Essays in Idleness

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has been, for seven decades, the only reliable point of sanity in the English-speaking world. She did not slip into perversion or hysteria even once in all that time. How lucky, for the rest of us, that she has been Queen, throughout — and seen off the various mental cases whom we elected. The family she leaves is a mixed bag. There is still some chance that her successors will show the benefits of her example.

Even in her choice of mischief, which she shared so wonderfully with the late Prince Philip, she set an example — of decency, requiring good humour. I remember her speaking after an Archbishop of Canterbury, in public perhaps thirty years ago.

“His Excellency has just spoken to you on the subject of sin,” she began. “And he was: Against. … I wish to speak on the subject of the family. And I will be: For.”

Neither the Queen of England, nor little boys live forever. Perhaps dragons do. (I was born in her Coronation year.) But for good or evil they preside over us, in ways both official and unofficial.

I was fortunate to have been assigned to these last seventy years.

And now the Queen is dead. Long live the King.

As my long-suffering, gentle reader must know, I do not like to choose between “the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society.” (Dorothy Sayers in Creed or Chaos?)

I pay taxes to the latter, because I live in a “bourgeois” country where it is usually less painful than not paying taxes. This, I suppose, shows loyalty of some sort.

But I do not proclaim “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” (the national motto of Haiti), or “Democracy!” (wherever it is invoked). These moments of hysteria are common to both sides, and I think uttered with equal sincerity, for both are essentially mad. Not living in the United States, I need not mention the “American dream” or “American exceptionalism” among the shopworn slogans. We have as tedious from the mouths of our politicians in Canada.

The world would do well to use geographical expressions to describe nations, or historical ones that cause no anxiety, rather than supplementing these with idealistic vapouring. For confusing the vapours with realities — things — leads to so many unnecessary murders. We must, from time to time, defend ourselves against the violently mad and their armies, when they are invading. This is an understandable and necessary task, so I would not have myself confused with a pacifist. But I have no use for other forms of virtue signalling, such as voting.

The adequate society is not ruled, or more precisely, misruled. It is a monarchy where no one can advance himself: one inherits, or is appointed from above. There is no tradition of electoral politics, or rioting of other kinds. For the King does not actively “rule,” either; rather Custom prevails. The judges the monarch appoints can of course depose him when he goes psychotic or senile, or “tries something on.” Customary law — which for the most part enforces itself once it is established — does not encourage madness all round. It is, indeed, the only alternative to the “fascism,” which all progressive factions are sworn to resist (and do so, in an unambiguously fascist manner).

Anyone who seeks power is a fascist, and should be customarily restrained with leg clamps from running for public office.

Saint John Henry Newman, in his Essays on Miracles, and in the Grammar of Assent, calls attention to what Science and Revelation have in common. Both are rules-based. Religion is certainly, and science is apparently, immortal; neither admit exceptions.

Our current historical mania for “evolution” is in denial of this, from two directions. First, we believe that these generalities have the remarkable power to write themselves into existence; and second, having that singular power, they may also change themselves over time. In a word, they evolve, and did evolve or will evolve if they cannot be seen to be evolving now.

To my mind, however — the author of these idle essays — the interest of science is that its laws are impregnable. No matter how often the defiance of gravity, or of the conservation of energy, or of the sum of entropies, or of the fastidious speed of light, or of progress by perpetual motion, is proposed or promoted through such a place as YouTube, we know it cannot happen. There will be no variations in principle or fact. Indeed, a variation transiently observed will bring a better understanding of the law, for if it is genuine it will prove indefinitely repeatable.

Likewise with miracles, which appear (though seldom on YouTube) to break all the rules that pertain to religion, as well as science. They do not, however. They are only detectable because of the seeming breach in the physical order. But they remain perfectly consistent with the moral order, which thus shows itself to be “higher” that the physical.

How else can we tell them apart? The physical provisions of the universe are plausible. But the moral provisions are paradoxical in kind.

The rules of warfare belong finally to the moral. At the physical level, the power with the bigger army, and the better weapons, wins every time. That is “how the world works,” according to the military manuals, and the great majority of soldiers. The moral order is by comparison naïve, and is sometimes summoned as an implausible joke.

But what is this moral order?

“We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer. Heaven and earth will sooner fall than this rule be reversed. …”

To which I might add, that who dares, wins.

“Mankind must learn to serve beauty before we can faithfully serve freedom.”

