Essays in Idleness

I enjoy, or will at least tolerate, the woolly thinking of sheep, or at less, I haven’t objected or proposed to censor it, ever. They do not shout. By contrast, my toleration of human liberals is quite finite. I have limited experience with sheep, however, though more with other New Zealanders, and it is possible that if I belonged to a sheepfold, or even hung out with one, I might formulate a stronger objection. But so long as they are providing wool, meat for mutton curries, and milk for Feta cheese, or indeed Pecorino Romano, I can enjoy brief periods in their company. I am disturbed to read there are homosexualist sheep, and other perverted animals in nature, though I’m not sure I believe it.

“Rainbow Wool” is a human organization, of course, for no sheep can be that stupid, notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, their non-participation in radical wokist, left-wing politics. However, armed with a “study” that shows up to 8 percent of rams show no interest in ewes whatever, a non-profit collaboration between Californian and German environmentalcases has been launched. This will defend assumed poofter sheep from the abattoir, by bidding against them (the abattoirs) at auctions. The females, even if sapphic, will continue to be raped and butchered, though, despite their possible progress towards feminism.

I wish to protest, for while I realize that our environmentalcases have diets low in ketones, they do not appreciate the philosophy of the Artidactyls, as I think we call the sheepy order. I assume their silent Platonism was learnt from antique Greek pastoralists, who sang to them about their ideas.

The male bachelors might just be tired of the females’ company. As I say, actually, I might be, if I were compelled to maintain any consecutive discourse with an uneducated ewe. I much prefer flirtatious (but not bestial) asides with nanny goats, with one of whom I once had a delightful conversation near Abbottabad in Pakistan.

Among my objections to “capitalism” — a specialized form of socialism, practised in the West — are the many kinds of tyranny that the “capitalists” adopt to annoy me. One might suppose they had another motive, perhaps the desire to get rich. But here is another proof of socialism, for most investors soon surrender their money. Indeed, enough “capitalists” lose their shirts, that I suspect this is the government’s real priority. It assists them in compelling obedience from some of the natural troublemakers.

A good example is the supply of door-slammers, installed probably by law throughout apartment buildings. The slamming of doors is a constant distraction to all forms of intelligent life. What was designed as a way to help bankrupt the landlords, doubles as a method to keep tenants on their toes with anxiety.

Or, the back-up warnings on every commercial vehicle, which offer a continuous irritation on waste-collection days. In a free society, anyone genuinely without the wit to get out of the way of a monstrous truck should be sacrificed on Darwinian principles. Ditto, delete the rest of health and safety regulations, which were created by the capitalist communists to, for instance, mix poisons into supermarket bread. The idea was to eliminate the many millions of little family bakeries that used to be, and, I understand, still exist in Europe. This meant enabling central distribution of bread from industrial soviets, and thus the use of poisons to preserve the loaves. Indeed, all other groceries are now warehoused in this way. No government can abide free trade, and detailed regulations are imposed to prevent it.

Which is not to say that regulations, per se, are unnecessary. It is simply wrong to allow huge governments to make the rules. They should be written for the municipal markets, by distinguished, appointive characters in the trade. But thanks to national and international permission structures, the whole world has become pre-diabetic.  A corrupt bureaucratic inspectorate, having no familiarity with anything at all, is “democratically” put in charge of everything.

I’m sure leaf-blowers can be traced to some government directive, for the idea of them is too outrageously stupid to be credited to sober people. They blow leaves around pointlessly in the autumn as they fall, replacing old-fashioned hand rakes; which are anyway still required to remove the leaf piles if they collect. This job could have been done by children, entirely without high technology, before the State began to phase children out, or washed the survivors’ little brains with communism in the public schools. The purpose of the leaf-blowers is to necessitate the importation of iIllicit immigrants — working in teams, to operate the head-splittingly loud machines which the liberals mount on their backs, that generate the powerful winds that remove the pretty seasonal leaves from the yards to nowhere in particular. Everyone should see this was a demonic plot. Although I haven’t yet been able to discern how this was legislatively imposed, some reader will surely tip me off.

A beautiful German girl — a very beautiful German girl to whom it was quite impossible to give only half-attention — once patiently explained to me the word and concept of Sitzfleisch. It might be translated into English as “sit-flesh,” but as the reader may guess this conveys an incomplete understanding. It implies sitting still, and peacefully, while using one’s soul to some purpose. A person who has this quality is blessed with a certain productive capacity; with “productivity” in reality, rather than as a pose. He is reliable, perhaps in the extreme. He does not require excitement, and can even endure boredom. He has command of himself. He is not frivolous, except by intention. I think perhaps this German maiden was recommending this quality, specifically to me.

