Essays in Idleness

A young friend, who must work for a living, was caught out of town on a job, attending to someone’s “emergency”; when he received an important, if garbled, message. It was about his wife. She — coincidentally, also young — was in hospital. He decided that he must go to her, right away. His customer, whose emergency was only in her head, could wait.

Now, if one doesn’t own a car, it is nearly impossible to get around Ontario. Merely getting to his work assignment, not that far out of Toronto, had been a nightmare. No bus. Once there, he was stranded. I won’t go into this, however. It might make me angry.

Luckily for my friend, he had another friend, too, who was unafraid of our roving Batflu gestapo. He was picked up in an hour, and driven right downtown, to the hospital’s very door. After passing through multiple layers of front-desk bureaucracy, he was finally able to learn what had happened to his wife, and as a bonus, what room she was in. (Sharp eyes, that young man.) Uninterested in getting permission to visit, he walked off.

Someone seemed to be calling him back, but he couldn’t hear, because the elevator door was closing.

It was as he had suspected. The baby had arrived, a little early; their first. His wife was holding him in her arms as he broke into the maternity suite. And she had the most serene, the most beatific smile, as she raised one arm to greet him, and invite him to draw near. Then kissed him, and pulled him nearer, into this tight little triangle: man, woman, child.

And what she said he will not forget, should he live to be one hundred. They were just two words, that could excite any grammarian. They were:

“We three.”

I emphasized the youth of this couple — twenty, and nineteen, respectively, I think — for a reason. Also I will mention that they were properly married, even before the child was conceived. I only learnt of them, thanks to this Idleblog; apparently, some young Catholics know how to read. (Home-schooled, of course.) And there may be others.

The world, as gentle reader may have noticed, is going to hell.

But not all of it is going.

My mama turns one hundred today. She would miss the celebration, as her descendants will miss it, owing to the latest Batflu lockdown; but then, she also missed the last seven. This is because she died in 2013. It is one of the inconveniences of the human condition, viewed strictly from a worldly point of view; but being a worldling myself, I often regret it.

I have no idea, I can have no idea, where she is now. I pray that it is in a better place, notwithstanding her sometimes fiery atheism. This held up through the years of painful illness: a stoicism that sometimes broke down in tears, or toyed with sentimentality, but never forgot the quarrel she had with God.

As a young apprentice nurse, raised as an over-literalist Protestant, she had prayed earnestly, desperately, for a sweet little boy. He was tortured by a hideous, and then untreatable, spinal disease, where she was in training at Halifax. In the end he died, and mama was outraged. She’d prayed and prayed and prayed, and then this happened. She felt conned. She was going to get even with God, by never praying to Him again. She would deny that He existed. That would show Him.

A choirgirl, too, with a magnificent mezzo-soprano voice, she got through bouts of horror (“old age is not for cissies”), by singing hymns from childhood, in her geriatric cell; and repeating the Lord’s Prayer. This is because, although a stubborn “Scotch” atheist, she did actually believe in God, as I would sometimes force her to admit. It was just that she was really mad at Him.

A young priest, whom I stuck on her, spent hours — many hours, sometimes in the middle of the night — not trying to convert her, exactly, but praying over her as she had prayed over the broken-spine boy. Until nearly the end, she had the power to send him away, but never did; even though he was Catholic (a serious error, where my mama came from).

But if you are the loving God, you can handle people being angry with you. Or so I have reasoned. You look around them, as well as through, and find any goodness they were trying to hide. And mama had much, that was hard to hide: although she could be secretive about it.

Moreover, You, if you are God, spot the little things that humans often miss, in their hurry, such as sincerity and candour. For unbridled sincerity and candour can sometimes resemble faith, to the point of being it. You see where, as the result of poor theological instruction, the “impenitent” has slipped off the rails. Yet, contrary to human-all-too-human superstition, You aren’t actually out to get them.

Hell is very real, and why people insist on going there is hard to understand. But Purgatory, in my own reckless speculation, is very large. It might not be easy to save some people, from any human or even churchly point of view, but I wouldn’t underestimate God’s ability to beat the odds and obstacles.

Meanwhile, from my privileged position, I remember a mother who was eminently worth saving. I could tell many anecdotes to confirm this, but these belong to receding time and place. We are beyond that now, and the extraordinary virtues that were manifest in this world, must now be seen in light of the immortal. They were as real as she was. And reality itself has the virtue, that, it cannot be deleted.

[Fearing this Idlepost was too mild, I added a few sentences to jag it up a bit.]

*

It would be unfair, as well as disrespectful, to describe political parties like the Democrats in the Natted States, or the Liberals up here in our Fair Dominion, as coalitions of the mentally ill with the mentally retarded, under the management of ruthless criminals. And gentle reader should know, that I am never unfair.

