Essays in Idleness

One of my Ottawa Correspondents (I have so many, I have almost run out of fingers on my left hand) reminds us this morning that:

“Sin is the most democratic activity in the world. Anyone can do it without any training or any accomplice, in public or in private.”

I used to write the “Sunday Spectator” in some atrocious Ottawa rag, from which this correspondent has also been retired. Jim is more succinct. …

It’s fun to tell the truth, as a private face in public places. … But we can’t really expect to be paid for it.

The death this week of Father Ian Boyd (C.S.B., S.T.B, Ph.D., &c), at the age of eighty-eight — when people are expected to die (unless they die before, or after) — came nevertheless as a surprise. I had naively thought him one of the immortals, but in a too biological sense.

I first became aware of Fr Boyd about forty years ago, when reading the Chesterton Review, which he founded. He was an “academic” in Thomas More College, Saskatoon. At the time I was editor (and founder) of The Idler in Toronto, and apparently both publications were candidates for Canada Council grants, along with (precisely) 97 other literary, or literary “artsy,” magazines in the Howling North. We were the only two to be “declined,” perhaps because we were the only two with literary standards, or perhaps we were both dismissed as rightwing. You see, G. K. Chesterton was Catholic, and though only some of my contributors were, none of them were also contributors to the Liberal Party.

This was not a big disappointment, however. The Idler capitalized with a house ad that declared, “Subscribe to the 98th best literary magazine in Canada!” which won innumerable subscriptions, and the Chesterton Review was published out west where they really, really hate Liberals, so we both did well.

Later I came to actually know Father Boyd, and found him an uncommon Basilian. Though educated at St Michael’s College and Aberdeen, he had retained Christian beliefs, and was a remarkably entertaining authority not only on Chesterton, but I soon found, on Hilaire Belloc, Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor and the legion of fine modern reactionaries; as well as Dickens, Trollope, and many other dead white males. He was that astounding thing, a genuinely learned “English perfesser,” and a very lively (though polite) controversialist in his own right.

His success in teaching was a priestly accomplishment. He cared, sincerely, for the souls of the little people that he taught, and would go to extraordinary lengths to stock their young minds with admirable content.

He also did miracles. When I decided to convert to Catholicism myself, partly on his example, no one knew except maybe John Muggeridge and my (appalled) mother. Father Boyd was minding someone else’s parish for him in the dark recesses of British Columbia, at a distance of 2,700 statute miles. So how did he instantly find out?

I was informed that he had said a Mass for my intention, before I had fully formed it myself; and during a drive across the continent shortly after, he called on me, so we could attend Mass together. He also gave me a copy of This Tremendous Lover, by the eminent Cistercian, Eugene Boylan (1947), which was almost excruciatingly apt.

Then he went to Seton Hall, where both he and the Chesterton Review found welcome, and now to Heaven, where he may expect the greatest welcome of all. However, I will miss him.

When I was a very young man, travelling in Israel, and first visiting the old Jewish quarter in east Jerusalem, I learned what Warren Goldstein (chief rabbi of South Africa’s orthodox Jews) is now firmly but patiently explaining. He addresses a world that contains the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice. Both are controlled by evil regimes which constitute a majority of the U.N.’s voting members, yet are supported by a deafening blather of false and flatulent “idealism.”

Jerusalem may actually be the ideal place to submit to the indoctrination of the Talmud. Then (early ‘seventies) and there, I came to appreciate the struggle of little Israel to survive, surrounded by implacably violent foes on every side. Her civilization, as civilizations everywhere, stands on three pillars: on justice (tzadik), truth (emet), and peace (shalom), in that order. Each is impossible without the pillar that stands before, yet each is sustained by the one that comes after.

For without justice, we can find no truth, and without truth, there can be no peace. This reality has been inversely demonstrated too many times in the United Nations, by peace plans that are unjust and untruthful; and by a vicious prejudice against Israel and the Jews. The world’s only Jewish state (there are dozens Muslim) has been condemned in U.N. resolutions more times than all the other countries, put together.

A first step towards the establishment of justice, and the civilization that might follow from that, would be for aspiring civilized countries to abandon participation in the U.N. and I.C.J. They should do what is in their power to demolish, and then to replace, these institutions.

