Essays in Idleness

Sadly, I lost my girlfriend this week (funeral today). She was Milady Sue K., among my late mother’s friends at the oldie home around the corner. She was only ninety or so (never parted with her age), flirtatious through all of her several marriages (by her own account), and a bundle of consistently mischievous good humour.

I write “girlfriend” with some confidence, for once, when asked who I was by some rather severe and starchy grand niece, she explained:

“This is David, my boyfriend.”

Then reached over to caress my knee.

I first encountered Sue jammed in the automatic door at “Lakeview,” as she was coming in from a smoke in the snowdrifts. (Unusual cheroots, by preference with wine.) Her wheelchair was locked into the glass and metal by the closing mechanism. It required all my cruelly limited engineering skills to extricate her.

Upon wheeling her towards the elevators, I asked if she liked to go fast.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “I’m a very fast woman.”

Arriving at the elevator, I said that I must abandon her now.

“Oh yes, and I have often been abandoned.”

An indomitable spirit; entirely indifferent to rules and regulations. We put young Father E. on her case, and she quickly converted to the Catholick Faith. Then proved almost as earnest as he, peppering us with embarrassingly difficult theological questions.

My mama and she were buddies, while they lived. I had chiefly Father H. (a Czech of superb height) on my mother’s case, but like cricketers the two priests often switched over. (I once entered mama’s room to find Father H. apologizing if he was being a plague. “Nonsense,” my mama replied. “I have no objection to being harangued by tall, handsome, Slavic men.”)

Both of these ladies uncharitably dismissive of the “mental corpses” around them, “especially on the staff.”

Both incurably vain. Never seen except fully made up, and by custom regal. Except, Sue’s lipsticks were alarming. She said her dream in life had been to become the mistress of some profligate French monarch; or now that she was Catholic, perhaps a Borgia pope.

She had the ability to quote reams of English verse. Sometimes she improved it in recitation, with little word substitutions to update the comic effects. A Wodehouse could easily have transformed her into a magnificent aunt. Indeed, anyone could. … Aheu!

Took the name Scholastica (whose feast happens also to be today), and was for her last eight years, without ceasing to be lively, a very sincere and devoted Roman Christian.

Requiescat in pace.

This is admissions week in the High Doganate. I shamefully admitted to not having read Wodehouse on Tuesday; today I will admit to not watching movies. Never say never, however: I did see some movies as a young man (mostly with the object of taking girls to them), and am aware that they are still being made. I read about them sometimes. Why, just this week I have read two such articles. (This one, and this one; both recommended.)

In the event of war crimes trials, I shall have to admit that I reviewed movies once, for a daily newspaper. But that was a very long time ago, and let me assure gentle reader I made a fool of myself trying, and was soon fired.

My last effort in this regard was in 1987, when CBC Radio asked me to review a version of Little Dorrit that went on for six hours. Or maybe it was eight, or longer. They’d heard I had read the original novel, which no one else had, and perhaps thought I could sit still for the duration. My review consisted of explaining how much of Dickens’s sprawling, sentimental epic had to be omitted to fit the time; how unconvincing the (celebrated) actors were in the principal rôles; how inappropriate the Verdi soundtrack; how badly the director had captured a kind of poor-house Gulag, within which, as in Solzhenitsyn’s, the human spirit is rising. More generally: everything of value in the novel had been lost, and what a waste of time and money. I did however praise one passing animated backdrop of early Victorian London, so scrupulously accurate that it made me think, “Good Lord, this place once existed!”

Unfortunately, it turned out, the New York Times had just exalted the production, and so dissing it was now forbidden. I could not be persuaded to change my own views. At the last minute my pre-recorded comments were canned, and I was replaced by the programme’s producer, who used all my material to give the impression he had seen the movie himself, but methodically reversed each of my critical judgements. This did not bother me, for by 1987 I already knew what the CBC is, and besides, they paid me.

The last movie I had seen before that was, Blade Runner, in 1982. I was impressed by that but, alas, no one asked for my opinion. I would have said it was a brilliant and entirely successful depiction of modern urban life. Looking back, I still think so.

Snippets of movies I have seen on the Internet, when curious to discover what people around me are talking about. It takes about three minutes, I find, to gather everything one needs to know. Longer would involve unconscionable self-abuse. (Well, I think I slipped and watched several snippets of The Big Lebowski.)

Perhaps I have seen another movie, in the last thirty years. If so, I have forgotten.

“Dining with sinners,” I am told by one of my neo-Southern correspondents, “is far more enjoyable than dining with the morally earnest, puffed hypocrites of the elite.”

I’m sure this was true twenty centuries ago, for some things on this planet never change.

Judging from the Gospels, Our Lord seems to have made something of a show — of his preferential option for dining with sinners — by way of subtly undermining pharisaic claims. He did not waste much time on the self-satisfied and “fulfilled”; focusing instead upon the hungry.

Of course, Holy Church proposes to feed everyone; but not everyone likes her food. It is prepared specifically for those customers who know that they fall short of moral and spiritual perfection.

This is not something that should be hard to know, supposing we have any idea of what moral and spiritual perfection might consist. (Hence the divine Example.) Today, this is a real puzzle, to our children exhaustively indoctrinated, from first contact with media or schools; as also to our parents’ children, taught that the only real crimes are the icky ones, and that those are entirely subjective. Each begins with a conscience unformed, but most continue to a radical deformation, so quickly that from an early age they are unlikely to detect the source of so much psychic pain.

