Essays in Idleness

“Scientists” (you know what I mean) have told “correspondents” for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun that “mysterious signals” have now been received from a source inside our Milky Way, just fourteen thousand light years distant. We had previously received them from farther afield. They last only a millisecond, but an “Italian astrophysicist” (I hope it wasn’t the one we employ at the Vatican) said that this latest could be traced to a “Magnetar.” This is the imaginative name for stars reputed to have powerful magnetic fields.

Perhaps we will send it a link to the pope’s Twitter account, in return. I’m for supplementing this with Doktor Fauxi, in case they have coronavirus issues. (Previously, I’d have been content to send him to Mars, with Elon Musk driving the Uber.) I gather that early instalments of I Love Lucy, launched by radio-wave in 1951, have yet to arrive.

And I fear they may never, owing to an amplification problem. For it seems the Magnetar in question had to explode with the power of a million Suns, to get that brief radio message out. Imagine what it would take to extend this longer than the millisecond to, say, the full audio track of a television skit, then add the visuals in black & white. Colour seems almost out of the question.

On second thought, why not keep Elon Musk? At only a few billion dollars of taxpayer subsidy, he’s probably an entertainment bargain. But Doktor Fauxi has cost at least a trillion, for a more boring show. There comes a point, according to a businessman I once met, when you have to cut your losses.

Thanks to my education in very backward, low-budget schools in Asia, I learnt to count. This puts me at an advantage over the average North American post-doctorate, who only knows that “black lives matter.” With arithmetic comes a certain apprehension of scale, though let me add, not always a happy one. In my morning tours of our planetary meejah (not a million Suns; at most a couple dozen) I am daily boggled. Do the people who write these things have any idea what they are saying? Or how long their logical leaps extend?

From a millisecond of incomprehensible starburst, to “intelligent” life elsewhere in our galaxy, is such a leap. I could wish that, like a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon, it had not even been attempted. But my wishes are not being consulted on this planet, and see where it has got you.

Should women be barred from the printing trades? (Just asking.) I am so old that I can remember the irritation of a dear old guy (happily married) who burbled with resentment whenever he saw a member of the fairer sex at or near a printing press, or typographical machinery. But this was, like so many things now, half a century ago, and the machinery with which he was familiar, was exclusively hot type. It was not only hot, in the sense of molten, but being heavy metal, could kill you even when it was cold. Too, it often moved very quickly. In his opinion, very freely given, it was “not a woman’s domain.”

This was in England, where that domain was preserved into the 1980s, even 1990s, by the unions in deference to Karl Marx, and King Lud. (One thinks of Lud-gate Hill, and Fleet Street.) Women were legally admitted to most trades, by this time; they were only excluded in practice. But with an invasion not of Amazons, but of photo-typesetting, Xerox tech, and soon enough, digital production on computer screens, the women flooded in. It was like the Three Gorges Dam on a bad day. Fortunately for my elderly anti-feminist friend, he’d had a stroke and died. Otherwise he would have had to witness it all.

Whereas I, so much younger, grew further into adulthood taking women in printing offices for granted (whenever possible). They were generally more capable than the men, though also more subject to the vapours. Prejudiced, like any normal human being, I found that I preferred dealing with women, because I could not understand their ego problems. Whereas men, I understood perfectly well, and it would put me off them.

For the sake of a smidgen of historical accuracy, I shouldn’t say that women had never been in the printing trades. Several got inside, over the centuries.

One of my heroines is Beatrice Warde (1900–1969), who, although denied an apprenticeship where she came from (New York, I think) rose to “chief sales girl” in London for the Monotype Corporation. (Perhaps we would say, “sales director,” now.) An accomplished calligrapher, and adept of type, she single-handedly changed the tastes of British and many international book publishers, reviving and adapting many classic pre-industrial fonts (with the help of Stanley Morrison and the London Monotype team), and making the publishers buy them. She was also a very beautiful woman, as well as frightfully articulate by voice, pen, and brush. I theorize this could have been to her advantage. For men, so it seemed, were desperate to please her.

Still, she was habitually a minority of one, and as I understand, preferred it that way. (One thinks of Margaret Thatcher telling some journalist that she’d “never have a woman in my Cabinet.” She loved trolling journalists.)

My point, if there is one (this is an Idlepost, after all), is that the changes had nothing to do with “the demands of women”; or if anything, more at the end when they were unnecessary than at the beginning when they would have been ignored. The same with race, colour, creed, &c. For I am mischievously suggesting that this soi-disant “progress” may be true in other fields, too. Sudden, unrelated innovations in technology, circumstance, or rules for something else, transform the labour market; and this, even without anyone intending, let alone wanting any change.