There is a risk that, in a feverish property market, the General Assembly will be made into high-rise condominiums, rather than cleared for a park, or the grounds salted. The art collections might be preserved, however — even the heavier items like the stained glass by Marc Chagall, or the “Bugs Bunny” mural by Fernand Léger.

In the time since Nathaniel Hawthorne, the amount of scandal offered in our American society has continued to rise, so to say, scandalously. Hawthorne himself kicked off a delightful scandal with a memoir of his “Custom-house” experience, that ended with his firing, and served as preface to his remarkable romance of repentance and dignity (or “Able-ism”), The Scarlet Letter. It retells events from the “witching time,” when Puritan America was inventing itself.

Witches were the original scandal. Women who were old and ugly were exposed by young, attractive girls (as they continue to be today). Mr Hawthorne’s long novella improves on the plausibility of persecution, by its extension to adulterers. By the political era of the “Custom-house,” there were many different forms of the New England ideal, in which witches (which witches?) were sought. Hawthorne, with his gentle humour, his light poetical musicality, and his literary Anglophilia, was naturally on the other side. After all, the melodious Chaucer had been able to work in a customs department without memorable scandal; but that was in an age before Whigs.

The history of Protestantism, in Europe as in white America, begins with witchcraft trials, and executions, but later it settles until these events can be falsely attributed to the Middle Ages. On the contrary, sensible mediaeval men sent only heretics to the stake. (One might praise them for their “enlightenment.”) Witches belong to another religion, which may or may not be considered a heresy, as Islam has been. But the scandal of custom agents is with us still, and will not go away, so long as we have taxes.

Today, we live in a golden age of scandal. The progressive Left, as it calls itself, can be scandalized by the most innocent things, such as off-colour jokes and male swagger. But it is fun to scandalize them, and play their tricks in reverse, e.g. by firing someone simply for being black and a woman; … and incompetent, of course, but that is hardly grounds to remove a university administrator.

I thought that I spotted Zdena Salivarová on the street, recently, loitering by a bookstore barrow, as I might expect. Perhaps it was my imagination, or the effect of my “neurology,” for by the time I got there she had disappeared.

This woman is among my heroines. She did the typesetting for the Idler magazine, when it first started, and wrote the memorable novel, Honzlová (in Czech). It is a very warm book, about life in a cold war police state; translated as Summer in Prague, half a century ago. Zdena herself would now be ninety.

Another contributor to our magazine was Josef Škvorecký. He died, about that age, a dozen years ago. Mrs Salivarová, a singer and actress in the Czech land, was his young wife. They had been married for I don’t know how many centuries, before and after taking refuge in Cabbagetown (one of the provinces in Toronto). For some reason she hasn’t returned. I suppose it is harder to leave Cabbagetown, than Prague.

Reading Mr Škvorecký’s books, as an editor though illiterate in Czech, I noticed that each was dedicated by name to a different woman. Being a shallow person, I thought, “Typical Czech, playing the field.” This I believed so long as no one challenged it.

Škvorecký, author of the magnificent Engineer of Human Souls, wrote many delightful novels. It took me some time to discover the truth about him, however. You see, all of his books were dedicated to Zdena, but each under a different affectionate nickname.

A reader might form the wrong impression. He didn’t care.

The world turns, or rather, it rotates, which is a less dramatic thing than, say, an iceberg flipping over. Even less dramatically, the ice freezes, or melts away; or there is the spectacle of the livid paint of our rhetoric, gradually drying. Most of what can be seen in our “environment” is undramatic; the rest cannot be seen. It is a blank rhetorical colouring book, for our verbs and adjectives.

As today is the sixth, my rhetoric will be on Donald Trump. Readers through the years since he became the news have easily misjudged my views on him. I am against politics, by disposition, and as Trump’s disposition is against that part of politics I am most against, I often seem to be among his fans. But I am not, because he is not reliable.

The 6th of January 2021 was, as all intelligent observers have had time to discern, a “set-up.” It was a fairly peaceful demonstration by some Republicans which some Democrats used to distract from having twisted the election. Progressive media routinely spun or suppressed information favourable to Mr Trump, who nevertheless received what would have been a record number of votes. But his lazy and undistinguished opponent scored more votes still, against known statistical principles, and won all the tight races by results which changed overnight. But the fraudulent effects made possible by mail-in voting and machine tabulation were dwarfed by the effect of a smearing campaign of lies in the progressive media.