It can only be found by that guided self-examination, which the “modern” is encouraged to avoid. Instead, he is launched on a career of blame-seeking.

The worst thing a doctor can tell a patient, in urgent need of help, is that his illness is imaginary. This is what the Church does, when she invites her members to approach the altar in an impure state. She is presenting the Mass as a quack prescription. By representing the Host as a remedy for what ails us, she is selling sugar pills. Or rather, the Church herself never does this; only the hucksters among her human agents.

A man aware that he is dirty will not be outraged by the prospect of a wash. Only the man who thinks himself clean.

Let him also consider the nature of the Feast to which the dinner bells call; and in Whose company he will eat. The Confessional “shower stalls” are on the way into a Catholic church, for benefit alike of rich and poor; because all carry in the dirt of the world.

The Muslim must both ritually and actually purify his hands, upon entering his mosque. The Christian must both ritually and actually purify his soul, upon entering his church. He is not entering a common diner. Neither is the Muslim, God save his soul.

Christ, in the Last Supper, was not doling out hypochondriac medications. Rather as He explained, His own flesh. Let us not pretend this wasn’t a shocking thing to do. We call it “the Sacrifice of the Mass,” and have so called it from time out of mind, because we take Christ at His word. We find him hanging above the very altar, the scapegoat for us all. There is no glib interpretation of this that can make any sense to the formed Christian, thick and sinful as he may otherwise be.

When, on the other hand, Christ dropped in for a common meal, He arrived as a man among men. I do not know how even the latest experts in Rome, can fail to distinguish a church from a diner.

Today’s confession — I tell you, gentle reader, things I really ought to keep to myself — is that I have never read P. G. Wodehouse. I am surrounded by people who have, so that I sometimes feel as if I were the only person in a large room of jollies who does not get the joke. Have never read him at all. And this although there are among these Wodehouseans some with proselytizing zeal. At least one has called me a “classic” Wodehouse character, then added, “Not Jeeves, but Bertie Wooster.” Now another adds, “A Bertie lacking a Jeeves.” Verily, from his further explanation I learn that I may have been Woostering, these last sixty years — a Hamlet without a solid Horatio; a Don Quixote without a Sancho Panza. Arjuna without Krishna.

I mention all this from a peculiar coincidence. In email, over the last few days, in three, now four unrelated screeds, the name of this British comic author has come up, in each case without the slightest tip from me. And in each case, Wodehouse was mentioned in connexion with the Catholic religion, and even with conversion. It is a dark mystery.

The more when I reflect upon the little I know of the personal history of a Swedish friend: a refined, almost dandyish, pipe-smoking intellectual. Oddly, he is a Catholic. Very Old-Mass, too. With a beautiful Swedish wife, also very Catholic, and innumerable perfectly behaved, Swedish-looking children, whom she carries about, three or four at a time.

Converts! … No, no, far weirder than that. … Swedish converts! … I had to ask him what led to his conversion: what had he been reading? what thinking? who inspired him? what could possibly turn a harmless Scandihoovian, soap-loving, post-Lutheran secularist boy into a red-meat mediaevalizing Papist?

To which he smoothly replied, “P. G. Wodehouse.”

“Um, I don’t think of Wodehouse as especially Catholic.”

“True, but while I was reading him, I discovered what is meant by ‘a sense of humour’. Being Swedish, I had no idea such a thing was possible. But when that penny dropped, it all made sense. Everything fit together: I must go to Rome.”

Let me add that I am still assimilating this information. I have met many Chesterton converts, and C. S. Lewis converts. I have even met an Evelyn Waugh convert, which I can understand. I should like to put myself down as a Hilaire Belloc convert. That would be a lie, but I think, a good one.

There are days when I wish that I still had a Comments thread. This, for the purpose of eliciting reader suggestions on “how this could be so.” For we have Wodehouse converts, who aren’t even Swedish. (I am thinking of four Bangladeshi brothers just now, who, as all Bengalis, were born laughing at the ludicrous nature of life on this Earth.) So curious, that I am toying with the exercise of reading this P. G. Wodehouse myself.

For it would be just like God, to use a low-brow, popular farcical humourist as the means to accomplish profoundly serious, heavenly ends.

Trump lied. He predicted the Patriots would win by eight. They only won by six. And anyway the result of the game should be overturned by the courts, for the Falcons clearly won on yards rushing. (I stole this from some Comments thread somewhere.) And Brady, the Patriots’ quarterback, is a friend of Trump’s. He should never have been allowed to play. And Edelman’s pass reception should not have counted, because it was too good to be true. Ditto for White’s final touchdown. Or his previous one. Or the one before that.

Notwithstanding, the Patriots won.

Yes, I was watching the game, having found a livestream that worked on my laptop, though not until late in the third quarter, when the score was New England 3, Atlanta 28. I don’t usually watch American football; or any other kind of football; or any other professional sports. I especially don’t watch a game that’s not close. I can’t exactly say what glued me. My prejudice on behalf of the Patriots was mild, founded in a long dislike for the city of Atlanta, going back half a century to my hitchhiking days. Too, in my belief that of the two sides, the Patriots were less politically correct. But Sherman burnt it down once, and now Brady has burnt it down again. (Sorry gentle reader in Atlanta; the rest of Georgia I adore.)

