Essays in Idleness

That was very post-modern, on the part of Trumpf. I call such operations, “experimental bombing.” Choose a bad country in no position to retaliate (Serbia, Taliban Afghanistan, Libya, …) that has got itself unpleasantly into the news, and wing in a few dozen Tomahawks. Though I must say aeroplane strikes are more photogenic. Then see what happens. Perhaps the subject’s behaviour will improve. I suspect surgeons sometimes try this with difficult patients. Bask in praise for your decisiveness, for a few days. You may decide whether to have a war later.

It all starts with emotional pictures, from one of the world’s many “hot spots.” The media rule our minds, including Trumpf’s, judging from his Twitter account. We may like or hate them, trust them or not, but they do have the power to set our agenda.

There have been plenty of horrific pictures from Syria over the last decade or so: ghastly unspeakable crimes committed either by the Assad regime, or by its opponents. The “sarin attacks” on Khan Sheikhoun were exceptionally effective, as media drama. Even those encouraging partial-birth abortion, wince at the sight of babies being slaughtered in gas attacks.

There was a “90 percent chance” it was indeed sarin, and a “90 percent chance” it was Assad’s, and a “90 percent chance” there were no Russians in the way at the Shayrat air base, when it was selected for demolition. Factor a 90 percent chance something technical or unforeseeable does not go badly wrong. This works out to about two chances in three the bombing experiment ends well; three in four it will not end that badly; four in five you won’t hit something you will wish you never touched. Time will tell what time tells in the longer run; usually nothing.

Now, the strike wasn’t only about Syria. It contained “messaging” for Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, Putin, North Korea, and the Chinese gentleman with whom Trumpf was dining at Mar-a-Lago last evening. Ah yes, and the congressional Democrats. All are expected to understand that “America is back” as an active player on the world stage. No more of this Obamanoid shirking. For this purpose, it was rather an eloquent gesture, to remind that messing with America makes a foolish hobby.

Too, it was an organizing measure, showing a formidable corporate skill. The rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia had been through the White House lately; all these Sunni powers are at the point of realizing, with the clarity of the late Anwar Sadat, that Israel is not their real enemy. (“Sunni days” would be the operative Canadian pun.) Too, the Gulf states are certainly onside. We have suddenly a tenable Trumpf coalition of the more-than-willing to return us to the good old days of American superpower prestige in the region, and forward in the rivalry with ayatollaholic Iran.

Speed is its own signal. Surprise counts for more than tactical advantage in military affairs. On the strategic level, it informs your enemies that they may not have time for a correction, should they put a foot wrong. The prospect of a hanging at dawn tomorrow is more effective than the prospect of a possible hanging after a lengthy appeals process.

I don’t have an opinion on what happened yesterday, incidentally. But I did notice it.

A century has now passed since President Wilson disowned President Washington’s advice to his successors — to stay out of European conflicts — and war was declared by the United States on Germany. A moral preener, Wilson justified himself by declaring an even more extravagant mission to go with it:

“The world must be made safe for democracy.”

However large, a war is just a war. It should have a beginning and an end. As my old Indian girlfriend explained, “Too much war only leads to peace. Too much peace only leads to war.” As most people prefer peace, most of the time, it is well that war is not a permanent condition. But a war to some idealistic purpose can get very large, and go on for a long time, and morph into conditions which resemble peace, but are not peace. We’ve been making the world safe for democracy for at least a century. By now we have far too much.

Paradoxically, or rather not, this year is also the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was greeted with something like relief by much of the war-weary Russian populace. This is because Lenin immediately completed his deal with the Kaiser’s Germany, which had contrived to deliver him safely to the Finland Station. He took Russia out of the war, so Germany could focus on the Western Front; this also allowed Lenin to focus on the annihilation of his Russian adversaries. The addition of America tipped the too-well balanced scales against Germany; but a war-weary Europe soon lost its stomach for dealing with Bolsheviks — and resurgent Turks — in the East. War was over; the massacres never stopped.

Wilson’s idealism was further expressed through his progressive admirers in the dismemberment of the old European order, for his idea of democracy became inextricably mixed with the idea of ethnic nationalism. The maps were redrawn and the ancient Habsburg realm — the Austro-Hungary that had been suing for peace, also since April 1917 — was among the casualties. There and elsewhere, dozens of new jealous nationalisms were spawned. Germany, too, was guided into chaos, and the circumstances from which the Nazi regime emerged; all in the cause of “a new world order.”

