Essays in Idleness

When the Calgary Stampede is cancelled, one might begin to take the Batflu seriously. There were some preliminary indications in the international death tolls. As the overwhelming majority of victims have multiple “co-morbidities,” however, these counts are arbitrary. The meejah have been able to find a small selection of young, healthy people who were struck down, too, in order to improve the scare. That guvmints all over have locked down their populations might, at first, seem another clue, but the day is long passed when I took a political response to be evidence of anything.

Endure this for a moment. It is my general approach to the Red Chinese Batflu crisis. An open mind, if anyone had one, might postulate a general overreaction. The Swedes, and South Dakotans, to say nothing of others, have shown that if, instead of a Maoist lockdown, we’d simply asked the people to use their brains, we’d get approximately the same death curves on the charts that we get from letting the state bully them. What we wouldn’t get, is a way to appease the Nanny Statists.

They are long-practised in the art of going berserk when they don’t get their way. Our meejah are long-practised in the art of amplifying their holler. Citizens of the modern West are now practised in the art of being pushed around, and have mastered the complacency that is needed while watching their tax money being flushed down various progressive toilets. Our economies are based on massive transfers from those who earn, to those who whine.

Let me expose my own pointless indulgence in meejah reports, by the theft of another story. It appears that Prickles the Sheep has been recaptured, after escaping from a fold in Tasmania. This now-celebrated champion of self-isolation survived in the bush for seven years. Her fleece had grown considerably during this retreat, from the usual hairdressing routines. Locked down once again in her pasture, she will now be paradoxically restyled. I doubt that she will like that. If gentle reader can guess the weight of her woolly locks, I gather, he may win a prize.

Here I wish Mabel Henrietta née Jevon, my paternal grandmother, were still with us. I have a photograph of her winning a classic Kelvinator, for guessing how much frozen food it contained. She was a superhuman estimator of weights and volumes.

But getting back to Prickles, I propose to make her into a religious symbol. Let her stand for all those Catholics abandoned by the neo-pagans who now control the Vatican. Churches everywhere are now closed, but none tighter than those in Red China, where our pope has directed all Catholics to turn themselves in, to the Communist authorities. Some won’t. Some of those may succeed in hiding.

Many all over the world have already become “bush Catholics,” self-isolated from what is rapidly becoming a self-persecuting Church, under extremely contemptible management. Pope Francis hectors these people in vain, with his asinine “Amazon” and “climate change” homilies.

My piece in the Catholic Thing today (here), touches on one dimension of this phenomenon.

One of the first indications that England might be going squishy, was the replacement of Edward the Confessor as her patron saint, by Saint George in the 14th century. While I have no objection to the slaying of dragons, or even of foreigners in certain situations, my view of nationalism tends towards the grim, and I’m particularly suspicious of pop enthusiasms. Saint George has had the misfortune to be associated with jingo thuggery, especially in the far West (England; also Portugal, &c).

Shakespeare’s celebration of Henry V is more ambiguous than, I think, England’s patriotic scholars have assumed. I do not think the dramatist concealed the thug aspect in King Henry’s manipulation of chauvinist emotions on the battlefield. He was orchestrating carnage. Saint George in the West has ever been depicted on the attack.

I prefer his muscular, yet gentler behaviour in the East, for instance Ethiopia and of course Georgia, and even among the Crusaders, rescuing lost Christian tribes. For here Saint George’s rôle as a defender of scattered Christians is the better pronounced. Remember that even before the Mussulmans, we had to deal with the Parsis, who were the more aggressive, once upon a time. Indeed, we sometimes welcomed the Arabs, at first, to save us from worse enemies. Too, there is an aspect of Saint George, that I detect in eastern icons, where the spooky flavour of an Elijah is presented in his character.

Today, for instance, I pray towards Saint George for the succour of our persecuted Christians in Red China. May he slay the Communist dragon.

But in England, at the Protestant Reformation, his image was flown as a replacement for all religious flags, and made a symbol for the Tudors, finally against their pope. His cross became the maritime symbol, and flew on that remarkable fleet of ships that first extended English commerce, across the wide seas. They were engaged mostly in piracy, against the chiefmost Catholic power of the time. I insist that we retain this detail.

My association of violence with mental squishiness may be deemed controversial, however. To me it seems obvious, and to others it might, if they made it a topic for philosophical contemplation. It is when the hard unchangeables of our Faith are selectively abandoned, and the empty spaces they leave are plugged with crowd emotions, that we become the worst representatives of ourselves. This is where the blubbering squishiness  comes in: where sentimentality invades our reason. It is all blancmange or custard on the surface, but beneath this we find the howling murderous rage.

From the latest photographs I see that it is a clear day in Delhi. By eliminating almost all motorized traffic, shutting down all construction sites, closing a dozen coal-fired generators, and this and that, particulate levels in the world’s most air-polluted capital city have fallen to less than half the previous normal. Higher-caste residents are quoted expressing their amazement at how clean the air is, and the pleasure they take in breathing. India’s poor, and Delhi’s, may take a different view, but unknown to our global media.

