Essays in Idleness

Sometimes, I learnt in a schoolyard somewhere, you just have to fight. My own experience was usually of getting clobbered, but I did not come from a pacifist home. That Our Lord told us to turn the other cheek towards importunate Roman legionaries, I noticed, but if gentle reader examines the biblical commentaries he will see that His proposal could be interpreted as a diss. He had more irony than a White House press secretary, and often answered questions in a more confrontational way. In this world conflict happens, even within families, and it is important to remember, in addition to the fight, just what it is that one is defending. Blessed are the peacemakers; but not all of your adversaries have prioritized peace.

To my mind — the one that is employed to write these Idleposts — there are better reasons to fight than to uphold one’s ego. This is a point I did not fully grasp when I was younger and more proud. A great deal of conflict can be avoided by letting insults pass. What people think of you, including the thought that you have no honour, is a matter of no consequence in light of what God thinks. But to do something that might very well be dishonourable, on the field of the divine, suggests sloppy thinking.

“Martyrdom” or “witnessing” is a good fight to have. I don’t mean an habitual self-indulgent posture, but the real thing. To my secularoid friends it is foolish. Why court death, when “sucking up” offers an easy way out? They imagine themselves pro-life where Christians are pro-death. But for a person whose conception of life is limited to not getting snuffed biologically, this whole definition of foolishness is strange. We (Christians) are in for the long game; they are in for the short.

Notwithstanding my dislike of politics, in the aesthetic and several other dimensions, there are political battles that must be won, and I favour winning them. I was writing recently that one should be governed not by optimism but by hope, including the hope that God will contrive the best possible worldly result (since no human will be capable of imagining it). But as I said above, I am familiar with losing. True honour requires a willingness to lose, which is almost opposite to a willingness to surrender. For in causes where good and evil are easy to distinguish — abortion is an example — we must never surrender.

Victory also requires a willingness to win, however; and then, having won, to show magnanimity, &c. The transition from victory to magnanimity is a pretty one to watch. I would argue that this is only possible to the happy soldier, in the grand scheme of things; to the soldier not prey to his own pathologies. But there is no happy soldier unwilling to fight.

Generally speaking, I am against attributing crimes to demonic possession. I find this practice is too “liberal” (in our postmodern sense of leftwing): it distracts from the criminal’s personal responsibility. We see this in most journalistic accounts of major pathological crimes. To mention “demons” or “devils” or “Satan” is unfashionable, so instead the term “evil” is used without qualification. It is an expression of panic, among those who were never taught that evil progresses in subtle grades, and must be qualified by definitions. Or who don’t know that evil begins in the whining of the unrestrained child.

Among people with no training in exorcism, there is the tendency to over-simplify. The mechanism by which the criminal embraces radical evil may seem simple in its result — a murder is just a murder, after all — but the personal “journey of self-discovery” on the part of the murderer is different in each case. True, he has, in the end, expressed his allegiance to Satan. But like the murder itself, this is just an end point. Along the way, he has toured many other motives, including some for which he might expect to be praised, as the modern parent will praise an errant child. In reading the manifestos of mass killers, for instance, a naïve idealism will often be encountered. (The relation between naivety and madness is a topic someone should explore.)

The greatest crime writers (Dostoevsky comes to mind) trace the development of a criminal mind from invariably glib, rather childish origins. Often he (the criminal) is looking for something as “innocent” as a shortcut to some goods he wants. By small increments, or by accidents in the course of trying to commit a “relatively harmless” robbery, things get out of hand.

I don’t think the average housebreaker, carrying a sawn-off shotgun, has the slightest intention to use it. His chance, unexpected meeting with the homeowner becomes his excuse to the court, for performing the murder; or to God (as suicide is self-murder), for himself getting “blown away.” Those with experience interviewing criminals, including injured ones, often note their use of the passive voice. (“There was a gun. It went off.”)

But this does not apply to such a wilful crime as, say, the massacre of children in a school; almost invariably ending in the suicide, or as it were, “constructive suicide,” of the perpetrator. There is unambiguous intention to do evil. Planning was involved. Likewise, behind every case of Islamic terrorism are practical considerations. The “pure theory” of avenging some historical injustice doesn’t get you very far.