Let’s say, I don’t like Trump because of the way he handled the Batflu. He accepted false claims by the World Health Organization, and the American public health bureaucracies aligned with it; he gave power to Anthony Fauci and others like him; he let Americans be exploited for the profit of Big Pharma; and he failed to launch investigations that could have quickly exposed the truth about the “Covid pandemic.” Most outrageously, Trump allowed the lockdowns to proceed.

So how could I like him? … Other than for his style, which is an affront to progressives.

I wouldn’t have voted for Hitler, in that season of disgrace, ninety years ago, but then, I wouldn’t have voted for the “social democrats,” either, or for Thälmann, the Communist. I think I would just have thrown my vote away on Heinrich Held, the Catholic Bavarian. More likely, I wouldn’t vote. In this way, in the German Reich, 5th of March 1933, I would have reduced my influence over the national destiny, from one in forty million votes for the moment, to zero, tops.

Trump is entirely unlike Hitler, by the way. He is loud and vulgar, but quick, and he has an agreeable sense of humour. He is also entirely unlike Herr Held, but I might vote for him anyway. This would be for the personal satisfaction of annoying leftish people. But so far as I can see, the Democrats will win the election, regardless of the way that people vote.

It is a modern progressive notion that “civilians” should not be “targeted” by the military or police, when clearing riots or terrorist nests.

Gaza may serve as an example, along with the “West Bank” and southern Lebanon, where active, murderous “Palestinians” enjoy the support of approximately the whole population. Polls show that overwhelming majorities in all these places approve what was done by the armed “Palestinians” on October 7th, and say it should be done again and again. But a more useful distinction would be the specifically technical one, between those who are using weapons (including rock-throwers), and those not using weapons, at the moment. We needn’t shoot members of the latter group; let them self-pacify.

By a more liberal policy on shooting the former, however, we might save lives. For once the general population of “Palestinians” comes to realize that we are no longer “just kidding,” mothers might instruct their children more carefully. Adult perpetrators of violent acts would no longer have to wonder about their chance of survival (for it would shrink to nil), thus reducing everyone’s anxieties.

The same approach should be taken throughout the West, and indeed in Toronto, where a Jewish delicatessen was firebombed, penultimate night. (Our intrepid cops, reading the graffitoes scrawled on the premises, suspect that there was “hate motivation.”)

Complacency may be found in the German mainstream press, reporting the number of arrests during New Year celebrations in Germany. This declined by 10 percent from the previous year. And while many dozen policemen were, as usual, injured, their injuries were “minor” — i.e. none were killed. The reader must then dig through the “hard right” Internet to learn what happened, and where, in the course of that evening. For Europe was put on fire.

The number, for instance, of cars that were torched, in the hundreds around Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, &c, increased, together with the number of stabbings on the street, and desecrations of many other kinds; but we should look to the future. A perfectly robust response to the rioters would, for instance, reduce the need for arrests by 100 percent.

It would also turn the tide on Islamism, and Woke Leftism. For Islamophobia — “the fear of Muslims” — is only half of what is required. It is the passive part. We need a more active strategy against Islam and the Left.

Progressive notions are unsound. They don’t “communicate.”

While freedom of speech, and the freedom of peaceful association, are recognized in law, neither resembles a licence to intimidate. The authorities should not be shy when making this distinction. Let them be bold in making it understood. Their message should be: “Live and let live, or we’ll kill you.”

Lift up your hearts, the priests have been saying in the Anaphora, or “carrying up” of the offering, in the Apostolic tradition of countless centuries.  The spirit of the Eucharist — the Sacrifice of the Mass — is the opposite of depressing. In the account of Abraham binding Isaac, and the instruction from Elohim for his release, there is something not merely optimistic, nor libertarian. Verily, we go beyond that.

Abraham, according to the Jewish rabbis, knew perfectly well that God does not command human sacrifice. This “Judeo-Christian” God is not the God of the Aztecs, or the God of Muslim terrorists, and in this tale, He conveys the extraordinary information to the humans. In the story of Christ, He explains this once again. We are to be “lifted up” as Isaac was lifted, and as Christ was lifted, in the Resurrection.

