LOTT CHRONICLES, DAY 1
That would be Master Jeremy Lott, the 17-year-old binational conservative dynamo, not Senator Trent Lott, the 77-year-old disgraced troglodyte majority leader.
Jeremy arrived today to begin the five-day (I hope) process of reteaching me how to produce The Report. Several of the procedures have changed since I did this last in 1997, and back then I had been in Edmonton in the same room as the rest of the production staff. Now I am in Victoria, which will require some modifications.
Jeremy was over an hour late arriving at my home: a delay he blamed on my directions. (”They suck.”) Funny thing, however, Link Byfield had managed to find my home easily enough from my directions.
Sunday was a day of frantic activity, attempting to make my home Lott-suitable. Which means cat-unsuitable. They have been banished from upstairs and all traces of their previous residence painstakingly removed. As close as dammit, anyway. Young Master Lott is “allergic” to them, you see. They are allergic to him as well. One jumped seven feet to the lawn from the top of the front-door stairs at this approach.
Like most preternaturally successful people, Jeremy appears perpetually exhausted. Yet despite suffering from a cold for several days, he proved even more ebullient in person than on the telephone. He arrived with not one but two notebooks. A Sony VAIO for him and an Apple iBook for me. What a sleek, impressive looking unit the latter is. The top of the shell is white, like hard icing or the body of an electric guitar. Now I have two computers and my very first notebook. Well, not mine, actually, but mine to use. The iBook is required because the magazine is put together using Quark XPress, an Apple program. Well, not an Apple program, actually, but the magazine has been produced on Apple software for donkey’s years, and that’s not about to change now.It has been five years since I have used an Apple. I am not an Apple person. Who are the Apple people? Here’s the test. Steven Levy describes (in Insanely Great—recommended) his first exposure to the Macintosh:It certainly looked different.
In about thirty seconds, the woman had everything plugged in and connected. She reached behind it and turned it on. The disk drive ground and whirred. And the small screen turned milky white. In the middle was a sharp little machine self-portrait, with a blinking question mark on the screen inside the screen. Then the disk drive whirred once more and the question mark evaporated. In its place was a happy face. Macintosh was happy.
I was witnessing a revolution.
If you are the kind of person who inwardly delights to see a computer with a happy face, then you are an Apple person. If you are like me and a computer with a happy face causes you to grind your teeth, then you are not an Apple person. Jeremy is not really an Apple person either, but he has benefited from the tutelage of Production Generalist Dave Stevens, one of the great Apple proselytizers. (Although as you can read here, Dave is all turned around these days on the Wintel question.)
So we booted up the iBook. The happy face remains, but the disk drive is gone. Apple has decided that disk drives are otiose, much as they decided years ago that colour displays were otiose. We launched Photoshop and Jeremy started to plot the layout. I had done the layout for Alberta Report and BC Report dozens of times, but in those primitive days I used a pencil, three sheets of oversized paper and a plastic eraser. After a while, Jeremy asked me to take over. Using an Apple is like falling off a bicycle; you never forget. It’s a simple matter of pretending to be dyslexic and then doing everything twice instead of once.To be perfectly fair, I must admit that networking the iBook was shockingly easy. We needed to connect it to the Internet to receive text files from the writers and the Quark files from Dave. I had anticipated bringing in a network specialist at $50 or whatever an hour. There was such a guy in the mall where we went for lunch. He told me to my chagrin that he was not an Apple person, not in the slightest. We returned home somewhat chastened. Just on the off chance, I found a network cable and attached to the iBook and to my network router. It worked perfectly. Pretty impressive.
I was starting to develop a whole new respect for the Apple. Then I decided to push my luck. I went to make some tea and asked Jeremy to show me how the iBook’s DVD player worked. I am going to Edmonton next week for a two-day editorial meeting and wanted to be one of those guys watching his own movie on the plane. O vanity of vanities! Getting the tray to open took some fiddling, which should have been a warning. I slapped in a disk (Best of Bowie—recommended), and nothing happened. The Help function proved unavailing. OK, I said, we can always do this later. I went to the kitchen to get our tea and returned to find Jeremy on the phone with Dave. He could not get the DVD out of the iBook and the iBook was frozen.Dave explained that the DVD player did not work with Mac OS 9.2 but that it would probably work with OS 10. OK, so how do we get the disk out? From Dave to Jeremy to me: do you have a paperclip? That certainly took me back. How I remember the many times I had had to manually eject now otiose floppy disks from Macintoshes that froze up and refused to surrender them.
I ask you; what kind of company builds a DVD player into a computer—and remember this is Apple, no third-party jiggery-pokery here—and then gives you an operating system that does not support the hardware? Ah, yes. The next version of the OS will fix that problem. Always with the next version—it’s a time-honoured Apple tradition, just like the paperclip.Well, we got the DVD out, got back to work and finished the layout. Afterward I was informed that I’d laid out the same 6-column story twice, but we can fix that tomorrow. All in all, not a bad day at all.Elsewhere, Colby Cosh takes me to task for my assertion that Joe Strummer would have boycotted the Clash’s induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Mausoleum in Cleveland next year. He’s right, and I’m wrong. I had been sentimental. It won’t happen again. Remember my motto for 2003 and beyond: less feeling, more thinking.I do think Colby is wrong about Bono though. The Bono of 1980 is a different creature from the one we all know and loathe today. He was young, frisky and eager to please. He shaved and washed his hair regularly. I remember discussing back in 1980 or so the Bono that was with my old friend Phil Smith, the Vancouver singer-songwriter-impresario. Phil amazed me with one of those tremendous insights of which he was capable. “U2 are the punk Yes!” he said. Just so. Bono even looked like Jon Anderson. I mean, You Too? Come on. Wake up and smell the granola, Colby.
Finally, I know you’re all sick of Trent Lott—who is, of course, not to be confused with, nor is he related to Master Jeremy Lott—but I urge you all to read the best analysis of the significance of his fall, which comes from VDARE’s Steve Sailer. (See here and here.) Sailer comments on the politically correct frenzy that is consuming the American Right:Gentlemen, why is it necessary to remind you that the Republican Party cannot win a war of attrition fought on this particular battlefield?I have only one thing to add. The Lott affair has little to do with the Republican Party per se. It is all about the neoconservatives and their attempt to seize control of the conservative movement, an institution for which they have no love and to which they demonstrate no loyalty. Neoconservatism derives from Trotskyism, but its political praxis has more in common with Leninism. Divide, divide, divide. So they wreck the GOP? No matter, so long as they control what remains.
I persist in using the word “neoconservative,” despite the caveat from papabile Jonah Goldberg (Norman Podhoretz remains Pope) that this usage is, well, not yet anti-Semitic—but we have been warned. Someone should find a copy of the two-decade old Esquire profile (it could even have been a cover story) of Irving Kristol. As far I can recall, the piece praised Kristol (a thinker for whom I have a great deal of respect) as the “godfather” of something called “neoconservatism.” I don’t recall him complaining that the term was a slur against Jews–he even wrote a book called Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Expect to see these and many other primary documents vanish down the memory hole.Kevin Michael Grace, 2.49 a.m., December 31, 2002 [Link]

AM I BUGGIN’ YA?
Once again I have to ask why newspapers bother with unsigned editorials. A perfect illustration of the fatuity of this genre comes from Saturday’s National Post, which fails to say a single interesting thing about Joe Strummer.
The former lead singer and chief lyricist for The Clash, who died earlier this week of a heart attack at the age of 50, was arguably the most important leader of the late-70s/early-80s punk movement. The double-album London Calling is considered by many to be one of rock’s greatest recordings, and the band’s stage presence was legendary.

Mind you don’t exhaust the superlatives now. So Strummer influenced Bono, eh? Influenced him how, I wonder. To become the Sammy Maudlin of the rock world? I think not. Is there anybody Bono hasn’t been influenced by? Doubtless when Billy Joel kicks the bucket, Bono will tell us what a great influence Piano Man was on him.One might expect the Post to take issue with Strummer’s politics. Well,
The Clash’s left-wing political posturing was generally simplistic and misguided.

But on the other hand,

Compared to other acts of the period, it was enlightened stuff. Recall that the Sex Pistols had been out-and-out anarchists.

Ooh, anarchists! How déclassé! Johnny Rotten claimed he was an “anti-Christ” as well, and isn’t that even more irresponsible than mere anarchy? The Post’s political typology is fiendishly subtle. Johnny was taking the mickey, wasn’t he? A joke? What’s that?
Mr. Strummer addressed relatively complex social and political issues–including urban decay and war in Central America.

Not to mention how he addressed the “relatively complex” issue of pigeon infestation in “Guns on the Roof.” Gotta love that New York Times stylebook. Doubtless when Iggy buys it, the Post will inform us that Mr. Pop was “arguably” the most important leader of the late 60s/early-70s punk movement and that Raw Power is “considered by many” to be one of rock’s greatest recordings.
Mr. Strummer flirted with other music genres.

“Flirted”? Is that supposed to be a compliment? How so?

In later recordings, The Clash infused its music with various black influences, including soul, reggae and calypso–a healthy counterpoint to the skin-headed racists who sought to co-opt punk as a soundtrack for the White Power movement.

Never mind that this anonymous editorial writer is obviously unaware that the skinheads were into bluebeat, ska and reggae and ska long before punk existed—what a strange insinuation this is. Is he suggesting that “white” music is inherently “racist”?Finally,

In March, The Clash will be inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. It is a shame that Mr. Strummer will be unable to attend, for he will be among the institution’s most worthy inductees.

From hesitant to ignorant to pompous. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Mausoleum in Cleveland is the antithesis of everything the Clash stood for. I’d like to think that Joe Strummer would have shown it the contempt it deserves.
Kevin Michael Grace, 1.04 a.m., December 30, 2002 [Link]

KMG: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

For Kevin Michael Grace, 2002 was a year of preparation and waiting. The year 2003 will be one of action and decision. Here’s a look back—and a guess at what lies ahead.
Hey, my year-end review begins exactly the same as David Frum’s! We really have a lot in common, you know. We were both born in Toronto; our mothers were both beloved national institutions; we both attended three different Ivy League schools; worked in the Bush White House and now for National Review and the National Post.
Actually, none of the above is true, except that we were both born in Toronto, a place I have visited precisely twice in the last 30 years. I have spent precisely three days there in three decades; three days too many, and three days more than I’ll ever spend again, if I have anything to say about the matter.
Where were we? Oh yes, my 2002 recap. I would judge it the worst year since 1992: a year of deprivation, dislocation and calamitous personal betrayal. By year’s end, however, the deprivation was somewhat ameliorated; the uncertainty, both professional and personal, was uncertain no longer; and the personal betrayal was played out to the final act.
More important than any of this: I had found a new voice.

A LOOK BACK

2002 was a learning year. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but as Thomas Szasz reminds us, this is but one of the differences between dogs and men. What did I learn? Nothing I didn’t know already; that is to say I had known certain things intellectually but hadn’t appreciated them viscerally. Or not viscerally enough–visceral like being kicked in the testicles.
Money makes the world go round. It’s not my highest value, but then nothing beats an abundance of the readies. I learned that noble sentiments, urgent protestations and fine words are as nothing compared to comfort and security–no matter how incontinent his dog might be. Only a fool would would think differently.
Never deign to be pitied. For pity is the skim milk powder of human kindness. (As I have epigrammatised in this space.) I learned that the pleasure of dispensing pity is great, but the pleasure of receiving it negligible. Pity is often hard to distinguish from condescension or even contempt; it elides easily enough into cruelty.
Trust once ruptured can never be repaired. Merlin, in John Boorman’s Excalibur, says, “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.” I would add that he also murders a part of himself. I learned that given enough lies, there is no man left. For love or even friendship to survive between two people, words must be cognate to some truth, however attenuated. Otherwise one might as well attempt to converse with a dog.
More important than any of this: I learned how to use FrontPage.

A GUESS AT WHAT LIES AHEAD

Time is a continuum; any division is arbitrary and ultimately meaningless. On other hand, life would be intolerable if we didn’t convince ourselves that Wednesday would be better than Tuesday and 2003 better than 2002. I’m no different. My 2003 begins on Monday, December 30, 2002, when clever, young, thrusting Jeremy Lott arrives in Victoria to teach me my new job. I say goodbye to reporting and writing and hello again to editing, production and the Mac. I think I’m good at the first two, so the translation should be felicitous.
I will continue writing but now almost exclusively for The Ambler. My blog has been my lifeline. To speak of readers worldwide numbering on average 120 a day as a community might sound absurd or insane, but it is a community to me, and I love it.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money; so call me a blockhead. My blog has given me more pleasure than I ever imagined. I will keep it up so long as it is physically and legally possible, and I hope my readers understand how much they mean to me. Effusive thanks to all those that have linked to me, especially Colby Cosh, Kathy Shaidle, the 2Blowhards, Lew Rockwell and, most recently and spectacularly, Jesse Walker of Reason’s Hit and Run.
My promise to you for 2003: I will post every day and attempt to give you the best of which I am capable. God bless you all.

On the stereo: the Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free” (Lou Reed):

I’ve been set free 
And I’ve been bound
Let me tell you people
What I found
I saw my head laughing
Rolling on the ground

And now I’m set free
I’m set free
To find a new illusion

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.47 p.m., December 28, 2002 [Link]

ETERNAL RECURRENCE

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. The Ambler’s 2002 Most Disingenuous Assertion Award goes to Barry Cooper and David Bercuson of the University of Calgary for their National Post column of December 27, 2002:
In this season of sustained hopes for peace on Earth, no one wants to think about war.

Peace sells, but who’s buying? Not Bercuson and Cooper, that’s for sure. War is their bread and butter. Why so coy? Haven’t they heard of the New Romanism? War is man’s highest expression—peace is for wimps. All together now: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.Their column is entitled, “Canada must defend South Korea.” Must! Is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little men, little men. So tell us professors, why must Canada defend South Korea?

Increasingly, U.S. policymakers are arguing that a nuclear-armed North Korea is currently a greater threat to American interests than is another prominent member of the “axis of evil”—Iraq. Much smaller and less strategically important than Iraq, a nuclear-armed North Korea would still be a threat to the Republic of Korea, to Japan, and to several nations on the rim of the East China and South China Seas. The reason is not just because North Korea is building nuclear weapons but because it has already developed the capacity to deliver them using long-range Taepodong missiles. In 1998 it flew a rocket high over Japan, and its self-imposed moratorium on missile development expires early in the new year.
This hardly serves to instil us with confidence regarding the acumen of U.S. policymakers, does it? What have we heard, incessantly, from U.S. policymakers for the two years of the Bush administration? Saddam Hussein, new Hitler. Saddam Hussein, madman. Saddam Hussein, threat to life as we know it. Weapons of mass destructions? He’s got ’em. Or he might or he will or he’d like to get his hands on some. In any event: Saddam Hussein, intolerable. And we got your regime change right here, pal…
…Whoa! This just in…Even scarier madman in power in Pyongyang! Sure, Castro says “Socialism or death!” but this Kim dude means it—they eat bark there, man. He’s building real WMDs, not just notional ones. Has a real weapons delivery system too, not just some junk left over from WWII.
How did this happen? Never mind. America is fully capable of fighting a two-front war. Right? But what does any of this have to do with Canada, anyway?

Conditions on the Korean peninsula are very different today than they were when the North attacked South Korea in June of 1950, sparking a three-year war. The North today is little changed from what it was 52 years ago. But the South is a democratic nation with guarantees of civil rights and a successful, globalized industrial economy. Accordingly, those nations that came to the defence of South Korea in 1950 have an even greater obligation to do so today.

Canada was one of those countries. In the days when this nation still could mount a decisive foreign policy, more than 28,000 Canadians served in the Korean War, and more than 500 were killed in action or died on active service before it was over. Should war break out in Korea, Canada’s interests, Canada’s pride and Canada’s debt to its Korean War dead should commit this nation once more to battle.

More necromancy from Bercuson and Cooper. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere with regard to Bercuson and Cooper, the dead cannot speak. What would they say if they could?
Private Donald McDougal, you took a hunk of shrapnel to the gut during the Battle of Kapyong on April 24, 1951. Unfortunately, no medic could get to you, so you bled to death slowly and in excruciating pain. Professors Bercuson and Cooper say that Canada “must” defend South Korea again. What’s your take?If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.

This is what Bercuperson would have us believe. There’s always the possibility, of course, that the late Private McDougal might say this:
The whole of the Korean Peninsula is not worth the healthy bones of a single Princess Pats infantryman.

Who knows? Dead men tell no tales—contra Bercuperson.
I think their theory of Canadian “eternal obligation” might need some fine-tuning, lest our military resources be stretched just a teeny bit. Yes, Canadians served in Korea and served with distinction, but they also served in China, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia, to name just a few. And would Bercuperson have us on the hook for South Africa as well? Should civil war break out there, would Canada’s interests, Canada’s pride and Canada’s debt to its Boer War dead (224) commit us to return?
With all these Bercupersonian potential obligations, hadn’t Canada better introduce conscription? Not necessarily. As Bercuperson suggests, let us take history as our guide. We’ll fudge that issue when we come to it.
Kevin Michael Grace, 3.23 p.m., December 27, 2002 [Link]

RELIGION PROSCRIBED

Barbara Findlay, a Vancouver lawyer, was appointed a Queen’s Counsel December 20, 2001. According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the QC is “an appointment bestowed on a barrister by the Attorney General in recognition of excellence as an advocate.” Findlay is certainly an excellent advocate; while she has yet to force everyone to spell her name without capital letters, her campaign to destroy Canadian religion has become a juggernaut.Lest I be accused of hyperbole, here is the woman herself, as quoted by Xtra! West in 1997:

The legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation.

One year to the day after Findlay got her gong from British Columbia Attorney General Geoff Plant, she received a present from the Supreme Court of Canada. It ruled 7-2 against the Surrey School Board in the Chamberlain decision. Findlay’s showdown has arrived, and freedom of religion is being routed.
Gay activist James Chamberlain, a Kindergarten-Grade 1 teacher in Surrey, B.C.’s second-largest city, had sought approval to use the books Asha’s Mums, Belinda’s Bouquet and One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads as “supplementary learning resources” in his classroom. The school board refused Chamberlain’s request. The books in question are gay propaganda; they tout the virtues of “same-sex families.”
According to the Supreme Court of Canada’s summary of the facts:
The Board’s overarching concern, as found by the trial judge, was that the books would engender controversy in light of some parents’ religious objections to the morality of same-sex relationships. The Board also felt that children at the K-1 level should not be exposed to ideas that might conflict with the beliefs of their parents; that children of this age were too young to learn about same-sex parented families; and that the material was not necessary to achieve the learning outcomes in the curriculum.

The board lost at trial, but this verdict was reversed on appeal.
Chamberlain, et al., argued that the board’s decision was contrary to the British Columbia School Act and thus illegal. The Supreme Court of Canada agreed:
The appeal should be allowed. The School Board’s decision was unreasonable in the context of the educational scheme laid down by the legislature. The question of whether the books should be approved as supplementary learning resources is remanded to the Board, to be considered according to the criteria laid out in the curriculum guidelines and the broad principles of tolerance and non-sectarianism underlying the School Act.

The words “tolerance” and “intolerance” appear 14 times in the Supreme Court’s decision. The word “diversity” appears 21 times and “diverse” 10. None of these words appears even once in the B.C. School Act, however. From 1991 to 2001, B.C. was governed by the New Democratic Party, one of the most “gay friendly” governments in North American history. The NDP could easily have rewritten the Act to enshrine the principles of “tolerance” and “diversity.” It did not.
The court ruled against the Surrey School Board based on Section 76–here is what it actually says:

Conduct

76 (1) All schools and Provincial schools must be conducted on strictly secular and non-sectarian principles.

(2) The highest morality must be inculcated, but no religious dogma or creed is to be taught in a school or Provincial school.

In effect, then, the Supreme Court has “read in” to Canada’s basic law, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “tolerance” and “diversity” as the “highest morality,” and it has interpreted that morality as the imposition of gay propaganda on five- and six-year-olds, against the wishes of their parents. As Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, writing for the majority, declared, “Tolerance is always age-appropriate.” Here we see another example of the iron fist of Svend Robinson’s “sensitivity.”
And yet another proof that Canada is no longer a democracy. The decision to exclude the three “gay friendly” books was made by a democratically-elected school board. It was obviously a controversial decision; the board was pilloried by Canada’s bien pensants, as was its spending of close to a million dollars to contest Chamberlain in court. On November 16, 2002, Surrey’s electors delivered their verdict on the school board. The Surrey Electors Team, whose representatives had refused to authorize the use of the three books, elected five of six trustees; an independent ran sixth to claim the final seat. But what is the will of the people compared to the will of Justices Beverly McLachlin, Louise Arbour, Ian Binnie, Frank Iacobucci, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, Louis LeBel and John Major?
The Supreme Court had a problem with the Surrey School Board. For the Surrey Electors Team is not a “sectarian” party. It has made an explicit appeal to conservatives of many different faiths and ethnic groups, Sikhs and Moslems in particular. Here is where the court’s hierarchy of values came into play. At the top of the hierarchy are feminists and militant homosexuals. In the middle are members of religious and ethnic minorities. At the bottom are Christians, whites and males. When Muslims battle Christians, as in the Harding case, Muslims win. But where Muslims (or Sikhs or Buddhists) battle gays, the gays win.
So in Chamberlain, the Supreme Court of Canada expanded upon its Trinity Western University ruling: 

The freedom to hold beliefs is broader than the freedom to act upon them.