My point in this little Idlepost is to call attention not to terror crimes, but to the more modest criminality of the liberal mind, resembling that of the housebreaker. He only intends to “push the envelope” a little way, towards his unexamined utopia. He makes demands for goods, in the form of taxation, of those who are “rich” from what they have somehow earned. (To the criminal mind, this “earning” must always be illegitimate.)

There are people who have volunteered to pay, without pressure, and there is nothing wrong with such conventional taxation, to fund various forms of community defence. Nor do I oppose people beggaring themselves, on ludicrous schemes, with their own money. But the liberal cannot be satisfied with this; he anyway needs more for his generous redistributions, or batty, counter-economic projects. Even those opposed to them must be forced to pay. He graduates from a collector of charity or taxes to the equivalent of a weaponized thief. This may remain peaceful for a while, but eventually the homeowners resist. Only then might violence suddenly occur. It comes as a surprise; especially to the criminal.

It is the misfortune of our society to have forgotten that the whining child must be resisted from the start; prevented, until it becomes a habit, from doing things that are wrong — when self-discipline can take over. We must restore that clarity of will, that prevents nature’s liberals (a class that includes all babies) from growing into criminals.

The Batflu we still have with us; and I doubt that this postmodern liberalism can be easily expunged. But we must at least try to eliminate it, permanently.

We do not know much about how the world works, or what is in it, so by analogy I guess that we know less about Heaven. None of my gentle readers have visited there, to my knowledge; though perhaps we have had glimpses from far off. Not one of us, I am fairly certain, has a clew how to get there, by any “scientific” means.

Mars may be in sight, but there is no programme of heavenly exploration in the SpaceX budget; only a few billions for getting to trackable places. We know a bit about celestial mechanics, from careful observation, but I for one don’t know what Gravity is, or Time for that matter, and have never met anyone who could explain them to me. Only their effects. It was an easy leap to the proposition that No One Can — explain what is inexplicable.

Even in my adolescent years as an atheist, when I was inclined to think that I knew it all, I was puzzled by inexplicable things. I have mentioned in some previous Idlepost an inspiring biology teacher, a Mr Henry, who implanted in my mind, at the age of just a few months past eleven, the notion that “life is a mystery.” All these years later, I am unable to shake it.

By this he didn’t necessarily mean it was a Catholic mystery (he was not a Catholic), but more simply that the origin of life on earth, like the origin of matter in the universe, was not something that could be accounted for. It wasn’t “difficult,” but plainly impossible, and while Mr Henry had formed the merry habit of ridiculing Darwinian Evolutionism, he’d get serious and mention that there was no place for any “natural history” to start. But, too: no way to deny that it had started.

And likewise with the human embryo, or to recall this biology teacher, any other animal embryo. (He could read Greek, and cite terms from Aristotle.) At what point does it become animated or “ensouled”? When does it become, in effect, a novel creation? To describe the mechanism of conception, in detail however tedious, is to advance our understanding a distance of zero. For the timing of it is of no consequence. It happens out of time.

Driven out of his last job in the Natted States, for his unflattering views on scientism, I had the luck to meet him in a private school in the third world. His wasn’t an uncommon fate, for in modernity there is no tolerance for persons with scientific qualifications who also develop philosophical skills, especially the ability to perceive logical contradictions. But Mr Henry was in possession of an extraordinary humility, in the face of nature. He never complained, in my presence, about the ridiculous behaviour of men. He took up his bag, and moved to where he was wanted. He continued teaching, to anyone who wished to learn, or was allowed to.

What can we know about the Ascension?

As in every other subject, only what we are told. We must, ourselves, judge of the authorities, for we are physically incapable of testing everything we hear. Our tests, themselves, we must review with scepticism.

Mr Henry had the gift to draw enthralling diagrams of cellular and molecular structures, and the power to make me check them against what I could see through a microscope. We carried our investigations to the periphery of a pond. He had also the power to pronounce himself powerless, to see beyond what he could see. He never spoke against prophets, but could be almost catty in rejecting what we have been calling “visionaries” for the last century or five.

That Our Lord came down from Heaven is incomprehensible to us. That He, of His own will, returned there, is beyond the farthest reach of scientific inquiry. That by His grace He has invited us to follow is something we can know, however, in our hearts.

