Essays in Idleness

For Jesus, whose arrival in this world we will commemorate: in our hearts if outward celebration is banned, and Communion is denied to the faithful. It is hard to keep God out of the world that He made, and transcends from the beginning to the end of time. It is difficult even to smear Him, and such efforts rebound against themselves. Even crucifying Him turned out badly for the Roman State, if we take a candid view. For Jesus is still here, and the Roman State isn’t. Were I a political advisor to a Caesar, I would recommend against persecution. This on purely practical grounds. For His opponents have had a poor track record against Him, and looking back, none have prevailed. “I wouldn’t count your chances.”

From the start, Our Saviour defeated expectations. Mary’s Child resembled all babies. In particular, I note, babies are powerless. This one, born in a Bethlehem manger to a couple from out of town, was in this respect like the rest of us. Our own nativities were usually fairly humble. The choice of mother and father was not made by us. Jesus alone chooses. For the rest, whether they decide to welcome or abort us, we will not be consulted.

I am deeply moved by the story of the shepherds; of the angel who announces Him to them. It would seem that God is partial to shepherds. Out in the fields, on warm nights or cold, they have a privileged view of His starry Creation.

They were dazzled, and naturally afraid; the announcing angel told them, “Fear not.” This was the first expressly Christian command.

“Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born a Saviour.”

Our history then divides in two; into a Before and an After.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.”

That last point is vexed, or was vexed intentionally, by modern liturgists. They like to mistranslate “men of good will” to “all people” again. But the angel made an important distinction.

The Child grows. We have known a few more things about Him over the last twenty centuries or so, in this world transformed by His arrival. There is a political point that is worth making.

He is self-referential, and refers to Himself, unambiguously, as if He were God. This was as alarming to his contemporaries as it is to us. Many then, as now, thought Him a shrieking madman; although He didn’t shriek. Rather, He cultivated understatement. He did not like to show His credentials, though when necessary, through miracles, He did. He spoke in the same knowledge as the angel of Shepherds’ Field.

Why are there shepherds? Because sheep will stray. And there are wolves.

My political point is about Christ’s claims. His Kingship was, and is, and will be, “not of this world.” He actually dodges earthly kingship. He avoided arrest for the duration of His mission, but also avoided the enthusiasm of his followers. When they were on the verge of proclaiming Him a king — some Lord of Palestine — He walked away. He’d disappear from what was turning into a rally; duck into a temple or other private place. He went to some lengths to avoid misunderstanding; yet was tacked to a Cross by those who misunderstood. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Father, forgive. It will be Christmas, very soon, when we start over. May we be reborn, in You.

The lights are going out in our churches this year, all over the world, as we ready ourselves for a Midnight Mass that has been withdrawn. For unlike any Christmas we remember, the darkness will continue through Christmas morning, and all the holy days ahead; and through the primary Christmas season to Epiphany; through Candlemas, most likely, and then through Lent, to another vacated Easter. States all over have decreed that Christian worship be replaced by worship of the Batflu, as a precursor to the universal lockdown our “progressives” long for, when all human life will be permanently regulated, by them, and made unbearably grim. The Batflu itself will pass away, as every contagion before it, but it is the prospect of a “reset,” in a vast “climate change” bureaucracy, that keeps the shine in their eyes.

That every conceivable human evil may be advanced by methods of social isolation, has been this year’s “breakthrough” rediscovery, and points to its ultimate authorship, Below.

In Ontario, for instance, under a simpleton premier, almost all human interaction is banned, except that of mass-market retailing. Starting on the Feast of Stephen (December 26th), familiar visitors to our households will become liable to fines of up to 100,000 Canadian dollars, and up to one year in gaol.

While such lockdowns have been shown to have no effect whatever on the transmission of viruses already widely disseminated, wherever they have been studied, they are imposed as if they were “science,” by petty, and very sleazy, politicians. In no civilized jurisdiction had they such personal authority. But they are thrilled to discover that they can get away with it; that a public systematically misinformed, and deprived of prompt, decisive legal recourse, will obey their edicts, and thereby submit to enslavement. Throughout history, those willing to be enslaved, have been enslaved.

In Christendom, through the centuries, freedom was associated with Jesus Christ. It is no coincidence that our current batch of godless, sordid tyrants close the churches, but not the crowded “big box” stores; demanding that small and family businesses be crushed, thus expanding the market for “Amazon” and the other monsters of Big Tech. Freedom is thus abrogated by means of both “socialism,” and “monopoly capital.”

I write this in explicit reply to some of my (often otherwise kindly) correspondents, who now criticize me for being “too dark.” (Yet I do try to err on the side of smileyface, sometimes.)

