Essays in Idleness

I once wrote a column on an anniversary of the Battle of Verdun (February through December, 1916). This was a memorably destructive event in the Great War, in which Germany and France combined to eliminate more than 300,000 of their respective soldiers, and maim another half-million or so. The Germans struck first; the French eventually “won.” I was defending, not so much the French, but the willing sacrifice of French youth, fed into a (highly efficient) German meat grinder.

It would have been better if the generals on both sides had not been so wasteful of human life. But they were very wasteful, and as “Jerry” ascended the Meuse Heights — at incredible cost — “Marianne” replied, not for liberty, equality, and fraternity, but for everything.

Our Canadians on Juno Beach in Normandy also understood the meaning of, “No price too high!” They also triumphed when they had no option, among many incidental deaths.

Readers of the newspaper with my Verdun column (the Kingston Whig-Standard) were scandalized, as they often were, by me. (It’s a commie town.) How dare I advocate for the deaths of so many, especially when an Iraq war was approaching, and “NBC” weapons might be used? Not for the first time, I was hazed on the street, by pacifist ninnies. Perhaps I encouraged this by calling them “poofters.” All had missed my delicate reasoning; I was not defending war for the sake of war. I was not half-cracked, like them.

There are times when you just have to fight. There may even be times when you are in the right. Operation Overlord was a good example; we must be ready to go there again. For there are times when the man who is running from danger lives a worthless life, compared to the man who gets killed.

For a person who loathes statistics, and in particular social (including financial) statistics, one of my more eccentric interests is in weights and measures. This has relaxed over the years of my maturity: at age sixteen it was an incurable obsession. For, as with others who have obsessions (baseball statistics; alcohol), I have never entirely escaped from it, and even the slightest indulgence will lead me back into slavery, as it were.

An example occurred yesterday, while consulting an older edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The eleventh, 1911 — always more reliable than the Wicked Paedia.) As everyone should know, the roundness of the world was known even to ancient man, especially the seafarers. The philosophers in Alexandria-by-Egypt even measured its circumference. They calculated by comparing the sun shadows at different locations. Mediaeval man of course inherited this information through Ptolemy; only in XIXth-century America was it lost (by Washington Irving, father of the Flat Earth).

Now, put this together with our archaeological record of Egyptian rulers. Not, their heads-of-state, but rather the marked strips of wood or metal used (e.g.) in schools. We have found plenty of rulers among the ruins, and the older (pre-Muslim and even pre-Christian) show that the Egyptian “cubit” was slightly over 20 British inches. So were the cubits in ancient Sumer, and elsewhere, apparently. Trade, after all, has been global for quite a few millennia. The Sumerians taught the Babylonians, who taught the Egyptians, and everyone else, the Joy of Sexagesimals.

Sexagesimals are written (invisibly) all over our planet, in for instance the lines of latitude and longitude. Indeed, the earth’s known circumference is precisely 21,160 nautical miles, which is sixty times 360 degrees. Only clowns, to my mind, would use the viciously decimalical metric system (invented in Revolutionary France) when we had a universal system of mensuration at the ready, all along. This was, and is, the nautical mile, its multiples and parts — in Babylonian, sexagesimal terms — not yet retired from shipping and aviation.

My realization yesterday is that the cubit is not merely the approximate distance from a man’s fingertip to his elbow, as the dictionaries insist. This ancient cubit is also, nearly precisely, the 60th part, of the 60th part, of the nautical mile. Everything fits together!

We may then reconstruct the “foot” as two-thirds of this, and break it down hexidecimally, as the classical Greeks, or classical Chinese, would do — into sixteen “digit” or “dactyl” units to replace the “inches” or (God help us) “centimetres” on our contemporary rulers. This longer foot (about 13.5 Anglo-American  inches) will prove more useful in ergonomic design. Trust me.

William Blake: “Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth.”

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — My cybernetophile son defends “metric” as a system of hard precision for use with machines, for the very reason that “base ten” is so fraction-averse. He concedes, however, that “beautiful sexagesimal relationships” are more appropriate for the humans, who think in fractions and approximations.

The poor and the feeble, the halt and the lame — the maimed, in body and spirit, the blind — all have been invited to the Feast. And many have made their excuses. Our task is, first, with those who will come; it is to feed His people. And second, to renew the invitation, to those apparently well, and sound, and otherwise occupied.

Ecce iam noctis. …

“To have mercy on those guilty of sin, to banish all distress, to bestow health and to give us the good blessings of everlasting peace” … let us beseech the Lord of creation.

I took the week off in a location remote from Vallis Hortensis, hoping to forget about the politics that had fragmented my attention recently, but upon my return to the High Doganate, I looked in the Internet again. My anger was restored. I can imagine many million Americans are very angry, too, though millions more exhibit smug satisfaction. The incident of course was the conviction of President Trump, on all 34 counts of invented felonies, by a kangaroo court in the rogue district of Manhattan, operating on instructions that came down from the White House.

The conviction will of course be overturned at the first appeal, but Trump will be called a “convicted felon” in Democratic talking points. This, and stuffing ballot boxes, is their only way to win. Worse, Republican hacks will assuredly take revenge at their first chance. President Biden, who is even more corrupt than he is senile, can be tried for innumerable crimes, along with all senior congressional members of his party.

This will be unwise, however. It makes the United States unambiguously a “Banana Republic,” in which politicians retire only at death. They will cheat and brazen to avoid passing out of power and into the hands of their enemies. Peaceful transitions are impossible, in the chaos of public unlawfulness. This is, as I have argued in these Idleposts before, how all democracies have ended. A fourth American Civil War (1775–83; 1812–15; 1861–65; 2024–?) seems inevitable unless some angelic agency intervenes.

The United States was not a Democracy, in conception. It was founded explicitly as a Republic, under the Rule of Law, and Our Lord. “In God We Trust.” Voting was carefully tamed: basic rights could not be overturned by legislation. But agnostic rule, by the manipulation of laws, is dear to the heart of every progressive — and sadly, the USA is a full democracy now.