Essays in Idleness

Like many aging gentlefolk, home-schooling themselves through the Batflu summer, I have spent an inordinate amount of time “researching” whimsical topics on the Internet. For instance, I am now largely caught up on abbeys and cathedrals, throughout Europe. I was an architecture nut before I became an Anglican, then a Roman; and therefore obsessed with temples of all kinds; yet without any calling to faith. That came later.

I was not obsessed with the religion of the churches, but with their art. The European mediaeval (and earlier) heritage in art is not the equal of the world’s other cultural traditions, whether civil or religious. It is their decided superior. This is what called me back to the West, when I was travelling. We have not equalled Sung Dynasty pots, or a thousand other specific accomplishments, but I’m referring to a matchless whole. What we export today (via our Western conception of free trade) is, in the main, worthless. What we once exported — this cultural tradition — is now deprecated, when it is not suppressed.

My catch-up is a depressing activity. I have only been trying to learn what has happened to the physical structures; what nasty tampering has been done, to make them more “market-friendly.” Chartres, Reims, Beauvais, were already built. Notre Dame must be restored, again, after the recent fire. That psychopath of vanity, Emmanuel Macron, wants to turn it into a “starchitecture” showpiece. Our critics now confuse our wealth with our garbage.

But in the condition of splendid greatness these monuments were secondary from the start. They were expressions of faith, and means of communication, at the highest level, among the men who made them. Now they are dead museums, quite literally. In France, for instance, the greatest cathedrals were long ago appropriated by the state, and converted into tourist attractions. Christians are still allowed to pray in them, for the time being, subject to the state’s rules and regulations. As we’ve seen through the Batflu, the “right to worship” can be casually withdrawn.

Even the satanic creatures of the French Revolution could not bring themselves to level Notre Dame, although their mobs desecrated it, until they converted it into a “Temple of Reason,” under police protection. Today, only Islamists would torch it again; or perhaps Antifa, which serves the same master. Or it will burn as an accident during more riots.

What we cannot foresee, for now, is the re-animation of souls. The Spirit is still there, but ignored. To the modern mind, even at its least destructive, it is a cost-benefit analysis. What advertising will draw people to see this potentially lucrative property, and how to extract the most cash from them? What tee-shirts can we sell them? There are moments when I think, bomb it and have done; there will be better to see in Heaven.

Christ is not mocked, although the great majority of tourists do not understand that they are doing this, when they visit His Church as if it were Disneyland.

There is no such thing as “white supremacy,” except among a handful of pathetic goons, but here I am recalling French supremacy, along with Italian, Spanish, &c. What they had in common was Christian faith, operating through artists. It raised them miraculously above their normal stations. It may come again: in Africa, or China.

It cannot come to Europe unless something other than cathedrals are restored. Probably, we have to hit bottom first, but hitting bottom is not how to rise.

I bring gentle reader shocking news. It is Labour Day already. In North American terms, this means that the summer is over, and we must return to work. Allow me to sound like Trump for the occasion; one reader says I always sound like Trump, and I would hate to disappoint him. The work before us is yuge, putting things back together that we have wantonly pulled apart. It was the summer of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and of the Batflu Gestapo; all perfectly unnecessary, and each founded on deceit.

The gentleman also says that I am a “Truther.” So let me also rant on behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful. For these are things voluntarily sought, as opposed to shoved down our throats by swinish bureaucrats and violent demonstrators. (The Nuremberg Rallies were also “mostly peaceful.”)

There will be elections, here and there; we have a moral duty to cut all the radicals off their funding. Trump says, “Make America Great Again,” but when not proposing Christian sanctity instead, I say, “Mow them down to marmalade.” Start with the public health officials.

Er, I mean this “metaphorically,” of course; lest I be charged with a “political incorrectitude.” I try to be “metaphorically correct” at all times, and whenever I can, to massacre the vilest ideas.

The most effective strategy is to recover, in our own souls, the idleness of labour; the notion of Homo Ludens, of all good work as play. The best jobs are not done exclusively for money, which, like anything that becomes “virtual,” will not be worth anything, soon. The best work is done wilfully, as an end in itself. It is to make things that are the opposite of “virtual,” including, every day, the example of good living.