Incredible change happens, but we can’t learn why. This is because we’re trapped in our own lazy, narrow, irrelevant, and obnoxiously political, “narratives.”

*

Let us not get too excited. On second thought, let’s just go for it. Had I not sworn off the phrase, “batshit insane,” I might be tempted to apply it to our world at present. Exempli gratia, this is hardly the first epidemic in history, although its inhabitants act as if it were. Nor, for that matter, is it the first time that the world has gone mad, in unrelated ways. It is perhaps because no one ever learns from history, that its worst features so frequently recur; but no one learns anything from epidemics, either.

Yet, whether in this century, or the next, things may return to normal.

Examples of the madness are exceptionally plentiful, at the moment. We need talented female art directors to produce coffee-table books on this subject, on acid-free paper. I know one in rural Ontario who is doing this, so I am quite hopeful. Future generations may be uselessly warned.

“So which is true?” — an interrogator asks, — “Your profession of Friday, July 24th, or your profession of Friday, July 31st? Your ‘V for Victory’ cultural warmongering, or the grim resignation a week later?”

My irritating response was, “Both and neither.” Both, if you take each on its own terms; neither, if you were looking for a manifesto.

For the definitive position, I would refer gentle reader to the opening passage in the Gospel of John; and bid him read with unstraying attention. For the Last Word is the First Word, as it explains. (Go to a traditional Latin Mass, to hear it said in the right position.)

But “we the peeple” are only dealing with the moment, as I touched upon yesterday. (I’m one of them peeple, incidentally.) We are acting, sometimes, within external contradictions, or more usually, trying to crawl around them. Yet I, at least, see no contradiction between fighting the good fight, and losing. That they may exchange positions in heaven — these “winners” and these “losers” — was vouchsafed by Our Lord.

(One should also check in with the Beatitudes, from time to time.)

Duty requires us to stand up for our faith, when as now it is mortally challenged, and to stand for our beleaguered fellow faithful, rather than slink away and hide. Yet we should fight meekly, like the Crusaders of old, for the worthy cause, and not for ourselves only. Perhaps we forgot, when the days were sunny, positions we held when the nights were dark.

While I’m in favour of free markets, low taxes, free speech, and all the falderal of current political conservatism, they are not ends but means. I wish we had more leaders in the Church who could spell this out smartly — we still have a few — because our troops are misdirected when our leaders sell out. I would like to hear the occasional war cry, and not just requests for social distancing. I do wish I could hear a bishop, sometimes, telling Nanny State what to do with itself, or reminding moral dwarves that Christ outranks them.

And now we are in a big rumble. The Culture War was something declared on us, when our lives and churches were invaded by these stinking, statist trolls. Their motives are demonic, but we leave that to God: for our purpose can only be to destroy them, in the near term. The pulverization of the Left and all its projects, would be good for us, and in itself, but also good for the leftists. Here let me resort to the “argumentum ad Hitlerum”: we did the Germans a favour by getting the Nazis off their backs. Had we been pacifists, and surrendered, we would only have gone to hell with them. There is no holiness in surrender, except to God. It is our duty to “bend the knee” to no other.

Yet it is not a strategy, but an attitude I am defending. High prudence in these matters is not easy; for not only cleverness, but wisdom is required. Low cunning will not save us from the pain we fear. It only adds ignominy.

And so — Deus lo vult, as it says in the Gesta Francorum.

Perhaps I have mentioned before, that I cannot predict the future. No one else can, either, and no one can save himself. That, “we’re all gonna die,” I don’t take as a prediction, any more than that the sun will come up again tomorrow — and whether or not one accepts Darwin, or Copernicus. Maybe some day the sun won’t rise, but in that case gentle reader will not be needing predictions.

The Prophets did not make predictions. They were not economists. They were more like routine journalists, or reporters. Each received a message, from God, which he reported to the Israelites. Old-fashioned reporters, to a man: I should think their principal concern was getting the message right. (My usual apology for intruding on theology.) But if God seems to be making a prediction, one should listen up.

Being, myself, neither a Prophet, nor the son of a Prophet, but a mere herdsman, as it were, I make predictions like the world makes predictions. For instance, that the pot which just slipped from my hand, will land on my toes. True, some predictions like that can be reliable. But they are seldom of more than passing subjective interest. It is only when one makes grand unlikely predictions that one is able to elicit subjective interest in others. That’s where asteroids, and climate change come in. Or, “Trump wins,” to scare half the population; or “Trump loses,” to scare the other half.

A more interesting question remains, whether he wins or loses. My view, that either result will lead to chaos, is not actually a prediction. Rather it follows from the observation that we have chaos now. Further, that neither of the alternative parties, in Natted States or most other Western countries, can do much besides sprinkle some additional chaos over the top.