It is Earth Day, the fiftieth anniversary, and this year I may feel it unnecessary to turn every electric device in my apartment on for Earth Hour, and leave the refrigerator door open. The truth is, that this had little effect anyway, for my instinctively neo-Luddite habits had long since minimized my electrical consumption, and limited my collection of artificially powered gadgets. Too, my Scottish genetic heritage kicks in. I can only bear to leave the fridge door open for about three minutes, and the stovetop burning long enough to make tea. My commitment to “iniquity signalling” is shamefully lax.

I would actually like the air to be cleaner (as it is in all developed countries), and less plastic to be floating in the oceans (mostly from the underdeveloped ones). I would also like the great sprawling conurbations, both East and West, to be downsized, broken into self-reliant neighbourhoods, detoxified, humanized instead, ticky-tack suburbs returned to farmland, and so forth. My plans for this are poorly thought through, and may be as incoherent as any fruitcake environmentalist’s. …

Well, not that incoherent. I’ve left out the maglev trains.

From the age in which I was raised, I retain at least one Whole Earth principle. The hippie it came from was Immanuel Kant. He called it the “categorical imperative,” and held that, for all sentient creatures, the central commandment of reason is to do as you’d be done by. Gentle reader will note that I amended it, discarding Kant’s universalist calculations, and substituting the implicit and explicit commandment of Jesus of Nazareth, the Saints, Moses, Socrates, the Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tan, and older moral authorities. We must not pretend that the Enlightenment changed anything, unless it was to install atheism as the default position for reason itself — which in turn leads to the abandonment of all inconvenient forms of human decency, the innumerable revolutionary massacres that followed, aborting our own children, &c.

Some hippies sometimes glimpsed the ancient truths, on their mentally clear days, grasping if only briefly that “power tripping” is the opposite of goodness.

We should try to recover our moral poise. This involves the replacement of feigned by legitimate reason, and its supplement by wisdom and faith. For better or worse, however, these possessions can be acquired by only one person at a time, through humble and unceasing work.

Earth Day, by contrast, is a celebration of eco-arrogance and vanity, for all the proponents of “structural change.” (This is the current slogan-code for the imposition of socialism.) It is an example of exactly what blocks the advancement of all such unstructured activities as kindness, devotion, loyalty and love.

One is reminded of Typhoid Mary by an item in this morning’s Beeb. She was the Irish girl from County Tyrone who became the talk of New York around the turn of the last century. This she accomplished as a domestic cook. A classic “asymptomatic,” she spread the disease she was carrying to all of her employers and their families; and went through quite a lot of them, for they all died of typhoid. Or, most: journalists told the story, so we will never get it straight. But Mary Mallon herself never got sick. The yellow press lord, William Randolph Hearst, took up her cause, when she was confined on North Brother Island — now a bird sanctuary, but where the smallpox hospital then was. (A nice story in itself, up the East River.) His long deceased newspaper, and their obscurely paid lawyers, got her sprung as an “innocent victim.” But as the trail of death followed her under each of her subsequently assumed names, she was eventually returned to isolation — public sympathy for her having expired.

As unlucky Irish immigrants go, Miss Mallon (finally died 1938) is something of a legend. At least she achieved fame. The same has seldom been realized by history’s other millions of disease spreaders.

We have no idea what the asymptomatic carriers of the novel coronavirus — your Batflu, as I call it — will do. Oh, and let me mention that it came from Red China, and was hosed on the rest of the world intentionally by the CCP (which locked down Wuhan within China, but left international flights open).

Sooner or later we may learn a few reliable things about it. Society — “the economy” — will reopen whether or not a vaccine is discovered (it is no sure thing). There will be “second waves,” perhaps thirdsies, and millions may yet die. Or, the disease will start disappearing from the news in mid-May. Please read this carefully: We don’t know.

We don’t know about many things in this world, though we think we know, which is why we are such prey to surprises. It is why Religion is the Most Essential Service. Only those at peace, with themselves and their Lord, have a chance at coping. That puffball, Trump (I’ve come to quite like him), says that our present contagion is like nothing we’ve ever seen. In fact, while it is “novel,” so once were all of the others which afflicted the human race (which includes Chinese, Blacks, Brown, and even White People) since time out of mind, and will do in the future.

What to do about them? Social distancing is very old hat. Soap was a useful invention of the Babylonians, and its frequent application an important development of the late Victorians. Some medicines are exceptional (most are a waste of money). I’m a great fan of vaccines, and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and how she learnt things from the Ottomans at Constantinople.

But it is the custom of killer viruses and bacteria to steal a lead on us, when they first break out; and even after we have got the cut of their jib, to still find ways to sink us. Life involves risk, and will not cease to do so. The management of risk will always be a makeshift.

I really wish people would master these platitudes. We should embrace our inner banality.

