Essays in Idleness

Alas, after a few consecutive days without an Idlepost from me, some readers have concluded that I am at Death’s Door. But really, I am only on the verandah.

Saint Lawrence, whose day this is, would anyway be special to me, for he was born on December 31st — the day I was formally received into the Catholic Church, though quite a few centuries later. And it is precisely fifty-five years since Lawrence’s saint day, back in 1969. I did not realize at the time, however. (There were quite a few things I did not realize, when I was sixteen; and even today, I am fairly stupid.)

The fox knows many little things that the hedgehog doesn’t know, but I knew one big thing, like the hedgehog in Archilochus. What it was, I will not tell you, today.

Pope Sixtus II had made Lawrence, his fellow Spaniard, archdeacon of Rome, a job which entailed minding the Church treasury, and conducting alms into the hands of the poor — especially the hungry, old widows, and consecrated virgins. But the Emperor Valerian (also memorable) had Sixtus martyred in early August, 258 AD, as part of his policy to have all the Catholic bishops, priests, and deacons rounded up and executed. Sixtus was caught red-handed, celebrating Mass in the Cemetery of Saint Callixtus.

Lawrence was also immediately surrendered to the prefect of Rome, who instructed him to turn over all the riches of the Church, thought then as now to be extraordinarily wealthy. He said he would need three days to collect it all. The saint used this time to distribute the loot among all the indigents of the Urbs Aeterna, before returning to the prefect — with a little delegation of the blind, crippled, and so forth.

“Here are the treasures of my Church,” he declared. “As you can see we are much richer than your Emperor!”

This annoyed the prefect, as it would any humourless bureaucrat or tax collector. Lawrence was prepared atop a great gridiron, with lighted coals, to be toasted. (This account is disputed by “scholars,” whose job is to doubt everything they have learnt.)

After he had been toasted on these coals for awhile, but as he was still lively — thanks to Christ’s intercession — he cried out, that he was entirely done on one side, and should be turned over. That is why Saint Lawrence is the patron of cooks, and comedians.

Except for superficial changes, the world remains the same as it was in the works of Sedulius Scottus — grammarian, scriptural commentator, and poet — writing in the IXth century, Anno Domini. He is travelling on the continent, and writing his elegant, though sometimes slapstick, verses, in Latin, from Liège. (We might call him an Irish colonialist, and indeed, we owe our civilization to this Irish colonialism, or the “spiritual imperialism” of the Gaelic sphere. Western Christendom was an Irish invention.)

The familiar, IXth-century Christian world of Sedulius contains Germans, and French, as well as Irish; and there are Slavs, Greeks, and the Holy Land, stretching into Asia, and Scythians and Indians somewhere beyond. Formative Europe is threatened with violence — from Moors and Saracens to the south, and from heathen Northmen on the other side.

Indeed, Islamophobia begins in the largely Christianized and Judaized Arabian peninsula, with the appearance of Islam, in murderous waves of conquest; and we might call the other enemy “Borealophobia,” which began when the Northmen first arrived in places like Dublin. It also took the form of murderous waves, and monks were its first victims.

The Boreal savages have been replaced by Marxists, as numerous and various as the Northmen once were. They have faded into our white-ish societies, because so many of them are palefaced themselves; but they are dedicated to advancing profanity. They have infiltrated our schools, and all other public institutions, and are constantly plotting to “cancel” Christianity, often in association with the barbarians of the “global south.” (And Ireland has been lost, again.)

Verily, Christians have become a shrinking minority throughout what was once Christendom, and serve our “new” masters, their mad philosophies, and their Godless gods. We survive so long as we obey the whims of this political “Left.” But apart from that, life goes on (until it doesn’t).

So, instead of heathen Vikings, we have the heathen Left. This makes the world slightly different from what it was in Sedulius’s time.

Another subtle change is that Christian writers are no longer optimistic — hopeful towards the future, and building and illuminating beautiful things. Their notion that, “With God, all things are possible,” has receded. Today, their outlook is sad and grim, and what we build and illuminate is overwhelmingly “pagan,” and usually very ugly.

