Essays in Idleness

It would seem there is a consensus, that after one hundred years, the question in my title has been settled in the affirmative. Of course women should have the vote. But I’m a Thomist by disposition. When an article begins, “It would seem,” you can bet I am itching to confute the proposition. So yes, to be sure, Emmeline Pankhurst won; and after her, Virginia Woolf; and then Betty Friedan; and now, Rosie O’Donnell. But as the old saying goes, “Who’s afraid of Emmeline Pankhurst?” … &c.

Why don’t we ask the question afresh, now that we have a century of empirical data on this radical innovation. Should women have the vote?

Should anyone?

My own answer will be, it depends on the woman. Surely, in most cases, the answer must be no. In my opinion, the answer should also be no for most men, but that would be an evasion. We’re only discussing the women’s vote today, whether here or in any of the centenary celebrations. Let’s leave men out of this.

A socialist of my vague acquaintance once brought the house down — on his own head, as it turned out — by mordantly observing that, “The problem with stereotypes is, they’re all true.” They are especially true of women. Thousands of stereotypes apply to them, and while there are innumerable contradictions between one stereotype and another, I’m sure there is a context for each. (The same could be said of men, but again, we’re not discussing them today.)

I have met some very impressive women. But I have met some unimpressive ones, too, and found they are the majority. I won’t comment on men, but I’ve noticed that most women vote according to their “feelings.” They know nothing about the policies at issue, and make remarks on the candidates that focus entirely on their externals. They empathize with the oddest things, and cannot detach themselves from strange and unaccountable follies. Subtract the women’s vote from all the elections in the last century, and we are retroactively spared some of the most irritating (i.e. liberal) public figures. Subtract it, and the “pretty boys” don’t stand a chance. On the other hand, we’d still get Margaret Thatcher.

There are masculine and feminine qualities, within each human being. This does not mean we’re all hermaphrodites. Nor can it mean that the qualities are equally useful, regardless of the matter at hand. For instance, a certain masculine range is of value, when considering the more vexing questions.

Thus, the sort of women who should be compelled to vote are, to my mind, the very sort who wonder if women should be voting.

It was the wisdom of our ancestors to attach property qualifications to the vote. This was not the wisdom of all our ancestors, though; only the ones with property. But since those with little or no property couldn’t vote, the system was relatively stable. Yes, they had gin riots and the like, but these would fold when the gin ran out. People — in this case mostly drunken men — would remember their place, and go home. A good sprinkling of rotten boroughs kept Parliament from becoming too imaginative. I’m with the Duke of Wellington on that one.

For years, I thought simply restoring the property qualifications might fix the mess, rather than tampering with the sex balance. But then I realized that rich people are as foolish as poor ones. Indeed, the rich get crazier as they get richer: we would need a maximum as well as a minimum cut-off. But then we’d be prey to the middle class.

Now, I must mention John Stuart Mill, a rogue male. He was not the usual violent kind, but a notorious wuss. (There was a woman behind him, who pushed him about.) He demanded equal voting rights for both sexes as early as 1867 — in his squeaky, fey little way. His other eccentric proposal was to get rid of the secret ballot. Let each voter sign, to validate his ballot, and thus each take responsibility for a consequential act.

This might at first strike gentle reader as barmy, but perhaps there is some promise in it.

Let us leave both men and women with the vote. But then, when they vote wrongly, let us quietly remove them from the lists — without prejudice to race, creed, colour, sex, magnetic polarity, or planetary origin. In the course of a couple of election cycles, we could whittle down the franchise to a handful of reliable Tory voters. Since half of those would probably be women, there could be no grounds for complaint.

Yes, I think that’s the answer.

Dump one 12-oz can of Aussie or New Zealish corned mutton into fry-pan, then moosh in contents of one 19-oz can of “whole potatoes” (reserving potato water to cook rice in, later). Lace with chillies and garlic to taste. When all is sizzling nicely, make hole with spatula, to drop hen egg in. Do not overcook (yolk must be runny). Serve with Mitchell’s ketchup (Pakistan’s finest). Gobble with mug of Red Label tea, and you will be returned to my splendid childhood.

This makes a monstrous amount, incidentally. Up here in the High Doganate, we freeze leftovers on the balconata. This is one of the many advantages we enjoy, through the Canadian winter.

But is it really mutton? Yes, “with juices,” so far as I can determine, from the very short list of ingredients on the can, and the inspector’s mark. The other ingredients are water, salt, and (most important) sodium nitrate. The “halal” label doesn’t bother me, much. At least the can doesn’t say “organic.”

I’m not sure why I have opened an Idlepost in this way. Somehow it seemed the right thing to do. I was anyway able to patch most of the text from an email. This was attractive, because at the present time the keyboard on my fairly new (Samsung) laptop is disintegrating. This makes typing slow. For days now I have had to copy-and-paste the defunct letter, i. You might think this would make me less egotistical, less first-personal; but no. (My son will come to my rescue soon.)

Messrs PayPal have meanwhile been shutting me down, for reasons they are unable to explain coherently. Something to do with someone who pressed “send shipping label,” thus alerting them to the fact that I am a large multinational corporation. I may also be on their terrorist watch list: the robots that write their form letters aren’t sure. Too, they have mentioned the Internal Revenue Service of the Natted States Merica, which must want cutting in to all the money I’ve been laundering.

It is hard to sort out people who don’t know what they are doing, and don’t particularly care what the consequences are. But I shouldn’t be too tough on them: all Internet business is conducted in that way.

I do like corned mutton, however. There is something so solid about it.

One cannot keep up with the little events. While I was delivering the speech I texted yesterday, Justin Trudeau was addressing one of his obsequious “town halls.” A young lady asked him about Canada’s crippling regulation of religious charities, that limits the worldwide mission to which she belongs from doing the sort of charitable work here that has won them awards in other countries (such as the Queen’s Award in Britain).

In the video, our young prime minister is incurious, interrupting to hurry her question. But then we get a flash from him. This is when she uses an officially proscribed term. It is, “mankind.”

As in: “Maternal love is the love that’s going to change the future of mankind” — the sort of phrase Saint Teresa of Calcutta was in the habit of using. And as Mother Teresa would have done, even before an audience aggressively sterile.

“Peoplekind,” was Trudeau’s illiterate correction. This got him zombie applause from the other young people.

Then he added to his condescension: “We can all learn from each other.”

Young Justin, fresh from his latest accomplishment, which was changing the words of our national anthem (yet again), to make them (yet more) “gender inclusive,” can’t be helped. He listens only to those of his own ideological faction. This puts almost all human knowledge and history beyond his comprehension.

The same could be said for the college-aged kids in the audiences he feels most comfortable with. By the age of twenty or so, the average Canadian kid has been thoroughly brainwashed to use politically correct vocabulary, and strike the matching poses on demand, and to keep up with the latest ukases.