Notwithstanding, I am increasingly annoyed, to see what both of these triumphalist parties take for granted, as they look forward to the future they will impose on the rest of us. The trillions they will vomit, into soi-disant “climate change,” and soi-disant “equity,” and perpetual soi-disant public health “crises,” are a discouragement to the sane. That each bundle of their crackhead schemes is not merely useless, but counter-productive to their stated goals, is a point I have often made in passing.

These parties depend entirely on the urban vote; inflated by corruption. As we saw once again in The Election to the south, they are trounced elsewhere. As evidence, the Democrats felt so protective of the zombie vote, that they even ran a zombie as their presidential candidate.

Each “issue” is not based only on a fraud, but something much darker. For each was advanced as the groundwork for tyranny, from the start. Moreover, each is no longer “talking points” for some deranged, radical clique, but all have spread through urban society as a cancer. None of their premisses may be challenged, no matter how obviously ludicrous; for the advocates cling to them as to religious dogmas. (Leaving us with only our guns and our Bibles.)

Tomorrow, my part of Ontario (most of it) goes back under “lockdown.” This is because the previous lockdowns had no effect at all. We can already know that this one won’t work, either, although it will spread poverty and ruin through millions of lives; while creating new sinkholes for public money.

The more serious victims are, overwhelmingly, not Democrat or Liberal voters. They are those who are by nature independent, keep small shops, take risks on their own savings. These are the “family types” being squeezed and trampled and put out of business by Big Bureaucracy and Big Tech. The “progressive” types, employed by large organizations, can work from their designer homes, and order in their ice cream, because they continue to be well paid, for jobs that are truly inessential. That’s why, politically, the lockdowns “work”: for they are aimed at people these inessentials sneer at; whom they call “deplorables,” “racists,” and “chumps”; those within and without the cities, who harvest and distribute the resources, and provide the myriad services, that make urban life physically possible — come rain, shine, or Batflu.

Far be it from me to suggest that they should abandon the cities, and stop deliveries to the urban cores. And yet, innumerable environmental problems could be solved thereby — from excess consumption, to excess leftwing voters — by the simple expedient of cutting the cities off.

Like most people, I am capable of biting into a juicy conspiracy theory (without losing teeth). Take reality, for instance. Viewed as a theory, it is pretty wild. The constituents of reality fit together in a way that is rather too neat, and often sadly predictable. Purveyors of outrageous phantasies, such as Q Anon, and the Proud Boys, have been drawing people in with their suspiciously plausible assertions, such as two plus two make four. While they haven’t tried anything as wild as White Supremacy, there are other groups that earnestly believe in that, such as Black Lives Matter, and Antifa. (“Just an idea,” as the Biden man said.) They think arithmetic is part of the conspiracy.

Do two plus two always make four? Not in theology, according to a progressive Jesuit member of the pope’s inner circle. (Fr Spadaro didn’t give any examples, however.)

It gets worse. According to some crazy people, the world is full of “bad actors,” including some who are prepared to lie, cheat, and steal. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Well I did, and believe I have evidence. Verily, with my conspiratorial mind, I entertain the notion that some of them may be cooperating with others.

As an old-fashioned, indeed very backward Christian, I’ve bought into the theories of one Jesus of Nazareth. I think some people are demonically possessed. Not everyone, of course: but surely everyone on the Left. (And quite a few on the Right, too.)

In addition to the Nazarene’s, I have dabbled in the theories of John Stuart Mill. These are extremely radical. Perhaps anticipating Twitter and Facebook, he held that when something is felt to be wrong, the best way to correct it is with open discussion. Moreover, that when this is suppressed, or routinely censored, society as a whole is made (more) stupid; or “idiotized” in my preferred expression. Now, there’s a real conspiracy theory for you.

But once again, I must admit to subscribing. My only excuse is that I was raised not only to believe in logic, but to imagine that logical propositions can be demonstrated — “objectively,” as it were. I actually drove myself through Mill’s big fat beuk, System of Logic (Ratiocinative & Inductive, &c) — when I was an innocent youff. I’m still flinching from the experience. I’m afraid that it has marked me for life.

Call me a White Supremacist. You wouldn’t be the first. Also a Proud Boy, for when physically attacked, I might be inclined to defend myself. That makes me, I think, a Fascist, too. A Racist, of course, but that seems redundant. (There I go off on logic, again.) All my friends of other races must be just for show.

A minor parting thought, inspired by Mr Mill. It is about The Election, and the aftermath of it.

The Democrats still haven’t conceded the presidential election of 2016. Why should Trump concede 2020?

Being a White Supremacist, a Proud Boy, and a Fascist, I would recommend putting his fraud allegations before the courts, and “we’ll see what the law says.” (Fine Scottish expression, that; but needs the brogue.) …

Rather than just declare a “President Elect” in the Pravda, and demand that all charges be dismissed without a hearing, while open discussion is closed down. But that’s just me.

