can also be the happiest and most uplifting places, and I have the fondest memories of people, especially brave GIs, who were caught up in that one. Seldom will there ever be a seriously difficult human situation to which one of the humans does not rise, and that includes the Mekong Delta. I have names to visit on that monument in Washington, DC. Indefensibly, I also have names that I have forgotten.

I lived with friends, for a time, in a magnificently decaying French colonial mansion, out Tan Binh way, almost to the Tan Son Nhut air base; my bedroom directly above a little arms cache. (I was the lowest-ranking member of the household.) It had been overrun during the Tet Offensive, and was therefore surrounded, above one storey of garden wall, with two storeys of barbed wire. Very loud C&W music could be heard from a USO juke box next door. In the evenings, from the flat roof, one could smoke ganja and watch the Phantom jets light up rice fields around the city with their flares, for the pilots were curious about Viet Cong movements.

One day I had the honour of being picked up in a jeep, by military police, on the suspicion that I was AWOL from the army. I finally agreed to show my passport, with the lion and unicorn gilded on the front. That farce, and many others, including thrilling rides in helicopters upcountry (at the expense of the American taxpayer), and nearly-free misordered stuff at the Cholon “PX,” was my vantage into an extremely populous bureaucracy that, with resources beyond imagining, was assiduously losing the war.

But I was very young, and by nature and upbringing an anti-communist; more broadly, against murder and massacre, as young idealists sometimes are. I never fell for the anti-war bullshit. I had indeed arrived in Saigon, gung-ho for the Yankees; and left, still believing that they should change their minds, and win.

In years past, I would rely on a date book, to remind me of important public events. I had one, for instance, fifty years ago, in which the 200th anniversary of the Botany Bay landing was pre-printed. It wouldn’t have been necessary to consult it, however, for the visit of Her Majesty the Queen to Australia was then prominent in the news. It was, undoubtedly, a glorious anniversary, of which all Australians — note that I wrote, “all” — could be proud. I recall feeling almost antipodean myself that day, for I had been blessed with Australian acquaintance from a very early age; and have been ever since. I could fill pages with memoir of impressive characters I have met from that “far south.”

To a Canadian, that island continent is also a special place for the heart, coloured pink on our old classroom maps of the world: our brothers and our sisters of the Britannic realm.

Captain Cook himself, the first European to look upon Australia’s east coast, with what I must guess was “a wild surmise,” remains by any standard a hero. His feats as navigator — as explorer, surveyor, and cartographer — are in several ways unmatched and unrepeatable in the history of the world.

Australia was only a part of his discoveries and researches, and in Canada’s Newfoundland he also deserves his monument. I have stood upon that hill, over the city of Corner Brook, amid the Blomidon Mountains, and viewed at dusk that water passage, with its string of holy outports, to our own Bay of Islands. It was Captain Cook who accurately surveyed the entrance to the Saint Lawrence, thus speeding General Wolfe to Quebec. Captain Cook stands there in statue, with his quadrant, and likewise stands in statue on our opposite frontier, upon that island named for his protégé, George Vancouver. His noble Whitby collier, the HMS Endeavour, sailed right around the world, and her crew endured terrible privations, to achieve what they did.

Yesterday was the 250th anniversary. Two more generations have now flit by, and as I learn from Australian correspondents, it is not just the Batflu that has tamped celebrations. The Marxist filth are a virus in Australia as they are everywhere else — we saw their work recently in the incarceration of the obviously innocent Father Pell. Wherever great accomplishments of men would be commemorated, for the inspiration of the young and free, these vicious and ignorant “antifa” creatures will be there instead, in their ghoulish costumage, spreading their moral stench. Nihilists, they condemn events upon which their own existence still depends.

It is our duty as civilized men and women to confront these “post-modern” savages, and drive them off, until once more they can be ignored and, except by the devil, forgotten.