But outside the Mass, human sacrifice continues. It is what the humans do, when they revert to their animal condition. They are wild, and dangerous.

The happiness of my New Year will come — always assuming that I live to the end of the day — on the gust of a XXth anniversary. This is how many years it has been since I was received into the Catholic Church, on the 31st of December, 2003, by Jonathan Robinson, late Father as well as Founder of the Toronto Oratory. As a good friend, received elsewhere about the same time, comments to me this morning, “those years feel like a single day.”

It is a day on which, externally, much seems to have happened, through the reign of three popes, and in a world where we now seem to communicate almost exclusively through cellphones. These devices were introduced a half-century ago by the Motorola Corporation, in a version considerably more clunky than an earlier version, another half-century before. The first inventor was charged with fraud for suggesting what his invention might do. But like many inventors, he was guilty of the opposite.

Both the Catholicism and the cellphone have been moving me out of this world. I still don’t own one of those little hand-held machines, and my subscription to the Internet is mostly for the purposes of these Essays in Idleness. It is my industrious exploration of the phenomenon of idleness. Like other advanced technology, it leaves an unsettling impression that one has participated in busy-ness, however; whereas handwriting does not have this effect.

It is also about half-a-century since industrially manufactured books became physically irritating, which they hadn’t been throughout my childhood. This is chiefly because new issues in “hardcover” are now printed as immense puffy objects, wrapped in vile repulsive covers, and crudely glued so that the spines crinkle and the pages fall out. (“Paperbacks” were always contemptible.)

But it is in books, latterly printed but originally hand-drawn by illuminators, that the message of Catholicism travelled around the globe; and by the medium of speech, directly between sentients. This message has not benefited from improvements in technology.

Having been a fairly radical conservationist (not quite the same as “a conservative”), from the age of six when I first formed this attitude, I am among the enthusiasts for what used to be called “global warming.”

Of course, I am a reactionary, more than a conservative, and all my attitudes are tied up in a package with a fine Catholic bow. The mental space I have allotted to “conservation” could be dismissed as materialist, and sentimental, excess. But it makes me happy, and with the year-end approaching, it is time to conceive a Happy for the New Year.

Global greening will therefore serve as my topic for today. The last major survey of the satellite data that I noticed, by multiple authors from multiple institutions in multiple countries, showed that vegetation had undeniably increased, by about one-seventh over all, and by some amount in every climate zone, over the last thirty years. Even Greenland and the Sahara are beginning to open to agricultural possibilities, which are of course further accelerated by technological inventions. This process is, moreover, continuing at a rate much faster than temperature is climbing — an accident that, to my mind, is probably artefact of urban sprawl. Thus, more “green” improvements will address that.

There are political movements to induce despair, as there are always; and power-crazed “progressive” activists (i.e. malicious idiots) try to ban desirable fossil fuels. Their parallel opposition to efficient, non-polluting nuclear electric generation provides proof of their hypocrisy. But I expect that, despite ruinous expenditure on their “climate change” agenda, with ludicrous subsidies for hideous “wind farms,” solar panels, and battery cars, we will be saved by (of all things) democracy. This is because the majority of voters, while demonstrably stupid, eventually learn that “climate change” is a fraud, and that they have been cheated of an unconscionable amount of their income.

We should welcome the increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, by two-fifths over something approximating to the whole time period. This is easily the major cause of world-wide greening, as it is, obviously, in more confined glasshouse spaces. And if urban temperatures “continue to rise,” so will our wealth and our regular use of air conditioning. It, too, generously releases carbon, so that our prospect is win/win.

Gloria In Excelsis Deo! …

And on earth, peace, to men of good will.

A very Merry Christmas, especially to those Christians, Jews, and sympathetic others who face the “holiday season” on their own — when even those with surviving family must endure a passive-aggressive “toleration.” Christmas has become a time of division, with scarring along political lines. The joyousness of the festival is replaced by aggressively anti-Christian virtue signalling on the one side, while commercialism corrupts it on the other. Too often, the professional class of religious leaders betray us with their concessions to Woke.

We live in a time when, in Canada for instance, many dozen churches have been burned to the ground, and dozens more vandalized, in a criminal response to an entirely fabricated story of ancestral genocide (of Indians fancifully slain in residential schools), promoted by our government-subsidized, profoundly wicked national media. Our flags flew at half-mast for the better part of a year, by way of saluting this media lie; and our university-educated young still march for it and for such other causes as the actual genocide committed by Hamas. We have achieved, in time for Christmas 2023, a degree of shamelessness that is unprecedented.