Had I my druthers — O cowering world! — there would be almost no place in our towns or cities, for any sort of powered machinery. Different it might be in the country, although I’m not yet sold on a tractor, to replace the family bullock, and will avoid the topic of combine harvesters. Drilling and mining have, I think, been improved by the techies, from the miners’ point of view. I allow exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions.

There are other details I will overlook for now.

But almost everything now being done by jackhammers and the like, was formerly done with hand tools. Indeed, with a wink to some lady in Oregon, whose house was burnt out, soon after her husband died, and for whom sundry other things have been going wrongish: you can do anything with hand tools. She sends me links to videos by craftsmen, showing just how things are done, or were done in the olden times, going back to before the masons did the Pyramids. How to lay in a good stone foundation, for instance.

From what I can see, this lady is a match for any forest fire, with what I take for a burning Catholic faith. (The pun was intended.) Note that the power source for hand tools is hands, and the like. Ultimately, they are the source of computer chips, too, but something should be said for direct living. A burning Catholic faith may reveal that.

The sound, for example, of a mason’s clinking as he dresses his stone, is a delightfully musical sound; and for another, the soft notes of chisels in wood. Even handsaws and hatchets, one can usually sleep through, though not well while they are working next one’s head. Yet they are not only the acoustic properties that cause me to prefer craft work to the heavy industrial. For the craftsman works more slowly, and thus contemplatively. Too, his efficiencies are nearly impossible to quantify, and the products of his work can’t be sold in volume.

A window-sasher I once knew, was inspired to a fine sarcasm when an adept of “the art of the deal” tried to get four windows for the price of three. As Ruskin said, there is no fair competition where the only criterion is money. Justice demands that the good craftsman flourish, and the bad one starve, until he finds a trade better suited to his gormlessness.

How do I reconcile my opposition to modern construction techniques with my enthusiasm for freedom? I don’t have to. Nor will I listen to glib arguments about modern “life expectancy.” Being a proponent of quality, over quantity, I care more about how the life is lived, than whether it can be made interminable. Still, a joyous, well-employed craftsman is likely to outlive a neurotic wastrel with ulcers.

But as another girl I once quite liked was apt to say, “Who’s counting?” She was annoyed by gift-giving in the spirit of bookkeeping, with frequent auditing of what one owes, or is owed. “Communism is only possible among friends,” my exiled Czech companions used to say, who vied to clear the bar bill ahead of each other.

The free man does what he does voluntarily. He does not need a bureaucracy to “guide” him when, for a much smaller outlay, he has already in his possession a Bible and some poetry.

As an old friend, now early-retired from guvmint, said to his still diligent colleagues: “Take all your statistical analyses, and stick them up your ass.”

Hand tools require intelligent, and practised, organization for the job. Mass enterprise requires organizers even for the organizers of the organizers. The tyranny implicit, when it is not explicit, in most aspects of modern life, while obsessively advanced by commies and “liberals,” is not something to celebrate, rather something to throw off — Trumpestuously, I would say.

From a world now being again “reset” by the very rich and progressive, it is necessary to detach ourselves.

My instinct is that this can be done, with hand tools.

____________

ADDITIONAL. — My Chief Texas Correspondent, who is agnostic on questions of technology, but seems to share my preference for quiet, and is no fan of the disposable, links something to the effect that cars today cannot be repaired. When they stop working you just throw them away, like defunct televisions and computers. However he touts “artificial intelligence” for prospector oilfield drilling. Whereas, I recommend bamboo poles, inserted in the ancient Oriental manner.

But this does not address the car-repair problem.

My favourite car, from my Asiatic days, was a rusting Land Rover, designed to be not only fixable by hand, but fixable under exotically bad conditions, and with very simple tools, which it carried. It could run, if necessary, on banana oil, when caught miles away from any conceivable petrol pump. There was no air conditioner, but you could drive it with the windscreen hinged down. Or up, during the monsoon season, when torrential rain presented the greater irritant. 

Twenty-twenty has not been one of the better years, in my retrospective survey over the few decades I have been a worldling; and yet it may look good in years to come. With the defeat of Trump, by the tireless combination of the dark state and media, the small hope for improvements has been muffled. Henceforth, not only in the Natted States, the abridgement of our freedoms will resume. Too, under the guidance of the worst pope in many centuries, the Catholic Church will continue to contract, along with other bulwarks against the power of sleazy politicians. And yet we cannot know the future, for better or worse; and things we could not possibly have anticipated will disturb every trend.

The only certainty is that we will die, and the only imperative is, finally, to prepare for it. For eternity stretches beyond our days. To be immersed in the politics of this world, even defensively against overbearing politicians, is to be wrapped in a kind of never-ending Batflu, in which our actions are constrained by a constantly growing “public health” gestapo.

