Essays in Idleness

Only three weeks left, until America dissolves in chaos. We should enjoy them while we can. A time will come, when we remember these as happy days. Remember when all we had to deal with was lockdowns and bat-muzzles? When people were obsessed by some passing virus from Communist China? When they felt safe to fetch milk from the corner store? Before the Dem-wits packed the Supreme Court with socialist nutjobs, the way Chavez did in Venezuela? Or alternatively, Trump published his Executive Order, giving Associate Justice Clarence Thomas five votes?

In Canada, where complacency is our national sport, we celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday. I hope this will be revived in years to come, when the Yankee refugee invasion is a thing of the past. I was able to obtain a roastable ham, from my Serbian butcher, in less than nine minutes. (That is my limit for muzzle-wearing.) For days I will be living off the slices!

Life is good.

And this morning I realized that the jackhammers hush the shrieking madwoman across the street. It would seem the authorities have given her a new medication. The poor lady can keep it up for ten hours, now, instead of just six or seven, as before. I say “poor” because, although she is an irritation to the neighbourhood, she cannot be enjoying herself, either. (Another miracle of psychotropic drugs!)

So maybe not her, but the rest of us have a lot to be thankful for. Today, we only credit Nanny State, but there was a time when God came into it. And a plentiful harvest was good news, even if it might drive commodity prices down, and disturb the futures markets. As gentle reader may know, however, I entertain the most eccentric economic views, essentially opposed to capitalism as well as socialism, and eager to restore the Higher Feudalism, where the chief motivations were hunger, and joy.

In the Natted States it was perhaps the last Christopher Columbus Day. Dr Robert Royal, my sometime boss, has written an excellent book on this topic (see here), in which he grasps that the achievement of the greatest hero of late mediaeval navigation was not to test if the world was flat (a lie put about by the pop novelist, Washington Irving), but to sail west by south-circling trade winds, then back east to Spain by the north-tending ones. This was exceedingly clever of him, and the reason he was able to die in poverty back home, rather than drowning in the Atlantic, like his predecessors. Too, he brought Christianity to wherever he landed, and quite intentionally. (He even got to Venezuela, on the fourth voyage, before Chavez and Maduro.)

Whereas, our great Canadian navigator was Sir Martin Frobisher, who celebrated our first Thanksgiving off Baffin Island. Well, actually he was an English privateer, looking for a Northwest Passage, but found a cargo of fool’s gold instead, thus inaugurating Canada’s mining industry.

Thank goodness, human sacrifice was expunged from our continent — chiefly by the Spanish — for a while. Today, of course, it is commonplace everywhere, on a scale that would surely impress the Aztecs. Thirty-three million have died from abortions since the Batflu struck, according to an official-looking estimate, compared to just a few millions from cancer and heart disease. “HIV/AIDS” has claimed a mere one-point-three million in that time, and the exaggerated numbers for “Covid-19” have finally reached one million (internationally).

Humans, like Frobisher, are easy to fool. Even the Eskimo slaves he brought home were a poor investment. They just died. But then, we all do, eventually.

The more reason we should celebrate now.