Religious belief is not yet proscribed, but the practical effects of religious belief have been expelled from the public square. Here’s how Madam Justice McLachlin explained Canada’s New Order:
The [B.C. School] Act’s insistence on strict secularism does not mean that religious concerns have no place in the deliberations and decisions of the Board. Board members are entitled, and indeed required, to bring the views of the parents and communities they represent to the deliberation process. Because religion plays an important role in the life of many communities, these views will often be motivated by religious concerns. Religion is an integral aspect of people’s lives, and cannot be left at the boardroom door. What secularism does rule out, however, is any attempt to use the religious views of one part of the community to exclude from consideration the values of other members of the community. A requirement of secularism implies that, although the Board is indeed free to address the religious concerns of parents, it must be sure to do so in a manner that gives equal recognition and respect to other members of the community. Religious views that deny equal recognition and respect to the members of a minority group cannot be used to exclude the concerns of the minority group. This is fair to both groups, as it ensures that each group is given as much recognition as it can consistently demand while giving the same recognition to others

This is entirely specious. Schools will continue to inveigh against murder, robbery and falsehood, despite the injunctions against these practices in the Ten Commandments, because the gay agenda does not oppose all of the Decalogue. If Madam Justice McLachlin is to be taken seriously, only an explicitly atheist school board could proscribe gay propaganda. Even then one knows that the court would rule that since this “intolerant” position is coincident with religious belief it would fail the “secularism” test anyway. To put it bluntly: the gays always win.

Justices Charles Gonthier and Michel Bastarache dissented from the majority. They wrote:

The Board’s decision is also consistent with a proper understanding of “strictly secular and non-sectarian principles” in s.76. Section 76 provides general direction as to how all schools are to be conducted. The assumption that “secular” effectively means non-religious is incorrect. The religiously informed conscience should not be placed at a public disadvantage or disqualification. To do so would be to distort liberal principles in an illiberal fashion and would provide only a feeble notion of pluralism. The dual requirements that education be “secular” and “non-sectarian” refer to keeping the schools free from inculcation or indoctrination in the precepts of any religion, and do not prevent persons with religiously based moral positions on matters of public policy from participating in deliberations concerning moral education in public schools. Regardless of the personal convictions of individual members, the reasons invoked by the Board for refusing to approve the books–that parents in the community held certain religious and moral views and the need to respect their constitutional right to freedom of religion and their primary role as educators of their children–raise secular concerns that could properly be considered by the Board.

Justices Gonthier and Bastarache are dinosaurs. The “feeble notion of pluralism” they decry is the law of the land. Christians and other believers are still allowed to hold their beliefs in private, but they must discard them whenever they venture into the public square. Or, to put it in simpler words–the gays always win.

Reaction to the Chamberlain decision was just as one would expect. Canadian conservatives are well used to losing gracefully, to snatching fatuous dreams of victory from crushing defeat.
Mary Polak, chairwoman of the Surrey School Board:

We are disappointed that the Supreme Court of Canada has found that the Board’s process was flawed. We are pleased that the court has affirmed the very important role of parents as primary educators of their children and the rights of parents to have input into the selection of learning resources.
In January of 1999 when the Board decided to appeal the decision of Madame Justice Saunders, the reason given by the Board at the time was “in order to ensure that the rights of parents, whether religious or otherwise, are upheld, we have directed our legal counsel to file an appeal of this decision”.

We are pleased that the court has remanded the decision to the Board thus respecting our role as elected representatives of our community. The Board will now reconsider the inclusion of these materials in accordance with the guidelines from the Supreme Court of Canada.

Adam Exner, Archbishop of Vancouver:

Called the judgment a good news-bad news decision “but mostly bad.”

“Without checking our beliefs at the door, Catholics will continue to join many other Canadians in defending the rights of parents as the first educators of their children,” Exner said (Vancouver Province, December 22).

The Canadian Alliance party and its “libertarian” leader, Stephen Harper:

[Silence.]

From the winners, triumphalism and blasphemy.

James Chamberlain:

“My hope is that today’s court ruling will help lay the foundation for building a more caring and compassionate school system, one in which censorship, anti-gay bigotry and the profound lack of anti-homophobia education in schools will eventually become archaic relics of the past,” Chamberlain told a news conference at the B.C. Teachers’ Federation (Victoria Times Colonist, December 21).

John Dixon, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (which intervened on behalf of Chamberlain):

The Supreme Court is sending a message that’s perfect for this time of year, that the Christ himself, who had nothing whatsoever to say about opposing homosexuality, had everything to say about upholding tolerance, respect and understanding (Vancouver Sun, December 21).

The only sane comment came from Janet Epp Buckingham, lead counsel of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (which intervened on behalf of the Surrey School Board):

The result of the majority decision is that if religious parents have moral objections to material taught in schools, there is no room for them to have any meaningful accommodation…[other than] leaving the public system altogether.

The following is the preamble and the first two sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.

These rights, never mind the “supremacy of God,” are in direct opposition to the “Equality Rights” section of the Charter:

15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

(The words “sexual orientation” do not appear within Section 15(1). They were, of course, “read in” to the Charter by the Supreme Court of Canada.)

Earlier this year I engaged in an ugly public argument with Iain Benson, a conservative Catholic lawyer associated with the Centre for Cultural Renewal. He accused me of “knee-jerk journalistic whinging” because of my belief that Sections 2(a), 2(b) and 2(d) had been “gutted” by the Supreme Court of Canada and because of my refusal to agree with him that “‘the tide is turning’ against the gay agenda in the courts.” (Freedom of peaceful assembly was lost some time ago, when the right of anti-abortionists to protest was pretty much abolished.)
To be blunt, I thought Benson was a bloody fool, but I take no pleasure in being proved right. The question for Benson, for me, for all theists and opponents of what Ted Morton calls Canada’s “soft totalitarianism” is “What is to be done?”
Here is what I believe. To begin with, Canadian Christians and other theists should remove their children from public schools, as Janet Epp Buckingham suggests. In the longer term, we must determine the limits of our association with Canada’s Satanic New Order. Belief has been expelled from the public square. But as the Marc Hall and Scott Brockie decisions prove, the gays want more. They are coming after our temples and our consciences. If you don’t believe me, just ask Barbara Findlay.
Kevin Michael Grace, 11.44 p.m., December 26, 2002 [Link]

POETRY CORNER
 
Auf eine Christblume
 
I
 
Tochter des Walds, du Lilienverwandte,
so lang von mir gesuchte, unbekannte,
 im fremden Kirchhof, öd’ und winterlich,
zum ersten mal, o schöne, find’ ich dich!
Von welcher Hand gepflegt du hier erblühtest,
ich weiß es nicht, noch Wessen Grab du hütest;
ist es ein Jüngling, so geschah ihm Heil,
ist’s eine Jungfrau, lieblich fiel ihr Teil.
 
Im nächt’gen Hain, von Schneelicht überbreitet,
wo fromm das Reh an dir vorüber weidet,
 bei der Kapelle, am krystall’nen Teich,
dort sucht’ ich deiner Heimat zauberreich.
Schön bist du, Kind des Mondes, nicht der Sonne,
Dir wäre tödtlich andrer Blumen Wonne,
dicht nährt, den keuschen Leib voll Reif und Duft,
himmlischer Kälte balsam süße Luft.
In deines Busens goldner Fülle gründet
ein Wohlgeruch, der sich nur kaum verkündet;
so duftete, berührt von Engelshand,
der benedeiten Mutter Brautgewand.
 
Dich würden, mahnend an das heil’ge Leiden,
fünf Purpurtropfen schön und einzig kleiden:
Doch kindlich zierst du, um die Weihnachtszeit,
lichtgrün mit einem Hauch dein weißes Kleid.
Der Elfe, der in mitternächt’ger Stunde
zum Tanze geht im lichterhellen Grunde,
vor deiner mystischen Glorie steht er scheu
neugierig still von fern und huscht vorbei.
 
II
 
Im Winterboden schläft ein Blumenkeim
der Schmetterling, der einst um Busch und Hügel
in Frühlingsnächten wiegt den sammt’nen Flügel;
nie soll er kosten deinen Honigseim.
Wer aber weiß, ob nicht sein zarter Geist,
wenn jede Zier des Sommers hingesunken,
dereinst, von deinem leisen Duftetrunken,
mir unsichtbar, dich blühende umkreist?
 
–Eduard Mörike, 1804-1875

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.58 p.m., December 25, 2002 [Link]

CHRISTIANITY PROSCRIBED

Christmas Eve was certainly an interesting choice of day for the story “Robinson defends his bill, labels foes ‘fearmongers.’” As I argued in Eclectica recently, “Often the most interesting aspect of any newspaper story is not what it includes but what it omits.” What’s missing from Douglas Todd’s Vancouver Sun story is the name Mark Harding. Todd either doesn’t know or chooses not to inform his readers that Christian evangelism is already illegal in Canada if it offends certain protected minorities.
Svend Robinson is the British Columbian gay activist MP and God-hater. His private member’s bill, C-250 (originally C-415), seeks to insert the phrase “sexual orientation” into Section 318 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
318. (1) Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.

(2) In this section, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group, namely,
(a) killing members of the group; or
(b) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.
(4) In this section, “identifiable group” means any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion or ethnic origin.

Now bear with me here, gentle readers, but the reason Robinson wants to amend Section 318 is to affect Section 319.

319. (1) Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace is guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.

(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.

(3) No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2)
(a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true;
(b) if, in good faith, he expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject;
(c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or
(d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.

(7) In this section,

“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;

“identifiable group” has the same meaning as in section 318;
“public place” includes any place to which the public have access as of right or by invitation, express or implied;

“statements” includes words spoken or written or recorded electronically or electro-magnetically or otherwise, and gestures, signs or other visible representations.

If Robinson’s bill passes, Canadians will face imprisonment if they criticize homosexuality or, especially, the “gay agenda.” And Bill C-250 will likely pass; it is supported by every party in the House of Commons except the Canadian Alliance. And the Alliance’s opposition is suspect; its leader, Stephen Harper, a so-called “libertarian,” has demonstrated repeatedly his disinclination to speak out against the gradual extermination of free speech in Canada.
During the 1980 hearings on the Charter of Rights, Robinson attempted repeatedly to include “sexual orientation” as a protected class. He was refused repeatedly by the then Minister of Justice, one Jean Chretien. Fifteen years later, Prime Minister Chretien turned a blind eye as “sexual orientation” was “read into” the Charter by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Egan decision.

The supremacy of Parliament has for some time been notional in Canada. Jean Chretien, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the legal profession, the gay activists, the feminist activists, the media, academia, business and the media like it that way. It’s the New Canadianism: consensus above all. That the game is fixed even before the whistle blows makes it even better. The elite never loses.
It is an interesting question as to why Robinson felt the need to resort to legislation. Given a test case on Section 318, there is no doubt the Supreme Court would do the right thing again. Perhaps Robinson seeks to establish just how powerful Canada’s gay lobby really is, lest there be any doubt. Call it a coming out party.
Gay bashing is good news for gay activists; Matthew Shepherd is an American saint. Aaron Webster is not yet a Canadian saint, but give us time. Webster wandered naked into Vancouver’s Stanley Park one night in November 2001 looking for anonymous sex. He was found beaten to death the next day, and the “teaching moment” began. The Vancouver Sun editorialized November 20, 2001:
What can ordinary citizens do to prevent this kind of violence, especially when the perpetrators seem so fundamentally deranged?

We can do many things, and we can begin by realizing that everything we do and say creates a social context. Every act of violence is the result of a chain of events, and that chain can often be broken.

We have to quietly, but firmly, express our displeasure when someone makes a bigoted remark. We have to talk to and assist those who are having difficulty in their lives, so that their frustration doesn’t manifest itself in violence. Our political leaders have to make it clear in word and deed that discrimination, in which most hateful violence is rooted, will not be tolerated in any form…
Most of the time, we have a lot to be proud of in Vancouver. This week is different. If the murder of Aaron Webster is a hate crime, then it follows that we haven’t done enough to prevent intolerance from thriving.

We will never entirely stop such violence. But we can at least try harder to end discrimination in all its manifestations.

Anne McLellan was listening. The Justice Minister (since reshuffled) contacted her provincial and territorial counterparts to seek their support for the inclusion of “sexual orientation” into Section 318. She got it, unanimously.

The curious thing, however, is that Aaron Webster’s murder remains a complete mystery. No one has been arrested for it, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was a gay bashing. I have heard that the Vancouver police are inclined to believe it wasn’t. But that is second-hand tittletattle.
Never mind that there is no relationship between the effect and its supposed cause. Soon all Canadians will be “gay friendly”—by force of law. Another mystery, of course, is why the Chretien government did not introduce its own legislation. Justice Minister Martin Cauchon is accommodating enough on “gay marriage,” for example. Perhaps this is Jean Chretien’s farewell gift to Svend Robinson, just to prove there are no hard feelings for those snubs of 22 years ago.
There has been no opposition of any consequence to Robinson’s bill from Canada’s mainline churches and none is expected. The sum total of opposition to the bill is from Real Women of Canada, my magazine, The Report, and a few evangelicals. (For the record, The Report’s opposition to C-250 is both religious and libertarian.)
Robinson, as we have seen, condemns his religious opponents as “fearmongers.”

Svend Robinson — who is being denounced by many conservative Canadian Christians as a grave threat to their faith — says he’s going to be celebrating around a Christmas tree in Cuba on Dec. 25.

As he prepared to spend Christmas Day with the family of his homosexual partner Max Riveron in Cuba, the MP for Vancouver-Burnaby said the Canadian evangelical leaders who are accusing him of trying to have the Bible declared hate literature are “fearmongers of the worst sort.”

The long-serving New Democrat was responding in part to attacks last week by Presbyterian clergy in New Brunswick, who are objecting to Robinson’s private member’s bill, which seeks to make sexual orientation a ground on which the Criminal Code’s hate-crime provisions can be triggered.

The Maritime clergy’s campaign to lobby Canadian politicians also comes on the heels of the national evangelical newspaper, Christian Week, declaring Robinson’s private member’s bill has provoked one of Canada’s top 10 religion stories in 2002.

Conservative Christians across the country, particularly in Alberta, the Maritimes and Quebec, have labelled Bill C-250 a threat to freedom of religion and an attempt to ban the Bible, since certain Bible passages condemn homosexual acts as sinful. In a pre-Christmas interview from Cuba, however, Robinson accused his critics of misinterpreting his bill to raise money.

“What they’re saying is absolutely ludicrous,” Robinson said.

“They’re using this bill as a fund-raising effort. It’s a deliberate distortion of the objectives of Bill C-250.”

Free religious expression, Robinson said, will always be protected in Canada under the Criminal Code.

Robinson, the first Canadian MP to openly declare he is gay, said he’s not anti-Christian. He has fond memories of singing with his mother in Vancouver Heights United Church, as well as taking part in the Danish custom of dancing around the family Christmas tree.

As well, he has a Christian (Bill Siksay) on staff in his constituency office in Burnaby. And he believes Christians, and people who celebrate Christmas, should be respected and treated with sensitivity.

But that doesn’t stop Robinson from saying he wants to stop extremist Christians such as Fred Phelps from coming to Canada and spreading the kind of hateful material he turns out on his Web site, www.godhatesfags.com.

The Canadian Criminal Code currently makes it illegal to publish hate material aimed at groups distinguished by colour, race, religion and ethnic origin.

Bill C-250 seeks to also protect people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Robinson argues every provincial attorney-general in Canada, as well as the Canadian Association of Police Boards, supports the bill.

Bill C-250 did not pass during the last legislative session. But it’s expected to come to second reading in January or February of 2003.

In the meantime, Robinson’s many evangelical critics are trying to lobby federal MPs and senators to have the bill killed.

They believe it might make “hate literature” out of sections of the Bible, such as Leviticus 20:13, which condemns homosexuals to death.

“We are concerned that the bill has the potential to have the Bible declared hate literature and infringe upon freedom of speech,” said Reverend Martin Kreplin, a Presbyterian pastor from Moncton, N.B.

The bill, Kreplin said, could “deem free and open debate about sexual orientation” as hateful.

Robinson recognizes he’s become a target of conservative Christians’ anger, especially since he presented a petition to the House of Commons several years ago, which called for a reference to “God” being removed from the Canadian constitution.
The long-standing MP, known for finding colourful ways to attract attention to his causes, said he celebrates religious diversity in Canada.

Still, unlike many religious people in Canada this December, Robinson is not upset about the controversy over some organizations excising religion from their celebration of Christmas.

Although Robinson will be sitting around a small Christmas tree with his Cuban partner’s family on Dec. 25, he says he’s not worried Christmas or Christianity is being pushed out of the public sphere in Canada.

“I think we should be sensitive to those who celebrate Christmas, but we also have a multi-faith society and we should celebrate that too. I wish my Spanish constituents a Happy Christmas and my Jewish constituents a Happy Hanukkah. Let’s enjoy the diversity of holidays.”

The State of Canada, in the Year of Our Lord, 2002: A prominent and powerful Canadian politician expects applause for his declaration that Christians should be “treated with sensitivity.” He makes us sound like people with AIDS, but that is how the Canadian elite thinks of us—as diseased.
In a follow-up statement, Robinson adds: “The Criminal Code of Canada currently protects Canadians from those who advocate genocide or spread hatred of others based on their colour, race, religion or ethnic origin. My bill seeks only to extend that same protection to those targeted on the basis of their sexual orientation. It is important to note that C-250 in no way limits or threatens the freedom of religious expression or religious texts. The Criminal Code expressly protects this freedom in subsection 319(3), which states:

“No person shall be convicted of an offence … if, in good faith, he expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject.”

That’s what Section 319 says, all right. Any reasonable person reading this would conclude that it is exceedingly difficult to convict anyone of the criminal offence of “spreading hatred.” (Quasi-criminal conviction under federal and provincial human rights statutes is entirely another matter, however.) And he would be right; the federal government, despite years of strenuous effort, was never able to convict the notorious German national and anti-Semitic pamphleteer Ernst Zündel, for example. (Zündel has since decamped for the United States. One fewer immigrant obsessed with irrelevant Old Country hatred: a small victory for Canada.)
Yet as Mr. Robinson knows well, it matters not in this country what the law says; what matters is what the courts say it says. And here we come to the name omitted from Todd’s story: Mark Harding. He is the peripatetic lay preacher angered by accommodations to Muslim students made by Toronto schools. Christian observance is forbidden in these schools; he saw no reason why disciples of the Prophet should receive special treatment. Harding’s line on Islam is closer to Pat Robertson’s than George W. Bush’s. He believes it is a “Satanic” religion and that the teachings of the Koran are synonymous with terrorism. Harding disseminated his opinions in pamphlets and on a telephone answering machine.
After September 11, 2001, a great many North Americans share Mr. Harding’s line, and a good many of them are agnostic and atheist. Nevertheless, on December 17, 2001, Harding’s 1998 criminal conviction under Section 319 was upheld 3-0 by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Writing for the Court, Justice Karen Weiler reaffirmed the decision of Judge Sidney Linden:
The essence of the trial judge’s finding that the defence contained in s. 319(3)(b) was not established in this case is found at p. 219 of his reasons in the following passage:Now, Mr. Harding is entitled to his opinions on religious subjects, and he is entitled to publicly attempt to convince others of the correctness of his beliefs. His pamphlets and message do contain opinions of religious belief which he appears to sincerely hold…
Although expression of religious opinion is strongly protected, this protection cannot be extended to shield this type of communication simply because they are contained in the same message and the one is used to bolster the other. If that were the case, religious opinion could be used with impunity as a Trojan Horse to carry the intended message of hate forbidden by s. 319.

In addition, Madam Justice Weiler ruled that the failure to prove mens rea–that Harding had “wilfully” promoted hatred–was irrelevant.

Let’s review the facts. In the course of his evangelizing, a Christian preacher argues that Islam is evil; this is a sincerely held opinion. He is criminally convicted anyway. Canada has no need of Trojan Horses.
The truth or falsehood of Harding’s statements was, of course, not at issue at the appellate level. As far as I can discover, however, this was never at issue at trial either. Nevertheless Judge Linden concluded that Harding was guilty of “false allegations about the adherents of Islam calculated to arouse fear and hatred of them in all non-Muslim people.”
Harding apparently accepted legal advice that it would be best to throw himself on the mercy of the court. This was foolish. The Toronto Star reported January 12, 1999:

Prosecutor Michael Blain had asked Linden to impose a prison sentence ranging from three to six months, because of the fear Harding’s hate messages aroused in young Muslim students and their families. He argued that the materials were “more dangerous” because they came “from someone who is cloaking himself as a good Christian,” rather than from an extremist such as a neo-Nazi.