My Loyalist ancestors, who, on this continent, first fought for the Continental Army, then fled, had a saying I will come to in a moment. My worthy ancestor, Stetson Holmes, nominally on the winning side, saw how his victorious neighbours were persecuting his defeated neighbours, with tar and feathers at the end of the “Revolutionary War.” He took his family north from Massachusetts, at first to the independent Republic of Vermont. And then, when that merged with the new Union, by cart across the state of Maine, and by fishing boat up the coast to Halifax; then Cape Breton. With his sons, he once again pioneered, at Holmville (later spelt “Homeville” by casual bureaucratic edict). A little Scotch, already, themselves, with the generations they married with the Gaelic exiles, who had fled the Clearances in the Highlands and Islands, to become crofters in the free New World. And in time we come to the economic and spiritual destruction of the society they formed — homogenized by pogey into the new Nanny State.

The saying began as a Loyalist cri de cœur: “Better one tyrant three thousand miles away, than three thousand tyrants one mile away.”

I was raised, on my mother’s side but also on my father’s, with a deep distrust of “The Peeple,” which has evolved in my own case into a general suspicion of “democracy.” The best the State can offer, in my view, is to honour its old, rather British commitment, to stay out of my life. Unfortunately, this requires its determination not only to recognize one’s freedom and autonomy, and the dignity of the small; but also to enforce this.

Freedom of speech, for instance, depends on the State’s willingness not merely to disapprove, but to actively oppose things like “cancel culture.” Those trying to shut you up should themselves be subject to arrest by the police, and cracked skulls when they get pushy about it.

This is not the current view of the public at large. The great majority only go with the flow, and half-believe the vicious lies by which their behaviour is modified. It is like “Covid Compliance” — like everyone wearing these bat-muzzles, that have long been known to have no effect whatever against the spread of a virus, but to be actually detrimental to health when worn for extended periods. (Or the more spiritual bat-muzzles, that make us watch what we are saying.) The guvmint says, “Wear them!” — and even those who know better, do, for fear not so much of the police, but of their tarring neighbours.

“Patriots” and “Loyalists” were two of a Yankee kind. Both fought for freedom, and now that a couple of centuries have passed, they are retrospective allies against the modern world.

Against that, all we can be is stroppy; and all we can be for the foreseeable future. But all is never lost, so long as we are able to remember that our Kingdom is not of this world.

There is an elephant in the room, according to an overused cliché, for something so big that no one can see it, because nothing else is visible. (Fish, it is sometimes argued, don’t believe in the existence of water.) Those blinded by its scale think the problem may just be oversized ear flaps, or over-hard tusks; over-heavy feet; or an over-swishing trunk or tail. Those eccentrics who suggest there is an elephant in the room, are dismissed for exaggerating. Or more effectively, their point is both conceded, and ignored.

In this case they are exaggerating, for the elephant has been mistaken for a donkey. If the people who live with it took off their blindfolds, they’d have better zoological judgement. But what if their eyes were sewn shut? Or what if their judgement is clouded because, they are themselves the donkey, and the problem is strictly relative? In the donkey’s view, too many animals in the room are not donkeys. Time to get into a rage, and kick them out.

But returning to our original analysis, the big problem was the elephant, Mr Donald Trump. For people don’t really have their eyes sewn shut; they just see what they want to see. And they see, clearly, that he is very large, in the mental room they are trying to occupy. Everything they want, he is in the way.

Let’s take a longer view of this, however. It’s not just the elephant. The people who live between New York and Los Angeles, except those in the other big urban tumours, are elephantine by nature. They sent the Trump monster to Washington, to trample as much of the “deep state” as possible. They aren’t inclined to apologize for this. Verily, their enthusiasm for the monster is confirmed wherever he holds a rally. The Batflu donkeys are unable to shut it down. “Fact-checking,” that the crowd was only thirty thousand when he said it was thirty-five, does not help shrink it.

They think they have him pinned by the zombie vote. But so long as he lives, he is not a butterfly. I am, of course, again referring to The Election, as I have been, obnoxiously, in many Idleposts lately. In my view — which enjoys a monopoly at this website — it was fraudulent, bigly. Or is, because the whole thing isn’t over, and won’t be until, right or wrong, the results are certified, and the Electoral College meets. If it is over, then. Unfortunately, the urban zombies have been misinformed. Elections in the Natted States, as elsewhere, are not decided by mass media. And in lawful jurisdictions, irregularities are investigated first.

But the fraudulence of The Election, indicated by the number of red flags thrown up — apparent to an easy consensus of boring, conventional fraud perfessionals — does not come down to anecdotes. I can’t speak to which ones are true; I wasn’t personally there, at the hundreds of locations, like so many journalists who imply that they were. The allegations are numerous, and run only one way. But in my view, the fraudulence was deeper. It is indicated by another consensus: the overwhelming agreement of mass media — who are Left in an unsubtle way — that there is nothing to see here. They have asked the operatives of the Democratic Party, with whom they are allied, if there were any irregularities; and their friends said, No.

Happily, this overwhelming consensus is undermining itself. It is feeding the quickly growing desire for alternative sources of information. Were I a Big Tech executive — and I assure gentle reader I am not — I would worry that my efforts to monopolize the conversation were highly counter-productive.

