Essays in Idleness

A most exhilarating spectacle came to me, on a card sent by a couple in Dunrobin, Ontario. I am privileged to receive not only generous donations, for my idleness, but often, to find the cheques and money orders enclosed in beautiful cards and letters. This one contained a watercolour reproduction, “Serene Bay,” by the California painter, Dennis A. Francesconi.

He became a mouth painter in response to a terrible water-skiing accident, which left him “C-5” quadriplegic at age seventeen. But dissatisfied with his “mobility issues,” and without use of his hands, he decided to master penmanship by mouth. Then he took up drawing. His artist-wife Kristi comes into this somehow, and his extraordinary sense of colour seems to have found itself. He also removed himself from public support.

Thanks to the Internet, I quickly learnt about him and about the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists. It is an association that itself inspires, consisting of people making original works of beauty, rather than just whining for money. At their website one may review a catalogue of other such painters, in India, especially, and in almost every other country.

Dennis writes that by helping others in similar situations, “one begins to truly understand why all of this has happened in the first place.”

If Trump is a Fascist and a Nazi, then I certainly am, for I view Trump as a “Liberal.” Or rather, perhaps, I am to the Far Right of the Fascists and Nazis, for I find little in their party lines even slightly compatible with my reactionary views.

Verily, it would be more intelligent to call me, and people like me, Anarchists; although I fear we are not violent enough. Perhaps we may dissociate ourselves from Trump and company (even while voting for them), by exposing them as incorrigibly bourgeois; but then re-associate with anyone who is sincerely trying to be catholicly Christian, and thinks politics just a present for Caesar.

Hell, art is more important. (This includes poetry and pop-free music.) But the love of art, like the practise of religion, must be a genuine, and therefore a humble thing. For when it is presented as a fashionable pose, it is garbage.

We now have it straight from the lips of Michelle Obama, that anyone who does not vote for Kamala Harris is a sexist and a racist, and from Kamala Harris’s, that Donald Trump is a fascist. From me you have heard that anyone who votes Democrat (or has voted Democrat in the last sixty years) is a Woke Marxist. I prefer Republicans, and specifically two from California, and one from New York. (Nixon, Reagan, Trump.) My current pick for President of the USA is actually Trump, though I like J. D. Vance better. Trump has a basic understanding of how the world works, and appreciation of the American Constitution; he is theatrical, but sane. He appeals to me because I am pro-American, and somewhat interested in personal survival. This has nothing to do with democracy, of course.

My standards for politicians have never been very high. That means I am not opposed to them, absolutely. I do not look for the best, however, but for the least bad. I am radically opposed to those who will not tell the truth, except perhaps at gunpoint. Yet even in this stressful situation, they would probably lie, for they are, medically speaking, compulsive liars.

In Canada if not the States, our political culture was relatively sane as recently as when our prime minister was Louis St Laurent (defeated, 1957). In the United States, I would celebrate Calvin Coolidge as the least bad president in the XXth century, and mark Woodrow Wilson as the most bad. He was the first (Yankee-doodle) “Woke Marxist,” to use that expression expansively. He was, in the most poisonous sense of these words, an academic and an intellectual. But in those days the government was so constrained — by the Constitution, which did not begin to be discontinued until Lincoln — that the amount of ideology it could impose fell short of comprehensive. Nevertheless, Wilson and his batty wife did what damage they could.

Listening to the Misses Obama and Harris, one feels nostalgia for the days when the modest voter would shy from termagants and madwomen.

Among my more indelible political memories was in an Ontario backyard. The provincial “conservative” party had recently swept to power in one of those “common sense revolutions,” and the gentleman I was chatting with had a plan to destroy the province’s municipal governments. He was also now the municipal cabinet minister, and thus at the head of the wrecking crew.

“David,” he explained to me affectionately, for he was arguably an old friend. “The local governments have been featherbedding.”

Astounding!

This I gathered is why they would be merged and centralized into bigger and bigger units, and put under more robust provincial control. Local governments would be losing power; the province’s local government bureaucracy would be vastly expanded. And after changing all the boundaries (so that, for instance, a unitary “City of Prince Edward County” was created to attract capital investment to a quaint, beloved, recumbent domain), very profitable automotive stripmalls could overspread the rural landscape.