“The fact that he purports to be a normal, average, everyday Christian makes it more deplorable to the Muslim community,” Blain said.

So now we have an employee of the Government of Ontario establishing the limits of Christian belief. Here we see the iron fist of Svend Robinson’s “sensitivity.” The only sensible thing for Canadian Christians to do, it would seem, is to debase themselves and their Creator before the Koran, just as Pope John Paul II did.
Mark Harding’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was dismissed October 17, 2002. So there you have it. The explicit protection given to religious expression in Section 319(2)(b) has been declared null and void.
Harding was not imprisoned. He was sentenced to two years probation and 340 hours community service, to be supervised by Mohammad Ashraf, general secretary of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ont. So now Canadian Christians are delivered unto their oppressors. Hey, at least we’re not throwing them to the lions. According to an October 31, 2002, story by Art Moore of WorldNetDaily, Harding believes he is being “indoctrinat[ed] into Islam.”
Harding, 47, said he had one session under Ashraf in 1998 before an appeal process stayed the sentence.

Ashraf, according to Harding, said that instead of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, “it would be better if you learned about Islam.”

The cleric made it clear, Harding recalled in an interview with WorldNetDaily, that during the sessions nothing negative could be said about Islam or its prophet, Muhammad.
“He said he was my supervisor, and if I didn’t follow what he said, he would send me back to jail,” recounted Harding, who had been prevented from speaking publicly about his case under a gag order…
Harding, an evangelical Protestant, insists he has love rather than hatred toward Muslims and wants to see them go to heaven.

A lawyer for Harding, Jasmine Akbaralli, says she is trying to obtain permission for her client to serve out his sentence in an Islamic community closer to his current home in Chesley, Ont., north of Toronto and about a three-hour drive from the Islamic Society of North America.

The plea is based on humanitarian grounds, she said, due to her client’s poor health.

Harding said he has suffered four heart attacks since 1997, and he and his wife and two children are penniless because his health has prevented him from maintaining his trade as a cabinetmaker.

Akbaralli said she would not comment on Harding’s previous experience with Ashraf, noting that she was not representing him at the time. Calls to Ashraf and others at the Islamic Society of North America on Tuesday and Wednesday were not returned…During his 1998 session with Ashraf, Harding was told to read a book called Towards Understanding Islam, by Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi.

On page 12 of the book, Harding noted, it gives a description of a “kafir,” or infidel, a person who does not follow Islam.

“Such a man … will spread confusion and disorder on the earth,” the book says. “He will without the least compunction, shed blood, violate other men’s rights, be cruel to them, and create disorder and destruction in the world. His perverted thoughts and ambitions, his blurred vision and disturbed scale of values, and his evil-spelling activities would make life bitter for him and for all around him.”

“It was obvious that he intended to make sure I understood that I was a kafir,” Harding said of Ashraf.

Harding’s 1998 conviction on three counts of wilfully promoting hatred was commended by Canadian Muslims.

His conviction was commended also by organized Jewry. From the January 12, 1999, Toronto Star:

Linden’s decision was welcomed by Bernard Farber, executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario division, who acted as an expert witness on hate propaganda for the prosecution.

“This has drawn that line across the country…in understanding that religion can only go so far in offering a means of protection against prosecution,” Farber said.
Far be it from me to lecture Canada’s Jews on their best interests, but then Mr. Farber feels perfectly free to lecture Christians on the practice of their religion. He might want to reconsider his commitment to multiculturalism. This country is filling up with people that would gleefully slit every Jewish throat they could get their hands on. Hundreds of them chanted “Death to the Jews!” in downtown Calgary earlier this year, but Mark Steyn and I are the only two Canadian journalists who have dared to comment on this horrific incident. Needless to say, no one has been prosecuted for this hate speech.
Even as Svend Robinson vacations in Fidel Castro’s Christian-persecuting cesspool of a country, he dares admonish Canadian Christians for “fearmongering.” Perhaps he and Todd are ignorant of the Harding precedent. It wouldn’t be surprising, as it has been almost completely ignored by the Canadian media. And Canada’s Christian leaders seem almost to delight in collaborating with their persecutors—or in claiming that defeats are actually victories.
Make no mistake, however. If Robinson’s bill passes, those that condemn homosexual practice or the “gay agenda” based on Scriptural injunctions will be subject to arrest, conviction and imprisonment. As will those, religious or otherwise, that condemn homosexual acts as selfish, childish, depraved, aesthetically repugnant and medically disastrous and the gay agenda as totalitarian.
Public notice: My “Eclectica” column of December 17, 2001, to give just one example, is illegal under C-250. If convicted, I shall not pay any fine and shall not perform any service to the “gay community.” For many years I have read of and reported on Canada’s notorious “country club” minimum-security prisons. It would be interesting, if nothing else, to experience them at first hand. I’ve always wanted to be a better golfer.
Kevin Michael Grace, 11.51 p.m., December 24, 2002 [Link]

NO ORDINARY JOE

Joe Strummer dead at 50. It’s customary at these moments to express shock, but anyone who ever saw the Clash wondered how he made it to 30. Watching him howl into the microphone and pummel his Telecaster, one expected that vein throbbing in his temple to simply explode and his limbs fly off in every direction.
Strummer performed as if his life depended on it, but then most of the punkers did. Why then did so many of the others seem callow, even laughable? Attitude will take you a long way but not all the way. It helps to have talent, and Strummer had lots. He was one of the great masters of the 45 RPM single. Nobody did fast, loud, simple and short better than he. I realize I’m indulging in the customary rock crit diminishment of Mick Jones, but the Clash always worked best when Jones was Strummer’s preening foil. Jones was seriously lacking in judgment. “Stay Free”? What a simpering sentiment. (As everyone pointed out at the time, it was the perfect soundtrack for its feminine hygiene homonym. And it’s not too late; “London Calling” has been pimped to sell Jaguars.)
The Clash’s eponymous first album (UK edition) is a serious contender for the most exciting record ever made. Strummer never made a better album than this; not surprising, since he became trapped in a political prison of his own making and never really developed as a songwriter.
The Telegraph obituary declares that Strummer “became the punk movement’s voice of anti-Thatcherism.” This is a serious historical error. Margaret Thatcher did not become Prime Minister until May 1979; by then punk was exhausted. English punk rock was a protest against the Britain of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and the slow-motion nightmare of national collapse that characterized the period. Johnny Rotten sneering “No future for you” was no pose when national repossession by the IMF was a distinct possibility.
Such bollocks is talked about punk rock now. It was thoroughly apolitical at first; only later did it become ideological. Mick Jones would probably not like to be reminded that his group immediately prior to the Clash was called the London SS. As it included Keith Levene (later of the Clash and Public Image and subject of “Deny”), however, it seems safe to conclude it did not proselytize neo-Nazism.

Few are willing to remember this now, but at the time flirtation with Nazi iconography was a commonplace. To give just five examples, the Dictators, the Blue Öyster Cult and the Ramones–bands with Jewish members, management and record company CEOs—all did so. Siouxsie Sue and Sid Vicious wore swastikas. It wasn’t all play-acting, either. The National Front enjoyed significant popularity in urban Britain in the mid-1970s and quite a few bands, Sham 69 in particular, enjoyed significant patronage from NF supporters.Britain was sleepwalking into chaos. The comparison to Weimer Germany became a cliché. Even as the Pistols sang of “Anarchy in the UK,” everyone longed for order—of one sort or another. Also forgotten is that Thatcherism had its punk rock supporters as well. Paul Weller made known his intention of voting Conservative in the next election—a gaffe for which he as spent the rest of his life grovelling.
According to the Telegraph obit:

Billy Bragg, the singer and songwriter who followed in their political footsteps, said last night that the Clash had given punk its “political edge”.

“Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers,” he wrote in an appreciation posted on the BBC website.

This is true and revisionist at the same time. The Clash’s look, engineered by manager and Malcolm McLaren acolyte Bernie Rhodes, was critical to their success. Who was the enemy? Wankers like Yes, with their 80-minute concept-album “suites.” (Rick Wakeman made a famous intervention to get the Pistols off his label, A&M.) How did Yes dress? Like a bunch of faggot hippies. So how did the Clash dress? Sharp, tough and male. Long hair, for so long de rigeur, became the ultimate faux pas. Bernie Rhodes was not above flirting with political ambiguity as well. Paul Simonon sports a Union Jack on the first Clash album; then as now, this flag was (mis)understood as the unacceptable symbol of British racialism.
The serious British music press was, as they say, shocked and appalled by the inchoate irruption that was punk rock. I remember well Tony Parsons (now the beloved lad novelist) sneering of Magazine’s “Shot by Both Sides” that Howard Devoto should “get down on his knees” in gratitude for all that socialism had done for him. One also remembers his then-wife Julie Burchill (now the beloved spent volcano of the Guardian) sneering that the Pistols’s “Bodies” was just the sort of anti-abortion tirade that one could only expect from a Catholic Irishman like Johnny Rotten (né Lydon).
They were Trotskyite to a man and woman, these angry young journos, and they bent punk rock to their agenda, at the cost of its charisma. Thus it lost its power as a unifying force. Later, of course, Mrs. T. would become a unifying anti-force; the punching bag they could always smack for easy applause, even as they all became rich, even as she accomplished what the Labour Party never could—destroying the class system.
The Clash knuckled under. The punk movement became a mere adjunct of the Socialist Workers Party. They touted Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Sexism, rock against every ism except Boringism. “Political correctness” became a catchphrase. You could never be ideologically pure enough.

As I discovered to my bemusement. I knew most of Vancouver’s punkers of the late ’70s and early ’80s. One night after some gig I found myself at a party in some dive face to face with Gerry Useless (né Hannah), bass player and political commissar of the Subhumans, a band still remembered fondly in these parts. Like DOA, they traded in Mannerist Marxism but were rather more earnest. I was disgusted by Mr. Useless’s ignorant attitudinizing and let him have it with both barrels. I was fiendishly subtle. I delivered a wholly false but passionate and closely reasoned diatribe against “left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder.” Mr. Useless was quite shaken. When I was done, he asked, “Who are you?” (It helps if you picture me wearing a bespoke suit, which was my style at the time. I enjoyed the tension.) “Just a Leninist,” I replied brusquely, turned and walked away.) The Subhumans broke up, and the next I heard of Gerry Useless he had been arrested. He had foresworn music for a group called Direct Action—the infamous “Squamish Five.” No poseurs they; they bombed porno video stores and a BC Hydro substation in Vancouver and a weapons system plant in Ontario. Useless was sentenced to 10 years. Sorry guy, it was just a drunken prank; I never figured you’d take me seriously.
Joe Strummer was as obvious a nom de punque as Joan Jett, of course, but we never realized it; we were all rather earnest then. He was a diplomat’s son and attended the City of London Freemen School. He died in Somerset, a Telegraph reader. The apple never falls far from the tree, I suppose. I wonder how much of a Red he ever was. Anyone who’s ever seen Rude Boy will remember the scene where Ray Gange catches Strummer in a Red Brigade shirt and insinuates he’s a communist. “They shoot Communists,” Strummer responds, but he seems as unpersuaded as Gange (and the audience) is.
Strummer was later to record the deathless classic Sandinista!, and isn’t it a good thing that conservatives aren’t rock and rollers? Can you imagine having to live down the shame of once having owned an album called Violetta! or UNITA!? Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?So farewell then, Joe Strummer. I’m not going to hold your politics against you. I prefer to remember you as you were in 1977–one of the greats. Rest in peace.
Kevin Michael Grace, 3.51 a.m., December 24, 2002 [Link]

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My tranny post reminded me of the years I lived just off Commercial Drive, Vancouver’s Lesbian Central. Big dogs, slow-pitch softball, pretentious coffeehouses—rampant crime, open-air shooting galleries, squalor of every description and more Commie bastards than you could shake a stick at.
One day I was taking the bus south to Broadway and observed an angry young woman with a crewcut, overalls and bovver boots. Oh jeez, another one of them, I thought. I was then filled with self-recrimination. Why can’t I be more charitable, I lamented. Why must I always be so quick to jump to conclusions? Perhaps this unfortunate young woman merely prefers an efficient look. I luxuriated in my newfound latitudinarianism. As she walked down the aisle, I saw she was wearing a button. I looked up to read it. One word: “Dyke.”
Kevin Michael Grace, 10.15 p.m., December 22, 2002 [Link]

KICKING HENRY WHEN HE’S DOWN
Picked up the latest issue of The American Spectator yesterday. It’s good to see it out of George Gilder’s hands, and any magazine that publishes Ben Stein, James Bowman and Tom Bethell is worth $7.95 of anyone’s money. (Clever, young Jeremy Lott is there, too, with a review of Matthew Scully’s Dominion.)
I was saddened, however, by Tyrrell’s review of Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: The Life of H.L. Mencken. Did you know that that Mencken, Tyrrell’s literary idol, was, essentially, a shallow man?
While Mencken was laughing on the outside, almost nothing was going on the inside.

Tyrrell inducts Mencken posthumously as a member of the Blame America First Club.

The liberals’ fondness for him endured even beyond the 1940s, long after his reactionary tirades against Franklin Roosevelt. He had even harrumphed World War II as “a wholly dishonourable business. I believe that that will be history’s verdict upon it.”
“Reactionary tirades,” eh? I seem to recall reading any number of condemnations of FDR in the old American Spectator as the man who “lied us into war,” who introduced fascism to America in the guise of the New Deal, who dealt American constitutional government a blow from which it has never recovered. But perhaps I’ve got that wrong.
In the indexes of his posthumously published books I could not find the word Stalin. Hitler appears, but usually as a Menckian joke: “a shabby ass,” an Austrian William Jennings Bryan. The dramatic rise of democracy to challenge these moral monsters and starring such heroic figures as Winston Churchill was depicted by Mencken as just another burlesque, irrelevant to his happiness and security.

“Democracy,” eh? I seem to recall that Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and remained enormously popular, beloved even, in Germany at least until 1939. But perhaps I’ve got that wrong. I once remember Jesse Jackson, on Nightline, insisting that Hitler had never been elected. Am who am I to disagree with the Sage of Chicago? Vox populi, vox Dei? Sorry, Tyrrell, I just don’t buy it.
And as for Winston Churchill, “heroic figure,” shouldn’t a hero believe in some principle other than self-aggrandizement? Churchill lusted for office as a child lusts for sweets. He was a bad man, a war criminal who didn’t even have the guts to take credit for his mass murders. (He let “Bomber” Harris take the fall instead.) He had no morals to speak of and didn’t think twice about handing over half of Europe to Stalin. He thought Stalin a capital fellow. (”I like him the more I see him,” he wrote to his wife in 1944.) He was an enthusiastic proponent of cradle-to-grave socialism. And he was an atrocious writer.
The only God Churchill ever worshipped was the will to power. So it really is a bit thick for Tyrrell to write this:

It is understandable that liberals such as [Murray] Kempton identify with [Mencken], but when pious Christians fall for the fantasy it is worth comment. The Kultursmog is brain deadening.

So it is, but Tyrrell should flush the smog from his own head before lecturing others.

It is simply bizarre for Tyrell to excoriate Mencken for his belief that the Second World War was “irrelevant to his happiness and security.” It was irrelevant to every American’s happiness and security. Or it was until Roosevelt finally got his war, anyway. Over 400,000 Americans had lost their happiness and security by the end of it—they were dead. And for what? So that one monster could supplant another and usher in the era of perpetual war for perpetual peace.
I never thought I would see the day when “conservatives” would venerate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But it didn’t start with Bob Tyrrell; Ronald Reagan was there first. It stands to reason; once you’ve renounced Republic for Empire, why not extol the man who made Empire inevitable. Hail Caesar!
Kevin Michael Grace, 9.53 p.m., December 22, 2002 [Link]

SNIP, SNIP

Colby Cosh is fascinated these days by transsexuals. (See here and here.) I used to know one, back when I worked in the University of British Columbia Library. I’ll call him Darren. He was a friend of my girlfriend of the time and became, I suppose, my friend as well. He was a nice enough fellow, but his effeminacy was outrageous even by gay standards, and being seen with him in public was an ordeal. So far as I know, however, he was never a homosexual.
One day Darren announced that he was a “woman trapped in a man’s body,” and that he had made arrangements to have the surgery done. (Or surgeries, as we were later to discover.) My girlfriend took this news badly. She argued with him passionately and unsuccessfully. She decided she could no longer be his friend.
One of the tests for wannabe trannies is to masquerade as a woman. This was especially amusing in Darren’s case, as his facial features were resolutely male. He made a revoltingly ugly woman. To top it off, his character was in no way feminine, either. He was one of those sad souls who actually memorize the bus schedule—a nerd, in other words.
Darren rather shocked everyone with his confession that he really did have no sexual interest in men. Instead, he intended to become a lesbian. I did some research later and found out this is quite common. I suspect his thinking was like this: woman won’t have sex with me now because I’m ugly; after the op, I’m in like Flint, because these dykes have it off with anybody. They’ve got to—it’s in the manual!
And so Darren became…I’ll call her Julia. Every detail of his experience was related to his co-workers, so much so that the two women he worked with most closely, who had originally been keen supporters of his decision, became weary of the whole business. I found it easy not to pay attention, even as his braying voice filled the basement of Library Processing Centre—any man who has his wedding tackle lopped off is obviously insane. One day, however, Julia described his latest operation: the removal of his Adam’s apple. This was intolerable; I found myself almost retching in disgust and horror.
Julia lived in my neighbourhood, and from time to time I’d catch sight of him in some shop. He looked and acted like no woman I’d ever seen. I wonder if he ever managed to get any real lesbian into the sack.
My last contact with Julia was years later, when I was a producer at CJOR Radio. News had broken that the taxpayers were footing the bill for Julia’s (and all the other trannies’s) folly. The talkshow lines were humming with outrage. I declared—in the manner of one playing a trump card—that I could deliver a real, live one. I expected congratulations. Instead, the host, Wayne Cox, responded that he really didn’t like unpleasant subjects like that. Why on earth does this man want to be a talkshow host, then, I asked myself. Turns out he didn’t. He didn’t last long at CJOR—but longer than I did. Julia was duly interviewed on the first day of The Wayne Cox Show. It was the last show I was to produce for him; I was taken aside directly after 12.00 p.m. and told my services were no longer required. It wasn’t Julia’s fault; the general manager simply disliked me. But that’s another story.
Colby asks:

Who are the doctors still doing these surgeries, and what belief are they motivated by? The old, apparently mistaken one? ["Woman trapped in man’s body."] Or the simple desire to provide surgical enhancement to all comers and buy a Porsche with the proceeds? Either way, is it advisable to entrust your body to such a person?
Perhaps I can shed some light on this. Another woman I knew at the UBC Library had had the unpleasant experience of her boyfriend being talked into having his wedding tackle lopped off. A sad story but a somewhat amusing one to me, as the medico in question was my old family doctor. There are certain MDs that specialize in this quackery; they are well known within the wannabe tranny “community,” and those flirting with consensual castration are directed to their offices.

A final note. A few months ago, I saw a CBC news report on the much rarer phenomenon of female-to-male transsexualism. The woman profiled was—guess what?—a man trapped in a woman’s body. (She was good at sports, you see.) But she had no interest in sexual congress with women; she has since become a fake gay man.
Kevin Michael Grace, 7.07 p.m., December 21, 2002 [Link]

IN A NUTSHELL

Speaking with my friend Peter Brimelow last night, I was rather taken aback when he asked me to explain to him something about Canada. Fancy me explaining Canada to the author of The Patriot Game. (A book that changed my life.) Peter wanted to know why immigration reform remained unspeakable politically in this country. Let me give you an analogy, I told him. In America, Pat Buchanan is a multimillionaire; in Canada, he would be lucky to have a job.

I remain convinced that immigration reform would be a winner for any Canadian party that championed it. I’m not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, however. Another argument for Western separatism.
Kevin Michael Grace, 5.58 p.m., December 21, 2002 [Link]

ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.

–Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Consider me broken. No, no, not by Mr. Attila’s unwanted attentions. I’m a Canadian. We faced down the German Army at Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach. I’m not about to turn tail and run from a Hungarian bureaucrat. David Janes worries that my “cage rattling” is not “the wisest of options.” I’m not worried about that too much. What worries me is Janes’s conclusion that my blow-by-blow account is “kinda interesting.” Gosh, I thought it was riveting. But I suppose it has begun to pall. And the last thing I want to do to you, gentle readers, is bore you. So no more of that unless something catastrophic happens.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. Anyone who’s seen Croupier will recognize this as Jack Manfred’s other mantra. When he expresses Hemingway’s sentiment to the loathsome Matt, the latter’s response is, quite reasonably, “Wasn’t he the one who shot himself?” No chance of that with me, contra Attila. Two reasons: 1. Mortal, despairing sin: Straight to Hell. 2. Egotism: The world would be so much less interesting without me in it. (Not that I’m good or gentle or brave, let alone very.)
But in the meantime, God, it hurts to be alive. Most particularly, semi-consciously. Recent experience has persuaded me that the “hypnogogic experiences” associated with Stage 1 sleep are when my perception is most acute. Perhaps something akin to the “aura” suffered by epileptics. Last night I was jolted awake by an insight that afterwards shocked me by its obviousness. Everything was now so clear; I felt a fool for not realizing this earlier. I lay in anguish for an unknown period. Morning came, and I put my hypnogogic insight to the test. Was it true? No, no. OK, yes. This was something I had anticipated for some time, and yes, it is usually a relief when the guillotine’s blade, so long retarded, finally falls. But one always hopes that the foreseen will not be proved true. I was distraught.
God, it hurts to be alive. But as Marshall McLuhan said, “Consider the alternative.” I have considered it; much of my days are consumed with this consideration. I am 47 years old; the best of me is gone; I see little before me but the long slog to the grave. Muriel Spark says (in Memento Mori): “Being old is better than growing old.” I daresay she’s right; I would be foolish to disagree with a woman as wise as her. But then there is the meantime. As Michel Houellebecq says, “A man in a midlife crisis is asking only to live, to live a little more, a little longer.”
It is my blessing (or curse) to have the artistic temperament. At my moments of greatest sorrow, I cannot help observing myself from without, completely detached. At these times, a nasty, cynical voice comes into my head. It always sounds, for some reason, like Martin Amis:

Oh, poor, poor Kevin Michael Grace. The sufferings of the prisoners of Kolyma are as nothing to your wretched little life, are they?

Just so, Marty. As the National Lampoon once put it, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no socks.” But as Hank Williams sings:

No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive
So where does that leave me? A man who has wasted this rare artistic temperament, expended his talent in his life rather than his art. A man who has been crucified to romance. As Camões (”Seven long years was Jacob herding sheep”) writes (in Roy Campbell’s translation):
The disillusioned shepherd, thus denied,
As if he’d merited his bride,
Began another seven years’ indenture.
Seven more years he laboured, staunch and strong,
Saying, “A longer contract I would venture
But life’s too short to serve a love so long.”
Life is too short. But unlike Jacob, pawned off with Leah, I am not a poor shepherd. I am a man, born to die like all men, but I have a talent. A talent squandered for lack of ruthlessness. And my storehouse of experience lies overflowing and rotting.

This post is already as lousy with quotations as a George Will column, but here’s one more. An early New Year’s resolution. From Horace Walpole:
The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

Less feeling, more thinking in 2003.

On the stereo: Hank Williams, 40 Greatest Hits, “A Mansion on the Hill” (Fred Rose, Hank Williams):

Tonight down here in the valley
I’m lonesome and oh how I feel
As I sit here alone in my cabin
I can see your mansion on the hill

Do you recall when we parted
The story to me you revealed
You said you could live without loving
In your loveless mansion on the hill

Kevin Michael Grace, 9.23 p.m., December 20, 2002 [Link]

HUN WATCH 2, OR, FUN WITH TYPOGRAPHY

The following was received from Mr. Attila (see here and here) at 11.09 p.m. Wednesday. It is reproduced exactly as received, except for spacing:
Dec.18, 2002.

To Mr. Gross
from Árpád (you call it Mr. Attila.)

(I dare you to put this on your web site also.)

Your ignorance of Hungarian history is evident from the start, when you don’t even know that the Huns and Attila lived centuries before the MAGYARS came (1100 years ago), but the stupid westerners called them Hungarians because they did not know any better.

Furthermore I have a few more things to say about my unfortunate experience meeting you personally.

1.) It is obviously either your Irish background or the English upbringing which does not give you the guts to tell people to their face what you are really thinking, but you would backstab them with ingeniously twisted and tarnished gossip, which you admit you enjoy as a hobby (see your biography).

2.) The fact that you are willing to spread personal information about others (which was given to you in good faith in the belief that you are a friend, not an enemy) in order to hurt them, shows that your moral standards are on similar level with a viper.

3.) The other little fact you left out of your story to your readers (all five of them) is, that I am old enough to be your father and have older grandchildren than your kids. I don’t think that the police would consider it very “threatening” if a 68-years old member of your “fan-club” visits your place over his concern for your silence.

4.) I don’t care if you interpret or color the same event differently than I do,—this is a free country after all—,but when you lie about something or somebody, because you don’t like it, I draw the line. My phone calls or e-mails were never threatening or frightening. They were concerned and inquiring. I thought you were sick or out of town. Your daughter was not frightened either, but invited me in (to my surprise) when I asked if you are home? And what gentleman from the “old world” would not offer a ride to a young lady to work, whose father has not got the brains or the know-how to do the same in the pouring rain?
5.) You have already come within a hairline of the legal limits of my tolerance towards your impertinence, but if you keep this up, the next letter will not be an e-mail, but a registered one from my solicitor.

So shut up Mr. Gross and if you want to be correct, (at least historically) you can call me Árpád (not Attila), because he brought the MAGYARS (not the Huns) into the Carpathians basin in 896.

Last time I checked, Mr. Attila, truth was an absolute defence in Canadian libel law. I could also mention that I have never used your real name, and (something I forgot to mention in my first post) that you were informed the night before your last visit to my home that I was neither ill nor absent. You might also want to acquaint yourself with Section 264.1 of the Criminal Code of Canada, “Uttering threats”:

(1) Every one commits an offence who, in any manner, knowingly utters, conveys or causes any person to receive a threat

(a) to cause death or bodily harm to any person…
(2) Every one who commits an offence under paragraph (1)(a) is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding eighteen months.

Now, I’m no lawyer, Mr. Attila–unlike Jean Chretien–but you did send me a hate letter that began with a reference to “nasty viruses” and concluded with an expression of willingness to facilitate my violent death. You might also want to take a look at Criminal Code Section 264, “Criminal harassment.” By the way, I trust that gun is registered and that you have a valid Firearms Acquisition Certificate for it.
Kevin Michael Grace, 4.12 p.m., December 19, 2002 [Link]

SHURELY SHOME MISHTAKE

Tony Blair for President? Who’s having us on? Alexander Chancellor writes:
The [New York Times] columnist Thomas Friedman made the whimsical suggestion that, with Al Gore out of the race, the Democrats needed to find a candidate who would connect with people’s gut concerns, who would put forward an alternative positive agenda to the Republicans, who would be a likeable personality and who would be good at giving reassuring fireside chats.

“Right now, there is only one Democrat who could live up to all these rules: the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair,” he wrote. “Maybe the Democrats should give him a green card. He’s tough on national security, he has an alternative global vision, people like him and he is a beautiful, reassuring speaker. He’s Bill Clinton without baggage. I’d say he’s a natural.”

Chancellor concludes that veneration abroad spells trouble at home. Would that this were true of the Rev. Tony. But “whimsical”? Berserk, more like it. “Bill Clinton without baggage”? Does Friedman read the British press? Blair has become nothing but baggage. One would have to go back to Harold Wilson’s final years (1974-76) to find a British government as corrupt. And that’s saying something.
Friedman writes:

We desperately want to believe that [our leader] knows what he is doing, and that he is always acting in the best interests of the nation—and not on naked political considerations—because if he isn’t, we’re all sunk.
Once again, does Friedman read the British press? Blair has become notorious even within the Labour Party for being nothing but spin. “The best interests of the nation”? Which nation might that be, eh? The best interests of his contributors, more like it.

But perhaps the strangest word in Friedman’s encomium is “reassuring.” The Rev. Tony’s phraseology is reassuring enough—when he’s not threatening the Conservatives with civil proscription, that is—but look at his eyes! Kingsley Amis observed:
J. Enoch Powell and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the reason for their failure to reach the top is surely obvious. They both look barmy. I understand this is an elastic term which would include Benn’s appearance of general dislocation as well as Powell’s of more specific derangement.
Blair manages to exhibit both Benn’s “general dislocation” and Powell’s “specific derangement.” His eyes are never in sync with this face. So why did the British give him two huge majorities? Because they are as mad as he is. Something snapped in the British character when the Princess of Wales died. (See Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain.)
Richard Nixon may have looked like an embezzler and Bill Clinton like the president of a swingers’s club, but the Americans have never had a plainly barmy president in my lifetime. (Although Jimmy Carter is a close call). Didn’t we just finish establishing that Al Gore failed because of his looks? Well, Tony Blair makes Al Gore look positively mundane.
Kevin Michael Grace, 11.15 p.m., December 18, 2002 [Link]

POETRY CORNER 
Spleen
 
I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,
And all my memories were put to sleep.
 
I watched the river grow more white and strange,
All day till evening I watched it change.
 
All day till evening I watched the rain
Beat wearily upon the window pane.
 
I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything that ever I desired.
 
Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me
The shadow of a shadow utterly.
 
All day mine hunger for her heart became
Oblivion, until the evening came,
 
And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,
With all my memories that could not sleep.
 
–Ernest Dowson, 1867-1900

Kevin Michael Grace, 1.58 p.m., December 18, 2002 [Link]

A SCARY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

Off to Future Shop to buy Minority Report. The soundtrack to my shopping experience was a loop of “seasonal” songs consisting of Christina Aguilera’s My Kind of Christmas and the smug, sententious, sanctimonious “Merry Xmas (War is Over)” by the sainted John Lennon. (Instant Karma’s gonna get me? No, I’m afraid it got you first, you Michael X-donating, IRA-supporting git.) 
Remember that woman who suffered seizures whenever she heard Mary Hart’s voice? I get like that whenever I hear any of the Melismatics—Christina, Céline, Whitney, Mariah. (When did emotion get conflated with trying to cough up a lung, anyway? I blame Barbra Streisand.) I don’t black out; I just want to vomit or howl like a beaten dog. (Much as Christina, Céline, Whitney and Mariah do, come to think of it.)
OK, so you don’t like Future Shop’s in-store tunes. What of it? My point is that I know I’m not alone in this. There is no middle ground with the Melismatics—love ’em or hate ’em. (Paul Theroux: “When people say of someone, ‘You’ll either love him or hate him,’ I think, ‘I’ll hate him.’”) Wasn’t Muzak invented precisely to avoid this sort of binary division? If a significant number of Future Shop customers feel sick as a parrot whenever they hear that “Whoah…Whoooaaah…WHOOOOOAAAHHHHH!!!—isn’t it going to tend to put them off their shopping? Just a thought.
(And I am alone in finding Christina Aguilera about as sexy as as a paternity suit? How do we even know she’s a chick? When did pulchritude get conflated with looking like a drag queen, anyway? I blame society.)
Kevin Michael Grace, 9.54 p.m., December 17, 2002 [Link]

HUN WATCH

After several days of absence, Mr. Attila returned to my website last night. His first session began last night at 8.33.15 p.m. and lasted 23 minutes and 34 seconds. The second began at 9.35.01 p.m. and lasted 14 minutes and five seconds. The latest visit was this morning at 11.32.57 a.m. and lasted zero seconds.

I trust that you read my history of our relationship closely, Mr. Attila, and that you took its concluding warning to heart. I’ve got my eye on you, pal.

I have received some correspondence on this issue: two readers thought I should have gone to the police already and the third, a shared acquaintance, well, I don’t know quite know what to make of his rebuke:
I really wish you could be more generous and understanding of Mr. [Attila]…Neither of us will ever really understand what it means to be a Hungarian and come through a period of Communist oppression, and to fight that oppression and to leave your country and start all over again in the new language and new country.
I thought I had been generous. Not to sound like David Ahenakew, but I am more than a little disgusted with immigrants that bring their nasty, parochial quarrels to our peaceful shores. Mr. Attila came to Canada 46 years ago. It has been rather good to him, and he has had more than enough time to learn our conventions. I refuse to believe that his behaviour is considered acceptable in Hungary or anywhere else in the civilized world.

So I am to applaud Mr. Attila for having fought communism, am I? Well, speaking as a member of the Old Order of Cold Warriors, I find this argument less than persuasive. Ultimately, it is for the Hungarians to judge Mr. Attila’s courage or the lack of it, but it seems to me that the real heroes were those that stayed behind. In any event, I refuse to accept anti-Communism as an excuse for acting like a pig.
Kevin Michael Grace, 1.53 p.m., December 17, 2002 [Link]

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Mark Steyn has it exactly right in Monday’s National Post:
I cannot agree with Hugo Gurdon’s conclusion that [Archbishop Bernard Law's] “past actions were, surely, due to shortcomings and mistakes rather than to malignancy or indifference to the plight of children.” Indeed, I’m staggered Hugo could write such a sentence. The overwhelming weight of evidence is that Law was at the pinnacle of an elaborate racket set up to protect those he knew to be compulsive child rapists. In 1997, the Archbishop went out of the way to give fulsome thanks for the “priestly care and ministry to all” of Paul Shanley, a man Law had been aware for two decades was a serial sodomizer of those in his care and who had given public lectures on the benefits of “man-boy love.” It was Law who re-assigned and re-re-assigned and re-re-re-assigned the now defrocked Father Geoghan, in full knowledge of what had happened in the last parish and of what would certainly happen in the next. “Shortcomings” won’t cover it, nor will “indifference”: In essence, Cardinal Law was a supplier of fresh meat to Geoghan and others. He is a profoundly wicked man who presided over an almost unfathomable swamp of institutional depravity.

Or, as Our Lord put it, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.28 p.m., December 16, 2002 [Link]

TOO ‘ETHNIC’ BY HALF?
Al Gore has dropped out of the presidential race, so I suppose we can all forget about him. I’ve long thought he was a good man corrupted by politics, which is not a suitable occupation for a gentleman. Steve Sailer argues that presidential politics is not a suitable occupation for any man who seems, well, “gay.”
Now, the reality is that Al is plenty heterosexual, but he’s cursed with an ever-so-slightly effeminate way he holds his facial features (what old Italian ladies call “the gay face”–comedian Gary Shandling is another straight guy who has it too).

And Gore has a nearly subliminal version of that speech defect (the “lisssssssp”) that’s much more common among gay men than among straight men, such as himself.

So Gore equals “gay” equals failure. But Gore looks so presidential. Far more so than George W. Bush. Gore has the magnificent head of a Roman senator. His curse was the tension between how one would expect him to sound and the sissified vocables that issued from his mouth. Irresistibly comic. In other words, Gore was too handsome for his own good.

I wonder what Steve would make of my other hypothesis—that Barry Goldwater was thrashed so soundly in 1964 because voters saw or heard his name and thought “Jewish.” Surely Bill Buckley was correct when he argued that Goldwater’s candidacy was doomed because America would not countenance three different presidents in 14 months, but this is not sufficient to explain why Goldwater received less than 39% of the popular vote and carried only six states. After all, Lyndon Johnson was a rather physically (and morally) repellent man.
Barry was not a religious Jew, of course; he was officially an Episcopalian but unofficially an atheist. Vic Gold, in one of his hilarious books, recounts how, serving as Goldwater’s deputy press secretary in 1964, he fielded a reporter’s query on which church the Senator would be attending that Sunday. Gold replied that he would not be attending any church. “I don’t think you understand,” the reporter declared. “Every presidential candidate attends church on Sunday.” (Quoted from memory.)
Besides his home state of Arizona, Goldwater carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. These five are all “Deep South” states, which, as we are reminded by the Trent Lott affair, remain sinkholes of unspeakable prejudice. But if my hypothesis is correct, does this not suggest that the Deep South is less susceptible to anti-Semitism than the rest of the ostensibly enlightened United States?

Kevin Michael Grace, 2.38 p.m., December 16, 2002 [Link]

THERE, I’VE SAID IT
In his Edmonton Sun column yesterday, Ted Byfield comes perilously close to sheer, naked apostasy: Western separatism.

The House of Commons approved the Kyoto treaty last week, resulting in who knows how much economic damage to Alberta…
Ottawa knew that Alberta isn’t Quebec. We’re loyal Canadians. So Ottawa can kick us around as much as they please. That’s the Ottawa attitude…
And now, if the consequences of this treaty are anything like as severe as [Alberta Premier] Ralph Klein himself warned they would be, we know who to blame. But then where do Albertans turn?…
What’s urgently needed is another movement, a re-confederation movement, a movement not to break up Canada, but to re-shape it. Ontario looks at the country as a finished thing. And why should it not? It has done very well under the present arrangement, so why change it?…
The only stance that has a hope of success is one that begins with the assumption that the West is no longer in.

It’s as good as out. It will come in, but only if the rules are changed.

I think it will take more than threatening to threaten to leave. It will take many thousands of Albertans—politicians, academics, journalists, businessmen, athletes, entertainers, ordinary men and women—saying simply, “I am a separatist.”
I lived in Alberta for five years. I came to love the province yet hate its subservience. I met many separatists there. They told me so—after a few drinks among people they could trust. They would not dare to speak openly. They feared for their careers, for their social status.
Come to think of it, I’m exactly the same. For many years I have cowered and excused my cowardice by persuading myself that an open declaration would harm my prospects. Ha bloody ha. Any prospects I might have had in Canadian journalism were destroyed years ago. And didn’t Solzhenitsyn exhort us, “Live not by lies”?
So here goes: I am a Western separatist.

And by “Western,” I mean Canada west of the 110th meridian. Saskatchewan is Arkansas with added state socialism. Manitoba contains Winnipeg, incubator of Liberal thieves.

To paraphrase Umberto Bossi, British Columbia and Alberta are a cow milked by Ontario to feed Quebec and Atlantic Canada. Every Albertan—man, women and child—is robbed of $2,900 every year so that Quebeckers and Atlantic Canadians can maintain their “traditional lifestyle” of skiving. And are they grateful? Not a bit of it. They hate us; they call us Nazis.All that remains of the Canada that was—a great country now abolished–resides in the true West. The Empire that has taken Canada’s place employs multiculturalism to destroy what culture we have managed to preserve and Kyoto to steal what wealth we have managed to create. Enough!
Westerners unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.19 a.m., December 16, 2002 [Link]

THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST
In his famous essay on Nick Drake, Ian MacDonald laments the triumph of rationalism:
Magic! No room for that now, in 2000. Another religion-deriding article by Richard Dawkins, another reduction of love by an evolutionist: day by day, reality thins further into physical matter as that obsolete spirit-stuff evaporates. Nowadays “spirit” is being squeezed out of our materialist society. To say that “it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it” is still acceptable, but to put it another way–to propose that what matters is the spirit in which we live–would strike most of us as outmodedly idealistic. The “spirit”? A fantasy, a dream, an evasion. Yet the difference between the view seen normally and the view seen “magically” is the spirit in which the seeing is done.
MacDonald’s words came to mind after viewing (for the first time) John Boorman’s Excalibur the other night. How long has it been that the numinous has been banished? How flat, how desiccated our lives have become. Knowledge has devolved into mere data; Eros has devolved into mere physical sensation; religion has devolved into mere health-and-happiness cultism. I have noted with astonishment, for example, the universal acceptance granted in North America to the Chinese witchcraft known as feng shui. Millions of people that pride themselves on their rationalism are now mucking about with malign spirits. Ah, but you see, this ancient Oriental wisdom makes us fitter, happier, more efficient. And what do the spirits demand in return? We shall find out soon enough, I expect.There is more truth in any single aspect of the Arthurian legend than in the collected works of Darwin, but there are none so blind as those that will not see. Like Michael Ledeen, the neoconservative sage and warmonger. He tells Jamie Glazov:
I’m happy to do a history tutorial for Pat [Buchanan]; God knows he needs it. Arab and Islamic people have been very successful at lots of things, such as preserving Western civilization while the Catholics were doing Dark Ages.
I could point out to Ledeen that the “Dark Ages” were the centuries when Europe was reclaimed from savagery, when man learned an integrated—”holistic,” if you will—way of being, but what is that next to the necessity of imposing the Golden Arches on Bosnians and other lesser breeds without the law.I came late to Boorman’s films, and with every one I see the greater is my admiration for him. Boorman understands one great truth—man is a questing animal. For what can be the purpose of our otherwise inexplicable lives if it is not a search for meaning. Surely we were not put on this Earth merely to consume and die?Colby Cosh writes:
The attention paid to [box-office] statistics has skewed audience and cinema behaviour, in obvious ways; it’s helped squeeze the art out of Hollywood. Everything stands or falls on the opening-weekend gross now, partly because the number-one movie gets such a huge marketing boost from the Sunday stats. That, in turn, has changed the ways movies are made and marketed, privileging spectacle above staying power.
Boorman put it this way, in a 1998 interview with Charles Taylor of Salon:
Before Spielberg and Lucas revealed to the studios that the real audience was 14-year-old boys, we were allowed to make these movies in that middle ground, which has disappeared completely. That middle ground has disappeared. You’ve got mainstream movies–2,000, 3,000 prints, and massive advertising–and then [whistles] a huge gap. [Affects voice of studio chief] “Gonna make a film? It’s gotta be under $10 million.” You’re down there in the ghetto.
I suppose we should be grateful that filmmakers like Boorman have been only ghettoized and not exterminated. Nobody saw The General in theatres, but it’s available on DVD for anyone who’s still interested in films that don’t need special effects to take your breath away. (Steven Spielberg saw it and discovered Brendan Gleason; too bad he wasted him in AI.)In a 2001 interview with Stephen Lemons of Salon, Boorman describes the difficulty of working with the poet and novelist (Deliverance) James Dickey:
The problem with Dickey was that he was such a drunk. Whenever we met, he’d get very excited and terribly soused. You could never get a sensible word out of him. We had great times, but it wasn’t helpful to the script. So we did a lot of it by correspondence. I’d send him a comment and he’d send it back. It was marvellous. But in person he was just a mess.
I remember I brought him out here to L.A. with me to work on the script, and he was holed up with this dancer. I couldn’t get him out of his room for three days. We finally go back to Atlanta, and on the plane, he falls straightaway into an alcoholic sleep. About an hour later, he came awake, and he says to me, “If I wasn’t a famous poet and a Baptist, I’d divorce my wife and marry the dancer.” [Laughs.]
Auberon Waugh certainly didn’t have a high opinion of Mrs. Dickey. He describes her in his autobiography as the great man’s “speechless, catatonic wife called Maxine.” He met the Dickeys in 1969, at the instigation of William F. Buckley, Jr.:When we arrived in our vast limousine, a couple of hours late, we found that he had invited the entire university [South Carolina at Columbia] to meet us, at a gigantic reception which had been going on for several hours. Four hours later, there were still 20 guests left and no sign of any food. Mrs. Dickey disappeared into the kitchen from which she emerged at one o’clock in the morning with some canned soup which she had spent two hours heating up.Dickey was under the misapprehension that Waugh was a close student of his work. Waugh had never heard of him. “Then why did you come here?” he asked. There’s no answer to that, is there?The next morning the Waughs awoke to find Mr. Dickey sitting outside drinking beer. After further torture involving an archery exhibition, they finally escaped “sweating with terror.”
I met Dickey again 10 years later at [Malcolm] Muggeridge’s house in Robertsbridge, where he had come to do some television program or other. He seemed to think we had all had a whale of a time.The fog of unknowing! A nice life, if you can make it work.
Kevin Michael Grace, 10.32 p.m., December 15, 2002 [Link]