I am wilfully biased by nature; I don’t need much to get me started. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, I was a New England Patriots fanatic; and by the time the score was 20 to 28, I was muttering prayers and reaching for my Rosary.

According to an American proverb, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. (And this Gaga lady wasn’t fat enough.) To other counsels against ever giving up, I now add Tom Brady.

As he said himself, after the game, there were thirty plays that could have gone either way. If even one of them had not gone right, the result would have been different. That’s what Wellington noted after Waterloo: that it had been a close-run thing, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”

Should we ever be saved, gentle reader — you or even me — I think it might be a close-run thing. And as the next lap could be our last, remember to ask for divine assistance.

Nothing in this world is perfect (except Our Lord and Our Lady). But we wouldn’t even be here today, were it not for many million close-run things.

From some newspaper or other, found on a trolley seat, I read the latest on granny dumping. This is when your granny has Alzheimer’s, or a similar dementia, to the point of forgetting family names, and needing a lot of unselfish attention. You take her to England on a family vacation — or any other welfare state will do — and leave her at a bus stop somewhere. (Or grandpa, as in the item I was reading.) But should your budget not go that far, you might just “lose” the inconvenient progenitor, over a few county lines. With luck, no one will recognize the face when some busybody posts it on Instagram or Snapchat. Having legal guardianship, and most likely low intelligence, you might even continue to cash granny’s cheques.

Let us not be too harsh. This is better than “euthanasia,” as the progressives call it; or senicide, or homicide, or “whatever.” And it probably puts an end to the physical abuse that granny was experiencing back home. By emerging Catholic standards it might count as merciful and merit a gold star. From Rome we are after all now hearing that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Why do the journalists reporting such stories sound so judgemental?

In Japan, according to the paper I was reading, the operation is called ubasute, and involves carrying granny up a high mountain, or to some other remote place. A quick check on standard references indicates that this custom is associated with the distant past; but then, a further electronic search indicates that it may be reviving. It is a country whose welfare and tax authorities recently discovered did not have almost a million centenarians, after all. More like 65,692; and some laxity in reporting bereavements.

I recall many similar legends, on the topic of senicide, circulating in my youth: Eskimo grannies floated off on ice floes, for example. As I grew, I learnt that such accounts were not necessarily true. Later, that they were not necessarily untrue, either. (Last known case in 1939, according to the Wicked Paedia.)

Whichever, and in defiance of political correctitude, my darling children were able to acquire this last detail of Canadian lore, in the form of a modern urban trope; the elder one especially. Hence a memorable remark, when his father admitted to age and mental enfeeblement, by way of explaining some eccentric act. I believe the lad was being droll. Nevertheless, I resisted his subsequent proposal for a family vacation in Nunavut.

From Procopius, we learn of the eugenic practices of the Heruli, a Germanic tribe, who assembled their sick and elderly in woodpiles, mercifully stabbing them to death before setting the piles alight. The Heruli were, incidentally, quite democratic, as were most if not all pre-Christian tribes. Everything by majority decision. (Electronic voting makes that possible again.)

A more thorough review of the annals of anthropology would yield a fairly thick dossier. We are reminded that in pagan cultures, including those of urbane Athens and Rome, Christian ideas about abortion, infanticide, suicide, senicide, were not yet in place. Today, we observe that they are slipping.

Under an Executive Order of a former German chancellor (also 1939), the Aktion T4 programme provided a one-size-fits-all solution for the incurably ill, the physically and mentally disabled, the emotionally distraught, and the irretrievably old. Soon this was extended to assorted Slavs, and all identifiable homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews — entirely without what our liberal intellectuals call “informed consent.” The sort which might today be at risk of granny dumping would be accommodated under one category or another; and with Teutonic efficiency, house calls were arranged.

Did I mention this wasn’t Christian? Oddly, it became labelled as unprogressive, too; for while eugenics was all the fashion with the Darwinian avant-garde, before Hitler, after it went briefly out of style. I say “briefly” in the deeper historical context, for after only a few decades it is coming back in. Indeed, granny dumping might be given as an argument to make these policies more efficient and hygienic. It is (exactly) like demanding state abortion, so that women don’t have to make more hazardous arrangements to free themselves of their unwanted children, and go skulking about in fear of getting caught.

But of course, we now have “informed consent.” (Try getting it from an unborn baby.)

I have noticed that the truly doddering aged will agree to almost anything. For they are no longer following the plot. And some I have met in the oldie homes, even among those who recognize their descendants, may be so glad to see them again. And after such a long time! They’ll do anything for a smile.

We can make a law to permit something, or remove a law that gets in the way. We could also make a law forbidding it again, or restoring the status quo ante. We could have a lot of discussion about this, and the sort of Burkly riots that become easier to imagine, as a national entertainment, every day. For it’s not a pretty sight when the progressives stop smiling, because they haven’t got their way.

And yet as I realize from a clump of stray newspaper on the seat of a trolley, they are probably quite opposed to granny dumping. For it adds a fiscal burden to the state’s already mounting healthcare costs. Perhaps we’ll get new regulations against it; but I shouldn’t think anything too serious. For as I have elsewhere observed, the only “pro-life” position that progressive legislators are willing to support is on behalf of the convicted perpetrators of what were traditionally capital crimes.