I do not mean “brainwashed” rhetorically. They rarely slip, and are mortified if they do. The world, as it has been these last ten thousand years and more, is a closed book to them. They are programmed to look only for ideological error, and are on guard against normal English usage — even while copulating, I should think. Any reminder of civilization, or of the natural order of mankind, has become offensive to them.

The defence of civilization requires us to offend them.

____________

Since I wrote this, first thing this morning, I see that the story has “acquired legs,” or “gone viral.” I just read versions in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Fox News, &c, and the Twitterverse is having fun mocking the Trudeau lad. While this is satisfying, it does not help with our zombie problem, alas. I would compare it with the difficulties in restoring Gaelic. One may speak it to the “young adults,” but it does not follow they will understand a word. For that, they would have to have been caught younger. Advice to parents: save your children while they can still be saved. Get at them before the Enemy does. Do not leave them alone with the media, or other satanic external forces. Church them; Christianize; never give up. Verily, this is why mothers are so important, and fathers must set a masculine example: “No surrender!”

You don’t want your boys to turn into weenies.

And you don’t want your girls to do that, either.

Here are the thoughts I imparted to the Catholic Civil Rights League (of Canada) Friday, when they so kindly invited me to address their annual general meeting. It will perhaps be appreciated that these are my thoughts, not theirs. Indeed, their policies differ from my prescriptions in important respects, insofar as they are dealing with that “real world,” from which I keep a cautious distance. Notwithstanding, they heard me out, with a warmth I could have mistaken for approval.

*

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley once wrote, “they do things differently there.” This was the opening sentence of his most popular novel, The Go-Between, published in the year of my birth. It is not quite forgotten now: the BBC did a television adaptation a few years ago. But I wonder if it can be understood.

It is about an old man who, through an old diary, begins to reconstruct what happened to him during a summer, when he was a naïve twelve year old, at the tail end of the Victorian era. He was used, to run messages between illicit lovers; then he was used, to track them down, still not understanding what was going on. The lovers get caught in flagrante, their affair ends in a suicide — the man, incidentally, not the woman, who goes on to marry the fellow she was engaged to all along. The old man returns to the scene. Is anyone still alive? He wants to know what happened, and what came of it.

The novel is complex, and cannot be summarized in a quick blurb — in other words, it is a good novel — but let me say that it stays true to its memorable opening line. The protagonist finds everything he wanted to know, yet still knows nothing.

There is a mystery, in the human heart, which like the mystery in nature, and of nature’s God, cannot be plumbed. And this is so, even when the facts are obvious, and everything is laid out clearly.

Why do people do what is wrong, and what they know is wrong? Now there is a question for you, and I bet you can’t answer it. I know I can’t, and yet I’ve seen it in myself.

What emerges from this book, according to me, is a wonderful paradox. On the surface it seems to promise an exposé of nineteenth-century class and sexual hypocrisy. That would be what the reader is expecting, and I think the reviewers mostly fell into that trap. But really it is an indictment, not of the nineteenth but of the twentieth century.

With the passage of years, and for reasons that are tellingly hinted, the capacity of society to appreciate the moral dimension of life — of its dark corners, and irretrievable mistakes — is being lost. Small horrors are replaced with larger, and larger, to which we learn to be indifferent. And what is lost is lost to a kind of glibness, and jadedness. We turn our attention away from the sometimes traumatic facts of life, more easily and spontaneously than any Victorian, trying to avert his eyes from scandal. And all this is carried in the texture of the novel.

These last few years I have been teaching “literature” to Catholic seminarians; Shakespeare, among other writers. I am trying to teach two kinds of things: what is subtle, and what is obvious. Both tend to be missed by young people today. I have some marvellous students, yet many are, in their own ways, trying to recover from the stupefying effect of a childhood in our new Internet cloud, and from the cynical waste of public education.

That novel by Hartley is not on the course, yet I mention it because like others that are, it tells a story we don’t begin to understand until we shed our shallowest, temporal illusions. We are, after all, creatures of our own generation. In reading, we become lost in worlds much different from our own; yet which nevertheless hold up a comparison. In many ways, we live in a time, and raise children in a time, unlike that of any ancestors; in a world that has broken with history in an unprecedented way. We have entered a cultural blind alley. In order to go forward, we must first go back, and try to understand what has happened.

Nineteen fifty-three was the year in which that novel was published; a past which now seems itself to be a foreign country. Viewed from the present day, so much has changed that the world of the late nineteenth century, and that of the mid-twentieth century, seem equally distant to us. So-called “progress” continues to unfold, but has been accelerating, like a very tall building coming down.

The most recent notice I have read of this old novel presents it as a homosexual coming-of-age story. It is quite possible the author, Hartley, was a homosexual; but if so, discreet about it. Were he still alive, he would laugh or cry. All his efforts to compose a symphonic picture of lives and times are reduced to this one note, obsessively repeated.

*

Being from an artsy family, I’ve known homosexuals all my life. Each was or is his own case. Yet thinking back, I cannot remember one who defined himself by his sexual orientation. He was first a man, or she was first a woman. Now, as many homosexuals lament, they are all of a kind, defined by what makes them horny. And this is supposedly done for their own sakes.

Justin Trudeau’s latest edict on summer jobs is like this. It is an essay in cheap reductionism. I want to emphasize this at the outset, as he advances and we resist his ideological agenda. That agenda is worse than wrong: it is glib. It reduces the whole panoply of human life to a monotone, to one very dull political pitch, endlessly repeated.

This, to my mind, is important. I would almost say it is more important than the foolish and destructive measure he is taking. It pulls us all down, into a kind of earthly hell, in which we must spend our days dealing with the latest affront to our civilization. It is, when you think it through, the exact opposite of “inclusiveness.”

Anything not on the progressive agenda must be shut down; and yet that agenda itself is a black hole. It offers nothing positive, nothing that can be enjoyed or exalted except — arguably — fornication and perversions. It amazes me sometimes that its own supporters don’t get bored with it; or even rebel, from the whole idea that “human rights” can be reduced to this glibness.

*

The Dominion of Canada into which I was born — in that same year, 1953 — was then governed by the Liberal Party, and “Uncle Louis” St-Laurent, prime minister of the day. Its electoral base was in the unambiguously Catholic province of Quebec, and its operatives were very careful to avoid offending Quebec sensibilities. Yet it had long had electoral outreach to labouring Methodists in Ontario, to immigrant and co-op farmers in the West, and other select constituencies, as well as enjoying the reflexive vote of the Catholic minority across English Canada. It tried to play both sides of every aisle. Too, it was the party of business, private investment and free trade.

It was a government whose idea of an ecumenical gesture was to build “Ad Pastores” — a little chapel for the shepherds on the slopes by Bethlehem, in the Holy Land — with a plaque on the side explaining that it was a gift, “from Canada, a Christian country.”

That was how they blew the taxpayers’ money, in those days. Twenty thousand dollars. Except, some private patrons kicked in.