True, I am quoting that radical Protestant, Friedrich Schiller, apparently with approval; but his view was shared, broadly, by such natural Catholics as Corneille, Burke, Plato. Alas, Schiller sometimes speaks with that repellant smile I hinted at yesterday. But fortunately it is not the happyface smile by which we are afflicted by naïve propagandists of the present time. He lived when the limits of “progress” had been illustrated by the collapse of the Revolution in France. His remarkable capacity for philosophical abstraction was freed by this disintegration of political ideals. He had no choice but to explore more deeply, honestly and awkwardly, the crossroad of philosophy and poetry.

His extraordinary work of 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, swept me aloft many years ago; recently, I caught sight of its trajectory through the stars. The book was also written by a surprisingly young man, I now realize.

“Beauty is not an inductive idea; it is an imperative.” (I think that is a quote.) It is what moves us to right action, and to the making of good things.

The alternative inspirations turn out to be sordid. We could, most obviously, work for money, in order to get rich or perhaps just to get by; or we could be slaves of some other kind. We might not do much harm, while being paid “hourly”; but if we are idealistic, and work “for the greater good of mankind,” the result will be horrors.

Justice is, in this light, one aspect of beauty. I leave to some other discussion how beauty can be judged — Schiller refers to Kant, and for many of his examples to that other contemporary, Goethe. That each of us is born with some apprehension of the beautiful, quickening our heart, I accept almost as a point of dogma.

It is a command, an imperative. We must act upon it. It might be trivial to suggest that we should all be artists, but to be an artist is to be the opposite of a slave.

In the command of beauty, we rise to the discovery that we have been working for God. But when we don’t even make the attempt, to advance the beautiful into being, we find that we have created ugliness all around us.

This touches on what Prince Myshkin meant, when he said that: “the world will be saved by beauty.” In his novel, The Idiot, Dostoevsky sought to create this “perfectly good man” as a protagonist — this entirely positive, beautiful character. An artist, as it were.

Unscrupulous intrigue can sometimes lead to conspiracy theories. However, sometimes they grow imaginatively on their own. After the allegations have been often-times repeated, we begin to think that, as well as smoke, there must be fire. This is what gave the Jesuits such a bad name, for instance with Friedrich Schiller, and other Protestant writers; and even within the Catholic Church, for the last few centuries. For even inside, the Jesuits seemed “wicked,” in both the positive and negative sense. Yet most of the memorable incidents are ambiguous, or doubtful.

This reputation is a pity because the Jesuit order, in addition to little faults, has done so many noble things. These included their missions among the placid Huron Indians, and their sacrifices at the hands and tomahawks of the Iroquois — whose “Great League of Peace” once invaded the world of pre-Ontario, and bathed our current cottage district in blood.

Curiously, or perhaps there is no irony at all, the greatest achievement of the Jesuits, came when they were outwardly quite powerless. For a priest or missionary is radically powerless, I would say, while he is being burnt, flayed, or pickled. Yet oddly that is just when the most indelible mark is made — not only on himself but on his external observers, to say nothing of all-seeing God. And note that, the Jesuits did not need to intrigue to get themselves martyred, and probably did not lobby in this cause. Their most winning argument was made non-verbally, “in the flesh.” To this day, Christians need not sneak up on their assailants, or beg to be put down. It is the assailants who, normally, must do the sneaking.

Schiller is incidentally among my favourite Protestant bigots. He does not waste his time as a historian researching actual Jesuit conspiracies, which are frequently alleged. It is almost as if he doesn’t quite believe them. But in his dramatic works, he is quite free with dark Jesuitical legends. For instance, he paints their influence upon Spanish court and society in uniform tones of black.

He is the opposite of Shakespeare in his casting. Known Catholics in his plays are generally fanatics, known Protestants are morally upright; whereas in Shakespeare the Protestant exemplars go the distance to humourless priggery, and every faithful character depicted as a Catholic (starting with monks and nuns) is more or less a white-hat. We have the reverse face of Schiller’s lyrical display of smiling, tolerant, genial light and love — in which he settles scores like a Wokeman.

One (this one in particular) does not know much about Argentina, and what he knows is at second hand, and from not much reading. Indeed, my Argentine Spanish “sucks,” as I must assume from a condemnation of my continental Spanish, if I understood one of my Spanish interlocutors. My Argentine reading is entirely in English, and consisted of Jorge Luis Borges — especially when I was a teenager. There is not much to add to it, although I recall Idle Days in Patagonia, by William Henry Hudson, which was one of my many influences in naming The Idler (thus).  Too, there was a gentleman named Adolfo Bioy Casares, who wrote a book entitled La Invencion de Morel. It is about a fugitive from Argentina on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, visited by many vividly illusory figures. This struck me as the ideal representation of a South American country.