Many others have written to ask for my advice. “You tell us to defy our persecutors, but when we go to a Catholic church, we find that it is closed, and there is no Mass to go to.” I don’t know what to recommend, to fellow Catholics abandoned by their Church.

Indeed, our Church has been descending into depravity for some time. The worst of it is priests who themselves do not understand what the Church IS, and are shielded by their bishops. They think of the Church as if she were a civil corporation, bound only by the rules of “organization men.” But the organization that was founded and is sustained by Christ, is not of this nature. She is rather a mystical body — once far from invisible — with clerics meant to serve her, not serve themselves.

If the light of Christmas does not come through them, Christ will find ways around them. The Hope that comes from Our Saviour is not something they can turn spigot-like on and off. If we cannot reach His Presence in His churches, then we must go underground, and sometimes suffer martyrdoms, even at the hands of fellow churchmen, for His sake. But in the face of Eternity, this is a minor inconvenience.

The Church herself will eventually join us, underground; leaving a desiccated husk on the surface, to be scattered by the winds. Christ will retrieve His Church, because, for all the betrayals, Christ abides.

“Nothing will cure the sick lion but to eat an ape.”

The line comes from Marianne Moore, I think; a Presbyterian from Missouri. It drifted into mind, while I was trying to think of something else. My memory is often sound, and if it is now, I used to rather adore this poet. On the one hand, she was crystalline: sharp and precise. On the other, she could be whimsical — a masculine quality — and at the same time both brutal and light. The line I quoted above exhibits this. She was probably against sacrificing apes to sick lions, but could be ambiguous. She could be very stiff and formal, while utterly sabotaging stiffness and formality. Too, she wore a tricorn hat, when making public appearances.

Miss Moore lived two lives, sequentially; first as a modernist poet, then as a college campus celebrity. That is the usual order. Today, one may become a college celebrity without ever having been poetic, but only for fifteen minutes. A Republican and enthusiast for Herbert Hoover, she was never in danger of becoming a cult. Her much-applauded passing interest in the suffragist movement was a feature of juvenile life at Bryn Mawr (circa 1900). Looking for later hints of feminism is one of those games that academics play, in order to distract themselves from the verse, and its contagious beauty.

In which, to my mind, she was on the “Tower Bridge” between Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens: up high, but lower than either peak. For I continue to believe that Pound and Stevens were our two magisterial poets in English, in the twentieth century. I say “bridge” because Miss Moore could almost combine virtues from both towering poets; though being closer to the Stevens side. Her attitude towards Pound, when he was incarcerated in the St Elizabeth asylum as an alternative to hanging him for his wartime pro-Mussolini broadcasts, was just right. She stiffly disapproved of his anti-Semitism and Fascism. But she visited him regularly.

Someone should put together an anthology of female Presbyterian mystics. I think of our Canadian contributor, the late sublime Margaret Avison. While there was little theological presence in any of Miss Moore’s earlier poems, and less through her unfortunate rewrites near the end, it seemed to me that religion, and in the form of a recessive Holy Spirit, sparkled deep within her drollness.

And look, I have found her (1951) Collected Poems, still extant among my books. And I have just looked it up. The quote with which I started did come from Marianne Moore. Thank God because, if it hadn’t, I would have had to write a whole new Idleblog.

The great majority of the world’s population is dead. Even the statisticians concede this. Counting only the last fifty thousand years, they suggest, more than 108 billion of us have been born. (More precisely, 108,760,543,790, as of 1st July 2019; presumably at midnight GMT.) Yet only seven-point-seven billion are still alive. Every week, another couple of million “pass,” as we say, using a sporting metaphor.

Among the demographic experts, there is no agreement on how many remain unborn.

There is also the vexed question, of how abortions are to be counted. I would think they are a “force multiplier” on the side of death, to use the language of the Pentagon. But count them dead, and a feminist may have a spittle-flecked nutter. Should we then count them as never having died?

I get my figures from the PRG, incidentally. (This is the meejah-beloved Population Reference Bureau, not to be confused with the People’s Republic of Batfluvia.) If one attentively reads their claims, however, one learns that “99 percent” of the accumulated people never provided reliable census information. And thus we get some insight into their methods.

Notwithstanding, just think of all those people: a sum of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. (And then there are those harder to categorize, like Joe Biden.) The plurality of the deceased must by now have reached landslide proportions, no matter how hard we, the living, have tried to resist.

While, in apparent defiance of the pope, I think Filipinas and others should “breed like rabbits,” I must confess it is an uphill struggle. Within less than a century most of our children will have died, too. The toll keeps outpacing our most diligent efforts to “level the playing field.”

