Essays in Idleness

The hint I dropped yesterday, on the Eve of this Feast of Fools, was a distinction between the “holy fools” and the “unholy fools.” This extends much beyond politics and did not, in fact, originate in that. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, and the foolish behaviour of one tempted woman, and one tempted man, inclined to believe her. But it is my habit generally to avoid the theological depths, for fear that I might fall in.

The Celebrated Fool dates back only eight centuries, to Saint Francis of Assisi, who became Holy Fool of the West, “a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature, and with himself,” in the words of Pope Francis. In the painting by Giotto, he is feeding the birds, and in imitation of him environmentalist politicians have spent many trillions, feeding “Gaia” and the other gods of earth, sea, and sky — very foolishly.

Or there was the yurodivy, of Russia: outwardly quite eccentric but inwardly wise, who did not cost us very much; or even among the Muslims, the apparently mad. (I met one of these in upcountry Pakistan; he threw a brick at me.) The Christian accomplishment was to sort the many fools presented by abundant nature into holy and unholy, by their fruits. This was Christ’s analysis.

There are many other kinds of Fool, such as Royal Fools (consult Shakespeare on this, and the broad mediaeval tradition); it is a vast multiculture. Today, as we celebrate the Fools in our own past, present, and future, including ourselves in all of our seasons, I should like to append to Christ’s distinction a specific fiscal observation.

It is that Fools should not cost us extravagant amounts of tax money. For those who cost other than themselves are not only Fools, but tedious.

Democracy is a sick joke, as the prosecution of Trump in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Salvini in Italy, Georgescu in Romania, and now Le Pen in France, has displayed, unambiguously, to the whole world, if the world were capable of noticing, or thought. Each of these candidates stands accused of being a “populist” — i.e. likely to win an election, unless they had already won. Marine Le Pen is being put in prison, where the Democrats tried to put Trump (for up to 300 years on twisted and absurd charges), using the United States’ corrupt progressive judicial system. The specific charge brought against Le Pen was that she embezzled from the European bureaucracy. As all mainstream European politicians are constantly and obviously guilty of this, it was a convenient charge.

The parrot gallery is all singing that she is “far right,” this morning.

I am not your political reporter, and will not take the extravagant amount of space required to explain the detailed particulars of each case, when all are essentially simple. Democracy is a viciously corrupt system, in which the powers-that-be in each electoral district do what they think is necessary to maintain their dictatorship. Power is the only thing they care about, because with power, money can be appropriated. Truth is something they all despise. This has been my own experience, both here and abroad; and one must be a fool (though with some practise, a “holy fool” perhaps) to stand up to a political establishment, for it will own even the opposition parties. (Your homework assignment: Find out what commands all-party agreement.)

To know what is afoot in each place, you need only to read the news media, but with the sort of background that requires genuine experience. Journalists are dead easy to buy off, as Canada’s fully bought media notoriously shows. If you aren’t a tame, obedient, “progressive” journalist here, you aren’t being paid. And if you aren’t being paid, you are not employed. Though literally, the NDP-Liberals buy off the journalists, with tax money, individually and collectively.

Rarely is it a formal political party that calls the signals. The Devil can happily work through those, but feels more comfortable in the darker backrooms. But when democracy seems to work towards some just and happy result, the Devil is enraged. He must organize violent and destructive demonstrations.

The most annoying thing that I was told by a publicly-assigned (i.e. socialist) general practitioner, before I was “rostered” (banned) by him from access to any other doctor in Ontario (several million patients have been effectively “rostered” in this province), was this: I must not consume honey. Being denied all use of doctors and therefore prescription drugs has proved good for my health. It immediately improved when I was cut off all of the many medications I was instructed to take after my heart attack and stroke, four years ago. I’ve now been free of the expense and nuisance of them for a couple of years. But were I to stop putting honey in my coffee (and by preference, a little too much), my health would have been seriously compromised.

My mother gave me the most permanently useful medical advice. It was not to trust doctors. She was a widely experienced registered nurse — a ward matron — and to be fair, she allowed that one might use surgeons occasionally, in a pinch. “Trust, but verify” is the Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan famously translated. (It rhymes, in Russian.) But always, be sceptical.