For more than half a century, the Liberals had been the natural party of government, and the Conservative Party that of often rather strident Protestant opposition. The “Prairie Fire” of Diefenbaker had not yet ignited to singe the Liberals’ wings.

Were it not for my own direct memories, I might find many aspects of the Canada into which I was born impossible to believe. Its Britishness, for instance. Or the visible presence of our armed forces, retasked from the Second World War to NATO. Or what we would now call “social conservatism” — from Avalon to Vancouver Island. Most of all, and most visibly, its Christianity. This was sectarian and regional, of course, but everywhere serious.

Here in “Toronto the blue,” Sundays were quite dead, and there were elaborate by-laws to discourage the consumption of liquor. Any old-timer can tell you that. Freedom was a city called Montreal. Ottawa meant Parliament Hill, and beyond that, the almost antediluvian Ottawa Valley where, like the Maritimes, fiddles and country were normative. And so much more that is now inconceivable.

I remember the general pilgrimage to church, in small-town Ontario every Sunday morning. I was myself raised by sincere “agnostics” — yet taught right and wrong in no uncertain terms on a scheme that now seems unmistakably Christian. Still, I was conscious of not being part of those Sunday pilgrimages.

In many ways that society was narrow; in many different ways, in different places. But nothing to approach the narrowness of today, in which everything that binds families and a society together is under acid attack. We could satirize our own provincialism; we often did. “Hewers of wood and drawers of water.” But I have always preferred something to nothing.

The idea that the Dominion government would fund private summer employment schemes would itself have boggled minds; let alone that it should now be imposing religious and ideological tests to restrict eligibility. The idea that these tests would be devised to exclude opponents of abortion, or same-sex marriage, or a freshly-invented kaleidoscope of transgenders, would go beyond disbelief. These are things that were once genuinely inconceivable, for all they are commonplace today. Each came out of nowhere, to the top of the progressive agenda, until that agenda “moved on.”

*

I have a long history of not ticking boxes on government forms. More generally, I have tried to avoid government forms altogether, whenever that is legally and morally possible, for what seems like centuries now, though it is only decades.

There is a reason for this. I am the sort of person — the sort of old-fashioned person — who thinks that if I’m not plausibly suspected of a criminal offence, and there’s no war on, the government has no business with me.

Truth to tell, I am opposed even to the income tax, except in wartime. Many once were totally opposed, but the opposition eventually died away, as a war measure was gradually extended into peacetime and then, into perpetuity. I am, as they were, opposed, not principally to a revenue measure, but because the income tax enables the government to intrude into our intimate daily lives. We didn’t want that in a free country.

Yet I am no libertarian. I am today a Catholic, and a “traditional” one at that, but long before I was received into Holy Church, I subscribed to the idea of an objective moral and spiritual order. Though opposed to any intervention by the State in non-political matters, I have always thought the State had not only the right, but the duty, to uphold what I’ll call in shorthand, “Motherhood and apple pie.” Important things: like the recognition of marriages.

On the other hand, the State once had, and should still have, no rôle at all in directing “the evolution of society.” Its job is to reflect received attitudes and long-established public opinion; not to create such things. It is there to conduct public business: to enforce laws and defend our borders. It is not there to be the vanguard of a social revolution. That is what totalitarian governments do. Whereas, Canada was a free country.

I never, for instance, thought that abortion could be justified, in anything less than the most extreme and therefore extremely rare cases, for the simple and easily-understood reason that, “Thou shalt do no murder.” Though often rather dim, I was never so stupid as to believe that the child in its mother’s womb was “foetal tissue” — for after all, women don’t give birth to cats. If the State cannot intervene against the wanton killing of human beings, what is it good for?

Only to intrude in other areas, which are none of its business.

I should think 99 percent of the adult population would agree with me — were we now in 1953. It took a very Long March through the institutions, by the progressive Left, to reduce that to 50. It took a tremendous advance, through media and the schools, to every public aspect of our culture — of glibness.

For here I cannot pretend to be naïve. Times have changed, with great certainty. We confront today a State which has taken upon itself an interventionist rôle in every aspect of daily life; which claims an authority far beyond that of the Church in the most remote theocratic corner of the Dark Ages. And through modern technology, neutral in itself, the State has acquired absolute power to enforce its authority and its whims.

We have what I now call the State as Twisted Nanny, imposing her insatiable will on the motherless children of our post-modern orphanage, now that the traditional family is largely destroyed. Twisted Nanny treats her “clients” as wayward children, of no individual significance, and with “rights” only insofar as they are organized in groups for whining, and need to be bought off.

*

This Catholic Civil Rights League, founded as recently as 1985, exists, one might say, to organize some Catholic whining. You protest the defamation of Catholic people and causes, and represent the Catholic teaching in quarters where it is utterly despised. The League came into being after 1982, the year in which Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms was legislated. The CCRL was a necessary response in a political environment where indifference to Catholics was being progressively replaced by something else — thanks partly, I think, to what was achieved by that very Charter.

I was among a fairly small minority which opposed the thing, in principle, for many reasons I will not review, except to say that I clearly foresaw the consequences of redefining “human rights” as group entitlements, in contradiction to many centuries of British Common Law, from roots planted long before the Reformation.

Henceforth, I argued, we would have the opposite of what we had before. We would have an essentially Napoleonic system, in which a citizen has such rights as the State confers, and no longer intrinsically as a human being. It was, to my mind, the equivalent in the realm of the soul to what abortion was in the realm of the body — new liberties to cancel the old. Grown men and women were now the spiritual equivalent of that “foetal tissue,” which the State and its courts could effectively “overrule,” for reasons so vague that there must finally be no definable limitations on Twisted Nanny’s arbitrary powers.

This may strike my audience as a very radical view, and be dismissed by some as fanatical. It is true, I even call myself a reactionary. But it is founded in the observation from which I began: that the past is a foreign country. And call me if you wish a ghost from that past, for this has become a foreign country to me.

Forget, for just one moment, that as a Catholic Christian I owe my highest allegiance to an agency far above any human government — to Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and not to some bureaucrats in Ottawa. My loyalty to the Canada into which I was born is itself inconsistent with loyalty to the Canada of today. That Twisted Nanny may compel me by her irresistible physical power. She could take away my livelihood or even my life. But she has no claims whatever on my heart.

This is not to say that I am unpatriotic. My love for the country in itself continues. Rather I am saying that my Canada is not restricted to the living and the glib; that it includes, as it were, every dead Canadian turning in his grave, and all the children of our future. Ours was from the start — from Cartier and Champlain, from Cabot and Frobisher — an explicitly Christian country. I do not accept its de-Christianization. (There are many non-Christians who don’t accept it, either.) I do not agree that what fundamentally defined us, as a nation, can be legislated away. I have not deserted my country; I merely note that my country has deserted me.