For if, as I believe to the point of know, a majority of Mericans have policy views much closer to Mr Trump’s than to Mr Biden’s, those views will surface, Trump or no Trump. Moreover, making these people more angry will not make them more calm.

____________

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH. I’d intended to greet the day, as if it were a statutory holiday, the way I try to greet all other days. But it seems that I went ahead and wrote another Idlepost, in defiance of my own lazy intentions. Well, it’s too late now, and I am already being criticized.

On the subject of Intention, I have been reading Elizabeth Anscombe’s beuk on this topic, and getting less from it than I had hoped. This is because Mrs Geach (she was married to another of my philosophical heroes) writes with such precision, that I find it a disadvantage as a reader, to be old and mentally feeble.

To answer several who were themselves confused by my use of this word “intention,” the other day:

When a Catholic “prays for your intentions,” he is not praying that you will get what you want; unless they are good intentions, in the eyes of God. If your intentions are deranged, he prays that God will fix them. I learnt this the hard way some years ago, when a Catholic told me he was praying for my intentions. What he meant was, I now realize, he was praying that I would stop being an ass.

Today, I find myself, not for the first time, praying for our pope’s intentions.

There are times when one really must go to gaol, or at least risk it. And this, even though one is in a small minority, and will receive only contempt for being “difficult.” A few “Red State” Americans will understand what I mean. We don’t riot when we don’t get our way, like delinquent children. At our best we make the situation plain, and take the consequences.

We do believe in self-defence, however, for ourselves and our families, and I am heartened that in Florida, the State apparently intends to restore the citizen’s ancient right to shoot looters and other housebreakers.

But against outrageous Batflu regulations, this tactic won’t work. The State itself is the perpetrator, and it is much too strong to resist. Not being a Left-progressive, I do not advocate shooting at policemen. The question — What to do? — should be answered in another way.

Suppose, to obey the regulations, the Catholic Church of which I am a member is specifically ordered to desecrate her Mass. Visitors must wear muzzles, must approach the altar in strange batty ways, not sing, and receive Communion in the hand. Priests to wear plastic gloves, as if Christ himself were a vector of infection. In my parish, pews have been removed, and tape marks placed on the remaining, to show where the penitent may rest his behind. One needs a ticket just to get in.

There is no point in objecting: the majority of parishioners play along. They do whatever they’re told, and are still scared silly by (mostly false, or aggressively misleading) media reports. One may go in “between acts” (if one can, without a ticket), and say the Lord’s Prayer solemnly, and perhaps one Hail Mary before body and soul are repelled by the fatuous bat-masks. Even so, the pastor sends around frightened emails. He is worried that some congregant may rat him out for overlooking some petty regulation, and fears at every moment that the cops will close him down.

This was once only a problem in Red China.

What should Church and churches have done? They should have stood their ground. They should have forced the government to show its hand, and arrest all the Christians, or give up. They should not “demand” that they be given the same rights as Walmart customers, but take them.

(Nothing against Walmart customers, by the way; they should refuse to be dehumanized, too.)

As the Mussulmans have been teaching us, there is no advantage in being soft and wet. Make the authorities more afraid of Catholics than they are of suicide bombers; and yet without flourishes of terrorism. But who would join me, in these degenerate times?

In passing, I am disgusted that even one self-styled Catholic or general Christian voted for Biden, in the election next door, given his support not only for abortions but a round number of anti-Christian policies besides. He pretends to be a Catholic himself, but disproves this by everything that comes out of his mouth, including habitual lies. Trump is actually closer to a Papist. Biden casually compares his opponents to Nazis, thus skipping beyond the reach of civil discourse. But we have become accustomed to such garbage, and not having it collected any more.

Fake Catholics should be told that they are fake, and dismissed fairly sharply. They should not be welcomed into Roman churches, but sternly asked to behave, or leave.

The flip side of this is gaol preparations. For that, and worse, has often been the price of devotion — not to the pagan gods of the State, but to the Risen Lord.

There are people who are almost the opposite of idlers — not many, but a few. They are not necessarily the most intelligent people, nor the deepest thinkers: what must be done seems obvious to them. That it will be difficult, both we and they take for granted; we prefer the term, “impossible.” These are not, usually, the most attractive people, though a strange light or charm may summon impressive allies. This is different from the “charisma” we normally associate with politicians, however, and which is the mark of a fraud.

Monstrous energy is the mark of the heroic non-idler. He may be put out to pasture, but he won’t stay there. Like goats, these heroes can’t be still unless sleeping, and don’t much sleep. They have their missions, they cannot be stopped. Like, notoriously, honey badgers, or weasels (another animal hard to herd), they are mission-focused, and cannot be distracted. Snakes, especially, dislike them.