AWAKE MY SOUL! IT IS A HUN, OR, MR. ATTILA COMES CALLING
I have noted in this space that sleep deprivation is the normal concomitant of the second week of my magazine’s production cycle. This engenders a dreamlike state of consciousness. Yet I had never suffered visual hallucinations. Not until Wednesday, that is.I was engaged in a last-minute telephone interview, pacing my house, as is my wont. I was in my bedroom when my daughter Teresa arrived with an urgent message. Several attempts to decipher it failed, as it was delivered sotto voce. All I could figure out was that something extraordinary had happened. So I went into the hall, and from there I could see, at the top of the second-floor stairs, the dapper and determined figure of Mr. Attila.
Incredulity hardly described my state. What was he doing in my home? I sought to be authoritative, but my words of banishment came out as a shriek: “I’m working!” I then returned to my bedroom. Some time later, I heard a car start and saw from out my office window Mr. Attila’s immaculate, diesel-powered German sedan depart. It took me some time to recover. Surely I had imagined it all.I had first encountered Mr. Attila three months earlier. CBC Radio had broadcast my commentary explaining why conservatives should oppose the invasion of Iraq. The estimable Victor Olivier, Link Byfield’s assistant at The Report, emailed me that a man from Victoria called Attila was keen to talk to me about it. He had refused to give him my number and had taken his instead; this he forwarded to me.I called Mr. Attila the next day. He began by saying he was pleased to hear from me: pleased I was not one of those journalists who ignored messages. This was my first clue something was not quite right with the man. Tens of thousands of Canadians had heard my commentary; I was under no obligation to communicate with any Tom, Dick or György who happened to call. Mr. Attila told me he had enjoyed my little talk but thought I had been too kind to Slobodan Milošević in particular and to the Serbs in general. He did not like the Serbs. I would not know this, he asserted, but the northernmost province of Yugoslavia, Vojvodina, was actually part of Hungary. He had underestimated me; I was well aware of the various European irredentisms. I had once even heard the Polish wife of a university professor declare defiantly that Kiev was, is and would always remain a part of Poland. But I did not tell him this.”Grace,” he asked. “What kind of name is that?” Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Then the other shoe dropped. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m a Serb. “It’s an Irish name,” I explained. “Oh, Irish.” I’m not certain he believed me. I could have changed it from Gracević, I suppose. Now I hold no brief for Milošević, but I have the highest regard for the brave and noble Serbian people. For a start, they had defied Hitler and paid a ruinous cost—which is more than can be said for some of Europe’s other nations. But I did not tell him this.Mr. Attila wanted to know where I lived. I told him. This is wonderful, he said. We are almost neighbours. We must get together sometime. I muttered something noncommittal.
I met Mr. Attila in person about a month later at a social function. I could feel his determined eyes even before I saw him approach. He handed me his card. He expressed a great desire to spend time with me. He asked whether provincial politics interested me. I muttered something noncommittal. He was very interested, he explained. He had been a provincial civil servant, and he had a great desire to inform me of his reformist ideas. We simply must get together, he burbled. We live so close; I can come and pick you up anytime. I muttered something noncommittal.
Then the telephone messages and emails started to arrive. Ah, the pushy Hungarian! I am always delighted when a cliché springs to life before my very eyes. Later, of course, I was rather less delighted. I did not respond to Mr. Attila’s importunate demands. I had made no promises. I thought it kinder to give him the brush-off than tell him the truth–I had had quite enough of his Hunnish wiles.I first came to associate the quality of nightmare with Mr. Attila about a week later. I was about to walk to the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes when I noticed a commotion outside my front door. A tow-truck had appeared, from which two men had exited. They were attempting to break into a parked car. This car did not belong to my house, and I was attempting to explain this when I felt a familiar pair of determined eyes on me. I turned around, and whom should I see but Mr. Attila. He had found himself in my neighbourhood, he said, and thought he’d drop by. Where was I going? Somewhat disoriented, the obvious responses did not come to mind. 1. Normal people do not “drop by” the homes of casual acquaintances. And 2. He could not possibly have “found” himself in my neighbourhood, as I live at the very end of a long cul-de-sac. Instead, I found myself being driven to the drugstore and back (with a pointless detour to his home) by Mr. Attila.Mr. Attila wanted me in his home that morning. I explained that would not be possible. He expressed his disappointment and, I thought, his irritation. Presumably, some sort of spread had been laid on. I said I would visit him the next day at 10 a.m. He said he would collect me. I had forgotten the next day was the same as my daughter’s Remembrance Day concert. I thought it best not to reschedule, however.Mr. Attila lived about a mile away. The grounds of his home were beautifully landscaped, and I told him this. After we crossed the threshold, he sat me down at a large table and proceeded to take out several large binders. They contained a profusion of photographs detailing the transformation of the house in which I sat. The significance of each of these snaps was explained to me. Mr. Attila found time also to give me his life story. Escape from Hungary in 1956, translation to the Sopron forestry program at the University of British Columbia, work at three branches of the B.C. civil service, divorce, illegal travel back to Hungary to find a “replacement wife,” imprisonment, escape, remarriage, work, retirement. I heard also a disquisition on Hungarian woodcarving and a denunciation of the Rumanians for their persistence in regarding Transylvania as part of their country. As he rabbited on, his wife, who seemed a decent sort, interrupted occasionally to suggest that Kevin did not want to hear all this. Her counsel was ignored.
A large, laminated map detailing the iniquity of the notorious 1920 Treaty of Trianon was then produced. Did I know that the Sopron school had had to be moved because Slovakia now possessed what was rightly part of Hungary? No, I did not know this. I did know that the Slovaks still resent what they regard as their brutal treatment at Hungarian hands from 1867 to 1914. But I did not tell him this.
We then moved to his television room, where Mr. Attila played me a CBC documentary on the history of the glorious Sopron translation. There was much starting and stopping of the tape as he pointed himself out repeatedly. On my way out of this room I noticed a large, handsomely framed map detailing the iniquitous consequences of the nefarious Treaty of Trianon. This was a different map than I had seen earlier.
Mr. Attila then showed me his office. There was more talk of the lack of due respect paid—in both Canada and Hungary–to the achievements of the glorious Sopron translation. Several foolscap pages were proffered to me; would I like to read more about this and of his reformist campaign in education? I accepted them.We then retired to his dining room; his wife—I believe the cliché is “long-suffering wife”—was again in attendance. There was more talk of Sopron, and several monographs on the subject, in English and Hungarian, were produced. I ate sticky buns and drank tea. At last Mr. Attila got around to the primary reason he had buttonholed me.As mentioned above, Mr. Attila is a retired civil servant. The proximate cause of his retirement from the Ministry of Education was his crusade to decentralize the grading of Grade 12 provincial examinations. (The proximate causes of his transfers from the Ministries of Forestry and Finance can only be imagined.) He had reckoned, a decade ago, that this action would save the provincial treasury $2 million annually. Yet his superiors remained unimpressed.
Mr. Attila had made himself quite a nuisance on this issue. So much so, the Ministry of Education had offered him a buy-out, on the condition he signed a confidentiality agreement. Too late, he had declared triumphantly, he had already spoken to the media. So his quest for provincial parsimony had cost him a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately, he still had his wife’s salary to maintain them. He expressed the desire I write something on this subject (notwithstanding that exam grading had already been partially decentralized). He confessed he had had mixed results with previously buttonholed reporters–some had written stories; some had written stories only after considerable prodding; others had ignored his entreaties entirely. He had a low opinion of the last group.Included in the material given to me were two letters to Christy Clark, the Minister of Education. I gave one a cursory examination. It was addressed to Ms. Clark in a grossly insulting manner. It is generally not done, of course, to seek to ingratiate oneself with a potential benefactor by slapping her across the face. But I did not tell him this. I said I would examine the material more closely at my leisure.
Mr. Attila then presented me with a page reproduced from the website of the Ministry of Education. It was Christy Clark’s curriculum vitae. Did I note something untoward in it? No, I did not. Ms. Clark, he declared, was claiming educational degrees (at the Universities of Edinburgh and Paris) to which she was not entitled. I pointed out that Ms. Clark made no such claim; she claimed merely to have attended these universities. There was nothing untoward about it, I said. He persisted otherwise. I said that if I discovered Ms. Clark had indeed inflated her résumé, I would be sure to let him know.Mr. Attila then addressed other provincial concerns. Did I not think the Liberals had gone too far, acted too meanly? I said I thought not. What about the cutback to free dental care for seniors? At this point, I found it difficult to maintain affability. Looking around at Chez Attila, I calculated he must be worth at least a quarter of a million dollars. He had no dependents, but I had four. He had a fine set of teeth, but mine were falling from my head. Why the —- should I be taxed so this rich oldie should continue to receive free dental care? I muttered something about budgetary constraints.
Did I know, he inquired, of B.C. Ferries’s scandalous treatment of Mayne Island? No, I did not. He explained that Pender Island got six times as many arrivals and departures as Mayne Island. He explained that he owned property on Mayne and thus felt this injustice keenly. He hypothesized that this favouritism was explained by the presence on Pender of many New Democratic Party bigwigs, including former Premier Mike Harcourt. By this point, my affability was almost exhausted. Do you know what I would advise the Liberals on ferry service to the Gulf Islands, I asked. Please tell me, he said. I would advise them to slash service to the bone. Why, he asked, astonished. Because the service costs a fortune; few people live there; and they vote NDP almost to a man.Three hours had passed, and I made my excuses. I picked up the foolscap pages he had given me. I made no promises. Limbo will freeze over before I see you again, I said to myself. But I did not tell him this. Mr. Attila drove me home. I concluded I had discharged any obligations courtesy demanded.
Then the telephone messages and emails started to arrive again. I did not respond to Mr. Attila’s importunate demands, including one for the return of his precious foolscap. I knew he had innumerable copies of these documents, and, in any event, they had been a gift. Besides, every adult knows not to expect the return of unsolicited material.Mr. Attila’s communications began to take on a threatening tone. On Tuesday, he made his first call to my family’s telephone number. Then, as you know, he came calling on Wednesday, barging into my home, frightening my daughter and, initially, refusing to leave even after I had made my anger at his presence perfectly understood. Teresa was finally able to get rid of him by explaining that she had to leave for work. He, of course, offered a ride. She, quite wisely, refused.I completed my final interview and then looked about for a large envelope. Just as I was about to place the documents inside, I noticed something I had not noticed before in one of the letters to Ms. Clark. By his own account, Mr. Attila had chased her into the maternity room in the Provincial Legislature. And on one or possibly two occasions, he had been removed from the Legislature by security guards. A determined man indeed, this Mr. Attila.
I sealed the envelope and ambled to the post office. I bought stamps costing $1.03 and returned Mr. Attila’s precious dossier to him. Finally, I thought, I was quit of this man. Not quite. Three hours ago, while I was writing this post, another email from Mr. Attila arrived. I discovered later that a hard copy of this document had been hand-delivered to my mailbox; it had been adorned with a yellow ribbon and a Christmas decoration.I reproduce this letter exactly as received, except that Mr. Attila’s real name is not used, and the name of his long-suffering wife is veiled:Friday, December 13, 2002
Dear Kevin,
Thanks for the papers you sent back. 
M— has already burnt them out of concern for the possibility of catching something from them. You understand, she is working in the health industry and worries about scabies and all those nasty viruses.
It’s unfortunate that you were so upset by my visit, that you had to yell at your daughter in such an ugly way. I don’t know if I was more embarrassed by it or your daughter was, but just because you are “at work”, it’s no excuse to behave like a jerk. This is when the though occurred to me, that grace is not the right word to describe your behavior. Did you ever consider changing your name to something more fitting to your frame of mind, like Gross?On the other hand, you brought this situation on to yourself, because you did not reply to my e-mails or didn’t return my telephone calls either, so I was concerned about you and I wanted to know, if you are sick or maybe left town? Obviously you must be convinced that the communication tools are only a one-way street, which are there to serve you? You can phone anyone you please, but others should not try to bother you. Your time is “too important” to write your earth-shattering articles to your THE AMBLER website (2 a.m. at night) which might be enjoyed by 10% of your readers. For the rest, it goes over their heads, would not understand it, or do not care.Now, at least I know, that you are a sick man, who has an overbearing ego and a self-consciousness, with the feeling of self-importance of a grossly enlarged proportions, coupled with an arrogance and a superiority complex such as I have never seen before. This is presented in a manner of a rabid dog, who would bite the hand which is reaching out towards him in a friendly manner.
I feel sorry for your family, who has to live with you in that animal farm: a dog behind the door, a rabbit in the cage, four cats all over the tables and the rat on the telephone. Your daughter is a good example of a flower, which can grow even in the garbage dump. She deserves something much better, and I cannot help you, only a good psychiatrist could.
As a final greeting,–metaphorically speaking–if you decide to commit suicide, I would be happy to loan you a gun.Sincerely,
[Mr. Attila]
My very first stalker! I was frightened to receive Mr. Attila’s hate literature but also relieved. It serves as an insurance policy, you see. If I receive further unpleasant phone calls, letters, or packages or, if there are any attacks on my family, person, home or animals, you may rest assured, Mr. Attila, I will be straight round to the Saanich police. I shall have your letter to hand, and they shall most likely arrest you.I would advise Christy Clark to look into a restraining order. And I can imagine only with horror what sort of letter Mr. Attila might have sent to poor Mike Harcourt.
Kevin Michael Grace, 6.50 p.m., December 14, 2002 [Link]

THE SHOCKING TRUTH
A humbling admission: the only thing that keeps traffic to this blog above a risible level (risible by my pitiful standard, anyway) is the attention paid to it by Kathy Shaidle. Thank you, Kathy. Everyone should buy her latest book, God Rides a Yamaha: Musings on Pain, Poetry and Pop Culture. It makes the perfect last-minute Christmas gift. Her previous effort, Lobotomy Magnificat, is still available—and wouldn’t that make a great name for a punk band?In other blogrolling news, I was speaking to Jeremy Lott today and asked, “Hey, are you related to that Trent Lott?” He replied, “Oh, shut up!” Jeremy confessed he has been bedevilled by this inquiry for years. Significantly, however, he didn’t answer the question. I think we should be told, if only because it might save him some embarrassment when it is revealed that he led the fight—unavailing, thank God—to prevent the integration of his Trinity Western fraternity.I strongly suspect that Jeremy is related to the rightly reviled Senate Majority Leader. This would certainly explain the shocking truth behind the near conflagration at Kevin Steel’s infamous party. Various participants (including Jeremy himself) have skated around the issue, but suppressio veri will never find a home at The Ambler. Publish and be damned, that’s my motto. Why was that gentle soul Barrett Pashak so angry with Jeremy? It was certainly not any odium theologicum. Turns out they were actually discussing politics, and Jeremy uttered this shocking statement: “If America had followed George Wallace’s lead in 1968, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years either.” It was all anyone could do to look him in the eye afterward, and quite right, too. The price of multiculturalism is eternal vigilance. That’s my motto, too.Kevin Michael Grace, 3.15 p.m., December 13, 2002 [Link]

FRANK CAPRA’S HERESYI mentioned Gary North’s essay on It’s a Wonderful Life yesterday but had no time to comment. North argues that Frank Capra’sthemes are fundamental to the American character: good vs. evil, David vs. Goliath, money won’t buy happiness, personal salvation through good works, and–neglected by most reviewers–one of the most powerful themes in American history and uniquely American: national redemption by home ownership through mortgages.This seems self-contradictory. Quite rightly, North calls It’s a Wonderful Life a tale of “secular redemption.” And like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, its message is a very secular one indeed: money can buy happiness. Scrooge’s monetary intervention saves Tiny Tim, does it not? Does not home ownership through mortgages demonstrate the happiness that money can bring? Are not the people of Potterville condemned to lives of dissipation—damned, if you will—precisely because they haven’t the money to buy homes?And what saves George Bailey from “bankruptcy, disgrace and prison”? The good will, even the love, of the people of Bedford Falls isn’t enough. George always had that; it is their whip-round that rescues him. But has it really been such a wonderful life for George? In some of the most harrowing scenes ever filmed, we see him in the depths of his despair. We have seen George sacrifice for others time and again; it gnaws at him, but he sucks it up. After Uncle Billy loses the money, George at long last gives vent to his darkest thoughts, the existential terror he has spent a lifetime suppressing. After such a catastrophe, is amnesia possible?North writes:
It is easy to criticize Capra’s view of how the economy works. His plots often had holes in them larger than George Bailey’s wad of honeymoon cash. But his movies held together, and also have held up over decades, because the holes are covered over by his fundamental theme: individual righteousness wins out in the end. The American system, while open to greedy villains, ultimately rests on ethically solid ground. Nice guys don’t finish last.This is the American heresy. God has no covenant with America—it is not the New Israel or even the Fourth Rome. It was not conceived immaculately; Original Sin still obtains. One day America will be as one with Nineveh and Tyre, but God will still be in his Heaven. And every day in America, nice guys go to their graves having finished last. Just as they do in Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Ghana or Mongolia. Individual righteousness doesn’t win out in this vale of tears.”Americans root for the little guy,” North observes.
We are afflicted with what my friend Hans Kraepilin calls “infracaninophilia”: love of the underdog. (Lawrence J. Peter, of Peter Principle fame, reworked this phrase after I told him about it: “hyperaninophobia”–hatred of the overdog. It just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)Interesting that North uses the word “afflicted.” I wonder whether “love of the underdog” and “hatred of the overdog” are quite the same thing. The first is bad enough: a sentimental disease that has blighted the Western world and threatens to destroy civilization. The second is altogether more sinister. For isn’t God the biggest overdog of all? Isn’t “hyperaninophobia” hatred of authority on Earth as in Heaven? Isn’t it the Greek form of Lucifer’s declaration of rebellion, Non serviam?I like a happy ending as much as the next man. I watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Yuletide and weep happy tears. Even as I weep, however, my higher faculty informs me that Frank Capra was guilty of what Eric Voegelin called “immanentizing the eschaton”: dragging to Earth what rightfully belongs to Heaven. Frank Capra’s heresy has become a de facto state religion, and I tremble for America when I remember Deuteronomy: “For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.”Kevin Michael Grace, 11.20 p.m., December 12, 2002 [Link]

TRIUMPH!
Ten days ago I lamented the non-release of Futurama on DVD and cursed Fox for its bloody-mindedness. This morning comes the glorious news that the first season will be released in North America March 25, 2003. Only 109 days to go; I can hardly wait. Feel the mighty power of my blog and tremble! Next up: To Live and Die in L.A.
Kevin Michael Grace, 9.04 p.m., December 12, 2002 [Link]