For my birthday this morning, the asteroid “(52768) 1998 OR2” is waving “Hiya!” as he whips by my native planet, from the close distance of four million miles, at a speed of nearly 17,000 knots. He is only a mile or two wide, but NASA tells us that’s good enough for an extinction event, and so we’re not to play chicken with him. I, however, am sick of being told what to do by officious, control-freak science types. They name these things as if they were diseases, and even on a red-letter day like today, are no fun at all.

The asteroid himself would appear to be tumbling in his habitually cheerful way, as he essays his closest approach to the Sun and, I assume, adjusts his make-up slightly. (Is he wearing black-face?) Wanting a better view, I have consulted Internet astronomy sites, but he is hard to resolve amid the fundraising pop-ups and subscription offers.

Of course he never asked, and probably didn’t expect to be treated with august formality on the one hand, or even a sporting levity on the other, by an Earth-based space agency, in this age of crass commercialism. Best to ignore us, and go shooting along. As his orbit approximately intersects with ours, he will have more opportunities to test our responses. On this pass, hills and ridges at one of his ends make it look like he is wearing a Batflu mask. But while he is classified as a PHO (“potentially hazardous object”) he is not anti-social, and is just waving d’accord, and then, adieu, adieu, adieu.

Salut, mon petit astéroïde!

He will return in 2079, I gather, when I will be enjoying my 126th solar revolution, unless I have moved. By some Australian calculation he will pass within one million miles next time. We will still need a telescope to see him. Frankly, I’d prefer an asteroid that can be seen with the naked eye, and pull up some tide. But then I am a thrill-seeker; today I plan to attempt another walk, if I can make it, right across Parkdale.

Given that they have been wildly wrong in each of their predictions about the course of the Red Chinese Batflu, I have no confidence whatever in expert predictions. It is a mystery to me why anyone has, in epidemiology or any area I have observed over the years. About the only thing I would predict with confidence is: “We will fail to predict the future.” The closest we can ever do is to predict what won’t happen, from elementary common sense. When the number of variables is tiny, this may give us some hint. Or we may guess what always happens, because it is a law of nature. If, unaided by any sort of prop, you step off the parapet of a tall building, you will plunge to the ground. This is not a statistical probability: it is 100 percent.

Some of the “rules of economics” are like that. If you spend more, you have less. At some point you go into debt, no matter how much you had to start with. Even Charles Dickens understood this, though like any sentimental progressive, he didn’t like it. There are consequences to going into debt, which will grow the larger the debt is. From this, we enter politics, where we may try to abrogate such rules. All schemes of deficit financing end badly, though it is often possible for one administration to pass onto the next. Eventually, however, someone has to pay, even when the politicians succeed in transferring the load onto another generation. We can’t predict how the disaster will occur, only that it will. By the study of human nature, we can reasonably expect that those consequences will be worse than we foresaw.

Happily, pandemics may be better or worse. The one we have now has, in defiance of very grave epidemiological predictions, proved better so far. Only a couple hundred thousand have died. We can’t know, and we should know we can’t know the future, from the history of pandemics. For instance, serological tests “prove” that the asymptotic are the overwhelming majority of those infected. But maybe they will show real symptoms later. Millions, including many young, will start dropping dead from strokes. Or perhaps they won’t. We’ll see.

We’ll see what happens in the summer, then in the fall. For now, pandemic deaths are falling sharply, and we attribute this to our lockdown. That the rise, crest, and decline of these deaths has followed roughly the same statistical pattern, whether there was a lockdown or not, is interesting. Not having tried such an act of tyranny before, we can have nothing to compare with that lockdown. Still we can say that the virus is indifferent to our measures, and speculate that future waves will not consult our wishes, either.

For all our medical hubris, we are more or less defenceless. A vaccine or some therapeutics may reduce the toll slightly, during a wave, as it does with conventional influenzas each year, but we’ve never had much luck with vaccines against coronaviruses, and are at sea on much physiology. Some die, others live, because individual immune responses are widely variable; we haven’t learnt much except in our imaginations. When we learn more against the last Sars we may know more about the next one, but again, maybe not.

