In my latest National Post column I urge Canada’s federal Conservatives to tackle their electoral and image problems by leaning into them, being the reality party instead of trying to be Liberal lite and having it fail for the umpteenth time.
“Toward the end of her life she [Dorothy Sayers] was to write, in the 1952 introduction to The Surprise, a forgotten play of Chesterton’s whose posthumous publication she instigated, ‘To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in the gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler.’”
John Hissong in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“If you're shopping in a Home Depot store, and someone who doesn't work there offers you assistance, you may live in Canada.
If you've worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you may live in Canada.
If you've had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong-number, you may live in Canada.
If 'vacation' means going anywhere south of Detroit for the weekend, you may live in Canada.
If you measure distance in hours, you may live in Canada.
If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you may live in Canada.
If you've switched from 'HEAT' to 'AIR-CONDITIONING' and back again, in the same day, you may live in Canada.
If you can drive 90 kilometers an hour through 2 feet of snow, during a raging blizzard, without flinching, you may live in Canada.
If you install security lights on your house and garage, but leave both unlocked, you may live in Canada.
If you carry jumper-cables in your car, and your wife knows how to use them, you may live in Canada.
If you design your child's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit, you may live in Canada.
If the speed limit on the highway is 100 km/hour, and you're going at 120, and everyone's passing you, you may live in Canada.
If driving is better in the winter because all the potholes are filled with snow, you may live in Canada.
If you know all four seasons: Almost-winter, Winter, Still-winter, and Road Construction: you may live in Canada.
If you have more miles on your snow-blower than on your car, you may live in Canada.
If you think of minus-2-degrees as being 'a little chilly', you may live in Canada.”
Complete text of that part of an interesting-item roundup email from a friend Nov. 22 2025
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that NATO meeting in Turkey instead of expelling it indicats a collapse of faith in the Western civilization NATO was created to protect.
During the South Sea Bubble “‘Every fool aspired to be a knave.’”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [he provides no source or citation for that marvellous line, however].
“And in that glance [eye to eye] you see the sort of man: and chiefly there are two sorts. The one sort always brooding, always planning; mean, silent men, collecting properties and money; keeping the law on their side, keeping everything on their side; except women and heaven, and the late, leisurely judgement of simple people: and the others merry folk, whose eyes twinkle, whose money flies, who will sooner laugh than plan, who seem to inherit rightfully the happiness that others plot for, and fail to come by with all their schemes.”
Lord Dunsany Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley [filed in my notes under “Scrooge and Cratchit”]
“I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art – for instance, Emma, or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michael Angelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea – that much more contemptible substance. But on the whole I still think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life. But I have another and more important quarrel about the sensational novel. There seems to be a very general idea that the romance of the tomahawk will be (or will run the risk of being) more immoral than the romance of the teapot. This I violently deny. And in this I have the support of practically all the old moral traditions of our civilization and of every civilization. High or low, good or bad, clever or stupid, a moral story almost always meant a murderous story. For the old Greeks a moral play was one full of madness and slaying. For the great mediaeval a moral play was one which exhibited the dancing of the devil and the open jaws of hell. For the great Protestant moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a moral story meant a story in which a parricide was struck by lightning or a boy was drowned for fishing on a Sunday. For the more rationalistic moralists of the eighteenth century, all agreed that shocking calamities could properly be indicated as the result of evil doing; that the more shocking those calamities were the more moral they were. It is only in our exhausted and agnostic age that the idea has been started that if one is moral one must not be melodramatic. Hence the novel of the tea table has passed the censor everywhere as a thing that cannot be really wrong because there are no murders in it. As a matter of fact I am prepared to wager that as much wickedness has been talked over a teapot as ever was talked over a witch’s cauldron.”
G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly 7/4/1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024).
“Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organisations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our population – with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they’re here and will be. If we don’t win them Wallace or Spiro T. Nixon will.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [and it does help explain MAGA]