This is because (another observation), there is no philosophical integrity, either on Right or Left. Perhaps a little more on the Left, because it is more consistently destructive, and progressing from irreligion, to outright satanism. Whereas, the Right is holding with irreligion, and just spinning at the moment.

My own position is like that of the “liberals” I grew up with: neither pro- nor anti-Trump, but anti-anti-Trump, the way my generation were anti-anti-Communists. Actually, I deprecate him myself, for a long list of reasons, such as whimsical policies on the trillion-dollar scale; nevertheless, I support him as the least available evil.

But tell that to the ineffectual Louis XVI, on his way up to the guillotine. That man was also a (mild) liberal and reformer. He was always willing to give his lethal enemies half of what they wanted. He, too, lacked a philosophical spine. As “absolute monarchs” go, he was a klutz — symbol of a power already hollowed out. Like Trump, just trying to ride the tiger. The ideal enemy for a genuine revolutionary, one might say. And history is full of Louis XVIs. Unfortunately, it is also full of genuine revolutionaries. And it doesn’t take all that many of them, to seize the instruments of power.

This last is less a prediction, or an opinion, than a little-known fact. The great majority of Frenchmen were not enthused by the downfall of King Louis, nor Russians by that of Czar Nicholas, or either by the fall of any of the mediocrities who first replaced them, trying to preserve a few constitutional norms. “The peeple” could never have voted for what was coming, as they won’t be voting now. They were just trying to get on with their lives, as opportunistic as any of their leaders.

Those “peeple” have no philosophical heart either, let alone experience with rudders. They’d need such things to take their own stand. Those noble individuals, who resist ruthless revolutionary tyrants, generally end up in the same way: friendless and dead.

I am not even expecting the next Revolutionary War to be coherent. Things just happen. No predictions from me.

Resolved: I must swear off calling people “batshit insane,” for my chief bat informant — who doubles as my acting deputy chief correspondent for western South Dakota — won’t have it. Vespertilio Antiqua, as she signs herself, thinks bats are being libelled, slandered, and smeared. Frankly, I should have agreed with her from the start, for in my experience — which has included sharing an office with them — I have found the Chiropterians to be not only blameless but upstanding (well, downstanding in their case) — polite, considerate, and while flighty, always impressively so.

Only a very few vampire bats give their whole order a bad name; so that even while jungle-camping in hottest tropical Americas, gentle reader is unlikely to be bothered by one. For the rest, they should not be criticized if they are unwillingly infected, or attacked by thoughtless parasites. Nor should other species complain that they are carriers of disease; for this would hardly be a problem if the bats were left alone.

As I learnt in Lawrence Gardens, across the street from me when I was a little lad in Lahore, bats are much like us. Their chatter is decipherable when anyone is listening, and as computer analyses were always certain to show. They have many dialects, and their speech is not mere declarations, as we (no doubt falsely) assume of most animals. Rather their conversation is addressed specifically to their neighbours.

According to researchers in the Tel Aviv university (in the latest study done with algorithms), Egyptian fruit bats are easy to translate. They review food, and argue about portions over dinner; they give each other fruit and insect-finding tips. When roosting they upbraid those who may be jabbing them, or otherwise huddling too close. The females take a “me-too” attitude towards unwanted sexual advances. They use baby talk with their juniors, and different tones with their contemporaries, ranging from subservient to smug. Like most species, they hang together when threatened, but when not they squeak as proud individuals. They know who, among predator species, are particularly mean to them; and I suspect, when to shut up.

Their skin-wings, which some might think could be aesthetically improved by feathers, make them more manoeuvrable than any kind of bird, and the tiniest can be mistaken for moths. You’d need a pretty quick stop-action camera, to appreciate some of their aerial tricks. To turn on a dime is hard enough for quadrupedes (quadrupedi?), but to do it while airborne is spectacular.

Neither this Dakotan correspondent, nor I, have any idea how the current epidemic was launched from the Wuhan coronavirus lab, but we doubt that the bats — from Yunnan caves or wherever — played any voluntary part in it. Given what the Chinese Communists do to Uighers, Falun Gong, and Christians, I hate to think what they do to bats.

My own allusions to bat guano were unfair. It makes an excellent fertilizer, rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — to say nothing of the micronutrients. Verily, I regret comparing bats to Democrats, or other loathsome progressive fools. They didn’t deserve it, and I take it all back.

I am, it must be confessed, an abject incompetent. Take, for instance, the Idlepost I uploaded yesterday. My purpose was, paradoxically, to recommend Charles Dickens, as something to read while the Batflu continues. Sneakily, I suggested that he is very entertaining, and in a “non-highbrow” sort of way, to those who may have tired of Hegel. He will fill many hours with delight — by a delicious escape, into another world in space and time. He will excite both laughter, and tears, for the person who might like a break from merely wanting to kill certain politicians. He is a joy to read, as chocolate truffles are a joy to eat, if you happen to like chocolate truffles.