To my mind, such laws are a secondary consideration. We can argue and riot until the pigeons come home to roost, in our dense intellectual smog; we can watch young, “politically aware” faces contorted with rage, carrying signs declaring their opposition to “hate,” and calling for assassinations. That is all quite irrelevant. The choice is really between a cultural reconversion to Christianity, and continuing our slide into murderous savagery. Meanwhile everyone has an opinion, and everything is up for grabs. We vote.

Civilization is oppressive. It makes certain acts unthinkable. You hardly even need laws, once that is established. But they are kept on the books, all the same, and the hangman’s noose still stands as a paradoxical reminder of the sanctity of human life. As Doctor Johnson said, it helps to concentrate the mind.

That was the “dead-white” Euro thing: oppressive Christianity. Before that we were like the Heruli. Now we are becoming like the Heruli again — albeit with much improved technology.

How do we know that the Earth was created by God? Because it exists. The same can be said for the universe in which we are located: our little universe, quickly expanding but still less than 93 billion light years wide, at the broadest estimate. It exists, and continues to exist, even when we close our eyes; or die, for that matter.

This naïve little “proof” first occurred to me about forty years ago. Or rather, first occurred to me then as an irrefutable proposition. It may not satisfy gentle reader, to say nothing of Saint Anselm in Heaven, but it pleaseth me. I found Descartes too subjective. I was trying to get behind cogito ergo sum. You may think you are, but what about a machine that thinks, but has no consciousness, and has parts that can be switched on and off? A Cartesian machine that has nothing but brains, and thus no way to anchor? How could it ever know? How do earthworms know? Why are humans privileged?

We are, if we can ask the question. Animals may be problem-solvers, too, but I rather doubt even those clever (and sometimes vicious) dolphins spend time on problems like this. They know what they know; had they the philosophical capacity, they would have walked out of the water by now. For that matter most humans don’t, until there is some tease, such as looking into the face of death: one’s own in particular. Does this universe continue when I check out?

“Well, what do you think?” I asked myself, sardonically. Of course it does. I’d watched other people die. The “fact of life” was ineluctable; clinched, as it were, in the fact of death. There it lay before me.

It struck me, in the darkening London twilight, on the steps of the V&A Museum, that the choice between is and is not had likewise been made before me. Consider: the universe “ought” never to have existed, and nothing ought ever to have been. This would be sensible. It would solve all metaphysical quandaries. But as in fact there was something, not nothing, one must deal with a miracle. A rather large one. Modern men do not care for miracles, but there’s a whole chain of them to contend with, and we might as well start here. The “IS” just where we look for an “is not” provides, if nothing else, an outrageous scandal; for with that IS we have the unavoidable authorship of meaning. We have Being, Life, things that Exist. Even an atheist is stuck acknowledging them, and suicide can provide no escape. We might have some Becoming, too, but in the face of such truths, it is an homeopathic dose; I wanted my Reality straight up.

That it all “just happened” is no explanation; that one thing led to another is lame. Being does not come out of nothingness. It eradicates nothingness. It establishes for fact that nothingness never was. One cannot even aspire to restore what is unrestorable: for it is nothing, not something, that never was. One might preach that “God is dead,” but it will be just words. That IS, is prior, and it seemed to me then that I could see where even “godless” Buddhism, and very godful Christianity converged — in an undeniable immortality. Or to take this to the Upanishads, something that “neither is nor is not” unmistakably IS. He might be prior to male and female and neuter, prior to many other distinctions, but too, He is prior to prior.

One might even say, with Jean-Luc Marion and the cutting-edge theologians, that there is “God Without Being.” Notice one must say that this IS.

“Live with it,” as they say. Or as Isaiah put it, “Choose life.” We are stuck with IS for as long as we should live, and infinitely before, and after. We might as well start coming to terms, with the elephant in our cosmos.

Thoughts like this began to afflict a young man not quite twenty-three, who had done his best to be “an evangelical atheist,” with whatever bells and whistles came to hand; to deny everything that could not be proved. My intellectualism had defeated itself, and now I would be prey to the suggestions of the greatest poets and philosophers, saints and doctors — whom I had previously noticed were never on my side. My unconscious lie had become a conscious one, which meant, sooner or later I should have to abandon it, and tuck into minds greater than my own.

Add a few more thoughts, some time in a hospital with a collapsed lung, and a great deal of intellectual and emotional confusion, ending in a question asked ever less sarcastically, ever more candidly, to wit: “Christ, if you exist, why don’t you just show yourself to me?” and answered finally with the most personal sun-burst of unearthly Love, accompanied by the words, “I will cross this bridge with you.” The story of my conversion and subsequent development into a “born-again Catholic” has been told elsewhere. I don’t like to repeat it, because I cannot do justice to the experience, only awkwardly report my inadequate response to it. But if gentle reader is looking at his watch, let me add that from IS to Christ took about three months, and a half.

As I think back, I realize, one must start somewhere, in this universe full of starts and finishes. “If you came this way,” &c. (See: The Four Quartets.) One must try to get behind what is, to what IS. One must find one’s way out of the “box” of time; walk through its walls. There is no door, no material key to be found, and yet, knock and it will be answered.

Several readers of the hard violent Right are disturbed to find Mr Trump so aggressive; I’ve been chatting with them on current news. Let me continue with a footnote to what I wrote yesterday.