I could not entirely blame my friend for these policies. He did not, after all, know what he was doing. Each measure, on its own, would pass the plausibility test for an incurious person. The rule of Chesterton’s Fence was being ignored. (Find out why something is there before you dismantle it.)

I fear that my anarchist expostulation, Tuesday, may have encouraged the fence-removers. But note that, while mentioning federal and provincial governments, I omitted municipal. Chester-Belloc’s further principle of subsidiarity applies especially to the smaller agencies. They should be comparatively ineradicable. (Call it “featherbedding” if you please.)

We need to totally exterminate socialism on its grand national, indeed international, scale. But capitalism should be demolished creatively instead. A huge multiplication of (scandalously independent) local governments, laws, customs, conventions, and rituals, is what I count on to drive the capitalists away.

One of the unfair advantages I have gained in life is that, at one point or another, almost everything I had was taken from me, by one injustice or another. Well, not quite everything. Towards the conclusion of my life I still retain hundreds of literary, artistic, and sentimental items, and have been able to replace many books. This, I have found, is a joyous thing, and I am much happier than I was in earlier life; much, much happier than when I had money and career prospects.

There is very little a Liberal or Woke Marxist can do to me now; perhaps imprison or shoot me; but I’ve had my “three score and ten.”

Nevertheless, I should like to defend others who are greedy, not only for a long and healthy life, but to be permitted to keep the money and property they’ve accumulated. As Thomas Sowell says, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

It is up to the money-maker, or should be, how much he will surrender to church, charity, or favoured cause. Of course, if you are a Liberal or Woke Marxist you think he should be paying more taxes. (The top 5 percent already pay two-thirds of our taxes, incidentally.) I would give advice on how to deceive the tax-collectors, if I could, but like most little people I have no expertise.

The money the government impounds is almost entirely wasted, just as its costly regulations  are mostly unnecessary or counter-productive. The money that goes to “welfare” is quickly dissipated, and deprives others, especially family, of their opportunity and duty to help, as well as expunging humility in the poor. Let them feel honest shame if they are collecting pogey: “free money” is even more damaging to the poor than it is to rich people.

But the money of the rich “trickles down” carefully, from private hands. And when it comes to financing those eleemosynary things, the people will give them their own money, once the government withdraws. It won’t withdraw, voluntarily, however, because the government uses the money to finance its corruption, and power displays. In particular, all genuine cultural life is supplied by the rich, and also by poor individuals. What governments pay for is overwhelmingly false and ugly.

I would not recommend greed to individuals, lest it be bad for their souls. However, it is not the government’s business, and we would all benefit if at least 95 percent of the federal and provincial governments were permanently closed. Even the bureaucrats would benefit, as I did, from being stripped of their jobs and income.

My banterings on contemporary politics have been misunderstood. Several readers are under the impression that I champion “theocracy,” and long for a state like that in Iran. But of course, it would be a Christian theocracy, with perhaps the pope replacing the High Mullah.

Let me explain why this is heresy, and why a Shia-style theocrat was never in our cards.

Christ confirmed “the separation of Church and State” (as we paraphrase in modernist language). “Give unto Caesar,” as Christians are told in the synoptic gospels; and unto God, the things that are God’s. The display of divine contempt for the things of this world is part of every Christian’s “identity.” Government, and power, are just secular, material matters.

Whereas in Islam, which is intrinsically fanatical, there is no distinction. Allah is to be consulted on everything, however trivial, and his agents become tyrants, naturally. Those not Muslim were born to be damned, as in Calvinist Protestantism. There is no escape.

“But Otiosus is against democracy, like the imams!” …

There have been others against democracy — Plato and Socrates, after and before — but Islamists are not among them. They are in the totalitarian democratic tradition, along with Communists and Fascists. All claim power from a vote, which may not have been counted honestly. Our Western democracies parody this, when they pretend that there are “group rights.”

Instead, we should cling to the rule of law. We should accept boring, secular, predictable law, without revolutionary flourishes. And, governments, whether republican or monarchist, should be at least tolerable, not seizing things; with the police and military under them, by tradition. The law is required to vindicate our freedom.

Theft is bad; it is sin. It doesn’t become right when “the people” vote for it. “Tax the rich” is essentially obscene. The idea of a welfare state, depending upon involuntary taxes, isn’t merely economically inefficient. It is dark, wicked, stinkingly evil. A government that impounds and transfers arbitrarily from one social group to another, is guilty of this enormity. Democracy has made the welfare state possible, and for that reason it must end.