In my view, that Great War, that Totaler Krieg, hasn’t ended yet. The old etiquette, that war was for soldiers — that non-combatants should be non-involved — became a thing of nostalgia. Vast conscript armies had been summoned, and would never be fully demobilized. The men I call the “Three Stooges of the Apocalypse” — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau — clinched at Versailles this new normal. It was not simply the punitive terms that were imposed on the war’s losers, but a more fundamental reorganization of all national and international affairs: “statecraft” became “policy.”

For Wilson was also the pioneer of progressive schemes to change the American way of life. He was, in some sense, a second Washington, consolidating a second American Revolution that had begun more modestly with Lincoln and the Union victory in the Civil War. America would be recreated, along bureaucratic lines, in a tireless campaign for full secularization, under centralized government control. The general mobilization of the First World War, now in America as well as Europe, created a new opportunity, by accustoming men to following orders; by the propaganda that made them identify with huge abstractions.

This is of course an inexhaustible topic, at which I pick away, in my attempts to explain if only to myself what makes our world so different from all preceding. It embraces more than any single force or event. We must also go back to the Prussian invention of the welfare state, and for that matter to the Gatling gun. Post-modernity is an invention of modernity, as modernity was an invention of the Middle Ages. The contemporary revolution has antecedents that may be found in the Enlightenment and in the Reformation. (What will post-modernity beget?)

Totaler Krieg and Totaler Frieden: that is our post-modern age, in which we have lived for a century or more; the age of the monstrous Nanny State, in war but also in peace. It grows ever more “inclusive.”

The world in 2060 will be different from the world today. How it will be different we don’t know yet; but what self-respecting demographer will let it stand at that?

For some reason I cannot fully explain to God, I’ve been glancing through the latest prognostications from Messrs Pew Research. They do “global” better than the other funny-number companies, and have some interest in the religious factors at play. People make a difference, sometimes, and I think being founded by a devout Presbyterian (J. Howard Pew of the Sunoco fortune, 1883–1971) begins to account for this. A graduate of the Shady Side Academy — the preparatory school for Christian plutocrats in Pittsburgh, full of Fricks and Mellons, back in the day before they admitted the “Shady Ladies” — he left five billion to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Add this to his enthusiasm for Liberty, and the Athabasca Tar Sands, and we had a mover and shaker for the lighter shades of grey.

As I will be past my centenary in 2060, I hope to take the developments in stride. Demographic change is not new to this planet, and Christians have been challenged for the lead before. The first odd thing I notice is that the Muslims still will not have caught up. They’ll need the rest of the century for that, at their current pace.

Why, back in my preferred century (the thirteenth), the Christian population was still less than 70 million. This, according to the best pseudo-authorities I have seen; and note it was before the Black Plague. The Muslims must have been ahead of us then, one would think; except they almost certainly weren’t. This is because they were still a minority in many of the populous lands they had conquered. And to this day, I doubt the veracity of many a national census which, typically in Muslim countries, likes generally to inflate population, and counts specifically as Muslim anyone who isn’t explicitly something else. By the same tactics, Canada could be counted as a Catholic country, and 96 percent of Americans are Christian. Let me tell you a few things about Indonesia.

On second thought, let me not.

Based only on longer-term trends in birthrate, deathrate, immigration, emigration, conversions, reversions, and other supposedly quantifiable things, the demographers at Pew tell us what we already know as a media cliché. It is that Islam has been moving ahead by birthrate alone. However, Christians are almost keeping up, with the second-highest birthrate (2.6 per woman compared to 2.9), and making some of the difference back in conversions. The biggest stories, as we ought to know, are in Sub-Saharan Africa and farther Asia; we just look at the West. Hindus will be holding their place in third, and everything else will be proportionately declining, should everything continue as it was from the imaginative baseline of 2015.

Bad news for “nones” and atheists. Their current numbers are much higher than gentle reader might estimate, owing chiefly to the many in China. But there, as everywhere, they don’t breed. They have the world’s lowest birthrates — lower even than Buddhists, and far below replacement levels. Their only real hope is for a fresh spurt of faithlessness thanks to Capitalist and Socialist excess. Who, from information available in 1915, could have predicted the situation in 1960?