There are expressions that strike so adjacently to the bone that a cowardly, “sensitive” politician won’t use them. They instinctively know better than to stir up “sensitivities,” thus making an easy target for their unimaginative opponents. To tell the truth is to concede an easy target, and perhaps has always been since the “Enlightenment” granted the Devil direct entry into our political affairs, under the party designation, “Left.” (This was when sensitivity first prevailed). That colourful expressions can create such excitement is a proof of their accuracy, revealed in the explosion of pious, hypocritical rage. As elsewhere in the use of language, we have gone beyond literal description.

Oddly, I admire such practising politicians, and among those not practising, the talent and ability to invent, and the courage to use, such “politically incorrect” phrases. But then, I know better than to run for political office, and probably prefer to the successful in politics, the failures. Show me a man who easily wins an election, and I will show you a contemptible soul. Meanwhile, I continue to take delight in the “controversial” expressions themselves, and in transcribing them into my copybook.

“Childless cat ladies” says more than was ever said by a sociologist, or any self-styled “social expert,” in three words or less. The cat-lover must applaud the use of felines, to clinch a point. For the “childlessness” is clinched, in such a way that a modest number of innocent old maids can be excluded. Curiously, it shows innocent intention, for if an arguably female and childless cat-keeper — even one who dotes upon her animals — comes forward, she will just be laughing. (I myself love women, almost as much as I distractedly love cats.)

Note, that we the people should laugh when we are accused of Nazism, Fascism, and Far-Righteousness; and not take offence when atheistical morons utter or display squalid blasphemies. “They” are just being what they are. But the progressive types go squirrelly when we merely mention their pets. What could better distinguish the “normal” people (probably a minority at the present time), from persons who are, indisputably, “batshit insane”?

Most easily verifiable things are presented by the Left as “conspiracy theories,” so that if something is flagged in the media for having marks of a dark, far right, conspiracy theory, I tend to believe it is true. There may be no contest over many, multiplying facts, so these are not reported. For instance, the background of the assassination attempt on Mr Donald Trump. No one who is at least partially sane doubts that this happened. Thus the event and its colourful details are now being “memory-holed” by the commentariat. What the Democrat Party cannot benefit from (or the NDP-Liberal coalition in Canada), disappears quickly from the news.

A poll has meanwhile shown that one-third of eligible Democrat voters believe the assassination attempt was a sham, and that Trump used a ketchup packet, or whatever. But none of these people are partially sane.

Trump himself, in my delicate judgement, is also somewhat batty — as a person must be who wants to become president when he has already had that miserable experience. He is rather extravagant with his facts, and yet, still more accurate than, say, 99 percent of Democrats. This makes me willing to ignore the exceptions. His opponent, Kamala Harass, is so laughably inadequate (she was a “diversity hire”) that his election now seems inevitable; but that is not to count the Left out, or to underestimate their malice. Generations of “progressive” brainwashing, on the least intelligent, has made straightforward elections unpredictable.

“They tried to coup him, impeach him, remove him from the ballot, they ran show trials against him, tried to bankrupt him and his family, put him in prison, and assassinate him. They’re OBVIOUSLY not done,” as Mollie Hemingway explains.

This is why a “reasonable” prediction for the U.S. election is that Trump will finally be murdered. The only reason to doubt this is that the Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security, and about seventeen other national “security” departments are — individually and collectively — so extremely incompetent, that none of their members can be relied upon even to holster a gun.

May God continue to protect Donald Trump.

The motto for the modern Olympic Games was suggested by a French Dominican friar, Louis Henri Didon, while hanging out with the first Olympian gamers. This I have learnt, from one of the Catholic ethnic papers. Père Didon got the motto from the school at which he was principal — Saint-Albert-le-Grand, in Paris, whose halls had echoed with: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” A former military chaplain, and a prisoner and refugee during the Franco-Prussian War, he had developed the school into something like Arnold’s Rugby in England, with sports idolatry, but Catholic more than pagan in nuance.

“Faster, higher, stronger” is how we say this in English, since the launch of the modern games in Athens, 128 years ago. In this time the games, which began as strictly amateur, have degenerated into something professionally commercialized, and the cosmopolitan flavour has turned into a spectacle of vicious competitive nationalism. Every four years various statist cheering sections congregate, and a huge fortune is expended promoting the host country. There are also acts of compensating vandalism, such as the sabotage of the French national rail system this week. “The media” are drawn to spectacles, naturally, for they are the extravagant promoters of everything false.