What are we going to do, now that the (Red Chinese) Batflu is over? Or, not exactly over, for some of our progressive epidemiologists are still cheering for a second wave. But the thing itself — the first wave — is becoming harder and harder to sustain. In the Natted States, for instance, it has more or less disappeared from the Red States, and the “plateau” is tilting downwards even in the Blue — where governors had to feed the virus-infected into nursing homes, to keep their death rates up.

How will they justify their lockdowns, when their citizens stop dying altogether? When, with summer, they just go to the beach? When even their cops have stopped listening to them? And Doktor Fauci has noticed the wind shifting, and has therefore adjusted his sails to the “irreparable damage” that could be done if we don’t re-open quickly enough?

Moreover, it turns out, that the general public is somehow bored with “climate change.” What else can the progressive media use to scare them? How are we to maintain distancing in circumstances like these?

For social isolation is important to maintain. Myself, I look forward to the churches opening again, so I may sneak back into the Mass — the most Latin and traditional I can find — to get my isolation in there. The higher the Mass, the more is available, for the priest has turned towards God on our behalf, and even the wilder of the infant parishioners sense an atmosphere of reverence.

It has been my conviction, however, since before I began these Idleposts, that social isolation is possible even without wearing a bandit mask, or putting on that face which says: “Come any nearer and I’ll spray you with sanitizer!”

For decades, it seems, I have been avoiding long queues and crowds. I haven’t attended a football game in fifty-one years (and even then, I was playing). My computer is too old to have a Zoom camera, so I am able to keep unwanted visitors out.

Life in the city is chaotic enough: one is constantly affronted by shamelessness and noise. We must hatch a new scheme for social isolation.

Among the oddments that sometimes appear in opinion polls are questions like, “Would you accept a lower standard of living in exchange for” … whatever policy is currently on offer. That policy might range from a climate-change shutdown of all carbon-based energy production, to reduced levels of immigration and foreign trade.

In principle, I approve this recognition of policy trade-offs, and every acknowledgement that, in the red-pilled world beyond political phantasy, “you can’t have your diamond-studded hand-sculptured fondant wedding cake, and eat it, too.” Or in the more modest, Yorkshire version of this important cliché: “You can’t have the penny and the bun.”

Any concession towards what I remember as reality is welcome at the present day, to me. As a non-economist, however, I regret that the trade-offs are only expressed in money. They apply also, and frequently instead, to things the modern world doesn’t count, because they are intangibles.

Take the example of elephants.

From an interview with (the magnificent) Mary Eberstadt, I have learnt that an elephant calf will stay within a few feet of his mother for the first eight years of his life. I was vaguely aware of this from my travels in exotic countries, but now I have a tag to put on it. I will file it under “family values.”

Gentle reader, who may be a zookeeper or mahout, might ask an obvious, possibly rhetorical question. What happens if we separate mother and child earlier? One answer is, baby elephant dies. Another is that he doesn’t, but then you may have, in later life, a juvenile delinquent. And believe me, a juvenile delinquent who weighs upwards of three metric tonnes can be a considerable social problem.

Now, fish are notorious for abandoning their children, but not whales and other sophisticated seaborne mammals. Indeed, as we ascend the dignities of the animal kingdom we find that the higher animals require, in addition to the installation of “instincts” by nature, regimes of liberal education. Parents are first teachers throughout that kingdom, at least among the elites, in which we tend to include ourselves. One must be taught how to be an elephant, and likewise, how to be a human being.

Orphanages have been established among men, and certain animals still accept orphans, to make the best of difficult situations. Nature herself has been known to wink at a good back-up plan. But she prefers her original arrangements, and is conservative, if not reactionary, by disposition.

Let me mention a distinction of my own. Sophisticated animals with child-rearing skills tend towards rule, in the animal kingdom. Animals without, tend towards “becoming” — their food. This is a vague inference, however, and I would not recommend it to a student doing a biology exam.

Rather, I would consider such things in a general approach to life. At the risk of challenge from the speciesists, I would go so far as to suggest that humans may be superior to elephants (in some respects; I admit that elephants are heavier). Our children may require even more parental training, and the consequences of omitting this — or “economizing” on it, as it were — could be more grievous. (Traditionally, even fathers were involved.)

And while this may have little to do with money, directly, a world of trade-offs comes into view.

Do you have any rights, gentle reader? Perhaps not. Up here in the Canadas we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, granted by the charity of Pierre Trudeau (late father of the child now governing us). It spells out what we are allowed to do, “subject to such limits” as may occur to our government from time to time. I viscerally opposed it, whenas it was being written over our inherited constitution, four decades ago.