While it is not in the latest Pew mega-report, or I didn’t notice it, I think it worth mentioning that the Muslim acceleration dates only from about 1950. It is historically anomalous, and can be explained by several obvious external factors. All trends are reversible, as I like to say.

My bet is they can’t keep it up.

There are a lot of hotheads in this world. Take me, for example. Often I find myself on the horns of a false dilemma. My gut tells me one thing, my brain another. Or rather, they are in rough agreement to start. But then they go different ways. The brain might for instance say, “There is nothing you can do about this, and there is no conceivable influence you may exert on other persons to join with you in doing something, now or in any foreseeable future.” Whereas the gut says, “Kill!”

The heart is somewhere in the middle. I am using these terms in a less than strict anatomical sense, I should explain. I am considering the whole human, in his complexity. This would include the soul. I lose the scientistic materialists along this way, but so it goes. If I wanted to confuse them, I would court plausibility, by using current jargon from brain science. But there is no point. One has a “soul,” and even a “conscience” — harder to lose than any limb or organ, though they go bad more easily. And there are many other things about our human that would look messy in a diagram. But I am not drawing one. I am being, shall we say, impressionistic.

Back to the conflict. The mind is, if anything, too calm. It can construct an argument for inaction in almost any circumstance, and in the exceptions, prefers flight to fight. The gut is more of a wild animal. Calmness is satiety to the gut, and after eating it will go to sleep. When disturbed, however, it goes to fight or flight directly, and the brain is forcefully dragged along. Actual wild animals have better “instincts” than we have, and don’t come to grief so quickly as we do, when we obey ours.

Animals have a bit of moral heart — I have seen them sometimes weighing things — but not such as we have. I have chosen to locate the human forum in what I’ll call the “thinking heart,” to distinguish it from the reflexive valves. It makes those decisions which follow from character, and can make them sharply once that character is properly formed. It is capable of taking the brain’s analysis to committee, and parsing it again. Often it tells the gut to shut up: “I heard you already.”

It has “emotions.” (Good thing I’m not drawing a diagram here.) Its job, in addition to pumping blood, is to legislate on them. Which emotion would be the best idea?

One of the cleverest things C. S. Lewis noted is that a man gets the same feeling in his stomach whether he is in love with a young maiden, or has eaten a tainted fish. I reiterate that we are dealing on a level different from, and higher than, that of physical reaction. The human being has tremendous emotional and aesthetic range. By comparison, his body is stupid. And when the brain is roller-chained to the gut, he presents a farce.

The purpose of education, through more centuries than one could shake a stick at, was to build character. This was why it was not confused with school. And at the centre of things we recognized the human heart. Mens sana in corpore sano is all very well if one is speaking in Latin and thinking in Greek; but as post-pagans know, this is a dodge. Neither is completely within our control. More fundamental to us is the character of the heart, for even the man who is losing his mind will retain splashes of character.

That is the key thing to educate. If necessary, one must embark upon self-education.

For in the end, knowledge is worthless. And being smart is no particular advantage. It is like your stamp collection: you can’t take it with you. Everything you know will be as straw.

From the profane, to the sacred; from mere prats to holy fools: today we embark on Passiontide. It is the fortnight victory march to Easter, not around but through the enemies of Jesus. Father Hunwicke in his fine Mutual Enrichment blog set the beat in his post on Friday (“Strong women”): trochaic tetrameter catalectic, in its joyous truncation. He is discussing, of course, hymns such as the Vexilla  regis and Pange lingua of Venantius Fortunatus, composed for the Merovingian court at Poitiers in the sixth century; and the Pange lingua in which that beat is echoed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, in rhymed accentual, seven centuries later.

As Father Hunwicke explains:

“What is interesting here is that this metre was used by writers such as Menander in Athenian New Comedy for scenes that are pretty nearly slapstick — Aristotle called it kordakikoteron or ‘tending to a lively vulgarity’. Caesar’s soldiery chanted their ritual abuse at him (to avoid the risk of the Gods taking offence as he rode in triumph) in this metre. …”

Generally, we are sober at the approach of Death, and in churches the spirit of austerity is shown by the veils thrown on the altar Crucifix and all other images — until they are lifted in the Easter Vigil and the bells ring out. The fullness of Passiontide was alas suppressed in the Novus Ordo, but fortunately the Vetus Ordo is in course of being restored, and our hearts are free no matter what nonsense we must endure in the Bugnini chapels. The Death of Christ is certainly approaching, and observed, but with this signal qualification: He is going to defeat Death.

