Waaak waaak waaak. I often make that noise when I realize how badly I just parked. But soon my car will do it for me. And "Cock-a-doodle-dooooo!'' or possibly "Waaaaaaah!'' if my engine catches fire. True, for now I still must clap manually at the news that British psychologist Denis McKeown is working on a whole new series of alarm sounds for cars. But let's hear it for humane engineering, and devices designed as if intended for human users. Monday's Citizen says Mr. McKeown got so fed up with "the meaningless beeps and buzzes that serve as alarms in cars'' that he set out to test a whole range of alternatives, from roosters to ocean waves to a crying baby.

We certainly need more sounds; the problem of multiple alarms that could be anything from an unfastened seatbelt to a door that's ajar to imminent hull breach was already a cliché by 1977's Kentucky Fried Movie, and it will only get worse as technology gives us navigation aids, radar to help us avoid collisions and a multitude of other sensory and warning devices. But there's more.

We also need alarms that have more to do with the problem they are warning us about and, especially, its urgency. The broader concept here, introduced to me in Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface, is an "affordance,'' the technical term for a control system whose use is immediately obvious to a human being.

Mr. Raskin's specific subject was computer operating systems, whose eccentricities I had always taken for granted until he convinced me they could easily be far more user-friendly. Fortunately, I have now forgotten about half of his suggestions, which makes it easier to put up with their absence. But I still remember clearly his vivid preliminary example of the way things ought to be but aren't.

We all know, he says, how baffling it usually is to set the clock on a VCR. Why? All you'd need is a little button above the hour display with an up arrow and a one below it with a down arrow, and ditto above and below the minute display. Would anyone, even an adult, have two seconds' trouble guessing how it worked? And there are no technical difficulties; it's just a matter of realizing the importance of humane design.

I think people are beginning to do so. I see more affordances around us than there once were. For instance, those arrows that go from blue to red around hotel shower taps. (The exact opposite are my mother's bilingual taps, one labeled C for Cold and the other C for Chaud.) Halfway in between is my current windshield wiper; you turn the end of the lever to speed it up or slow it down, but do the thicker dashes mean longer pauses or heavier action?

For that matter, why should the windshield wiper and turn signal be two very similar sticks poking out of the steering column? Why can't the windshield wiper be a knob you press to start, and turn away from you to speed up?

Here science and engineering are part hero, part villain. For instance, Mr. McKeown and his 40 volunteers have established by experiment that the sound of the ocean lapping on a beach is not an effective alarm noise. It seems screeching tires work better, as does breaking glass. If they paid for that advice, I wish I'd been there to submit a lower bid. (And judging by the story, they didn't try some obvious alarm possibilities like "voice of mother-in-law.'') They are mostly on the right track, suggesting things like a bird song for minor matters like low washer fluid and a rooster noise to say it's time to service your engine. But Mr. McKeown says, "If it were easy to do this just by intuition, then the sounds already in use in vehicles would be appropriate. They are not.'' And there I think he's significantly wrong.

Intuition works, all right. It just hasn't been tried enough. The reason engineering, with some exceptions, has failed to think in terms of affordances for human beings is that in the past half century we've had too much social science and not enough humanity in an amazing range of areas from architecture to social programs to appliance design.

But things are changing in a subtle yet pervasive way that may, ultimately, overshadow even what Prime Minister Paul Martin has called the most important election in our history though otherwise he hasn't called it.

For instance, London's Sunday Times reports a trend among architects toward healthier buildings with meeting rooms and cafeterias far from offices and stairs attractively placed. As though they were made for real people, not human units.

Couple that with other trends, from computer mice shaped to fit the human hand to car alarm noises that are readily, humanely intelligible, and I think the tide has turned.

What a soothing sound.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What if Hitler had won the Second World War? What if Einstein had been run over as a child? What if Al Gore had won the presidency? What if the Gunpowder Plot had worked? What sort of mess would we be in today? Speculating about the "What if's" of history is denounced in some quarters as a silly parlour game. Marxists in particular disapprove of it which, notes historian and editor Andrew Roberts in What Might Have Been, is one good reason for taking the opposite view.