Animals have rights, under the law of the jungle. I approve of these, insofar as I approve of life on this planet. Hunters have rights, because they are animals. The state has rights, thanks to soldiers and police, for as long as they are willing to obey. What a lot of rights exist!

In the old Roman Fora, the Christian had the right, to be eaten by a lion. He had no other rights, however. As the Marxists say, the capitalist has his right, to become extinct. In their time, the passenger pigeons were as free as any bird; and the eagles, who used them as a foodstuff, had the right to harry their vast flocks. Our own right, to squab, tipped the balance until the last ones found the right to die naturally.

Rights are not conferred. They are taken. They exist for as long as they can’t be taken back.

Under the fabulous and mythical Natted States Constitution, these truths are self-evident. Though still young, it contains many mediaeval features. Federal, State, and Municipal governments are allowed to exercise certain prerogatives, under specified conditions; but there is another level of government. “The People” have all the rights that remain. This includes the ancient right to overthrow a tyrant. In the theory, they have not been granted these rights by the government, but by God — the Same who granted the rights of the Lion.

As Loyalists, not Patriots, my ancestors opposed the innovative Yankee legal arrangement; though as fellow Americans, they were just as feisty. Since I mentioned hunters above, let me consider gun rights. Our “right to bear arms,” up here in the Loyal Canadas, wasn’t encapsulated in any constitutional arrangement because it was among the oldest and most obvious rights. A man has a right to defend himself, and if he has the means, he will be respected. In his recent “Covid-related” (i.e. characteristically fraudulent) ban on 1,500 brands of firearms, the Trudeau child has been revising this. It is hardly the first outrage he has attempted — avoiding Parliament whenever he can.

To my shame, as a Canadian, he was not overthrown — even when we had a chance to do this peacefully.

Today, we have (not only in the Canadas but through much of the West) the sort of people to whom I’d have to explain that I am not advocating disorder. Rather, I propose to restore it. We were once free countries, to an extraordinary degree — thanks explicitly to our Christian traditions, through which were established conditions of trust. We have still, however, such rights as we are willing and capable of defending.

Unless we are willing to defend them — violently, when push comes to shove — we proceed to conditions like those in Red China. We will be allowed what most people seem to want: a “progressive,” consumerist, high-tech megacity. But it will be one in which we have agreed that, because we can’t be trusted, we must wear the equivalent of GPS bracelets.

My policy, up here in the High Doganate, my ivory tower, is to maintain an attitude towards the world, down there, that is consistently sceptical and pessimistic. It is a policy that has been tested by events, and has seldom failed, if ever. There are, let me admit, moments when I have indulged a mushy sentimentality, relaxing my guard; when I have entertained the rather liberal thought, “things are getting better.” And I have been duly punished for each of these phantasias. For no, things are terrible, often getting worse, and anyone who thinks human life will end well, hasn’t been shoved into a ventilator yet. It is the one positive thing we might say about the Batflu; that it serves as a much overdue reminder — that if we are not dead yet, we will be, soon enough. In my view, it is the fate of optimists to be routinely suckered.

But this does not mean I am not hopeful. Or that, while I tend to be generous in my criticisms, things aren’t passable as they are.

Now, if gentle reader thinks I am going to blather on about Heaven, in the manner of a Born Again Happyface, he has guessed correctly. I don’t actually know anything about that place, except what I have glimpsed in fleeting moments; or have construed from my religion. From both I gather that our hope, when it is genuine, lifts us out of worldly conditions, disconnects us from our prospects down here. Moreover, these moments link or knit to each other, not to anything we might trade. As the saints have discerned, or so I speculate, futurity is now.

Hope is indicated, and to be cheerfully expressed in our works, as a lawyer might say. An optimist expects things to turn out well; a pessimist merely hopes to be wrong, for a change. But being right as usual needn’t disappoint him. We know that we will fail, in the end, but we do not hope for failure. Rather we hope for a good resolution, leaving this to the divine.

The hope is in Eternity, of course, but into our mundane life, it will frequently spill over. The beauty that is rejected (as “irrelevant” and unprofitable) in contemporary practical living, will be visible to the hopeful at the strangest times. It will appear in the most ridiculous situations. We must do our best to be prepared for them.