DARTH VADER’S CHRISTMASHere are couple of things to tide you over while I’m on deadline. 1. My Report cover story on the “moron” incident is now online. Americans might find it interesting, as they may not understand the extent to which Canadian anti-Americanism fulfils a national need. 2. Gary North’s Lew Rockwell essay on It’s a Wonderful Life is delightful reading and got me thinking, “Who else could find the connection between Capra’s Christmas classic and fractional reserve banking?” Why, that would be me! The following is from “Galaxy 500,” my erstwhile TV column in the erstwhile BC Report:The way the world works
How the IMF made capitalism a no-lose proposition for the rich
July 12, 1999
In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life George Bailey is about to leave on his honeymoon when he hears of a run on his family’s savings and loan. He rushes back to the office and is confronted by a mob. They want their money–all of it–now. It isn’t here, George replies. Where is it? they demand. Waaal, it’s in Bill’s house, and Barney’s house and Ed’s house, he explains. His homily on equity fails to satisfy–they demand cash. Evil Mr. Potter, who controls the only other bank in Bedford Falls, is offering 50 cents on the dollar. George, a “starry-eyed dreamer,” is determined to prevent Potter from beggaring his neighbours, so he sacrifices his honeymoon money, doling it out in tens and twenties. Bailey Bros. and Bedford Falls survive.
That was the 1930s. After watching the excellent PBS Frontline documentary The Crash: Unravelling the 1998 Global Financial Crisis, I wondered what the George Bailey of the 1990s would say to his terrified shareholders. The money’s not here. Where is it? Looking down at his computer screen, he replies: Waaal, it’s shorting Indonesian rupiahs…no, it’s shorting rubles…now wait just a minute, it’s shorting Eurodollars. Making up the shortfall from his own savings is unthinkable, and as the mob tears him limb from limb George reflects it hasn’t been such a wonderful life after all.
Some will see this dramatization as an object lesson in the evils of fractional reserve banking. (Please, no essays.) Others will complain that generous 1930s’ George is pure “Capracorn.” A banker risking his own money? Not bloody likely. But that’s precisely what J.P. Morgan (no “starry-eyed dreamer” he) did in single-handedly putting an end to the Panic of 1907, going so far as to lock several of his fellow plutocrats in a room until they agreed to join him in lending the millions needed to prevent a crash.
That was the 1900s. The whole world, not just the United States, is now subject to the tender mercies of the International Monetary Fund, which is backed not by robber barons but by Western taxpayers, i.e., you and me. And any country that wants to be part of the IMF’s exciting New World Order must embrace what it calls “liberalization,” i.e., “imperialism.” Here’s the Globalization for Dummies version:
The IMF, with its trusted partner/lackey the U.S. Treasury Department, persuades the “developing countries” (now known as “emerging markets”) to adopt free trade and allow unfettered foreign investment. They must also offer high returns and peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar. The capital pours in, and the good times roll. But the slightest shock can burst the bubble–as in 1997 when the finance ministers of the G7 countries (wave for the cameras, Paul Martin!) agree to let the dollar appreciate against the yen. The currencies of the emerging markets appreciate in lockstep; their exports become more costly; sales fall; interest rates and deficits rise.
George Soros, the Angel of Death, has been watching closely. He bets against Thailand. Other currency speculators follow. Thailand exhausts its foreign reserves before devaluing and begging the IMF for relief. Now, economist Jeffrey Sachs calls the world’s banker “Typhoid Mary,” but it prefers to call its bacillus “austerity.” Banks must be closed! Taxes must be raised! Spending must be slashed! The result is devastation: first for Thailand, then the rest of East Asia, then Russia and South America. Unlike in Bedford Falls, the locals are not offered 50 cents on the dollar.
Finally, after the Dow Jones suffers its second-worst loss ever, the crisis is “stabilized.” In New York the good times roll on, and the Dow hits 11,000. The IMF goes on its way rejoicing. We hear not from executive director Michel Camdessus, the man Jude Wanniski calls “Darth Vader,” but from his deputy, Stanley Fischer, whose steely gaze, economy of gesture and mysterious accent (Rhodesian? South African?) suggest Ernst Stavro Blofeld. “It is surprising that the depth of the social distress [the crisis] has created is less than the critics have asserted throughout,” Mr. Fischer avers. He sounds disappointed. I almost expected him to stroke a white Persian and murmur, “They told me we assassinated Hong Kong.”
Meanwhile, no preventative measures are taken. What William Greider calls the “poker game in the sky” is played for ever-higher stakes. Half the world is in recession or worse. Middle classes have been left poor and the poor, destitute. Where has their money gone? Straight into the pockets of the bankers that cajoled their leaders into accepting their “venture funds.” From each according to his vulnerability, to each according to his greed. J.P. Morgan turns in his grave while George Bailey wonders why he was such a patsy. And evil Mr. Potter? He is angry: Risk-free capitalism? Why didn’t I think of that?Kevin Michael Grace, 3.59 p.m., December 11, 2002 [Link]

WORD POWER
The National Post editorializes this morning, “Until last week it was possible to empathize with” Cardinal Bernard Law’s “position.” Empathize? Let’s see:Sure, I know what it’s like to cover up for pederastic priests for two decades and then to advance the daring legal position that the “negligence” of a six-year-old boy and his parents was partly to blame for the boy’s rape at the hands of Father Paul Shanley. I mean, c’mon, we’ve all been there. Let he who is without sin pay off the victims.Golly, there appears to be one prodigy of cynicism on the Post editorial board.
To reiterate: A good dictionary: $50. Benefit of the dictionary habit: priceless.
Kevin Michael Grace, 2.41 a.m., December 10, 2002 [Link]

STRAINING (FOR EFFECT) AT THE LEASH
“Violence begets violence,” declares the B1 headline in the December 7 Calgary Herald. Emma Poole reports:
If the signs are all there, it is just a matter of knowing how to read them. People who lash out and commit a serious act of violence once will likely become a repeat offender, said Dr. Kenneth Hashman, head of forensic psychiatry for the Calgary Health Region on Friday.
History repeats itself, he said.
“If significant red flags have been raised in the past about violence…it probably would have been reasonable to expect it in the future.”Dr. Hamish Deutlichman, head of forensic rhetoric for the Calgary Media Region, comments:
It was a dark and stormy night wherein all cats were grey. A cat may look at a king, but the Emperor has no clothes—and as the cat was away, the mice did play. Curiosity killed the cat, but it’s a bold mouse that nestles in the cat’s ear. Even a dead one, as cats have nine lives.Kevin Michael Grace, 2.16 a.m., December 10, 2002 [Link]

DOGGEREL
Trust Colby Cosh to raise the bar higher. I merely quoted poems; now he’s gone and written one. Well, two can play that game, even if my skills are a parodist are not nearly as developed as his. Like Colby, I have chosen the immortal Bard as my source: “Hark, hark! the lark” from Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 3.Hark, hark! the bark from Mason’s flat nags,
And Murphy’s mouth lies,
Her hand stills phone as Jeff’s paw snags
Floors in his Dupont prize;
And near memories begin
To tear my hazel eyes:
With every thing that falsehood is,
My lady sweet, she lies:
She lies, she lies.Kevin Michael Grace, 1.41 a.m., December 10, 2002 [Link]

MY LIFE IN (POP) SONG
“Someday I’ll Find You” by Noël Coward:When one is lonely the days are long;
You seem so near
But never appear.
Each night I sing you a lover’s song;
Please try to hear,
My dear, my dear.
Someday I’ll find you,
Moonlight behind you,
True to the dream I am dreaming.
As I draw near you
You’ll smile a little smile;
For a little while
We shall stand
Hand in hand.
I’ll leave you never,
Love you for ever,
All our past sorrow redeeming:
Try to make it true,
Say you love me too,
Someday I’ll find you again.

Can’t you remember the fun we had?
Time is so fleet,
Why shouldn’t we meet?
When you’re away from me days are sad;
Life’s not complete,
My sweet, my sweet.
Kevin Michael Grace, 6.28 p.m., December 9, 2002 [Link]

JUST THE FACTS, MA’AMWhat does “pedophilia-related” mean? Michelle Mark of the Calgary Sun reported December 8:
A convicted pedophile running for public office could be Airdrie’s newest alderman tomorrow. [Airdrie is a community of 21,000 just north of Calgary.]
David Moore, 39, and a married father of seven children, was convicted of pedophilia-related charges in Cardston in 1989.
Moving to Airdrie seven years ago–after his sentence was served–Moore tried to hide his status as a convicted child molester.
But, on the eve of tomorrow’s election, his past has come back to haunt him.
Last week, an estranged family member recognized Moore’s name on election signs while driving through Airdrie and immediately alerted employees at the Airdrie Echo newspaper.
Confronted by the Sun about his prior conviction yesterday, Moore admitted it is something he has tried to keep from the public.
“When you make a mistake of that nature, it’s something that you work hard to make sure it isn’t something that is public knowledge,” Moore told the Sun yesterday.
He also said he doesn’t think voters should hold his past against him.
“I’m very careful about keeping myself out of situations like that again.”
Moore was convicted of two counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 18 months in jail. 
What kind of situations are those? Moore doesn’t tell us, and neither does the Sun. “Sexual assault” in the Criminal Code of Canada means everything from rape to “sexual touching.” (If indeed Moore was convicted of an offence under Section 271 and not of an offence under one of the various other sexually-related sections of the Code.) The age of consent in Canada is 14, but sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 are illegal if one of the parties is in a position of “authority.”Elsewhere in the Sunday Sun, columnist Rick Bell expresses outrage:
Thank God. Thank God someone drives through Airdrie and reads the election signs and puts two and two together.
Thank God that person phones the Airdrie Echo and thank God the folks at the Echo alert us.
Thank God the Sun is able to stand up the facts without the benefit of a sex offender registry that doesn’t exist.
Thank God it isn’t Tuesday, the day after the by-election vote. Yes, thank God. Because you just never know.
Here is a man, the kind of man you’d meet in heartland Canada. A family man with family values who wants to keep his small city a family kind of place. A hard-working volunteer who runs for office and wants to upgrade the roads and keep the taxes down and get new businesses to move to town.
Here is a man who has publicly defended those who’ve defended children, a respected member of a political party priding itself on a no-nonsense law-and-order platform.
Here is a man who has already run for elected office in his city once before. Here is a man you could know and yet never really know.
But what is that Moore actually did? Moore has not been charged with further offences, so there is no legal impediment to the Calgary Sun printing the details of his conviction, so long as it does not identify Moore’s victim or victims.Moore’s exposure is an considerable embarrassment to the Official Opposition, as he is vice-president of human resources for the Wild Rose riding, held by Canadian Alliance Member of Parliament Myron Thompson. Contacted by Bell, Thompson was nonplussed:”I don’t know what to say. How do you spell the word shocked? I’m really sorry to hear these things,” says the MP, after asking if this is some sort of sick joke.
“I’ve known him for five years. He was another one of the guys, never a complaint about him. Far as I knew, he was a good family man. He seemed to have a pretty happy family. He has a pile of kids. I met them all.
“Nobody out here was aware of his conviction. Nobody. Anybody seeking office had better make sure their background is out in the open. The people have a right to know.”
Another Calgary Alliance MP interviewed by Bell, Art Hanger, suggests strongly that Moore is a serial offender:
“Nothing surprises me. Pedophiles are manipulators and con men extraordinaire.
“They con themselves into the hearts of people and organizations.
“In my 22 years of experience on the police force, the pedophile is the most underhanded, the most deceitful, the most manipulative of offenders…
“There are those who don’t want to admit there’s a problem since it is a criminal act committed by every kind of person in every strata of our society. It can be the pastor, the teacher, the politician, someone in your own family,” says Hanger.
“But there is always a cadre of people who go and support the convicted pedophile.
“They don’t agree with pedophilia but they still take up the cause. They’ve put the person in a position of trust and now they’re in denial.
“They forget there are consequences you have to live with, like it or not.
“The effort not to disclose something like this is not acceptable.
“Where is the shame? Where is the outrage? Have we slipped so far?
“Thank God most of our society still abhors those who pick on the most vulnerable, our children.”
The Sun clearly intends for us to consider Moore a monster, a man whose crime was so heinous he should never be allowed to attain the level of constituency party official or small-town alderman. If the Sun has the evidence to prove this, it is their duty to provide it. In the absence of the facts, however, it is difficult to determine the level of social ostracism Moore deserves.
In the event, the editorial standards of the Calgary Sun do not inspire confidence. According to Michelle Mark:
Although some Alliance MPs say they’re floored to find out there is a convicted sex offender working alongside them, they say he won’t likely be booted from the party.
There are no provisions to bar someone from holding an Alliance membership because they have a conviction, said Wild Rose MP Myron Thompson.
He also said Moore’s situation will not be discussed formally at the next board of directors meeting.
Myron Thompson is obviously ignorant of his own party’s constitution, but what is Mark’s excuse? It is freely available at www.canadianalliance.ca. Section 3.d.iii states, “Membership in the Alliance shall be terminated without refund”:For just cause, including conduct judged improper, unbecoming, or likely to adversely affect the interests or reputation of the Alliance as determined by National Council of the Alliance, in its sole discretion, after consultation with the Member’s Constituency Association Executive.
“In its sole discretion.” For any reason or none, in other words. And it’s not as if the Alliance has not moved like greased lightning to remove members in the past. I suspect Moore will be out of the party by Monday or Tuesday. He is certainly guilty of more than many others that have been expelled. I don’t think I am in denial, and I certainly abhor those “who pick on the most vulnerable, our children.” But I think we deserve to be told exactly what Moore did.[UPDATE]
The Calgary Sun reports this morning that Moore has announced he will not take his seat if elected. He evidently considers himself a victim as well: 
“I will strive every day, every day, to make sure I don’t put myself or any child in that situation,” said Moore.
“And six of my children are girls.”
Moore said he had been sexually abused as a child which led him to commit the crimes.
He said he turned himself in to police after the incidents. 
What were the incidents? Why doesn’t the Sun simply tell us the facts? “Nothing beats news in a newspaper,” as Paul Johnson likes to say.
Kevin Michael Grace, 1.23 a.m., December 9, 2002 [Link]

THE FAMILY THAT BLOGS TOGETHER…If you look to the right, under “Friends and Family,” you’ll see the names Patrick Grace and Rebecca Grace. They are two of my children. My other child, first-born Teresa, 18, evinces no interest in her own website.Patrick, 16, has devoted his site to an unknown to me videogame called Shining Force. For some reason, he has adopted the name Billy Frost. His site has been on hiatus for some time. I asked him recently when it would be active again. He said probably by Christmas. “Christmas?” I replied. Big mistake; he can’t bear teasing. You have no idea how very busy I am, was his rejoinder. I suppose I don’t. Patrick is a serious young man. Two weeks ago he asked his mother to write him a note excusing him from attendance at a school play; he preferred to study instead. He is a better student than I ever was, which should please me, even if the tone of his every utterance is murderous resentment.Patrick was the first in the house to get his own website. He had learned enough HTML to put one up but obviously wasn’t satisfied with it. I had hoped he had learned enough code to design a site for me, but he hadn’t, so I learned FrontPage instead. The tables were turned; I was now in a position to help him, but then, rather perversely I thought, he decided he would learn Dreamweaver instead. Recently, he’s got a friend to do some Flash animation for his entry page; he was rather excited about that.None of my children have expressed much interest in my blog. Just as well, perhaps. But then they’ve never displayed much interest in my journalistic career.Rebecca, 12, is not as hermetic as Patrick. Although I don’t imagine this is going to last much longer, as she is on the cusp of adolescence. Soon enough, I fear, she will become sullen, humorless and obsessed with amour-propre, as all teenagers are. As I was myself, as I remember to my horror and shame. In the meantime, however, she is an engaging girl; she still wears her heart on her sleeve.Casting about for her attributes, I’m afraid I don’t know much about her. Does this make me a bad father? I don’t think so. Children are jealous of their privacy, and I don’t like to pry. Especially as my own adolescence was blighted by my mother’s obsessive attentions. I’m certain Rebecca has a rich interior life, as her blog would seem to attest. I look forward to whatever she will choose to reveal.What I do know about Rebecca:
Types 70 WPM.
Typical Harry Potter fixation (although she did surprise me by reading Pride and Prejudice).
Horrifying soap opera fixation (decadent, I thought; although I am informed this is perfectly common).
Plays the clarinet in her middle school band (at my insistence; she wanted to play the saxophone, but I maintained this was not a suitable instrument for a girl).
Loves grotesque pop tarts such as Christina Aguilera and Shakira (although she likes Avril Lavigne, who is quite tolerable).
Has the disconcerting habit of asking, “Is this person still alive?” about the people whose records I listen to.
Has written at least one novella based on videogame characters.
Perhaps in the future all family communication will be by blog. Rather like the Tolstoys—but of course there are the diaries left out for others to read, and then there are the secret diaries.Kevin Michael Grace, 11.23 p.m., December 7, 2002 [Link]
 
POETRY CORNER
The South Country
When I am living in the Midlands,
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.
The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea,
And it’s there walking in the high woods,
That I would wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Walking along with me.
The men that live in North England
I saw them for a day;
Their hearts are set upon the waste fells,
Their skies are fast and grey;
From their castle-walls a man may see
The mountains far away.
The men that live in West England
They see the Severn strong,
A-rolling on rough water brown
Light aspen leaves along.
They have the secret of the Rocks
And the oldest kind of song.
But the men that live in the South Country
Are the kindest and most wise,
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our sister the Spring
When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
She blesses us with surprise.
I never get between the pines
But I smell the Sussex air;
Nor I never come on a belt of sand
But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs
So noble and so bare.
A lost thing could I never find,
Nor a broken thing men;
And I fear I shall be all alone
When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me
Or who will be my friend?
I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald;
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high wood,
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.
—Hilaire BellocKevin Michael Grace, 12.22 a.m., December 7, 2002 [Link]

AN INCOMING WARM FRONT
Rick Salutin, one of my favourite columnists, takes issue with Marshall McLuhan in today’s Globe and Mail. In a column called “What McLuhan missed,” he credits him with “underst[anding] the impact of the invention of print,” but of overlooking the “continuities” in “the experience of books and that of TV or the Net.”TV is still text-based and scripted, though it’s not a book. Furthermore, the communication is entirely one way, just like reading. Even on the Internet, interactive means one side speaks, then the other; not the simultaneous encounter of live beings responding in the same moment to everything, including gesture and breath—as actors do to a live audience, even when it’s silent—and as happens in every conversation.Reading McLuhan now, you’d think the kind of individualist ideologies of the past 20 years—Reagan, Thatcher, Bush—could never have happened. Instead, there should have been eternally youthful people acting tribally and dancing the twist. But the collective nature of experience in oral or preliterate societies was not based on a technology, whether focused on the ear, the eye or all the senses together; it was based on the direct connectedness of living people. Anything “mediated” by media, that is by communications technologies, whether print or electronic, will always lead to the fragmented quality of print culture. We still live, despite TV or the Internet, in the age of print.I think Salutin is guilty of categorical confusion. When McLuhan died in 1980, the personal computer industry was in its infancy, and the World Wide Web more than a decade way. So we never benefited from his wisdom on the subject. If it were not too presumptuous to speak for the Master, I would speculate that McLuhan would say this—the Internet is a new medium and must be considered by its own laws. The Internet is print-based and hot, hot, hot. They don’t call Internet disputes “flame wars” for nothing. Just as everyone had written off print, the Internet allowed it to come roaring back. McLuhan taught, of course, that whenever a new medium arrives, its essence is misunderstood by those (almost everybody) that think in the past. What did TV give us in the early days? Vaudeville in a box. Just as New Media tyros squandered untold millions in a doomed attempt to turn the Internet into an online version of TV. Do you sit through Flash animation? Does anyone?Remember the received wisdom that the masses would never read newspapers and magazines on CRT screens? Remember how everyone used to format and print articles off Slate and other sites? Does anyone do that anymore? But the best example of the Internet revolution is the totally unexpected success of the blog. Vanity publishing, the Old Media sneered. We have what the people want. Corporately sanctioned opinion, straight from Mount Olympus, respectable, predictable. Bland, blander, blandest. Print, naturally hot, became increasingly lukewarm as it aped cool TV, the great conciliator.
The blog gives us a single human voice. Unfiltered and immediate. And now the movement is all in the other direction. Newspapers and magazines are becoming hotter. Singularity is no longer a mortal sin. I can hardly imagine, for instance, Mark Steyn being hired by the National Post before the World Wide Web. Film and television have become hotter as well. And television will continue to grow hotter as television receivers become bigger and ever more high definition—as television changes from a low-information medium to a high-information medium.This shift has profound implications. The low-fi TV age was one of consensual politics. It was the age of overweening “democracy”: egalitarian and multiculturalist, the iron fist of enforced harmoniousness in the velvet glove of “consent.” Salutin mocks, “Eternally youthful people acting tribally and dancing the twist”? Isn’t this exactly how we all believe we are supposed to act? Isn’t “elitist” a nastier epithet than “nigger”? Remember Clinton discussing his underwear on MTV and playing the sax on Arsenio?And Salutin is wrong about Reagan, Thatcher and Bush. The first and last (if he indeed means George W. Bush) are hardly “individualist.” Their appeal is and was primarily national and collectivist: “morning in America” for Reagan, “national greatness” for Bush. Federal spending exploded during the Reagan administration, and it is exploding again during the Bush administration. Thatcher is a somewhat different case. My assessment is that her success can be understood only if she is recognized for what she was: a class warrior. Thatcher fought entrenched privilege; she was no conservative. Yes, she destroyed the unions–a conservative institution–but she also allowed the House of Lords to atrophy to the point where it was a mere trifle to be dispensed with by Tony Blair. She was a creature of the zeitgeist. It’s not for nothing she is admired openly by both Blair and Christopher Hitchens.The low-fi age was the nadir of liberty. It was an unthinking age, characterized by moral panics and the almost instantaneous triumph of innumerable crusades. It was the age of enthusiasm. If McLuhan was right, lovers of liberty have reason to be optimistic.
Kevin Michael Grace, 8.32 p.m., December 6, 2002 [Link]