Humility is the great weapon against the arrogance that would impose “employment” on other people; that compels them, under the threat of arrest or starvation, to do what they don’t want to do, or to do what they believe to be evil. Simply avoid these tyrants, until they catch up with you. Get as far away from them as you can, in your own vocation.

Inscribed into a Gothic joist, I saw somewhere in Olde England (in what was once the hall of a mediaeval farmhouse), a carpenter’s declaration. This was: “In the work of my hands I am closest to God.” That work was being undone by death-watch beetles, but this only gave another generation of workmen an opportunity to work with their hands, and in their archaeological skills to be closer to the same Maker.

A little-known fact is that all honest work is liturgical. This includes such jobs as cleaning toilets. I once watched the son of a gloriously old man, still living independently, alone in his modest residential cell, go to work on his porcelain. His son, scrubbing the thunder box, looked like he was enjoying himself. By the time he stopped for tea, it was gleaming. This younger man also worked daytime, as a lawyer. (Perhaps he enjoyed that, too.) In his own phrase, he liked to “live like a marine” — so far as that was possible with nearly a dozen children. I daresay he had changed a few diapers, too. This is holy work.

At the other extreme, we have union members, such as public schoolteachers. Note that these unions have been diminished since their conception in ancient guilds. They strike today only for more money, which indicates a hate crime. They hate their jobs. They think that if there is the slightest danger they should walk off them. But it is precisely where there is danger that work is most rewarding. Mow them down, I say.

In the highest sense, our work should be idle. As the Shakers said, “Hands to work and minds to God.” They were wonderfully unboastful people who, by their craftsmanship, speak still to our time.

The present danger — the Red Chinese Wuhan Laboratory Batflu — is visible everywhere thanks to state-mandated muzzles or batmasks. We are now in the sixth month of “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” and I’ve noticed that these filthy mouth-pieces have become another urban environmental blight, on a scale even worse than the sidewalk basketball bouncers I recently decried. I spotted four discarded Batflu-spreaders on the sidewalk during a walk of less than one city block yesterday, to a deadbeat “supermarket” to fetch milk for my tea.

I’m sure these cloth garottes are choking our Blanding’s Turtles — already considered endangered by our provincial bureaucracy because less than one in a thousand of their eggs ever hatch, and then the adults try to cross country roads. Call up a picture of one on the Internet, and gentle reader will see that they are all apparently wearing yellow batmasks on their chins, in compliance with guvmint regulations. For if they took them off, they would risk being confused with another turtle species that might not be Protected.

But while my affection for Blanding’s Turtles, and empathy in light of their persecution by Ontario motorists, is of long standing — a friend proposes that we found a Blanding Lives Movement — I am even more concerned about the fate of our children. The Batflu has been discouragement enough, to those who may never reach maturity, but the spectacular success of the Nanny State effort to keep them socially atomized and in muzzles, portends innumerable (fake) “pandemics” to come. For what faceless time-server, “dressed in a little authority,” can resist an opportunity to treat the general population as if they were retarded children? Especially now, that the general population has shown it will comply?

According to an item that somehow slipped into the New York Times, only a tiny fraction of the much-publicized Batflu deaths were attributed to the Batflu alone, on death certificates sampled from across the Natted States. By this focus, the “pandemic” toll is reduced from the official number of 187,777 (I just checked this morning), to about 9,200. Of course, the commie and never-Trumper meejah have gone splenetic to “cancel” this interesting fact. It is as bad as the French study which showed that your one-in-ten-thousand chance of dying with the Batflu in that country is cut a further five times if you happen to smoke.  Or the Hydroxychloroquine scandal, in which Mister Trump suggested (correctly) that a simple anti-malaria drug, already mass-produced and dirt cheap because long out of patent, can cut it by a few times more.

Of course, we will never know the true death tolls, even approximately, because they are impossible to collect. Doctors are notorious for filling out death certificates “subjectively” (I’ve heard too much about this over time), and one of their motives is, understandably, to avoid oversight. A Batflu death will not be reviewed or challenged. So I also doubt the certificates that only mention “Covid XIX” are reliable either.