This is what we can say about the future of the Batflu: that we don’t know, and can’t. It may disappear tomorrow. It may grow suddenly much worse. It may seem to disappear, then return.

But whatever it does, if we don’t get back to work, we will starve. We are already watching “supply chains” break down, including some for food, here in North America. I flinch to think of Africa, where conditions for famine are already well advanced, including locust swarms — now also crossing the Middle East. Everywhere, arrangements to merely slow (not end) the Batflu seriously hinder the response to famine.

Fear has been abetted, much of it for obvious political purposes by those who actually want to wreck the economy because they think it is the only way to defeat Trump, or stealth-legislate their political agendas. This derangement is acute in politicians, not only Left but Right, who get a kind of erotic thrill from their newfound powers, which they long to keep. It is reinforced by the arrogance of specialized “medical experts.”

It will be interesting now to see whether this psychic “pandemic” can be tamed: whether people, long cowed by their Nanny States, will find the courage to resist the latest micromanagement. This is where the battiness of progressive ideology most tells, after generations of leftwing infiltration and agitprop — a holdover from the 20th century. Again, we will see what happens. If we are lucky, under pressure of events, “progressiveness” might even become a target, and “wokeness” might be eliminated entirely. All trends are reversible, as I like to say. If we are unlucky, the human race will suffer instead. Courage is among the unpredictables.

As recent popes have said, we must choose: to be on the side of life, or on the side of death. This controversy has been with us for some time.

As Isaiah said: “Choose life!”

Jesus Christ did not hold press conferences. We can see now why He did not. Can you imagine what the hacks would have reported, had Our Lord been engaging with their malice daily? As things stand, we get little hints from the Gospels, of what the hacks of that age were doing with His more paradoxical and parabolic statements.

I was thinking this when reading reports of a Trump press conference. The Natted States President spoke unguardedly about the health advantages of sunlight, heat, and bleach. The hacks reported this as something like, “Trump recommends injecting Lysol and drinking Clorox.”

Were I Trump, I would have doubled down in a Tweet, declaring that, “For sure, if you pump enough Lysol into your veins, and chug a pint or two of bleach, you will NOT get the Chinese Batflu. You will also qualify for a Darwin Award.”

I would then say that Dr Fauci had confirmed this.

When the virus first hit us, we knew so little about it, that in retrospect we can justify almost any fool thing. The idea of closing down whatever the politicians thought “inessential” seemed plausible at the time. By now we know enough to say that our forty-day lockdown was a catastrophic mistake. It was not just economic suicide. Deaths were almost certainly increased by it, overall.

Gentle reader will find evidence around the Internet. I cannot be bothered to fetch it for him.

Had we instead, from the start, instructed everyone to behave as if they were Swedish (Canadians can be quite good at this), the Batflu would have spread in roughly the same way. We should indeed have closed our borders (permanently, to Red China, for this was one Sars-lab accident too many), and maybe indoor chess tournaments. But not baseball, if it were played in the open air.

I don’t deny that the Xi Jinping Batflu can be a real killer: as bad as one of the worst flu seasons (when added to the flu). But trying to defeat it in the Red Chinese manner, by locking everyone up in their cells, is possibly more stupid than it is evil. It creates a secondary disaster significantly greater than the (unavoidable) primary one. We now experience it, as we try to reopen.

A traumatized population now crawls out of its confinement. Their immune systems were compromised during their captivity, in the absence of sunlight, exercise, and fresh air. (I, at least, had Dettol.) Their exposure to the virus was only delayed. Nature’s voluble prison keepers now wait to pounce, as the caseload once again rises. I recommend badass responses to them.

Thank God, sumer is icumen in. As so often, God is our only friend. Welcome the sun, the air, the fields, streams, and beaches.

Oh, and prepare yourself. You are going to have to get back to work when your pogey runs out.