This is why I find dark humour so encouraging. It invites us to cease hoping for the wrong things.

Long before the Batflu, there were plagues, as I’ve been hinting lately. Perhaps I should thank the shut-in, for an opportunity to revisit Marcus Aurelius, and the physician Galen, too. Roman soldiers campaigning in the Persianist Near East had often returned with nasty infections, in that ancient globalizing world, when the West was first trading with India and Han China; and disease was among the first things they traded in.

But the Antonine Plague of the later 160s AD, with its spectacular fevers, inflammations, and skin eruptions (possibly smallpox), visited millions of deaths upon the people everywhere from sober civilized Africa, far north into the German heart of darkness, making previous spot outbreaks seem tame. The later Plague of Cyprian (possibly our first adventure with the measles) also paradoxically helped to keep the Huns at bay, by substantially reducing the pressure on land.

Our estimates of the death tolls from these contagions are even less reliable than those from Italy or New York today. Hospitalizations were zero, however, because hospitals hadn’t been invented yet. Perhaps a quarter of the population was eliminated in each of these plagues; but it could have been half in either. Large rural areas were completely depopulated, from disease and the subsequent famines and disorders. The economy could be a problem, even then.

Yet the thoughtful Marcus Aurelius, who may himself have died from plague complications (he’d had co-morbidities all his life), did not think it was the worst thing that could happen, even when it was at its most raging in Metro Rome.  He thought the spread of falsehood and of charlatanry was worse — the way deceit circulated, as it were, like a virus.

Saint Paul of beloved memory had already issued his “Guidance” to the longsuffering citizens of this world. He did not (check it out) specify social distancing, sheltering in place, or any other method to stay safe. Rather his advice to its inhabitants was, “Be ye not conformed to the world.” This would work for all occasions.

In this generation of deChristianization, when the cads and monsters of surveillance are increasing their control, it is worth remembering our one defence against them. Even if gentle reader has been gaoled, for congregational singing, or for being a clergyman over the age of sixty-five (I cite two of the many banned items in a provincial instruction on church re-openings), he may remain inwardly free. For stone walls do not a prison make, &c.

Of course, if it were up to me, I would have the Knights of Columbus form armed militias to prevent the cops from busting in during Mass, but I doubt this idea would appeal to our present church leaders. Other, more pacific suggestions, such as sending a few Christians with flowers to a nearby abortion clinic, to keep the cops busy while others pray in church, would probably also be ignored. From the pope, performing pagan rites in Rome again this week, while continuing to sell out the Catholics in Red China, down to every smarmy liberal bishop and priest, our Church has herself been active in the deChristianizing process.

But it wasn’t just Saint Paul preaching non-conformity. Jesus of Nazareth had already warned us to expect stuff like this.

Veritas liberabit vos, as it says in the Bible, or if gentle reader prefers, ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς. In our casual English rendering, “The truth will set you free.” My own habit is to put a “shall” in that instead, but forgive me, I can be a hothead sometimes.

The truth leads to Jesus; verily, it is Jesus, as Western men were among the first to discover. But we have also gratuitously applied this saying to a wide range of things, including many with no obvious religious significance. Being backward and reactionary, as well as a hothead, I am often inclined to use it for our general inheritance of common sense: things learnt from experience through the centuries, and not to be abandoned without cause. Most such “truths” are now being abandoned, however, at least in our universities and other asylums, because few of them are politically correct.

The ancestral experience of mankind is that epidemics are not defeated by the human will. Rather, they are endured. True, they can be more or less intelligently endured; we may take elementary precautions. But if we think we might defeat them with these, we are, as it were, batty. That a vaccine, or equivalent, may eventually drive a virus into extinction, has been part of that olden experience. It did not occur to our ancestors, however, to shut down the economy after polio was first identified, about thirty-six centuries ago, until Jonathan Salk invented his vaccine in 1955.

And this was because they were not drooling morons. A man cannot live on bread alone, but he does need some form of nutrition. That this hasn’t been proved by epidemiologists in double blind tests does not phase me in the least.

That we must love our enemies, including the drooling morons, I accept as Christian Truth. Loving them, I think, involves trying to understand them — an effort for which patience may be required. In an emergency, such as a threat to our freedom, we must confront them, sometimes in a truly decisive, badass way. But this is finally for their own good, too.

