Essays in Idleness

[An Italian editor, of the magazine, Tempi, recently asked me to explain Canada to his readers. How did this most timorous and bashful of nations come to be at the cutting edge of the international “gender revolution,” and related monstrosities of social engineering? My answer was published, here. Should any of my readers feel uncomfortable in Italian, I publish an English version, below.]

*

With a French Canadian friend, and a talented portrait photographer, I once contemplated writing a coffee-table book about Canada. The idea was to travel coast-to coast — from the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland to the farthest rock on Vancouver Island — seeking mischief, and taking pics. There are plenty of coffee-table books on Canada; ours, of course, would be different. It would tell wayward histories of places, including the element of farce; dig into ancestral culture and cuisine; and interview the saltier characters, while maintaining a tone of backhanded affection. It would subvert various national clichés, and shoot some sacred cows.

But we fell out quickly. I found my proposed co-author too forgiving of English Canada; he found me too forgiving of Quebec; the photographer found us both naïve about the Indians. I was allergic to the picturesque and romantic (which sells). Nor did I wish to echo the pretension of depth in the title of a once-famous journalist’s survey, Canada: The Unknown Country. In fact I proposed, “Canada: The Stupid Country,” in an effort to appal everyone.

Years have since passed, and far from having been completed, this project has yet to start. Perhaps I am writing the introduction only now.

*

It would be easy to say Canada is not a country at all, or not a country any more, but a quilt of a few spare American regions, stitched whimsically together. It has no organizing principle that any of its inhabitants could articulate. On the one hand, the dominant ethnicity, speaking English by birth or convenience, is itself merely a northern extension of English-speaking North America, otherwise known as the United States. Most of our people live within a short drive to the USA border. There are climatic reasons for this, and they are unanswerable. Our own regional differences, east to west along this thin strip, are greater than those of any with its adjoining American region. When our nationalists assume their opponents want Canada to become “the 51st American state,” I contradict them. No, we would become the 51st through 60th states.

But too, we have consciously discarded our old British, “Crown-in-Parliament” political identity, which did make a difference. For what formerly distinguished us as a nation was the fact that our ancestors had lost the American Revolutionary War, to those frisky “Patriots.” We were the “Loyalists” who, in 1776, violently refused to rebel, then marched into the northern wilds to free ourselves from the tyranny of popular government. (“Better one tyrant, three thousand miles away, than three thousand tyrants one mile away.”)

Indeed, both sides were cantankerous, wilful Yankees; ours was more racially varied. But we have since copied various USA institutions, from the Supreme Court, to the lamentable sport of baseball, while abandoning our old enthusiasm for the Crown, and replacing it with democratic cant and blather. The vestiges that remain of our distinct identity are thus now foreign to us. We’re apt to apologize for them.

Margaret Atwood, the American-style feminist, once wrote a book (Survival) in which she got the history of our country prior to her adulthood precisely backwards. She presented us as victims of Imperialism. But we had always been perpetrators: Imperialists ourselves, and quite proud of it. Our one frustration was that aged English granny was still clinging to the reins. And then, when it was our turn to run the Empire, the silly old woman gave it away.

Until recently Americans, like Europeans, were taught their national histories and mythologies in school. Present-day Canadians have no clue about ours. The younger graduates think it began in 1982, when Pierre Trudeau declared independence, and freed the slaves. If anything happened before, it must have been shameful, as our authorities confirmed last year, when we were supposed to be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the actual foundation — of our fair “Dominion,” as it is no longer called. (It’s now a “federal government,” just like USA.) It was a grim, year-long festival of liberal-progressive virtue signalling, through which we apologized to the Indians, for having apparently stolen their land.

This yielded many unintentionally comic moments, that were typically Canadian. We love to apologize, and are good at it. Apologizing for crimes in which no living person could possibly have participated, is what we do best.

We are also world leaders in queuing. We like to form polite and patient lines, for everything from bureaucratic forms, to Tim Horton’s coffee. A “cultural difference” may have emerged in this area, for Americans still don’t like to wait. They would much rather shoot you. But Canadians like to organize themselves in long, winding, respectful lines, for which, alas, there is no Olympic medal. And unlike Americans, we don’t talk to strangers, so there’s none of the socializing you get, south of the border, if a bus is late. Talk to the next Canadian in line, and his first impulse is to call the cops.

Rather than boast about this accomplishment, we simply radiate smugness and self-satisfaction. Recent immigrants learn: how, for instance, to walk like a Canadian, and apologize to a lamp post, should you happen to collide with it.