We need much more testing, as we reopen Western economies. While I cannot see the point of much more testing for Batflu infection, now that it is known to be and to have been at large through the general population, and critical cases announce themselves in hospital emergency rooms, there is an argument for the serological tests that give us a better view of Batflu epidemiology, including fresh insights into its nature and methods of proliferation. We may learn things like, does it kill one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand? This may help us prepare for a resurgence in the fall, or at any other time(s) in the future. In the absence of any immediate prospect of a safe or effective vaccine (we still haven’t got one for the last coronavirus, after many years), it may prove a boon to therapeutic researchers.

At worst, no harm can come from obsessive testing of these two kinds, except for the extravagant expense that we are now used to. Both may give those returning to work some peace of mind, and at a time of panic, this may help to restore some sobriety. But neither will much enlighten us on the origins of the pandemic, which will require the sort of “humint” (human intelligence) spycraft at which the Red Chinese have proved themselves far more adept. Too, we face Communist success in distributing malicious disinformation. (The “Wuhan wet market” story displayed their cynical brilliance). They do this with ease through our progressive media.

Pro-Chinese Communist agents of influence dominate more than our “fake news,” however, where the crudeness and stupidity of our journalists is too obvious. They have infiltrated other institutions tirelessly, and have the money to buy off many who, without this corruption, would know better. The kind of blackmail the Communists can exert against everyone from powerful businessmen with Chinese investments to protect, to prominent scholars and diplomats bought into the globalist fairy tales, down even to sponsored basketball players — ranges from the overt to the exquisite.

By comparison, Communist Russian efforts during the Cold War were modest, and often embarrassingly clumsy. The Soviets lacked such a galaxy of agents. Owing to inferior propaganda, they could not dominate our news cycles as flunkeys of the CCP have learned how to do. They were amateurs when it came to exploiting the pathological “white guilt,” that continues to be an object of the Red Chinese. The latter have become real professionals at seeding infective memes. They are able to spread allegations of “racism,” “xenophobia,” and “paranoia,” against the very people who see their threat most clearly, and make the plainest distinctions between the victimized Chinese people and the monstrous dictatorship that controls them.

The scale of technological theft is also known to be vast. The Red Chinese laugh at fussy Western concepts, such as “property rights.” Their economy, like the much less successful Soviet Russian economy before it, suffers from the domestic oppression of inventors and entrepreneurs, by the suspicious hand of socialist bureaucracy. The state needs to steal its most useful ideas from abroad. The vast network of PRC students and professors on Western campuses is only one dimension of this.

It thus strikes me that, in the course of disengaging from both the Xi Jinping Batflu and the Xi Jinping State, we need a testing programme. We should examine not only Chinese recently settled in the West, but many of our own in an objective, scientific way. This would hardly be racist, for all those sympathizing with Taiwan, or with freedom fighters in Hong Kong, &c, would be welcome to stay.

Only those from China or other foreign citizens (WHO and UN staff, &c) who test positive for allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party would be sent home. Those who test positive but can’t be extradited could be quarantined, indefinitely. As with any lethal and destructive disease, our intention should be to eradicate it.

When the Calgary Stampede is cancelled, one might begin to take the Batflu seriously. There were some preliminary indications in the international death tolls. As the overwhelming majority of victims have multiple “co-morbidities,” however, these counts are arbitrary. The meejah have been able to find a small selection of young, healthy people who were struck down, too, in order to improve the scare. That guvmints all over have locked down their populations might, at first, seem another clue, but the day is long passed when I took a political response to be evidence of anything.

Endure this for a moment. It is my general approach to the Red Chinese Batflu crisis. An open mind, if anyone had one, might postulate a general overreaction. The Swedes, and South Dakotans, to say nothing of others, have shown that if, instead of a Maoist lockdown, we’d simply asked the people to use their brains, we’d get approximately the same death curves on the charts that we get from letting the state bully them. What we wouldn’t get, is a way to appease the Nanny Statists.

They are long-practised in the art of going berserk when they don’t get their way. Our meejah are long-practised in the art of amplifying their holler. Citizens of the modern West are now practised in the art of being pushed around, and have mastered the complacency that is needed while watching their tax money being flushed down various progressive toilets. Our economies are based on massive transfers from those who earn, to those who whine.