But then I retrieve the sailor Vito Dumas, who single-handedly circumnavigated the planet in the ruta imposible of the roaring ‘forties (if not furious ‘fifties) of that other hemisphere. He eloped with my attention about forty years ago. His ship, an under-equipped thirty-foot ketch, seemed a still more whimsical place of exile. He was doing the right thing — avoiding politics during the Second World War — and didn’t carry a radio lest he be arrested (somewhere near Antarctica) as a spy. (Note to self: get rid of cell-phone.)

So you see, I am an expert on Argentina after all, having without visiting heard such interesting information as that Buenos Aires contains the prettiest girls in the whole world. This from a man whose objectivity was assured, because he was prejudiced against all the inhabitants of Argentina, and considered them all, and the women especially, to be corrupt and inclined to criminality.

Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, known to the over-familiar as “CFK,” is a notorious example. An ex-president, and the widow of the ex-president Néstor Kirchner, she is one of the many “Peronists,” or “Justicialists,” who infest that country (as Liberals do in Canada). They are the fanatic champions of “social justice” — which I am unambiguously against — together with a species of economic perversity. Readers may remember her as a frequent visitor to the Vatican, when she was irremovably in power, and thus as one of the presumed intimates of Pope Francis.

Having strayed out of power, she is now the compelled visitor of some district attorney in Buenos Aires, who wishes to put her away, for twelve years or so, in a common prison, for her first billion dollars of road contracts, and has three tonnes of paper to give his accusations weight. My chief Argentine correspondent reports some “argy-bargy” (noisy quarrelling) in his neighbourhood and expects more. He tells me that another hundred billion (Yankee) dollars of dubious Argentine government payouts have yet to be contested.

This is the problem with presidents of banana republics such as Argentina or the United States. They tax us as long as we can be found breathing, then give most of the money away to their agents and supporters, who must be equally corrupt (though on a smaller scale).

But power politics (is there any other kind?) is so tedious. Surely anyone who has been president of anything should be in gaol by now.

In the future, unless you are a member of the ruling class, you will surrender your home and move into an apartment; you will give up your car and take buses and trains; you will stop eating meat and begin eating insects (and highly-processed vegetable matter for a treat). You will submit to rationing for water and energy. And you will be happy.

For only if you can present yourself as delighted with the imposition of green fascism, will your bank account not be cancelled, and all the government’s “gifts” taken back. As in the heroic age of communism, you will have only one human right. That is the right to be annihilated when you step out of line.

Of course, you might instead be a member of the “progressive element,” in the ruling party, in which case you laugh at all these restrictions, and mock the people whose survival depends on abject obedience.

This is the future, for which progressives everywhere are striving, unknowingly, but also, knowingly. The prospective arrangement has enjoyed a “great leap forward” during the Batflu lockdowns, and is hyper-accelerated by inflation.

In the United States, the federal government has passed (under the current administration) three-point-eight trillion dollars of climate and woke subsidies, towards achieving this end. This is justified by an envelope of lies, pretending that the purpose of the spending is to “fight inflation,” when it is caused by the very same reckless expenditure. The American media support this effort with their own torrent of fiendish (and farcical) fabrications; in Canada, the media situation is worse.

In both countries, and throughout the world, governments and large corporations are simply “following the science.” This is their guiding satanic untruth.

Not George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, gives the best account of how we descend into Hell by this method; and the latter also, how we rise out, through an effort that is not our own. As Orwell complained, Lewis’s scientifictional story allowed supernatural agency, in defiance of readers’ bourgeois sensibilities. We might call it an attack on science. By contrast, Orwell provided a counsel of despair.

The reader will understand that I am only writing this to prove (within reason) that I am still alive, and enjoying my new life as a vegetable. For this I must thank the surgeons who generously gave me a neurological condition, to replace the cardiac problem I approached them with. The stroke left me in a constant state of the dizzies, walking the streets as a common Parkdale inebriate, and forgetting things — for instance words, and names especially. Given enough time, however, specific vocables may suddenly return, and I may fill in the blanks of an abandoned composition.

A kind reviewer has told me that the result can be almost coherent, and you know, I am wilful and determined to persist.