For that matter, economic collapse is not a novelty either, and while it is the product of human imbecility in almost every instance, that does not mean it is going to stop happening. I marvel at the self-destruction of our commerce, in order not even to stop the Batflu, but to slow it down, so we can enjoy it longer. Whereas, I am hardly enjoying it at all.

As an antiblogger, I am sometimes curious about such competition as may be offered by blogs, and this morning I became aware of a new one: here. What a marvellous thing, I reflected. I credit the gentleman I believe to have been chiefly responsible for its creation, Mr Michael Gove, a minister of state in the United Kingdom.

If gentle reader will peruse the content I have flagged, he will see that, in a plain, clear, timely and decisive way, it utterly demolishes an “insight” article published in the previous day’s Sunday Times. It does so in about the space required, without unnecessary rhetorical flourishes. It does, more serenely, what the American president less serenely attempts in some of his press conferences: to highlight and expose fraudulent and irresponsible work by those whose trade is to circulate garbage. This (street-cleaning or trash removal, as it were) is an important public service.

Although a man of the 13th century I must say that, before the current pandemic, I used to take holidays in the 18th century. This, unfortunately, was where I acquired my propensity to journalism and diffuse prose-writing, and an excessive familiarity with the origins of modern, so-called “enlightened” literature. I once delivered extempore at King’s College, Halifax (the original of Columbia University in New York), a term’s worth of public blather on “The Lives of the Hacks,” sketching this modern history from Defoe and the periodical essayists forward to our later journalists, novelists, and “generations of swine.” I contrasted this enterprising, business tradition with the older arrangements in which journalists were invariably bought, not sold. (Today, they are once again mostly bought.) They were the running dogs of the powerful, or in some cases, their barking, biting antagonists, until either bought off or “retired.”

Oddly, I favoured the new, capitalist arrangements, of the “free press,” even though it frankly contributed to public literacy (even women were accepted as readers), and other indelicacies. The world would become an unhappier place, as more and more information became available. But hélas!

That was nearly thirty years ago, and since, I have become more conservative and backward-looking. I have inwardly concluded that the whole modern experiment is a mistake, though I have had to concede its prevalence. I consider it as a form of plague — intellectual and spiritual — such that, we must seek what antidotes we can find to survive, as we await divine intervention.

One of these antidotes is true information. The old-fashioned (essentially 17th-century) method of commissioning writers to post calm and reasonable refutations to false and malicious reports, is what has been essayed in my link. It is the best that can be hoped in a time when most if not all commercial journalism is not only false, and malicious, but morally degenerate and obscene.

Ideally, we could still have a few newspapers that tried to be factual, and impartial, and to omit rubbish, at least from their news columns. Of course, they would be dull, grey, and sell poorly among the functionally illiterate. But they would serve that tiny minority who need or want to know what is happening in the world, as well as what is not happening. Given the latest technology, perhaps this material could be posted online.

Up here in the High Doganate, we still try to advance the notion of a “free press” — that is, a press that is free of putrid, stinking garbage. We hope to be able to stay out-of-date in this way.

Many are opposed to faith, family, industrious habits, common decency and public order. The “radical” will not be able to articulate reasons for his bitter opposition, but one look at his face should make everything clear. Here in Parkdale, we have a lot of Leftists. Perhaps they had unhappy childhoods. I hope gentle reader will not think me a bigot, but I have noticed that they are almost all white people.

Whatever the cause, they cannot “smoak a jest,” recognize other forms of humour, or distinguish the parts of speech. This makes them appear batty (in the old sense, when it would have attracted institutional attention). They are frequently convulsed with anger, then sullen when they have exhausted themselves. Alas, they cannot be left in normal company, for they will immediately and raucously demand a “safe space,” and then not go away. They will accuse the normal person of “racism,” “fascism,” “sexism,” and “microaggressions.” Their spittle represents a health hazard.

It is hard to know what to do with these people, in the absence of the traditional arrangements. When world markets open again, we could sell them into slavery. But in the meantime, I suppose, we must keep them in group homes, ideally under armed guard. Maybe feed them okra; surely there is a surplus, and I’m told it has calming properties.

But that’s just me, always looking for solutions.

Another is to pretend they aren’t there. I saw an encouraging attempt across the street, the other day. A strong-jawed woman, of the usual leftwing views, was shouting obscenities from her porch at a workman as he innocently passed by, observing the six-foot rule along the sidewalk. I doubt he’d ever met her before. She accused him of raping her, stealing her fortune, injecting her with drugs, and other deeds which she characterized as “inappropriate.” It was as if the poor fellow had just received a Trump nomination, and been brought before a committee of Democrats. She warned him to get away from her, shouting louder as he moved farther and farther away. She declared an intention to call the police, and recommended that neighbours dial nine-one-one.

“You can’t fool me,” he called back from a secure distance. “I know you love me.”

Within minutes, he must have been several blocks away: successfully parted from another progressive woman. God bless the sane and stable working class, who keep our telephones working.

But you don’t have to engage, at all.