I have decided to demote the Red Chinese Batflu, from a pandemic to an epidemic — this in the cause of injecting cool reason into it. All mass media please copy. And should you hesitate, remember that by following my instructions, you are not following Donald Trump’s.

That this Batflu has spread internationally, I have been informed. That it originated in Wuhan, China, and almost certainly by an accident at the Communist Party’s big virology lab in that town, I take for known. That the totalitarian authorities deny this, I accept. For as Bismarck said of other arbitrary statesmen, “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

But a plague is a plague is a plague, and always has been. It is something that happens, and once it is happening, except for mostly ineffectual precautions, the human race is defenceless against it. The first wave of the Batflu followed the same pattern in sensible Sweden, as it did in hysterical Italy. We are gradually realizing, as we could have from ancient experience, that spectacular theatrics do no good. Specifically, we can already know that our lockdowns have been a waste of time and spirit. So are all of our proposed theatrics, going forward.

For instance, the present explosion of virtue signalling, from behind facemasks. Many, many previous studies of influenza virus transmission showed them to be useless, except in places like surgical theatres. They could catch viral sneezes, but so could your elbow. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence (summarized here) that healthy people wearing facemasks are sickening themselves, and reducing their immunities. That might seem counter-intuitive to some, but the truth is often counter-intuitive, and therefore requires reason.

Once again, hard-earned, “tried and true” medical knowledge is too easily replaced, among the panicking, by the untried and false. Soon it is imposed by ignorant politicians.

Those who have faith in statistics (I don’t, because my faith is in God) should note that more than two-thirds of hospital cases in such a place as New York came from lockdown locations, where the infected had been diligently following the public health orders. Moreover, 97 percent of cases were generated indoors where, thanks to political idiocy — real, manslaughtering idiocy like Governor Cuomo’s — most of the population has been trapped. “The peeple” are discouraged, or actually prevented, from seeking safety outdoors, where it was instinctively sought by plague-threatened people since time out of mind.

That the sun and fresh air are cleansing, should be known to every child, approximately from birth. They should also be taught that the truth will make them free.

A lot of things happened, more than half a century ago; suddenly I’m among the shrinking number who recall this. For today’s Idlepost, I will remember an article I read in a popular science magazine, back then. I’ve forgotten both the title of the publication, and the date of the number. I can, however, say that I was in high school at the time; my fact-checkers may take it from there.

According to this article, the worth of a human being was 98 cents. The authors showed how their figure was arrived at. They had combined current market prices for the materials in an average human frame of 130 pounds. (Details like this I remember.) A sceptic, even then, I recall noting that they excluded hat, mid-season clothing, and shoes, from their total; and that they didn’t mention whether they were citing wholesale or retail values on the flesh and chemicals. Most pointedly, while accompanying my mother to a supermarket, I checked the prices for beef, pork, and broiler chicken, choosing the lowest grades. All were over 10 cents a pound; and so I concluded that the price of the meat alone, per human, would exceed their total estimate.

Given background inflation rates, I think the total value in 2020 may approach twenty dollars, or even twenty-five. I’d have to recheck chemical prices, to be sure. Though perhaps the total might be reduced, closer to one dollar again, for babies.

Now, I hate complicated statistical calculations, so here is an alternative approach.

Once, passing a second-hand bookstore, I spotted in its window a book I very much wanted to acquire. Knowing the bookseller, I dashed into his shop, grabbed the book in question and, clutching it tightly while advancing towards his counter, exclaimed that I had been willing to kill for it.

“How much?” I asked, catching my breath.

“Eighty dollars,” he replied, nonchalantly.

I told him I could not possibly pay that, and sadly released the book from my grip.

“Well,” the bookseller observed. “Thanks to this exercise, we know the value you place on a human life. Less than eighty dollars.”

In those days, I think I would have drawn the line at thirty. But to his moral credit and mine, the bookseller and I were finally able to agree on fifty-five dollars (plus sales tax).

This week, there is a “Virtual March for Life,” from and to virtual Parliament Hill, in virtual Ottawa. Owing to the Communist Chinese Batflu, the actual walk was cancelled — by far the largest annual protest march in the country, although for some obscure reason our progressive media always bury it on an inside page, in the rare instances when they cover it at all. To them, I suppose, the value of a human life is whatever it costs to typeset a paragraph, divided by 20,000 or so.

Call me reckless, but I’m willing to go higher.