Let me expose my own pointless indulgence in meejah reports, by the theft of another story. It appears that Prickles the Sheep has been recaptured, after escaping from a fold in Tasmania. This now-celebrated champion of self-isolation survived in the bush for seven years. Her fleece had grown considerably during this retreat, from the usual hairdressing routines. Locked down once again in her pasture, she will now be paradoxically restyled. I doubt that she will like that. If gentle reader can guess the weight of her woolly locks, I gather, he may win a prize.

Here I wish Mabel Henrietta née Jevon, my paternal grandmother, were still with us. I have a photograph of her winning a classic Kelvinator, for guessing how much frozen food it contained. She was a superhuman estimator of weights and volumes.

But getting back to Prickles, I propose to make her into a religious symbol. Let her stand for all those Catholics abandoned by the neo-pagans who now control the Vatican. Churches everywhere are now closed, but none tighter than those in Red China, where our pope has directed all Catholics to turn themselves in, to the Communist authorities. Some won’t. Some of those may succeed in hiding.

Many all over the world have already become “bush Catholics,” self-isolated from what is rapidly becoming a self-persecuting Church, under extremely contemptible management. Pope Francis hectors these people in vain, with his asinine “Amazon” and “climate change” homilies.

My piece in the Catholic Thing today (here), touches on one dimension of this phenomenon.

One of the first indications that England might be going squishy, was the replacement of Edward the Confessor as her patron saint, by Saint George in the 14th century. While I have no objection to the slaying of dragons, or even of foreigners in certain situations, my view of nationalism tends towards the grim, and I’m particularly suspicious of pop enthusiasms. Saint George has had the misfortune to be associated with jingo thuggery, especially in the far West (England; also Portugal, &c).

Shakespeare’s celebration of Henry V is more ambiguous than, I think, England’s patriotic scholars have assumed. I do not think the dramatist concealed the thug aspect in King Henry’s manipulation of chauvinist emotions on the battlefield. He was orchestrating carnage. Saint George in the West has ever been depicted on the attack.

I prefer his muscular, yet gentler behaviour in the East, for instance Ethiopia and of course Georgia, and even among the Crusaders, rescuing lost Christian tribes. For here Saint George’s rôle as a defender of scattered Christians is the better pronounced. Remember that even before the Mussulmans, we had to deal with the Parsis, who were the more aggressive, once upon a time. Indeed, we sometimes welcomed the Arabs, at first, to save us from worse enemies. Too, there is an aspect of Saint George, that I detect in eastern icons, where the spooky flavour of an Elijah is presented in his character.

Today, for instance, I pray towards Saint George for the succour of our persecuted Christians in Red China. May he slay the Communist dragon.

But in England, at the Protestant Reformation, his image was flown as a replacement for all religious flags, and made a symbol for the Tudors, finally against their pope. His cross became the maritime symbol, and flew on that remarkable fleet of ships that first extended English commerce, across the wide seas. They were engaged mostly in piracy, against the chiefmost Catholic power of the time. I insist that we retain this detail.

My association of violence with mental squishiness may be deemed controversial, however. To me it seems obvious, and to others it might, if they made it a topic for philosophical contemplation. It is when the hard unchangeables of our Faith are selectively abandoned, and the empty spaces they leave are plugged with crowd emotions, that we become the worst representatives of ourselves. This is where the blubbering squishiness  comes in: where sentimentality invades our reason. It is all blancmange or custard on the surface, but beneath this we find the howling murderous rage.

From the latest photographs I see that it is a clear day in Delhi. By eliminating almost all motorized traffic, shutting down all construction sites, closing a dozen coal-fired generators, and this and that, particulate levels in the world’s most air-polluted capital city have fallen to less than half the previous normal. Higher-caste residents are quoted expressing their amazement at how clean the air is, and the pleasure they take in breathing. India’s poor, and Delhi’s, may take a different view, but unknown to our global media.