“Unassisted” Batflu deaths might be as high as 9,200 (one-in-thirty-five-thousand); we just can’t know. We do know that the overwhelming majority of those who die after testing positive (or are assumed to have been positive) are quite old, and afflicted by (usually multiple) co-morbidities. They are the same sort, and in roughly the same numbers, as are carried away by old-fashioned, conventional flus (for which vaccines are also nearly useless). They were “the walking dead” already, in the phrase of another rudely candid bloguiste. Young, healthy people die from it almost never; so that when one is said to do so, a coroner should be summoned.

However, this is an intensely politicized issue, in which the Left, and related sleaze, are very deeply invested. The chance that we will be told anything resembling the truth, through “mainstream” meejah, is practically zero. On the other hand, the chance of one “pandemic” after another is a near certainty — until the general public learns why arbitrary instructions from Nanny State should be, consistently, treated with contempt.

Let us make a small point, in few words. I should like to resist, in my ineffectual way, what has now emerged from that long, narrow, mental asylum, that stretches down the west coast of the Natted States. The legislators of California have convened a task force to examine the possibility of paying “reparations” to black people, in view of the fact that some of their distant ancestors were slaves in other states. Judging from their voting propensities, coastal Californians are always eager to pay huge sums for new government welfare programmes, or at least compel others to do so.

I have no opinion on the idea of reparations, in itself. My view is, you cannot argue with the insane. My one comment is that the programme needn’t be proposed, because it has been tried already. Conceived in the 1950s, market-ready by the ’60s, it was merchandized under the brand name, “Great Society.” It persists today, as a correspondent notes, with such gifts from the state as free cell phones, rent subsidy, food stamps, Electronic Benefit Transfers, supplemental nutrition (“WIC”), free school breakfast and lunch, free healthcare, utility subsidy, … and so on. All were designed to buy off the poor, and specifically to secure the Democrat Party’s near total command of the black vote, and by extension, others willing to queue. “Reparations” were not demanded openly, but the notion of these people as victims of history was never advanced subtly.

Free money, to all who agree that the world is unfair, is a suicidal fiscal policy. But my objection is to the moral disorder, in which it places each recipient. His freedom, including that vital freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, is abridged; his income depends on his willingness to play victim. The lolly breaks down that nexus of personal responsibility, family, and near community, that is the recipient’s only hope to escape what might really be bad historical circumstances, making him instead a bureaucratic “client.” It is profoundly corrupting, and the evidence that it has corrupted may be easily found, in such events as the destruction of black fatherhood. While they were too shy to do this before, the introduction of explicitly racial criteria is the “new thing” in the progressives’ repertoire.

That looting, firebombing, and other property destruction — along with incidental murders and other mayhem — is now being defended by progressives as “reparations,” should come as no surprise. Sadly, this attitude cannot be confined to seaside California, where the San Andreas Fault might cure it in less than an hour. Madness acts as a virus, contagious in crowds, and superspreaders are now dispersed around the world. The virus will burn out eventually — it requires infinite electronic money — but the social fallout is already immense.

I am encouraged to see, however, that in the course of nature, black people themselves are becoming the “first responders.” There is evidence that a quickly growing segment among “African Americans,” and other racial minorities, have tired of being used by white hustlers, and would prefer to solve problems that the hustlers have compounded by their own constructive acts. For the “victimhood” pose is not only morally egregious, but boring, and having waves of college-educated young white simpletons as your political patrons makes the situation plain.

Rules are for the little people, in art as in life. Those who have the power, whether by genius or strength, only obeyed them when they were little. Breaking rules was a coming-of-age. When a Nancy Pelosi, or a Justin Trudeau, act openly above the law, in a way that no little person could dream of, we (that small minority who notice) accuse them of hypocrisy.

But on their own small, toothy scale, they are doing what a great original artist does. They are being transformative. The only difference is that the great artist — a Fra Angelico — lacks the criminal tendencies, and is utterly sincere. He craves no pelf. Too, he is being creative, in partnership with God. He is bringing something new and living, true and beautiful into the world. Whereas, Pelosi and Trudeau are just helping themselves to the groceries.