The same pattern repeats elsewhere: media narratives constructed from lies, and an educational establishment that installed them in the first place; a touchy “liberal” ruling class that has perpetuated itself in government bureaucracies, and expropriated the rule of law.

And we have become accustomed to it. A shrinking minority still capable of human decency, without being oppressively monitored, must train themselves to ignore the provocations.

To be witness to Truth is a calling more important than to be the beneficiary of social approval and family cuddliness. The celebration of Christmas, before Canada ceased to be a Christian country, may fade in our memory; but the reality of family — of the Holy Family and of the Nativity — is, absurdly enough, still vividly remembered.

We cannot wish for trends, or even for the reversal of trends; such optimism is as shallow as pessimism, and as easily dismissed. Hope, rather, is the transcendent religious virtue. It is Hope in the recognition, of God.

And in the presence of that Godly act of “reaching out,” to us in all our apparent hopelessness, it is absurdly Merry.

Blessings have become empty and meaningless, in recent times. Or one might say they are the very substance of the “Church of Nice” — an imaginary institution to which the Catholic Church bears less and less resemblance.

Blessings in Christ are another matter, for they may be found in the Gospels and throughout the Bible. Christ, and our life itself, are expressed in these blessings. That they continue from the past, into the future, cannot be taken away — even in Hell, I suspect (in contradiction to our present pope, who has given his opinion that the damned are erased, painlessly).

For a person, even a priest, to say “I bless you!” — informally, outside the liturgy and unaccompanied by any sacramental gesture — can mean nothing until, with the invocation of Our Lord, he raises it at least to a religious statement. But then, he is under obligation to make sense. Pope Francis’s blessings on same-sex couples, proposed in the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, create a rational problem. Can a blessing be given for committing, and proudly continuing to commit, a mortal sin?

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Tucho Fernández, another Argentinian, explains that such blessings do not imply approval for “gay marriage,” or any other undoctrinal thing. But he cannot explain how it doesn’t. It is simply an assertion that opposite and contradictory things, such as two plus two equals five, are possible in the Church, as they were long possible in Argentina. From news reports we see that a considerable number of bishops, especially those appointed by Bergoglio, have spoken up in support of the pope’s document. A considerable number, especially of those appointed previously, have spoken against — including, I think, virtually every one for whom I have respect. (My census is incomplete, hence the “virtually.”)

Of course a bishop, like any other employee, has a motive for keeping his job; and the pope recently stripped Bishop Strickland of his employment, and Cardinal Burke of his apartment and salary, because they irritated him. But bishops, cardinals, popes, &c — whether they are good or very, very bad — are not Christ, the true source of blessings. Remember this in prayer.

Like most people who prattle about “liberty” and “freedom,” I hardly know what I am talking about — unless in the light of someone else’s miracle.

The wild animals have a defensible idea of freedom, or at least of their own, it seems to me. This must necessarily include a knowledge of restraints, including the identities of other wild animals who eat them. But in the life of every little sparrow there are moments of purest joy, when not only are they free of kestrels, and such limitations as hunger; they are indulging in play, which is part of their business, according to their conception of the joyful. Or so it has seemed to me, who have spent some time feeding and observing and (once) rescuing the sparrows. They are among my favourite “little brown jobs” or LBJs, as the ornithologists call them.

Christ himself points to the sparrows with approval, in the knowledge that the Hebrews, and the other humans, tend to disregard them, or may even find them rather annoying. They sell them two for a penny (in Matthew), or five for two pennies (in Luke). He echoes the Psalm: “For the sparrow hath found herself a house, and the turtur a nest for herself where she may lay her young ones.” And these nests are close to the altar of Our Lord.

In ancient, religious practice, liberty could be understood as the creature’s freedom, to go about the business for which he was created, without interference from ungodly tyrants. For men, in particular, have evolved, to where they assume God’s functions and privileges, and their politics now replaces religion. Only a few will confess their ungodliness, however.

And of course, the kestrel, too, denies he is ungodly. His liberty, too, will last only for a time, until it is taken away.