I long to live in a voluntary order.

“You can’t argue with stupid.” — This phrase, used recently by one of my favourite old ladies, is typical of her charity and kindness.

I, on the other hand, yield too easily to the “mendacious” analysis; for when anyone destroys everything he touches (Justin and Jagmeet come to mind), I too quickly assume he is doing it on purpose. Take Justin, for instance. I have endured him in power for almost a decade, but like my friend Stephen, I became aware that Justin was one of Canada’s stupidest public figures long before that. But he had nice hair, a cherubic smile, and swept the women’s vote, so his rise in Canadian politics was irresistible.

He is probably slightly less evil than I have assumed. This is true of most presently or formerly popular politicians. Not having the ability to make “muchmoney” as an enterprising businessman, yet wanting to make a name for himself, he contrived to master what takes little brains, and fly quickly on the family name through the pedestrian ranks of party politics. Because the successful politician can more or less help himself to the taxpayers’ billions, he easily collected a retinue of low-intelligence bureaucratic types, come to share his good fortune. They have spotted the gold coin lying in the ditch, or loose in an unattended pocket.

The hereditary principle indeed comes into play. Justin actually inherited “muchmoney” from the start, as his father Pierre did from his own (genuinely enterprising) father. Pierre, though a notorious skinflint with his own money, was unprecedented for his extravagance as a politician, and we (the humble, taxpaying Canadians) are still paying off his public debt. And just when the budget was finally balanced, after thirty-something years of great pain, Justin appeared, to revive the Trudeaumanic spending. He appears to be the new record-holder for irresponsible profligacy, helped by his subscription to the “climate” fraud.

To listen to him during Question Period in the House of Commons — and the many criminal scandals he is being asked to account for — one might form the wrong impression. His shrieking, bawling, girlish postures might be mistaken for demonic inhabitation. But this would be unfair. More simply, the man is an idiot.

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THE HIGH DOGANATE has been overrun with complaints about this Idlepost: that it is offensively mild. By turning away from God, and to some foolish distractions, Justin represents not citizens but the Ministry of Lies. My attempt to defend him by showing that he is an idiot, will not do. Prince Myshkin is our standard for a holy idiot. He is “a fool with a heart and no brains.” But those with brains and no heart are also unhappy (in the religious sense). Does that make those who lack both less wicked? And, what about Jagmeet?

In an unusual moment of optimism, this morning, I was reminded of the first Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated by Martin Frobisher in what has been officially called the Qiliqtaaluk region of Nunavut since 2021. Or, Frobisher Bay off Baffin Island, in Meta Cognita, as the Canadian arctic was called from the XVIth century.

Frobisher and his men, audacious privateers, had regathered after being scattered by a formidable storm in the Davis Strait. They were offering thanks to Our Lord for their safety, and successful crossing of the North Atlantic, a most dangerous passage. Ice floes seemed to be blocking their voyage farther into the Northwest Passage to the interior of Cathay. But hell, they had salt beef, biscuit, and mushy peas (the ideal Canadian Thanksgiving repast), and the sailors of the expedition — at least those who had not already perished — were treated to a sermon by an Elizabethan divine, before the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Moreover, today is Christopher Columbus Day, or was, throughout the Americas. This holiday, which Ms Kamala Harris proposed to cancel before changing all her “most deeply held” opinions recently, may nevertheless survive in the hearts of all civilized men, even as DNA investigators opine that Columbus was not from Genoa, but from a family of Sephardic silk-spinners in Valencia. Then as now, the Jews were persecuted; and now as then they are persistently over-achieving.

If you aren’t Catholic, you can at least pretend to be.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison’s incomparable Life of Columbus:

“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavouring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. …”

The saintly Instapundit, who joins me in calling fashionable Woke Marxists “worthless” and “garbage people,” recalls a scene just before the pioneering “colonialist” landed in the New World. The Aztecs sacrificed 84,000 men, women, and children at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, in 1487. He wishes us a Happy Indigenous People’s Day.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” … No Roman adaptation of an adage in Plato has caused such vexation among the vegetarian types. “If you want peace, prepare for war.” It is directly in conflict with their instinct to the plausible, the glib. (That’s why I call them “vegetarians.”) Peace through being nice, and arranging ceasefires, has a track record like all the other glib, plausible ideas. And the sort of people who would ban guns are responsible for the high murder rates in all the progressive, Democrat towns. This comes to the same thing: that nature does not reward stupid.