Connoisseurs of rightwing media will know to what events I refer. I find them tedious to relate. From ignoring their own Batflu regulations, to siphoning millions from the tax troughs, it is all one continuity of habit. You have the power to do it, and no one to stop you. Discretion is unnecessary, if you pose as a progressive; the choral yapping of your meejah lapdogs protects you.

The elected politician who does not leave office rich, earns only the contempt of his colleagues. The one who was rich to start, and leaves office ruined, wins no sympathy. On the contrary, he will be hated by the whole political class, and their hysterical poodles. Trump may end like this: his sincerity dooms him.

Do my political examples show bias? Of course. The authors of the Nanny State have always been the principal beneficiaries of it. All socialist systems are built around an élite, a master class. There was a time, very brief, when a Christian could be a socialist, in the foolish belief that it would establish some kind of monastic equality.

But as my old Czech drinking buddies knew, “Communism is only possible among friends.” They picked up each other’s bar tabs voluntarily, without paperwork. Whereas, dirigisme in politics is not only the opposite of freedom; it produces monopolies of wealth in which the masters can bathe. It makes the little people littler, and more interchangeable; it makes the big ever less accountable. As history will bear me out, this has been true in one hundred percent of cases, and will remain true while the world wags.

My party political bias is transparent, however. It is also transient. The Left is always lunging for control, with a shopping list of policies to impose. But this is true of all politicians; every one is a socialist at heart.

The only break comes when one of them is genuinely Christian, and thus discerns an interest higher than himself. He may prophesize civic glory, oppose trash in culture and art, denounce corruption and despotic rule. He will champion the poor, against their actual oppressors. And he will go down in history as Savonarola.

I had intended to take the whole month of August off — from any participation in the meejah, of which my Idleposts are an example. A couple of my friends do this, devoting the thirty-one days of the eighth month to re-sanitization. “September will be work. Get ready for the crazy. It’s an annual cycle. We toggle between the usual nonsense, and right up the wall. Set August to ‘off’.”

They disconnect themselves from all periodical input, especially electronic. I would myself avoid print generally, except books published before I was born. (Anything since, I count as “too recent.”)

But I kept putting “off” off. Suddenly it was August 31st, only one week prior to North American “Labour Day.” Perhaps I would declare seven days’ rest, a bit late. Gentle reader might, if curious, look through the approximately 1,500 Idleposts I have left up, though none were written before I was born. (Some of the worst have been deleted.)

Too, I invite him to meditate, on the theme, “We are not fragile.” Over-informed readers may catch the reference. I first used it, as a headline, over an advertisement I wrote in 1988, during Canada’s “free trade election.” I gathered more signatures on it, and more impressive, than the “Liberal” culture marms did on theirs, for their ad declaring that the Mulroney government’s Free Trade Bill would eviscerate the Canadian culture and economy. My thought was, if it could, it should; that what’s truly not worth having is not worth having. But let us proceed on the possibility that, even in a slightly more competitive environment, we could hold our own. That we might even flourish. For, “We are not fragile” — not afraid to be alive, not pathetically inferior.

(Perhaps I was wrong.)

This morning, turning the meejah back on, I was made aware of an assertion by the Pope in Rome. He was affirming that the Batflu was good for the Environment; that it enabled the old thing to take a rest. We all need a rest sometimes, I suppose; the pope most urgently.

But Catholic idleness is a different thing from not getting up in the morning. Since God made the world, in anticipation of man, He probably designed it to be durable. The evidence I’ve seen, suggests it is robust.

So on behalf of the Environment, I would like to reply: “We are not fragile.”

My old friend and exemplar, Anne Roche Muggeridge, would never in a thousand years have left the Catholic Church. But in the midst of the post-Vatican II squalor in the 1970s, she did ask this non-rhetorical question: “What do you do when the Church leaves you?”

This is a problem akin to modern marriages. They aren’t — I mean this literally — worth the paper they were signed on. Quite apart from the deterioration in contractual law, so that many other contracts expire from the moment you change your mind, the collapse of “good faith” is appalling. What is just, is not enforced; and what is enforced, is not just. More fundamentally: no man’s word is his bond; for, “that would be slavery.”