Can more than this be said about The Olympics? Could we use them as a pretext to quote Pindar, on the victors at the ancient games (which included poetry)? But a moment’s study would reveal that modern athletics are the negation of the nobility recalled in Pindar, and the glorification of what is unquestionably fake.

Let us puff the opposite qualities to the ones currently on display in Paris; and embrace the phlegmatic, philosophical virtues.

One of the best technical methods to detect badness in a person or a cause is to establish whether they are (or it is) lying. The courts often work on this, and over time, they have (arguably) shown a bias against the false, and sometimes against the pathologically false. This introduces a psychological term, I admit, but it is a necessary one. I could instead refer to the philosophers, and make a case from intention, but in that situation, too, the fact that person or cause is consistently lying, delivers to the same conclusion.

There are pathological liars, just as there are pathological perverts. And since I have mentioned psychology, the two pathologies are ultimately the same. They begin with the sin of Adam (and his attempt to conceal it) which proved to be “contagious.” Consult such a psychologist as an intelligent policeman — I’ve met such a gentleman! — and he will tell you that a man who is a specific sort of pervert will often be practicing other perversions as well; but also, different aspects of his original perversion. If he lies, intentionally, on one demonstrable occasion, he may be suspected of lying, intentionally, on others. But it is very likely that lying is not the only thing he does that is “a perversion.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’,” as Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman on the Dick Cavett show.

Miss McCarthy was answering a query about what part of Miss Hellman was dishonest. She added that Hellman was a bad and overrated writer, and several other charges sufficient to invite a lawsuit, which persisted for a few years until Hellman’s death (when her estate quietly dropped it).

What Miss McCarthy meant was that Miss Hellman’s lying was not encyclopaedic, but structural. It did not consist just of “little lies.” For instance, even her depiction of herself in fiction, as an heroic anti-Nazi, was utterly false.

As several correspondents have now told me, Joe Biden has celebrated “National Ice Cream Day” by capitulating to dark, progressive-Democrat pressure groups, and surrendering his nomination papers to them, though he fell short of resigning the American presidency — and though his incapacity for this job has been quite redundantly demonstrated. Mr Biden, who is notoriously anti-Christian, when he can think at all, celebrated Easter Day this year by declaring a “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Christian readers may quietly anticipate the annihilation of his party in the November election, but should not be supercilious.

The Democrats, who pioneered the Batflu-method “ballot harvesting,” under post-modern voting rules of their own contrivance, and by orchestrating a chorus of lies through the mainstream media, may be able to cancel a huge Trump lead — even if they have failed to enable his assassination. By this means, Kamala Harris — the girl who put the cackle into kakistocracy — will become the leader of the world’s most powerful nation state.

“I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled,” she declared in one of her more noxious word salads. Yet she will exercise power only nominally, for she will be merely the front for the Democrats’ sordid backroom.

Humour, I say, not for the sake of a few laughs — although that would be welcome — but for the sake of sanity. My objection to so much of the Left-Liberal agenda, is not that it is too grave and serious, but that it is insane. Even humour, defiantly perhaps, in opposition to good taste — although this permission may sometimes be indulged to the point of unreason.

And insane, I say, not in the hysterical, shriekie-sister way (although we get a lot of performative violence and rioting in “progressive” demonstrations), but insane in a dour and grim way.

The best current example is in the political dictation of “climate.” This example is based on the absurd “theory” that the chemical compound, carbon dioxide, is the cause of “global warming,” which may or may not exist, depending how far back into the last ice age we wish to carry our speculations. But the relation between CO2 and temperature is the exact opposite of what the (bought and paid for) “climate scientists” aver; and if you want to grow fruits and vegetables, cows and chickens (which, in agriculture, we often do) we must not discourage CO2. The world’s supply has indeed been accumulating, and the world is demonstrably “greening.”

Pollution is from other compounds, which may or may not advance economic interests in an environment of defective technology. But the application of sanity to this problem has been responsible for the huge proportional increase of clean air, and of clean water, in the course of my lifetime. This in North America, but even in the crowded settlements of the “third world.” And the greening we should moreover celebrate, because so many more of the world’s poorest are now eating regularly — so that diabetes is a replacement problem by which shriekies can be vexed.

