Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part II

Any attempt at a socio-political diagnosis of North America’s current condition that hopes to claim the slightest dram of explanatory validity must convincingly account for the undeniable fact that the “New World” is afflicted with at least one collective distemper utterly unprecedented in the cultural history of the West.

North Americans have fallen into a state of crushing torpor untold in the chronicles of Western civilisation. For proof, we need only acknowledge that we find nowhere described in any of the histories of the West a popular reaction to brazen elite criminality as mutely bovine as that which greeted Wall Street’s wanton years-long poaching of the global economy. Our cowardice in the face of this perpetually unpunished disgrace has no known ancestor. It is the Mitochondrial Eve of societal moral squalor.
 
Until 2008, the West had produced no society so thoroughly drained of its ethical haemoglobin as to be prepared to accept with a lobotomised half-smile that the already-obscenely rich perpetrators of the systemic rape of trillions of dollars of global assets shall not only waltz away from their felonies uncharged, unconvicted, and unjailed but shall also be pensioned off with bonuses hundreds of thousands of times larger than the yearly wages of most of those they robbed. Never in the course of human history, not even during the Viking sacks of Ireland’s gold- and silver-larded monasteries, had an act of such rapacious barbarity been committed with such lucrative impunity.

In a society healthier than ours, that of Caligula’s Rome or of France’s late ancien regime, for instance, such a laughing display of unconscionable rapine would have landed an emperor, festooned with innumerable gladius slashes, floating open-eyed amid the currents of the Tiber, or would have destined the powdered limbs of aristocrats to adorn pikes held aloft by garlanded girls dancing down wide, sunlit avenues bordered by their joyously weeping fathers and mothers. Mark that these executors of the natural law would not have been, as they are today, ragtag scratch militias of the marginal and the disenfranchised: it was the powerful Praetorian Guard, quintessential insiders, who obligingly delivered to the Palatine crowds the emperors they wished deposed; it was the most talented, ambitious, and bright-futured among the comfortable French bourgeoisie who led the toppling of the Bourbons.

Meanwhile, we Canadians, clearly aping Americans’ acquiescence before robbery, as we seem to insist on aping every species of American moral idiocy, watch the slow-motion shipwreck of the robocall fiasco unfold with the sullen, heavy-lidded indifference with which a fifteen-year-old Crip, returning to class after a spliff-puffing session enjoyed behind the school dumpster, settles in for a lecture on quadratic equations. Too many commentators have attempted to explain Canadians’ apparent unconcern before the troubling Roboscam facts as a symptom of the alleged “complexity” of the case. Those less afraid to wield Occam’s razor will simply add this supine unconcern to the mounting evidence of Canadians’ quadrennially shrinking inclination to vote for their choice of faceless party automaton and come to the necessary conclusion that a growing number of Canadians do not care whether their government is elected fairly and constitutionally, whether it slithers and slimes its way into the House of Commons via an I-Ching or Tarot reading superintended by one of the Trailer Park Boys, or whether a government is elected at all. Among the most glorious fruit of the harvest of freedom seeded by Stephen Harper’s overturning of the Chretien/Martin tyranny is the undeniable fact that most Canadians, in the year 2013, have as little thought of meaningfully interfering in their own political lives as had Yorkshire ploughmen under the Plantagenets.

Asking whether or not there is hope is not the right question to ask at the tail end of one of the two (formerly liturgical) seasons the most marked effect of which on me is the sad recollection that our culture has managed to degrade two narratives that had at least an iota of morally redeeming value into mere Pavlovian retail reflexes whose only function and practical effect are to goad children into abducting their parents’ superegos and forcing them to enrich China’s Politburo through gratuitous purchases the flamboyant uselessness of which would have caused the buyers to be thrust outside the moral borders of the society that founded this Dominion.

The right question to ask is whether there is a way to hope that does not have at its foundation the very urges that turn our hopes to ashes.

Season's Creepings

In describing the pagan desecration of holy places, early medieval accounts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle observe a euphemistic fastidiousness that, while acknowledging the Viking zeal to denude shrines of their relics and tabernacles of their gold and silver, leave implicit or entirely unuttered the grosser heathen habits of profanation, such as lustily evacuating or performing bloody sacrifices upon the altars of monasteries and abbeys.

I was reminded of the old monks’ proto-Canadian pudeur when imagining Canadians’ likely response to Stephen Harper’s Christmas message. My guess is that the few Canadians aware of the existence of the soporifically banal, annually hissed testaments to Stephen Harper’s utter inability to rise above vacuity even when inspired by one of the holiest days of the faith he pretends to profess will, generously, merely note that his vaporous flaccidities are bereft of the silver and gold with which his words might have been imbued were he capable of anything even touching the hem of a competently simulated sincerity, candor, or authentic commitment.