For they do not give up. They are, because focused, quick studies, and very hard to outwit. They are easy to underestimate, however. Put one on a job, and if he lives, it gets finished. One thinks of Donald Trump, or Florence Nightingale. I could name more.

But as it is Armistice Day, I will think of Florence Nightingale, and her medical mission to the troops in Crimea. Later, her invention almost from scratch of modern nursing techniques.

She had her millions of admirers, in Victorian times, although she was privately detested by the élites. Partly, this was because she got things done, that they knew to be impossible; and forgot to flatter them. Soon after her death (in 1910, neatly at the end of the Edwardian), the snakes came out again, from under their rocks. (One thinks of Lytton Strachey, and his Eminent Victorians, among the most scabrous and despicable books I have read.)

Was she an imperialist and militarist? (We are back to Miss Nightingale.) You bet. That is why she is misunderstood in a time of “rampant,” ideological pacifism. The idea that winning a war, that needs winning, is compatible with true charity towards one’s own troops, and even those of the enemy, is beyond the intellectual capacity of the progressive mind — for which enemies are for killing, and friends are for throwing under the bus.

Currently, I wish to champion Miss Nightingale as a heroine of cuisine. The words below the asterisk are frankly plagiarized, from some food column I wrote decades ago, that just happened to recycle itself, under my wet flipflops. This surviving fragment starts by invoking Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea; and Vimy Ridge.

*

“An army moves on its stomach” [I wrote], but it is hard to find anywhere in history an example of an army that cared much for the gourmand. Actually, I have misstated this entirely. It is hard to find examples of officers who cared for what the troops were eating — so long as it was nutritious and sufficient and did not contribute to mutiny. For the most part military food has been indistinguishable from prison food, and presented similarly.

This is partly understandable. War is not a picnic. I [used to] find it difficult to cook in the proximity of squalling children; I suppose the rattle of gunfire, incendiary bombs, and the whistle of incoming mortars might be equally distracting to the higher sort of culinary exercise.

But the circumstances of a field kitchen are not wholly grim. Dried herbs and spices are very light to carry, and wherever one happens to be on campaign, there are the fruits of that countryside. Moreover, as most old soldiers will recall, and the readers of their diaries and memoirs in their absence, most days are not that exciting. There is plenty of time to think about food. There are long periods of boredom and waiting with nothing to look at but the sky; interspersed with short periods of pant-shitting terror.

Supposing, for a moment, a bit of imagination on the part of quartermasters and cooks, and a semi-intelligent rationing authority, a war might be conducted with a bit of style. There could be rivalry between regimental kitchens, or between the galleys in Her Majesty’s fleet. Food could be made a powerful inducement in the recruitment drives.

There are some little sparks like this, in history. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, that extraordinary lantern-bearing angel, procured the voluntary help of Alexis Soyer, the leading London hotel chef of the day, to advise her on the organization of field hospital kitchens. These quickly became the place to eat — almost worth getting wounded. M. Soyer applied his very broad mind to analyzing the limitations of field cookery, then turning each limitation into a strength. (I recommend his Culinary Campaign in the Crimea, 1857.)

Morale is not a small thing in the conduct of war. A hot meal served in defiance of logistics in the cold wet of a hideous trench, comes to remind us of victory, in the very face of the enemy.

Instead, our military food traditions seem to descend from the Scots — those bold, hardy warriors sweeping through Northumbria in the 14th century, without baggage carts. In Froissart’s Chronicle we read of their diet: under-done meat from rustled local cattle, thin oatmeal cakes, and river water.

Perhaps that’s the way it has got to be. Certainly it’s the way it was, from what I learnt asking veterans (including my papa, and his papa).

So in remembering the men, and women, who served, we might put off breakfast today until eleven. Perhaps then the sludge should be eaten from a tin bowl, with a slab of stale bread (no butter). Not from any desire to fast, but to help us remember them; and those for whom such a meal was their last, this side of paradise.

Some years ago, when most things happened, there was a Finnic lady. She preferred this to “Finnish,” for she spoke English well. Sometimes she would use, “Uralic,” to the puzzlement of almost everyone, in the Asiatic city wherein she was conducting business. It was a store, where one could buy Scandihoovian furniture, light fixtures, bottles, and other material goods. These were early days of the “Asian Tiger” economies, but already there was a surplus of the “upwardly mobile,” many with European and even more with American post-secondary degrees. They just loved Scandihoovian things.

So did this Finnic lady, “in principle.” She was quite proud of “some” of the things that she was selling. This included a culture of sophistication, in the salons she conducted, Saturday afternoons. I, who sometimes attended, happened to notice that the guests consisted almost entirely of sophisticated white Occidentals, though occasionally a splendidly attractive Oriental woman, on the arm of a sophisticated, white lover. The house, too, was a splendid thing, full of choice Scandihoovian objects, which in their simplicity set off Asiatic antiquities to brilliant effect — turning them from objects of religious veneration into Western “art.”