It is Earth Day, the fiftieth anniversary, and this year I may feel it unnecessary to turn every electric device in my apartment on for Earth Hour, and leave the refrigerator door open. The truth is, that this had little effect anyway, for my instinctively neo-Luddite habits had long since minimized my electrical consumption, and limited my collection of artificially powered gadgets. Too, my Scottish genetic heritage kicks in. I can only bear to leave the fridge door open for about three minutes, and the stovetop burning long enough to make tea. My commitment to “iniquity signalling” is shamefully lax.

I would actually like the air to be cleaner (as it is in all developed countries), and less plastic to be floating in the oceans (mostly from the underdeveloped ones). I would also like the great sprawling conurbations, both East and West, to be downsized, broken into self-reliant neighbourhoods, detoxified, humanized instead, ticky-tack suburbs returned to farmland, and so forth. My plans for this are poorly thought through, and may be as incoherent as any fruitcake environmentalist’s. …

Well, not that incoherent. I’ve left out the maglev trains.

From the age in which I was raised, I retain at least one Whole Earth principle. The hippie it came from was Immanuel Kant. He called it the “categorical imperative,” and held that, for all sentient creatures, the central commandment of reason is to do as you’d be done by. Gentle reader will note that I amended it, discarding Kant’s universalist calculations, and substituting the implicit and explicit commandment of Jesus of Nazareth, the Saints, Moses, Socrates, the Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tan, and older moral authorities. We must not pretend that the Enlightenment changed anything, unless it was to install atheism as the default position for reason itself — which in turn leads to the abandonment of all inconvenient forms of human decency, the innumerable revolutionary massacres that followed, aborting our own children, &c.

Some hippies sometimes glimpsed the ancient truths, on their mentally clear days, grasping if only briefly that “power tripping” is the opposite of goodness.

We should try to recover our moral poise. This involves the replacement of feigned by legitimate reason, and its supplement by wisdom and faith. For better or worse, however, these possessions can be acquired by only one person at a time, through humble and unceasing work.

Earth Day, by contrast, is a celebration of eco-arrogance and vanity, for all the proponents of “structural change.” (This is the current slogan-code for the imposition of socialism.) It is an example of exactly what blocks the advancement of all such unstructured activities as kindness, devotion, loyalty and love.

One is reminded of Typhoid Mary by an item in this morning’s Beeb. She was the Irish girl from County Tyrone who became the talk of New York around the turn of the last century. This she accomplished as a domestic cook. A classic “asymptomatic,” she spread the disease she was carrying to all of her employers and their families; and went through quite a lot of them, for they all died of typhoid. Or, most: journalists told the story, so we will never get it straight. But Mary Mallon herself never got sick. The yellow press lord, William Randolph Hearst, took up her cause, when she was confined on North Brother Island — now a bird sanctuary, but where the smallpox hospital then was. (A nice story in itself, up the East River.) His long deceased newspaper, and their obscurely paid lawyers, got her sprung as an “innocent victim.” But as the trail of death followed her under each of her subsequently assumed names, she was eventually returned to isolation — public sympathy for her having expired.

As unlucky Irish immigrants go, Miss Mallon (finally died 1938) is something of a legend. At least she achieved fame. The same has seldom been realized by history’s other millions of disease spreaders.

We have no idea what the asymptomatic carriers of the novel coronavirus — your Batflu, as I call it — will do. Oh, and let me mention that it came from Red China, and was hosed on the rest of the world intentionally by the CCP (which locked down Wuhan within China, but left international flights open).

Sooner or later we may learn a few reliable things about it. Society — “the economy” — will reopen whether or not a vaccine is discovered (it is no sure thing). There will be “second waves,” perhaps thirdsies, and millions may yet die. Or, the disease will start disappearing from the news in mid-May. Please read this carefully: We don’t know.