Indeed, when the pundits in the fever swamps declare that we’re all going to die, or even that only one or two billion will go down (thanks to Trump or whoever), I respond with a yawning, “So what?”

Statistically, that’s like putting down a cat. (“The thing sleeps twenty-three hours a day already. What’s an extra hour?”)

I say the recent Natted States election was fraudulently stolen, and might refer to thousands of affidavits, forensic analyses of machines, and the probabilities against novel, startling voting patterns. But that is the weak argument.

For while I admit that a few million dead Mericans were in fact allowed to vote, the great majority weren’t. Some hundreds of millions of valid Merican citizens — both native-born and naturalized — were thus denied the franchise. And while we don’t know how long that country is going to last, let us charitably add several hundred million unborn — just arrogantly “cancelled.”

We say democracy is “one man one vote,” but even after adding women, the shortfall is appalling. And not even all the living voted. What about that?

As the great majority are, or rather were, extremely “conservative” — by any current standard — the results were more than a little skewed. And more, when one considers that the great majority in the future will be more than a little reactionary, too. (Long have I argued that the Republican Party dangles, way too far out on the Left.)

Tradition. Legitimacy. A constant Moral Order. Hereditary continuities. Violent opposition to any kind of change. Surely, every “democrat” in spirit will endorse these principles; and if some radical nihilist Supreme Court won’t throw out the election, the rest of us should.

Pretend, gentle reader, that you are the Batflu. Maybe you don’t want to be, but that doesn’t matter, for we are doing one of those mental exercises. Really, you are the opposing general — “surgeon-general” if you will — and the final intention is to defeat our enemy. But in the course of winning, we must consider things from the enemy’s point-of-view. We try to anticipate what he will be doing, to defeat us.

Now, the virus also has tactics and strategy. He is a bit like a communist invader, in the sense that he does not care about casualties. He is happy to sacrifice all his troops, to swamp just one position; and if he loses them all without taking it, he just moves on to the next one. Viruses do not get sentimental about life and death. And because they can suddenly multiply, exponentially as it were, when the micro-microclimate is favourable, they don’t worry about shortage of troops. Fire ants and termites are also like this, although on a much bigger scale. They are more sophisticated, too, but still they operate on essentially commie principles: by piling on.

Looking back over the æons to around January of this past year, it strikes me that we already knew these things, from many centuries of experience with contagions. We already knew, for instance, that facemasks give little or no protection, and that ordering social distance is mostly a waste of time. (Scared people do it without being told.) Both also do significant collateral damage, entirely to our side. Still, we can understand “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” given fears that the enemy might overwhelm our hospitals in the first wave of his “Pearl Harbour” attack, with all of our defences unready. But it should have been abandoned, after fifteen days.

We already knew that such enemies come in waves; that this type, like any conventional northern-hemisphere flu, lazes through the summer but gets back to disciplined aggression in the fall. We knew all about “herd immunity”; still know all about it, although the information is suppressed. The Batflu seems rather better informed, however. His (rather naïve) attempts to “evolve” in the available time, show he sometimes panics.

But in the Batflu’s view, our defences are inadequate, when not laughable. We can hardly evolve as a species so quickly, whenever switching to defence, although we do have some biochemical tricks up our sleeve. Our immune systems are not the predictable force that most meejah take them for (being, typically, more stupid than a virus), and are constantly adjusting their repelling techniques. Like any defencemen, however, they sometimes blow it.

Yet, there will always be drugs — hydroxychloroquine was just a start — that can be utilized experimentally, to give our immunities the upper hand. Indeed, I suspect a Batflu fifth column, in the form of “progressive” politicians, who immediately went to work sabotaging our most promising defences. They opposed intelligent experiment, with the immense stockpile of drugs we already have. They held out for a vaccine, thinking that would take forever. But now that, against the odds, thanks to crazy pro-active men like Trump, we have a growing selection of vaccine-like remedies, they are determined to sabotage those.

To the Batflu, vaccines might seem a setback, but optimism is not restricted to our side. Until herd immunity is achieved, there will still be a vast selection of targets, and he continues to hunt them down. He doesn’t need passports, as the leftists like to say (they also encourage illegal immigration), and could get around even without cars and aeroplanes, if a little slower on the long-hauls. Verily, should one care to check statistics, they get around quickest in the most locked-down environments, probably along paths created by the lockdowns themselves.

For if I may be forgiven for stereotyping them, that’s what all viruses are like. They are opportunistic, and there are always opportunities. By blocking one, we open another, and the Batflu is indifferent to our choices. He may be diffused into harmlessness in a large rally. He may strike like a cobra in a confined space. But like an uneducated cobra, he may strike and miss.