Don’t forgive me for the vulgar commercial analogy. It is useful. In earlier life I became familiar with quite impressive Chinese business practices, in which there were no written contracts. This was possible because a man’s word was his bond (as was once possible here). He would endure ruin rather than break it. This made him the more cautious in his business dealings. “Contract” was enforced by the culture. Fail once, and no one would do business with you ever again. You might as well become a pirate or a highwayman, for no other jobs would be available. And mysteriously, long before the Internet, if your credit was not good in Bangkok, it was not good in Singapore, either, or in Hong Kong, or in San Francisco. And there was no way to sue.

The Church was long accepted as a middleman to God. Her priest is supposed to act in persona Christi. But what if we doubt that he believes this himself? He is still a priest, and we ought not to judge him. His sacraments are “guaranteed,” by Our Lord. But what if the priest takes them frivolously? What if, almost everywhere we turn, we find a Church that does not take her own doctrines seriously? One in which bishops — even the highest bishop — seems to be an impostor? Then what?

To my understanding we act, according to our commitments, sincerely. We stand a little aloof from the clergy, and wait patiently for Christ to sort them out. We stop doing things like giving them money; giving it directly to the poor, instead. In other ways, we keep our distance, for buttressing falsehood could not be what Christ wanted Christians to do. Crucially, we keep examining ourselves, for signs of arrogance and other moral slips. We say our prayers devoutly. Especially we pray that Christ will not forget us.

I read this morning that three hundred and fifty “faith leaders” have endorsed Biden, hailing his “moral clarity.” The various signatories are mostly non-Catholic; though nominally Catholic career politicians are their intended beneficiaries. Their declaration is a tissue of media clichés and absurdities. One camera-ready (tatoo’d, half-naked) priestess celebrates, “The sleeping giant of progressive Christianity.”

Fifty-five million babies have been sacrificed on that altar, so far within the USA. (Disproportionately black.) I could mention many other outrages, but that fact is overwhelming and decisive. What need one add?

That no politician can help us, nor any Disney-costumed “faith leader,” or progressive witch-doctor of any other kind. That we must keep Christianity alive, out here in the “asphalt jungle”; wait even here for the Catholic Church to return. Perhaps we can get help from foreign missionaries, now that we are savages again. Some, surely, will be brave enough to come here.

There are reasons why things happen, and those with access to a working brain may discover what some of them are. This includes reasons for the bad things that happen. They are never complete, and won’t be, for in the end we are blind and partial. This does not mean we should not try to understand. For we are human, and one of the positive things about this condition (there are several others, arguably) is this compulsion to inquire. Much good sometimes comes of it. But again, I stress the need for a working brain.

In my unpublished dissertation, The Uses and Abuses of Paranoia (a topic suggested to me by the late beloved Eric McLuhan), I made an attempt to distinguish good from bad speculations. This turned out to be more difficult that I expected. I began with the glib confidence that one’s paranoia should be consistently open-minded.

On the analogy of ice hockey, we should keep our eyes on the puck, not only on the big padded brute who is trying to kill us. It may be that his eyes are on the same puck, and there is room for negotiation. Moreover, staying out of his way might be facilitated by moving the puck to another location — say, between his legs and behind him. I tried this once, and it worked. It was a victory for open-minded paranoia.

All human thought is essentially paranoid, to start with. Even among my housefinches, thought begins with the innate desire for survival. But at our human level of sophistication, we even try to avoid embarrassment. The strategies for doing this can be quite arcane. Paranoia demands that we consider our neighbour not only as another divine gift to the world, but also as a big padded brute trying to kill us. I think even among the Saints, while the Love is real, it is never perfectly uncritical.

Which is why Christ’s instruction to forgive the guy — more than 490 times (seventy times seven) according to my calculator, seems so hard. Often I lose count. Worse, He is making His point with Hebrew numerical symbolism, which I never took in school. He is saying, don’t just forgive, in some trite formula of words, but absolutely.

Erase his transgressions from your mind? This is dangerous because it undermines our paranoia.

Or rather, it turns it back upon itself, for we are told that we’ll be forgiven ourselves, as we forgive others. It is right there in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, and it scares me every time I hear it.

Frankly, it is a revolutionary proposition; and you know what we think about revolutions, around here. Notwithstanding, I reflect that He is God, and I am not. We should entertain the possibility of obeying.