But sometimes I am too paradoxical by half. I don’t know what effect my little electronic paper may have had, on non-Dickens readers. But I stirred a hornets’ nest among the Dickensians. I seem to have diverted that natural hatred of politicians, onto myself. Several have chastised me, in terms I would reserve for Justin Trudeau. Perhaps, in future, I should try to “paradoxically recommend” some other novelist.

That I was, unparadoxically, also trying to put in the reader’s head, that Dickens has contributed to the demoralization of our world, was on the surface of my essay. In this respect, I was acknowledging this author’s great power. The reduction of hard moral fact, to mushy simper and what we now call “empathy,” was partly his doing. I detect it even in the unpleasant vibrations of BLM rioters, and other agents of our Left.

They “protest” things that, indirectly, they learnt to protest from the kind-hearted Dickens; subjective hysterias about the world being unfair. Of course it is unfair, as it has always been, and to everyone who has been living in it. But unfairness is a whim, compared to sound moral judgements, and the reticence that should accompany them. We cannot make the world “more fair” by rioting. Dickens, incidentally, agrees with me on that.

He was among the writers (and artists generally) who contributed subtly to our post-Christian worldview, based on emotion, not remorseless thought. Who made, say, Christmas about giving presents to little children, rather than centrally about the birth of Christ. That doesn’t mean his works should be suppressed. On the contrary, they should be read and enjoyed, with this thought in mind. He moralizes, but in a way that may actually subvert morality, by substituting “feelings” for the hard truths, which are to die for.

My title today is out of Saint Augustine — Révisions, as the French say. This does not (necessarily) mean taking anything back. Rather, trying to make things clearer, in restatement.

*

On the other hand, there are things I should just apologize for. Yesterday, for instance, I finally took some aging donation cheques to my bank (almost all foreign). The delay was untoward. I had put off entering a financial institution, under (Red Chinese) Batflu circumstances, for longer than was conscionable — causing anxiety to several readers who asked if their cheques had ever arrived. They did, almost certainly; the Canadian post office is not quite as bad as its reputation. (Hardly anything is.) Forgive my procrastination. And thank you most vociferously for your patronage. Especially you foreigners, in Natted States and Australia.

As I mentioned above, I am abjectly incompetent, and this applies to many thank-you notes that I have failed to write. Often I condemn myself for “good intentions,” though I find it more comfortable condemning others. If gentle reader never received thanks for a splendid donation, he may be assured that I intended to send them. But he has a remedy: to never send me money again. That will teach me. And in the meantime, I can starve.

Contemporary book reviewers were often unkind to Charles Dickens. I am referring to the higher-browed Victorian periodicals, often unbearably pompous to the modern reader (though not, of course, to me). Rereading the Spectator’s review of Bleak House, I think they could have conceded more: that Dickens is a genius, and his novels are mesmerizing; that he silences his critics with magic sprawling art. His caricatures are unforgettable, and sometimes in the background of his plots there is a divine movement, rising independently of authorial intention.

But I agree on their main point: that Dickens is essentially mindless.

Consider Little Dorrit. It is apparent in the (often mawkish) scenes within the Marshalsea Prison (for debtors of the lower castes), where Dickens’s father was once an inmate. This was not a happy place, according to my historical information, but in son Charles’s treatment I detect an atmosphere that Solzhenitsyn would later capture, more purposefully, in the Gulag. The sense that, “We are rising,” floats in a ghostly way, through and above specific characters; who are only doing what they can to get by. In the worst sort of bureaucratic trap, constructed by a symbolic Circumlocution Office, the Marshalsea prisoners owe money, that they cannot possibly repay, because they have been gaoled. (This situation was revived by the feminists who rewrote Ontario family law in the 1990s.) And yet there is paradoxical hope.

Having no advantages of class, they would seem to have fallen to the cold cruel bottom of an unfeeling world. But they are free now. No one can do anything more to them; and the only way is up. These inmates are human, have committed no worse than petty crimes. They have no motive to envy one another. They make their prison into a neighbourhood. Friendless, except for each other, they’ll only ever get out by miracle — if some unlikely person on the outside suddenly pays their debts. Trust Dickens to contrive this happy escape.

By dei ex machina, the plot rumbles on. There’s good bits as he kills off his virtue-signallers in Italy, one by one. I discreetly cheer as each goes down.