I was very young, and more adept in those days at keeping my mouth shut. Too, I was dazzled by the Finnic lady’s guests, and thrilled to find myself among them. Ah, to be part of any élite.

Her store struck me as more downmarket. The son of an industrial designer, I had already acquired criteria of taste to rank objects above and below a certain standard. (That’s how I became an Anglican, incidentally; before descending to a Romish Catholick. The trinkets were more likely to be in good taste.)

One day, however, I asked this Finnic woman to explain her choice of stock. I’m afraid I asked this rather awkwardly, being young, but no offence was taken. She explained that, while she did not like such things herself, her customers were inclined to buy articles that were “big, red, and shiny.”

Now, I quite understand, possibly already understood, that a merchant who wants to remain in business will consult her customers’ tastes, in preference to her own. We must make a living. Some of us have children to feed, and in the old days, wives. Moreover, through the years, I have witnessed the progress of many haughty merchants into bankruptcy. The same might be said for the fashionable, generally, once the fashion in which they trade passes away. Indeed, none of this is any of my business; and I should mention that the only commercial enterprise I ever started, went the way of all flesh.

The world is full of items that are big, red, and shiny. This grieves me. Hardly anywhere will you find a law against them, at least over the last six centuries. (Previously, there were sometimes sumptuary laws.) A person, today, would have to be a leftwing loon, to formulate an objection. And as several readers have observed, some not even gently, I am a rightwing sort of loon.

Let me observe, however, that the world is quite complex. Taste, alone — vapid conceptions of what is in good taste — make strange enemies. But also it makes strange friends.

Those would be egg noodles, of course, with pressed cottage cheese: very nutritious. Too, they help bring out your inner central European peasant (who is not a “liberal”). I have no German or Slavic ancestry myself, but I’m willing to pretend. You put on the face, and get in the mindset. Add a dash of Mongol.

Lately, since the world went crazy, or rather confirmed that it had long been so, I have taken a renewed delight in “comfort food.” I believe that I confessed this the other day; but if one is going to write nearly daily Idleposts, one must acclimatize to constant repetition. Since most people read at half-attention (the way they do everything else), this is just as well. A point may not be picked up until the tenth time it is mentioned; and then soon forgotten again. The Idleposter keeps banging away. He’s just like that himself.

Not so with food. I got the point of cottage cheese and noodles, the very first time. Some diced onion or shallot fried in butter, salt, and blackpepper to excess, then dump it in boiled noodles with the cheese, and sour cream. The more the merrier, in my view (I am pro-life), but if you’re poor, you’re poor.

In my humble but persistent opinion, the socialists in high office have conspired with dairy farmers almost everywhere to make cheese ludicrously expensive. This is an outrage. I used to be able to recite enough statistics to make your ears curl; but hell, just trust me. Should the world return to the sort of freedom that was normal only a few centuries ago, we could all go back to eating bread and cheese. Or, noodles and cheese in the fast lane. To say nothing of meat, when we resume keeping animals.

With wine, or beer, according to the climate. Why, I recall buying wine in Paris only one half-century ago, and noticing it was cheaper than milk. Both of them were aged.

It was a simple life, I was young and happy, reading books I could hardly understand, because they were in French. Often I had to read things ten times to get the point, but then I noticed it was just the same in English.

Owing to politics, I was not in Prague. Why, at that moment, I wanted to be there, is a secret I will take to my grave. But not being there didn’t bother me, much; indeed it spared me the walk, for I used to find trains too expensive, and horses inconvenient to park. Still, I longed for noodles; and Czech dumplings.

The French seemed to do noodles with chicken and wine; I was capable of adapting. In their countryside, they seemed to do a better job at being peasants than, say, the English. But neither seemed conversant with pressed cottage cheese. Fairness compels me to admit that the French had other cheeses, however. And the English, a whole lot of cheddar.

To be poor, ideally to be young on top of it; to have noodles and cheese. This is the secret of being happy. The books are probably optional. But these kids today, they don’t understand.

____________

P.S. the plainest proof that The Election was stolen from Trump, is currently being provided by that country’s Left “mainstream” meejah, now including, or course, “Big Tech.” The speed at which they joined forces to blot out reporting on the numerous, very plausible court challenges to the counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, &c — each of which Trump was clinching until late votes started pouring in — and the many anecdotal reports of monkey-business in Dem-controlled cities, known to be extremely corrupt — contrasts brightly with their glacial patience when e.g. Gore was challenging a few unfallen chads in select counties of Florida, a few years ago. That they had, all, falsified the polls leading up to the election was anyway proved by the overall result. That was a psy-ops game: Biden did not win by up to seventeen points. The statistical anomalies in his local spikes, in precisely the states he had to take to squeak home, are in the same genre. I do not think Trump can overcome the headwinds now set against him. But the truth remains the truth, even when it is suppressed.