SOME MOTHERS DO ’AVE ’EMRemember Charlotte Church? The sweet little Welsh girl with the “voice of an angel”? Sweet no longer, I’m afraid. Now 16, she’s become a buxom piece of trash-talking totty. Three months ago, the London Daily Mirror reported that her “bit of rough” ex?-boyfriend was shopping around her “sex secrets” to the tabloids. Now the Evening Standard reports that Our Char has become a right diva as well.The singer appeared close to tears on [the] first night [of her American tour] in Cincinnati in front of a less than sell-out audience. Towards the end of the concert she was in her dressing room visibly upset with her head in her hands and being comforted by aides before eventually going back on stage for the finale, where she was performing Christmas carols.
Minutes later she refused to greet a group of relatives of cast members who had gathered backstage, including a handicapped child and the wheelchair-bound mother of Royal Philharmonic conductor Sir George Daugherty.
As aides tried desperately to get her to change her mind, she was heard to snap “f*** this. I didn’t agree to no meet and greet. Hello!” Concert host Julie Andrews stepped into the breach, signing autographs and welcoming the group.
Charming.
Charlotte had arrived late for the three-week tour after storming off her transatlantic flight just as it was about to leave Gatwick last Wednesday. There were reports that the 16-year-old has clashed with her mother Maria over her Welsh rapper boyfriend, 18-year-old Steven Johnson.
“Welsh rapper boyfriend.” Fresh from the mean streets of Pontypridd, no doubt.
Mother and daughter eventually arrived in Cincinnati over the weekend. Charlotte recently admitted that her mother is worried about her relationship with Johnson, who reportedly tried to sell stories about the singer to the newspapers. But she insisted: “He’s really, really lovely. The stories that he’s a bad boy, and he does this and does that, are just not true.”
During last night’s performance, the teenager was seen checking her mobile phone several times between numbers.
They blow up so fast, don’t they? This is the future of classical music, the girl Sony Classical spent millions of dollars promoting? Watch out for her comeback special with Barbara Walters in about…2009.Kevin Michael Grace, 7.12 p.m., December 5, 2002 [Link]

A BOY CALLED KEVIN
The latest issue of The Report arrived today. It boasts a cover story by me on the “moron” incident and the decline of U.S.-Canadian relations. The piece comes to a surprising conclusion about the future. Available at all decent newsstands, or you could always subscribe.
That lovable scamp Jeremy Lott contributes a two-page spread on Christmas movies and decides to have to some sport with me. He’s in Washington now—home of Murphy, Mason and Jefferson, the Hound of Hell—so I can have some sport with him. Jeremy’s Top 10 list concludes:10. Home Alone: Included at the request of an anonymous Report senior editor, who explained about the film’s child hero, “His name is Kevin, and all he wants is a slice of cheese pizza. I feel very strongly about this.”I wasn’t joking. Like Kevin McCallister, I grew up in a large family. There were six of us children: insane by modern money-mad standards. I was the oldest, but I lacked Buzz McCallister’s brutishness. “Be nice to your brother(s)!” was a constant refrain. My brother Christopher is lucky I didn’t kill him after he: smashed my table hockey set, the best Christmas present I ever got; pulled down the WWII fighter plane models I’d lavished so much attention on and then stomped them; constantly kicked my arm out from under my head as I lay in front of the TV.How I wished I could be home alone, not to do everything as a group, not to share everything with everybody else. Families are inherently communist, and that’s a good thing mostly—but not always. When I was about eight, my late aunt Maureen moved to Vancouver and took an apartment in the West End. She had had a hard life. She never recovered from serving as a nurse in Indochina during the last days of French occupation. And it didn’t get any better after she married an American physician who turned out to be a junkie.Maureen was a strange woman but a kind one. She once told me she was going to make me a present and asked me what I wanted. Quick as a flash, I replied, “Something I don’t have to share.” The next time we visited, she handed me a cold object wrapped in tinfoil. It was a frozen chocolate pie—all for me! I was right chuffed.As soon as we were out the door, my father said, “Of course you’re going to have to share this with everyone else.” I was apoplectic, seized with the rage against perceived injustice that so plagues children. “But she made it just for me! She said so! You heard her! This is so unfair!” My father was adamant: “Don’t be a pig.”Many years later, I told this story to my friend Celeste McGovern. I thought she might appreciate it, as she grew up in a family even larger than mine. Instead, she was abrupt and dismissive: “You were being selfish.” Was I? Even almost 40 years later, the Affair of the Plundered Chocolate Pie still rankles. So my heart will always go out to Kevin McCallister, a little boy whose only wish was to enjoy some cheese pizza in peace. God bless us, every one.
Kevin Michael Grace, 6.39 p.m., December 5, 2002 [Link]

OH CIGGY OF THE GYPSY PEOPLE!
Sarah Eve Kelly writes of The Simpsons, “While I understand that the show is basically finished, I refuse to let go.” Here’s some advice: “Hang on tightly; let go lightly.” This is the motto of Jack Manfred, protagonist of Mike Hodges’s little masterpiece, Croupier. That Guy Ritchie could learn a thing or two about the hard-boiled English genre from watching this—or Hodges’s earlier masterpiece, Get Carter. (The 1971 original with Michael Caine, not the unspeakable 2000 remake with Sylvester Stallone.)Croupier is a great smokers’s film. I was watching it in bed the other night, and whenever Jack lighted up, I wanted to as well. But I couldn’t smoke what Jack smokes, and there’s the rub. Jack’s brand is the King of Cigarettes, Gitanes Sans Filtre, the choice of John Lennon, Bryan Ferry and Serge Gainsbourg.
(Note the exquisite art nouveau design; the perfect union of form and function.)
I mentioned in my AirMiles post that I like Benson & Hedges, but I don’t really. I smoke them because they’re the best of a sorry Canadian lot. (Plus, they’re 100mm long, and after I remove the filters they’re still a decent length.) For a historical reason I don’t understand, Canadians like blonde tobacco. I do not. Blonde tobacco has a strident taste, a nasty aftertaste and stains your tongue and hands yellow. I love dark tobacco, preferably Turkish, but American tobacco will do. (”What’s her name? Virginia Plain.”)But what am I saying, “Will do”? I’d kill for some Pall Malls. Sans filtre, mais oui! Gitanes and Pall Mall (and Gauloises) were manufactured under licence in Quebec until about a decade ago. Those were happy days. They were pulled from the Canadian market after the federal government demanded individual tax stamps for each province. At least that’s the excuse Imperial Tobacco gave for its perfidy.If cigarettes are a drug, then Canadian cigarettes are a maintenance dose. When I was in Washington earlier this year, it was nicotine heaven. Occasionally, Murphy will send me some Gitanes (or Gauloises or Pall Malls) in the mail. Oh! the joy of pure tobacco flavour!; Oh! the tristesse of this brief respite!
But hark! Trolling the Internet for cigarette art yesterday, I found numerous sites that purport to sell cartons of Gitanes for less than US$20. God only knows if these places are legit, and I shudder to think how much Canada Customs would gouge me if my Balkan beauties ever arrived. But I’ve made up my mind. Next paycheque, I’m going to take a flyer. Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime Gitanes!Kevin Michael Grace, 2.15 a.m., December 5, 2002 [Link]

FUTURE PATHETIC
Welcome Sarah Eve Kelly to the…um, er, you know, that virtual space where bloggers exist. Someone should coin a name for it.I knew Sarah slightly five years ago when she was a clever undergrad at the University of Alberta. Now she’s a clever grad student soon off to England on a writing fellowship. Perhaps she will find time to visit exotic Swindon, home of her beloved Andy Partridge (and of Colin Moulding, of course).She is an admirer of Elizabeth I, but I won’t hold that against her. Not much, anyway. My heart grieves at the thought of the historical injustice (the “Black Legend”) done to her sister, Mary Tudor, who said, “When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart.” (When I am dead and opened, you shall find “Mason” lying in my heart.) I wonder if she has ever read Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion, which presents an alternative view of the Virgin Queen and suggests what England might have become. Oh, that the Tudors had never ascended the throne! Dr. Fagan (one of Miss Kelly’s kinsmen) was right: “We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.”Sarah disagrees with my explanation of The Simpsons’s decline. Actually, we’re not wholly in disagreement; I expressed myself clumsily or at least not fully.The problem with The Simpsons isn’t, I don’t think, that it’s become “grossly sentimental” (although I agree about the rest)–in fact, it seems as though it’s lost much of its sentiment. Many inferior shows have copied the template of The Simpsons, but forfeited its moral tenor, its emphasis on family. Case in point: The Family Guy. Ugh.
I should have said that The Simpsons has become “grossly sentimental” and increasingly vicious. A deadly combination and one more common than you might expect. Post-modernism in a nutshell.
Of course she is correct that the show has lost its “moral tenor.”
A casual viewer likely would not be able to understand why Homer’s family loves him, but watch episodes like “Lisa’s Substitute” and “And Maggie Makes Three,” and you’ll get it.
“Lisa’s Substitute” is a beautiful piece of work. It is didactic without being ham-fisted and displays sentiment but not sentimentality. It’s been years since The Simpsons’s writers could come up with anything in the same ballpark. What we get from them now are gags, some zingfully fresh, most of them tired. The pathos is gone. There’s plenty of pathos in Futurama, though: Fry’s doomed love of Leela, for instance. (Turanga Leela in full; so who’s the Messiaen fan?) Or Fry’s doomed love of the robot Lucy Liu. Or Fry’s doomed love of almost every woman that crosses his path.Matt Groening once declared that nothing would happen to the Simpsons that couldn’t happen to a real family. Well, that injunction sure went out the window. Futurama, however, is inspired by the anarchy of the great Warner Brothers cartoons. Anything can happen–and does! This is a show that surprises me consistently; and I love surprises. (I love to laugh, too, and “This concept of ‘wuv’ confuses and infuriates us!” is the funniest line I’ve ever heard.) I’ve been enthralled by numerous episodes, but I’ll mention just one more. Fry’s body is invaded by parasites from a superannuated gas station egg sandwich. What do the parasites do? Why, they make Fry better in every respect. So much so that he is finally able to court Leela as an equal. Leela loves the new Fry, but their romance founders on Fry’s harassing doubt: Why couldn’t she have loved me as I was? I see a lot of myself (and of Everyman) in Fry.Elsewhere on her site, Sarah refers to “The Ancient Sunken City of Atlanta.” She obviously didn’t see the Futurama episode on that very subject. They even got Donovan to reprise his immortal “Atlantis” as “Atlanta.” Brought tears to my eyes, that did.And the answer to the question, “Which cartoon character do you most resemble?” is…Daffy Duck. I’d prefer to be Bugs Bunny, but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t manage to pull it off. Now there’s pathos for you.Kevin Michael Grace, 1.14 a.m., December 5, 2002 [Link]

IT’S A MAN’S MAN’S MAN’S WORLDBlogrolling: from Kathy Shaidle to Reverse Cowgirl (can’t imagine what that might mean and don’t want to know) to Lisa Guernsey in the New York Times. Blogging is a feminist issue:The sites I was visiting were all run by men.
The bloggers I knew of, to name a few, were Andrew Sullivan, a writer; Scott Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com; Glenn Reynolds, the force behind Instapundit.com; and Jim Romenesko, a monitor of the media. The sites they linked to were also mostly written by men. Articles in mainstream publications, like one that ran in Newsweek last summer, dropped some of the same names, all male. Garry Trudeau even tackled blogging recently in Doonesbury, and the blogger he created turned out to be a man.
Where were the women?
Is this a chick thing? Guernsey looks for blogs, finds a dozen or so, all by men. Ergo, blogging is male-dominated. As my old friend Rodney Quinn used to say, “To these people, the personal is not only political; it’s sociological as well.” Having already made the leap from anecdotal to empirical, Guernsey decides to do some actual research. Turns out the issue is “complicated”:wrapped up in knotty issues [mixed metaphor alert!] like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time—specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare.Blast you, Mother Nature!
I, for one, was probably feeling the disparity with hypersensitivity. I became a mother last spring and started my blog to keep up my writing. (The fog of sleep deprivation made me crazy enough to think I would have the free time.) After spending hours dealing with technical glitches and typing with one hand while trying to soothe a colicky baby, I started to assume that women who blog, particularly mothers who blog, were a rarity.
Can you hear the whine of one hand typing? Special pleading, let us count the ways: new mother, sleep deprivation, hours dealing with technical glitches, colicky baby. How do you do it, my girl?
But guess what?
Women are, in fact, blogging in big numbers. Mr. Rosenberg, who keeps an eye out for new bloggers and links to them from his Salon.com blog, estimates that the ratio of women to men is something like 40-60, or perhaps 50-50. Once I dug around, I found plenty of company.
Let’s review. Guernsey discovers that bloggers are pretty much equally male and female. And what’s the title of this essay? “Telling All Online: It’s a Man’s World (Isn’t It?)” Well, it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Of course it is. (Phew!) The Old Boy Network still rules. The glass ceiling still obtains. Male bloggers are linking to other bloggers that (quel surprise!) just happen to be men.And that is where things get touchy. People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.
If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter.
Why men are more likely than women to write about news and politics is a question that existed long before the dawn of the Web, and the answer is rolled up in cultural trends that span centuries. Men’s continued dominance in the software industry, where they are apt to fiddle with a new computer art form, stacks the roster too.”Hate to make generalizations,” my ass. So diaries are a chick thing, are they? Is this a joke? Ever hear of Pepys or Aubrey? Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? Boswell or Johnson? Byron, Gilbert White, Mark Twain, August Strindberg, Siegfried Sassoon, James Lees-Milne, Evelyn Waugh, Alan Clark, Alec Guinness or Alan Bennett?
“Men want to talk about every but” their “personal lives,” do they, Guernsey? You were probably straining for “intimate” there, but never mind. Could it be that men talk about their intimate lives in a different manner than women do? Oh, I forgot. “Separate but equal” was overturned in everything by Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.
“The answer is rolled up in cultural trends that span centuries,” is it, Guernsey? “Cultural trends”—I wonder what phrase you were straining for there? What might these “cultural trends” be, anyhow? Go on; have a bash.”Men’s continued dominance in the software industry”? Oh, shut up. What on earth are you talking about? These dominant men are liable to “fiddle with a new computer art form,” are they? The history of the personal computer industry has been the struggle to make software more accessible to everyone. The blogging revolution is the result of websites-for-dummies programs like Blogger and Blogspot. I can’t say for certain, but I would hazard that these programs were designed primarily by…men.I ask you gentle readers; do you think the New York Times would pay me to write such drivel? Of course not. Why? Because I’m not a woman—specifically, not a feminist.Let it not be said, however, that Guernsey lacks hope. The Sisterhood is on the case.
Some women see the tables turning.
Why must it always be a case of “the tables turning”? I had been led to believe men were the competitive sex. Why is it always about revenge? Revenge for what, anyway? That men are the leading edge of a phenomenon that’s barely a year old?It was the sense of male blog domination that led to the birth of Blog Sisters, a site where female bloggers come together to support one another, talk about gender issues and spread the word about their existence.
Sorry, gals. Writing is a solitary activity. Always has been. All that time you spend talking about blogging is time you could have spent actually blogging. “Gender issues in blogging”? You’re making my head hurt. As Lisa Simpson said, “I understand the words, but I don’t know what they mean.”Guernsey introduces us to Julie Powell, who confesses, “When I started, it did seem more like a guy thing.” And what did Powell do? “Nevertheless, she kept writing.” Brave, brave Julie! Let’s have a round of applause for this valiant woman.And Julie’s not the only one.Women’s blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)Women…writing about…politics? Has the world turned topsy-turvy? (Guernsey could always take a peek at the Op-Ed section of the Times. Its most popular columnist is someone called Maureen Dowd. I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure Maureen is a woman’s name, and she does write about politics. Or show business, but these industries seem to have merged.)From anecdotal to empirical and back again. Guernsey concludes:
As for me, I’m still in awe of anyone—man or woman—who has time to blog and be a parent at the same time.Are you in awe of me then? I’m a parent to three children—two more than you—but none are colicky; they’re too old for that. But enough of solidarity forever, let’s talk more about me—you that is and your miserable life:I think of the hours that I have so far spent setting up my blog, learning the software, combing the Web for links, fiddling with graphics. Each minute I have been vaguely conscious of the things I should have been doing instead. I should have been reading Dr. Spock, gazing at my snoozing child, vacuuming the dog hair off the rugs, finding a child-care provider, doing research for work, paying bills, talking to my mother-in-law, writing thank-you notes, washing dishes, making dinner.
Heck, I should have been sleeping.
Oh, shut up! Blogging’s not for everyone, Guernsey. Talk with your mother-in-law instead. Take as long as you like. Long distance is practically free these days. Each of us must find his—or her!—own level. And I think I’ve found yours.I like to think of myself as a student of Marshall McLuhan. He taught that every medium has its own essence. After some thought, I’ve concluded that the blog is a personal medium and a discursive medium. It should be ideal for women. Rather like the novel. Women are good at writing novels, for the same reasons they’re, uh, not so good at writing, say, poetry.Self-criticism time. I see I have only three women listed on my blogroll. Two are friends, and the other is someone who has kindly mentioned my work on several occasions. But I have personal or professional connections to most of the links on my site. Life’s like that. Nothing sinister involved. I learn from Guernsey that “Mr. Rosenberg conceded that [his blogroll] needs updating, and he has linked to several new women’s sites in the last month.” Roll on, affirmative action; roll on.I would link to that Eve Tushnet, but I’m not going to until she tells us her real name. “Eve Tushnet,” indeed! That’s as filthy as Peter O’Toole.Is my blog a chronicle of my “personal life”? Up to a point, Lord Copper. You could say The Ambler contains elements of mythic autobiography. Women like Guernsey may believe that women like her trade in honesty, but they are being dishonest to themselves and to everyone else. People, men and women, are generally incapable of honesty. A good thing, too. Honesty is rare and dangerous; more often, it is boring. And the more honest people pretend to be, the less they should be trusted. 
Everyone creates a persona; everyone wears a mask. The only pertinent questions are how interesting is the persona and how artfully constructed the mask. Truths are best learned second-hand. That’s why God created gossip.Last word on Guernsey, from Reverse Cowgirl:
One of the nicest things about the blogo—— is that it still operates solely under survival of the fittest principles. If your blog sucks, no one will visit it; if your blog does not suck, people will read it. Of course, if you only update your blog once every other menstrual cycle, like Guernsey, you can always just blame men for its lack of popularity.
Bitchy. I like it.
On the stereo: Nick Lowe, The Wilderness Years, “Born a Woman” (Martha Sharpe):
It makes no difference
If you’re rich or poor
Or even if you’re smart or dumb
A woman’s place in this whole world
Is under some man’s thumbKevin Michael Grace, 1.26 a.m., December 4, 2002 [Link]

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN STUPID AND CLEVER
Why isn’t Supergrass bigger in North America? Too English, I suppose. Too eclectic, too ironic, too difficult to assign to a genre, not “angry” enough. Oh, and they don’t perform identikit “punk” numbers while shouting “Show us your tits!” at barely pubescent girls.When I come to power, the “other” band from Oxford will sit forever at the top of the charts, while Sum 41, Nickelback and the rest of that insipid ilk will be consigned to dungeons, there to be scourged eternally by the ghost of Joey Ramone.
Until that happy day, you should all buy Life on Other Planets, Supergrass’s not-at-all-”difficult” (but as-yet unreleased in the U.S.) fourth album. Not persuaded? Those fine folks at Parlophone have made the entire album available for listening free, here.I was listening to my store-bought copy last night, and noticed a nagging familiarity about the song “Evening of the Day”:
If she’s not on that 3.15
Then I’m gonna know what sorrow means
Then the bolt from the blue—this is an homage to Spinal Tap! Well, not Spinal Tap, exactly, but to the first song Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins ever wrote, “All the Way Home”:Well, I’m sittin’ here beside the railroad track,
And I’m waitin’ for that train to bring her back.
If she’s not on the five-nineteen,
Then I’m gonna know what sorrow means.
Great minds think alike.
One of many reasons why This is Spinal Tap is one of the all-time greats is outstanding original music. “Big Bottom,” for instance is as moronic as it sounds, but once heard is never forgotten. (Which certainly can’t be said for the pedestrian “Stillwater” tunes Nancy Wilson and Cameron Crowe wrote for Almost Famous.)Even better than the metal parodies, however, are the Sixties songs. “Gimme Some Money” and “Listen to Me (The Flower People),” sound like classics from the British Invasion and the Psychedelic Era you’ve never heard before. (You can here them for free, here.)In the latter, I especially like the bit—a sly dig at The Move, I should think—where St. Hubbins sings, “It’s like a Mozart symphony,” and then Tufnel plucks one out on the guitar. Even here’s there’s a joke, though—and a subtle one. For it’s not a symphony he quotes; it’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Genius.Kevin Michael Grace, 3.09 a.m., December 3, 2002 [Link]

