Essays in Idleness

There are lines which are old, worn, and commonplace, but to hear them delivered to the General Assembly of the U-nighted Nations is pure joy:

“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

The President of the Natted States Merica fleshed this out, as obviously: “Wherever Socialism or Communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish, devastation, and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.”

The only way I can think to improve that, would be to have a pope say it.

Now, up here in the High Doganate we’re inclined also to criticize the Capitalist ideology, in its current recension, but not for its failure to generate material wealth. Trump’s remarks were spot on, as far as they went, and as a bonus we got to sit back and watch various progressive heads explode, starting with Maduro’s. So we can’t say nothing was accomplished.

Trump, it has been noted, can be “politically incorrect.” To my mind this is his signal virtue. While I understand the need for diplomacy in mumbling and grumbling with one’s putative allies, it is good to speak plain truth sometimes. And since the gliberal media dare not quote such lines, they travel through the aether unadulterated.

Cue Belloc, and Chesterton: not “an army of Davids” but single Davids with their slings.

There is no reasonable immediate prospect of progress in the right political direction — towards the dismantling of Twisted Nanny State, and the restoration of Christendom. And it is true that words are just words. But they may carry the power of Heaven when truthful, even when spoken by morally imperfect “artists of the deal.”

Indeed, so greatly do tyrants fear truthful words that they go to extravagant lengths to suppress them. Yet murder will out, and so will sharp phrases that cut to the heart. This is what Solzhenitsyn was saying: that if everyone spoke the truth of a morning, the Soviet system would collapse by noon. It took another fifteen years, but by the accumulation of such trumpet blasts the wall came down.

I have been writing lately about “pushing back.” Some gentle readers imagine by this that I am proposing some sort of violence. So I give this as an example of the sort of violence I approve: to speak the truth plainly.

And why should we leave this pleasure only to Trump?