Meanwhile, so far as I am able to judge, the world has entered a state somewhat similar to my own. I suspect even the leading statesmen wobble, when they try to walk. As the plurality of children are now aborted, and the sex of the survivors is frequently changed, and “Medical Assistance In Death” may be prescribed for the remainder, the population of the world might soon be running out.

For the transient inhabitants of this world are now obliged to “follow the science,” and the content of this science is murderously insane. We thus spill into an environmental anti-disaster, of a kind so appalling to make all the mega-disasters of the past seem merely frumpish by comparison. Ours will consist of industrial disintegration and collapse, general hypothermia, and famine, as all of our sources of energy and food are politically banned, in the general hysteria over “climate change.”

Already carbon dioxide and nitrogen are scheduled to be phased out, on the planetary scale, and I would imagine that oxygen and other objectionable gases will be added to the list. The object is “carbon neutrality” or death.

Ah well. Perhaps we will experience the contrary fashion, in the next season.

While the prophets and sages of our Christian tendency — at least the Catholic ones — tend to resist morbidity, they are nevertheless acquainted with their personal share in what we call “Original Sin.” This is, for those who have never heard of it, the Sin of Adam, our most distant paternal ancestor. It is by extension the imperfection of the human race, including Eve, our most distant maternal ancestress.

Both Adam and Eve, in the course of being evicted from their “starter home” in the Garden of Eden, understood at least vaguely why this had come about. (The Lord made it plain to them.) They had done what they had been told not to do, and not done what they had been told to do.

I was going to admit that wondering whether a modern person has heard about this is itself rather baroque, and almost a pose; but I’m not sure it is an error.

Some Internet star just asked a set of contemporary university students if they had ever heard of the Holocaust, for instance, or of several other historical events, such as Kristallnacht, or the Normandy Landings. They were utterly confused — and “blanked out,” as I sometimes do, on names. I reflected that the Bible was not published until somewhat earlier in our collective history, than World War II. But who can say it has faded with distance, when much nearer events have quite disappeared?

Of course, the students could argue that they were never taught about these events, but then, they were never taught they could be missing anything, either. They seem to have learnt, as it were, nothing about nothing.

From what I can make out from correspondence, my own readers belong to the very cream of an élite, for I’d wager they have all heard of the Bible, and even of God. Even the non-Catholics among them have been told about sin, whether or not they took the teaching seriously. For this is the modern world. As Baudelaire says, “Everyone believes in God, although nobody loves Him; no one believes in the Devil, although his smell is everywhere.”

Baudelaire is often misunderstood. He is taken as almost the inventor of modernity in the arts, whereas, his concern was to confute it.

Many centuries before, Augustine anticipated Baudelaire’s simplification, and explained that the Devil cannot be blamed for all sin. In fact men (a term which used to include the women) sometimes committed sins which they had themselves devised. (This is what made them so Original.) He was among the first to openly resist the morbidity that endangers all Christian thought, on the subject of Sin. It is almost as bad as the opposite obsession, which we might characterize as psychotic: to feel no guilt at all.

This is a Christian challenge: to contemplate sin in the lightness of one’s being, finding it deeply implanted in oneself but neither in despair nor indifference.

I was reading Baudelaire, and also his mentor, Joseph de Maistre, author of Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg — the most wonderful account of politics. These are “entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence.” (In my post-stroke neurological condition, I will not attempt to translate “entretiens.”)

They are a font of what is called Pessimism, in our post-Christian environment. For all of our worldly ambitions are — without exception — subverted by Original Sin. This universal and comprehensive subversion is the condition of our life in this world, to which, by now, we should have adapted. I, and my reader, are likewise constrained.

On the contrary, my hope in God is excited by this. It is at the root of all “spiritual optimism,” when we seek it aright.

The latest trick in what we might call “eco-commie-perv agitprop,” emerged while shaming Canadian history and traditions. I’ll touch on it in a moment. It is a product chiefly of the Indian Wars of the last few years. The White Man, and more specifically when Catholic, has been accused of massacring the Native People in 20th-century residential schools, just as he did (according to “experts”) upon coming to the continent. He then ploughs the anonymous victims into mass graves, showing his affinity to, exempli gratia, the Nazis.

