Soggy Saturday at home

Except during imminent or current illness I cannot recall the last time I glued myself indoors throughout an entire day. As mundane as my daily routine may be it normally involves a bicycle ride, grocery shopping or a drive about the countryside.  In truth I did in fact venture abroad earlier this morning to the car wash but I returned within minutes because the place was “closed for maintenance“.  Whatever that means. I have yet to see any activity when the sign is displayed. The weather was cool and cloudy today so I spent my time – until now (my accustomed coffee hour) – reading  British history and replying to email concerning the trucker convoys to the parliaments of Canada and New Zealand.

This worldwide trucker business  – denominated the “Freedom Convoy” here and “Convoi de la Liberté” in Paris, France – has an indisputably Trumpian toxic air to it; viz., noise from the working masses putatively about legitimate concerns regarding wait times and washrooms but paramountly involving secret and large monetary donations (mostly from the United States of America), Confederate flags, conspiracy theorists and a number of unrelated complaints none of which identifies any leader. The sole unifying theme is disruption of government – which has apparently become the standby target for all the shortcomings of a multitude of indefinable sources. I am reminded of Chris Rock’s observation, “What ever happened to crazy!

Overall reaction to the annoying obstruction by these huge machines has not been favourable. However from FOX NEWS comes this unexpected intelligence:

“Real Time” host Bill Maher asked himself “why truckers” specifically were organizing such a protest and went on to answer his own question by pointing out they were the ones making the deliveries to the people working from home during the pandemic.

“You didn’t use that word ‘elitist’ in your whole speech, but, like, that’s the word I think is on people’s tongues and minds,” Maher told Ramaswamy. “There is this idea, and it’s not wrong, that some people are staying home in their Lululemons and other people can afford to, like, wait out and get a free vacation and money from the government, and other people can’t. And they’re p—ed off- the people who can’t.”

“Woke, Inc.” author Vivek Ramaswamy agreed, telling Maher it’s about the “uprising of everyday citizens” against “the rise of this managerial class in democracies around the world.”

“These are the unelected class leaders that ultimately, I think, are using the bureaucratic power to supplant the will of everyday – not only Americans but Canadians and Western Europeans too – and that’s why we’re seeing a fusion of both the left and the right here saying that, ‘Actually we want our voices heard. We want to be able to speak without fear of putting food on the dinner table,’” Ramaswamy said.

As I mentioned yesterday on our FaceTime exchange with friends in New Zealand, though I am uncertain regarding the bona fides of either the Capitol insurrectionists or the truckers, I am convinced that neither left nor right, liberal or conservative, elitist or populist wishes to see the country dissolve into chaos. It’s just bad for business all ’round. The rhetoric, vehemence and vengeance will soon give way to accommodation of whatever ultimate description whether guided by taradiddle or codswallop. It can only be hoped that democracy does not in the process suffer the overwhelming wave of autocracy. Authoritarianism is never in my opinion the answer to difficult questions – for no other reason than that neither divine right to rule nor absolute power has any greater claim to legitimacy than the superstition that underlies each of them. A more persuasive option is captured in the following discussion:

“Dating a movement is always a challenge and can never be strictly precise. Most historians agree that the Enlightenment began around the 1680s and lasted until the early 1800s. In Britain, the beginnings of enlightened thought can be traced back to the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Over a period of decades that began with the English Civil War, Britain was transformed from an autocracy led by the Stuart monarchy into a more constitutional society where religious tolerance was encouraged. In France, the death of Louis XIV in 1715 is often cited as the starting point of the Enlightenment, with the French Revolution of 1789 marking its end point. For some, the wellspring of enlightened thought can be found even further back in European history, around the 1620s when Europe experienced a surge of scientific inquiry, experimentation, and innovation.”

Excerpt From
Age of Enlightenment: A History From Beginning to End
Hourly History

It is noteworthy that to this day many of the same sources of conflict survive. It is equally worthy of mention that nobody over the generations of evolution has escaped peril at the instance of these differences whether advanced by Guy Fawkes, James II or Marie Antoinette. Ruin is by no means the preserve of the poor and oppressed. Just ask the Romanoffs.

In 1762, shortly after the death of Empress Elizabeth, Sophia, who had taken the Russian name Catherine upon her marriage, overthrew her unpopular husband, with the aid of her lover, Grigory Orlov. She reigned as Catherine the Great. Catherine’s son, Paul I, who succeeded his mother in 1796, was particularly proud to be a great-grandson of Peter the Great, although his mother’s memoirs arguably insinuate that Paul’s natural father was, in fact, her lover Serge Saltykov, rather than her husband, Peter. Painfully aware of the hazards resulting from battles of succession, Paul decreed house laws for the Romanovs – the so-called Pauline laws, among the strictest in Europe – which established semi-Salic primogeniture as the rule of succession to the throne, requiring Orthodox faith for the monarch and dynasts, and for the consorts of the monarchs and their near heirs. Later, Alexander I, responding to the 1820 morganatic marriage of his brother and heir, added the requirement that consorts of all Russian dynasts in the male line had to be of equal birth (i.e., born to a royal or sovereign dynasty).