Essays in Idleness

“Bye, bye, Eskimo Pie,” declares a blog headline that I earnestly wish I had got to, first. One year short of its centenary, this popular ice cream product must be removed from the supermarkets, as part of the insane racist campaign to remove all reference to minorities from their shelves. First they came for Aunt Jemima (an American black woman who rose from slave to millionaire), and now they are coming for the rest. The scheme of the race baiters, of course, spreads much wider than to commercial brand names. As Donald Trump predicted, they are now even toppling the statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; and naturally, those of Abraham Lincoln, “who freed the slaves.”

That the “social justice warriors” are doing exactly what the Ku Klux Klan did, right down to lynching black people who don’t know their place on the Democrat plantation, is a proof that the world does not necessarily change for the better. Once upon a time the men in white bedsheets (American version) were only after Catholics; then they went after the coloured people; today, their targets apparently include the innocent denizens of Canada’s far north; and according to polls, half the voters in Natted States Merica support them.

Finally, my gentle Yankee readers will understand why my Loyalist ancestors fled to Canada. They had property down there, but it was getting too crazy.

General Washington was an admirable man, in many respects; a great believer in British freedom. (“Which to the open sea / Of the world’s praise from dark antiquity / Hath flowed, ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood’.”) Everyone has flaws, though everyone has excuses, if you read your history books long enough. Some of these excuses are not very good, but history’s like that. If we are to concede to the Democrat Party belief that people can be property — especially black people; voting fodder, if they cannot be aborted — some incidents of history don’t look so bad. Only a sane person would be repelled.

(Oddly, when I first heard the name “Black Lives Matter,” I thought it must be a pro-life group.)

When the Royal Navy was collecting refugees from New York, back there in 1783, the dispossessed included many thousand slaves, who had won their freedom by fighting in the British colonial ranks. They were to be carried off to freedom in other colonies.

Sir Guy Carleton (1st Baron Dorchester) was negotiating with this Washington gentleman over who would be allowed to leave. To the credit of the latter, he didn’t butcher everyone, as he was then nearly in a position to do. But he did throw a hissy fit on Carleton. This was because a number of Washington’s personal slaves were among the runaways who had, by then, retreated to New York. They were his personal property, and dammit, he wanted them back. (Carleton told him that he could do something with himself: these blacks were unalienated British subjects.)

If I were the prime minister of Canada, instead of Pierre Trudeau’s pathetic child, I would be reminding my fellow Canadians now, in my characteristically mischievous manner, of some historical reasons to gloat. We have, it is true, committed a few of our own enormities; but the good thing about being the smaller country, is that they were on a smaller scale. I’d be introducing a Bill in Parliament right away, defending the honour of our most northern peoples, and if it passed, handing out Eskimo Pies.

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LYING DOGGO. I have decided to get off this Internet thingy for a week or so. While I am a Reactionary in my preferred sense, I am at risk of becoming a reactionary in another: a person who merely reacts to the news headlines. This is all very well, to fill space sometimes, but if one doesn’t watch oneself, one will degenerate into a pundit. (Been there; done that.) Whereas, I aspire to be something more effete. These Essays in Idleness will resume, however, by Dominion Day I should think, always provided that I am still alive. … Parting thought from B-16: “The truth always has a future.”