Honey has magical properties. It is not like human-refined sugars, or any of the poisons used as sweeteners today. It cures diabetes, for instance; most alternative substances are likely to cause it. Bees of several species produce honey, and stockpile it in their hives for general use; but God was its inventor. If you carefully examine a pure honey, you will see that this is the case, and that my former general practitioner’s disbelief in God will tell against him. I have warned him that he risks burning, perpetually, in Hell.

The worst feature of “democracy” is that it sometimes gives “the people” what they want. That this will not be good for them is generally agreed by all the politicians, across the spectrum from left to right; their need to be discreet about this is easily understood, however. Of course, few are wise or clever enough to know what they are talking about, regardless of the topic; but all at least understand pain, and try to avoid it. Thus, when the people ask for something, directly — even if it is for their leaders to stop monstrously lying to them — they eventually get what they want.

Except, often there is conflict between what might be desirable for the people, and what might be good for their masters. The politician’s principal interest is in wealth and power for himself, and this is made much easier for him, after all, than for anyone who must earn his living, given the limitless supply of tax money. He must only win his first election; re-election should be automatic, once he has control of the levers.

This is why Trump is such an unusual politician: for he was already filthy, stinking rich before he even ran for the top office. He was in a position to just give the people what they wanted, out of the goodness of his heart.

In an aristocratic system, in which the appointive holders of public offices begin as members of a class well above that of the commoners; or a monarchy, where the King is born far, far above them — there is less con, for the rulers have little to gain from it. (That is why politicians should never be paid, and why they should be punished severely whenever their hands are caught in the till.)

The people, to be sure, will not get what they want from this, but so what? Often they get what is good for them, instead.

The expression, “Mother of God,” got my attention long before I became a Christian, let alone was received into the Roman fold. I found it a rather thrilling assertion, whether or not “true.” The idea that God could have a Mother, fritzed my underdeveloped neurons; but it was better than that. For there is a second, Trinitarian punch coming, when the corollary follows, that “Christ is God” — and thus no “prophet” as I was raised to think of Him in my highly secularized milieu. It seemed to me that the Catholics had knocked the wildest Evangelicals into a cocked hat.

This comes back to me, naturally, each year at the Annunciation. From the same milieu, I knew that word as a term of art. Quite literally, an “Annunciation” was a painting of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary, to declaim a famous passage from the Gospel of Luke. I was once fairly well-educated, by Canadian standards, I would have you know. I knew that passage from a provocatively early age. I’d read my Gideon New Testament, which in those days was distributed to schoolchildren. (If the schools tried that today there’d be trouble.) I had it from both post-Christian parents that one ought to read the Bible, in order to become an “educated person.” This was not the Holy Bible they meant, rather, “the Bible as Literature” — another book, of identical text, but much different meaning. (Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a good story on this theme: “Pierre Menard.”)

“Mother of God.” … Well that just takes the cake, my wee mind thought.

Having been pupil in a certain Saint Anthony’s in earlier childhood (a school in Lahore), I was already prepared to accept the proposition that Catholics are, as a species, crazy; though not necessarily crazier than other people. Indeed, they seemed so easily to attract persecution (not only in Lahore), that I tended to identify with them. (I was also an instinctive Jew-lover.) At some point in early adolescence, the notion that those alleged most crazy, but apparently non-violent, might be the most sane, was consciously formulated.

It took me to age fifty to join up formally, but as God is my witness, I had been gently pro-Catholic until then; and never more than in a Canadian high school, where I was an “evangelical” Atheist and a spiky debater. I noticed the school’s few Catholic kids were the butt of much smug, bad humour. I decided, for instance, to defend Humanae Vitae, as a spiky debater back in 1968, on purely secular, rational grounds.

All my crushes were on Catholic girls; but that was only indirectly because of their religion. Really it was because they wore their hair long, and had headbands, and were one hundred percent not tomboys.

This eccentricity eventually got me inside several Catholic homes, where I saw the statuary. Mother Mary invariably made an appearance, as she did not in nice Protestant homes. These “Mics” had pictures any Protestant would find in bad taste. They had crucifixes “with the little man on them,” which looked as if they might drip blood on your shoe. They pulled out biblical texts in weird translations. They were tribal, largely because they were excluded from respectable society, and their fathers might work in sinful places like a brewery. Their surnames might end in vowels. One might call mine an anthropological fascination; for I was also partial to Armenians, and Chinamen.

“Mother of God.” …

A (deceptively sweet) little girl called Liddy, who told me that I would be going to Hell, because I was not a Catholic, once used this expression. I found it as enchanting as her pigtails.