For myself, growing ever more impatient of polite euphemisms as I age, whenever I hear crypto-religious pieties from reptilian frauds such as Harper or any among the cowed, invertebrate caucus of castrati over whom he presides, my mind runs immediately to visions of Norseman emptying mead-filled bladders onto ciboria and squatting over the scattered bones of saints, for, though I am willing to assume that history’s vomitorium of rhetorical hypocrisy contains far viler blitherings than Harper’s, there is little in Canada’s history of prime ministerial conceit and pretension that offers impudence equal to that with which Harper consistently preens himself as a credit, rather than a disgrace, to the Christianity the key beliefs of which his core political and economic principles (and his executive proclivities) daily violate.

Ecco homo, this avid disciple of Pilate, boasting of how his government promotes “the things that unite us as Canadians” mere months after providing Jack Layton with state obsequies in order to pour bleach over his party's despicable “Taliban Jack” vilification program (inspired by Layton’s espousal of a common-sense view shared by the vast majority of Canadians and that has since become official NATO policy), not long after accusing the Liberals of being Taliban sympathizers, not long after sponsoring the gravest truncheon-wielding violation of civil liberties in post-war Canadian history in order to make Toronto safe for the scumbag emissaries of corrupt totalitarian regimes, and a mere handful of years after accusing a Canadian prime minister of enjoying the sight of children being raped.

Behold the verminous pork-barreling hack, luxuriating in his prime ministership after having spent decades dancing attendance upon corporate elites whilst managing to keep his threadbare CV untainted by the slightest evidence of volunteer (or even avocatory) service to his community, lecturing Canadians on the importance of “remember[ing] those who are less fortunate” not long after conspicuously failing to see any reason to get off his ass and personally assess the ongoing humanitarian disaster on a Native reserve and only a few years after unrepentantly cheerleading one of the half-century’s most disastrous, civilian-butchering military interventions, one whose Christmastide is a perpetual Massacre of the Innocents.

Note that Harper’s message is a smarmy exhortation to remember the less fortunate; it is not directed at the less fortunate. Harper does not deign to address the less fortunate: he prefers to speak over their heads. They are to be spoken about; they are not to be spoken to. The prime minister, as Harper conceives the office, must not stoop to a direct communication with the poor and marginalized, though he may sometimes, when decorum demands, acknowledge their existence when chatting to those who actually matter (he is a populist, after all). Prime ministers don’t talk to losers, and they confine all collateral reference to their humanity to a few smug, oblique shibboleths exchanged with their smug constituencies at this time of year, designed to reinforce each other’s high self-regard.

Christ stood with the poor, the outcast, the victimized. Harper stands with the hateful, the criminal, the cretinous. Harper’s is not really a Christmas message; it is an Easter message, graven with a nail, and delivered in much the same spirit as that which wrote and hoist atop a cross a sign reading “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.

Constitutional Pedantry Justified*

* Now with "What He Said" and "Support Our Troops" updates!

Anyone who wondered how badly we need to restore dignity, authority and competence to the office of Governor General and beg of it to take ultimate executive authority away from the giggling psych-ward outpatients who now pretend to national leadership needs to understand that our current prime minister thinks democracy is dangerous. No, really.

Just when you were starting to bow under the apparently persuasive weight of the endlessly reiterated insistence that Stephen Harper has changed—that he is not the state-hating, anarcho-libertarian, free-market fundamentalist he used to be—the man himself proclaims that, since the "games" (he means "debates") that go on in Parliament are so frightening to international finance, the House is better off kept empty.

Disappointingly, Harper failed to pursue his train of thought to its logical conclusion and announce the indefinite suspension of Parliament and the immediate proscription of all political parties (except his own) in order to ensure that Canada remains attractive to the sharks that ply the world's capital markets. Perhaps he’s just waiting for his blue sweater to come back from the dry cleaner’s, as he would wish, of course, to sport his “harmless eunuch” look when promulgating that particular edict.



What He Said:

I just came across this week-old editorial by noted constitutional scholar Errol Mendes (of my dear old University of Ottawa) and thought I would share it with you. It’s so close to the spirit of my last post that it might have served as its contextual preface. I was quite surprised to read Mendes explicitly argue that Harper’s prorogation was undeniably unconstitutional (as in illegal).


"Support Our Troops":

On a lighter (though, also, darker) note, I thought I would pass along a clip of Noam Chomsky deploying his rarely used stand-up skills. Here, he talks about what asinine, bumper-sticker-ready slogans like “Support Our Troops” are designed to accomplish on behalf of élite objectives.

Given that the latest Parliamentary suspension might go down in history as the “Support-Our-Troops” Interlude (as it barred the evil Opposition from doing the Taliban’s work in their subversive House committees) and given that Chomsky’s guild syndicalism is the closest thing to Romantic-Jacobean Toryism of which modern Americans appear capable, I believe the clip to be more than glancingly apropos.