Trumpf, but also Steve Bannon and a few lessers, are civil warmongers to be sure, and adrenaline junkies. (Bannon a former Benedictine choirboy: they’re the toughest.) My own instinct is not to provoke people gratuitously; except on a battlefield. The general wants to provoke the opposing general into doing things that are stupid, by making him very very angry. But of course he must remain cool-headed himself, to exploit the mistakes. For this the Trumpflings may need heavenly help. For they are themselves a little too easy to annoy.

Now, God works in mysterious ways, and through unlikely agents, and His grace — as theological experts have observed — is not always comfortable to those who’d prefer the quiet and luxurious life. History, too, is not always nice, and the ways in which what goes around, then comes around, can also be rather inconvenient, from what we like to think an “humane” point of view. “Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of Mercy,” is a phrase that comes to mind from my Lit classes.

And God is in this somewhere. He always is. See: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. (Here, in case you can’t find it.) The sudden conversion to, then enthusiasm for “pro-life” is striking. Perhaps God has given the thick flesh of Trumpf a specific task: such as, bring down Roe v. Wade. Reagan was a poofter on abortion; his successors were not even that; this guy seems to mean “bidnis.” (That’s a Flannery O’Connorism for what one goes about, day to day.)

Of course that could mean war, and tremendous suffering. While the defenders of “the woman’s prerogative” over the life of her unborn child are now sinking into the minority, it is the central rite or “sacrament,” around which the whole Culture of Death revolves. That is why even progressives who feel badly about abortion, defend it to partial and post-birth: because so much else depends on it. (Verily, it is the reason Southerners who felt uneasy about slavery, were willing to fight and die for an institution on which their whole culture depended.) It is hard to imagine a peaceful surrender.

One might say, that in their Civil War of 1861–65, Americans both North and South paid off their cosmic debt for half a million slaves.

I can’t imagine the debt on sixty million babies.

I love phrases like “frothing hysteria.” They are so frothing, so hysterical. Over the weekend I heard this one from both sides of the current American Civil War. It hasn’t got to uniforms, yet — you can’t get people to dress properly, these days — but it has become obvious that the line is drawn between the Red and the Blue. I have mixed colours in my paintbox to produce to my satisfaction what might be called a “Trumpf Red” and an “Alinsky Blue.” Blood red was incidentally the old Tory colour, before the Communists stole it; Whigs were often sky blue; Yankee colour schemes are thus stuck in the eighteenth century. (Bravo!)

The breaking news is that the Left are freaking out. But this is an old story. They’ve been doing that for decades, whenever they don’t seem to be getting their way. It is part of the power formula, not only for them but for the average three-year-old. … “What do we want?” … “Goo-goos!” … “When do want them?” … “Now!”

Rather, the curious development through the recent American election is that the Right are freaking, too. The Left may not follow this because it isn’t covered in their electronic newspapers. They have really no idea what is going on, or has been going on — what bugs these people in the broad space between the several Left Coasts. Ever gracious, I told them that Trump was going to win, even though I didn’t much like the man myself; but they didn’t believe me. (Perhaps they don’t read my Idleposts!) They couldn’t imagine such a thing: like that great genius Pauline Kael, sainted expositor of leftishness and Hollywood movies, who could not understand how Nixon had won when everyone she knew had voted for McGovern.

Who got Trump elected? The short answer is “Obama,” that wonderful man (from a Republican point of view) who, during his time in office, filled more than a thousand Democrat legislative seats with Republicans, right across America. With continuing popularity in all the big cities, he pushed the rest of the country a little too far. And that is why this time the simpletons in the sticks did not get behind a polite, pussy-footing McCain or a Romney. They got behind some real estate tycoon from Manhattan who appeared to understand them. Who — now this is a delicious tiny fact — consistently dressed in his sharpest boardroom suits, to convey his respect while he harangued them. (Professional politicians instinctively dress up for their colleagues; dress down for their more “rural” audiences, hoping they’ll appreciate the inauthenticity.)

There are lots of little things like that of which my gentle reader may be perfectly aware; especially if he comes from a Red State. In addition to novelties, there are little continuities in national character, that show from one generation to another. “Middle America” was never, exactly, isolationist. Rather, before 24/7 media, these people were a long way from the coasts. They were small town and laid back and slow to anger. Sometimes they’d turn up three years late for a World War. But when they got there, they got there.

Here’s another little thing. On his first few days in office, President Obama flourished numerous Executive Orders. The traditional number for new presidents was zero. Trump has nearly matched his predecessor, and indeed, most of his simply reverse Obama orders. The one notable exception was the modest, temporary (ninety days) item on inbound travel, which made so much news over the weekend. Those who have actually read it — apparently no one in the mainstream media — will have noticed that it does not contain any of the features they frothingly and hysterically condemn. It does not even mention the few terrorist-infested Muslim countries whose nationals were flagged. That list was helpfully supplied by the Department of Homeland Security. It came from the outgoing Obama administration. The nefarious Trumpfists had taken strictly Obama-era materials and recycled them into force. I think they did that purposely, to set their opponents up and make them look foolish.