Up to a point, which we soon pass, increasing wealth may be good for us. But increasing poverty may also be good, as the Father of mercies and the Son have suggested. And sanity is compatible with either condition.

Often I have wished the Democrats in USA could achieve their rhetorical ends without character assassination, to say nothing of murder. The party of slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the (welfare-statist) “Great Society”; of abortions, and generally of warm opposition to the Republicans (three of the first six Republican presidents were assassinated); has a heritage that it must find hard to shake off. For instance, their profound commitment to racial segregation, as well as splitting up black families and keeping them poor, continues by means of e.g. succouring “Black Lives Matter.” Their vicious hatred of Jews (especially, and Catholics) is implicit in the pro-Hamas terrorist demonstrations, promoted throughout the university campuses.

Antifa, looting and rioting, are their natural means of political expression. But of course, there are “moderate” Democrats, who are only moderately evil. Their leaders tend to be not only senile, but hypocritical, spiteful, and nasty, much like the Republican leaders. I am not aware of a senior Democrat in the last generation who is not a pathological liar.

The outlook among Republicans is markedly different, however. This could be seen in the assassination attempt on Donald Trump: the crowd did not “freak out,” and go violent. It can also be seen in the appointment of James David Vance as their vice-presidential nominee: a man who is both honest and intelligent, who can, all by himself, write an interesting book; who is happily married and has other traits that make him exceptional in the U.S. Senate. The Democrats already depict him as “Dangerously Far Right.”

But I am not at the Republican National Convention, where I would be exposed to the common run of cynical operators in the Republican camp. The élite of any modern political party consists of ideological hucksters — of criminals, and the repulsively ugly.

I have no express ambition to save Democrats from the Devil, except the Christian one of loving even those committing reprehensible acts (for acts of love must include the punishment of evil-doers). My recommendation to them is to replace their violence, and their verbal blasphemies, with innocent mockery, and at least make some attempt at wit.

This would have an instantaneous, positive effect — for the Devil hates the sound of laughter. He flinches when he hears it, and finds it hard to take possession of a soul that is armed with a sense of humour.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — My Chief Argentine Correspondent usefully translates “Dangerously Far Right” from the Democratese.

It means: “Christian, heterosexual, male.”

Am I a dupe of the “Far Right”? … Or, alternatively, a chump for Trump? … Or perhaps there is no distinction, and I am more generally far-righteous? I have received a modest amount of criticism (appropriate to my modest readership) on the assumption that I, who despise politics and politicians, am a one-man fan club for the most intolerable of them.

In reality, I am an absolute Monarchist; but there are no absolute monarchies about for me to favour. They’ve all been replaced by dictatorships of the proletariat. … Eheu!

And to be fair (do you anticipate irony?) such criticism is a sign of the times. It has been an offence against my heroes for many decades. It was perfectly common for, say, Evelyn Waugh to be condemned as a Fanatick Conservative, even though he had gone to the trouble of saying that he never votes for them. “They’ve never set the clock back a single minute.”

Today, anyone who is contemptuous of political operators, and votes only in the most extreme conditions, when he thinks in defiance of reason that it might do a tiny speck of good — or more likely for psychological relief, because his despication of the Trudeau boy or the Freeland woman is more than he can bear — will be accused (by them) of supporting the Far Right.

This is irrational, as my critics should have admitted by now. What they call the “Far Right” consists of political operators, too; therefore I despise them. It is just that befouling them is less urgent, since everyone and his dog are supplying this service.

There is — we learn, on the authority of “scientists” — a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. What it is doing there, and how it came to be, are questions to which we do not know the answer, for there are aspects of the history of the Milky Way which might not be intelligible after a few billion years, even in a commonplace barred spiral galaxy like the one we live in. Nevertheless, they (the scientists: astronomers presumably) were reasonably comfortable in the assignment of the number and size of black holes that we shall have encountered, when we complete our extra-terrestrial explorations.

Imagine their surprise to discover, through the James Webb Space Telescope, that there were galaxies just like ours well over thirteen billion years ago; and moreover, black holes a thousand times bigger. These things do not have a right to exist, so close to the time of the Big Bang, according to current models of galactic protocol, in which each large star bundle and its regulating black hole grow together over billions (and billions) of years. They don’t just scandalously appear in (perhaps) the first hundred million.