Hence that paradoxical joy in the battle as we, His soldiery, fall in behind Him.

Attention, please. In the Old Mass something else is happening today. The plurals that dominated the chants through Lent tip decisively to first person singulars — from the voice of congregations to the voice of Christ Himself. Lead, kindly light.

Though I grant it is a profane, not a divine commemoration, we who are fools have a special attachment to this date, and are bound to celebrate it somehow. The first fool was Adam. The second was Eve. More than one hundred billion have followed, by the best cumulative estimates. We are by now a biological force of some magnitude and antiquity. My own memory of some foolish pranks, timed for the first of April — together with the subsequent punishment for them — fills me with a contemptible pride. For the truth is, I am still capable of mischief.

As a sub-editor on daily newspapers, in years now long past, I never let the anniversary pass without an attempt to “craft” some item for publication, that would be false yet strangely plausible. Also, cruel in some way (short of physical injury), towards one despised entity or another: usually some fellow fool. Twice I came near to being fired, for my efforts. My last inspired an editor to warn all staff, that anyone who tried that again would indeed have to find another job. (Soon he was trying to ban smoking, too.)

The trick is in the elaboration. Be an industrious journalist, and invent more than one source. Accentuate the gravity.

The most ambitious essay in foolishness I recall, was most of my life ago, at the long defunct (and still lamented) Bangkok World. We (I had accomplices) ran a feature story purporting that Pablo Picasso would unveil a big mural in a local art gallery that day. The work, which could be interpreted as a sequel to Guernica, would be a protest against the War in Vietnam. In this pretentious article, full of art-critic jargon, signed by an imaginary French intellectual, we explained its aesthetic importance in Picasso’s unfolding oeuvre. We said it had been meant for a launch in Saigon. However, the Vietnamese authorities had denied Picasso a visa, and so it had been shifted to Thailand, the nearest alternative venue. The gallery we selected was a nasty little place in “Siam Square,” which sold factory-painted portraits to tourists — of bug-eyed children, and underdressed young ladies, done with acrylics on black velvet.

As a finishing touch, we then planted a paragraph of “breaking news,” in spot red ink, in a bottom corner of the front page. This simply stated that Picasso and his wife Jacqueline had arrived at Don Muang airport, on Air France flight whatever, amid a crush of reporters. Seeing this, and fearing they had missed a big story, we hoped the wire services would pick it up, and in the absence of any other information, plagiarize our spoof.

Sure enough, the morning of April 1st, a fairly large crowd was gathered outside the gallery. We booked a photographer to take pictures of all the fools, and a flatfoot to record their comments. Gentle reader may imagine the chief editor’s response; but it was nothing compared with the publisher’s.

Ah, the good old days, when fake news might have a humorous component. It is all so grim today.

Though an earnest pro-lifer, who believes (knows would be more like it) that abortion and euthanasia are forms of murder, and that no murder can be justified, I am sometimes driven nuts by my allies. I think of those who will not make any political compromise, that would “merely reduce” the number. They insist on the full restoration of our old laws, or they will feel themselves complicit in each act that remains legal. Thus they will sabotage any promising half-measure. And thus, they become actually complicit in any killing that could have been prevented.

(The “Freedom Caucus,” in the USA, also comes to mind.)

My point is ultimately theological. It touches on the question of the “lesser evil.” Catholic, if not all thoughtful Christians, understand that one may not justify an evil means by a good end. More profoundly, one may not intend an evil. And some things are intrinsically evil (see above); there can be no argument for them. Yet in “real life,” as people fondly call it, we are sometimes presented with a circumstance in which, if we do not do the grisly thing, a grislier must follow.

An example which amused me was in a journalistic “ethics” quiz I wanted no part of, many years ago. (“Ethics are for people who have no morals,” as I have sometimes observed.)

You, gentle reader, are the engineer of a railway train. You have just learnt that the bridge over the deep gorge ahead, has collapsed. Your only chance of saving, not only yourself, but five hundred harmless passengers, is to brake as much as you can, and try to shunt onto a disused siding. You go for it, no?

But then you notice there is a sweet little girl on the siding, standing right between the rails, with a beautiful bouquet of daffodils. She wears a pretty satin dress, in blue, has freckles, and is smiling beatifically. (Yes, I have parodied their emotionally loaded question.) If you succeed in performing the shunt, she will be … pancaked.