Noam Chomsky, ladies and gentlemen. Well into his eighties, and still really, really angry. Now that’s my kind of guy.

Pontificating to the Pagans: Might as Well Whistle "Dixie"

I am speaking as only an intermittently observant Catholic (and a philosophically Tridentine one at that, as the Inquisitorial motto you see on the upper left will attest), but I do wish His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI were doing something productive--like rubber-stamping annulments--rather than preaching Catholic doctrine to a people who are even less receptive to the Catholic world-view than the indigenous Nauset tribes who looked on in horror as the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower.

American popular culture has produced the most supinely relativist and crassly nihilist zeitgeist ever to exhale from the bowels of Western civilization. The lifestyles of opulent excess that our southern cousins pursue and the degrading forms of media entertainment that they consume communicate values and priorities that would have revolted even the most dissipated of the worthless court sycophants who cavorted with the teenaged Nero in the taverns and bathhouses of ancient Rome. Americans should thank God that Man is a fallen, wretched creature, otherwise their culture would not be the eminently lucrative and exportable commodity (and the key pillar of their global influence) that it is.

The Pope's U.S. visit treats us to the edifying spectacle of an essentially liberal people being instructed by real conservatism, one descending not from the pages of Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman, but from the pages of Origen, Aquinas and Thomas à Kempis. The Pope puts it decorously:

"It is not enough to count on [America's] traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined," he warned the bishops gathered at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. The "American brand of secularism," he said, "can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator."

Of course, the American brand of secularism can reduce (in fact must reduce) everything to the lowest common denominator. This is entirely a deliberately enacted consequence of the levelling process of American democracy, by which nobody can claim to be "special" (though Americans do self-confer the privilege of being collectively special).

Americans despise unearned privilege. Yes, their habit of elevating to quasi-divine status "celebrities" who impress only by their uselessness suggests that the American definition of the verb "to earn" is an odd one indeed, but their anti-aristocratic impulses are unquestionable. The problem is that truth, like beauty, maintains itself only through privilege. For the truth to be truth (that is, not an option among "truths" but rather the "Truth"), it must be sovereign; it cannot depend on anything for its power, not even on reason. Made ancillary, truth no longer belongs to itself, but to us; and what belongs to us, we may do with as we please. As soon as truth becomes the product of private ratiocination or of public argument, it becomes a man-made object--a commodity; and, in a democracy, commodities are all equal--equally provisional, equally exchangeable, and equally expendable.

Truth is intolerable to republican laissez-faire societies. Conservative author Yukio Mishima once argued that it had become impossible to speak the truth in liberal post-War Japan because the Emperor was no longer divine: in the past, one swore an oath to the Emperor, and where there is no Emperor, there can be no oath. Where oaths are impossible, there is no Truth.

Truth is feasible only for societies with a tradition of privilege, such as monarchies. This is why, despite its rapid secularisation over the last few decades, Europe is still the centre of Western philosophy: Truth, while no longer a sovereign force for them, retains a world-weary, Elvis-in-Vegas-like authority as an object of nostalgic respect. Conversely, America is the first great power in Western history to fail to produce a single indigenous school of philosophy (Transcendentalism and Pragmatism being derivatives of British prototypes). Americans are a practical people, and even the intellectually gifted among them have always recognised the futility--even the danger--of pursuing something that has been placed under social proscription.

No doubt, many conservative Americans--Catholic and non-Catholic alike--will applaud Benedict's critique of relativism, oblivious to the fact that relativism is a foundational feature of their society and now serves as America's primary cultural export. Likewise, most of them are quite unprepared to understand that it is precisely that relativism (rather than America's wealth, power, or "freedom") which frightens and intimidates fundamentally conservative societies--such as Islamic ones.

Certainly, none of them would acknowledge that a society whose pornography industry enjoys a per-annum gross higher than the GDP of many European nations and that provides massive mainstream audiences for execrable monuments of degeneracy like Saw and Hostel needs to ask itself the kinds of uncomfortable questions that would help Americans discover whether they are even still part of the Western civilisation that Pope Benedict represents or whether, like Turkey and Russia, they jumped the rails a long time ago.

Of course, many Americans would find presumptuously ludicrous the notion that anyone could speak on behalf of the Truth in the first instance, as if someone could hold a monopoly of access to a transcendent power that, in any event, may not even exist--as if anyone has the authority to determine (ex cathedra, as it were) what we must believe and what we must reject.

I felt rather the same way when I heard a certain semi-literate Texan bark to the world, "You're either for us or against us!". Americans, though, seemed disappointingly comfortable with this crude moral and intellectual blackmail. Perhaps too few of them understand that, although they are pleased to place the tin wreath of Petrine supremacy upon their Chief Executive, the world is not, and that those of us who still believe in Petrine authority prefer the real one.