I am making this point because it is crucial — crucial to understanding what we might call the Canadian “atrophy.” We are a people going nowhere in particular, and thus, unhurried. We have a few pushy capitalists, to be sure, but they are a product of nature. The rest are accepting, even of the weather; for these days we can fly to Florida when it becomes insupportable.

An American friend, after a long visit, told what would happen if you drove your car right over a Canadian, dividing him in two. The top half would drag itself up to your car window. It would say: “Excuse me, sir, you should watch for pedestrians.”

This is crucial because it explains why Canada seems, to distant observers, to be in the vanguard of progressive “human rights,” drug toleration, and the “gender revolution.” It is not because Canadians are exceptionally depraved. The average Canadian would die of boredom before participating in an orgy. We’ve had “gay marriage” here for fifteen years, but hardly any takers. We have human rights tribunals, reminiscent of the Star Chambers in centuries gone by, and now laws governing our use of pronouns, but no one pays them any mind. And should they run afoul of them, they will go quietly, and write apologies to everyone. We have had legal abortion, seemingly forever, without even nominal restrictions, and sure enough we also have a few “pro-life” activists; but nobody likes them because they’re so unCanadian.

*

Perhaps I should mention that what is true today, wasn’t in the past. Canadians certainly did their share of the damage in two World Wars and Korea. From German memoirs, one learns that our troops — Methodist farm boys from Ontario and the like — filled them with terror. They’d be psychopathically aggressive to a fault, then suddenly stop for tea. The same was generally true through my parents’ generation. They would make scenes when they weren’t being served; you didn’t want to cross them. Our feminist tradition was from pioneering women who cleared rocks and tree stumps before planting wheat. You wouldn’t have had to explain their rights to them. But all that faded.

The story of post-modern revolution is certainly not a Canadian story. As befits our ancestry, centrally Norman English and Norman French, we were for God, King, and Country, and if English-speaking, extremely quick to sign up for wars. The French of Quebec were famously defeated on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and have sometimes moaned about that. But there was continuity at the heart of their experience, too. From their first landings to the present day, they have lived under one monarch or another; his ethnicity didn’t matter much. Only in 1960, suddenly and almost unaccountably, they awoke from their mediaeval slumber and overthrew … their own Catholic Church.

Since that “Quiet Revolution” — nobody hit, even by a snowball — they have entertained a Separatism that is paradoxical and odd. Having destroyed their own heritage, they demand that it be protected from immersion in the “Anglo” culture all around them: the very one they so eagerly embraced. Hence oppressive language laws, with bureaucrats who actually measure the point-size of any English that may be visible on a sign or label; and other unbelievably petty impositions, instantly waived for American tourists.

That is how it came to be, that in the vast reaches that speak English only, public services are bilingual; but in the bilingual areas, they are French-only. The national capital, Ottawa, speaks English in the streets, but French in all the government departments. This is very Norman: England was like that, too, in the twelfth century. And it is very Canadian: for people here take everything lying down. Or more precisely, we line up for it.

And this is why Canada has advanced, to the “cutting edge” of contemporary depravity: because no one — French or English or assimilate “multicultural” — would think to complain. I am of course exaggerating. It is not quite everyone. There are a few exceptions. But I think I know them all.

[Continued in next post, above.]

The Carthusians, an eremitic order a few decades short of their one thousandth year, provide a model for retirement from the world. They do not proselytize; they do not mess with the world at all, except by prayer. They don’t beg for money; they refuse even to make cause for any of their own suspected saints; only others may speak for them. In the descent through the centuries from St Bruno of Cologne, they have consistently minded their own business, stayed clean of politics, and got on with their tasks in daily work and worship. Only a few hundred remain, in a couple dozen Charterhouses around the world; yet they shrink and grow unaccountably.

Well, short of death, no complete disengagement is possible. The Nazis massacred them because they were sheltering Jews, and a few Communists, too. (There is a good book on this, La Strage di Farneta, “The Farneta Massacre,” by the Italian journalist Luigi Accattoli, compiled from the extensive materials Pope St John Paul II was assembling on the martyrs of the twentieth century.) After the war, Carthusian survivors were compelled to publicize that their sanctuary was disinterested. The fact that Communists had come to them for shelter in no way implied sympathy for their cause.

Indeed, they had been massacred by the Republicans and Communists during the Spanish Civil War.

They were massacred during the French Revolution.

They were massacred during the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against Spanish Catholic rule.

They were massacred during the English Reformation after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

They were massacred during the Hussite Revolution in fifteenth-century Bohemia.