What they have now learnt, is that clever tricks like that don’t work in an environment where “facts” are mostly “alternative.” You cannot argue with the (frothing, hysterical) mobs that were hosed into the aeroports by the same social media that got the Arab Springs going. There will be no opportunity for a civilized debate with people in a state of psychiatric meltdown. If this state were temporary, it would be unwise to excite them. But what if, thanks to Pavlovian indoctrination, it has become permanent, and the mere uttering of the monosyllable “Trump” will set them off? Straitjackets, anyone?

It was an unnecessary Executive Order, and from what I understand, nothing Trump has done so far has required one. All could have been accomplished with a few quiet phone calls, and perhaps one discreet written memorandum. But he wanted to make a splash.

His reasoning, and that of his remarkable Benedictine-educated chief strategist (Mr Bannon), is that you have to make a splash. You must fulminate and tweet to get around the guardians of the portals of information, and be heard by the folks “back home” — the ones who think you need to have a war sometimes, and why not now?

Too, they reason — and gentle reader may mark my words on this — that they are up against the leftist tactic of concentrating all available forces on one target at a time. This always wins, against a dispersed, purely defensive enemy. Now the Bannon Brigade are counter-attacking on nineteen fronts, and counting. Let’s see how those, who haven’t played defence for a long long time, will handle it. My guess would be through an extremely incoherent Long Hot Summer.

Risky, risky, any counter-attack strategy. Capitulation is much safer. But sometimes you get sick of always losing, and resolve to try something new, by way of experiment; or in this case something old, that hasn’t been tried for a while, against opponents who have grown smug and self-satisfied.

For decades the Left have been playing for keeps. The Right have been playing for mercy. With Trump, those Red State types — “progressively” deprived of elementary freedoms, of their dignity, and even of their livelihoods — have voted to play for keeps, too. They were used to shrugging and taking their lumps, from politicians they happened to despise. The politicians were used to administering the lumps, to their own fabulous enrichment. Suddenly the simpletons — or deplorables, as they now prefer — decide they’ve had enough. (Americans can be like that sometimes.) Elitist and anti-populist that I am, anti-nationalist and anti-tribalist, I kind of understand it.

The media think only the Left can get angry, and that it is their exclusive right. They are making a splash of how angry they can get, on the old assumption that it will intimidate the simpletons. Yet this is the very assumption they have pushed too far. For Middle America is in one of those Clint Eastwood moods. And the cameras are rolling, on frothing and hysteria; versus “make my day.”

“To be at peace with the absurdities of the world, which he knows to be part of a divine plan he doesn’t presume to grasp fully.” (Weigel on Schall, echoing Saint Peter, quoted by Deavel in Catholic World Report.) By a happy chance I discover that today Father James V. Schall enters his ninetieth year. I thought he was a bit older than that, actually; after all, he formally retired as a university perfesser nearly five years ago. I hadn’t expected him to do that till one hundred; but perhaps at Georgetown University they have an early retirement policy. And I have been reading him for what seems like a century, though it turns out only forty years or so. He writes, I think, more than I do; still does from what I can see. But what I seem to do as a way of life, he does in his spare moments. Dozens of beuks and still counting, thousands of essays year upon year, each impressively learned, and not one sentence pretentious. Moreover, he never loses his temper, in territory where one’s temper is usually the first thing to go.

If you asked me where I got my politics from, I would always say Homer, but in justice I should add that the rough edges were largely sanded down by this young Jesuit writer and thinker, whom I first discovered in the pages of obscure journals. He is still sanding, for I was very rough. Both directly and through later contemplation I would say he taught me that politics are incomprehensible unless well-founded in a worldly understanding and a reasoned faith. He has been like a good boxing instructor, who shows when to deak and when to pounce; when to pull punches and when to let fly. He speaks for a Christianity that can be gentle and muscular at the same time; balanced and inwardly still while constantly in motion.

I was a freshly-minted Christian when he came into my ken, in the later ’seventies; though already from my slight experience of life a fairly robust soi-disant “conservative,” stirred by the loss of Vietnam, and by friends who had come in exile from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. What I needed was some tactical sense, and by this I mean some divine guidance, through a world very much under Caesar’s control, which it was not my calling simply to ignore.

So in wishing Father Schall a happy birthday, across the thousands of miles to Los Gatos, California, and the years that have passed, I find that I am writing only of myself. This is the mark of a great author — that he is absorbed into one’s own flesh — but also evidence that I have never met him. I must know a dozen people who know him; but have been too shy to bother him, and aware he must be very busy. I was astounded to find he sometimes reads these idle Idleposts (a proof that he has read everything), and was proud like some former pupil to find him quoting me, one place or another. And it is with the thought that this little squib might reach him that I want to say, to Father Schall himself: God bless you for all you have done, and God give you many more years, if only for the benefit of my own slow wit.

The way to estimate crowd size that I was taught goes like this. Go to the highest place you can reach, create an approximate mental grid with the help of fixed objects, count the people in a few squares to get the approximate density, then multiply by the number of squares that look filled. You will need to know the principles of perspective if you don’t have a helicopter. You will get a number so rough that any two people using the same method are likely to give vastly different estimates. But you could get a large number of people to provide estimates, then average those. This will produce a number no more reliable, but slightly more plausible.

You want accurate? Carefully fence and patrol the perimeter, and sell tickets to get in.

