december momentarias

 

Twas in the bleak mid winter.

I mean yesterday.

I was returning from church where I'd been praying for an aunt who has just died.

As I drove up the avenue to the old homestead, a robin flew from the hedge and landed directly in front of the car.

I wound down the window and called: "Howya Robin."

He showed no interest in moving.

I got out of the car with the engine still running.

The robin pecked about happily close to my feet, still directly in front of the car.

The behaviour was unusual enough to make me think.

I wondered could the bird be bringing a greeting by the grace of God from Aunty Eileen.

Something similar had happened a few years ago with the death of an Uncle.

As I drove down the same avenue, behind schedule and in a hurry, heading to church for the posthumous remembrance known in Ireland as a Month's Mind, a dove had landed directly in front of the car.

He was so close and disinclined to move that I was afraid I'd run over him. Like the robin, he'd stayed where he was until I got out of the vehicle, said a few words, and gently moved him on.

I thought the creature might have been from Uncle Bernard whose remembrance I had been going to.

I ended up being late for the prayer service because of the dove.

And now today's robin from Aunty Eileen.

I remember the psychologist Victor Frankl recounting in his book Man's Search For Meaning that on a freezing winter's day in the Concentration Camp where he'd been doing forced labour, a little bird had alighted near him and looked at him fixedly.

He'd instantly thought of his wife who unbeknownst to him, had just died in an adjoining Concentration Camp for women.

It is an opprobrious and dangerous thing to try and contact the dead through mediums but I do believe that God may permit a blessed greeting from a loved one via the birds or even sometimes in dreams.

These things call for care and discernment.

Uncle Bernard's wife Mary was startled to find a robin in her house the Christmas after the Uncle died.

The robin was perched beside a photo of Uncle Bernard and Aunty Mary.

Again the coincidence was enough to make me wonder.

Last word to the husband of a woman who a few years ago was thinking of setting up a restaurant cafe and cookery school in Kilcullen but was having doubts about the project.

She told me that while she dithered over what to do, a robin came to her windowsill and she felt that the robin had somehow been sent by her recently deceased father and that he was telling to her to take a chance on the new business.

Her husband was with us in the kitchen when she told me the story.

"What do you think Tom?" she asked him.

"Ah Siobhan," he said consolingly, "sure the hedge is full of fucken robins."

You can find her Kalbarri Cookery School just outside Kilcullen.

pardon me sir but there's a goatherd in my soup

 

The commentator Mark Steyn remarked this week for the umpteenth time that "we" (by which he meant the American army) "cannot even win against goatherds with fertilizer."

I'd quibble with this.

After the Nine Eleven attacks on America, the American army defeated Al  Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and gave the Afghans twenty years of the most free, most civilised, society they had ever known.

In a decade long search the American army also hunted down Muslim porn addict and Nine Eleven perp Osama Bin Laden in his bolt hole in Pakistan and sent him home to Allah.

In 2003 the American army liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein's murderocracy, taking about five minutes to accomplish that job.

During the liberation of Iraq, the American army captured Saddam Hussein (soon after executed by the newly liberated Iraqis) and in the ensuing mopping up operation, killed Saddam's two putative successors his sons Uday and Qusay.

Saddam Hussein's army was according to some, the fourth largest in the world. It did not at any level consist of goatherds with fertiliser. (No offence to any goatherds with fertiliser who may be reading this.)

The American army then gave Iraq some years of genuine freedom, as with Afghanistan, making it for a short time the most free most civilised country its people had ever known.

I would contend that the American army's only defeat in these matters came when opportunistic politicians anxious to make a name for themselves on the homefront in the USA decided to betray our war time President George W Bush and the war effort itself, by claiming the wars were unnecessary and that the American commitment to a free Afghanistan and Iraq should end.

Barack Obama became a two term President of the United States, slandering President Bush and peddling withdrawal and appeasement regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Obama's withdrawal of the American army from Iraq in 2011 constituted its only defeat there.