*

Now the strange thing is, Twisted Nanny knows this. Part of the reason faithful Catholics are defamed, is that she knows we are basically errant to her wishes. We believe in original sin; she doesn’t, and is out to fix us. She believes in what the anciently persecuted Irish and Scots Catholics called, “The Religion of the Yellow Stick.” This was the facetious expression the peasants used for the landlords, with their gold-handled canes, who would beat them for going to the Catholic Mass; or force them to attend services in the State’s new spic-and-span Protestant chapels. All the cowards were converted in that way — by the Yellow Stick — and as I have come to learn, the majority in every society are cowards.

The landlords in question were not so dumb as to think they were loved for offering their corrections. I should think they were reasonably aware of the fact that they were hated. But it wasn’t love they were after, it was control — just as it is in the post-Christian “Reformation” of today. And backed, today as then, with an overwhelming national propaganda.

I have inserted this historical aside to suggest that while our world has outwardly changed in quite spectacular ways, in the course of the last generation or two, the changes have deep historical antecedents. For while the Protestant Reformation is no longer in vogue, the tyranny of the State has outlived it. The State appropriating the functions of the Church, is not something new.

Rather it is a theme of history, through all generations, times and places. The pagan Romans took the same attitude towards the early Christians; the Muslim conquerors of our Byzantine Christian East imposed their Shariah; and we ourselves have sometimes forced our own Catholic religion on subjects of another one, through the medium of State power. In this sense, what seems very new is rather very old.

I would not even call this a lapse of “tolerance” — an old word redefined to its opposite, like so many others in the Newspeak of today, bent to serve the purposes of “progress.” No State really cares what its people believe, so long as they keep it to themselves, and salute the State’s gods on all State occasions. The State’s gods today may be Abortion and Sodomy and Gender Metamorphosis. We might want to laugh at the idiocy of it. But they are gods, State gods, and every citizen must salute, as we see in this form-ticking exercise. Those who refuse must confront the State’s high opinion of itself.

This does not mean you can’t be a Catholic — so long as you keep it in the privacy of your own mind. It is only when you act as a Catholic, that you deliver yourself into the State’s hands.

Thus, “freedom of conscience” does not really come into this, either. The State has its religion, we have ours. So long as we remain meek and obedient, to anything we are required to sign, the Antichrist himself wouldn’t care what we think. The trouble arises only when we fail to sign, salute, or check the right boxes. That is, from the Antichrist’s point of view, a form of defiance that requires punishment — a punishment that we have brought upon ourselves, as will be condescendingly explained.

The ancient Christian position was, “bring it on.” That’s how we made converts, even among our executioners, who saw the face of the Crucified Christ in our sufferings, and became Christian martyrs in their turn. Our liturgy is filled with saints and martyrs.

But another truth is that most apostatize under pressure, and I think this has always been so. God bestows such Grace that we could all be martyrs, but in practice we don’t want to receive it. The courage that we don’t have is not something we’re inclined to pray for — and when I say “we” I do not only mean people at the present day. The history of earthly tyranny corresponds to the human search for the path of least resistance. As Alexander Solzhnitsyn used to say, if everyone in Soviet Russia would get up one morning, resolved to speak only the truth, the Communist Party would collapse by noon. Yet through seventy-five years, that never happened.

I don’t expect it to happen today, even though the tyranny we now face is minor in comparison, and still fairly early in its development. It is growing fast, however.

*

What struck me hardest about the job-forms outrage was not that Justin Trudeau tried it on. Our prime minister is a man whose preparation for high office was, after all, as a high school gym instructor, and a nightclub bouncer. I expect him to do stupid things. What struck me was the way he and his equally ditzy cabinet doubled down — after even progressive talking heads and pundits called them on what they could see was a frightful imposture. This indicates how far things have gone. They really think they can do things like this, and perhaps they can.

For the truth is, that we are facing not something deep, but something glib; the “banality of evil” if you like. That is the most one can say for the ideological checklist for these summer jobs.

It seems a minor issue to the public, the great majority of whom won’t be hiring anyone this summer anyway. Who will never appreciate that history can turn on buzzfly irritations — on very minor issues we wish would go away. The path of least resistance dictates that even the majority of self-styled Catholics including bishops will cover their faces, or make meaningless fly-swatting gestures, or just ignore the whole thing. Checking off a few boxes, by way of declaring oneself a Catholic apostate, is such a small price to pay in return for remunerative government support. Let us scratch each other’s backs and get on with it.

Young Justin is himself an example of the kind. For all his faults, his father was at least an educated man. He was educated by the Jesuits; he could read Latin. He was an apostate himself, accordng to me, but knew enough about the Church to offer her some respect. He had some idea of the twenty centuries of Church teaching and history, and the many centuries of Hebrew faith underlying that.

And his son calls himself a Catholic, too, of which he speaks as some kind of quaint ethnicity, perhaps still good for a couple million habitual votes.

We might wish to explain our position to him, but I don’t see how it can be done. How do you explain something complex yet intellectually coherent, to a man like that? He does not have the equipment. You can’t teach catechism to a soap bubble. The most you can do is, wait for it to pop.

We are, for the most part, silent now about a few disturbing things; our children will, as a consequence of our silence, be silent about much more. They will be less like persons of character and more like soap bubbles; except the many who already are.

*

It’s a pity our gliberal media do not report any substantial opposition to their Liberal Party, even from within Parliament. To them it’s just not news. They leave the impression of a national closed camp, in which everyone is onside with progress, and the Liberals are delivering it, when in fact at least half the population are not onside, and never were. As a former hack journalist myself, indeed as someone driven out of our mainstream media for persisting in my non-progressive views, I am more aware than most of “media bias.”

But I would call very few of my former colleagues Leftists or fanatics of any kind, or even uncritical supporters of the mainstream progressive agenda. In private, many will utter things that would explode the heads of the politically correct — if they were listening. But first they look around to see who is listening. That caution, about being overheard, is a sign of our times.

They aren’t, for the most part, radicals themselves, but they follow the playbook. Instead, I would call them “bought,” but have to qualify this by noting that the purchase comes in many currencies: good job, good pay, career advancement, personal prestige, sexual favours; a chance to rise in the pecking order, or at least, don’t lose your place. Essentially, it is the path of least resistance. A happy life is believed to require little or no serious thinking; indeed, thinking can often be a source of pain. In the modern newsroom, one goes with the flow. Stay away from topics that interrupt that flow; ride the raft to safety.

If off-agenda items should force themselves on public attention, they know how to paddle round. Attribute any discordant voice to “rightwing influences from the USA,” and it can be dealt with smoothly. If you happen to be working for one of the more consciously Leftish outlets, such as the CBC or the Toronto Scar, mention neo-Nazis and the KKK. Everyone will know what you mean, and shelter from the smears that are flying. There are days when I find this sort of complacency almost annoying.

But in the end, without newsworthy confrontation, no one will ever hear contrary views. Mere protests are meaningless, and will be deflected. It is when Catholics and other Christians actually refuse to do as they are told, that the coverage begins — overwhelmingly negative. Of course, confrontation requires some God-given nerve, and will benefit from some tactical preparation. But don’t mince words.