Photographs can lie, and can be made to lie shamelessly, as I learnt from practising print journalism, which sometimes involved travelling in a posse with the other hacks, the photographers and TV cameramen (under intense peer pressure). Almost everything presented pictorially has been staged. The exceptions, too, have been carefully selected and cropped by professional editors (under their own intense peer pressure). They are trying for some emotional edge.

That is among the reasons photographs replaced engravings in the papers, more than a century ago. It was not a mere technological advance, as the sweet young things are taught in the J-schools. At the start, reproducing photos cost more money. Technology is developed for a market: to supply what people seem most likely to buy. In this case, the press lords wanted photography: it made what they were selling seem more immediate, more “truthy.” The improvements in technology followed.

Here is an example of journalistic fraud, more egregious than usual, but not by much. The CNN television network juxtaposed two aerial photographs from the same angle, one showing the National Mall full of people, the other showing most of it empty. They explained that Picture A showed the crowd for Obama’s first inauguration, Picture B for Trump’s. They didn’t mention that Picture A was taken while Obama was being sworn in, Picture B three hours before Trump was. It was the “proof” that Obama had outdrawn Trump, picked up and enthusiastically hustled by all other liberal media — and a knowing misrepresentation. But it achieved its purpose. Not one in a hundred who saw it will ever learn that they were had.

I fell for it myself, at first, and had I been on air as a talking head, would have explained it by mentioning that the inaugurations are held in Washington, DC, which votes overwhelmingly Democrat. How could Trump possibly match Obama’s crowds in that town — even after he had outdrawn Hillary Clinton by huge undisputed margins at election rallies across the rest of the country? (Of course, Trump didn’t waste any time in California.) When Trump’s press secretary disputed the comparison, I winced. “Why are you bleeding credibility, Spicer?” I mumbled to myself. The media he was disputing with, hooted him down. Yet, now that CNN has been exposed (with almost no press coverage), we find that the inauguration crowds were, by their own later footage, somewhere in the vicinity of equal.

The replacement of the truth with a plausible lie is “normal” among interested parties. Truth — even minor factual truth — requires a certain chastity, possible even to an interested party, but requiring intelligence and character. I could explain why the media have no interest in truth, but it would be tedious. In the end, the argument would come down to chastity: they don’t have any. And in the further absence of intelligence and character, they are unlikely to grow some.

Other media stories breeze by. For instance, rather than show the crowds at the March for Life, today, the Washington Post was reporting that the Metro showed no exceptional ridership spike. (It was simply at capacity.) Or we’re told of the “mass resignation” of (four) staff in the State Department. (Immediately after they were fired.) And so on. There are days when I have looked at the front page of the New York Times, and known enough to see that every story on it is an intentional misrepresentation.

With practice one may read between the lines, as in the old days with Pravda, to guess what has happened. (Example: “There has been no riot in Gorki.” Translation: “There are huge and continuing riots in Gorki.”) If they say that “Trump is lying” about something, I can be reasonably certain he is telling the truth — at least on the point at issue.

I have no idea (yet) what were the comparative numbers for the March for Life today, versus the leftist Women’s March last Saturday in Washington, or parallel marches elsewhere. (We had a nice turnout of ditzy dames, of all sexes, shouting their obscenities up here in Toronto.) I do know that year after year, for more than four decades, the March for Life has been by far the largest public demonstration in Washington; that adults with their kids bus and fly from all over USA to be there; and have exhibited consistently dignified behaviour. Too, that it gets almost no media coverage; and that what little it gets is focused on a handful of noisy, often rude, pro-abortion counter-demonstrators. Whereas, the Women’s March last Saturday got wall-to-wall coverage on the networks; with camera angles chosen to suggest great numbers.

And yet, for all this, Big Joe is not confused. (Viral video here.)

I have a confession to make to gentle reader. When I describe myself as “a man of the thirteenth century,” it is an “alternative fact.” In other words, it is not true. According to my passport, and birth certificate, I was actually born around the middle of the twentieth century. That may seem a long time ago, but it was not the thirteenth (or the late twelfth, had I been a “thirteenth centennial”). This is painful to admit, especially as one of my constant correspondents, a rather sarcastic and irritating Leftist, has frequently alleged that I am a liar; not only to me, but to anyone who will listen. I expect he will go to town on this one. Aheu!

All I can say for myself, is to remind that feelings trump facts in this day and age. I often feel as if I were a man of the thirteenth century, and that should be sufficient. By Canadian law, as I understand it, I am what I say I am, and in light of what I have said, should be entitled to the standard Canadian pension, backdated to the year 1293. With compound interest.

Let me add that I am not to be confuted, for I am also a woman of colour. I think this is established in the official record, for some years ago, I made a formal statement.

You see, I was hired on as scriptwriter for a documentary movie. It turned out the directrice had a subsidy from the National Film Board, which required her to hire only “visible minority women.” She’d apparently passed the test herself, on sight, being a reasonably dark Tamil, though lightened by parental miscegenation (with a Bengali). A beautiful woman, by the way, and a self-declared feminist; normally, whatever she wanted, she got. But I had to fill out this form, in which the question of my sex and pigmentation was directly raised. But not my ethnic origin: or I should have added that I was a red-haired Gaelic woman of (beige) colour from the Western Isles. (With antlers, born in 1228.)