And so on. I mention these things not to jerk tears, but to make a point confirmed through history. If gentle reader thinks he may retreat to a place where the world will not follow him, he may think again. The very act of retirement to prayer is an excitement to the devil, and murderous mobs of nominalists, enlighteners, liberals, progressives, and others inspired by Satan, have been with us since time out of mind. Do not assume that you are safe in South Dakota, or wherever else the Latin Mass is sung.

Holiness, more largely, is an incitement to the demonic forces, as Christ not only taught, but demonstrated. It is a grave theological error to present Him as naïve. One is safer in this world to avoid holiness, if you are capable of believing that Hell does not exist. How Christ will save you, when you have done no good, I leave up to Him; for it is beyond my imagination.

It happens that my Joint Chief Washington Correspondent has forwarded a brilliant short piece by Dr James Patrick, in which he advances the “Newman Option” for Catholic life in these difficult times. (See here.) As it states realities in a learned, elegant, and very concise way, I shall merely endorse it. Moreover, it appears to be a tract for what I might describe as Christian Idleness.

There is a place for political works, to my mind, including especially works of self-defence when something can be accomplished by them. But these are transient acts. In any longer scheme, and even in the shorter, God and not man is the author of Salvation.

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I have received a protest from a South Dakotan, who writes:

“The home of the B-1 Bomber, one of the more desirable nuke targets, is in a big, open field that I look out on from my picnic table. … People call their neighbours in downtown Rapid City when a cougar is walking down the boulevard. (No, not that kind of cougar.) … Children are minced up with farm equipment, though never for profit, unlike other places in the USA. … South Dakotans do not imagine that they are safe; they are simply intent upon preserving what they love. In the case of the Latin Mass, they built their own chapels, flew in priests and bishops for Sacraments, and stared down more than one Novus Ordo bishop. … South Dakotans can cut their own trees and build their own churches. They can spin and weave their own vestments and altar cloths, take their own wheat and grapes and make hosts and wine. … Some of their children become priests and monks and nuns. Others become scientists and teachers who know what creation means and what salvation requires, and pass that information along intact to the next generation. … By the way, Mr Warren, we also write and bite.”

But, but, I reply, I do not say that South Dakotans have illusions about the safety of South Dakota. Rather, beleaguered Catholics of the Eastern Seaboard have the illusion that they’d be safe in South Dakota, and I would edify them.

Call me a rootless cosmopolitan, but (you could feel that “but” coming, couldn’t you gentle reader?) the wide world would be lost on me without a sense of place. In the moment of space and time, there is location, and it follows us about. In starting upon any journey there must be a point of departure, and in life itself one must come from somewhere. Perhaps we have forgotten.

It might be a place you despise. Many of my friends come from places like that; I love hearing them trash their own origins. Always, there is love at the root of it; but how well it can be concealed!

Some Hebridean I have come to know through the mixed miracle of email has it just right. He was born in South Uist, but has hardly been back. His love for the place has grown in his absence from it, in the usual Caledonian or Hibernian manner. Yet it expands. His sense of being from a croft or blackhouse, a long time ago; from an island, from an archipelago, from Scotland, from the British Isles, from Europe, from the planet Earth, is telescoped in a single soul on what we might call the Aristotelian focal principle. True love is something that cannot be escaped.

Among the dangers of travel is homesickness. I was myself, as a once-girlfriend put it, “kicked around the globe” in childhood and youth, and in a moment of fury, she described me as an empty can, shaped by this experience. A man of dents and creases. I had to acknowledge the truth of her observation, for as a consequence of my wanderings, I already felt nostalgia for many different places; and that sense of loss that comes with many deaths. Persons to whom I was once so close — when we were young — removed over seas of space and time. And now I hear of the death of someone in his seventies, whom I had not seen since he was thirty, and weep for all the lost years.

There is an old Japanese Buddhist quatrain I once carried around in my heart, and in my shoes on the open road. It is a prayer of pilgrimage; perhaps a pilgrimage to nowhere:

Really there is no East and West:
Where, then, is the North and the South?
Illusion makes the world close in,
Enlightenment opens it on every side.

All roads lead to Rome, as once was true throughout the West, and continues true in the Catholic chest. And in every Christian: to Heaven’s Gate in Jerusalem Wall. (Roman Catholics are Christians, incidentally.)

Once I was on foot in the north of Spain, following what I did not fully realize was a pilgrim route to the shrine of Saint James the Great: the Camino de Santiago. That was in my pre-Christian state; in fact, I never got there. It is among my regrets that I did not carry on.