“That’s easy,” I replied. “Ace the little girl.”

But this turned out to be the wrong answer, according to the journalistic sages. Why? It is wrong to kill sweet little girls, they informed us, in their unctuous way. (“What if it were the terrorist who just blew the bridge?” I asked, mischievously.) You must never do things like that. Not ever. To them, the fact of five hundred on your train, was irrelevant.

(Guns are necessary, I reflected. And moral absolutism is necessary. But neither should be left in the hands of small children, journalists, or the insane.)

Let me be clear. I have never extirpated a little girl. Not even one. Thought of it, once or twice, when I was a little boy, but never acted upon it. Wouldn’t cross my mind, under normal circumstances.

And that is the key to the question. The engineer does not intend to liquidate the sweet little thing. He intends to save the lives of five hundred passengers. And she just happens to be in the wrong place, and at the wrong time.

I will admit that my calculation was statistical. Consider that, however dressed, and whether with daffodils, or without, there will be, by close to demographic certainty, more than a dozen sweet little girls on the train. My preferential option is for saving as many as possible.

Most likely result if, unlike a journalist, you know anything about trains: this one will be moving too fast to make the turn. Blame the fog of war. It derails, killing a hundred people, starting with the engineer. But the little girl on the track survives! (Perhaps traumatized for life.)

Still, you saved four hundred, and should get the (posthumous) gold star. But probably won’t, because, life’s like that.

Let me preface today’s whining with an apology to the several readers who have sent me gifts of money over the last three months. I thought donations had dried up entirely, since I hadn’t been notified of a single one, in all that time. Upon investigating with the help of my brilliant son, I found that no, Messrs PayPal had simply changed their reporting procedure (yet again), requiring me to visit their website to get such vital information. The same son has now taught me how to get into my own account, by computer (the only possible way). I now find that I owe thanks and acknowledgements to many kind souls. I am also, as usual, fallen behind general email, which never abated. (And snailmail, too.) There are queries in there more than a month old, which I couldn’t think how to answer when they first arrived. Forgive me, gentle readers, for as you must have reasoned already, I am a clown and an … idler.

Meanwhile, rich or poor, I will continue to upload these strange Idleposts to my anti-blog almost every day. It may be noticed that I failed the last two days. To those interested or amused, let me explain that I try to write something every day (but Sundays), and when nothing appears, it is not necessarily because I am lazy. More likely, I wrote something ill-humoured, or exceptionally stoopid, and decided to kill it. Then couldn’t write something else.

I also like to kill old Idleposts, when I happen to re-read them.

Perhaps I am not alone in another foible. I mentioned car horns, back-up wailers, and fire-alarm testing in my previous post. I could add the constant excruciating noise from construction sites, including counter-productive home improvement schemes. And then, what comes from the current iteration of ghetto blasters. And, angry people, shouting obscenities at each other in the street below me. I have excellent hearing, but a mind that can be arrested by loud, viciously ugly, sounds. I’d be useless as a soldier.

Wallace Stevens touched on this, circa 1935:

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano. …

In adolescence, I read somewhere (probably in the biography by Aldington) that D. H. Lawrence could write in any environment and circumstance at all. No amount of noise could distract him. I have since decided that Lawrence is the sort of writer who should have been dissuaded; but learnt that Mozart had the same capacity. And many others, of whom I am not one.

But the world is the world. “Adapt, or die,” as a boss once told me.

He hated whiners. In theory, so do I.

Often I wish the lads in my neighbourhood, and the lasses, for all I know — the non-consensual products of a ruinously progressive education system — would either stop trying to steal cars, or learn how to do it. From the evidence of my ears, they are inept. They are constantly setting off the alarms, without managing to break in. The cars remain, in situ, their horns bleating. It is a sound worse than vacuum cleaners, or the back-up wailers on omnipresent trucks.

And tomorrow, the authorities will be testing the fire alarms, again, in this building. These will be blaring at short intervals for about two days. We must wait till the inspectors leave, to remove all the batteries, or endure false alarms through the coming year. Then remember to replace them in time for the next inspection. Meanwhile, as life will become unbearable in the High Doganate, find somewhere else to be.

Though not an enthusiast for post-modernity, I do experience appreciative moments. I draw my inspiration from other quarters. For instance, newspaper headlines. Here is one for the ages:

“Alone in the Wild for a Year, TV Contestants Learn Their Show Was Cancelled.”