My piece at Catholic Thing today (here), touches on the social implications. A world without forgiveness is one in which the worst forms of paranoia tend to prevail. The better sort might fall into the category of Prudence. A world without Prudence can also be pretty bad.

Does gentle reader enjoy watching basketball games? If so, let him keep this eccentricity to himself. For the author of this piece, who has already bravely exposed himself to danger, by preferring cricket to baseball, takes a view of basketball that is almost pro-Batflu. Far from being upset by the apparent cancellation of the NBA basketball season, he is exultant.

It was a sport designed (in Almonte, Ontario, I am ashamed to admit) around the concept of social distancing, even before off-seasons were invented. And while good healthy shoving was added when it was exported to the States, it remains a sport for socially isolated seven-foot freaks. The bouncing of huge basketballs on city sidewalks by misdirected youff is among the principal unaddressed problems in urban life today.

That the basketball stars appear to be all commies (one might call their matches “peaceful demonstrations”), has been noticed by members of the public at large. The commercial rights have been bought up by the Chinese Communist Party; the mass market is increasingly in China; and the stars train within sight of Uigher prison camp facilities. That they shill for the Party also in America makes sense from these arrangements. That their dabbling in American racial politics, with their boycotts, follows, too. That their astronomical salaries could be lost with their professional season is a modest piece of good news. But all will be lost for them, anyway, when the labs in Wuhan or wherever breed their own species of seven-foot bats. (Prototype here.)

Make no mistake: childhood memories of “dwarf basketball” do not inspire me to some benign alternative. I was once almost crushed by a basketball wielded by a boy named Billsborough, using this weapon as a missile. He weighed about three hundred pounds, which he was able to convert into kinetic energy. Doctors were later able to restore the use of my several body parts, but the lad continued to call me “The Mouse.”

Not that this affected my judgement. My horror of basketball had already matured in the courtyard of an Asiatic boarding school. (I was merely visiting.) It was a form of cultural appropriation which I could see, even by the age of ten, ought to be condemned. It led to other derangements, such as sweet, uniformed Asiatic girls playing Elvis Presley hits on 45-rpm recordings. The slide was inexorable.

But the end is near. The removal of this curse from our own continent is a first step. Elsewhere, we may hope it shares the fate of the politburo at Peking.

____________

UPDATE. I am advised by a fellow Neanderthal that the NBA is not dead yet. Apparently, President Xi Jinping has ordered the players back to their show. Darn. I thought they were gone forever. I’d already poured a drink to celebrate the end of bucketball. It came from an expensive jar of Laphroaig. Oh well, I cannot waste it.

An asteroid — not a very big one, mind — is expected to fly by Earth on 2nd November; or, failing that, to hit us at one of three locations. I do wish NASA would tell us what they are. The Natted States election will be the next day, and I have several preferred urban locations, but the chance of the car-sized thing colliding with our planet at all seems remote. Even if it does, it would probably burn up in the atmosphere, leaving us all disappointed. A slightly larger rock whipped by a week ago, and the best you could say is that we bent its orbit; it hardly bent ours. There are billions and quadrillions of these tiny rocks hurtling through space, however, surely one will hit us eventually. But the ones that could do memorable damage are a more select set; and big enough to be seen from a distance. I’m sure Elon Musk could figure how to nudge it away. As to these mere stones, the police in any progressive Merican city get more flak, on the average evening.

Normally, we oppose asteroids hitting the Earth, but with the other choices in the big election, some make an exception for this case. So far as I can see, it is Trump versus Trump (half for and half against him), which to my analysis suggests, Trump wins. I don’t know anyone enthusiastic for Biden, but several who’d prefer an asteroid to Trump. In my view, they are trading on false hope.

Why even argue about what would be better for the economy — the riots after Trump wins, or the riots after Trump loses — when the most satisfying course might be to blow everything up. Which leads me to think, that everyone wins in this coming election. All options will prevail.