From here to there we go, in time, even if we don’t in space. Our own home may become unrecognizable; if we returned as a ghost in a thousand years, we might be dispossessed of our last illusion. There is no here, here, on which to rely, and everything crumbles in the passage through the ages. All change is for the worse, as Father Faber said, including change for the better. But, “those are pearls that were his eyes,” &c. Everything will be transformed.

We can know of our beginnings, but in the old Roman proverb, respice finem, we must “consider the end.”

Would it be in gentle reader’s best interest to be dead?

Don’t ask me. The question is for you this morning. Your case may be more complicated than mine. Perhaps the choice is between being dead and committing a monstrous crime, that will involve the death of others; whether this be a sin of commission, or omission. I find it useful to think about such situations myself; and to dream about them, as I have done. Nightmares they are, truly, but in this life, there are not only sweet dreams.

But what if you were in pain, perhaps terrible pain (I leave you to decide what “pain” means), and your prospect of getting out of it alive were naught, short of a miracle. Then what do you do?

The Christian teaching looks tough. The pain, however great, is yours to endure, and offer up to the Cross, till God himself pulls your life support system. His works differently from the tech support in hospitals. There are no legal appeals to turn it on or off. Sooner or later, everyone must die in the flesh; until when, choosing life is indicated, as a lawyer might put it.

A great deal of blather has been pumped into the issue of medical life support, thanks to the complexity of our machines. Even a healthy human requires air, water, food, and an environment within a certain temperature range, or he will die in the flesh. Remove these things from another in one’s care and, at least in the past, one would be facing a charge of murder. There is no hospital, of which I am aware, that has not the equipment to deliver these things, even to a comatose patient; and I have seen some under-equipped hospitals in my time.

The rest is negotiable. It is a little known fact that the Church does not, and never did insist on genuinely high-tech interventions, to keep a body nominally alive. She is there to provide the Sacraments to the gravely ill and dying. This, too, requires simple machinery, and must not be denied.

Comas, “vegetative states,” incurable conditions — these are nothing new. The neurological disorders are perhaps more a mystery to the doctors, yet all human diseases are finally a mystery to them. A doctor once described to me the mechanics of kidney failure. He was an honest man, and a specialist, who distinguished between what is obvious, and what isn’t. There was so much he could do with confidence; so much with less confidence; so much he could not do at all. The sort of doctor, I would say, who would never be involved with “killing a patient for his own good”; the sort who may already be rare in our medical faculties.

Brain degeneration is common to us all. One thing can be said for it: the condition is painless. If a man really is reduced to the intellectual state of a turnip, then he feels no pain, beyond that which a turnip might feel. If more, then one has misstated his condition. But practically, we do know that patients with serious brain damage are normally unaware of the fix they are in, for the very reason that they feel no pain.

It is the same for those immersed in the contemporary media of news and entertainment. The brain damage is cumulative, and sadly very real; but the customers are unaware of it.

[Today is my LXVth birthday. Pray for me.]

There is little to add to what I wrote in yesterday’s Thing (here), besides the words quoted in the heading above. They have been used many times, but I am thinking particularly of an old diary — from pioneering life in Ontario — in which these words were the entry for one day. Two hundred years hadn’t lightened them.

We assume that our ancestors were hard people, because they lived harder lives. They “couldn’t afford” all the feelings we have in our much easier lives. The proof, to us, is in such hard-fact diary inscriptions. We have the leisure to make a bigger display. Paper and ink are cheap today; electrons are free. We emote freely; we have the space on Twitter and Facebook to share our grief with the world. Our ancestors did not. But it wasn’t just the price of ink and paper.

In Vietnam, I first noticed a remarkable cultural misunderstanding. I can’t speak for the present, but know this from what soon will be half a century ago. Americans, and also Europeans, would be appalled by the unsentimentality of the Vietnamese. Often they did not scream, when seriously injured, through what must have been intense pain. An involuntary tear was the only indication. Funerary wailing was formalized, and as in many pre-modern cultures, the wealthy might hire others to do their wailing for them. The grieving would, having paid for this service, have nothing to add. They might stare. They did not smile when greeting friends and relatives, the way we have long done in the West. And Westerners would take this for rudeness.

In every “traditional” culture I have encountered, raw emotion is masked. We, the products of Hollywood, assume that what is masked is nothing. We can do far grander displays, even while faking it. It is theatre of another kind. With an understandable total ignorance of a foreign culture, Westerners would sometimes actually say that, “the Vietnamese don’t have any feelings.” This made us feel better about blowing them up — since, until they had been westernized, they showed no emotion when blowing us up.