Be afraid, be very afraid, gentle reader. Of volatile organic compounds! They’re gonna get your mama. Some scientist in Germany named Brasseur has done studies. So did another called Stavrakou somewhere else. And they have colleagues! At least one of those courageous people has spoken to the press. And while what they said may sound innocent enough, grab hold of your whisky. It is time to be terrified by another Unknown.

Since nitrogen dioxide, and all the tonnes of fine particulate matter, began falling out of our atmosphere (thanks to the the lockdowns that followed the Xi Batflu), surface pollutants have been piling up. Atmospheric gases have been interacting with those volatile compounds down below. And do you know what that means, my poor frightened soul?

It means that Ozone Levels — right here at the surface of our planet — have increased. And you know what Ozone did, in Antarctica. Remember that Ozone Hole? There’s hardly anything living in Antarctica today, but penguins. The Ozone must have fallen, and killed everything else. Now, down here on the surface of the planet, this Ozone may have grown by 2 percent. Or 200 percent: whichever is higher.

And worse, the summer is coming. As the sunshine increases — and it will, mark my words — there will be more and more complex reactions. You can count on it. Bwahaha!

Yes, our enemy is the clear skies! It is the invisible enemy, as Trump might say.

Call the United Nations! Demand action! Re-animate the corpus of Al Gore! We must educate the public. Only world government can save us! We need emergency task forces right away!

But while we’re waiting for the task forces to arrive, there are things that we can do. (“We’re all in this together!”) All of our household appliances are at fault. The fridge, the aircon, the coffee grinder, everything. Stovetops and ovens; hotplates too! Laptops, cellphones, personal computers: all contribute to this crisis. Cars, of course; trucks, trains, and aeroplanes: we must disable them all! Turn off all your lights, while you’re at it. Everything must be extinguished, now! And that includes candles. They’re emitting those volatile compounds for sure, snuff them out! Pour water over them!

We must shut everything down until we find a vaccine! Or forever, because we have to be safe!

Meanwhile, we must burn as much coal as possible, to restore the atmosphere’s particulate supply. This dust was what was keeping our Ozone Levels steady. Open pit mining is only a start.

It will all be worth it, if we save just one life!

*

Everything written above is scientific. (“We must listen to the science!”) Note that it is also batshit insane. You may forget all about it now, for you might never hear about it again, for the rest of your life. Just concentrate on your whisky. Light another cigarette.

Alternatively, you might hear about it eighty times a day, for the next five decades.

I was, truth to tell, performing a mental exercise: trying to guess what the rats in labcoats could come up with next, together with their friends in the meejah and acadeemjah — when the trillions you are willing to pay for their advice shrinks to mere hundred billions.

For that would be a real environmental crisis, for them.

Among the more interesting human perversions is the desire to be lied to. The opposite is the desire to be told the truth, but this, to my mind, is not a perversion. I have met at least one fellow human, in possession of a philosophy degree, who speculated that there might be a third, “middle way,” between these extremes. He is dead now, but while he lived, he described himself as an “Antinomian.” (As an “Antediluvian,” I was on the other side.)

Let me stick with the perversion with which I started. There are many circumstances when even a “normal” person, if we could find such a being, wants to be told untruth. He does not want to believe it an untruth, however. I remember when my Antinomian friend died. I did not want to believe it, although the evidence conflicted with my fact preference. I could not imagine him not being alive because, theretofore, he had always seemed to be alive, even when absent. Perhaps it was a small thing, in the context of the whole world, but to me the world had radically changed, by his death. By dying, my Antinomian (who could be quite charming) had refuted his own philosophy, and my first instinct was to call him, and point this out. He was no longer taking calls, however.

Gentle reader will, if he has reached mature years, be aware of “the stages of grief,” whatever they are. This is because he will have experienced them. Let me suggest that, to some degree, these accompany all corrections. They may be inverted, or proceed very quickly, but consciousness itself has a pattern in the creature who must deal with the true/false dichotomy. For all I know other animals share it in their respective ways; I seem to have observed it in pets. There is a moment of transition in the more sentient animals — now I am thinking of cats — when they rearrange themselves, and seem to choose which instinct to favour. They don’t look happy.

And humans I have found, often, even more sentient than cats. Our responses may not be subtler, but they can be. The question, “How is this possible?” may be answered with impressive sophistication.