Instead, “Peace through strength.” I get sick of explaining this.

Hezbollah has asked for a ceasefire; and while Israel is unlikely to grant it, the Americans who can be relied upon for “stupid” think, “Hooo! Ceasefire! Whoopee, peace, peace!” They will then advocate for a “two-state solution,” for a region which contains fifty-eight states, fifty-seven of which are Muslim. “Peace, peace” is what they recommend, using the expression ridiculed in the Bible. For even the Arabs understand that “Palestinians” are, and have long been, trouble. After half a century of brainwashing by terrorists, they have not improved.

If you want peace, prepare for war; but if you are in a war already, through no (or very little) fault of your own, the way to prepare for peace is through Victory. Ceasefires are merely tactical, as any well-informed Islamic scholar could tell you. They are useful for a loser, to avoid defeat. “Hudna” they call it, and recommend it to jihadists, when their pips are about to be squeaked.

As the BBC, and other malicious, but low-intelligence observers, proclaim, “the Middle East is threatened by a wider war.” They were all-in for Oslo Accords, and very sentimental about the late, alas replaceable (Egyptian) psychopath, Yasser Arafat. Indeed, granting him a visa was among the stupidest things Israel ever did.

The entire war machine of “Palestine” is due for annihilation. Verily, the Israelis are working on this, against Hezbollah and the several other Iranian proxies. And their sponsors, in Shia Islamic Persia, are also nearing “the cusp of history” on the exit side. Peace can come to the Middle East, along with excellent prospects for liberty and trade, when they are ushered through the gate into non-existence.

For those who have an interest in politics, who also wish to have some knowledge of this subject, I can recommend a book published in 1944. It is by Friedrich Hayek, and is dedicated “To the socialists of all parties.” The title is, “The Road to Serfdom.”

It is extraordinarily well-written, for an academic whose native language wasn’t English, in less than two hundred exhilarating pages. The book predicts, correctly, that while they will lose the War, German ideological notions that began to prevail before the War in e.g. Germany, Russia, Italy, and throughout the West, would continue to do so, in Britain and America. They were plausible and were thought to have been proved in wartime. In the coming peacetime, all the intellectuals would be on board.

Yet they were wrong, and had always been wrong. The professor, Hayek, shows why neither a little nor a lot of socialism will ever work; why it invariably makes everyone poorer, except for an ideological elite; and why it traps whole societies in the condition of serfdom. Oddly enough, almost no one wants to be a serf, but some wish to have power over serfs. Hence the popularity of socialism among the power-hungry.

Too, ambiguous and poorly understood political terms fool people. (My father explained this as the Triple-B principle: “Bullshit Baffles Brains.”)

The idle reader should still be captivated by this book, which hasn’t dated, even slightly. Re-reading it, as I have been doing since high school, I find the arguments irresistible and compelling. Other members of the “Austrian School” out of which Hayek sprang (it was originally a Catholic movement, incidentally) are also informative, but none are so articulate.

The “Chicago School,” of Milton Friedman et alia, was the nearest American equivalent. But that was based on numbers, more than upon the ironical ideas, which old Austro-Hungaria had the leisure to mull.

For we should realize that political principles are not mysterious and mathematically complex. Within the realm of human understanding, the universal truths of supply and demand are like the truths of everyday physics: simple and constant through time. Gravity doesn’t turn off and on; the sun doesn’t rise in the west, ever.

Thanks perhaps to his English disciple Margaret Thatcher, this Austrian candidate was once knighted by our Queen. While waiting backstage for the presentation, he was approached informally by Her Majesty herself, who had one question. It was a time when the Irish Republican Army was much in the news, and London was perhaps over-informed about its demands. Things were blowing up daily.

“How is your name pronounced?” the Queen whispered. It looked like it might be, HAY-eck, but you can never be sure with these foreign persons.

“HIGH-eck, ma’am,” the learned professor replied. … “As in, HAYEK-splosive.”

Today, and tomorrow the 8th, will be glorious anniversaries for the Jew-killers of Hamas and Hezbollah respectively; and for their admirers and conspirators all over the world, including many (mostly recent) immigrants to Canada, Britain, Europe, USA. I would rain on their bloody parade, to begin diluting the foetid gore, were it possible. But our progressive politicians, and other filth, stand in judgement whether the IDF response is “proportional,” or if they might be guilty of “genocide.”

