Essays in Idleness

My difficulty in the Canadian media, or perhaps gentle reader will call it a missed opportunity, began many years ago and was properly diagnosed by a kindly editorial page editor, who had to field innumerable complaints about my works. People objected to my “conservative” politics, he said. But that wasn’t why they hated me. The reason was aesthetic. One is allowed to be a “conservative” in the media, he said, but if one is, one must also be a redneck and a drooler; a “man of the people,” as it were. But I was some kind of highbrow elitist conservative. There’s no category for that, and it upsets people.

Himself mildly Tory, and Scottish from Aberdeen, and remarkably civilized — well-bred and well-read — he flourished for a time by keeping his opinions strictly to himself. His editorials gave no hint what they might be. Eventually one must have come out, for now he is working at the Shakespeare Festival. I won’t name him; he needs to keep that job.

Similarly at the foundation of the so-called National Post. (Imagine naming a newspaper after our dysfunctional post office.) It was going to be a “conservative” newspaper. The first editor was thus entreated to deal with me, as one of the country’s few known “conservatives.” An Albertan (Canada’s answer to Texans), publicly identified with the Right himself, he took an immediate dislike. In a press interview in the Toronto Scar (Left-populist) he went on about the sort of conservative who would not be welcome in the new paper. That would be a sherry-drinking intellectual in a tweed jacket. Other hints suggested he was referring expressly to me. I seem to recall the employment of an E-word. Perhaps it was “elitist.” Might have been “effete.”

I didn’t help matters by replying in a note that people from Edmonton can’t tell the difference between sherry and port.

Effete? … Moi? … Of course I am effete. I have spent sixty-four years working on it.

To my mind, one should make as much distance as one can from any sort of mob. And that is what “populism” represents: mob rule, led by mob rulers, whether nominally Left or Right. This is why I was viscerally opposed to Trump, from my first sight of him as a political candidate — though since I have decided that the alternatives were worse. And he has the best enemies list I have ever seen. That must count for something.

Returning briefly to my extinguished rôle as an “effete conservative” (though I consider myself a howling reactionary), I am delighted to see the election results from Argentina. It would seem the Left-populist, Peronist movement is now so buried, that the only surviving Peronist lives in Rome. I can no more predict the future than can anyone else; I can only hope that they stay buried.

The world, I’ve observed, is going quite mad. I collect new evidence each morning, upon consulting “the news.” We won’t go into that this morning, however.

Instead, we will take this moment to celebrate the Death of Peronism. Raise your port sippers, gentle readers! Don your tweed jackets, and let us dance an elegant carnavalito.