We’ll get to herd immunity sooner or later, as ever. Dragging it out isn’t very clever.

Truly, there is no way to manage a Batflu, and only our vanity says we’re in control. Try Vitamin D if you are paranoid. It might work and it might not, but won’t hurt you much if it doesn’t. Whereas, facial masks turn half the population into Karens. (Tell me about it!) This causes long-term social effects, including despair and œconomic ruin.

And they spread pimples, too.

In my last Thing column of the year (here) I review the year 2020, in my pessimistic way. Yes, it has been fairly bad; but next year could be much worse; and a time may come when we look back on “the first year of the Batflu” with nostalgia; as a time of candy and roses.

Perhaps I should mention why I call it “the Batflu.” At least one correspondent thinks it is because I am racist, and “have a problem” with bats. But he fails to discriminate between bats and viruses, between the Chinese generally, and the Communist devils who rule them. He thinks I mean one, if he thinks at all — when I mean the other. Not being any sort of bigot, to my knowledge, and not even wanting to be one, my practice is to ignore people like him, except when they can be used as illustrations.

Our “speech codes,” which are unambiguously vicious, are designed to trip up anyone not parroting a progressive party line. The natural iteration of a communist ideology is that one is guilty, from the moment one is accused — no matter how obviously the accusation is ridiculous. This is not a new thing, however. It is a method that has been used, throughout recorded history, by those in whom the moral stench is overwhelming; who demand heresy trials, even for unbelievers. It is the casual and humourless use of epithets such as “racist” that marks a person as something worse, and beyond the reach of any civilized disputation. He is what Glenn Reynolds calls “a garbage person,” or what Pope Benedict characterized as “filth.”

In my use of the word, “Batflu,” I mean something beyond the current, wildly overstated, viral outbreaks. My reference is to the whole syndrome (fine Greek word) in which it is one component. Yes, people may die from the virus, and many more get sick. Many, many more test positive and show no serious symptoms, or no symptoms at all. And many, many, many were effectively immune, from the outset. But no one is immune to the political machinations, in which fear of a disease is cultivated to delete our freedoms.

Like the counting machines used to advance fraud in elections, it is a phenomenon that ultimately crosses party lines. Anyone might use that technology, once they see that it works. And those who are evil will not hesitate to use it, for as the Devil ever whispers: “The end justifies the means.”

Unfortunately, at this time, our society is so broken by the spread of falsities, that it is hard for any simple, honest man to espy the rhetorical tricks, cast everywhere to ensnare him. While he is on his guard against one set of lies, he succumbs to another. He lets things pass, because there are too many to stop. And if he is a coward, he accommodates the lies, in his longing for a quiet life.

For much more than any virus from a batcave, or Wuhan, he fears what will happen if he does not wear the mask; how he will be fingered and ostracized. As we have seen from the rank hypocrisy of well-known politicians, partying in defiance of their own illicit commands, even they do not believe the horseshit they are preaching; they only calculate what they can get away with. (Sometimes, happily, they calculate wrong.)

My point is that the real “pandemic” is the by-product of a war, seemingly perpetual, between Truth and the Lie. The side of Truth is currently losing badly, and a temptation to surrender is always there. But in my view, we are in need of escalation.

Speak the Truth. There is no price too high.

With apologies to Alison Balsom, OBE, who probably never wished to get involved in Yankee politics, I love a fine Baroque C-trumpet. And that is a service Mister Trump has been providing, over here in the trans-pelagic realm. By this I don’t mean that he plays the instrument (quite wonderfully, like that Balsom lady), but that he IS one.

Given an extremely rough ride by the (“fake news”) meejah through four years, and appalling treatment by fake intellectuals and genuine grunge, he is still triumphantly, trumpistically, delivering his prize solos, with their distinctive phrasings, tone colourings, and delightful shifts of key. I would compare his music to Purcell’s, but can’t quite get there because I first gag.

What a waste that he became President, one might think, when he was capable of so much more. But no, I disagree. He became the trumpet of beleaguered Merican Liberty in office, and will continue to Trump-thump as he steps away.

My own conversion happened the night of the 2016 election. I had started out “Never Trump,” but Hillary Clinton was able to convince me that he was worth a try. It was when I found myself shouting at a laptop: “Call Michigan! Call Michigan for gawdsake!” I realized that I was now on his side.

Soon I found that his “enemy list” was exquisite. The élan with which he’d tweet back, caught them by surprise. Abortionists would call him a baby-killer; euthanasiacs would say he kills grannies. Pornographers would call him vulgar. Rioting thugs would condemn his violence. Democrats would start impeachment proceedings, due to rumours that he’d put ketchup on a steak, while those accusing him of hate crimes would froth at the mouth. He was compared to Hitler, Göring, Eichmann, &c — as they had done with Bush. But Bush was able to win a second term, by just ignoring them.