But we had once been much like them. Once, we had taken our lumps, silently; once, we had ritualized external display. And this was decency. You (anyone) will never be able to see inside a marriage that is not your own; or inside a family death. Words don’t go there.

Our civilization is so broken, that it is now possible to take death out of the family. Like every other human thing, it now belongs to the State. The British State decided when and how Alfie Evans should die, and of what his “death with dignity” should consist, in unapologetic contempt for the wishes of his own mother and father. For hardly the first time, the legal and medical machinery of State imposed a decision to remove “nutrition, hydration, ventilation”; to make Alfie die in a hospital, attended by cool professionals, rather than at home alone with those who loved him. The bureaucrats now have policies on this.

In the refrain of a Canadian folk song, by the late Stan Rogers: “God damn them all.”

I think that I am living in Toronto (or “Greater Parkdale” from my point of view), but when I consult the media I cannot be sure. I should know, I suppose, but most of the information is dubious.

Now, Los Angeles clearly does not exist, but is a creature of its own imagination. This I realized while proposing an article to an editor once, that would have been entitled, “A Pedestrian in Greater LA.” He, a former Angeleno himself, turned down the idea, either for my own safety (parts are as dangerous as Kabul or Chicago), or because he feared I might give the city’s little secret away: that despite appearances, it isn’t really there. Still, the appearances are maintained; for the unreal city is “too big to fail.”

When I lived in London, as a much younger man, I felt certain that the city existed, and that every shyre of Engelonde existed, too. Canterbury, for instance: I once walked there from Southwark, confirming map references along the way; then returning, found nothing had moved. In conversation with an old lady, polishing brass in a parish church, I learnt that the town had existed for some time, even on the night the Luftwaffe tried to erase it. She’d been there. And of course we have the evidence of Chaucer. (For Los Angeles we have only what Hollywood says.)

The blitz of 1st June, 1942, was a shocking event; as shocking, I should think, as the RAF blitz on Cologne, two nights earlier. And yet, I was told, the inhabitants were not shocked. A row of timber-frame houses had blown down. The brass-polishing lady, then a little girl in one of them, remembered that only a few of her neighbours had been killed; but many were trapped in the wood and plaster. Those who found themselves alive in the street went to work digging them out and, she said, there were no tears. “Full employment,” as an economist might say. Moreover, they had reason to be happy, for the great cathedral behind them looked undamaged. The neighbourhood was gone, true enough. But the cathedral was standing in “a ring of fire,” as St Paul’s had been in London some months before.

One gets used to these things. One learns that tears are useless. We must attend to the living, bury the dead, organize the rubble in piles for recycling. “Let the dead bury their dead.” This is a hard saying, from the Gospels. One would have to be quite a clown, to think it means do not bury your father. Rather it means follow Christ: now, not later.

In Toronto, these days, I sometimes have the vision of a vast cemetery, bodies stacked to the skies, the hearses rumbling through every street, along with busloads of corpses. “Unreal city,” as a certain poet said. I look across Humber Bay, to a new row of high-rise mausolea, built in the short time since I moved into this flat. Do you know that children are raised in these houses of death? Not many, but a few. Imagine growing up in such a place: interred from birth.

Yesterday’s news event occasioned little shock, except among witnesses. Those on the streets, along Yonge below Finch, were surprised to see the driver of a rental van, purposefully running down other pedestrians. But a few miles downtown, where I was then and in the hours just after, it was like any other news item. I didn’t know that anything unusual had happened, until I got home and looked in my email.

I might have guessed from an announcement in the subway: “Line 1 is closed north of Shepherd due to a police investigation of an accident that occurred outside the station.” (Translation: “Whatever happened, it was not our fault.”)

But vehicle plough-downs are like fender-benders, these days. They’re like bombing raids during a war, once you get used to them. They can’t hold people’s attention. We need bigger and bigger death-counts to keep ourselves amused. The media, earnestly trying to fulfil their mandate, can only hope for them.

In the evening, in pubs across the city, people were riveted to the spectacle of our Maple Leafs trying to stay alive in the playoffs, against the Boston Bruins. The Leafs won, in the Air Canada Centre, before a capacity crowd of dead people. (Really?)

I am not being cynical. This is how things are.

God for Harry, England, and Saint George! Indeed, why the Lord would be so tolerant of the English, I may never understand, but there you go. Lots of Royal news, these last few days; gentle reader will excuse me as I continue to polish my monarchist credentials. And, good work Duchess! Not only the bundle in itself, but delivering its contents — our new tiny Prince — upon Saint George’s Day!