Dickens plays his audience for laughs and tears. That’s what the reviewers condemned him for. He was, from beginning to end, a “popular” writer, though perhaps somewhat morbid at the last. He brilliantly engages the emotions of his reader, but goes almost out of his way not to engage their minds. Except that he trips into politics, often, and irresponsibly. For his politics are cheaply “good guys versus bad guys.”

He casts his victims, to win sympathy for them. Yes, crime produces victims. But Dickens leaves the deeper questions of “crime and punishment” alone.

All tabloid journalism is like this; and all our meejah at the present day. It is Dickensian (like our Christmases used to be). It is Church of Nice. While I must admit having myself fallen in love with little Amy Dorrit, born as she was in the Marshalsea (and thus, debtless, free to come and go), I resented the Dickensian manipulation. In the end I was glad to (mentally) dump her on Arthur Clennan. May they live happily ever after, on their unearned money.

Arguably, the American people have a handle on this. Their strategy is to support Biden and the Democrats publicly, to save their jobs, discourage doxing, and avoid vicious attacks from “friends” on Facebook. Then come November, they vote for a Republican supermajority, including a Trump sweep of the Electoral College, and a GOP landslide in the House of Representatives. Thanks to the secret ballot, they can say they voted for Biden afterwards, if he is still alive. (Has anyone checked on the dear old guy in his basement?)

That Trump will lose badly will be obvious to everyone until the election results come in. The younger constituency has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the radicals who captured schools and universities, but will, as usual, rarely turn up to vote. There will be a huge volume of fraudulent mail-in ballots — nine-tenths of them Democrat — but the Natted States Postal Service will fail to deliver them on time. Desperate efforts by Antifa and BLM to keep the riots going will substantially reduce the urban leftie vote. The meltdown of the meejah talking heads, on the night of November 3rd, will be even more amusing than their meltdown in 2016. Many will succumb to the Covid virus, by morning.

Not to be political, because I never am — but I did have a long history of correctly guessing election results when I was myself practising the demonic art. (Journalism.) I was, for instance, a polite “never Trumper” even after I’d been deleted by my newspaper employers (who felt they didn’t need “token conservatives” any more). But I did think, against all the odds, that Trump would win. This was because I try not to let my own prejudices interfere with my observations. My reasoning was simple. There were lots of people who loved Trump, and very few who loved Hillary Clinton. Therefore, the latter would lose. (This also explains how I predicted Obama’s victories.)

I have, incidentally, no confidence in the scenario I sketched above — for the conditions are actually unprecedented. There are arguments to make on the other side. The meejah are distrusted by an overwhelming majority, but they are nevertheless effective. Most Americans have become like Canadians: entirely cut off from news, because the chief object of its providers is to suppress what they don’t like. The meejah culture is part of the Left culture; and the Internet censors will redouble their efforts to silence rightwing voices as the election approaches. There is also a history of successful demonization that has favoured the Left. Have they managed to demonize Trump, by constant repetition, to the “Two Minutes Hate” level? For all I know, the majority of Americans are now Batflu-masked zombies.

But one never meets a confessed Trump voter from ’16, who is not pathologically eager to do it again. Whereas, it is easy to meet “liberals” who have become “woke” in reverse. They are tired of being regulated by the self-appointed thought police. They don’t even suck up to Islamists any more. They have shockingly lost interest in Climate Change.

So what are the polls now saying? Nothing that could possibly interest an intelligent person.

“Not all leftists are violent. Some are just harmlessly demented. … Not all deserve to hang. Some could get by with just a thrash or a whipping.”

I applaud this sentiment from one of my more liberal correspondents, in the British Isles. It is a reminder that some things ought to be tolerated, or at least not punished too severely. Though not to punish them at all, might be unconscionable.

As we approach Belloc Night (27th July in Sussex) — when grown men in the environs of King’s Land at Shipley, eat bread, pickles, and cheese, and recite verses from the Cautionary Tales to their children — we are reminded of his sesquicentennial. For on Monday he turns one hundred and fifty; having been dead for only sixty-seven of those years. Magnificent in feuds, excoriating of his contemporary blockheads, he was unlike them driven by his loves. And with a fidelity that brooked no retreat.

Remembered today by the devout as the irascible half of our prize debating team, they prefer Chesterton, who balanced on the angelic side. But Saint Michael is also an angel. They did a travelling show together, this “Chesterbelloc,” against G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, prominent secularists of their day (and in person, blackguards). Today it would be YouTubed, and only 179 Catholics would watch; but in its time it attracted large and lively audiences. All four were masters of the English language. Today, the illiterates may sue you even for using the word, “masters.”