Whereas, Trump’s vote improved in all quarters in the election of 2020, except among the non-existent, and in Dominion counting machines. His efforts to get the court system to do anything about that, predictably failed. Merican elections are notoriously sloppy, and the judicial system is parti pris; it was hardly the first election Democrats had stolen — although it set some sort of record for audacity.

I have, incidentally, never thought that violence is the worst thing that can happen. No, losing the war is much worse.

But things are looking up. The Anti-Trump candidate, a senile political lifer named Biden, now becomes the weakest president since before even Carter; the smerfball for his disputatious allies. The Republicans, who unexpectedly held the Senate, and nearly took the House, even after any news unfavourable to their opponents had been “covered, with a pillow,” in the usual meejah way, will have an easy job revenging themselves, as the Democrats try to refill the foetid Potomac swamp. It will be fun to watch their humiliations, from a “conservative” point-of-view, as they are eaten by their own pet alligators.

To this day, I find it hard to believe that Merica could vote for such an idiot as Biden, and am relieved that they really did not. Kamala Biden & Co should inspire a thrilling swing in the next polls, assisted by technology, as the Republicans master the vote-harvesting art, and the many other skills for cheating.

Gentle reader will know that I am no fan of democracy; nor of the corruption that democracy engenders. I think it would have been more honest, had Trump done a Franco, and simply called in the troops. But as we may be saddled with a democratic farce for a few years more, let us hope for the next best thing.

“What goes around comes around,” according to some political maestro, and from what I can see, things will be coming around pretty hard.

“Blow up the trumpet in Zion,” I say.

Lilies come in many kinds, and so came even before they were bred by horticulturalists, long before horticulturalists themselves were ever bred; and being idle, through the ages, they would neither toil nor spin. Yet all are united, in being symbols of Our Lady.

That symbolism is both simple, and complex. It begins, in art, when the angel, Gabriel, presents a lily to the Virgin, at the Annunciation. And her Son, in art, presents a spray of lilies, to a virgin Saint, in what I sometimes think of as “little annunciations.” These are symbols, too, but as I was recently insisting, we lost the ability to make sense of symbols, in the northern nominalist cultures, five centuries ago. This was when our “reformers” decreed that they were “just” symbols — dead, instead of living, things.

Being no horticulturalist myself, I often struggle to tell one lily from another. The lily-of-the-valley, I know, is our symbol through Advent; and within it, of the Immaculate Conception we might have celebrated last week, as this week we step out of its Octave. To Protestants, as to degenerated Catholics, it must humbly be explained that this feast occurs precisely nine months before the Nativity of Mary, who was, herself, immaculately conceived.

All will call this a dogma of the Church, whether they agree with it or not; but I think our conception of a dogma was also overturned, five centuries ago. Like the True Cross that was, in the title of that feast, “invented,” it is not something that someone made up, but something that was memorably discovered (when the pilgrim Saint Helena was desperately looking for it, in AD 326).

The Devil’s whole strategy here, is to supplant a Thing with an Hypothesis. By teaching us to speak of things — as if they were “beliefs,” in competition with each other — he scored twice. First, by clouding us with doubt and confusion; second, by making all faith seem like tyranny — as if it were something that the Church tries to impose. It was a way for people to become atheist, while (falsely) claiming that they are merely sceptical; thus a way to make atheism commonplace. It was proposed as a “middle way” between receiving, and refusing, Christ; when there will never be a “third option.” It was the birth of “relativism,” in our current, progressive sense; of the Lie on which the modern world is founded.

But I still insist, that a lily is a Thing; just as that Church, founded by Christ, is a Thing; and what we call Faith, in its many dimensions, is a Thing — like reality, but more real.

And was Solomon in all his glory arrayed as one of these? In the Song of Solomon, the “Canticle of Canticles,” this is all resolved. Christ, as ever, is referring back as He refers forward, in this human world that began with the first man, and the first woman, and indeed their first child. From a scientific viewpoint, it necessarily did, for species are discerned by the fact of reproduction. For species are not immortal; they must start somewhere.

And those who have seen the unfolding in spring of that lily-of-the-valley — in the purity of its scent and of its whiteness — have partaken of that mysterious divine eros, manifested in the Creation; before it was corrupted.

But through these lilies, it is constantly restored.