I must have chortled five minutes at this. Another giggle, each time I think back. Ah, the vanity of human wishes: one imagines the suckerhood on their faces. No need to read the article, for it was in the New York Times, which graciously puts up a pay wall to warn you off reading more than would be safe for your health.

Back to Drudge for more headlines; it offers a daily survey of events that are contra naturam. … Breitbart is also good, but for my tastes, too engagé. … Small Dead Animals is all meat. …  Maggie’s Farm is for the connoisseurs. … They help you keep up with the Devil’s agenda. He has servants in high places, who every day try to push a few more “progressive” lumps, down the collective oesophagus.

We might call these “signs of the times” — mere road signs, really, not to be obeyed. But one may titter, privately. God gave us this means to cope with absurdities, and as a useful weapon against the demonic, in close-quarter rumbles. We know the Devil is tortured by laughter. So let us exhibit a mediaeval sensibility, and have some fun with him.

The world turned upside down; the fools’ festivals; pride parades are the current manifestation. April Fools is coming Saturday; make sure you are ready. (Earth Day, later in the month.) It is a day rich in anniversaries. We commemorate the first legalization of same-sex marriage (Netherlands, 2001); the accidental bombing of a Swiss city by the U.S. Air Force (1944); the foundation of the Reserve Bank of India (1935); the patent for an internal combustion engine (1826); … each, a celebration of unintended consequences, and thus amusing, in its own way. Digging deeper, we may recall the elevation of Maximian to Roman co-emperor (286). Or the crowning of China’s first female monarch, in 528. (She was deposed the next day.)

Painful as the consequences might be to others, or for the participants themselves, none of these occasions should be taken too seriously. All are eventually cancelled, in time. They are typical of the things that happen on this planet, which get into the news. More edifying events are hardly ever recorded. Goodness has never been newsworthy.

Contra naturam, or contra mundum: those are your options, my gentle reader. Don’t let anyone sell you a “third way.”

The expression, cited in my title, got my attention long before I became a Christian, let alone was received into the Roman fold. I found it a rather thrilling assertion, whether or not “true.” The idea that God could have a mother fritzed my little neurons; but it was better than that. For there is a second, Trinitarian punch coming, when the corollary follows, that “Christ is God” — and thus no “prophet” as I was raised to think of Him in my highly secularized milieu. It seemed to me that the Catholics had knocked the wildest Evangelicals into a cocked hat.

This comes back to me, naturally, each year at the Annunciation. From the same milieu, I knew that word as a term of art. Quite literally, an “Annunciation” was a painting of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary, to declaim a famous passage from the Gospel of Luke. I was once fairly well-educated, by Canadian standards, I will have you know. I knew that passage from a fairly early age. I’d read my Gideon New Testament, which in those days was distributed to schoolchildren. (If the schools tried that today there’d be trouble.) I had it from both post-Christian parents that one ought to read the Bible, in order to become an “educated person.” This was not the Holy Bible they meant, rather, “the Bible as Literature” — another book, of identical text, but much different meaning. (Borges once wrote a good story about that: “Pierre Menard.”)

“Mother of God.” Well that just takes the cake, my wee mind thought. Having been pupil in a certain Saint Anthony’s School in earlier childhood (the one in Lahore), I was already prepared to accept the proposition that Catholics are, as a species, crazy; though not necessarily crazier than the rest. Indeed, they seemed so easily to attract persecution (not only in Lahore), that I tended to identify with them. At some point in early adolescence, the notion that those believed most crazy might be the most sane, was consciously formulated.

It took me till fifty to join up, but as God is my witness, I’ve been pro-Catholic all my life; never more so than in a Canadian high school when I was an “evangelical atheist” and a spiky debater. I noticed the school’s few Catholic kids were the butt of much smug, bad humour. I decided, for instance, to defend Humanae Vitae, on purely secular, rational grounds. All my crushes were on Catholic girls; but that was only indirectly because of their religion. Really it was because they wore their hair long, and were not tomboys.

This eccentricity got me inside several Catholic homes, where I saw the statuary. Mother Mary invariably made an appearance, as she did not in nice Protestant families. They had pictures any Protestant would find in bad taste. They had crucifixes with “the little man on them”; which looked as they might drip blood on your shoe. They framed biblical texts in weird translations. They were tribal, largely because they were excluded from respectable society, and their fathers worked in places like the brewery. Their surnames could end in vowels. One might call it an anthropological fascination; I was also partial to Armenians, and Jews.