This propaganda campaign, which quickly reached the tedious stage, was founded on a series of oft-repeated unambiguous lies, driven into our susceptible children in our compulsory public schools, and throughout life by such agencies as the CBC. (All our significant media are now under government control, subsidy, and watch.) White men, especially the Catholics, contaminate Canadian history by their Satanic essence, according to this malicious fantasy. Goodness and innocence can be found only in their victims, the “visible minorities” (or majorities, as the case may be). Shame is inculcated among persons exhibiting the wrong race.

I write of Canada, but something similar is happening in the United States, and has been carried to Europe on the sails of Hollywood and popular “music.” Canada is, however, an extreme example — of brazen idiocy — and even to underprivileged (all-white) rural places the message is piped in. Disharmonious voices must expect state interference, and eventual arrest.

For Canada now has political prisoners, including many who participated in the Freedom Convoy of truck drivers. Tamara Lich, a prominent organizer of this demonstration, has been gratuitously jailed, though she didn’t even try to commit a plausible crime. This week she was gaoled again, apparently for receiving a freedom medal. (Persons it was in her bail conditions not to meet may have been in the audience.) She was put out of sight for “Canada Day” (the former Dominion celebration, yesterday). This manipulation of Canadian law is, sadly, no longer unprecedented. It seems to be ordered directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Liberal Government, and the NDP flunkeys who maintain it in power, use the police to do the dirty work, paradoxically while scumming the police in their publicity. Elections cannot so far be tampered with here, as they are open to corruption in the States. But as the majority of mostly urban Canadians (including whites) are Liberal-voting zombies, it is not really necessary. Their progress continues.

The latest trick is to identify those who wave the Red Ensign — the Canadian flag before the Liberals replaced it more than half a century ago — as racists and hate-mongers. Ditto with any national symbols of the past, before the Liberal strategy of discarding our ancient and proud traditions proceeded under Mike Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. These are now openly slandered as “fascist,” along with the people who prize memory of a Canada prior to ideological dystopia. The old flag. “Its usage denotes a desire to return to Canada’s demographics before 1967, when it was predominantly white.”

The current Canadian flag will, now that it has draped trucks and bridges in the Freedom Convoy, and other “Fuck Trudeau” protests, should soon be awarded the reputation of the Confederate banner, among Democrats in USA. Then I may finally take it out and wave it.

I expected to die before “Roe v. Wade” was overturned, though it seemed it must be, eventually. Though it does not touch me personally (I hope), I am still discreetly overjoyed. I say discreetly because I could not wish to boast of my “pro-life” credentials, at this moment. The anti-life forces have expressed themselves in a day and night of rage, on urban streets all over — as the court decision successfully abraded “liberal” sensibilities around the world. We have come to expect such demented behaviour whenever this happens. Closer to home, policemen in the United States may have longer shifts for some time, containing the explosions of satanic violence.

The American legal and political establishment will not buckle, however. For they know that stronger passions, though more quietly expressed, wait on the other side. Most of the electorate skitters away from commitment to either side — neither entirely in favour of, nor opposed to, the murder of unborn children. Cowardly, unmanly avoidance makes of this “a woman’s issue” — as if only female children were aborted.

That it would be connected to questions of hygiene is a small anecdote, or sign of the times.

No matter of principle was addressed by the Supreme Court’s decision; life and death does not trouble the legalistic mind. They will not rule on whether abortion is right or wrong. They simply restore the arrangements in the United States Constitution, that put the matter, as others unforeseen, in the power of the States. They confirm the need for politics, in addition to laws; and for better or worse, the American States are all democracies.

The current social convulsions were made inevitable by the original ruling, for its vacation was also inevitable. It flew in the face of established law, and mangled American jurisprudence, by creating a new regime of (arbitrary) “human rights.” Status quo ante has now been magically restored, but in a country changed even demographically by the lawlessness of fifty years.

For the Burger Court’s great imaginative try-on of 22 January 1973 — declaring the crime of abortion to be a “human right,” and a constitutional intention — will be tried again in due course. Those who care for life and liberty should be ready to defeat it.

The arrest and incarceration of bureaucrats would seem, on casual examination, to be one of the unexplored great ideas whose time is always ripe. On more careful study, however, the matter is not so simple as the victims of bureaucracy might imagine.

To start with, what is a bureaucrat? and how should he (frequently, she) be distinguished from the other billions of the world’s demographic inheritance?

I have thought about this question often, and it returns to mind after almost every encounter with persons who have regular employment. That they are all bureaucrats, has crossed my mind; but occasionally I meet a person who is not. (Yesterday, it was a truly philosophical bus driver.) Usually, the non-bureaucrat is by conventional definition, unemployed, or there is some skill he is expressly paid to perform, not in every waking hour, but “sometimes.”