ASSES TO ASHES
My latest “Eclectica” is up. I have a go at the Globe and Mail’s Heather Mallick, Canada’s most odious columnist. Having said that, I realize I’ve forgotten about Lyn Cockburn of the Winnipeg Sun. Hang on, I’ve just gone to the Canoe site to check the spelling of Cockburn’s Christian name and discovered a new contender, Hartley Steward of the Toronto Sun:I have always found it difficult to understand the appeal of organized religion to, say, a nuclear physicist or a philosopher or, to be honest, most any person of education and intelligence.
Today, in the face of the unspeakable horrors inflicted on mankind as the world’s great religions seek dominance one over the other, such appeal is even less understandable and more senseless.
This from a December 1 column called “Organized religion: Mere folly…or fraud?” Cor, what a devil you are, Steward. Mind the Spanish Inquisition don’t hear.Any person of education and intelligence, indeed anyone but the most purblind atheist would recognize that religious belief is the natural condition of man. Even Steward’s “nuclear physicist” realizes that he has come up against the limits of his understanding. Tom Wolfe writes in “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died” (reprinted in Hooking Up):Ironically, said Nietzsche, th[e] unflinching eye for truth, th[e] zest for scepticism, is the legacy of Christianity…Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind…He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of scepticism upon its self, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart and self-destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on “Limits to Scientific Knowledge.” The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn’t get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can’t record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog’s, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self-enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.And what’s this about “the unspeakable horrors inflicted on mankind as the world’s great religions seek dominance one over the other”? There’s one only great religion seeking dominance today, Steward. Call it by name, you coward.But we mustn’t forget about yesterday:Today, Muslim fanatics attack Manhattan’s twin towers, killing more than 3,000 innocent people. Yesterday, the Crusades saw Christian fanatics kill thousands of Muslim innocents in the name of their God.
“Yesterday,” eh Steward? Taking this rather personal like aren’t we? He does come by his outrage honestly, however. Few people know this, but his second wife was on a package tour of the Levant in 1191, when Richard Coeur de Lion showed up and mistook her for a Saracen. An ugly business, that.But what of the unspeakable horror in the 20th century, you might ask. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot: monotheists were they, Steward?
There’s no fool like an old fool, so let’s hear more:In my childhood home, religion was a game. My dear mother, more saintly than the nuns, was a devoted Catholic. She had not a single question of her own to ask, yet she accepted every last answer the Church had to offer.
In the confessional with her, were you, Steward?
My dad was aggressively anti-religion, specifically and even more aggressively anti Catholic. His anti-faith, you could say, was rock solid. He allowed my sister to attend church with her mother, but he sent my brother and me to Sunday school at the United church.
Each Sunday, he would stand in the laneway watching Sid and me as we passed by the big white Catholic church situated almost literally on our doorstep, across the road to the modest little Protestant church. He might as well have given the one-fingered salute, his smugness was so apparent, his defiance so blatant.
My mother, meek enough to inherit the Earth, suffered the dreadful hurt without complaint. My father raged against her faith until the day she died.
It was like a red flag to a bull. He left the bedroom each time she fell to her knees in player. He dumped his firewood where it effectively blocked the church’s drive and he refused to acknowledge the pleasant nods from the resident priests as they passed him on the street.
He died 10 years after his wife, still cursing her Catholicism and metaphorically dumping wood in the church’s driveway. Nonetheless, I know he saw himself as a good and decent man.
Er, how should I put this, Steward? I’ve sworn off profanity here, so this will have to do–your late father sounds like a demented jerk.Steward concludes, “I have never apologized for my religious scepticism.” Cor, what an iconoclast you are. Mind Hogtown’s Taliban don’t hear.”Scepticism,” eh? A good dictionary: $50. Benefit of the dictionary habit: priceless.
But back to Heather Mallick. Her November 30 column demonstrates she is concerned with matters eschatological, even if Steward isn’t:And it’s not just my death. There are many advantages to others buying the farm.
Myra Hindley. Karla Homolka, please emulate. Rosemary West. Pinochet, Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch.
Pinochet, Kissinger…Rupert Murdoch? Sure, the Dirty Digger is semi-respectable today, but I’m grateful that Mallick has not forgotten 1973, when Murdoch overthrew the democratically-elected government of Gough Whitlam in a bloody, CIA-sponsored coup. Even today, the mothers of Australia’s desaparecidos howl for justice. ¡No passarán!Mallick has already planned her posthumous philanthropy:
My personal legacy will be organs for my favourite people, should they feel the need. Some nice little six-year-old gets my corneas (she’ll need a contact lens in her right eye, sorry kid), Nelson Mandela gets my heart, Rick Mercer can have both my kidneys, Svend Robinson can have my lungs and liver. Ovaries to any child-hungry soul who wants ‘em. Mine were surplus to requirements.
Nelson Mandela, eh? There’s a daring choice; Mallick is full of surprises. But it would take a heart of stone not to recognize the infinite sadness in the words “surplus to requirements.”Regrets? Mallick’s had a few:
The hard-line environmentalists will be pleased…I will no longer be consuming the resources of the planet. I’m looking at what I bought last Saturday: beaded velvet jewellery boxes, a shearling overcoat, the collected works of David Sedaris, 45 pairs of socks, a facial at Estée Lauder, two Christmas wreaths, a purse by Longchamps and a hair crimper. I ate free-range eggs and toast for breakfast and lamb stew for dinner. Taxis transported me. I used electronic devices and made financial transactions.Hundreds of millions of people had a similar day. Face it, Gaia, Mother Earth [is] sagging beneath the weight of our demands.
I don’t know about that, Heather, but the spirits of thousands of Canadians are sagging beneath the weight of your ghastly prose.And 45 pairs of socks? I don’t want to even think about going there, sister.Kevin Michael Grace, 1.06 a.m., December 3, 2002 [Link]

THE FUTURE IS NOW
So Colby Cosh did in the end write about SCTV. He suggests you should sign the SCTV DVD petition. Yes, you certainly should, but you shouldn’t imagine it would make any difference. These petitions never do. One hundred and fifty-five thousand people signed the petition to save Futurama, and those pinheads at Fox cancelled it anyway.Bitter? You bet. Fox treated the best show on television like Matt Groening’s redheaded stepchild, slapping it around their schedule before finally leaving it to die in the 7 p.m. Sunday slot, pre-empted four months of the year by football.The right thing to do would have been euthanizing The Simpsons’ sorry ass. That show has been an embarrassment for years: poorly written, grossly sentimental, a showcase for witless guest stars unaware that its cachet was long ago forfeited. When did it finally jump the shark? Could it have been when they killed Maude Flanders for laughs and then had Ned dating again in the same episode. The breathtakingly cynical Armon Tanzarian episode? Or maybe the John Waters episode? Now, I like John Waters and think he’s a fine essayist. But when I want gay sitcom agitprop I’ll tune in Will and Grace, thank you very much. If The Simpsons had wanted to go out with any dignity, it should have packed it in after Phil Hartman got whacked.The Futurama petition claims, “Recently, Season One was released on DVD, every single DVD magazine gave Futurama high scores for its content and entertainment value. This was later backed up by the public who managed to put it at number 3 in the DVD sales charts. If you continued to make the show then you would be able to make huge profits from DVD sales.”
Futurama on DVD?! Excuse me while I rush out to Future Shop and grab a copy right now…What’s this you say? Not available in North America? Only in Britain and Germany? Seasons One and Two? Was ist das? Last time I checked, Fox was still an American corporation. And there are obviously far more Futurama fans in North America than in Britain and Germany combined–it’s shown only on satellite TV in Britain, for heaven’s sake.Oh well. If you remain one of nature’s optimists, you could always sign Amazon.com’s Futurama on DVD petition. Or you could always buy an All Regions DVD player, one that can plays PAL video…In the meantime, here’s a review of Season Two to torture you. I particularly like this line:Inserting the first Futurama DVD into my player, I see a lot of mumbo jumbo from the FOXy legal department. It’s the usual stuff, but I’m slowly getting unsure whether I’m legally entitled to actually view the episodes.
Soon enough, I predict, all DVDs will come with user licences specifying exactly how many people may be in the room when you watch them. Scofflaws will face the wrath of the FBI and Interpol.
On the stereo: Wire, Chairs Missing, “I Am the Fly”:
I am the fly in the ointment
I can spread more disease
Then the fleas that nibble away
At your window display
Kevin Michael Grace, 8.15 p.m., December 2, 2002 [Link]

IT’S A CANADIAN FACTI sent this link to Colby Cosh, and he told me it made his day, but he didn’t use it. So I will. According to Andrew Alexander, CEO of Second City, the long-awaited appearance of SCTV on DVD is now expected next year. I’ll be sick with excitement whatever is released, but please, please, please, could we have the episodes as they were originally broadcast? The SCTV 90 episodes have suffered greatly in syndication by Carl’s Cuts-like hacking.And congrats to Colby on being namechecked by Mark Steyn in the Spectator. I’m sure it will bring a tidal wave of traffic his way, and I’m sure he will continue to kindly send some of it my way.Rick Hiebert has contributed his own Canadian TV facts. Something of a mixed blessing, as nostalgia is my besetting passion. If I start down that road, I’ll spend all my time in the Black Box and not just more than is good for me.But I’m a weak, weak man, so here are two of my own blasts from the past. I was recently delighted to see Douglas Coupland refer to “Cablevision” in Microserfs. Coupland probably doesn’t even realize this himself, but this usage establishes him instantly as someone who grew up in Vancouver in the 1960s. Cablevision was the company that brought American TV to the Lower Mainland, and long after it disappeared from the market, many of us of a certain age and place continue to refer to the programming made possible by the magical coaxial cable by that name.Kelly Torrance used to shriek with laughter when I used the word, as she did when I pronounced “modem” with the emphasis on the first syllable. Where is Kelly these days? She’s become the Marie Celeste of bloggers, so underperforming I’m thinking seriously of removing her from the blogroll. There are no passengers on this voyage, K-To!When I was growing up in Vancouver in the 1960s, I lived and died for the Toronto Maple Leafs. There were only two Canadian NHL teams at the time, and every red-blooded Anglo boy rooted for the Leafs. (Halcyon days they were—four Stanley Cups in six years. And not one since!) Every so often you’d run into someone who rooted for the Canadiens, and this perversity marked him out as someone who’d bear watching in the years to come.I couldn’t give a monkey’s for hockey now. I suppose my disillusionment began when Harold Ballard (may he rot in Hell) took one of the greatest franchises in sport and drove a stake into its heart. Back in the Sixties, however, every Saturday at 5.30 I was parked in front of the TV, sick with excitement. The last commercial before the game began was for The Tea—”that dares to be known by good taste alone.” But why 5.30? Didn’t the games begin at 8 Eastern Time? That’s right. For some inexplicable reason, the CBC decided to join its franchise program 30 minutes in progress. I must admit, however, it was pretty exhilarating sitting there and trying to guess what the score would be when the game finally came on. Of course the Leafs will be ahead, I’d think in my optimism–or they’re probably two goals down already, I’d think when they were in the middle of a losing streak. Surely, the CBC didn’t begin its Eastern feed at 8.30, did it? If anyone knows the answer, or if you know the name of the show so important it had to be programmed Saturdays at 5 p.m., please drop me a line.On the stereo: Elvis Costello, This Year’s Model, “Lipstick Vogue”:You’ve got a lot to say–well, I’m not joking
There are some words they don’t allow to be spoken
Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being
Kevin Michael Grace, 4.06 p.m., December 1, 2002 [Link]

TWO TYPES OF MULTINATIONALS
A friend writes, apropos my shot at David Frum the other day:
But what about Mark Steyn, who is, apparently, American, Canadian and British? That’s three ways by my count, unless he also appears on the Continent in some French or Italian form. I don’t think he could do German.
I’m not so sure about that, by the way. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Steyn is by descent a Luxembourgeois, and they’re half-German. Or something. I guess the reason I bashed the one Torontonian (Frum) and not the other (Steyn) is that I like Steyn.I have nothing personal against David Frum. I’ve met him a couple of times, and he was as charming as could be. We spoke of our love for The American Spectator (the old one) and vied for the honour of who was the first to subscribe. I claimed 1977, and then Frum claimed 1976. I thought of trumping him by adding that I’d bought the back issues back to 1974…but this seemed—even to me—de trop.But it wouldn’t really matter if Frum were as charming as Audrey Hepburn. He’s a neoconservative. And that’s enough. Neocons are dishonest, every man jack of them, right down to their cold, black, ex-Trotskyite hearts.Here’s Frum, National Review Online, November 14:Angry Canadians: Canada is very agitated about Jonah Goldberg’s cover story in the current NR, accusing Canadians of succumbing to a national wimp complex. One of Canada’s most solemn journalists has urgently called on Canadians to pay no attention to “Pat Buchanan, Bill O’Reilly, the editors of the National Review and The Weekly Standard [, and] the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal.”Well, harumph. One question though: what’s Pat Buchanan doing on this list? On October 31, he fired off on his TV program one of his most pungent insults: He called Canada, “Soviet Canuckistan.” Rather funny that. But what’s his beef with Canada? The Canadian government’s policy on terror is virtually identical to Buchanan’s own stated views.This is a despicable lie, and Frum knows it.
Here’s how Canadian Press on November 1 reported the genesis of the “Soviet Canuckistan” comment:Canada is a “whining” country that has been “freeloading” off the U.S. defence budget for decades, outspoken American talk-show host Pat Buchanan said Friday.
The latest attack to come from the failed Republican presidential candidate followed his televised comment that Canada is a “Soviet Canuckistan” because Canadian officials objected to a U.S. law demanding photos and fingerprints from Arab-Canadian visitors to the country.
“Post 9-11, we’ve been making a tremendous effort to try to secure the American people,” Buchanan said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where he co-hosts a daily [MSNBC] talk show.
“And to hear this kind of carping criticism from north of the border, from folks whom we give a $50-billion trade surplus each year and whom we defend while they have been in some ways freeloading off the United States, got a little bit into my craw.”
“We exercise occasionally the right to criticize (Canada) and what I hear from up in Canada is some juvenile whining.”
On Tuesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham issued a warning to Canadians born in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria highlighting a U.S. law that targets foreign visitors originally from those countries…
While Buchanan called Canada a “safe haven for terrorists” and said Prime Minister Jean Chretien had done an “appalling” job of securing the country’s borders, he also said U.S. President George W. Bush has not done enough to counteract terrorism in his own backyard.
Buchanan elaborated his position in an interview with Diane Francis on Global Sunday, November 3:
What the United States was doing was putting a special check, not on people because they were Arab or Islamic, but because they were born in one of five countries all of which have a history of state sponsorship of terror. And that’s why we did it it’s a profiling of state sponsors of terror which is the only reasonable step to take. Now maybe some of our folks made a mistake with that one individual who was sent back to Jordan. Okay but then you get this harassment from the Canadian authorities, this holier than thou attitude and then they say that they’re going to put a travellers advisory against the United States of America and it was to that I think national insult that I was really responding
Buchanan’s comments on MSNBC and on Global were reported in almost every newspaper and on almost every television and radio station in Canada. Frum hangs his hat in Washington these days, but the affair was reported extensively in the United States as well. Buchanan’s position could not be clearer–Canada is a threat to American security, and Canada has no right to whine when America acts to meet that threat. This is the exact opposite of Chretien’s position. Are we to believe that Frum is ignorant of this?Frum has been lying about Pat Buchanan for years. In “The Last Leftist,” published in The Weekly Standard, November 20, 1995 and reprinted in What’s Right, Frum declared, “Patrick Buchanan [is] America’s last leftist.” He explained:Measured by the traditional New Deal standards—which candidate attacks corporations most violently? which candidate opposes reductions in government most strenuously?—Mr. Buchanan has moved to the left of President Clinton. Hey, he’s moved to the left of virtually every Democrat now holding national office.Does that sound implausible? Look at the world for a moment through the eyes of a union organizer. The intense new international competition in manufacturing has forced American companies to be less tolerant of impediments to the efficient use of labour—i.e., you. Which presidential candidate is promising to shut down that competition down and put you back in the driver’s seat. Only Mr. Buchanan, who has called for a 40% tariff on Chinese exports, a 20% tariff on Japanese goods and an unspecified “social tariff” on exports from Third World countries.Measured by the traditional New Deal standards, eh Frum? Measured by the New Deal standard on protectionism, Pat Buchanan is a Republican—and you are not. Which party and president was it that passed and signed Smoot-Hawley in 1930, Frum?Buchanan writes in The Great Betrayal:
The president [Herbert Hoover] was honouring a campaign commitment to protect American farmers from Canadian imports…But there was another reason for Smoot-Hawley—the Republican conviction, rooted in party history and philosophy, that protectionism was good for America. California senator Samuel Shortridge spoke in debate for the Grand Old Party of his day:What the American people want is a tariff that protects…American raised, American-mined, American-manufactured products and American men and women from competition with like foreign products raised, mined, or manufactured by cheap foreign labour…The free-trade has cursed America. The protective theory has blessed America. If the free-trade theory were now put into operation, it would bankrupt America.The Republican Party was solidly protectionist from its origin right up to Richard Nixon. Are we supposed to believe that Frum is ignorant of this?
Frum is so deceitful, he can’t even keep his story straight within a single chapter. From page 124 of his loathsome Dead Right:America First! What about quarrels that slogan dredges up, for the country but especially for the American Right. The epic of American conservatism since 1945 had been the story of William Buckley and his National Review purging the Right of the naivety, xenophobia and general stupidity of America First.
On page 148, however, Frum quotes the late Murray Rothbard:
Buckley and National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the rollcall: isolationists (such as John T. Flyun), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch society and all those who had continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights revolution even after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it.
Frum comments, “At this point, we’re heading off to the booby hatch.” Huh? Is Buckley an epic hero because he purged “xenophobes”—or is this claim a symptom of insanity? Well, which is it, Frum?America First (or Canada First, for that matter) would obviously be an alien concept to a man of no fixed national loyalty.
And just in passing, why is it that neoconservatives all give the impression of not knowing or of even having met anyone who earns less than $75,000 a year? “Impediments to the efficient use of labour,” eh? Is that Harvard Law School-speak for “decent wages”—or, more simply, “jobs”?I’ll say this for Mark Steyn—he has no contempt for the “flyover people.” He knows ordinary people and even likes them. Yes, I’ve taken a shot or two at him recently, but I’ll reiterate: “He is the best Canadian columnist (if that is not damning with faint praise).” Yes, I think his writing increasingly shows the strain of too many assignments, and too many of his pieces are written to a showbiz template. And yes, Steyn is an American to the Americans, a Canadian to the Canadians and a Briton to the Britons. Unlike Frum, however, he does not view every issue from Israel’s perspective.The primary reason I’ve gone off Steyn is his position on Iraq; it doesn’t make any sense. Steyn admitted, in the April 8 National Post, “Saddam had nothing to do with September 11th, the House of Saud had everything to do with it.”And yet:
As [an] quintessential British Arabist noted with pride, the Iraqi people are secular, tolerant, literate, the antithesis of those wacky fundamentalists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Their Deputy Prime Minister is Christian—admittedly a Kurd-gassing, Scud-lobbing, terror-funding Saddamite Christian, but nevertheless this is what passes for progress in the Middle East.I agreed entirely with the Brit guy’s analysis, disagreeing only with his conclusion. As far as he was concerned, these were all reasons for not invading Iraq; to me, they’re all reasons for pressing ahead. If you had to pick only one regime to topple, this is the one. Once you’ve got rid of the ruling gang, it’s the West’s best shot at incubating a reasonably non-insane polity. In Iraq and Iran, there’s a sporting chance regime change would bring about improvement. In Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, it’s far more problematic. The best way to destabilize the Islamist regimes is by destabilizing the non-Islamist one first. Sorry, Saddam. Them’s the breaks.
In other words, America’s got to invade somewhere, so it might as well be Iraq. This just won’t do. “Them’s the breaks”? This isn’t Realpolitik; this is rank cynicism. Steyn knows very well that September 11 was the result of a host of domestic security failures. He has pursued this theme eloquently and savagely on many occasions. For some reason, however, he believes that America is not up to meeting the Islamic threat within its own borders. For God’s sake then, how could he possibly believe that a country this inept could sort ort the billion Muslims living halfway around the world?On his new website, Steyn styles himself “The One-Man Global Content Provider.” I’ve heard it said that a man cannot serve two masters, let alone three. I’ll say this for Steyn–he believes in America First. I don’t think Frum does, but I don’t think he believes in Canada First either.Kevin Michael Grace, 2.05 a.m., December 1, 2002 [Link]