The Mother of God, and by extension, the mother of everything: as nearly as I could make out. My mind was not ready for the Virgin Birth, or the Immaculate Conception. That is for older boys. But these Catholics had devices called Rosaries — you know, looping strings of beads — and I gathered they’d address prayers to Mother Mary, fifty times.

Now almost seventy-two, and doing this sort of thing myself, I continue, amazed. The Annunciation seems to me, still, too much to take in. The conception of the universe comes into it.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM — This item has been brought forward from 2017 (with the usual fussy little changes).

One is often accused of living in the past, and I would certainly wish to do so, were the arrow of time not so uncompromising, and its direction set so immovably on “forward.” In heaven, perhaps, we might hope for more lenient arrangements. Down here on earth it appears that we may be run over. There is a certain amount of poetry on this subject, which I enthusiastically recommend, but, as usual, economics cannot help us, and medicine is a sad joke.

There are many other subjects on which to entertain eccentric opinions, but I remain conservative on the arrow of time. I believe it will continue to move forward, down here, and at a constant speed, at least where I find myself located. But there are some other things that we could change, had we the will — in society, as it were. Our allurement to mortal sin is the most spectacular. But one which has not been tried, lately, is the “depreciation” (in fact, appreciation) of our currency. Inflation is prescribed by all the Keynesian economists, whom I loathe, and is smeared (as such gliberals invariably do) with responsibility for the Great Depression. It was entirely innocent, but it would take me at least a book to clear it.

But let us suppose that all Freudians, Marxists, and Darwinists, ideally — and also Hitler and his Nazis — disappeared from our past. Thus especially, let us rewrite 1933, and edit out Roosevelt (who came to power that year), as well as Adolf the Fuehrer. In particular I would eliminate all of the economic policies of both, including FDR’s trashification of the gold standard, with (among others) John Maynard Keynes’s advice.

Have you noticed that gold has not lost its value since then, whereas Keynes is dead?

His argument was that attachment to gold made economic policy inflexible. It is a very evil thing to make policy more flexible for politicians.

One of my amusements, while growing up, was to calculate what the old dollar was worth, and thus what prices would be, from the glory days when it was about a pennyweight (24 grains Troy) of pure gold. (The gold sovereign was 113 grains.) The almighty, or rather inflexible, Dollar, would be worth something more than 150 American dollars today, and of course much more in the rubbish of loonies.

This would shrink your bank account faster than Trudeau did, or Carney will do, but make everything you buy rather cheaper. Indeed, most goods would be depreciating, even while new, rather in the way computers becomes less and less expensive as technology improves. A job only a human can do will tend to hold its value and pay, and might be worth more if the employee actually has merit; one that a machine could do, on automatic, would be automatically going down. Slavery, I assume, would still be illegal; and with inflation becoming a thing of the past, the wage slavery that it makes necessary might also be headed for extinction.

Getting rid of the income tax is among my other desiderata.

It is good, so long as one is trapped in Canada, to allow one’s mind to turn away from “current events,” and towards the things that are really here. This means trying to ignore our politics, and business arrangements for a bonus, and instead noticing our poetry and art. We have more and better than we have deserved, and may still produce it under some cosmic free trade agreement that we do not have to negotiate with Mexico or Trump.

The Canadian landscape required a new response, for we were further north than the others. It had, as it were, to be brought in from the cold. A century has passed since the “Group of Seven” began marking up the wilderness, leaving their Toronto commercial art jobs to explore the space between the bush and the muskeg. First and last among them was A. Y. Jackson, who came not only “a foreigner from Quebec,” but tramped the world and wandered towards Great Bear Lake and the Arctic coasts and tundra.

His accomplishment was to convey that the Canadian landscape was an enemy, to be not exactly loved, but with whom the artist must fight. He would show it as it was, with every unwhite of dirty snow, not even trying to be pretty and European; and in its persistently unearthly glory. He would bestow his relentlessly austere gaiety upon it. In contrast with our comatose official being, he would show things that were really there, and with unreal things like the people entirely omitted.

They were the painters of French Canada who depicted the life of villages and hamlets, and brought instruments to tame them. They provided the opposite extreme, even to Jackson’s Laurentian uplands. Both they and the Torontonians, marching into Algonquin Park, could be prey to sentimentality; but Jackson was instinctively pure. From near to his beginnings, he knew what he was doing, and never paused, painting in studio or field; and now, at the age of 142, he stands in my eyes as the true native Canadian.

