Large Fierce Mammal

Welcome back oh weary Pilgrim to another season of Dark Sentiments where everything dark is darker yet!

As you’ve clearly passed alive, if not unscathed, through the travails that for brevity I will refer to as “since last time”, you have earned your place at the fire we’ve stoked yet again to warm you through each of the lengthening and ever colder nights defining this month of October. As one point of order, undoubtedly superfluous as the sort attracted to our flames will be predisposed by nature against frivolous concerns, no discussions regarding the carbon dioxide emissions of our council fire, nor the sustainability of its fuel source, will be entertained.

We find ourselves living through interesting times indeed, to the the point where idiocy has been permitted to enwrap its fragile frame in a mantle of unassailability.

To speak metaphorically, if a group of self-appointed victims from now were to replace the actual victims aboard the RMS Titanic on the tragic night of 14-15 April 1912, the threat posed by the iceberg would have been cast into doubt on the grounds that to allege water can exist in only three states as solid, liquid, or gas is nought but a socially constructed “theory” not to be blindly embraced by anyone who follows “the science”. That the mere hue of the iceberg itself coupled with its uncanny ability to lay waste to a ship proclaimed unsinkable, let alone one painted in dark colours beneath the topmost decks which were dazzling white, unquestionably proves a strong white supremacist motive to have been foundational to the tragedy. That for the Ship’s Captain to issue orders for evasive action, or even for such a person to exist at all, is the utmost demonstration of toxic masculinity, and that merely stating, let alone enforcing, such a code of honour as “women and children first” presumes gender and may even be transphobic.

Where once was the Scientific Method used to guide systems of study, and no research outcome was considered unassailable, we now have “settled science” and those who “follow” it. Cursed be he who dares express reservations about the coefficient of friction manifest upon the slope. A “new study” seems to be in the arc described by the swinging of every demised feline, with yet another dire outcome “suggested” by a computer model running just the right data within a framework formed of just the right parameters. Upon such as this are careers now being built by the latest generation of “scientists”, and never were the brain droppings of the “assistant” professor more represented than now. Nor the World Health Organization (WHO) or the United Nations (UN) overall, come to that.

Current events driven by neglect of duty on the part of governments past, and not all that distant past at that, find themselves branded anew as weakened and worn out components of vital infrastructure and service delivery systems fail before the inexorable juggernaut of “climate change” whereby the sins of governance may be washed away (sometimes literally) by the wide brush of collective guilt for which we must all now atone. Well, those of us who aren’t among “the chosen” anyway … you know who you are.

Certainly not new, but ever growing in source and volume, we hear warning cries and calls to prepare for the “The End Of The World As We Know It”, often abbreviated to TEOTWAWKI, and usually uttered to describe a looming trigger point by which time preparations for it will constitute all you’re going to have. This may come as prelude to a mass die off of all we hold dear and a descent into “barbarism” as though that can only exist absent your friendly neighbourhood bureaucracy. But TEOTWAWKI, like Death in all its wondrous manifestations, is not bound to negative outcomes, however rough and fraught with peril the road to it may be. As an example from a culture far from ours in nature, time, and physical distance, my Esteemed Friend Stephen F. Kaufman has written:

“The samurai ideal is contemplative towards the finality of a situation or physical death. Most people confuse the attitude of death with the extinguishing of life, and in this they are confused. The idea is not to die in vain. Enlightened people, samurai or not, prefer dying to be meaningful and purposeful. Yes there is the formality of physical death, but there are many other forms of ‘death’ that occur in a person’s life. The death of an old way of thinking may be a more rational approach to the samurai ideal.” ~ The Way of the Modern Warrior — Living the Samurai Ideal in the 21st Century

According to those historically customary and once worthy public information sources that have evolved to feed upon the excretions of government (writing this from Canada I’ll pause to look at you CBC), everything is a “crisis”. And so we have such a state affecting health care, homelessness, cost of living, suicide, opioid, the economy, immigration, climate, energy, national defence, veterans, food security, water shortages, environmental destruction, wildfires, floods, mental health, unemployment, race relations, courts and justice systems in general, policing, immigration, international relations, human trafficking, weapons proliferation, and “rules based” world order by whatever definition of that term the one using it finds most supportive of their narrative. Please don’t take this as anything approaching a complete list as I’m sure to have missed something, and more crises will have no doubt been added by the time this sees publication, but notwithstanding that, a society with its every critical part in a state of “crisis” does not, in actuality, have that many discrete problems. What it does have is a much smaller number of BIG problems of which the smaller issues are symptoms.

I could go on, Goode Reader, but at risk of eating up the entirety of October in this introduction alone.

Never fear. The fire will still be burning just as hot and bright when you rejoin us here tomorrow night.

Until then, I offer this ditty to stand as an example of how even the most seemingly nonsensical prelude may still lead to a definitively pointed conclusion.