Never expect the agents of publicity to be on your side; think one step ahead of them, instead. They won’t be on your side today or tomorrow, or until the day that you win everything, and even then, they won’t be on your side. For they will be on the side of power and comfort, as they always were. If the whole country turned Mediaeval Catholic, tomorrow morning, they would kneel and take up their Rosaries; and have as much faith as they had the day before.

I am saying that we must accommodate reality; which requires real toughness of spirit. And we have not been doing a good job of that. If there is one thing I might hope, arising from the present controversy, it is that more faithful Catholics will realize that Twisted Nanny is not their friend.

Though I think we are right to state our grievances plainly, I do not think it will do much good. Nor, as I’ve hinted, do I seriously believe the majority of nominal Catholics in this country will rise to the banner. Polls indicate they much prefer Mammon.

This is from many causes, originating ultimately in failures within the Church herself — which was already retreating before Vatican II. The majority of Catholics now go with the flow. How, anyway, can they defend Catholic principles they were never taught? They more or less accept Twisted Nanny’s moral instruction, even when it directly violates that of their Church.

Pray for their souls, but don’t worry about them, on the practical level: for they will disappear. They have no foundations, no real opinions, and they don’t breed. The generation that follows “nominal Catholics” are not even nominal. The generation after that does not even get born. Over time, only the faithful remain.

Focus on what is within our power, which starts not with “outreach” and “dialogue” but with rebuilding our Church. For she is very weak, and we must make her strong.

Still, I cannot reasonably criticize those who today, like the CCRL, did not make the bargain, but inherit its effects; just as I can hardly blame Protestants for their inheritance of five hundred years. We must deal with the fallout from all historical mistakes. Yet we must try to understand what they were.

The Catholics of a previous generation, who welcomed financial dependence on the State, and eagerly accepted funding for Catholic schools and all of our declining charitable institutions, did not appreciate the full significance of their Faustian bargain. The paperwork of the secular bureaucracies now reaches through every rectory. The State’s priorities displace our own. From being our civil servants, we have become theirs. We serve the State’s very secular agenda, hop and bow to fulfil the conditions, haplessly beg for another State dime.

This is not something that I am predicting, rather something that already is. If the power of the State were reduced to a tenth, and the power of the Church increased ten times, we would still be their insignificant other.

*

“News from a foreign country came, as if my treasures and my joys lay there.”

I am quoting from the seventeenth-century mystic Thomas Traherne, who understood what L. P. Hartley understood, but at a level more profound. The past is a foreign country to be sure, one to which we can now return only in our imagination. The past is irrecoverably the past.

But: “There’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know.”

It does not follow from what I have said that we must go underground, as Catholics often did in previous centuries. I think that we are already there. And so I think it is time we started playing our glow-worm part. If we want to avoid State interference and dictation, we must eventually stop even asking for the State’s help, and pay our own way, every penny. And by pay, I do not only mean with what money Twisted Nanny happens to leave in our own pockets.

For the Cross will remind us what the fees are.

Up here in the High Doganate, we have long been inclined to delegate the study and analysis of Congressional documents touching on Merican spy agencies to our Chief Texas Correspondent. He is a shrewd lawyer and close observer of the Natted States political process (though a little weak on Catholic theology). From his reports I am now convinced that some dirty pool has been played, and is beginning to be exposed — notwithstanding the usual partisan gibber from all sides, and the fact that nothing has yet risen to the evidentiary standard of surprising me.

By other methods — facial gestures, vocal tone, overall smugness and content of tweets — I had already concluded that the former FBI director, Mr Comey, is a Bad Guy. In the last USA election, I couldn’t tell what game he was playing, but could tell he was playing a game. That we heard from him at all, was suspicious.

Partisanship conceals more than the obvious. At the lowest intellectual level, it is plain enough why the progressive media, normally shrieking for “transparency,” are now outraged by the declassification of departmental secrets; or why those who want police and intelligence agencies kept on a very short leash, now demand they be allowed free-range. As my CTC likes to remind, “If they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”

To be fair to them, however, few in the media can remember what happened more than five minutes ago, and this tends to make conscious hypocrisy impossible for them. We can hardly expect them to remember, say, the extra-legal eccentricities of J. Edgar Hoover; nor their own methods, both legal and not, when inquiring into Watergate, or the Pentagon Papers. It all makes sense, however, once we discern their consistent purpose, which is, lynching Republicans. Something that now focuses cold and penetrating light into the interior of the Obama administration, makes them instead glowering old maids of rule adherence.

The inability to see beyond one’s own partisan position is the easier to understand in a world that has been so intensely politicized. It appears, to the partisans of the moment, that everything is at stake: “No price too high!”

But that, I think, is the clue to what has happened beneath the intense partisanship: a terrible loss of Christian faith. Particularly: faith in providence.

One must do, consistently, not what is convenient to one’s party, but what is right. If there is conflict, then, it is the party that needs adjusting, and not the moral law. For as Lord Marmion of Fontenaye discovered: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!”

Having done what is right, trust things will work out – remembering that your own destruction may be part of God’s plan. He, however, will take care of things, in the long view; the final result is not up to you. Even the ultimate consequences of your own actions, are not in your hands. Prudence can compass only what is humanly foreseeable.

This, or rather the ignorance of this, is what I dislike about Comey (and the rest of them). It explains why he made such a hash, during the last election campaign, with his theatrical announcements of FBI investigations, called on and off. It explains why both Hillary and Donald detested him.

It was not partisanship, that provoked his actions. I’m sure he thought himself above that. Rather, he felt the need to decide, “Who should win in America’s best interest?” I do not doubt he is sincere, in believing himself a patriot.

Vanity always thinks it knows best.

And it thinks the end justifies the means.

Verily, the Twisted Nanny State is built on this premiss: “In God we don’t trust.”

Every million years or less, our poles flip over. The Earth’s North Pole becomes the South Pole, and vice versa. This is not news, though it seems to be making news at the moment, among alarmists who are starting to abandon their hopes for “global warming.” Clearly, trillions of dollars will have to be spent studying this (unusually straightforward) phenomenon, and preparing the planet for Armagneticon.

Sometimes the poles almost flip, then don’t. This would seem to be much more common, the last such event having apparently occurred almost within human history. That in itself could send everyone’s electronic infrastructure on a wild ride.

According to every compass in the world, not currently near the Isle of Canna,* the North Magnetic Pole has been shifting fairly quickly in recent decades, south and in the direction of Parkdale. That might be a hint. (I should perhaps explain that owing to igneous Tertiary intrusion, Canna has a mountain which has been described as the world’s largest fridge magnet. Bear this in mind whenever sailing by.)

