Sunday, March 11, 2012

A Perfect Royal Occasion


Perhaps some half dozen or so Christmases ago, the old man and his spouse were again invited to celebrate the occasion with his one remaining elder sibling and her family. His niece, Linda the Activist, mentioned previously in this journal, was among the other invitees to the family occasion. As Linda is again undergoing emergency hospital treatment of a serious nature, the old man offers this bit of story the old man offered to his sister after that dinner. She may have seen it at the time, but hopefully it will lighten her time a little when she returns home for what we trust will be a comfortable recovery. It went as follows:

A Yuletide Night’s Tale
(As Told by an Idiot)
Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Portishead the youngest son of the Royal Household was sent to the heavily forested but distant Colony of George, where he was granted the title, William Abraham, Duke of George and Lord of the Royal Hunt.
There he met and promptly married the Princess Katherine of the neighbouring Kingdom of Nonsuch as her royal parents deemed the match politically advantageous. As Duchess of George, she immediately took charge of the ordering of the various ducal palaces and hunting retreats and loyally served the Duke for many years, bearing two children and coming to be known far and wide as the Dignified Duchess of the entire Kingdom of Portishead. In the progress of her achievements she also cemented alliances with the neighbouring kingdom of her origin.
As the ducal pair approached the venerable age when title succession should be considered, the Dignified Duchess persuaded the reluctant Duke (who, though the royal succession was already into the third generation since his appointment was determined to continue as Lord of the Royal Hunt for further generations) to order celebration of the annual Yuletide Festival of the Birth of the Lord of Hope in Hunt Castle’s great festival hall.
Anointed as Chief Lady in Waiting and Maker of the Feast (more vulgarly known by the commons as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer) was the Duke’s elder daughter, the voluptuous Countess Esther. The Honourable Esther, known throughout the great kingdom for her wit, knowledge, experience in travel and commerce and sense of adventure also bore the title of Royal Ambassador at Large for the current generation of the Royal House.
The Countess was ably assisted in her festival duties on the principal feast day by the beauteous Lady Sarah, daughter of the Countess and dear to the hearts of the ducal pair. The great Festival Hall had been gladsomely adorned for the celebration throughout with garlands of ribbon and streamers and baubles and lights and mistletoe and greenery and plenteous gifts under the traditional giant of the forest in its central place.
The other guests invited for the main feast were members of the Nonsuch Royal Family related to the Duchess who occupied quite different outposts of that far-reaching kingdom lying adjacent to the Duchy of George.
First in importance and close to the heart of the Duchess was her niece, the cultured and intellectual Princess Linda, who presided over the outpost port City of the Great White Rock from her Castle Aerie overlooking the sea and its trade and commerce between the Kingdom of Nonsuch and other lands across the wide ocean. Undeterred by the fierceness of the wild winter storm, the Princess of letters, song, painting,  and arbiter of manners and means, with firmness and resolve, joyously mounted her four wheeled carriage, took the reins of the many harnessed horses and shouted at the wind with glee through the long journey to heed the summons of her aunt, the Duchess.
From nearby, only one gatepost beyond the forested duchy border, last in importance but closest in age to the Duchess in the Nonsuch royal house, came Prince William, Earl of Nowhere with his beloved Countess Shirley. Somewhat non-conformist since his youth, with a strangely mottled visage and the huge proboscis of his ancient forbears causing him generally to be known among the people of his fiefdom as Prince Longnose, this youngest son was not his father’s favourite, so he was granted the appanage of the Fiefdom of Nowhere with all its vassals, peasants, rents and incomes on the understanding that he remain in that far off outpost, far away from the kingdom’s capital for the rest of his days. Still, before taking up his appanage, he insisted on taking one journey abroad to seek a wife and unlikely though it appeared, he passionately wooed and won the Lady Shirley, heiress of the Celtic House of Banks in the course of his travels through the Scottish moors.
Prince William and his Countess took possession of Nowhere Manor in its protective palisades and continued there for lo these many years devoted to each other and the needs of their forested fiefdom. They were only too happy to partake of what they knew would be an incomparable feast and youthful companionship to celebrate the Birth of the Lord of Hope at Hunt Castle in deep midwinter. As befit their octogenarian status they left the gathering early to slither across the intervening border and just managed to stable the troika and settle in their cozy well-lit apartments when all again went dark and they were locked quietly within the palisades of Nowhere Manor to gaze contentedly across the snow driven palisades by lamplight while at Hunt Castle the wassailing went on for many hours.
The End