Biographies may be read by the enlightened skinhead, Joseph Pearce, the despicable A. N. Wilson, and the beloved James Schall. But what we need most is to return to Belloc’s own works of history; his wanders in both space and time. They are never shallow. That he is sneered at by the perfessional historians, is what he might have expected, for his comprehension of these “other worlds” defies the anachronism in which most contemporary histories are grounded. He can understand the motives of generations long past, and of their great men, including the blackguards. And while, to our narrowness, he is politically incorrect, it is because he loves, and therefore hates error.

It was Belloc who explained, to the uncomprehending world of more than a century ago, when Imperialism was still working, that the Muslims weren’t dead yet; that we had failed to box them in the Crusades, and the warmth of their faith in Allah could still triumph over our tepid faith in Christ. By being far behind his own times, he remains well ahead of ours. The Church he loved most of all, but with a love consistently unblinkered; the Reformation he hated most, but with a roaring affection for all English things, such as only a man could feel who was half-French, and really pan-European.

Poor, he had all his life to work for a living, so when asked why he wrote so much he replied, “Because my children are howling for pearls and caviar.”

A poet in his grasp of smallest detail, he winks at the reader in the midst of his storms. But he is no storm-trooper. He reserves his strongest blows for the censorious. A man of extraordinary stamina, until finally cut down into a nursing home, he walked everywhere, when not sailing in a yacht, and with his own eyes saw the indefatigable beauty amid all the world’s sorrows.

Often people who stand their ground, get away with it. This is one of those little-known facts. Yet we have martyrs enough to demonstrate that “standing tall” does not assure biological survival. We must fight for our beliefs in the fullest range of ways, and take our lumps as they come to us.

In our present Culture War, we must stand with Belloc. Let us see what we can get away with, until we can’t any more.

One of the more hopeful developments in this Batflu Year, has been the closing of North America’s schools and universities. While these have stayed open, or are now reopening in the rest of the world, with the blessings of those medical experts who are moved by evidence-based research, those in “progressive” jurisdictions across this continent promise to stay closed. There is actually no health issue, except for those teachers who are very old, or have mortal physical conditions. (Keep them quarantined.) The danger from infections, for the young and robust, is approximately nil. But here we have a huge political issue, joined by the vast, overpaid teachers’ unions. Parents are everywhere in two minds. They want to return to normal, but have been terrified by media reports that are intentionally misleading, when not openly false. For the meejah are another part of the Left “core constituency.”

Whereas, I am not. Yet I regret the absence of both imagination and spine, on my own side. For instance: we should be seizing this opportunity to put the nanny-state school systems entirely out of business.

Let the parents continue “homeschooling” their children. Let those of university age starve, or find jobs. Let everyone who wishes, continue to enjoy their holiday from reality, until the money runs out. Let federal governments give up trying to argue with provincial and state “education” departments. But let them also withdraw their catastrophically wasteful subsidies. The ambition should be to let the (darn) systems collapse — parent by parent, then school by school.

Instead, focus on championing the “charter schools” movement. The basic idea is to redirect spending from the foetid “education” bureaucracies, to parents in the form of school vouchers. Let the parents decide how these should be spent — on the existing public schools if they want, or if they know better, on better.

Should gentle reader be data-driven, I recommend Thomas Sowell’s latest book, The Charter Schools and their Enemies. Existing charter schools routinely deliver dramatically better results for their students, at significantly lower per-pupil costs. (About half of present spending is sunk into useless “administration.”) Minority students score decisively better in charter schools, than the white monied do in the nanny-state systems, however this is measured. But independent schools are hated by the Left, because they threaten its arbitrary power. More deeply, the Left depends on an idiotized citizenry, that can be easily manipulated to vote against its own interests. Were young people coming up, capable of thinking for themselves, the Left would be doomed.

Hence, there is a big fight, already. This is one front in the current Culture War, but probably the most critical one. Wars must be won, and can be. As we used to say in Canada, when sending our troops to defeat the original Fascists and Nazis in Europe: “No price too high.”

We need a new, “take no prisoners” attitude from the Right, to replace jowls and rumbling bowels. The enemies of civilization must be faced down, even while it looks like we are losing. But we have hardly begun. Take heart against an enemy that must be utterly destroyed.

____________

PONZU. Today is a memorable Friday, up here in the High Doganate. For long I have been assembling salmon sandwiches, for Friday lunch. My mommy taught me to make these with red sockeye salmon from a tin. (The “pink” stuff is rubbish.) Hellmann’s mayo, blackpepper, a squirt of lemon, and a dash of curry powder, all mooshed together into pulp. On white Wonder bread, or equivalent. But today I have discovered the ingenious effect of Japanese ponzu shoyu. It is an intensely limed soy sauce. A dribble of that, instead of the lemon, and one’s sandwich is raised to the sublime. I was already grinding my curry powder in an ingenious Japanese mill (which reduces coriander- and cumin-seed to a powder in just a few hand rotations). And they share my love for fish. So God bless the Japanese, our allies against the Chinese Communists.