There are other devices for repelling liberals, of all fifty-seven sexes, that require even less effort, and manufacturers now make quite effective ear plugs. These may be available in the pharmacies still allowed to open, although your local political master, “dressed in a little authority,” may have banned them as “non-essential.” In that case, buy them under the table.

This suggestion is for Canada, of course. In the Natted States, they have the Second Amendment.

It is a little-known fact that no government can do anything, without the cooperation of its victims. Of course that cooperation may be obtained by force and falsehood, but there will always be a few people who won’t play along. This creates a “technical problem” for the tyrant, which can also be solved by violence and deceit, but in the heart of every dictatorship there must be calculations. At what point do so many people want us dead, that they will actually kill us?

This is a political calculation, and it can turn even a genocidal maniac into a thoughtful politician. A monstrously evil country, such as Red China, can be moderated in this way. Superficially, it may sometimes come to resemble a bourgeois, Westernized, rule-of-law state, like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea. It may, indeed must in its own interest, pretend to be benign. But under sufficient pressure it has only two choices. One is to be openly monstrous, with all the risks that entails; and the other is to disintegrate.

My interest has been piqued as a China-watcher. Recent events have been bringing that kettle back to the boil. That the Peking politburo has been making serious mistakes, we may observe. It could not possibly have intended the Batflu crisis, which its own malign incompetence brought about. But as it tries to manage the crisis, for its own purposes, the mistakes multiply. Even the people it had diligently bought — such as our progressive journalists, politicians, and businessmen — are turning against it.

Within China itself, the unthinking default loyalty of the masses, has been disturbed. “Narratives” which conflict with the official ones are circulating, along with the virus — and even among those who “test negative,” as it were. These are people who would never rebel, but they become sympathetic to rebels. Moreover, the state’s image of invincibility — the Mao/Xi portrait, a hundred feet tall — is cracking. Imagined lines of contempt appear in the plaster. Chairman Mao, of course, is dead, but Chairman Xi must be sensing his mortality.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing from within, progressive Westerners tried to ignore it. This wasn’t something they wanted to look at, which is why they were all taken by surprise. The fall of the Berlin Wall inwardly distressed everyone on the Left. For a few years their confidence was shaken, slowing their efforts to regroup around “environmentalism,” or some alternative leftwing cause, that wasn’t in shambles like socialism. But eventually their smugness recovered, and those revealed to have been absolutely wrong about everything they had ever told us, were able to resume their status as “experts.”

Popular fear of the Batflu resembles our fear of Red China itself. It is analogous, at least circumstantially, to the “media wars” this old Cold Warrior remembers (most of which he lost). It is true that its allies don’t actually like the Batflu. Even Communist fellow-travellers, who had some acquaintance with the USSR, would admit that it “wasn’t perfect.” They denied being party affiliates, calling themselves, in effect, “anti-anti-Batflu” instead. They were opposed to that “inordinate fear of Communism” that the American fool, Jimmy Carter, decried. To men like him, it would not even occur to advance Communist interests directly. They did it from stupidity, alone.

Underneath, there was fear of the Batflu. If we antagonize it, what will it do? After all, it is very powerful. What if we failed to keep our six-foot distance, and it suddenly leapt at us? The wise statesman, in this analysis, will surrender whenever the Batflu makes demands. He favours “diplomacy.”

Whereas, I favour the approach of the people in Hong Kong, with their lives on the front line, who have been expressing their views undiplomatically. I was especially charmed, for instance, by the remark one Hong Kong demonstrator provided to a television camera, when asked for his advice to Mr Donald Trump: “Don’t trust China. China is asshole.”

Would Red China retaliate if we, too, were to express ourselves so succinctly? Of course it would try. Tyrannies cannot cope with loss of face, because in the end it is all that they have. And our freedom and dignity as human beings, is all that we have.

Courage, mon ami.

Mister Trump, the president of a neighbouring country, likes to win. This is his reputation, and it is enhanced by his public enthusiasm for winning, and the fact that he frequently wins. One might almost call him an embodiment of American optimism.

Now, as it becomes more apparent that the danger of the Red Chinese Batflu was overstated, he should be coming into his own. Having correctly anticipated that Americans (also Europeans, Asians, Africans, Brazilians, &c) would be panicked by irresponsible media reports, fed by the interests of massive and incompetent government bureaucracies, he took decisive action — in effect launching a “Green New Deal” overnight. Most other countries followed his lead, after smearing him a bit. The Natted States Opposition Party (so called because it is opposed even to itself) likewise followed the lead of “other countries,” i.e., smearing Trump and then doing what he said.

Unfortunately, he was “played” by the Red Chinese. Their masters had shut off all of Hupeh province (currently spelt “Hubei”), in response to a virus spreading from a bio-research lab that the French and Americans had designed and largely paid for in the conurbation of Wuhan. (This contested fact is no longer deniable.) The Communists stopped all road, rail, river, and air traffic to other locations in China. But through the latter part of January, they intentionally left international flights operating, so that the contagion would spread to, chiefly, Europe and America. Tens of thousands of travellers — anyone rich enough to leave Hupeh — half-knowingly fled abroad.