But I, as a consequence of my adolescent Weltschmerz,  the disagreeable product of Halbbildung, could not master Sitzfleish. That is to say, the half-educated are afflicted not only with superficiality, but with a painful “awareness” of the insufficiency of the world, that masks an insufficiency in us. We are not only ignorant, but sad. Of course, we consider ourselves to be over-educated, and by current standards we probably are. Inevitably, we lack Sitzfleisch.

At the age of fifteen, “Diotima” (as I called her) already knew what I might someday learn; or should have learnt already, were my mind not constantly wandering away.

I would be more enthusiastic about making bread from sorghum flour if I “had more facilities” — to quote a delightful young man, once encountered in Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as they were then calling it, but not for long. The fellow, a converted Roman Catholic, was gleefully emigrating to Canada — “a country with very good facilities” — though, given the fact he was trying to escape Mahometanism, he was probably making a mistake.

But he wasn’t mistaken about sorghum. In Bangladesh, and all over the “undeveloping world,” including Africa but omitting the Antarctic, it is, or was, highly apparent. And with justice, for it grows well in highly saline seaside soils, prone to destructive flooding, and yet also where droughts are characteristic and endemic, such as in deserts.

Indeed, sorghum can be an unkillable weed, and I think, like einkorn and amaranth, it has innumerable other practical advantages. This includes its modestly honey-sweet yet very slightly sourish, and earthy, nutty flavour, which can be addictively attractive to those not incurably bourgeois. But tell them it is gluten-free. The only problem is that you may attract health nazis.

Alas, droughts become less frequent due to increases in the anthropic carbon supply, and the seas are not actually spreading or getting any deeper, so the coastlines of Bangladesh and most other countries are reasonably secure. (I find that I can stay ahead of most environmental issues, simply by saying the opposite of what the environmentalists are saying.) The hungry people of the world get more fulsomely and nutritiously fed, year by year.

In Canada, sorghum is more often concealed among food ingredients, than advertised. With cream, and a dollop of blueberry jam, it is even better than oatmeal porridge. Yet I find it impossible to locate sorghum in my neighbourhood “No Thrills” supermarket, where good-tasting things are quickly withdrawn. And I’m no longer mobile enough to go searching in the more expensive neighbourhoods.

So the sad truth is no sorghum sourdough for me.

“‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

So remarked Sir Winston Churchill, pausing the debate for a few years. Now Mr Tucker Carlson, and a few other irresponsible click-bators, have challenged his authority. The elegant defences of democracy that appeared post-War, thoughtfully promoted by the C.I.A., have terminated. Yes, I was brought up reading Encounter magazine, and the experience never washes out. Uncomplicated references to “the Free World,” which could be made in my childhood, are not made anymore; the Woke children have been rediscovering Communism and Perversion, together with allies Islam and anti-Semitism; and that disembodied word, “Democracy,” continues to be in vogue. Perhaps it will always be favoured among hypocrites and the morally ugly.

I am incidentally not in favour of overthrowing anyone’s constitution — any of them, even those most overflowing with glib “idealism.” The Soviet constitution was the perfect example. It had little or no influence on the conduct of Soviet law; but the ideology that it proclaimed was sufficient to condemn several tens of millions to death; or well over a hundred million if we add the other Communist regimes. The great leader who scored by far the highest number of killings — Mao Tse-Tung — still has his portrait printed on the banknotes of the People’s Republic of China.

My ambition, which I share with all decent human beings, is to have “Popular Democracies” exterminated, together with many other works of Satan. You might call me an “Enemy of Democracy,” and certainly of the ideologies and abominations that it has invariably advanced — in the twenty-five centuries since Cleisthenes began tinkering with the Athenian mind.

Parliaments are nice, and sometimes voting is unfortunately necessary while resisting revolution. But from the moment tootling for “Socialism,” “Progress,” and “Democracy” begins, we should reach for our Brownings.

For as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante reasoned, monarchy is best!

