Here's another one ~ Tuesday, March 14, 2006

"Why I Like Civilization More than Barbarism"

Why Kathy likes being Catholic.

I prefer the artificial. The synthetic. The perfectly choreographed. Now THAT's Catholic. Big honkin' non-biodegradable paintings and utterly unrecyclable marble altars and pointlessly extravagant monstrances...

When we Catholics make the mistake of getting "natural", what's the result? Natural Family Planning. Which involves mucus. Just typing the word "mucus" gives me an ice cream headache/anxiety attack...


This made me happy. I have another reason for hating hippies: I was raised by them on the West Coast. I have noticed that people who were raised by hippies either became very very angry conservatives or very very angry feminists. But, Lordy! No one ended up happy.

I also like nature to be very controlled. I remember life in nature, in places like Hornby and Denman Islands where lots of hippies live to this day


Hippie co-op store, Hornby Island

and my peripatetic father briefly lived in a tarpaper cabin with a wood burning cast iron stove. It wasn't all bad. I liked the beach and the woods.


North Beach, Hornby Island

I liked collecting rocks and had quite a good collection of interesting nature things that I had found whenever I went out into it. I have admitted to being outdoorsy. Used to camp a great deal, wandering around the Gulf Islands every summer (the ferry rides between the islands were free in those days.)

But later I wised up. I learned, as did the Barbarians when they got a good look at Roman civilization, that nature is all fine as long as you can go indoors at night and turn on a light and read the field guide to all the interesing nature things you have found on your walk.


I kept camping, but I learned to do it in a manner befitting a lawful heir of Western Civillization. I camped in as much ostentatious luxury as possible. And I mean absolutely crazy luxury.


I'm talking oriental carpets, tapestries, giant iron braziers with whole pigs roasting on them, elaborately engineered outdoor baths heated by wood-stoked ovens. Every time I see a movie that has a medieval or Roman camp in it where everyone is lounging about in luxurious pavillions and drinking a lot of mead from a fancy metal cup, I sigh and think, "I've been to that party, and it was great." (Yes, I can't wait for Beowulf!)

There's nothing quite so wonderful as the experience of waking up early on a summer morning and listening to the birds start twittering in the glorious, clean and quiet and cool outdoors while encased in a silk brocade duvet on a double-size hand made wooden bed in a pavillion decorated with silk banners, an armour stand, and wrought iron candelabra, smelling of wood smoke and thinking maybe a little leftover venison would be nice for breakfast.

Medieval re-enactors are geeks of the highest order, it must be admitted, but how much geekier can you get than a Trad? And at least in their own context, those guys really know how to live.

After discovering the truth that man is meant to subdue and dominate nature, I learned to hate it along with the hippies who worshipped it. The one thing that Rachel Carson was right about was that man is at war with the insects. Her solution, however was to capitulate and thus, we have the absurd yuppies of Kitsilano and the Annex buying absurdly over priced organic fruit that doesn't even taste good. We have the vegans who are going to go blind, and prematurely osteoporotic and probably senile because they don't get enough protein and vitamins. All because we have adopted the liberal line that the strong must apease and capitulate to the weak. I understand we are at war with nature; and I intend that my species will WIN.

Actually, that's not true, I like nature just fine, when it is carefully controlled in a flower pot, cultivated garden, or zoo as God intended (literally! it says so in the Bible!). Otherwise, it tends to crawl on you with its horrible little legs and sting you with its horrible little stingers. Nature is really just trying to eat you all the time. I like that we have mostly learned to subdue it and subject it to our will.

I think I have stayed in Toronto, partly because I know that though it is a nice cozy fantasy, the idea of living in a hermitage somewhere in the woods of, say Vermont, would remind me too much of the grubby, little cabins on Pender Island (before it became a resort) with no indoor plumbing and wolf spiders lurking in every corner. Ugh!