*

MEANWHILE, I see from the Washing Tun Post, that Joe Biden will “redefine” the Catholic faith for us (by turning the discussion away from hard things like abortions, towards niceness to illegal immigrants, &c). … Is he more Catholic than the pope? … Possibly; but I still think he should check the Catechism, which, like the Bible, contradicts him on every point. Perhaps his wife could read it to him, since apparently she has a Doctorate in Education. At least, I’ve been told that some of them can read.

Consider, if thou wilt, gentle reader, the Baptistry I was designing with my coffee this morning. It is in the form of an octagonal glasshouse, or conservatory, seventy feet wide, with the baptismal font at the “epicentre,” within the floral pavilion. The rim of the font is at ground level, surrounded by a sunken circle of flagstones; the eight roughly triangular flowerbeds thus tilt inward towards this, gently down. There are four footpaths, intersecting upon the flagstones, dividing the flowerbeds into pairs; these paths themselves descend in gentle steps. Directly above that central font, a small “Pantheonic” hole cuts through the glass roof, through which a dove might fly. (Little rain will spray through, as the Pantheon architects in Rome knew; and excess heat may rise through the hole, as through a chimney.)

The whole structure, upon a stone foundation barely proud of the ground, is itself fairly low, so not to compete with the height of the parish church it is out front of, or with its Giotto-esque, externally-tiled bell tower (an earlier project). As my Baptistry is filled with flowers, not trees, it need not be extravagantly high. From the church tower it appears to be the face of a spreading kaleidoscope; yet from the grain fields, it is often invisible.

But the sun glints upon the angles, as it moves across the sky, making it a sundial, that can be read sideways.

I have added what I think a lovely, curved glass, fern-escorted tunnel, extending the key footpath to the porch of that church. Along it, the faithful may pass warmly towards the font, when snow is falling at Easter. Too, the matching passages, extending in the other three cardinal directions, inscribing a crucifix. The intention is to emphasize the quadrilateral, within the octagonal, as if they were the channels of a charbagh, or Persian garden.

My planting scheme, for the flowerbeds, is too complex to describe. Suffice, that as I tour it in my mind’s eye, my attention rests on hyacinth; on columbine, cyclamen, lady’s bed-straw; on lily-of-the-valley. There is a string of pale carnations, representing the Rosary, and towards an outer point of the glasshouse, a tiny isolated patch of hyssop.

Nor will I get into my novelty of irrigation, in capillaries detained or fed by small pools, from which eye-resting grasses and rushes are growing. Or the sprinkle of stones through the flowerbeds, on which the church gardener may knowingly step. Frankly, I think that I have tried to pack too much into my composition.

*

The jackhammerers on my building have been replaced by what sound to be fencing giants, clanking immense metal pipes incessantly together. Still no new balconies have appeared on Castle Maynard, after four months, but the shelves surviving from the old ones are looking somewhat neater.

I find that designing ecclesiastical buildings with my coffee — or later, with my tea — is the antidote to interminable urban reconstruction. Let me pretend that I am working through one of the noisier phases in my own (imaginary) projects. This seems an appropriate form of raw idleness, and supplies me with my own sacred architecture, at a time when real churches are closed to me.

But there are idle alternatives. A diligent, Mass-attending friend with nine children was just told by his priest that he, his wife, and they — with their collective allergy to muzzles — are now permanently banned from the old forms of Christian sacrifice. The new Batflu worship demands bold excommunications, such as the Catholic Church never had the guts to apply, even to monsters of heresy such as Trudeau or Biden.

An idler, too, at heart — gentleman, scholar — my friend came up with something else to occupy his fanciful moments. He wonders how many times that priest would bounce, if he kicked him as hard as he wanted to.

*

UPDATE. In the revision of my Baptistry design, late last night when I couldn’t sleep, I deleted the “curved-glass, fern escorted” tunnel, leading from glasshouse to the porch of my parish church. This looked too much like clutter. Instead, I placed a twenty-four foot open square, between the two portals, that congregants will simply have to walk across, even when it is snowing. (Of course the lads will have swept it clear.) It struck me that Canadians, for instance, should be robust enough to endure our winter cold, for about five Roman paces.

Having erased that, I slept soundly.

A little girl, whose formal education has barely started, may know more about computers and Artificial Intelligence than the world’s leading experts, whose post-graduate degrees continue to accumulate.

I noticed this while the little girl was speaking, evidently into a camera and microphone in her kindergarten class. Her teachers and the “AI” experts were doing experiments on her, and on her classmates. Some other professionals were making a documentary. The children were told to “play,” with heavily monitored equipment, to show the experts how their brains work. This wee thing — incorrigibly white and blonde — gave a voluntary aside. I sensed a future Idleposter.