Two elements go into the making of a modern book: a Title, and a Text. I used to think an author should spend about equal time on each of these elements. If the Text took a year to compose, then he should take twelve months more on the Title. If it took five years, he will need the rest of the decade. But now I think the “filler” is much less important. Not even the book reviewers care.

Depending on the Title, the book should weigh either more or less. Note: using large type is cheating. Everyone will see through that device, by opening the book only once. A truly heavy book will have smaller type, and lots of footnotes set even smaller. This doesn’t necessarily cost more time to write, however. A capable and efficient academic hack should be able to turn out twelve pages a day; and hire a teaching assistant to generate the footnotes.

Gentle reader may object that other elements ought to be considered. The painter Degas complained that he was full of ideas, but couldn’t write a thing. The poet Mallarmé replied, helpfully, that, “Poems are not made out of ideas. They are made out of words.” The same goes for literature of any other sort.

Sub-titles are a distraction. Academics are addicted to them. They stray upon a good Title (rarely), then ruin it with a feigning discursion. They should bury all such posturing in the copy-text itself, where it will be safe from a reader’s eyes. Too, mind that the chapter-headings aren’t pretentious: some readers may examine the Table of Contents. Save the posturing for just the one big hit.

A wise author (I’m only naming Frenchmen today), once advised his fellows to write magazine articles if they were “full of ideas.” Some range may be permitted in the glossier periodicals. But a book must be a narrow thing. Choose your spike and pound it again and again, at least through the Preface, in case anyone reads that.

Over the years, buying books at second-hand, I have had to endure underlining and marginalia. But these invariably stop by page seven; and usually after page three — unless the book has an Index. Then all bets are off. Readers may go hunting for references to other books they haven’t read. Famous people will scour for their own names. There could be hell to pay, when they find them. Or worse, if they don’t.

This is why copy-text is such a thorn in the side of an author. Having ghost-written half-a-dozen books myself, for people who could barely type, I know what a nuisance filling pages can be. If your income is so low that you must take such commissions, always insist on a nickel a word. A dime if you can get it.

My remarks above were occasioned by the latest visitor to the High Doganate. Noticing my library, he asked the perennial question: “Have you read all these books?” I try to answer this question facetiously, but in a different way, each time it is asked — blaming my tastes on an interior decorator, or whatever comes to mind.

“No,” I replied yesterday. “But I have read all the titles.”

When I first set eyes upon the statue in the centre of Piccadilly Circus — in London, as a little kid — I thought it must be the god, Mercury, a favourite of mine at the time. I was an inattentive child. I had neglected to mentally process his bow. Perhaps I failed to discern what it was. I thought he might be returning a crooked walking stick that some old man had mislaid.

That the figure was nude, didn’t surprise me. I come from an artsy family. Neither did the helmet he seemed to be wearing. Artsy people are partial to weird hats. That the figure was butterfly-winged, and fluttering above a public fountain, also made sense. In my childhood there were “fairies” under every bed. What to make of the bronze fish, cavorting in the fountain?

But to make a long story Idlepost short, by my second visit to Piccadilly Circus, I knew the presiding figure wasn’t Mercury. Imagine my disappointment when I looked it up.

Londoners typically think the statue depicts Eros, but it doesn’t. It was meant to be his brother, Anteros, the god of requited, safely married love. Its appearance as the dot at the head of Shaftesbury Avenue is an important clue. It was London’s “love returned” to Anthony Ashley Cooper — the seventh Lord Shaftesbury. He was among history’s most renowned philanthropists, and a great friend to London’s lunatics and paupers. He was also a raging Tory, of course — like all good rich people — and an immovable supporter of the Duke of Wellington, the last British prime minister to be uncontaminated by liberal ideas. (Defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, &c. Driven from office twice.) Some day I will go on and on about my adoration for the “Iron Duke” — so named for the iron shutters he had installed on Apsley House, so he could get on with his evenings while the commie rabble were hurling rocks at his windows.

Now, on the point about family values, Shaftesbury bitterly detested both of his parents. His wife Emily was thought to be the “natural daughter” of Lord Palmerston, if you get my drift. But they did produce ten legitimate children, and according to my source, he could remember all their names. He was a bit of an Evangelical nutjob, according to me; arguably the next best thing to a Dark Ages Catholic. Somewhat prim, at times. He was never a nudist.

Most philanthropists do more harm than good. This is an insight that comes with age. But some are heroic, and do genuinely useful things. Shaftesbury was cut from the same cloth as William Wilberforce, the great spoiler of the Atlantic slave trade. One might call Shaftesbury the complementary enemy of “blackface”: for he freed the chimney-sweeps.