Anything might happen, for all we know, and after that, anything might follow. According to satellite readings, a war is currently in progress, around the edges of the Earth’s molten core, with iron and nickel clustering in strength to drain the dipole. But since the satellites that can detect this were only launched in 2014, we have, really, no idea if this sort of thing happens all the time. (For just one billion dollars — hell, for a thousand and a case of good Scotch — I’ll flip a coin and tell you the answer.)

Okay, I just flipped it, and my research tells me the dipole will soon be fighting back, don’t worry about it. (Now, where’s my money?)

And, did you know? That if the poles suddenly flipped, every electronic device in the world might (or might not) be fritzed? Same from a variety of other cosmic causes. I’m so old now, I can remember when I first read all about this, as a schoolboy in the 1960s. And, saw the movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951; not some glitzy remake). It was fun then, I’m getting tired of it now.

Oh, go ahead, Poles. Flip. I want to see it. And if the event prevents me from uploading my Idleposts, so it goes. I’ll just catch up on my sleep instead.

____________

* I deeply regret that in the original recension, I confused Canna (one of the Small Isles) with Mull (that much larger isle well to its south, which offers magnetic anomalies of its own, but not to compare with Compass Hill on Canna). Fortunately, I now have Western Scottish correspondents to correct me, on such grave matters. Should my post have contributed to a shipwreck on either isle, I apologize and condole.

“If you’ve got rats, you call the guy to come in.”

I picked up this little gem of political analysis from this morning’s news-cruise on the Internet. It was on the Beeb website, of all unlikely places. Their correspondent was visiting Saginaw, Michigan, which he correctly identified as a proper noun in the lyrics of a pop song from fifty-two years ago. (BBC like to remind us how hip they are.)

Perhaps gentle reader already understands this analysis, uttered by a retired nurse, who was not the only Saginawian who helped deliver the “blue wall” state of Michigan to Mr Trump, two Novembers ago.

“You don’t care if his crack is showing, you don’t care if he swears, you don’t care if he got tobacco-stain teeth. You want the rats took out.”

I’m quoting from memory, I hope I’ve got it right.

The oddest thing about this story, which wanders off the Beeb’s anti-Trump narrative for a few paragraphs before returning to it, is that it tells us exactly why Mr Trump now has the Republican Party in his wee hands, and is beloved in “Middle America” — including Saginaw, a failed rustbelt town, once heavily unionized and in the fief of the Democratic Party. Under their management, the population of Saginaw shrank to about half.

But it don’t belong to them any more; and what is worse (if you’re a Democrat), it is coming back to life.

This is a mystery, to the media, although not to me. Even a prominent local patch of graffiti has been altered from “Saginasty” to “Saginawesome” — and little businesses are springing through the asphalt splits, including boutique shops, boutique breweries, boutique housebuilding, and boutique industrial workshops.

Let me explain the mystery. A very large part of human enterprise is founded on morale. One might call it a confidence game; but some of these games are better than others. The parties of managed decline, and political correctness, in America and across Europe, cannot understand this. To them, an economy is based on economic factors, and the government’s job is to control them. But morale is not an economic factor. It is a spiritual factor. Winning does not start with getting the right assistance; it starts with wanting to win.

And it depends on the most inscrutable enthusiasms, such as that for putting the rats out.

As their correspondent discovered, in Tony’s Original Restaurant, the town contains many “anti-abortion, low-tax” people — black as well as white. These are the sort of “deplorables” upon whom progressive Democrats (and Liberals and Labourites and Social Democrats) heap their anathemas and slurs. What he perhaps missed is that pro-life extends beyond unborn babies, to all kinds of deplorable activities, such as earning a living and supporting a family and building a community. It is very likely to include involvement in a church.

Mr Trump is rather vulgar, as I have previously noted, but I have myself migrated from the “never Trump” to something like the “MAGA” position. (Though I’d prefer, “Make America Christian Again,” with its more aggressive trigger term.) I did not watch his presidential address last night, because I didn’t have to. I still find his boastfulness and tweetersnipes rather taxing. I still won’t invite Donald up to the High Doganate (and it would be scandalous to invite Melania alone).

But he has fixed the morale button his predecessors busted — the one that is wired to the mysterious siren that drives the rats crazy.

Now that the consensus of media dieticians is shifting from carbohydrates to fats and proteins, I should like to put in a contrary word for chestnuts. They are very starchy indeed, contain little fat, and just a trace of protein. They are admirable roasted or boiled, and can be eaten au naturel once elegantly stripped of their casings. (Whereas, raw potatoes or yams are no fun at all.) They contain vitamins that other foods omit, better apportioned through a delicious nut than by chewing on manganese or copper. Moreover, they are real nuts, not fake ones like almonds and cashews, or peas passing themselves off as “groundnuts.” Those are all fats and useless calories. Chestnuts will make you fat, thus cutting out the middleman.

Which is why they have been fed to pigs, these last few hundred years; that, and the appalling propaganda mounted against chestnuts by our culinary elites. The European poor once ate them in quantity, as their filler; made bread from chestnut flour. Italians, harder to intimidate by fashion than most others, still adore their subtle flavours.

These thoughts were occasioned by a sealed bag of peeled chestnuts, casually purchased the other day as a snack while walking. They were candied in a rather disagreeable way. But worse, I unfortunately failed to read the label attentively, or would have noticed that the contents were “organic.” No intelligent consumer will buy anything on which this warning is prominently displayed. Quite apart from the doubling or tripling of the price, the product itself may be missing some important ingredient.

Children raised on “organic” food become weak and sickly. Those raised “vegan” as well are likely to die. If you find a child perishing in this way, be merciful and fill him with meat and chestnuts.

Or if no meat-bearing animal is in sight, the chestnuts alone will make a fine ragoût. Fill a saucepan with them (skinned and peeled), add salt and loaf sugar and a sprig of thyme, and more than you thought necessary of butter. Then drown all this in a good seasoned broth. Put lid on saucepan, and simmer for an hour. All the liquid will be absorbed in the chestnuts; and while hot they are fabulous.

Chestnuts make excellent stuffings, and creamed soups; compôtes with apples or oranges; soufflés with eggs either chicken or quail; sublime cake mixtures. In Heaven, they serve hot chestnuts with prunes in a sherry syrup touched with cinnamon and lemon. Always on silver, as Mrs Leyel prophesied.

French tinned and tubed preparations with chestnuts are not to be despised, though unavailable in the groceries of Parkdale. To some tastes (mine for instance) they may be “too too”; the integrity of the chestnut is lost in the confection. For the antecedent texture of the chestnut should be somehow preserved, if only in an allusion.

Roasted, they can be “just so.” There used to be chestnut vendors outside the Royal Ontario Museum; I should think they were also by the Museum at Alexandria. Since these splendid men with their charcoal trays were replaced by the vendors of hot dogs, no visit to the museum has been the same. My most beloved Sung-dynasty pots only make me think of chestnuts.