She was defending the continued biological existence of her best friend. Already over-familiar with a variety of gizmos from school and home, she observed that one must use different gizmos to do different things. And as there are lots of things to do, one acquires many gizmos. She was on the verge of discovering the aesthetic concept of “clutter.”

Though only five years old (or possibly six or seven), she was already wearing that look on her face, that we associate with another series of tests. More equipment! We must all be tested. Or so I discerned (accurately?) from a moment when her face was presented, in high resolution, close up. She looked somewhat complexified.

Whereas, her best friend was singular. She could do everything. The two of them together could do everything, plus. And while they probably couldn’t do anything as well as a specialized machine — for instance they couldn’t tell you how many seconds there are in a year, or leap year — she implied, Who needs to know? She would need another machine, anyway, for the next function, after hearing this answer from the talking gizmo, to a question that her best friend hadn’t meant to ask.

But her best friend was good for everything. She wouldn’t have to be replaced. The little girl could just keep her best friend, day after day. No need to install a more efficient model.

Depending on one’s core outlook — determined by the algorithms at Google — one might be hopeful about this revelation from a post-millennial child; or alternatively, frustrated. Their machines can tell which you are, and will feed you videos to confirm your bias. (For instance, videos on how to build an off-grid log cabin in the northern wilderness. And on how to make a successful YouTube documentary about it.)

Yes, the little girl may continue to exist, and her best friend might, too, even after the current phase in the Age of Biological Infection. (The documentary must have been made before the Batflu; no one was wearing muzzles yet, even in the segments shot in China.) Will she be able to hold on to her profound and searing insight?

Or will she turn out like me, watching idiot documentaries on the Internet late at night? Or tapping on a keyboard first thing the next day?

Now, the “AI” experts will guffaw at my examples. We won’t have these things much longer, after all. Soon, the sensors embedded in our household appliances will know everything we want, and supply the goods immediately (or at least order them for rapid delivery), while extracting payment from our electronic bank. Even before we ask!

My (hypothetical) toaster will compose and upload an Idlepost, every day at precisely seven o’clock, using the advanced language-search tools and missing-word fillers that Google is developing. It will even translate this into Gaelic and Estonian. As the machine already knows that I am a fascist, racist, religious zealot, and Trump-enabler, it will also know just what I would say. And then cancel it — all within a nanosecond.

I advise gentle reader not to buy a toaster.

But how long can I keep one out of the High Doganate, once Nanny State finds out? Or Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter — they’re all my “best friend,” don’t you know? Already they can correct a “wrong answer,” by an electorate of more than a hundred million.

Will the little girl still sort-of understand, when they have finished programming her?

Picture this scene. My correspondent is reporting from what I call Funcouver, in Brutish Columbia, but I have heard of something similar in Toronto.

A private baptism is being celebrated, on a Massless Sunday in Advent. There are eight people in the large church: the priest, an assistant, and six immediate family. Less immediate family and friends were told to stay away, in obedience to the Batflu Regulations. No singing allowed; everyone sanitized and bat-muzzled. It’s not like a Costco or a Walmart, where hundreds are permitted to spread their germs, while pressing towards the cashpoints. (God save them.) There is music, there: Christmas shopping music, piped in.

Suddenly a ninth person enters this church, running towards the Sanctuary. She is shrieking, and hysterical. She suspected something was going on in the church, and lo, something was. She demands that it be stopped right away. “You are killing people!” she shouts, while vapouring in their faces.

Why bother explaining the Regulations to her? She won’t hear. The woman is obviously batshit insane. But as a representative member of the “Covid-concerned” public, she will have to be accommodated, somehow.

Perhaps the doors could be locked, as they will be at my parish church, to keep the unwanted out, including the parish congregation, for the duration of — today’s item — a small private funeral.

As I’ve argued before, the Catholic Church has made a very foolish, catastrophic mistake, by bending over to the Batflu Stasi. She should have behaved more like that hysterical woman: “How dare you try this on!”

For the anti-Catholic bigots, including those in civil authority, are enjoying their power through the “crisis”; and those with an elementary understanding of human nature, know that they will prolong it, indefinitely if they can. They have now shown their hand, definitively. They will order lockdowns and muzzles in all future public health “crises,” and more imaginative commands, when they think of them. Their pet epidemiologists will oblige.

Not the Catholic Church alone, but everybody, should be responding with civil disobedience. (Why let Antifa have all the fun?) For it is a responsibility, indeed a solemn duty, to refuse cooperation with tyranny and evil. Surrendering to it should never have been an option.

By leaving this so late, we are going to have a mess, and possibly a violent one. For the civil authorities — the bureaucratic swamp, ever more filling with Left and Progressive sludge — have once again discovered that they can sucker the general public efficiently, through fear.