Up here in the Great White North (I wait patiently for this expression to become offensive), we have a new Conservative leader. Not even the Canadian meejah are discussing this, and no outlet abroad will condescend to report it. His name is apparently Erin O’Toole, and when I finally found some information on him, I learnt that he is not charismatic. The most attractive candidate was a black lady (Leslyn Lewis), who was also the most rightwing, and easily the most thoughtful and intelligent, so gentle reader can guess how much attention she got from our CBC (endlessly pumping for Comma-La Harris). Lewis almost won, despite meejah silence, and might have, had there been a proper convention with those “delegate dynamics” in play. She took Saskatchewan, outright, which is the closest we get to an asteroid strike.

That the Trudeau boy, still prime minister somehow (and may be as hard to get rid of as Angela Merkel), is laughably corrupt and incompetent, is generally known. But Canadians, especially those in my excessively populous province, are a dull-witted lot, and since he’s the only person whose name they’ve heard, they all vote for him. His current scheme is to use the Batflu crisis to impose an eco-socialist “new world order”; we’re still giving foreign aid to Red China.

I think I might favour the asteroid option myself, up here.

In his valuable anthology of Invective and Abuse, Hugh Kingsmill noted that our most popular (secular) “apostles of love” are an irascible lot. He was discussing at the time “Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky,” but was about to quote some choice epithets with which William Blake splattered his contemporaries.

My own attachment to Jerome might touch on the religious aspect. The Latin Father from Stridon, in addition to his spectacular translations in our Vulgate from the Greek (he moved to Jerusalem for his mastery of Hebrew), was conspicuous even in his own times. He was notorious for tearing stripes off people. We have Heaven’s assurance that this was overlooked, however, for how did he become a Saint?

Notwithstanding, I do not believe that all the short-tempered get to Heaven, nor all the quote-unquote “apostles of love.” I cannot be an expert on this matter, while in the flesh, and ain’t waiting to be briefed hereafter; but it seems to me that Love, here below, has the remarkable ability to speak for itself — often sotto voce. That is, it speaks not to be heard but overheard, in the manner of poetry; and more likely by actions than in proud boasts.

I would not discount invective and abuse, however. For I note that a good lover makes a good hater, too, and may be better at articulating the latter. Dislike for the demonic almost follows from a liking for the angelic, and in my experience, the demonic is all around us. Patience is indeed a virtue, but there is hierarchy in the virtues, and I can think of others that might overtop it, beginning with Faith, Hope, and Charity. Even compared with Prudence, I think of Patience as more a holding action, until for all we know Prudence will lash out.

As usual, I was preparing to say something irascible about “the culture” today. My annoyance, generally, with “niceness,” is a regular feature of these Idleposts, and I frequently suspect its alliance with demonic intentions, in its passive-aggressive way. This has been the trend through my adulthood, viewed against a past, at least in the Americas, that cannot have been such icky-sticky moosh. Our ancestors — or at least mine — were very aware of a fight with the Devil, and one they were less confident of winning, than we are now with technology on our side.

The modern man doesn’t really disbelieve in evil, but is easily taken by surprise. I think one of the strengths socialism now enjoys, is the inability of the day-school’d generation to expect things to go wrong. And then to be rather glib about it when things (predictably) do. Their criticism is reserved for the irascible, whereas, it ought to be directed at the smileyfaced and mild.

The simpler things are, the harder to explain, and it follows, to understand. Every serious “science kid” understands this. There is an impenetrable mystery, until the penny drops. And then we are no longer outside, but in. Ask Einstein. “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” It’s that simple. Prior to stumbling upon the equation, he was outside. Or the Fibonacci sequence, or the value for π. All kinds of things follow from these, including decimals that go on (“literally”) forever. But they are perfectly simple; themselves, not other things. They are absolutely constant: real. Change one numeral and it isn’t perfectly “pi” any more. We could go on like this.

And anyway I’m not interested in physical or mathematical constants, just now. When he was little, my elder son began finding them. At age about six he announced a proof of God. It is written into the math, unmistakably; and into our world, the immortal into the mortal. By age nine he had forgotten about this, and was already an engineer, with that drollness that adapts for aeroplanes and bridges and computers. I argued that none are conceivable without God; He has designed a world in which such things are possible. It is on the immortal that the mortal depends. By age ten we are taking this for granted.

The idea of “being there” is among the concepts that I consider to be “too simple to understand.” For it is not an analysis, but essentially a command. Yet it is there, and I have seen it understood by small children. I have also seen it in the old, sometimes; in a certain kind of unquenchable humility.