This was an unambiguously murderous act, by the successors of the butchers of Tienanmen.

So that when Mister Trump began stopping these flights on January 31st, it was already too late. The Xi Jinping Batflu had been seeded. And thanks to the interference being run by the corrupt World Health Organization (still denying that the virus was transmissible to human beings), it would take many weeks to discover what the Chinese government already knew, and showed that it knew by its actions. Fortunately, the virus, product of reckless experiments with bats from the caves of distant Yunnan, was not as lethal as it could have been. Ten-thousands have died when it could have been ten-millions.

The world economy is now crippled. Perhaps gentle reader has heard. This is a natural consequence of putting most of the planet’s population under house arrest. The electorates of the West are still convinced that the medical threat equals that of the Black Death, or the Spanish Flu; but this is wearing off.

Time now for Mister Trump to win by “reopening the economy” — which necessitates letting people out of their houses (or out of their dovecotes, in the case of the cities). Paying them to stay home soon proves as unsustainable as the Green New Deal, and almost as insane. Simply starving them to death is not politically viable. That Mister Trump was acting consistently in good faith (albeit coloured by his gigantic ego), I am convinced. As I say, he was played — along with the whole Western world. Had they been given true information from the outset, they could have taken effective action when the Chinese did.

Those with a broader sense of current history, might observe that Nixon and Kissinger made a grave mistake by their “opening to China.” But that was an argument I lost nearly half a century ago. China should have remained in isolation, until the demonic Maoist regime had collapsed. Here, however, I must not try to lure myself into the bottomless history of lost causes.

*

As Confucius would say (not to be confused with Xi Jinping), “Don’t hop on the long chariot.” This is among my mottoes from The Book of Songs, and the moral is, “Don’t concern yourself with the sorrows of the world. …

“You will only cover yourself with dust.”

It is the advice I’ve been neglecting in recent Idleposts.

Or put this another way: “The World Cannot be Fixed.” I know this sounds like a highly unsuccessful James Bond movie title, but it plays well in the cinema of my own mind.

The “long chariot” is the world of policy, or politics, where we are endlessly trying to fix the chariot: to keep it moving, or get it moving again. But the world doesn’t work on policy. In the broadest sense, it works on prayer; if I may define prayer so broadly that it includes ancestor worship. Its principles are those of celestial mechanics. It doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, it turns.

And it will continue turning. It didn’t stop when it was told to stop, and since it is already moving, it cannot be restarted, either.

Politicians, even the relatively benign ones, think the public is stupid. It is a safe bet, becoming safer every year. Repeat anything a sufficient number of times, and among those who know nothing about a subject, a consensus may be formed; quickly, when fear can also be manipulated. For well over a century, this has been the secret for the rise of the Left. It is based on sloganeering. It helps, to start, if one’s slogan is plausible — liberté, égalité, fraternité, sounds nice — but it ignores what is specific. This is because, the moment it gets real, it becomes incoherent. It is a blank face, a portrait of nothing. And nothing can’t do anything at all.

Repetition is key. The rise of totalitarianism has roughly coincided with the rise of democracy. I do not mean “fake” democracy, but the real thing: decision-making by genuine majorities. As anyone with any knowledge may know, the majority in society will share some conception of right and wrong, and this may well be reasonable. We may count on it for our everyday survival. But when they, or we, are put in unfamiliar territory, we are lost. We depend instead on leaders and guides. Our freedom is quickly surrendered to them. We start doing idiot things, like everybody standing six feet apart, or worse, two metres.

Our recent Batflu experience has brought home to me the novel virus in our modern world. We are, more and more, in starkly unfamiliar territory. In consequence, we are becoming unfamiliar to ourselves.

Trust may come from experience, but in order to acquire any experience one must start from trust. This is so even with freshly-born children: we don’t know them yet. So far as they are to acquire virtues, we must beat them in. And they will generally resist, and often defeat us. Parents, for the most part, learn this groundwork, which the childless never learn. The idea that people without children, or even the prospect of children, are entitled to the vote, horrifies me. They do not know the groundwork of human life. Their desires must necessarily be whimsical.

Perhaps I oversimplify. Parenting takes many forms. We call a celibate priest, “father,” and I’ve known old spinster ladies who were mothers in their kind. A child has not only biological parents, but the world into which he is born. He is parented, to old age, by the heroes he has chosen; by neighbourhood and nation. He is reared by the Church, though indirectly; or, mostly for worse, by the equivalent of a church. I did not mean “parent” quite literally.

It is this modern freedom from “parentage” that concerns me. Everyone traditionally came from somewhere. No two came from exactly the same place, not even siblings; but some commonalities had always been conceded. The expression, “assume a spherical cow of uniform density,” &c, explains why all statistical “sciences” are false and inapplicable; and yet it remains true that “a cow is a cow is a cow.” But now we have a society that, increasingly, believes itself to consist of spherical cows. And we are sloganed to, about our round-cow “rights,” constantly.