If they told the sheeple to “Vote Communist,” it would never work. But scare them with Plague stories and fantasies through Mass Media — lies, damned lies, and statistics — and they fall obsequiously into line.

Better still: they will do your work for you.

It is a flaw of these Essays in Idleness, that I try to say too much in each Idlepost. Just now, I tried to dock yesterday’s prolixities, when I realized that covering the Pacific Ocean with discarded plastic drinking bottles was not actually germane to the issue of poverty in the slums of São Paulo, and that I should have been content with getting the tilde right. Often, like a Democrat, I am guilty of exactly what I accuse others of doing.

So today I turn over a new leaf, yet again, as I do every day. I will try to make a simple point, then give up.

This point will be about the Chinese, whom I very much admired for three thousand years, but have been down on since the ‘forties. Note, this is not entirely their fault, but I was just looking at some stock footage, of vast numbers in the PRC, marching lockstep in expensive gear, with tanks, missile carriers, and other vehicles that (were I a superpower) I would be more discreet about advertising. On the instructions of a certain Mao Tse-tung — a gentleman who outdid Stalin and Hitler if we rank by body count — they bought into the postmodern in a crass and vulgar way.

On their good days, Trump and the Yankees are much more spiritual, and only the Batflu Stasi go about closing churches. But now I’m getting into the weeds, and will be mentioning “Fang Fang” if I’m not careful.

What impressed me about the Chinese, and satellite cultures of the Orient, was their genius for material simplicity. No matter how extensive their Forbidden Quarters and Palaces, or long their Great Walls and Canals, everything would have clarity from close up, and use goods and ingredients chastely, without the slightest aggravating hint of overkill.

The sails on a Chinese junk will be my example. Rather than burden them with over-heavy cloth, against the fearsome gusts of the oceanic breezes, they simply made them easy to patch. Their fully-battened balanced lugsails hung one sail to a mast, which leaned forward so they would not snag. Should the wind be fully howling, they could be taken right off and rolled securely. Those masts being set centre-deck, the rudders were to starboard, and could be raised in chocks when the vessel came ashore. The flat-bottomed hulls were divided into compartments so they wouldn’t fill with water all at one time, and the boat needed no keel, let alone a false one. These holds separated incompatible cargoes. The family who owned the junk could live permanently aboard, in cabins to the more tranquil aft, above deck.

But now they have replaced them all, with our awkward oversized metal clunkers, that require noisy smoking oil-sucking engines and might sink if they are violated with a single hole.

I could go on. Don’t get me started on the extraordinary peace embodied in the shapes of Song dynasty clay pots, or the purity conducted through ancient Chinese brush strokes. We were Promethean, they were not; but now they have come over to our darkest side.

(I have shortened this tedious thing.)

*

“Poverty,” someone noticed, is quite “relative.” It cannot possibly be an absolute evil — the way œconomists misleadingly present it. One can be poor in the country, and hardly anyone will notice, whereas in the city, social workers might break in. Moreover, the ratio of police to acres is much higher in the town, so you really should think twice before shooting them.

Now, hunger gets us closer to absolute, and naked would be a problem at these Subarctic latitudes. That is why most sensible people have always preferred the Tropics, where clothing is more optional, and the crops sprout even when you are trying to ignore them. And should that not be enough food, a coconut may roll into your way — “under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree.”

Listening, involuntarily, to a screechy radio, I heard an œconomist from the United Nations, or some other radical outfit. He had just returned from the slums of São Paulo (first class by jet, I’ll wager), and wished to report two things. The first was that the slum inhabitants do not have much money. The second was that they are morally superior to us. He sounded like our pope.

He was proposing that under some Global Reset, these slum-dwellers will get more money, so they will not be poor any more. But, assuming the truth of his second proposition, there would be a catch. They’d lose their moral superiority, I reckon. I noticed that he avoided vexing himself on this “off-narrative” detail.

Are people who win lotteries made happier? Or luck out with the latest œconomic “reform”? I venture yes, at first. But check back after a few months, and they are miserable and nattering again. The truth is that humans (like sheep) can become accustomed to any level of prosperity or good fortune, and take their advantages over the luckless for granted very soon.

This isn’t a problem anyone can fix. Certain ancestors of ours catastrophically failed to do the right thing, and we’ve all been perverse ever since. God is dealing with it.

Verily, the world burdens itself with problems whose twists are either created or imagined. The “problem of poverty” is like that. It is easily solved, by letting some people be poor.

Another is this “morally superior” thing. It is a (very Red) herring. For the poor are, on average, as obnoxious as the rich. Why not just stop denying this?