That god at Piccadilly was last vandalized in 1990, it says here. If it has been vandalized since, I must have missed the story. The nice thing about its height, is that it lures the vandals to death or injury. Generally, it would be wise to set statuary higher, and apply the latest high-tech slippery coatings. I recommend that the fountains, too, conceal powerful water-cannon, or other artillery.

I’ve been thinking about public statuary a lot, lately.

Norman Borlaug is credited with saving one billion lives, from starvation. He, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970, was the poster boy of the Green Rcvolution, said to have extended through the 1950s and ’60s. He is one of my heroes, from a previous life in which I was myself inclined to honour the men and women who had brought practical progress in many economic fields. Gentle reader will no doubt already know the story, or if he doesn’t he may read the quick boilerplate account in the Wicked Paedia. I see nothing in it that differs from what I remember. The facts, now, remain approximately as they were selected a half-century ago; right down to the nasal, Rachel-Carson whining against pesticides and fertilizers.

I do not personally object to the great mass of men being fed, or even to better nutrition. That the programmes — a kind of Marshall Plan for the “Third World” (Mao’s phrase) — was a chaos of overbearing government interventions, and wasteful, often fraudulent schemes, with routine environmental desecrations, tends to be forgotten; as in any war we won. Details, details. More significantly: in ten-thousands of locales, ancient social relations were busted up. People became more prosperous, and less happy. But where famine stalked, obesity now thunders.

The revolution was also a boondoggle for capitalist investors. The bigger the investment, the more likely to succeed, because it could more easily win the game of regulatory capture. Yet by some miracle of the (feckless) human will, the revolution succeeded. Farmers all over the world were pushed and prodded, into a vastly increased productivity, as much from mechanization as from improved cereal breeds. The more clever and ambitious farmers did not need the compulsion: they grasped the advantages of getting rich. (Their dispossessed neighbours could move into urban slums.) Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; and to be an agronomist was very heaven.

“We” (in the vaguest abstract sense) call this the Third Agricultural Revolution — the first having been the transition from hunting and gathering to settled life, the second coinciding with the Industrial Revolution. In reality, however, the posters lie. This “third wave” of vast dislocation began just behind the second, and continues into a fourth at the present day. The “technologization” of agriculture was extended through laboratory genetic modification, and now developments in robotics, sensors, GPS, and nanotech. We can already, where the markets have been primed, turn abandoned mineshafts into underground farms, and grow fresh salads and other vegetable matter in former parking lots under cities, as well as up the sides of our skyscrapers. Our supermarkets already sell meat substitutes.

And with each of these endeavours, we remove ourselves a little farther from the possibility of personal freedom and independence; and with that, the apprehension of God. “Man” in the abstract has triumphed, we believe. Man in the concrete is elided.

It is generally conceded that progress requires trade-offs. Freedom, for comfort and safety, is the usual deal. The current Batflu “pandemic” (which it is not, by previous definitions) wonderfully illustrates the typical transaction. We agree to be regulated for the common good, merely chafing at the restrictions. Those who won’t wear a mask become targets of those who do, with a few choice reverses. Similarly, we are required to prostrate ourselves before public campaigns against (historical and imaginary) “racism.” Inoculation, and indoctrination, can be centrally imposed.

According, at least formerly, to the teaching of the Church, innovations on every plane ought to be voluntary. They should be adapted to the human, rather than vice versa; to his families, and to his little plots. The principle of subsidiarity turns on this point. It is still entirely possible to conceive of changes made voluntarily, out of self-interest, one person at a time; and thus on a scale that permits local continuities.

Change could still happen, but at less bewildering speed; adaptation to the change could happen more organically; and certain human qualities, such as decency, would be easier to maintain. Moreover, genuine improvements would become easier to distinguish from the lunge towards progressive barbarism.

Should we have a government programme for this? Or might it be advanced, more effectively, by the gradual annihilation of government programmes?

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IN REPLY, to several objections, I would invite the anxious reader to consider the difference between negative, and positive. Traditionally, civil governments made laws. These were purely “thou shalt nots” against acts that were almost universally condemned as wrong, bad, evil, rotten things to do. The idea was to punish, or at least discourage, criminal behaviour. But Leftists, and other filth (by nature, criminals themselves), stretch this idea of law, to include positive, bureaucratic commands. They compel the citizen to do things, whether or not he wishes, and even if he thinks they are immoral. And if he doesn’t do as instructed (in long incomprehensible regulatory codes that require layerings of lawyers), they punish him. Note, the honest citizen gets punished; the “rights” of criminals they are eager to protect.