Note, I am not alleging “a vast leftwing conspiracy.” This is hardly necessary among the sort of people who do these sorts of things: our “progressive intelligentsia.” The end justifies the means for them, and the attraction to dishonest means comes quite naturally. We must pray for their intentions.

A discussion on some email thread, this evening, on the presidency of William Henry Harrison. This lasted for thirty-one days, in 1841, before Mr Harrison succumbed to something like the Batflu. The question posed was, will Joe Biden, now declared president of the same country by its meejah, and by vote-counters in cities like Philadelphia, serve longer?

The correspondent was referring to the 25th Amendment of the Natted States Constitution, which, as Nancy Pelosi likes to point out, empowers Congress to replace a President if — in the august opinion of several Very Important Persons — he is unable to get up in the morning. This would complete the coup by which Commie-La Harris, the well-known California harridan, is raised to “legitimate” totalitarian power.

My guess was that, with the assistance of modern medical technology, Mr Biden could serve a full term.

Note, in order to replace him, a vote of two-thirds is needed, in both houses of Congress. But the Republicans, even after the ballot-stuffing is concluded, will retain at least one-third in both, and could thus defeat the measure. Moreover Mr Biden, being projectively comatose, would be unable to reverse this by Executive Order. Then, by keeping him on life support, over the subsequent forty-seven months, Ms Commie-La is prevented from assuming his office.

In passing I should like to say a nice word for the late President Harrison. He was not only elected to the highest office in America, but was the last British subject to attain it (having been born in the Thirteen Colonies). Surely that is worth a salute.

As things play out in my fertile imagination, Mr Biden comes to a good end. He wakes, after a year or two in his coma, having been miraculously transformed into a faithful Catholic, and resumes his duties to general applause — rather as Pope Benedict might resume his office, although that would require the unfortunate demise of some fellow from Argentina. Still, the sudden obviation of all the Argentine bulls and appointments, would help me to contain my grief.

In the American case, I can’t help thinking that simply confirming the re-election of Donald Trump, would be a better route to a happy destination. All that is required is for the Supreme Court to disallow post-election voting. The downside, of course, would be rioting in the streets, but hey, they have the National Guard for that. And the worst damage would only occur in cities like Philadelphia.

A couple of starlings, alighted on the remains of my balconata, are giving their “take” on current events. I cannot quite make out what they are saying, but from this distance, their views sound harsh. Though possibly I am reading too much into their remarks. Perhaps they are only giving their opinion on the cosmetic “makeover” of this building, being performed to the music of jackhammers. (The volume of this noise has been slightly reduced, since needed construction materials failed to arrive from Red China.)

So perhaps I will give my own views on The Election instead. Or not: for my own points will mostly repeat those already made in media that the “mainstream” are blacking out (a tactic that usually backfires), and are censored or warning-flagged on social media.

Trump failed to win beyond the margin of fraud, and so his vote is being cancelled in the citadels of political corruption: cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, &c, where massive ballot-drops (approximately 100 percent Biden) can be performed, and protected by unambiguously Democrat-serving judges as the Republican lawsuits pile in. The media howl, that opposing fraud is “undemocratic,” and as one wit observed, this won’t be over until 131 percent of the vote has been counted.

This is nothing new, unless we consider the scale. Kennedy was able to steal the 1960 presidential election by ballot-stuffing in Chicago and Texas, and Nixon was too much the gentleman to object. (But what if Trump proves not to be a gentleman, in a streetfight with half of America behind him?)

For many years, Democrats were able to hold the South by lynching blacks and enforcing Jim Crow. With “civil rights,” changing demographics, and the wealth that comes from taxing capitalism, this strategy changed to buying minorities off. It is still in effect, in the form of “identity politics,” but must change again soon with the times.

Trump has increased the Republican vote-share in every “race and gender” category, except white males. Among those “white supremacists,” his share slipped by five percent.

After well over a generation of replacing news with progressive “narratives,” the meejah have understandably lost track of what is happening around them. Even their “human interest” stories, sports coverage, Hollywood and so forth, is now so heavily trampled under ideological strutting, that it can appeal only to those who already agree. Their practice of choosing between demonstrable truths, and demonstrable lies, according to which better fits the narrative (“political correctness”) has already cost most newspapers their existence, and is beginning to tell against the Googlesearch imperium, Twitters, Facebooks, and You-Boobs of Big Tech.

But there is, arguably, reason to hope, even in that world. Technology tends to get out of the hands, of those smugly installed as its masters, and just as little Apple ate the lunch of big IBM, the future will surprise them. This does not mean it will be a better future, however. Machine versus machine is not edifying. It tends to end in the victory of machines.

What interests me, is the future for little creatures in our High Tech world. I am thinking specifically of men and women. How much autonomy will they be allowed? (They are too small to simply take it by force.) But might the trend be reversed in which our freedom is constantly diminished? By unexpected developments? Which?

Perhaps that was what the starlings were nattering about. I can’t really say, however, for both of them have now flown off.