The American army could fight any other army on earth but they couldn't fight their own President.

The Iranians promptly hoovered up the abandoned Iraq.

We cannot blame the American army for that Mr Steyn.

To be quite clear, I am saying that it is objectively untrue of Mark Steyn to suggest the American army lost to goatherds with fertiliser in Iraq.

If they lost at all, they lost to Barack Obama.

There was more to come.

President Obama accompanied his Iraq surrender with the announcement of a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan meaning the  Jihadis knew they just had to outwait the American army. Not defeat them. Outwait them. Hardly the military's fault Mr Steyn.

And as with the Iraqis, it is deceptive to classify the Taliban as goatherds.

They are a modern army, succoured, trained, provisioned and maintained over many decades in Pakistan by the Pakistani secret service (known as the ISI) and by the Pakistanis' accomplices in international Jihad. (Known as the Muslim Brotherhood but including input from several significant State actors.)

The emergence of Donald Trump in 2015 as a political figure with  his hostile takeover of the Republican party and his successful accession to the Presidency of the United States a year later, similarly involved Mr Trump claiming like Obama, that President Bush had led America unnecessarily to war and that the American commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan should end.

Mr Trump was elected for one term and set a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

His successor President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party followed through on Trump's timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, brought the American army home, and thereby handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban who had waited patiently over the border in Pakistan for their moment to strike.

Mr Trump has now won a second term as President and will succeed Joe Biden in January.

Any victory won by the Taliban was not through defeats inflicted on the American army by goatherds with fertiliser. I maintain that victory for the Taliban was gifted to them cumulatively by Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama.

The American army therefore was defeated by three opportunistic and mediocre and ultimately utterly forgettable Presidents of the United States of America.

And, I hasten to add, by the corporate leftist appeasement oriented media groups of the Western World.

And, lest we forget, by Mark Steyn himself through his own willingness (like other former War On Terror cheerleaders Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity of Fox News) to turn Turk upon the American army and countenance Trump's venal opportunism in slandering President Bush and the war effort.

Twilight of the Sods

 

Standing on the riverbank near the Dominican Church in Newbridge.

It is a wintery dusk.

A little downstream from me, a woman sitting on the bank shoots me a delicious sidelong glance and rubs her pet thighs.

Like the character Mr Burns in the interminable Simpsons televisual cartoon, I will rue the day when such a piece of classic theatre is not worth at least an internal hubba hubba.

From behind me, like the knocking in Macbeth, a voice rings out.

"James, hey James, James Healy."

I am not best pleased at this interruption to my sensual superludities.

Turning I behold a slim, nondescript enough looking man, with a congenial middle aged visage.

He puts me in mind of a famous book title, to wit, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.

He draws level, breathless, and speaks, proffering a hand: "It's years since I've seen you."

"Who are you?" quoth me a tad cautious.

"Donal Deeney," says he, "I was at school with you."

"Good heavens Donal," I exclaim, "you haven't seen me since June 1983 and you still recognise me,"

"You haven't changed all that much," sez he.

I scratch my bald patch dubiously.

There is an awkward silence.

"I wanted to ask you to join the Legion of Mary?" says he.

"Are you a Christian?" sez me.

"I am."

"But Donal, when did this happen?"

"I, er, I always believed."

Another awkward silence.

I was kind of hoping he was going to talk about some marvellous miracle or an encounter with the Lord.

Instead the conversation took a more prosaic turn.

"We were a talented generation," reminisces Donal Deeney in an apparent fit of sudden delirium.

"Who?" quoth me.

"Our generation at school," says he.

"I thought we were a mediocre shower of fuckers who never amounted to anything," says I. "And I'd be watching out for anything you might mistake for an achievement on a dark night."

"Well Tommy Ryan became a highly respected professor in Academe," sniffs the old alum.

"Gaaak," says I.

"You've got to admit that's something of an achievement," he adds. "And he's also now studying law."

"Tommy Ryan is at nothing studying law," snorts I.

"Why's that James?"