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Power of the Hoi Polloi


Once upon a time before he was old, the old man read a book and saw a movie called The Razor’s Edge. It was written in the first person by Somerset Maugham about a young member of the wealthy American socialite elite who had experienced the horrors of the 1914-18 Great War. After returning to the socialite scene he told his possessive fiancé he needed time to travel and find out what life was all about, urging her to join him in that pursuit. She refused. He searched for the rest of his short life. Before it ended he came near to some meaning with some fatherly guru in the high Himalayas. Periodically Maugham himself would run into his hero (strangely, shortage of money never seemed to be a problem for Maugham or his heroes) and bring the reader up to date on the fascinating adventures of the man’s search. One scene of the movie seemed to be at a social function on the French Riviera. It provided the only line of dialogue from the movie I remembered ever after, when Maugham, looking around the cocktail party scene, told his protagonist “I hate the propinquity of the hoi polloi!” From time to time since then I found occasion to steal that line for my own purposes.
            I was reminded of the scene when I got a copy of Linda the Activist’s (see my recent post Portrait of an Activist) latest letter to the Catholic Teacher’s Association. The letter compliments the Association for being among increasing numbers of “intelligent advocates … taking steps to be proactive” about the wireless-in-schools issue. She followed that up, however, to take a stab at the hoi polloi with this: “Negative public and corporate reaction is, to me, astounding, as it tells us how very far behind the majority are in their awareness of this issue, and how far we have to go.  Also, how strong an ignorant stance can be, and how powerful money is in the big scheme of things.”
In her causes Linda has never been afraid to call a spade a spade, although she certainly knows that whatever her cause, calling the ignorant opposition ignorant is unlikely to win many of them over to her side of the issue. Still, I sympathize with her feelings and admire the strength of her commitments. There must be hundreds of examples of the ignorance of the powerful and the power of money and position in today’s current events. It has been so since the early days of recorded classical history and before, even among the ancient Peloponnesian gods!  A few current examples can be cited in this issue of the Post as they come to mind.
I cannot match Linda’s certainty as to the truth of facts or the righteousness of causes. She knows my disposition, age and condition prevent even a limited career of tilting at windmills. I think she still accepts me for what I am. I have considered my brief appearance on the planet a bit of an accident of nature. Often it is been a lonely struggle for survival and a search for kinship. For my puny efforts I got an overflow of good fortune in achieving that survival well beyond expectations as to quality and duration as outlined in a memoir appropriately called A Minority of One. I still claim to live in the best of times and the best of places on earth though my examples of current stupidity make me wonder how long they will last. At no time, however, did the old man have the strength, the chutzpah, the manipulative ability, the desire for prominence or the lack of inhibitions almost every teenager in today’s world seems to have. They perhaps can sustain such ongoing struggles for change.
Still, through this medium, the old man can sometimes release his inhibitions in spite of the possibility of post-publication ridicule! For me, the most obvious examples of stupidity among the rich and powerful can be observed on CNN almost daily in this American election year. Specifically, the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the endless primary election process are almost frightening in their competition for the right to lead the world into the next one hundred years of war and destruction. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to call each other names, to spread lies and rumours about each other and to call the current commander in chief a complete disaster and worse. It is a wonder that some even more stupid religious nut of the ultra conservative right has not found a way to assassinate Obama in spite of his tight security! The only one of the four to sound half reasonable is the old man running on a libertarian anti-war platform. I agree with the man’s ideas of personal responsibility and freedom from government intervention in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, people are not ready for such freedom. The result would be anarchy even if ever achieved. Common sense tells the old man that whatever their intentions each candidate knows in his heart that he will have no better chance of “changing Washington” than did Barack Obama after his 2008 campaign.
A few more examples of what I consider ignorance in power can be seen in the Canadian political environment. I have generally supported the conservative right side of our broad spectrum in the hope of weaning an ever more demanding and dependent population from the notion that any particular government in power, federally and provincially, is somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong in the life of any individual resident. Whatever party rules, however, each insists on the righteousness of ever increasing rapidity of growth. Whatever happened to Small Is Beautiful? Harper’s new Conservative majority is no different than any of the more leftist parties. None believe it would be good to “conserve”. If global warming is accepted as a fact, we must exploit, use, extract, develop, and sell all the goodies revealed by the rapidly receding ice. Thus we must dig up all the miles of muck known as the Athabaska Tar Sands to make oil so we can supply the world with ever more pollution.  To do so we must use more and more fresh water, a resource much more precious and critical to life on the planet than the few re-usable hydrocarbons gleaned from the oil sands. Wars may well be fought this century over access to potable water.
A related Canadian example of stupidity in power has to do with the current environmental assessment hearings on the viability of the Harper government’s proposed pipeline to send the half treated oil sands product through the mountains for shipment by sea to China. After the staggering financial cost of extracting and treating the product in Alberta, the investors must have their pound of flesh whether it gets sold to Americans or Chinese. From my own less than scientific assessment, both options south and west are undesirable. Furthermore, it seems to me inevitable that the combined pipeline and tanker option will be the cause of any number of monumental environmental disasters, whatever the government eventually decides, environmental hearings notwithstanding.
All I have left to say is, Let it be in the hands of the gods and not in the hands of the hoi polloi!

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I'm getting on in years, which is why this blog is called The Old Man's Post.