The causes of wealth are two: work, and thrift. The causes of poverty are two: idleness, and waste. Four words to the wise. This Scottish philosophy, with supplementary details such as the division of labour and open competition, is correctly attributed to Adam Smith. It was controversial in his own day (all my favourite Tories satirized it), and remains controversial to this, not because it doesn’t work, but because it is amoral. If wealth, however, is to be accepted as the ultimate good, it becomes morally charged, or “weaponized” for moralizing. An equal and opposite force is then summoned, from the partisans of “equality,” and our ideological wars ensue.

Let me drop no hint to the identity of an auld acquaintance, who by the world’s measure is quite rich, and by my own, fabulously so. His wife is given to candour, however, and once mentioned that he is not worth a cent. She loves him dearly, but explained, that what lies behind his reputation as a captain of industry, and her own spectacular domestic arrangements, is a great heap of debt. She, who is spiritually if not racially Scotch, lives in the expectation that some day the bankers will call it all in.

Add another wee dram (the eighth part of a fluid ounce), and she may add that it would be a good thing.

Doctor Johnson, a man of much sense and little nonsense (and that little mostly joyful) loved to correct people who had confused the concepts of “wealth” and “money.” The distinction can be over-complicated or over-simplified by the observation that there are some cash rich and land poor, others land rich and cash poor, and others still with both or neither. But by their confusion Lord Keynes, in our world a century ago, exhaled an acrid fog of plausible assertions, which fail whenever they are put into practice. That other man of four words, Samuel Johnson, would have confuted him, thus: “Money is not wealth.”

To the older economists, perhaps money was more valuable. This is because it was denominated in weights of silver and gold, and the miser had more options than him tied down to properties, and all the bother that goes with. But in itself this cash was only glister, until put to use. You can’t take it with you, of course, but then, you can’t take anything into that dark night.

There is a fly in the ointment of the Glasgow professor, which I will put in four words: poverty is a blessing. This has naught to do with how it’s brought about.

I could tolerate socialism if its advocates were honest, and said that their purpose was to make us poor, by restricting our freedom, in order to enhance their own power. As things stand, I think they are very devils, and that their efforts to pose as anything but socialists are the devil’s work. But good often comes of evil, and the impoverished and yet ordered decay of a Rangoon or an Havana is something pretty to see. Well, I have yet to walk Havana, but the photographs are attractive.

The challenge, to my mind, is how to achieve poverty, without any help from the socialists. And I think, once again, Adam Smith points the way. It is that the great majority of our fellows are, by disposition, neither industrious nor frugal. Left to their own devices, they will live in blackhouses and crofts. But they don’t want to die, so will plant their potatoes. Perhaps it should be the purpose of our political economy to let them do this, and find their happiness in music and dance. (And single-malt whiskies, which came before the tritely homogenized, blended kinds.)

For the rest, let us simply create obstacles to the accumulation of capital, by the withdrawal of “limited liability,” and the reinstatement of the usury laws.

Sunday is coming, and up here in the frostbitten and hypothermic North, it will be the thirtieth anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that made all abortions legal. The Crown versus the abortionist Henry Morgentaler was an odd decision in multiple respects. I often hear that it was not understood; that the court merely demanded that our Parliament rewrite the Pierre-Trudeau abortion law in a way more consistent with our later Pierre-Trudeau Charter of Rights. But the politicians of that day and since (both Conservative and Liberal) have not found the courage. They will not revisit an issue that is, shall we say, divisive.

It was like taking the roof off one’s house and then, to avoid a family squabble over the design of a new one, not replacing it.

The analogy is not exact, however. It was less rational than that. To start, the majority decision (a 5–2 ruling) was Hydra-headed. Three unrelated sets of “reasoning” were published, each batty but unique. One could not be satisfied, without ignoring the other two; so that whatever Parliament did, it would be right back in court.

(In such circumstances I’m inclined to recall the old adage, “As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”)

For instance, the 1988 ruling acknowledged that the State has “some” responsibility to defend the “potential life” of the “foetus,” by restricting abortion “in some way.” The assumption of Justice Bertha Wilson was that it would do this by retricting abortions to early term, the way various European jurisdictions were doing. But she was just one of the progressive voices. You can’t negotiate with the Lernaean Hydra.

My own view, back then, was that Parliament should agree to toss out the Pierre-Trudeau law, with its strangely arbitrary cosmetic restrictions (such as a requirement that three doctors rubberstamp each abortion on fanciful health grounds). Then, restore the status quo ante, in which all abortions were illegal, and declare that it would remain in force until there was consensus on how it should be changed; blaming the Supreme Court for forcing your hand.

In other words, turn the tables on them. And to the howls of progressive execration that would follow, the then-prime minister (one Brian Mulroney) could have responded with a Trudeau-like shrug. Mulroney had a huge majority in the Commons at the time, with plenty of reliable upcountry backbenchers. He could surely have powered this restoration through, on a three-line whip.

Granted, this might have cost him the Dominion election, later that year. But so what? Who could wish to win an election at the cost of his own soul? Mr Mulroney was a Catholic, after all. I’d like to think he was a serious one.

Today, we live in the alternative world where this did not happen. Thirty years have passed, and there is no foreseeable way to “overturn” laws that no longer exist.

But there ought to be laws, against any form of murder. And the onus ought to be the reverse of what it has become. An argument should be needed to justify the killing of what remains — no matter what euphemism is attempted — a human baby. No argument should be needed for not killing it.

Asked by a visitor what is the best way to see Greater Parkdale, I replied, on your back in an ambulance. I was serious, of course. At street level, transient franchise shopfronts bear no architectural relation to the older buildings they have been stuck on. But from a reclining position, only the unmodified upper storeys can be seen, yet nothing above the second or third (thus deleting most of the appalling highrises). The city thus retains something of its fine and fusty Edwardian provincial order. Prone in this way, one might drive for miles through repulsively glitzy shopping districts, without seeing what’s been added since the Great War.

I suppose this was a comfort to a dear old-Toronto friend I accompanied on his last ride to a hospital, a few years ago. He was a little hard of speaking, as well as hearing, on that last leg, but managed to communicate something droll, about how lovely the city was in late January. By the time we were in Emergency he apologized for being sentimental, explaining that his only regret in dying was that, at his age, all friends and loves had predeceased him. Therefore he was the only earthly being who could remember their voices and faces. With his passing, even their faint echo would be forever gone.

Dear “Mbob,” as he would sign himself. (A certain Robert Olson, inclined to nicknames in Greek, or Icelandic) — very kindly as well as Christian and I should think, gone to a better City.

I think of him today in relation to the Scandal of Interiors. I use the word strictly as a conventional term in domestic architecture. We both loved old houses, and old shops, too, and old low-life taverns, so regretted that none were left.

All things are a flowing, sage Heraclitus says,
But a tawdry cheapness shall outlast our days.