Moreover, stars within the “thick disk” in the middle of our galaxy are now inferred to be much older than the scientists were previously allowing. Note, the Doppler-effect red-shift cannot be used to check for age over very short distances, of fifty thousand light-years or so, and is entirely defeated by the Big Bang. Nothing beyond 13.61 billion earth-years back can be calculated or observed, for reasons that you will not find in this (Idlepost) space. But trust me: I am not a scientist.

It was the same sort of outrage when life on earth was developing. This planet and its moon go back only four-and-a-half billion years, by radiometric dating of our oldest rocks, &c — and for the first three-and-a-half billion nothing much was growing here that was not tediously microscopic. Then, in a flash, around 540 million years ago, we had the Cambrian explosion, in which all or most of the designs for the full-size creatures we have since spotted in the fossil record (and some additional) simply bounced into being. Out of nothing, and from nowhere, don’t you know.

But why then, precisely? And why weren’t developments more evenly distributed, given the huge expanses of time in which the Creator is left with little or nothing to do?

Alas, not having created us yet, God could not consult us on these critical aesthetic matters.

Back in the days of distant antiquity, deep in another century when I was young, and in the habit of falling in love with mellifluous, classical girls who were German and Catholic, and with one of them in particular, I remember trying patiently to read Bertolt Brecht. It was less the language than the man himself who prevented me from liking him. He seemed to be what I had come to despise: the exponent of a political mysticism naturally opposed to the spiritual mysticism of the beloved R. M. Rilke.

What made him bad were his verse rhythms, as I sounded them (ineptly) in my mind’s ear; Brecht was a prophet of Sendung, and inclined to percuss like a military band. Later, I discovered that this was unfair.

Sendung, I think, refers to that part of prophecy that is broadcast, that is delivery or performance, that is mission or some kind of consignment. In other words, it is not really prophetic. Today, the word may have shrunk to an entry in the television listings. But it was once a Prussian concept, with pretence to grandeur; a psychotic “national mission.”

I am not especially prejudiced against the Germans, or German poets, whom I rank according to their natural inability to form a military band. I am, however, prejudiced against Prussians, and in favour of that form of Germany that is rather Bavarian (omitting Augsburg), or better still, Austro-Hungarian — the sort of German that can sense paradox, and mixes sincerity with drollness. Martin Mosebach is currently my favourite German, even though he is from Frankfurt. (See: The Heresy of Formlessness, 2012.)

Perhaps, “Catholic,” with the capital letter or without, is the larger background condition, that rises above nationalism and any other “ism” (Marx-ism, for instance) that can be adopted by the Left, and used to “direct” us, purposefully. It is, in a sense, the story of what we have been facing throughout modernity, since the Reformation, this fake mysticism from a constantly changing fake religion, in the cause of a very material, political order. It expresses itself invariably as Sendung, and you get it as much in France as in Germany.

Always, “the Left,” posing as enlightened moderates, propose to rescue us from the “Far Right.”

Long live the Far Right!

The British election result has enhanced my interest in marine biology; in the milking of the blue whale, and the mastication of the Greenland shark. The result (of the election) was neither a surprise, nor a welcome development to those who oppose arbitrary measures and expanding, irresponsible bureaucracies — except, insofar as Britain’s Conservatives were annihilated. Unfortunately, this could not be done without electing Labour.

It is in the nature of political parties — right and left — to represent the interests of certain classes, in defiance of the interests of other classes. Politicians are team players, who build on each other’s mistakes, in the focused narrow interest of the political class. A person of ability and integrity must lose in politics, for he will be an unclubbable eccentric, but the person who lacks any admirable feature will also lose, when it comes to the vote. Victory is always transient, and illusory. (Who needs it? … Yes, that’s who.)

There are very few exceptions to this rule, and two of them went down in yesterday’s election.

The interest of the “citizen” is in perpetual opposition to that of the political functionary. Democratic, party politics assures that this citizen will always be ignored, or wildly outnumbered, when his own unique interests are discussed, unless he is a successful conspirator. He must, at best, agree to be sleazy, to get some of what he has surrendered (materially and spiritually) back from his taxes. But “guvmint” is now everywhere, and given the expansion of the technology of control, one cannot extract oneself from the earthly goo.

Except, via martyrdom. We must fly, with Our Lady, to the arms of Christ.