This, at heart, is our “globalist” new territory.

Gentle reader may be wondering how many people are in hospital with the Batflu. Let us take North America’s “epicentre” of New York City, for our spot check. The experts guessed, with all the confidence of settled science, that 140,000 beds would be needed at this point in the pandemic, give or take a few thousand. By the end of last week, 8,500 were occupied. That’s about one bed for every sixteen they anticipated. (A hotelier who trusted their calculations would be out of business by summer.)

Those glued to the news may have heard about this shortfall. Their horror is now, that if we go back to work, and try to put our lives back together, some of those beds may be refilled.

Horrible things do happen on this planet, and from the accounts I’ve read, the Chinese Communist Batflu is among them. If you get it, you could indeed become quite ill. But this is unlikely, unless you are already severely immuno-compromised. In a world that could think straight, the old and weak would be the very people we were racing to shelter: not de-prioritizing because they’re going to die soon anyway.

Your chances of getting the Xi Jinping Batflu are slight, and falling, but not actually zero. Of course, it is in the interest of the media of entertainment (which is to say, all the Western media today, with their heavy Chinese investments) to sensationalize; and thus produce a sensation that every political operative may apply to his self-interested, political ends.

It is hard for people, especially while scared, to consider anything in proportion. And it is difficult to find contextual information: for we cannot expect the media of entertainment to tell us anything that might ruin the show, while they’re in the theatre business.

The “beauty” of computer projections, working from speculative data by theory, is that it won’t be off by double, or half. It will be off by orders of magnitude. This will even help the researchers wet themselves. Whereas, mere common sense will fail every time.

Leafing through an old Idler magazine, during my own compulsory isolation, I was reminded of the scary age of Reagan. If my reader is old enough, he will remember nuclear annihilation. Did I know, I was then told, that the superpowers had enough A-bombs to vaporize everyone on the planet ten times over? — provided they were efficiently deployed, and we all held still. But as I argued then, there were other terrifying threats to human life.

“There is, for instance, enough water in the planet to drown everyone four thousand times; there are enough matches to set fire to every wooden building; enough kitchen knives to murder all the husbands of the world; enough hairspray (if drunk) to poison all their wives; enough pillows to smother the entire population of Asia; enough pencils to put out everyone’s eyes; enough fishbones to choke the combined population of France and Italy; enough ties, belts, suspenders, and pyjama draw strings to hang everyone over the age of forty; enough cigarettes (if eaten) to make everyone in Africa south of the Sahara throw up; enough stairs for all the toddlers in the world to fall down; enough statues to crush the inhabitants of the fourteen largest cities in the American Midwest; enough piano wire to garrot three-quarters of the population of Roumania; enough frozen lamb chops to club to death the entire Scottish aristocracy.”

Granted, the weight of human suffering. Granted, that we all progress to biological death, after a brief illusion of invincibility. But would it be entirely irresponsible, to dance our way through the interim? Even while the vultures are circling in the sky?

“Things will get worse before they get better; but then, they won’t get better.”

This morning’s happy thought is from Neville, an insurance broker who was among my drinking companions in Bangkok, forty years ago. To this day, he remains my standard-bearer for a certain kind of pessimism — the conventional kind — and I have often thought of him recently. Surely I have mentioned him before, in one scrawl or another. He was so perceptive.

One could walk down a street with Neville and, having been warned of the pedestrian dangers — many more, and less predictable, than one realized — he would call attention to faults in the design and construction of the buildings we passed by. All, so far as he could see, were doomed, and ought to be condemned frequently. At best, they might survive until engulfed in some large natural catastrophe: fire, flood, earthquake, volcano or whatever. In war, they might fall before they were hit.

I should mention, too, that Neville had the most delightfully dark sense of humour. The idea of a disaster filled him with good cheer; even little setbacks pleased him. He would giggle at the upshot from a memorable act of stupidity, then carefully constrain and collect himself, in order to express his condolence. But he knew what to do and say in an emergency, because he was so well rehearsed: dear Neville. (British, of course.)

Like many of my readers, I have become over-informed about the Batflu. Naturally, much of this information is knowingly false; most of the rest is wrong. By now, I even know that the pandemic was unlikely to have originated among the bats sold in the Wuhan wet market. This is because they don’t sell bats there (according to an old Hankow resident); whether for soup or for any other gustatory purpose. They do sell other interesting animals, however: especially fish.

That it was, as it were, a bat virus, follows naturally from whence it did come, in the same urban district. But rather than cultivate a reputation for paranoia myself, I will leave this to the historians.

For as Neville would say, you mustn’t blame anyone, unless you are willing to blame everyone, and apportion this blame justly. And you will never have time for that. You will only have time to do the sums on the insurance chart, and pay the indicated amount, provided that the total is small enough. If it isn’t, you might as well forget the whole thing.