We don’t know about many things in this world, though we think we know, which is why we are such prey to surprises. It is why Religion is the Most Essential Service. Only those at peace, with themselves and their Lord, have a chance at coping. That puffball, Trump (I’ve come to quite like him), says that our present contagion is like nothing we’ve ever seen. In fact, while it is “novel,” so once were all of the others which afflicted the human race (which includes Chinese, Blacks, Brown, and even White People) since time out of mind, and will do in the future.

What to do about them? Social distancing is very old hat. Soap was a useful invention of the Babylonians, and its frequent application an important development of the late Victorians. Some medicines are exceptional (most are a waste of money). I’m a great fan of vaccines, and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and how she learnt things from the Ottomans at Constantinople.

But it is the custom of killer viruses and bacteria to steal a lead on us, when they first break out; and even after we have got the cut of their jib, to still find ways to sink us. Life involves risk, and will not cease to do so. The management of risk will always be a makeshift.

I really wish people would master these platitudes. We should embrace our inner banality.

For that matter, economic collapse is not a novelty either, and while it is the product of human imbecility in almost every instance, that does not mean it is going to stop happening. I marvel at the self-destruction of our commerce, in order not even to stop the Batflu, but to slow it down, so we can enjoy it longer. Whereas, I am hardly enjoying it at all.

As an antiblogger, I am sometimes curious about such competition as may be offered by blogs, and this morning I became aware of a new one: here. What a marvellous thing, I reflected. I credit the gentleman I believe to have been chiefly responsible for its creation, Mr Michael Gove, a minister of state in the United Kingdom.

If gentle reader will peruse the content I have flagged, he will see that, in a plain, clear, timely and decisive way, it utterly demolishes an “insight” article published in the previous day’s Sunday Times. It does so in about the space required, without unnecessary rhetorical flourishes. It does, more serenely, what the American president less serenely attempts in some of his press conferences: to highlight and expose fraudulent and irresponsible work by those whose trade is to circulate garbage. This (street-cleaning or trash removal, as it were) is an important public service.

Although a man of the 13th century I must say that, before the current pandemic, I used to take holidays in the 18th century. This, unfortunately, was where I acquired my propensity to journalism and diffuse prose-writing, and an excessive familiarity with the origins of modern, so-called “enlightened” literature. I once delivered extempore at King’s College, Halifax (the original of Columbia University in New York), a term’s worth of public blather on “The Lives of the Hacks,” sketching this modern history from Defoe and the periodical essayists forward to our later journalists, novelists, and “generations of swine.” I contrasted this enterprising, business tradition with the older arrangements in which journalists were invariably bought, not sold. (Today, they are once again mostly bought.) They were the running dogs of the powerful, or in some cases, their barking, biting antagonists, until either bought off or “retired.”

Oddly, I favoured the new, capitalist arrangements, of the “free press,” even though it frankly contributed to public literacy (even women were accepted as readers), and other indelicacies. The world would become an unhappier place, as more and more information became available. But hélas!

That was nearly thirty years ago, and since, I have become more conservative and backward-looking. I have inwardly concluded that the whole modern experiment is a mistake, though I have had to concede its prevalence. I consider it as a form of plague — intellectual and spiritual — such that, we must seek what antidotes we can find to survive, as we await divine intervention.

One of these antidotes is true information. The old-fashioned (essentially 17th-century) method of commissioning writers to post calm and reasonable refutations to false and malicious reports, is what has been essayed in my link. It is the best that can be hoped in a time when most if not all commercial journalism is not only false, and malicious, but morally degenerate and obscene.

Ideally, we could still have a few newspapers that tried to be factual, and impartial, and to omit rubbish, at least from their news columns. Of course, they would be dull, grey, and sell poorly among the functionally illiterate. But they would serve that tiny minority who need or want to know what is happening in the world, as well as what is not happening. Given the latest technology, perhaps this material could be posted online.

Up here in the High Doganate, we still try to advance the notion of a “free press” — that is, a press that is free of putrid, stinking garbage. We hope to be able to stay out-of-date in this way.