"Because the IRA don't need lawyers now that they've bought up all the Judges."

He digests this for a moment.

"David O'Connor is a top physicist," says he.

"Ah Donal what's a physicist? Someone who can learn off fifty thousand makey uppy words for imaginary particles. It's like learning to recite Lord Of The Rings. Impressive in a certain light but not really an achievement."

"James," says he, "David's daughter is also a scientist. And he tells me she's dealing with theories that even he can't understand."

"But don't you see Donal, if the scientists have divorced themselves from the basic requirement of coherency or comprehensibility, if David can't understand his daughter and vice versa, and nobody else can understand either of them, maybe none of their theories mean anything."

"Their theories created the modern world," pronounced he grandly.

I shook my bald pate.

"Not a bit of it," I said. "The modern world was created by Thomas Alva Edison observing cause and effect, using the methods pioneered over a thousand years by the Catholic Church in its university system. Edison simply observed that when you heat a copper wire it glows. That's it. That's where the great scientific achievements of modernity come from. That's where we got the harnassing of electricity to make light bulbs, phones, batteries, computers, everything. And Thomas Edison had never even heard of those superstitious fables we call Relativity and Quantum Theory. Nor had George Stephenson by the way whose cause and effect observations led to the internal combustion engine. Nor had the Wright Brothers who made the first aeroplane."

"But science predicts all those things," says my old acquaintance.

"The advocates of Quantum and Relativity cannot even comprehensibly state their theories to each other," I argue. " "I don't see how we can say they predict anything. I'll hazard that if they do predict anything it's only that reality will be what it will be. That's not rocket science. But it is Quantum and Relativity Theory. The salesmen for these superstitions, by which I mean theoretical scientists, are trying to reverse engineer their foobooneries into the great accomplishments of the modern world."

"But James haven't you seen the photos from the Hubble telescope? Do you not agree they're simply astonishing?"

"They are works of art Donal. They are not photographs. No chemical emulsion on a plate has reacted to light to create those images, Those images from the Hubble telescope are based on supposed electronic measurements beamed back to earth from space. The measurements are fed into a computer. And the software on the computer creates those images. The guy who designed the software, who programmed in "if the measurement is point five then print a purple splotch, if it's one point seven, print an irridescent yellow oval burst," that's the man who created those images. He's your Leonardo. Those works of creativity are paintings. They are not photos. And they're not even as good as some of the images of birthing universes made with spray cans and sold by vendors on Grafton Street."

There was another awkward silence.

Then Doctor Deeney brightened.

"Richard O'Sullivan is a success," he said. "You have to admit that."

The name jarred with me.

Richard O'Sullivan hadn't been the worst bully at Newbridge College but he had been the worst toady, cheering the others on.

I think he was the only kid I ever thought of trying to do violence to.

I tried to stifle any resentment or jealousy at the possible forthcoming revelation of his accomplishments.

Best not to add sins against charity to all my other sins.

"What did he achieve?" I enquired delicately.

"A personal fortune of forty four million Euro," proclaimed Doctor Deeney with a note of triumph.

"Ah Donal. Come on. You just told me you're a Christian. Why would you be impressed by forty four million?"

"Well you've got to admit... forty four million... it's not bad."

"Tell me what's he doing with it and I'll tell you if I'm impressed. Tell me he's helping little old ladies across the road or something. Tell me he's feeding the starving millions or something."

"He's not doing anything with it," says Doctor Deeney.

"Why not?"

"He's dead."

And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I suppose I can't really complain to the Deity gentle readers, if Richard O'Sullivan made forty four million quid and then keeled over dead. I mean it's kind of a good one.

"Hoo baby," I said wiping my eyes, "that was worth waiting for."

But my companion was gone.

I could see him hurrying away into the gathering dusk.

Glancing back to the river bank I was presented with the scientifically incontestable fact that Sexy Miss Sex the Sexor had departed also, taking her magnificent silken clad thighs with her.

"Ah bawls," I exclaimed bitterly.