And, who is to say that the bureaucrat, however defined, is necessarily “good for nothing”? Before hatching any rehabilitation scheme, that would inevitably be designed and executed by bureaucrats, we must consider what would actually set him loose. My own emphasis would be on prayer; on preces privatae, and in the Mass.

Meanwhile, bureaucracy is the universal sponsor of “busy work,” as several dear to my memory indicated. This is that variety of pointless labour that appears to be done in a rush — awkwardly by habit, against an invisible deadline, to the end of no particular result. The purpose is to provide “full employment,” and it is considered virtuous for this quality alone.

For the masses require to be guided by a “work ethic,” or else they will be bored and apt to participate in a revolution. One requires busy work, as a matter of public safety.

Curiously most of the “slave economy” backwaters of modern, industrial, bureaucratic states, have the strongest work ethic, although they are the least productive regions. This ethic is the spiritual whip that keeps the labourers moving, when common sense would prescribe a siesta. They eat lots of sugars, get fat, and die young. There are franchise operations near every work plantation, dispensing carbohydrates; the staffs are also obviously dispensable. In fact, the whole economy is built around things that can be easily discarded.

One can understand why employers tire of paying these workers, to make something that, even when it is tangible, no non-bureaucrat, or person with elementary taste could wish to buy; until we realize that this employer is likely to be a bureaucrat himself (or herself, or itself, I hasten to add). And so the socialist principle of “you pretend to work and we pretend to pay you” comes to pertain also to our “capitalist” economy.

We have “human resources” departments which work by the same methods as livestock management, in the larger meat packaging firms, except, owing to bureaucratic convention, they aren’t allowed to kill or eat people; or not directly. That is a function more and more assumed by the government’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) service.

The employers are limited to creating a theatrical impression, of death in life. “Employees” doing useless things, or radically counter-productive, are presented as free citizens and electors in a constitutional democracy under the rule of law. This was never a believable impression, even in ancient Greece. One may penetrate through it by reading Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, or the novels of Dostoyevski.

Note, that people choose to be bureaucrats, and volunteer for the life sentence without thinking, upon graduation from the bureaucratic schools. They instantly look for a job; panicking if delayed. The job will include bureaucratic provisions for retirement, should they not require MAID service. Fear makes them take it. The only alternative would be to cultivate leisure, but this does not pay the prospective bureaucrat the equivalent of a pension.

From out of the tangled past, we retrieve some holidays, and discount, or actually forget about others. Father’s Day is our example for today. It should, according to all educated Catholics, fall on March 19th. In fact, according to the usual unreliable sources (Wikipaedia, &c), even some Anglicans and Lutherans honour Saint Joseph on his day, which celebration was formally instituted at Rome (I think) about the time that they drifted away from us.

He, Joseph, is also the Patron Saint of Carpenters, as almost everyone knows, and of the Dominion of Canada, as many Canadians used to know. Also the Patron in the red-and-white national celebration of Poland, where he is rather more acknowledged. Too, he is the Patron of the Universal Church, East and West.

I am not a priest, nor the son of a priest, and should not be trusted on the conventions of the Church Calendar, but I think we are luckier than the Irish in this respect. For Saint Patrick’s, which generally falls in Lent, is not necessarily a holy day of obligation, conferring exemption from lenten customs, outside perhaps Ireland itself. But St Joseph’s is such a day of dispensation, on whatever day of the week it may fall — whether or not our holy priests have expressly declared it. Not only can we drink ale on the occasion, entirely without guilt, and eat walrus steaks or chunks of any other animal, but we needn’t colour them green with food dye.

Saint Joseph is the model for an earthly father, of a child who is not really his own, as all human children are not really one’s own. They come from their mother’s body, and are tangibly their mother’s possession, for a short time (until yanked away, by one method or another). That the father has (or had), however, a prominent place, in Christian or even pagan families, was fairly well established until recently.

In the Woke family he has no significance whatever, and mothers have none either, because there is no such thing as a woman — except among biologists, apparently. Of course, there being no women there can also be no men, so the question of fatherhood doesn’t arise.

It does nevertheless arrive, on this day, in mid-June or thereabouts, through North American commercial culture, in our present societal order. People buy things for what they naïvely accept as fathers of some sort. The current inflation may help to reduce this.