The problem with democracy is the people. Democracy hucksters will argue that their self-interests are best served if they are asked about them frequently, by politicians pledged to serve; and that as things like war and civil violence are never in their interest, peace and all the other goods of nature will prevail. However, as mediaeval Christendom was convinced, the people are evil. They are not just predominantly evil, but the thing itself since the fall of man. When consulted, the people’s psychotic qualities often come to the fore. This is true more generally, in what we like to think are venial or lesser evils; “me bads.” These are confused with things that aren’t actually evil. Conversely, often the people demand things that they don’t really want, such as genuine liberty, equality, and fraternity. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence or integrity knows that they actually want to have all the good things, the consumable luxuries, the consumer durables, and more of them than anyone else. They would prefer that the others — the strangers of all kinds but also their friends — were punished. Too, being brutish and moronic, they are instinctively divisive, as not only the “best” Christians, but also Thomas Hobbes, was eager to point out. And given a Saviour, sent demonstrably from God in Heaven, our “free choice” will be to crucify Him. This is the human, or humanist, way.

It is why all the wise and thoughtful political philosophers have rejected democracy, and why it is overruled in detail, in all reasonable courts of law. They aren’t glib, they pursue justice. Rhetorically, of course, democracy is fostered, but only among the “experts,” who are no philosophers. That is to say, not even fake philosophers and sophists, but paid servants of the devil, who make their business the accretion of power; they are invariably the loudest puffers of democracy. They usually know exactly what they are doing, although some of them are insane.

Politicians are, in other words, following their self-interest, remorselessly, and naturally in opposition to the interests of everyone else. That is why being a democratic politician is the quickest way to accumulate wealth, and why only the very richest politicians can be sincere.

I don’t see how this situation will change, however, in the foreseeable future.

There can be only two points-of-view on guarantees and promises: his who gives one, and his who takes one; though the views may be similar. For instance, both may be, and generally are, naïve. Acceptance may be personal, or may be “impersonal” or collective, but in either case, one is usually foolish to believe. And those believing only in themselves are the most foolish. In God we may trust, but in priestly or institutional accounts of the will of God we should “trust, but verify.” After a lifetime of broken promises, some of which were underwritten by legal or quasi-legal guarantees (marriage, for instance), perhaps I should know. Persons, even bankers and insurance agents, cannot be trusted, which is why the more respectable of them contrive to have something to lose.

As for commitments from the Vatican, … don’t get me started.

What will it actually cost us if we break our promises? By which I mean, will it ruin us? Can we, as it were, afford to lose a bet? And the other party, who takes the bet, does he take responsibility for it? He may deserve to lose. Did he calculate what he could afford, and was he prepared, like Kipling, to “never breathe a word about his loss.”

We have courts, and once had relatively fair ones. So long as this remained the case, it was possible to hope for a little justice, but even way back then, to hope for more than a little was an act of foolishness. The same was true in capital cases, and is true today. In Nigeria and dozens of other countries, the reader may slaughter whomever he pleases, without consequence, so long as he is practising a murderous religion.

A serious purpose of the law is to allow us to forgive murderers, and other felonious types. The notion that a serious crime is never committed, except incidentally against an individual victim, but always against civilization, represented by the state, has been with us whenever we were civilized. When we weren’t, we would have no alternative to — purely private — acts of revenge. Liberalism, as John Henry Newman and others have suggested, is destructive of civilization.

Among the pleasures of old age — a physical condition I had the honour of entering into, during February of 2021 — is that one is given the opportunity to give up several of one’s pleasures. This isn’t offered as a choice, however. One simply cannot do what one was, perhaps habitually, doing before; although in some cases an old pleasure is replaced by a new one. I used to love long walks, for instance. Now I do short walks, followed by a fall, and then, all the excitement of getting up again. Since my son got me a “walker” — or “stroller” as I call it — this pleasure, too, has almost departed. But one gets used to not falling over, as I have now discovered.

A truly cosmic pleasure, in my former life, was reading; and somewhat ancillary to that, shopping in “beukstores.” Indeed, when compelled to live in some over-populous city, I would quickly establish where the beukstores were located, and visit them often during my daily, long-distance walks. Two features of my life assisted this compulsion. The other was my freedom from even short-term employment. For some reason, and it began long ago, I had never thought of applying for a job. Leisure was preferable. Jobs were simply supplied to me, miraculously, whenever it seemed I might need one. Indeed, sometimes they were forced upon me, by the terminally well-intended, with moral arguments as discouraging as decisive.. For I was born into that class of men who simply won’t “sign on” to the dole. (This bespeaks white privilege.)

For nearly five years I have not been in a beukstore, except when some saintly person gives me a lift; for I live in Parkdale — Vallis Hortensis as I call it — a part of this vastly populous city in which there are no beukstores; and in which none is conceivable, because no one reads anything intentionally, except filthy trash. (There used to be some who could read a newspaper.)