The officer who received and reviewed this document expressed scepticism. She said I did not look like a woman of colour. (She sure did.) But I smoothly explained that it was my human right to be taken at my own word, and if necessary I would get a lawyer. Eyebrows were raised, but no action taken, even when I wrote a column about my experience in the Ottawa Citizen, and suggested that readers confronted with the same sort of apartheid balderdash from government agencies should use the same tactic.

But just between us, gentle reader, the statement was not strictly true. Really I’m just one of these pasty-faced white trashlings, with male heterosexual tendencies. And, what I call “a reactionary.” Who believes with the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn that if, without exception, everyone in the country got up tomorrow morning and told only the truth — refused to tell any part of a lie — the entire Nanny State would crumble, in time for the midday news.

On the other hand, let me observe that it may not be possible adequately to condemn the current state of society, unless one is aware how bad things were in the 1950s. I choose that decade only because there are many, even among my readers, under the impression that things were much better then. They are right, of course. But then they infer that things were somehow good, in that time prior to the ’sixties. In this, they are getting carried away. Things were bad, and the world was a shambles, in the 1950s, as also in the 1250s. People behaved abominably. Hypocrisy was rife, and tyrants were jumping up and down on the human spirit.

Nor would I propose we go back to live in the past, before we have considered all the metaphysical and ontological implications. Prudence demands this.

A point raised in my last (now slightly revised) Idlepost is worth repeating, in case anyone missed it. This is about the definition of a reactionary, or how he is to be distinguished from a “conservative” or “liberal” or “progressive.” All three of those are trapped in the time series. So am I, as a matter of fact, physically compelled to ride along in a world where time’s arrow does not meander or take coffee breaks. And on a planet that rotates at an inconvenient speed, to those who wish the days were longer. And hurtles through space on a revolutionary course, round and round getting nowhere, indifferent to the passage of asteroids.

The reactionary accepts this. He accepts the facts of change — birth, life, death, et cetera. When in good mood he doesn’t bother to whine. His criteria for what is good, true, and beautiful are however timeless: he actually seeks such criteria in the welter of our world. He does not judge something to be better, or worse, because of its place in the time series, assuming it is “better” because it comes later, or came before. Nor can he place any hope in “progress” for, as Don Colacho dryly notes, today is the past’s dream of the future.

My reason to prefer the thirteenth century to the twenty-first would be because almost everyone in Christendom was a reactionary then, and I prefer the company of my fellow reactionaries. I do admit the plumbing may be better now, though in my building it is touch and go. And I can see some arguments for electricity, though I think they are overstated.

It is true that we are prisoners of time, and of every other arbitrary thing that from birth defined us. No one got to choose his parents — not even the test tube babies — nor even his original name. Freedom, which cannot be achieved without hard-won religious faith (hard-won by us, hard-won by Jesus), requires that we accept what we are, not in the face of some government department, but sub specie aeternitatis.

That’s what Baruch de Spinoza says, and in this matter, I’m with her.

The final nightmare of modernism, foreseen by Nicolás Gómez Dávila, seems outwardly to be upon us, but the fact it was so clearly foreseen speaks against its finality. Dávila, the great Colombian reactionary, so perfectly foresaw “the trend in world events,” that with all his gifts of penetrating reason he embraced a knowing reclusiveness, and buried himself in a private library (some ten times the size of that in the High Doganate). My Joint Chief Washington Correspondent having found a translation of what seems to be his longest epigram, I pass it along as a public favour. (Here.) Years, years, before names I will not bother to name, he captured that vain dementia which constitutes the post-modern mind, proving in retrospect its lack of development. Matthew Schmitz and William Randolph were, until last year, reposting Dávila’s aphorisms in English on Twitter, as a kind of tease. (Still archived here. I linked to a previous effort, here.) My purpose today is limited to reminding that almost everything I say, about the strange filthy world presented in our universally “fake news,” has been anticipated, and is better and more concisely expressed in Colombian Spanish.

Take, for instance, only this aphorism, apt to the present situation in Rome:

“Concerning himself intensely with his neighbour’s condition allows the Christian to dissimulate to himself his doubts about the divinity of Christ and the existence of God. Charity can be the most subtle form of apostasy.”

All one can add, is that it has ceased to be subtle.

I differ from “Don Colacho” (as he signed himself), only in this respect: I think that we should be slightly more interactive, through any media available to us; show the naked for what it is, with a little more aggression and insolence; and where necessary, accept the consequences. Never miss a chance to proselytize. Nonetheless, in defiance of the principles of mass advertising — on this eve of the Conversion of Saint Paul — I know that people can be reached only one at a time. And that imbeciles are by nature unreachable. That sandals need dusting sometimes. Strive to inform the last surviving reader (and “the soul you save may be your own”).

What is true was always true, and what is now false was always so. Though everything seems to change, nothing really changes, and the essence of the reacción we espouse is to acknowledge what is actually immortal. Hence the preference of poetry to politics; for personal liberty over the activism of slaves; and the teaching of the God-man Christ over the trite and malicious slanders of the fashion coolies opposed to Him. The rewards for this can only be in Heaven.

Don Colacho does not stand alone, although he is unique in his genre. Without exception, all the great human minds were reactionary, or rose to that state in moments of inspiration, in none of which they ever pleased the crowd. Or that is my earnest belief, after sixty years of reading. Earthly power, rightly apprehended, is a tinsel that will soon blow away, and let us take contentment in its passing, for everything that it pretends to offer will also pass, and the powerful today are the dust of tomorrow.