There are many causes of an unhappy childhood; by-and-large, I tend to blame the child. In exceptional cases, I might blame the parent (or parents), but I’ve met exceptional children who can overcome them. A greater tyranny is a childhood without play, and free wandering, or not in the open air. This generally ends in feminism, and bad marriages, but again, only if the child lacks good will. Architectural influences, for the worse, exist in every modern city, and on balance unhappiness is distributed more in urban than in rural environments, but the urbanity could itself be overcome where the urban young are not encouraged to be lazy, and insolent.

I don’t think such factors are adequately considered in our political sociology. A third of a century ago, when the Ontario socialist party suddenly won after a campaign of only six weeks, I stipulated this point. “It takes more than six weeks to make a socialist,” I wrote in a newspaper. “It takes a whole unhappy childhood.”

To my surprise, several of the socialists I knew openly agreed with me, and others established an “encounter group” to discuss their respective miserable infancies. This suggests that there are more effective ways to undermine the Left, than by excruciating economic measures. Irrational happiness is the leading instrument, and humour should be tried — shamelessly until it becomes contagious.

Well, nothing that is inanimate can save us, in the conventional account; but in a fair analysis of physical nature, a book will sometimes be in motion. Not always, but sometimes; and it depends upon what should be universally acknowledged as its animate “organ,” the reader, who will be wriggling about in extension of it.

I’ve been trying, quite unsuccessfully, to weed out of my library those books (or, beuks) which I do not intend to consult again, if I live to one hundred and fifty (as Elon Musk has discovered many American pensioners do). The books themselves conspire against me, and while I plot to eliminate as many as possible, they remind me of books formerly owned, that I should never have parted from. Also, I start reading just those books which I was certain to dispose of, and they live to trouble me another day.

This, perhaps, is the secret of bibliolatrical animation. Books move through one’s consciousness the more swiftly and dramatically, because they can hold still. And they change, through time — to that animate reader — in ways that the quick-moving newspaper or video cannot. For such things were never meant to be seen in alternate dimensions; whereas a book may be a “classic,” which will insist upon a tour of your mind, and may cause disruption in your soul.

Modern “media,” and perhaps the ancient equivalent, too, is designed chiefly to make you angry. With commercial luck, it will make you very profitably angry, but hardly will it ever suggest a way for you to get even. The more you read what is “in the news,” the more you see that you can do nothing about it.

I was trying to get rid of at least one copy of The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch. I have owned several copies, in both German and English. My hope was that I could reduce my current holdings of that book, but my emotional attachment to old copies gets in the way. Fortunately, one of them has an introduction by Hannah Arendt, which adds four unnecessary pages, so you may now find it in the Parkdale Salvation Army.

I have resigned as your commentator on political affairs in the Great White North, to which I had been foolishly tempted by living here. The smugness of my countrymen! … who have done nothing of which I could be proud, since they beat the USSR in the eighth game of the 1972 hockey series. But by reversing the repulsive nationalist slogan that is used to sell inferior Canadian goods (“the world needs more Canada”) I am once again in danger of being confused with Donald Trump. It does not follow that because I want less Canada, I want more of the United States. Also, electric cars and rocket ships to Mars: less is more.

The problem with being against things, is that you are presumed to be in favour of their opposites. This is not the case with me. I can oppose both junk food, and health food. My apparent support for America’s Republicans is a tactical position. I want them to destroy as much of their bureaucratic state as should be possible, although I would not wish them to close their military shops until they have closed China’s.

Socialism is invariably a great evil, but nationalism is potentially worse. If we all agreed to go about our business, and tend our own gardens like Voltaire, we would not have the time for either.

We see that a general election in Greenland has occurred, and that the Democraatit Party, which secured 30 percent of the vote, has nominally prevailed by means of proportional representation. They are the “little-endians,” who promise to seek independence from Denmark more slowly, compared to the relatively hot-headed Naleraq Party; but, as it were, both are just throwing snowballs. Proportional representation guarantees that governments will change very rarely, so that bureaucratic arrangements won’t be disturbed. A coalition of the most experienced and corrupt will almost always win. Should this not happen, the election will be cancelled and the winning party banned (as recently occurred in Romania). This is the European idea of “democracy.”