Being without new beuks is certainly an advantage, which the Catholic Church once recognized, for she created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to help her members stay away from works deemed heretical or immoral. A quick glance at universal modern conditions will tell you it is gone, and the Wicked Pedia will tell you it was “cancelled” in 1966. By coincidence, even though not yet a Catholic, I decided not to obtain beuks published after the moon landing in 1969; for it seemed that the readable and interesting ones had already appeared.

I had already noticed that the selection of beuks, generally, had much contracted in the beukstores, to make room for gifts and beverages, so I suppose that my not being able to visit them is no great loss. For now that one is old, one realizes, … what?

As I proceed farther into the posthumous phase of my career as a hack journalist, I am unsurprised to find that my readership is falling away. A leading indication of this has been donations. My donations have almost dried up, though perhaps my failure to explicitly ask for contributions partly explains the dessication. Too, I write on buzzing current issues and events, less and less, and I am more and more insulting to my readers. To be in Canada and to be supporting “La  Trompe” may be fun, but cannot be profitable — for I contemn the local opinion — and there is more to literature than inviting retaliation.

Nevertheless, my old promise to continue writing, regardless, for as long as I can form words, or while I may enjoy the toleration of the Canadian legal and tax lordships, still stands. I am aware that I am close to the last person writing from this icy latitude who is aware of the (mostly British) principles on which Canada was founded, and similarly, on which the Western world was operating, at least some of the time. We were free countries, which required, from Canada for instance, a willingness to fight: “No price too high.” I am proud of my actual ancestors, who immediately risked their lives when they were called for. And I am very deeply ashamed of my contemporaries.

My pleasure in the regime next door, can be quite misleading. It is nice that they have revived some common sense. But in a blink the dark, corrupt, profoundly stinking Democrat Party could come back to power. (They are as vile as our own Liberal Party.)

However, my hope for this world does not depend upon “Conservatives” or “Republicans”; but upon a revival of Christianity and of the Catholic Church; and, for instance, the forced retreat of the tribal “religions” that have been replacing her, due to decay of our intellectual and moral faculties. It is not good to know that we are going to Hell. Instead, let us affirm the truth: that salvation is through Christ.

Meanwhile, we come again to the Vigil of All Saints; a day of fasting and preparation.

When foresters, farmers, and fishermen, are put in ownership of the land and the seas, and left in freedom to do what seems best (which includes all-round profitability), the world mysteriously gets better and beauty proliferates. When, instead, bureaucrats are put in charge (“public” or “private,” it hardly matters), the world grows vile, ugly, and tyrannical. The definition of productivity is systematically narrowed by worthless people of the bureaucratic mind-set; and poverty is expanded to include everything else. Statistics multiply. I do not care whether the factota are “socialists” or “capitalists.” In either case they are joyless, tedious, and a danger to every human being who is not a revenant of complacency. Everything he does can be conveyed digitally, or on paper.

Well, I am inculpated with being a tad severe. This, by a person who also accuses me of unseriousness. Relevancy and efficiency are both found missing from my analysis of the world. I am, of course, guilty as charged. Relevance is invariably irrelevant, efficiency is inefficient, and I have no use for statistics. Rather I prefer things to be joyful, and interesting, so that my critic may add the word “dangerous” to my descriptors.

My technique, for forming opinions on anything at all, is by word association. When I was fifteen I fell in love with an enchanting German maiden, named Sylvia. I last saw her a little more than half-a-century ago; but she still playfully commands my imagination. By word association, my country notions have been formed around “Silviculture.” I’ve come to detest identical organisms growing in rows. This is what the factota of commodities are doing; but whenever possible, I like to patronize the farmers.

I could complain that the factota are irrelevant and inefficient, but this would play with words. In reality our modern “factory farms” would produce much more, and much more delicious, if our food were raised more labour-intensively, and in all four dimensions of space and time, rather than just the one. There would also be more employment, and happiness, with fewer additives and poisons, and no need for fertilizers except for what the farmer could supply himself.

The increase of atmospheric carbon is certainly helping this along. With Sylvan delight, I look upon our agrarian future.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — I think Ronald Reagan was right, in that mischievous advertisement that the Ontario premier posted in the World Series game; & that Trump is wrong, absolutely, in principle. Tariffs are destructive, like taxes. However, I’m enjoying Trump’s ruination of the Canadian economy. Perhaps that will put us ahead of the U.S.A. in backwardness. … I have also learnt that the one minute excerpt was trick edited, out of a Reagan speech in which tariffs were being recommended for purposes just like Trump’s.