Real brick-and-plaster substance is, perversely enough, often smooshed then overlain with a plastic parody of some “olde” style. We live today in urban environments which are comprehensively fake — a contributing factor to the fakeness in ourselves. The tactic of developers is to append “poetic” associations from a happier past, to their ghastly provisional installations. This odonymical abuse has been going on for some time: “mountain-view” where there is no mountain, “river-side” where there is no river, “park-dale” with neither park nor dale. “Old-world charm” that consists of ticky-tack boxes, with stacks of brutalist concrete poking through.

The “downtowns” of cities in the eastern half of this American continent were built before the automobile, with pedestrian compactness. So prosperous did we become, so quickly, and so extensive was the building towards the latter end of the nineteenth century, that plentiful evidence remains. The ground-cover is still mostly older buildings, paradoxically thanks to rocketing property values: new buildings must accommodate phenomenal densities, upon tiny footprints. But ten-thousands of apparently “old houses” remain, going on and off market at a million apiece. The principles of money-management have “evolved” over the years, and the idea of “home” as a fungible investment has been universalized. All one needs to acquire one is a small saving and a large credit line. Then one is cut in for all subsequent rounds of poker.

You move in and “re-decorate,” less from personal taste than in anticipation of re-sale. After this process has been repeated a few times, nothing remains of the older building except its “historical” façade, itself somewhat tarted. Travelling about by foot and trolley, I have watched a likely majority of the city’s more attractive “landmark” buildings reduced to fronts only. These are propped by girders, while entirely new (and disproportionately larger) new constructions are bunged in behind.

Thus, nothing remains that is “authentic.” All continuities are destroyed, beyond this tip of the hat — the aesthetic equivalent of that homage which vice pays to virtue.

One hears much about the diminishing ice caps on Greenland. At least this one does. Too, though less often, about calving ice sheets in Antarctica, though seldom with the qualification that the overall ice-cover on and around that continent is increasing. All very well, I enjoy science, and will read the report if there is any prospect of science in it, as distinct from more lipstick being wasted on the same old pig. I despise scientism, warmly — the pretence of science, dressed in high-priestly labcoat robes, in pursuit of an essentially theocratic power; or, “settled science,” as its adepts call it.

Here is an example of science. It is about those ice caps on Greenland which, I believe short of “faith,” are actually receding — especially along the north-east coast, where glaciers most copiously slide into the ocean. The plausible assumption of those whose livings depend on climate alarmism, is that “global warming” has been melting them down, from above, on the broiler principle. But as overall global and regional atmospheric temperatures have been remarkably stable, and there is no evidence of melting from the top, might one guess that they are melting from below?

Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, working from this hunch, and a knowledge of geomorphology, took it upon themselves to measure water temperatures at the bottom of fjords in north-east Greenland, where hot springs like those in Iceland have been discerned. Sure enough, they found, over a ten-year study, that waters more than a hundred fathoms down were consistently and significantly warmer than what conventional calculations would expect. The explanation is obvious. It’s that hot spot thing. Heat from the interior of the Earth is rising.

Put a chunk of ice in a pan on your stovetop. Turn up the heat and notice what happens. The ice melts, from below. This will happen no matter how cold your kitchen is.

It is good sometimes to do actual experiments, to test a hunch. It was in the twelfth century, in the West, that we first tried acting on this hunch of hunches. Even Aristotle got some things wrong, as we discovered, over the next five centuries. We celebrate the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century, which was quite impressive, but as Pierre Duhem and others established, the fruit sprang from a tree with historical roots much deeper. Modern science was not a rejection of, or departure from, mediaeval science. It was rather the natural outgrowth from it.

There could of course be other contributing causes, but what struck me and others about the ice cap reports is that they were geographically concentrated, in fairly remote places. One would expect, if “global warming” were true, that the melting would be quickest in the south, slower northward. And as the south of Greenland is rather more accessible, one would anyway expect the anecdotal evidence to be richest there. But no.

Marvellous things can be discovered, through empirical science, when researchers are looking for some particular thing. I will not say it rewards the open-minded. The hunch precedes the demonstration. An “open” mind is an empty mind: it has nothing to look for. An honest mind is more to the point.

Another busy day. I wanted to write an Idlepost on the word “houselling,” inspired by an item sent by a good friend in Washington. (See here.) “Living in Parkdale or DC is either an example of or an obstacle to houselling,” he comments. But after considering the matter from several angles, I realized that I had nothing to say. Often I come to some like conclusion. There is no difficulty finding topics that bark, only in taking them for a walk, as it were. Why, here in a sheaf of papers on my table I find a list of them (topics), fairly recently scratched down. I stare. Darn’d if I can remember what I was intending to add to any of them. I transcribe it below, so gentle reader may pick any item that pleases her, and write her own Idlepost today.

*

The crowd is only interested in the product. But the producer is more interested in the work. And the connoisseur is on the side of the producer.

You can read anything into Shakespeare, if you’re stupid enough.

To express my insolidarity with the partakers of mild North American food.

Vauxhall. In the 1970s they got into the competition to produce the most boring car the world had ever seen. I think they won. But no one can remember which model it was.

Trumpestuous. … If he’d only had a little more discretion, the world would never have heard of him.

Progressives in this age of mass media focus on “controlling the narrative.” There is a competition between “narratives,” after all. The winners must make their narrative heard, but just as important, they must suppress any alternative narrative. This is what all the “outrage” is for: to make a big noise whenever a rival storyteller is speaking. It doesn’t matter if people think the progressives are gauche, so long as they are unable to follow what Homer (the first Tory) is singing.

Google, Amazon, Tencent, Baidu, IBM, Alibaba, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. Kill them all, God will know his own.

There is no such a thing as free lunch, and no such a thing as free speech, either. Someone must pay.

Curre ut vincas. (“Run that you may conquer.” I Cor ix.24) … Sublimiora spectemus. (“Let us regard loftier things.”) These are mottoes of the Clan of Warren, it says here. Someone should have told me.

“There are opinions and there is faith.” (Lustiger)

But we ARE Jews, for gawdsake — spiritual Semites to a man from the start — and to a woman, and unto the childers. That is what it is to be Catholic, or Orthodox Greekish for that matter, in our liturgies descending from the Sanctuary, beneath the Temple Mount. We lay claim to ALL of the Scriptures, or rather they lay claim to us, and if you will read your Summa of Rabbi Saint Thomas (the forgotten sections on the Old Law, 1a2ae, questions 98 to 105), we take our Tanakh whole, noting the hardest passages in Deuteronomy and Leviticus — all 46 books and not just the 39 that Mr Luther and Mr Stuart happened to like — and as with Rabbi Saint Augustine (passim) we read the New Testament concealed within the Old, and the Old unveiled in the New. …

“Jews don’t forget!”

Saint Paul: “But even if we ourselves or an angel from heaven should preach to you a Gospel other than the one that we preached to you, let him be anathema.” (Galatians i, 8)

“A prince void of prudence shall oppress many by calumny.” (Proverbs xxviii, 16)

“If fitting into this culture and society constitutes sanity, then please God, let me never be sane.” — Ann Barnhardt

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Oh look, there’s more!