Essays in Idleness

There is a saying my mama would use, to describe some of my childish and youthful posturings. It was, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face.” It is self-explanatory.

The problem with writing every day, is that there are always things to write about. A quick glance through the morning news, and I find about a dozen topics on which I’d be prepared to rant or squabble. But beware, my wee writer angel says to me, for that is too easy. Within weeks one will have degenerated into a meejah pundit again; another sock-puppet for the Zeitgeist. Not a pretty sight. Worse, one’s audience may start growing. It may grow to an unmanageable size, once your opinions become tired and safely predictable, and the usual two galleries have formed, of your friends, and your enemies. The conservatives all love you; the liberals all hate you; or more commonly, vice versa. All will be reading at half-attention, or less. Your job is to flatter your friends (who indirectly pay you), and insult your enemies (who don’t).

I worked in the meejah for years.

But I’m stuck. I’m not a conservative or a liberal. I’m a reactionary, and that is off the chart. My mama, though we had many views in common, including ripe examples of Reaction on her part, might nevertheless warn of my nose-slicing tendencies. “Why not write something people can understand?”

At a cottage on the weekend I was asked to explain the difference between a “conservative” and a “reactionary,” by a mild liberal who seemed genuinely curious. I found the task relatively easy.

“A conservative is a person who thinks nothing should ever change. A reactionary is a person who thinks nothing ever changes.”

A liberal, note, wants change, for its own sake if no better reason comes to mind. A lunatick, to put it in one word. The issue only became complicated when conservatives noticed that they were always losing. So today, conservatives and liberals are interchangeable. Both claim to want “progress,” which neither can conceive except in purely material forms. Mostly they want the very same things — more money, more pleasure, more leisure, self-esteem — but keep each other in a state of irritation by using different euphemisms. Conservatives want a little more, liberals want a lot; it is merely a question of degree. The liberals are of course still winning. They set the agenda, and the conservatives drag after, leaving knuckle ruts behind each innovation.

“But how can there be no change?”

“Because the conditions of human life are changeless. All progress is an attempt to escape the inescapable, or when that becomes impossible, to distract from it. In the end you still die. And then what?”

You don’t have to be a religious nutjob to become a reactionary. But it sure helps. For if there is to be a glorious future, it won’t be here.

I say this by way of providing some context to the NAFTA negotiations, in which Trompe’s Natted States Merica just signed a deal with Meh-hico, leaving Canada noseless. The little Trudeau boy, our current prime minister, and his pert young foreign ministrix, had their kicks at Trompe’s expense, and succeeded in making him quite angry. Now we all share in their reward.

We get to keep our softwood subsidies, and our dairy “supply management,” and our monopolistic banks, and our investment restrictions, and everything — except perhaps our auto industry. And Trompe gets to nail us with any tariffs that occur to him while he is watching Fox News.

Or, we deliver our unconditional surrender by Friday.

I hate cars. Naturally, I hate auto parts, too. Banks have always annoyed me. I say everyone has too much money. I like forests, and will be glad to see so many trees preserved. I think most people have stupid jobs, which they should have quit years ago. We’ll be free to do more virtue signalling than Venezuela. Our whole economy will be DOA at the next election, and Trudope will be creamed. What’s not to like about the new arrangement?

So let me admit I’ve been unfair to Trudope, and his smug little sidekick. It would seem they have been doing my bidding all along.