“Mother of God.” A little girl called Liddy, who informed me that I was going to Hell, because not a Catholic, once used this expression. I found it as enchanting as her pigtails.

The mother of God, and by extension, the mother of everything, as nearly as I could make out. My mind was not ready for the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception. That is for older boys. But these Catholics had things called Rosaries — you know, the beads — and I gathered they addressed prayers to Mother Mary, fifty times.

Now sixty-three, and doing this sort of thing myself, I continue in amazement. The Annunciation seems to me, still, too much to take in. The conception of the universe comes into it.

Dear Mister Trump. After a couple of months of him in office, I have come to the conclusion that while he is reckless with his “facts and arguments,” hair-trigger in his responses, given to hyperbole at the expense of other rhetorical figures, and proud almost to a fault, he is basically honest. Even naïve. He is not the sort to commit criminal acts knowingly. He is verily a bull in the Washington China shop, if not a mastadon, and a simpleton (compared to Reagan, for example) in his understanding of how the world ticks — an authentic populist. But his schemes for “fixing things” is so innocent in juxtaposition with the policies of his predecessor and rivals, it would be nice if the congressional vermin could find it in their hearts to half play along.

“Please, Mister Trump, do yourself a big favour and don’t tweet that before you’ve shown it to one of those high-class lawyers,” is a thought I have perhaps shared, with many. Mister Obama, whose advice came invariably with scorpion whips, said the presidency is not a “family business.” Nonsense. Rulers are in great need of family advisers, to spread their tentacles wider, and provide the kind of criticism whose loyalty they might trust. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, seems to have her head screwed on symmetrically, and now has an office in the West Wing. She is a steadying influence on the old boy, and let me humbly suggest he put her in charge of his Twitter account. Not to edit, of course, except for grammar and spelling; just to selectively delete. If she is selling her cosmetic line while she is at it, I have no objection. Everyone in politics seems to come out rich, and this is among the least craven methods for amassing a White House fortune.

The Obamacare fiasco in the House of Representatives, now come to a head, is a reminder that the “administrative state” cannot be peacefully dismantled. The plan was set up, as all progressive measures, to be unrescindable. It did not merely create a vast new class with vested interests; it tipped the scale on medical expenditure (soon one-fifth of the USA economy, thanks to demographics and bureaucratic regulation) from personal to public responsibility. Government is now answerable for anyone uncovered by health insurance, and may use this to routinely demand totalitarian controls. You can’t take Obamacare down (or anything resembling) without replacing it with a more egregious system, or rather, you can’t take it down without tanks.

This is a “problem” with the entire Nanny State. Given 20 trillion of acknowledged federal debt (a small fraction of unfunded liabilities), common sense would indicate the need for economies. But they can’t be made. The federal budget, in USA as in all Western countries, is so dominated by the constantly inflating cost of “entitlements,” and those are so impossible to brake, that cuts must be made to services only governments can provide. There is no “democratic,” and certainly no quiet way out of this rat hole, which the cat of a corrupt jurisprudence now jealously guards.

Americans, as all other denizens of our decaying Western Civ, have become abjectly dependent upon Nanny, spiritually as well as materially, to our ultimate destruction. Individual self-seeking continues, however, and the common effort to game the system accounts for the insupportable debt.

The best excuse I have heard for the president, from Republicans and his international well-wishers, is that it takes a honey badger like Trump to grit in. I agree that vulgarity is often required. But from the outset, the gentleman announced he wasn’t going to mess with the welfare order, that he was just going to make it more businesslike and efficient. (“Businesslike” confers no political advantages.) In other words, from the outset he was totally defeated; and would never have been elected, had he been a genuine radical.

Ditto, for the “nationalist” parties in Europe.

The world has lost a truly great entomologist, perhaps its greatest collector of beetles, with the death of David A. Rockefeller, on Monday at the age of one hundred and one, among the cabinets of his specimens at Pocantico Hills: each impeccably labelled and mounted. Rockefeller’s dwarfed the collections of Darwin and Wallace, the accumulated stores in Oxford University, the holdings of natural history museums in many sizeable European countries.