Henry III is perhaps my favourite monarch from Canadian pre-history, speaking only of the Normans, and skipping over the Anglo-Saxons of the pre-Conquest in England. (Like them, I find Vikings distasteful.) These Normans did not tend to be saints, but until Henry Tudor they were not stinking absolutists either. Henry III is a model. Acceding to the throne at the age of nine (in 1216), a Plantagenet, and living to 1272, he had ample leisure to make his heroic mark within the XIIIth century — my preferred place to live, or at least hang out.

At his birth, the first Barons’ War was fuming, and a form of Crusade was launched against them. The French were also, as usual, revolting, and in order to raise the money to put them down, King Henry’s protectors, and later the monarch himself, agreed to be circumscribed by the terms of successive recensions of the Magna Carta. This was in the long view of things, perhaps acceptable — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton later pointed out. But what to do with all that money, once the French were put in their place?

This is where I think of Henry III Plantagenet as a model for “Engelond” and the world. He did not waste his fortune on public welfare and relief, or on the numerous gentle men and women who were breeding under conditions of peace. He invested, instead, in building of great cathedrals and abbeys, and in the glorious creations of Gothic art — in the illuminations, wall and panel paintings, sculpture and woodcarvings, metalwork, ivories, tiles, embroidery, stained glass. By this means, ignoring dull materialism in its ruder forms, he contributed to making England worth having.

It is the same when we review the other productions of history. “The peeple” might be starving, or knocked about in wars; there might be terrible and obscene injustices emerging in every place. But note, they are all dead now, and we have these wonderful works of art (if the Calvinoids or Muzzies haven’t yet destroyed them). These works testify to the noble values that command us still. Who cares if they put the Marxists, and other humourless scolds, in a bad mood?

For then came Henry’s son, the great King Edward (“Longshanks,” and “Hammer of the Scots”) to finish them off.

I continue to be loyal to the Plantagenets.

That conversations are taking place, throughout nature, and not only between the water buffalo (see penultimate post), is among the self-evident matters I am still young enough to understand — although not always to translate, from one species to another. For conversations involve nuance. This not only gives native speakers an unfair advantage, but one has to be present to get the joke, as it were. And one has to be listening, carefully, as well as being the creature for whom the language was designed, to grasp the poetics.

Amusingly, the “artificial intelligence” machinists have made some conspicuous discoveries while decoding the symphony of acoustic details with which the air is filled, when avians are communicating. Crows, ravens, jays, magpies, are among the most plentifully intelligent — far more than the bipedal “liberals” — and can best be studied with their cooperation, rather than by insulting or boring them, for instance by compiling statistics, &c. For, unlike liberals, they have dignity, and should be respected.

I learned, many years ago, that crows observe periods of mourning for fallen friends and family, and assemble for the inquests. I was once embarrassingly “mobbed” by crows, in Victoria, B.C., when I was understandably mistaken as the killer of a fledgling, which had suddenly and mysteriously perished, near my feet. It was thanks to the crows’ ability to describe me, that my alleged guilt was broadcast to the other crows, all over the town, together with details of my dress, comportment, smoking habits, facial expressions, &c. Though probably unable to kill me in revenge, I could at least be driven off Vancouver Island. The confinement of my understanding was entirely limited to me, who had never flocked with a “murder” or “parliament” of crows. For we lack the subtleties, in our senses five, to follow the proceedings in any crow investigation. We cannot even remain still for long enough, or endure a crow’s cross-examination.

On some other channel, you may find a little more information about this. But what I have to say is that, no matter how well-intentioned, you, as a human with your clownish ears, will never be able to follow the incredible procession of caws and clicks that are employed in crow conversation.

They are impressive even when restaurant reviewing, as I discovered when putting out food for them when I lived in Kingston, Ontario. Their leading gourmandess came to visit, promptly, but alone, whenever I put something out. I would listen to her detailed judgements, from the other side of a window, from which she knew I never threatened to pounce. Sometimes the proffered food was rejected, with a definitive, contemptuous phrase: “Unnecessarily exotic,” she might say. “Only a human would eat this.”

Now, the education system for their young (they had a school that met on the grass in Artillery Park, just across the street) put all our progressive scholarship to shame. For we classify everything fashionably into degrees of “Left” and “Right” — whereas the crows, like other intelligent birds, know that the categories are rather “Right” and “Wrong.”