God bless us every one: for we now have “an heir and a spare.” Two spares, since the so-called “Conservative” former prime minister, some fellow named David Cameron, persuaded the guvmints of the Sixteen Commonwealth Realms to revise time-hallowed English common law to absolute primogeniture. (Roman Catholics are still barred from the throne, but their descendants now qualify, so long as they aren’t papists themselves.)

But hello: “It’s a boy!”

There is a cry still echoing down the ages. Any feminist or gender theoretician who doesn’t like it can go dangle from a rope. I have no time to write an Idlepost today, to which I might have added further provocations, so this squib will have to do.

Gentle reader, take a moment from what you are doing to drain a quick coupe of champagne. Then back to the mèinnean salainn. (I believe that is the Gaelic for “salt mines.”)

[I’ve been fussing with this essay, which is much too grand.]

*

As an unreconstructed monarchist, and general reactionary, I have notarized several items of news lately touching on the British succession. Now, seriously, under Scots law, one cannot be a “notar” unless one is first a solicitor, or so I was once told. So perhaps I only noted, that the succession of Charles, not only to the Kingship of Canada, but also to the Headship of the Commonwealth of Nations, is already proceeding. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has, with her characteristic wisdom and foresight, been “pushing the envelope” on this one, internationally, lest the usual liberal-progressive fiends seize the opportunity to try something on, in the event (quod Deus avertat!) of her demise.

Of course, I am also a Jacobite, but my (Loyalist, Scotch Presbyterian) ancestors were able smoothly to transfer their allegiance from the Stuarts to the Hanovers, when a worse enemy came in sight — in their case, republican revolutionists in these American colonies. Gaelic dance requires feat footing, and the occasional exchange of partners.

It is best, in any realm, to have only one person on the throne at a time, and that person as legitimate as possible. Putting a committee, a party or, worst, an “idea” on the throne, instead, is no recipe for digestible oatmeal. And for sake of completeness, God leaves the construction of earthly thrones to the human chairmakers, and Christ the King is above them all.

The democrats of this world — and I am not one of them — are of the opinion that the only way to obtain a peaceful transition of power is by mass voting. This is nonsense, as will be seen in the impending civil war, between voting constituencies of the Left and Right that cannot abide each other. Princes of Church and State are meant to ride above mere factional squabbles; to embody wholes, not halves.

Yet peace is secured by neither monarchy, nor democracy, but by universal subscription to legitimate rule. It is in the hands of the people, finally, who alone can resist their Adamic inclinations to malicious idiocy, abetted by sociopaths and frauds, demagogues and imposters. The singular beauty of inheritance in a kingdom is that the instruments of succession hold relatively still. Mobs, by comparison, shift about. Their decision of one day is rued in another. They are combustible by nature.

(The USA revolutionists did finally frame an arguably legitimate constitutional order, that was mature enough to last fifty years. The Founding Fathers had views on democracy quite similar to mine. Came they back to see how their Constitution had fared “by the people,” and the politicians of DC, they would surely vomit.)

Nothing in our human world works smoothly for long, thanks to sin, and I wouldn’t want to overstate hereditary virtues. Moreover, the conflict with revolutionary forces is one that will exist in all ages, as we first discovered in Eden Pairc. For the devil never gives up, and won’t, until Time itself is concluded. The enemies of peace, order, and good government, may claim to have alternative organizing principles, but except Tyranny, they never do. Their real intention, under the sponsorship of the infernal power, is to undermine any order that exists, promote discontent, and turn it into violence.

Notwithstanding anything I may have said yesterday, the personal morality of the leader — whether she be Her Majesty, or Trump — makes no fatal difference. It isn’t a public matter, it shouldn’t concern the people, if the people are left alone. It is matter between the ruler and God. Even King David had foibles.

(Those Bible-reading Evangelicals understand this, among whom Trump’s popularity just soars.)

The issue with Henry VIII, for instance, was not that he was personally a rake, scum, adulterer, and overall sleazebag, like many other monarchs. Rather it was that he, by his actions, was overturning the political and ecclesiastical order of England, Wales, and all Europe — with terrible consequences that, incidentally, Saint Thomas More foresaw. For this alone, he was worth deposing. Alas, the Pilgrimage of Grace failed.

The crimes of the Borgias and Medicis fill me with indifference. They did not try to change the teaching of Holy Church. Only a pope who toys with that, ought to be removed from office.

One must not only have a legitimate ruler, but he must rule legitimately, leaving the office as he found it, having made no fundamental change. This, Her Majesty our beloved Queen, has been doing her best to assure, and as always, God Save the Queen!