“But surely someone should be blamed,” I once suggested.

“Good point,” he acknowledged. For he had also thought that through.

“You should do what the professionals have always done. Choose a plausible scapegoat, hang him, and then get on with your life.”

I pass along this advice, gratis.

Jesus was a nobody. Every modern university student should know this. He came from the equivalent of “flyover country” — in an insignificant (and colonized) backwater of the Middle East. His disciples were all nobodies, too. His earthly father was a working-class stiff; Joseph’s wife would have counted for less. He had no university or higher education: nothing even resembling a degree. He received no assistance from “experts.” So far as He did, in fact, have some expertise in Holy Scripture, he was self-taught. He had no standing in any of the elites of Palestine; no wealthy relations. He’d never been anywhere else (except Egypt, as a child). Nazareth and district were less visited than the Guadalupe Mountains, and Jerusalem was not an important provincial capital. Even within Jerusalem, Jesus was somewhere between unknown and disliked. There was little in the way of media in those days, even in Rome or Alexandria, but by what there were, He was ignored. His publicity was entirely word-of-mouth. The sensation briefly caused by His Crucifixion — one of millions of judicial murders through the ages — was well contained. All of his disciples (except one) abandoned him. A few loyal women still kicked around. But even after his death on Good Friday, and all the events after His death, the word spread slowly.

He was not one of the “smart people.” The only thing you could say, He was the Son of God.

This, however, is quite a lot, and helps to explain, if it does not entirely, his emergence as also the Son of Man — the most significant man in history. That it is a matter of frustration for those smart people, might go without saying. They insist on their intellectual monopoly.

Among His disciples we later count Paul. Now this was closer to a smart guy, with a few social connexions, as were displayed in his role as an early Christian persecutor. My own “road to Damascus” was across the old Hungerford footbridge in London, which is why I can begin to understand the event. Amateur psychologists can, if they want, provide a retrospective analysis of why anyone would reverse his attitudes on everything, when he had been enjoying worldly success; why he would court death by doing so; why, in the end, he’d be willing to die. Some have tried.

There is no arguing with such people.

In general, people believe what they want to believe, including the most astonishing things (ghosts, flying saucers, or the carbon threat). In my judgement, we are all half crazy. But the phenomenon of Faith does not reduce to belief. There are people of faith who believe almost nothing; there are people of belief who will believe anything. I hope to die a Christian.

But in the meantime, if any remains, I should like to oppose almost everything that is currently believed. One might begin by opposing the received views on Jesus Christ.

Tonight, it is my slight hope that all the bells on all the closed churches will ring out — say, from midnight to dawn. For I could not think of a plainer contradiction to these received views. The message would be simple:

He is risen.

True, I said that I wasn’t going to Idleblog this week, but today, Maundy Thursday, the 44th anniversary of the moment when I became a “born again” Christian, I will dispense a few more words.

*

This year, I am one of the world’s 7.8 billion coronavirus bystanders.

I arrived at this number by taking the total number of media-reported covid-19 infections, multiplying by ten, then subtracting the product from the UN’s current estimate of the world’s population. (Which is 7.8 billion.)

Were we instead to go by the death count, the number of non-bystanders would shrink. As we now know, the proportion who die from the disease is less than 1 percent, and it falls as testing increases. But as most of those victims are elderly, and enduring other life-terminative conditions, the published numbers still overestimate the toll. The conventional winter flu pneumonias would have carried many of them away, had there been no coronavirus.

For my sins, in earlier life, I acquired a fascination for “policy wonk” topics, and continue to suffer from that today. I am morbidly interested in the demographic questions, in the disclosures of epidemiology, in the economic ramifications of moral action on both large and small scales. It is an addiction.

Even before I became a Christian, I was curious about the social implications of Christianity in its various forms, and likewise about the other religions. (I lived in Asia a lot.) What are, or what would be, the fiscal effects of living with belief? What are, or would be, the effects on public health?

Add what we call “secularism” to the list of religions — in its mild “agnostic” or stronger Atheist modes — and a murky but grander picture emerges. The phenomenon that we call, vaguely, “globalism,” comes into play.

What is globalism? I define it differently from most avowed globalists, or those who accept it as an irreversible trend. It involves, according to me, the attitude that the world may be judged by numbers. It is post-godly “secularism,” or a thoroughgoing worldliness, writ on the largest scale its upholders can imagine — “world-class worldliness,” as it were. It is a universal reduction of moral realities to “value-free” numbers, and thus implies obedience to those who manipulate them.

Whether these numbers are gathered and applied by “socialists” or “capitalists” is not important. The mud-wrestle of power determines that, as to some degree it has always done.

