Poetry Corner : Peter Kocan

THE DIFFICULTY
by Peter Kocan (HT Club Troppo [now a dead link])

“It is difficult to eat well outside the capital cities.” — Food writer Cherry Ripe on ABC Radio, 1/10/97

It’s a heartrending thing to see
A gourmet who’s been caught peckish
And who knows he will never make it back
To the capital by dinner time.

There’s the look of mute despair in the eye,
The slack lips and distended belly,
The hand clutching the empty champers bottle,
The weak voice crying out for caviar.

We found a whole car-load of them once,
Their BMW stalled by the roadside.
We somehow got them back to the homestead
And offered what we could for pity’s sake.

There was nothing appropriate in the house,
Just Mum’s Sunday roast with the trimmings,
Followed by the apple-pie and cream.
Of course they couldn’t swallow muck like that.

We had to watch them wasting away.
We buried the pitiful bodies by the creek.
You blame yourself, thinking they might’ve lived
If only you’d had a French chef standing by.

Now we brood continually upon
Hardships that we have never known,
The endless compassion that we owe
To palates more exquisite than our own.

How NewSpeak Works

Each new accession of an “issue” leads to the demand that we demonstrate our “commitment.” Not coincidentally, the desired commitment invariably involves swelling the bureaucratic class and its power over our lives.

The spirit of neologism is perhaps best illustrated when it fastens on a word in common use. Note the recent career of the word “diversity.” This term denotes a key conservative theme. As is pointed out by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in writings including his classic Leftism (1974), a devotion to diversity arguably distinguishes the Right from the Left. The elements of this devotion are many; consider, for example, respect for regional traditions, the insistence that human beings are not interchangeable, the tendency to think in terms of distinct persons rather than large classes of people, support for various institutions that shield individuals from the State, as well as the related belief in decentralization. We are now expected to restrict the term to one explicit, technical meaning, one that refers to a specific demographic distribution. Not surprisingly, the new usage is explained and enforced by a phalanx of experts. Note also that, in a characteristic tour de force, the term is now compatible, not only with intellectual conformism, but also with the pursuit of economic and political integration on a global scale. 

~~ Rein Staal, “On Being Reactionary.” Modern Age, March 1996.
(Discovered at the marvellous and idiosyncratic Across Difficult Country).

Russell Kirk on Human Rights

Radicalism at the end of the eighteenth century expressed its case in terms of “natural rights”. Ever since Paine’s Rights of Men was published, the notion of inalienable natural rights has been embraced by the mass of men in a vague and belligerent form, ordinarily confounding “rights” with desires. This confusion in definition plagues society today, notably in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” drawn up by the United Nations Organization: thirty articles, and a somewhat greater number of “rights” defined therein, including the right to free education, the right to “enjoy the arts”, the right of copyright, the right to an international order, the right to “the full development of personality”, the right to equal pay, the right to marry, and a great many more which actually are not rights at all, but merely aspirations. The conservative adage that all radical “natural rights” are simply, in substance, a declaration of the Right to be Idle is suggested in Article 2: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” This lengthy catalogue of “rights” ignores the two essential conditions which are attached to all true rights; first, the capacity of individuals to claim and exercise the alleged right; second, the correspondent duty that is married to every right. If a man has a right to marry, some woman must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a right to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him. If rights are confused thus with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright. Burke (and after him, Coleridge), perceiving this danger of fixing upon society a permanent grudge frustration, tried to define true natural right and true natural law.

~~Russell Kirk. The Conservative Mind : from Burke to Eliot. (1985), pp.47-48.

Peter Kocan on the Quaint and Outmoded

Jimmy came afterwards to apologise for going against Tait’s wishes and when they really got talking they found they related easily to one another. They were both in their late twenties and found they liked many of the same things, like poetry and history and folk music and all that was quaint and outmoded. “Quaint and outmoded” became their key term of approval. Then they shortened it to “Q and O”, and finally to “QO”, which they pronounced as a word rhyming with “glow”. The QO stood for an entire value system, and when Jimmy did night duty they would sit and talk about it into the wee hours.

…

After about three years Jimmy had had enough of the place, or at least of that aspect of it that he and Tait called “the Regime”. Inmates consoling each other with a birthday song was a QO concept, while the spirit that turned it into derision was that of the Regime. They began to see the QO and the Regime as warring principles that were locked in bitter struggle in every sphere of life.

~~Peter Kocan. The fable of all our lives. p. 3-4.

Quotation of the Week – Robert Dabney on Conservatism

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

~~R. L. Dabney. “Women’s Rights Women”

Rene Guenon on the ‘Defence of the West’

Today one hears from many quarters of the “defence of the West”, but unfortunately it does not seem to be understood that it’s chiefly against itself that the West needs to be defended, that the greatest and most formidable of the dangers that threaten it stem from its own present tendencies.

Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

(via Handbook of Traditional Living)

Introductory

Feast of Blessed Charles, King and Martyr
30th Day of January in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Fourteen

Dear Readers,

It is entirely Meet and Right that on this solemn Day of the Remembrance of the Martyrdom of King Charles I in 1649, should witness the first post of the re-newed Journal (and Commonplace Book) of the Mild Colonial Boy, Esq. under it’s new Title, Mercurius Pragmaticus Redivivus. It has been named after the British Civil War-era Royalist newsbook because it was at this time that Things all Began to Go Wrong. With the defeat of the Royalists and the execution of King Charles I the seeds of the Ongoing Dissolution of British Civilisation were sown. The source of all authority shifted from God to the Mob, we moved from a King responsible to God, to an Elite who claimed to represent the People but ultimately only Themselves.

The new Mercurius Pragmaticus Redivivus will (in between Occasional posts of Humorous or Whimsical or Historical Interest) seek to promote the Royalist cause among many other divers Reactionary Matters.

This Journal will take it’s Stand on the side of: The Quaint and Outmoded against the Stalinist/Trotskyite Regime of Quotas, Blacklists, Non-persons, Thoughtcrimes and Internal Exile; The Tory versus the Whig and Jacobin; High Church Anglicanism versus Popery and the Puritan; Christianity against the Heathen, the Hedonist and Turk; the Cavalier against the Roundhead; the Jacobite versus the Hanoverian; Order versus Disorder; Monarchy and Aristocracy against Egalitarianism and the demands of the Social Engineers; the native inhabitants of a Country versus the People imported to replace them and the Traitors that make such things possible; Patriarchy against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; Natural Order versus Sodom and Gomorrah, The Agrarian against the Industrialist, the Localist versus the Centralist; etc., etc.

To sum up, this Journal will continue to prosecute Lost Causes and oppose the Progessive Consensus for the reasons given by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

“I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”

Your Humble Servant,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.