Continuing in my apocalyptic mode, let me consider the case of Meghan Markle, Greater Parkdale’s dubious gift to the Royal Family. And let me say that I have nothing against her, “personally,” and no objections to her impending marriage to sportive Prince Harry, beyond what any loyal subject should have.

It won’t be a real wedding; just a court masque with the full court media in attendance. Miss Markle (not to be confused with the admirable Miss Marple) is already married, to a Mr Trevor Engelson; quite recently discarded. Until very recently, in the procession of generations, the concept of “divorce” did not exist in Western Christendom. I didn’t say, “in the Church Catholick” — any congregation would have been scandalized. It was made to exist by the civil authorities, who at least required an Act of Parliament to effect a divorce in these British realms. In USA, it was a feature of Las Vegas.

Mere separation was scandal enough, but this could be assuaged by disappearing into a monastery, for instance, or by emigration. There are true incompatibles, who cannot be made to live together, and from whose parting we may look the other way; but it does not follow from a failed marriage that either party should be permitted to marry again. The opposite approach would be dictated, by reason.

Whatever gentle reader might mention about the monstrous King Henry VIII, the Church of England did not formally accept remarriage after divorce until 2002; by which time the whole institution of marriage was anyway a joke. The principle of “till death do you part,” at the very heart of our civilization, is still recognized by a tiny minority of churchgoers, mostly Roman. But for the population at large, mired in filth, it is now so much spit on the floor.

In my humble and possibly uncontroversial opinion, Royals are public figures. They are exemplars to that general population, so strictures should apply to them with double force. How are we to effect repairs, to the heart of our civilization, while the “cool people” are still twisting the knife?

Again, nothing against this Markle woman, though I think Prince Harry should have known better, and might well have done had he been better raised. He is brave and good in many ways, and I don’t doubt that she has talents. For instance, after examining a photograph in the Daily Telegraph, I am convinced that she is capable of walking in six inch stilettos. Or else they are four-inch, and she is very short. But let me frankly admit, that is quite impressive.

I am not impressed by her (media celebrated) mixed race, however. Countless millions have accomplished that, with no effort on their own part. The insinuation behind the blather — that the Royal Family was previously racist — is so far beneath contempt as to constitute a typical media smear.

It is true, I was not invited to the wedding. But it would take more than an invitation — it would take a fabulous pension from the Crown — to buy my silence.

My Chief Christchurch Correspondent (that would be Christchurch, New Zealand, where they get earthquakes the way we get snow) writes:

“Maybe I’m a pessimist — would like to earn the tag ‘realist’ but I see things being resolved by a repeat of twentieth century violence to the power of ten combined with famine and a pandemic. Out of that will rise the Church purified by the new saints.”

Au contraire, I find that pretty optimistic. It ends well, which makes it a Comedy, as I’ve been teaching my seminarians.

Certain readers, enmired perhaps in their earthly concerns, might dispute this jargon. War, Famine, Pestilence, Death — and other things of that kidney — have never enjoyed a good press down here. In a way, I understand it. I flinched myself this morning, merely because the hot water ran out while I was showering. Though I must say, I did not find the experience “unthinkable.” Within seconds, the phenomenon made perfect sense to me. Even my own death, from any number of causes, unlikely to include a cold shower, is comprehensible. We were all born with the ability to catch on.

I got in trouble once for saying something like, “Nuclear war would be a bad thing, but it is not the worst thing we can imagine.” I’d added that going to Hell would be worse, but the journalist who quoted me left that part out.

Stalin had some things right. In the event, I had also quoted his old chestnut that, “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.”

I was thinking of him this morning because I dreamt of him last night. I had gone to interview him, and was surprised to find him still in charge of Russia. He was surrounded by these big tough greatcoated gentlemen, in his inner sanctum, but was himself easy-going and fairly charming, in his silk pajamas, cross-legged on an Oriental dragon throne. In this dream, there was a kerfuffle with the outer office, where several American stenographic ladies were yammering. They were telling us we weren’t allowed to smoke in there, and so Stalin and his “boys” fell into confusion, wondering where we could go with our cigarettes.

Now, this would be a Tragedy, by the classical definition: it didn’t end well.

War, famine, pestilence, death. Hope I’ve got those right, I fear one of them was conquest, implying rapine. But only four horses. “Whatever,” as we say.

The modern man has lost track of an important comforting thought, with respect to his life in this world. It is that you can only die once. Prolonged and painful as the whole scene might be, the fear of death itself should not be exaggerated. Statistics can’t “improve” it. And as my little sister once explained, “If you knew that you were going to die tomorrow afternoon, you could be philosophical about it. After all, you can still do things in the morning.”