But as Red China has been proving (I hope for not much longer), the two systems — totalitarian dirigisme and crass wealth-seeking — are perfectly compatible. Scientistic numerology is their common language, and its opposition to the humane and religious becomes more and more explicit, everywhere. (Even in the Vatican the pope speaks in the “globalist” bafflegab.) It is the “trend,” verily, and in the world of numbers, trends have replaced God. The current pandemic has provided it with an unprecedented breakthrough. For the first time in all human history, the whole world can be “locked down,” and religious activities globally suppressed.

The “covid crisis,” to choose a label, might have spread gradually from a wet market in China under any system. We did have pandemics in the low-tech past. Once, they took longer to travel the Silk Road, cross the Sahara, float shipboard or (in the case of the Spanish Flu, apparently) come from Kansas.

But war, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts have been with us for some time. To the mind of the religious of almost any persuasion, they are facts of life, and quite possibly a poignant indication of the displeasure of the heavens.

To the “globalist” mind, however, they are a technical problem. The modern, progressive, habitually liberal mind can’t imagine a catastrophe as anything else. Its first instinct is to put a Dr Fauci on the job, and appoint a Dr Birx as Chief Nanny. This is also its last instinct.

I have nothing against either Dr Fauci or Dr Birx, by the way; nor against any of this world’s technicians. I am generally pro-life, and in the habit of granting breathing rights even to technocrats; even when their explanations of everything are in the habit of proving radically incomplete, or more simply, wrong; and even when they pull at the heartstrings of our empathy to engage our cooperation with their orders.

For these are true believers in the messages they project: a belief so sincere that they are willing to provide false and misleading information to clinch a point — such as reclassifying death certificates from the factual “pneumonia,” to the speculative “covid-19,” even when it hasn’t been tested for, to inflate the numbers. This is done almost without thinking, for to the modern almost unthinkingly, “the end justifies the means.”

*

The giving of comfort is a more complex thing. It takes us from statistics to their opposite, Love.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta was sometimes criticized (by Christopher Hitchens and others who considered themselves, like Trotsky, “on the side of history”) for her ministry to the very sick and dying. While her nuns provided medicines, whenever they could, their approach was not essentially pharmaceutical.

Perhaps most scandalous, to their critics, was their acceptance of the fact that people are going to die.

Jesus, too, was going to die, and among the most powerful and moving statements I find in all literature are the words Mother Mary addressed to Him along the Via Dolorosa:

“I am here.”

This is not what the high-pressure ventilators say, within which the dying patient is segregated from a nurse, or his family, or from anyone. Within all the expensive equipment that contains him, he is left to die alone and unblessed. The priest for whom he might have called, for last rites — administered, we imagine, from outside the machine — may not even be admitted to the hospital, unless he is seriously ill himself. Perhaps he is in another ventilator.

Context is rather important here. We can see this from the fact that church services, Masses, are closed by the public hygiene officials as, usually, their first step. While the coronavirus was merrily cavorting through the high-class shopping venues of Milan, its churches were already sealed off. Those who think the presence of Christ is more important than their very lives, are not indulged. After all, they might become living vectors for the virus. (“Statistics have shown.”)

That testing, contact tracing, and the quarantine of likely cases should be done, I take for granted. The quarantine of everyone is an innovation, however. In the past, people needed not even to be told about social distancing; they figured it out for themselves very quickly. (Read Thucydides on the plague at Athens, &c.) Such obvious points, as that crowding speeds infection, have been grasped since time out of mind. That cities tend to host contagions has been known since cities were invented. That travel is dangerous is not a new discovery, either.

When they do not have a cure, the “experts” do not have a cure. The best they can do is try to find one, or a way to reduce pain, failing that. But despair is not something that technocrats can “solve.”

I think of Mother Teresa and her nuns, going into the leper colonies. They took whatever precautions they could, but as their saintly mistress herself had said, “I wouldn’t touch a leper for a million dollars. I do it willingly for the love of God.” (She lived to age eighty-seven, incidentally.)

Beyond this, the facts of life continue to obtrude. Our medical experts cannot account for the ways bacteria and viruses disport themselves, often even in retrospect. They are constantly taken by surprise in sudden outbreaks: the where and why and intensity of them.

The hygiene authorities are actually trained to discount the power of a human soul to resist afflictions. The extraordinary efficacy of placebos demonstrates this narrowness again and again. That people are more likely to live, when they want to live, is shown in diminishing life expectancy in the most technologically advanced societies. Opiates announce this. In the West, suicides still outstrip “covid” deaths, defining suicide in the strictest, most immediate way. (Check the numbers; the hygiene specialists count it as a disease.)

Yes, covid-19 is a killer. It is one of many, and they all work. Death is almost unique in our world, in being 100 percent efficient. Perhaps that is why, at some level, we worship, propitiate, and appease, death.

But Christ not only died. He died for us, on Good Friday. For, having descended from heaven to earth, He then went farther, down into Hell. And was raised — Resurrected. And was dead, and behold, is alive for evermore. And has the keys of Hell and of Death.

For this is the Truth that, in defiance of the technocrats, we must shamelessly proclaim: that in light of these unalterable facts, death shall have no more dominion.