I think it was Douglas Murray who suggested that a “proportional” response would be for Israel to commit exactly the same number of rapes, butcheries, murders, and hostage-takings on Palestinian civilians as Hamas/Hezbollah has performed on Israeli civilians (in thousands), and I would suggest hurling a matching throw-weight of randomly-targeted missiles into Gazan and Lebanese neighbourhoods — say, just a few hundred thousand.

A sane person would not suggest this, as Murray implies. But in their bottomless stupidity and malice, it is impossible to calculate whether our loud “liberals” and narcissists are sane.

My own conception of a “proportional” retaliation would be a response that is unrestrained. War is war, after all, once it has started. Israel has been unambiguously and repeatedly attacked. Let the Israelis, however, proceed by wantonly destroying all of their mortal enemies (including the Houthis of Yemen, and mad mullahs of Iran); until all have declared unconditional surrender. This should satisfy the Geneva Conventions.

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LEPANTO. — The 7th of October is also the Feast of Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary, instituted by Pope St Pius V to keep alive in memory the naval battle by the Christians against a massive force of Ottoman Turks. By this action, western Europe was saved (quite miraculously, and not for the first time) from Islamic invasion. It was a frightfully close-run thing; go read Chesterton’s “Lepanto” immediately!

In the face of a disaster, that has proved worse than “Katrina” — upon which the media have obsessed for almost twenty years — we are reminded how things work. If there is a way to politicize a natural disaster — and there will always be a way — it will be used for political purposes. But if the party that is the darling of the media happens to be in power, the mess must be cleaned up by the locals. The bringing of supplies and voluntary help will happen, mostly without government assistance. For governments only serve themselves.

One may learn from a variety of sources that FEMA, the “Federal Emergency Management Agency,” proved its essential uselessness in New Orleans, together with the rest of the “Department of Homeland Security.” It is, of course, failing again in Asheville. It has been swamped by the Democrat Party’s scheme to bring many million new Democrat voters into the United States, in defiance of American immigration law, and had few resources left over, anyway. For it is an incredibly expensive business, when illegals from all over the world are given priority over U.S. citizens. They must, after all, be given food, shelter, and every other sort of government gift, with a path to voter registration.

I do not criticize the various state National Guard units that have selflessly thrown themselves into action, and other voluntary citizen forces. Too, I should acknowledge that there is a formidable traffic jam in the air, that does need regulation to avoid collisions. Too, there are stories circulated by Republican hotheads. We need more weeks and months to sort them out.

But from the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged.” The government is alleged to be seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in,” to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly in drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.

This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy,” we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.

If I were Satan (and I must assure my readers that I am not), I would go about my task of corrupting the human race by working on their supply of information.

First, I would practise on the animals, during the leisure time before the humans were created. I would observe their innocent trust, then teach the smarter ones how to exploit it, by leaping out of the shadows to slay them for food. Their appetites would, of course, have to be corrupted, too, so that they hungered for flesh. This is how I would scheme to subvert God’s plan, and bring death into the world. (How the world flourished, before the invention of death, I cannot remember. This happened too long before my time.)

By now, food ingestion through animal-eating is so well established, that in order to cut a figure, the apprentice devils are all vegetarians. (This is why they are so smug.)

But the question is, how to corrupt the human, who was designed, at least “in theory,” to be capable of conscious good, and endowed with smarts greater than a cat’s, although we have reflexes much slower. (Wisdom does not work at greater speed.) Where the animals could be fooled with simple conjuring tricks, people might see through these, and prepare to defeat them. But remember, if you are Satan, the “father of lies,” you are not a pathetic novice.

I gave my method away (misleadingly) at the start. It is “misinformation.” Genius requires that the main source of misinformation (or, lies) should be government programmes to correct misinformation. How better to launch the cleverest lies? But how to spread them? For after all, government can’t be everywhere, and do everything: not even Satan can rely on socialism.

Women, it is said, have the oldest profession, but this is not true. Rather it is “the media,” which began with malicious gossip in the ancestral cave. Women may have been the first “debate moderators,” but the significance of lying had already been demonstrated. The mass-media is merely its latest (and most effective) institutional framework. I think even the announcement of the End Time will begin, “This is the BBC News.”