We mustn’t get over-excited about death. It’s just a phase we go through. It’s the going to Hell that would be the real problem.

Today’s new word self-explains in a passage from an essay written by Roberto Pertici, a history professor in the university at Bergamo:

“One cannot effect a formal recantation of the faith believed and lived by generations and generations, without introducing an irreparable vulnus in the self-representation and widespread perception of an institution like the Catholic Church.”

I found the essay translated (here) in Sandro Magister’s blog. It is worth reading with ripe attention, at least twice, if only for what it attempts: to look at the current worldly fate of the Church in a modern context, not restricted to the time since Vatican II. Rather, in a context that helps to explain that Council itself. Yet it is not some general historical essay. Pertici is writing specifically about the intentions — the stated intentions — of our present pope, against this background.

Having invited gentle reader to consult it, I will not confuse him with my own “summary of the summary.” The essay concludes well, with the historian’s refusal to predict the future. It is sufficient for him to give a better understanding of how things came to be as they are. (In other words, he is a real historian, and not a media flake.)

Bergamo, in northern Lombardy towards the Lakes and the Alps, is two cities. The ancient one, of extraordinary beauty, sits upon a hill, nominally defended by its old Venetian walls; a city of continuous inhabitation from pre-Roman times.

On the plains below and surrounding is a sprawling, shapeless, hideous industrial estate, engulfing half a million human souls — “modern life” in all of its electrically pulsating obscenity. This in turn dissolves into the conurbation of Milan, which houses eight million more. Unfortunately, the beautiful part is a “tourist magnet,” so that it infills with the commercial facilities required by daily waves of the fat, bored, and vulgar.

A comparison cannot be made to the Two Cities of Saint Augustine. He could never have imagined our “cities of the plains.” The earthly city, more like Bergamo’s hilltop, was instead contrasted with the heavenly city.

Let me add that, in light of Professor Pertici’s essay, Martin Luther cannot be blamed for our post-modern sprawl, to which his tenets, and those of the Church against which he rebelled, are equally foreign. My question for today would be, can any form of the Christian religion, however heretic, appeal by its nature or be made “relevant” to that endless twinkling ant colony, which an ancient visitor might mistake for Hell?

The answer is of course, yes. But not without an effort by the worker ants to rehumanize themselves.

Though I flinch at much military jargon, because it lacks either euphony or wit, there is good meat lurking in the alphabet soup. At the moment I’m abuzz with the poetry of, “fire and forget.” These are missiles of modest size and weight with good dexterity, and a range of a few hundred miles. They are programmed to find a destination, much as the gizmos in gentle reader’s car. There are almost as many species of these missiles as there are of bats, and once launched, they are almost as hard to hit with any sort of ordnance. Tucked nicely under the wing of a fighter jet, they may be flown within range of the target and — ping! — off they go. Bit of a roar, too; though the pilot doesn’t see or hear the — bang! — when they arrive. That would be even more satisfying. Boys love this sort of thing, and these days girls get to play, too.

It is an expensive hobby, however; even the little fire-and-forgetters, so light they can be lifted by a girl, come in kits with launchers that will cost jolly taxpayer back home an arm and five legs. The bigger ones, that need lifting by a powerful aeroplane, cost much more. (Twelve arms and forty legs, I’ve heard.) I often wonder if, in the Middle East or elsewhere, it is easy to find cost-effective targets. Which is why, I suppose, when our air forces are in perfect control of the skies, we’re inclined to drop less sophisticated bombs. They give more bang for the buck, as it were.

We don’t count the cost of the administrative bureaucracy; that would come from another budget. I remember, from my own dreadful experience as a media hack, trying to get a more “inclusive” picture of the price involved in taking out a camel; or a chemical plant, for that matter. If you have a proper war, it might almost ruin you. But what can you do, on a planet like this?

There is also the question of blowing people up, including innocent bystanders, if you can find any. (Bystanders tend to be plentiful, but innocence is rare.) And of course, the inconvenience of being blown up oneself. All in all, the pacifists are right, for the more inclusively we look at it, the less sense war seems to make. But surrender to an enemy who is even worse than you are? Somewhere in the middle, we just muddle through.

History is like that. There are downsides and upsides, whichever way you turn. Prudence can hardly guess the half of them. There is usually a large constituency for “action,” once the media have done their job, to inflame us. (Later they can tell us how foolish we were to believe what they said.) Their deadlines fall every minute or two. The longer it takes to set the missiles up, the more impatient their audience becomes.

The results of action are invariably a mix. That’s why I’m generally against it.