It is fortunate, however, that — as might develop in a first-past-the-post election — a majority can never emerge, for the winning party might be dominated by lunatics. At least, this is the theory currently espoused in America, where government on the European model of irremovable bureaucrats is currently being challenged. Trump, Musk, Vance, &c, do not understand that this is unthinkable, and the progressive class now proposes violence as a means to remove them.

Violence is a more solid, historical method for changing governments, as for adding one country territorially to another. In my view, historical example should not be discounted, although I, personally, recommend against it. Still, if the United States should decide to conquer Greenland, I would give the Greenlanders even less chance than the Ukrainians against the Russians. The purpose of treaty organizations such as NATO, or the Danish Realm, is to discourage the big without allies. I imagine Mother Denmark and the Faroe Islands making a poignant stand, the morning after Trump makes his demands.

Greenland, we are informed, by those journalists who have discovered the Wicked Paedia, is legal home to fifty-seven thousand souls, about as many as the founding provinces of Canada. Perhaps it is so small now, in comparison, that even we ought to be able to conquer it. But we do not have a military that could invade any country in the arctic, or anywhere else for that matter, and anyway the Americans asked first.

We used to call them “communists,” owing to our difficulty in pronouncing the word “economist.” This was at the Thursday table, back in Idler Pub days: so far as I recall, the last instance of civilization in the northern wastes. I see that we thus have an official communist now as our Canadian prime minister, or “garbage person” as Instapundit will call him, who rather than being presented with a claim to a pension should have been dropped in the garbage disposal.

Indeed, Mr Carney may be worse than the Trudeau child, because his empty qualifications will confuse people, and Canadians are easily confused. He will be an ideal victim for Donald Trump, who fights rough sometimes, but is genuinely smart.

Since there aren’t obvious things to do, besides make an effort to stop our export and re-export of fentanyl and other lethal drugs, and perhaps lower our 300 percent tariffs on butter and such things, thus perhaps making Trump withdraw his proposed more modest tariffs, we should start preparing for the surrender of our economy. That incredible jack-ass, the Honourable Doug Ford, has a ludicrous scheme to cut off the occasional export of electricity from Ontario. There are at least six reasons to Sunday why he cannot do this.

But I have a simpler, more practical plan. It is to undecimalize our “looney” (formerly “dollar,” dólar, or peso, of eight reales), by letting it be chopped once again into eight pieces. The new pie-shaped bits would thus be worth one half of an old “quarter,” or we could also break old quarters in two. This would enable us to put all our depreciated dimes and nickels in the landfill where we previously abandoned our cents, thus making all the zinc, semi-nickel, and copper-plated relics more convenient for homeless persons to collect.

Then, at their leisure, our politicians could successively withdraw the constituent bits and the giant looney wheels, which must be expensive to mint, even when they are made from the cheapest metals.

Having made myself sufficiently unpopular within my (tiny) circle of Canadian readers, let me get back to the subject of Ukrainians and Russians. I see a possibility for becoming unpopular with both, which should not be neglected.

I am against nations butchering each other, generally, but more particularly against this when two Christian nations are fighting as if to the last man. This defeats the demographic interests of Christendom.

Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin continues to be immovable as Russian president, despite his armies making a hash of his invasion of Ukraine; and Mr Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky continues to be immovable as Ukrainian president, because his armies have achieved a stalemate over the last three years. Zelensky is a hero in Western Europe, which has been starving for such characters, but has worn out his welcome with the American public, sick of financing him. Putin is actually becoming more popular, over here.

Zelensky and Putin both, however, are corrupt psychopaths, as should be clear to the armchair generals by now. Putin has been consistently the less trustworthy, but that is the prerogative of the bigger power: to be, unchallengeably, the bigger liar.

Neither Putin nor Zelensky thinks that he can personally benefit from peace, although the people in both countries would gain by it. For one thing, the men, and a selection of the women and children, would cease to be maimed and killed — always an advantage, at least to them.

Nationalism has been blamed by most disinterested observers, but I think unfairly. The problem is that the nations (“sovereignties”) are too big. The Crimea, and also the Donbas region, should never have been added to Ukraine; both are naturally independent, and mostly Russian-speaking. And as for Russia itself, it should be forthwith dissolved into at least eight dozen independent micro-states, who could fight among themselves if they insisted.

For to paraphrase Churchill (who was speaking of Germany), “We love Russias so much, we would like to have as many of them as possible.”