During this monotonous Batflu crisis, I have the luxury of observing contrary lies. In fact there is a range from, “Oh this is nothing, laugh it off,” to, “Omigod we’re all going to die.” Here I note an argument for something in the middle, however, and even for keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

But what (mostly pseudo) scientists call “confirmation bias” is powerfully at work, in everything we do. Were it not, we would not be able to function. That taking things for granted, such as “gravity is still working,” is a forgivable inference, I’d be the first to admit.

What feels new, though it certainly isn’t, is the degree to which the global village’s informers, acting under political but also commercial impulses, exploit perversion. They know most people will believe a lie, no matter how unlikely, once their political beliefs have frozen — to the point of not wanting to hear any contrary information.

As the sage, Iowahawk, observed: “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

Find the people who want to be told lies — of commission or omission, it matters nought — and provide them with a regular supply. It is not the only way to get rich; but hooo, is it a good one.

This old Durkheim term emerged from that era, in the 19th century, when Europeans were discovering suicide statistics. They not only gathered suicide rates, but noticed that they were rapidly increasing wherever modern industrial life was extended — to all the backward places where pre-industrial life had hardly changed from one generation to another — suddenly, many times over.

Anomie the sociologists came to know as a product of conflict between belief systems. It is a breakdown, a disintegration, of long-established social bonds, which depended upon a common worldview (Christian, for instance). It is the disappearance of an ancient order, and its replacement with chaos. It is “fragmentation of social identity and rejection of values,” according to the Wicked Paedia.

“From normlessness to gormlessness” was one of my attempts to encapsulate this “progress”; from shifting to sinking sand, as it were.  I was first reading about this phenomenon in works by T. G. Masaryk, nearly fifty years ago. (The future Czech president anticipated all of Durkheim’s insights.) As our hut of norms begins to crack and splinter, people become deeply confused. As it subsides and is crushed, they give up on it entirely, but they have nowhere to run. The suicide rate is a measure of this, by a plausible statistical inference.

This has recently been accelerating, radically, once more, especially in boys and men. One might call it a great victory for feminism, or argue from the myriad of other dislocations. But while the male suicide rate is currently many times higher, women are learning how to kill themselves, too.

The majority remain survivors, however. The great mass of men (now in the sense of “people”) are not philosophers, and have not the luxury of listening to the podcasts of the philosophers. The sky that is falling on them is no intellectual construction, or rather deconstruction. It is from their little isolated worlds of work and leisure, that meaning is vacuumed, from family and prayer to steady jobs. Opiates take their place, like cheap goods from China. The great achievement of “progress” is a growing despair. (“Trumpism” interests me, as a resisting source of the positive; in this sense I think it is genuinely backward.)

Of course, most people adapt to our brave new world, in which no one can afford to be honest, and therefore no one can be trusted. There is a form of escape in becoming deeply cynicized. That the collapse of Western Civ could be good for the economy, I first noticed a few decades ago. It is one of the paradoxes of our time. Such material problems as famine, and disease, were apparently being solved. Now we discover this was also an illusion: the extremes of consumer comfort melt away. Those who had to work for a living (unlike public and private bureaucrats, who can prattle to each other from home) suddenly found themselves locked into a nightmare.

In the end, even the bureaucrats will starve, unless the economy reopens. My neat, conventional, mindless rightwing view is the glib-libertarian one, that this is what happens when the masses lose their freedom, and the progress that was wrought by capitalism is destroyed. There is some truth in this, but it is shallow.

The world that is reopening is normless. This it has in common with the world that went before. For a moment it seems to have improved, because we can walk outside again, and if it is still Spring, there are flowers and songbirds. Paycheques may also possibly resume.

But “normal life” cannot possibly resume, because “normal” (normed, normative) is gone. Even the distinction between a man and a woman has been eliminated; systems of reward and punishment are reversed; words have changed their meaning. Left-satanist utopian agendas are what animate our political minders, who have now learnt how easy they are to impose. While we were sleeping, through the induced coma of the Batflu crisis, we proved our extraordinary capacity for prostration.

We might observe that the Batflu works through our economy as it does through our nursing homes. The old and feeble companies are killed off. The young and ruthless inherit their empty lots. Technology now makes general surveillance possible, and has provided an immediate excuse for it.

Progress has made another astounding leap. And with this, the cause of anomie advances.