I noticed once someone “got it” from Blake. Or so he scrawled on the stonework of an abandoned church in England. Perhaps he was on drugs, for he claimed to be at one with all animate things. He was “in the moment” with nature.

Or was he? What could he bring back to prove that he was there? What followed from this enlightenment? A great deal of what pretends to be mystical experience — nearly all of it — has this evanescent quality. We “get it,” but when we come back it isn’t got. It is an abstraction, a fleeting dream. We were privy to a “virtual” thought, only. I doubt the person who wrote that graffito was changed in any permanent way. He did not have even one animate thing in his abstract view.

And yet the most commonplace person (me, for instance) carries with him a golden chain of such “moments,” in which time seems to have receded, and the absolute has become present to us. I remember, from age around six, holding a plum my father had passed me, in the hills above Abbottabad. It was the ur-plum. It is an indelible memory, with which I associate a certain purple I later saw in the late evening sky; the taste and texture of that plum, now universal. Far more would be needed to explain it. In sixty years, I have not got to the bottom of it. It was; it is. “It was real.”

The challenge to us all, today, is to be in the moment, or even capable of being. One must be there, not only in mind. Physically, we are alive and in bodies; there is no other way, than by contact. But we act as if we need not be physically there. We are content to read the news, as it were; to audit the lecture on the Zoom screen; to “visit” a Mass that is being recorded. We are present “in the spirit,” we say to ourselves. But I cannot credit these out-of-body claims. We are humans, not the spirits we imagine.

To my mind, the worst effect of the Batflu is to remove us even farther from the moment, to some unreal abstract space; from that mystical “transubstantiation” in which we are not elsewhere, but very fully here.

The Natted States Postal Service (mad yet?) has its brand to consider; or so we’ve been told. This was put in jeopardy when a recent design-your-own-stamp programme was rolled out, allowing customers to use whatever imagery pleased them. They could put innocent things like smileyfaces and their pet puppies on their stamps, or cuddly portraits of Karl Marx and Che Guevara. But some customers apparently did “Jesus stamps.” What a scandal! It was because of stuff like this, that the programme became the only profitable part of the USPS in modern history.

Imagine: some part of the Deep State was implicated in a scheme that allowed mere citizens — possibly even Christians or Republicans — to express themselves openly in a public place. Surely that wasn’t Constitutional. The bureaucrats who conceived this were, quite obviously, not thinking ahead. Perhaps they anticipated only “progressive” messaging. Embarrassed, the American postal administration has now cancelled the programme, citing interference with its “brand.”

And veritably, the idea that a post office would do something profitable would, if it continued, undermine their reputation entirely. It would spread the disorienting fear that they might do something competent, too, or participate in some other horror. But their brand is safe now, and loud Democrat demands for urgent, massive new subsidies, to support their mail-in voting plan, assure us that everything is back to normal.

I can’t find a figure on the Internet, but I would guess the USPS was the 114th postal service in the world to think of such a custom stamp promotion. A stamp-dealer friend once showed me examples of these he had collected from every continent (including Antarctica), towards the end of the last century. We agreed that all of the examples were tasteless.

Perhaps that was the initial attraction, to authorities, for stamp design has been in free fall since the art of engraving was abandoned, decades before that. Like almost any books printed after anno 1970, if not since photo-lithography arrived in the 1820s, they have been contributing to our “Age of Sludge.” Even when using symbols correctly, recent stamps look pre-cancelled. It seems unnecessary to obliterate them further with cancellation chops at the sorting stations.

Now, I have never been offered the command of a postal service, even in my native country, so anything I say must remain hypothetical. I would never have permitted “custom stamps,” and the head of the first person to propose them would have been mounted on a spike above the entryway to the Royal Mail department. (And that wouldn’t have been my most controversial decision.) Please do not turn to me for a defence of stamp desecration.

I only mention this as a way to comment on contemporary mores and manners. One is struck by the undisguised hypocrisy, the moral indifference, and the aesthetic squalour, of pretty much everything in our “urban environment.” But we must not jump to sweeping conclusions. For under each layer of vileness lies another, waiting to be re-exposed. We will have to excavate very deeply.