At the age of seven, this young David discovered his calling — or was called, by an elegant, an elongate Parandra, glittering dark caramel, the full inch long, with its formidable pinching mandibles. It was trespassing in the foliage on his father’s estate. Veritably, a Parandra brunneus. Bravely lifting it by its sides, the lad dropped it into a bottle, the first of his hundred thousand catches, by one means or another. For in addition to his personal pouncings, Mr Rockefeller was able to obtain many finely specialized collections, from the world’s great auction houses, to extend his own estimable hoard.

On his sixteenth birthday, while other boys might party, David found eight species of leaf beetle alone, on the same estate. In family visits to their rubber plantations in Liberia (where the prize was a three-inch Augosoma centaurus), their wine properties in Margaux (a memorable Caloclytus varius at Chateau Lacombes), he was able to find many beetles more. At Harvard, entomology was the only subject in which he scored an “A.” As an American soldier in Algeria during the last World War, he was able to amass more than a hundred of some forty-one species. Many hundreds, previously unknown, were catalogued on the expeditions he sponsored, and often accompanied, to the uttermost ends of the Earth. We can hardly look at a high-altitude scarab from Mexico today, without recalling that among the rarest is the Diplotaxis rockefelleri, discovered by, and named for, our hero. Indeed, more than a dozen splendid beetles now share his name.

This scion of the Rockefellers, youngest of the second generation to succeed the principal co-founder of Standard Oil — among the classiest of American robber barons and philanthropists — had advantages of birth over any of his rivals, but used them to laudable effect. And his collections will now migrate to the appropriate facility at Harvard, from whose Curator in Entomology (via the Internet) I have gleaned most of these facts.

David Rockefeller was in at the conception of many other things — Manhattan property deals including the sites for the United Nations, and the former Twin Towers; the foundation of the Trilateral Commission, and so forth. It’s all in the obituaries somewhere. But these were mere flexings of money and power. The discovery and entrapment of a new beetle throws all such accomplishments into the shade, and makes the life of a plutocrat worth living.

May he rest in peace, among his beloved bugs.

It is true I am a pirumphile, or lover of pears, as I am reminded by a plastic jug of excellent pear juice I have obtained from a farmer’s market. It is large, a half-gallon, but I cannot guarantee it will last very long, up here in the High Doganate. Fresh, it is very satisfying, but transformed into perry (poiré to you Normans or Angevins) it could become an exquisite mediaeval beverage, and would be among my tipples, were I able to find a source for it near this place and time. It is best as a still pear wine, or cider; please omit the modernist carbonation. Too, it can be distilled into a thoughtful, philosophical brandy. When the world contends that something has gone pear-shaped, I am all ears. Had I more enterprise, I would set out my orchards right away. For as the proverb declares, “Plant pears for your heirs.”

Though close, I would not go so far as to call myself pomaceous, for while my love doth extend to apples, and hath often done to a fine Calvados — and I wilt happily embrace a succulent loquat, a bletted medlar, a fragrant quince — it is capable of finding an ideal contentment in a perfectly ripened pear. All these “pomes,” each in many kinds, were common to Europe, and also to America, in times before the modernist standardization. Now, most industrial apples leave me cold, and some cannot even be redeemed in a maple-syrup deep-dish apple pie.

Or let us dwell briefly on the pert, pear-related rowans (“dogberries” to my far eastern correspondents in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland). These, in their innumerable varieties, were revered in merrie England through past centuries, leading back behind the iconoclast Reformation, yet I doubt any would be recognized in cities today, even were gentle reader and I bombarded with them. We are “urbane,” after all, or as I like to say, “conurban,” for we live not in cities as previously defined but in broad sprawling deletions of the landscape. The extraordinary variety of the world, as presented to the imagination in cookery books from almost anywhere before the Great War, is now beyond memory and perhaps belief. I see the most ignorant things said of our ancestors’ diets, by the believers in “progress” and therefore supermarkets, with their narrow range of strictly branded goods, the same at all locations.

Read Shakespeare — from the Warden Pear in A Winter’s Tale, to the Popperins on which Mercutio suggests obscene play for tragic Romeo:

Now will he sit under a Medler tree,
And wish his Mistresse were that kind of Fruite,
As Maides call Medlers, when they laugh alone …

Read Chaucer for that matter, by way of recovering an ancient alertness to the scents of a cultivated nature, in times when botanical curiosity had more dimensions. But of course, we have scientific gardeners today, at work preserving the DNA of ages. It is only missing from our everyday lives.