Here's another. Any judgment about current events, from rising gas prices to turmoil in the Middle East, contains an implicit judgment about the lessons of history. We can't compare this present with some other present, but we have to compare it with something to separate the essential from the trivial. For instance, are there many examples of big successful economic conspiracies in market economies in the past?

It's bad science fiction, as Mr. Roberts says, to give Lenin an atomic bomb. But it's highly instructive to ask if Britain and France could have stopped Hitler at minimal cost in 1938. If you think so, you are guided to the conclusion that any leader who resembles Hitler sufficiently should be dealt with early and firmly. Of course you might accept this argument while maintaining that Saddam Hussein didn't resemble Hitler closely enough to make it relevant. But if you really think you can't know what would have happened if the Allies had not betrayed their Czechoslovakian ally at Munich, you have no basis for making any judgment at all. (Even the Marxist view, that history was bound to turn out as it did, secretly depends on the notion that if individuals had acted differently nothing much would have changed.)

Making historical judgments is not easy, of course. Hence all the bickering over public policy. It's not even clear whether history tends in certain directions or is dizzyingly random. In Mr. Roberts' book, Norman Stone has Gavrilo Princip fail to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and there's no First World War. But since the German general staff were optimistic about war with France and Russia in the short run and pessimistic in the long run, I could easily write a version where they find some other excuse. Oh, and instead of the "Miracle of the Marne," Germany wins by Christmas 1914, western civilization is not discredited by four years of futile carnage, and there's no Hitler, Stalin, Holocaust or Second World War.

Or to take a Canadian example that's not in the book, Jean Chretien famously wished he'd been there to wake up Montcalm in time for him to win at the Plains of Abraham. But one can imagine an outcome in which France, beaten in the Seven Years' War, hands over Quebec anyway. Or French power in North America deters the 13 colonies from rebelling in 1776, a British and colonial expedition conquers New France in the 1780s, the colonies revolt, war starts in 1812, York is burned down, and...

Given this wide range of possibilities, it is particularly valuable that Mr. Roberts' 12 contributors not only deal with a range of events from the Spanish Armada to the 2000 vote in Florida but offer such a variety of treatments. Simon Sebag Montefiore immerses us in a parallel-universe scenario where Stalin flees from Moscow in October 1941, is overthrown by the Politburo in favour of Vyacheslav Molotov, and ... I don't want to spoil the surprise. Mr. Roberts himself similarly offers us a chapter from Kerensky's Triumph on the assassination of the demagogue Lenin in April 1917.

By contrast, Conrad Black offers a sober argument that if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR would have led the U.S. into war with Germany anyway. And since from little acorns mighty oak trees grow, Robert Cowley puts aside the geopolitical consequences to focus on the improbable way Benedict Arnold's treason was discovered.

It's very hard to know what might have been. The most famous counterfactual is Pascal's 17th-century observation that the whole history of the Roman Empire would have been different if Cleopatra's nose had been half an inch longer, or shorter, so that she failed to bewitch both Caesar and Anthony. But as Mr. Roberts notes, "for all we know her nose might have been the one thing that neither of them liked about her." And I'm not sure I buy Adam Zamoyski's benign European unification after Napoleon defeats Russia. Bad as it was, I'm frequently amazed history wasn't worse.

The book's cover, showing the first man on the moon planting a Nazi flag, is certainly sobering. But hey, it might have been.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Haiti is proving something of a disappointment. I'm not quite at the stage to which it reduced Napoleon, of cursing sugar, coffee and the colonies they rode in on. But even with my low standards for public policy discussion, I'm disappointed at the discussion of this unfortunate Caribbean nation. Our foreign minister just went there, you know. And while Haiti is more sad than geopolitically significant, surely the trip is important. All the do-gooders full of advice on Iraq are actually getting to show us what they can do there first.

I don't imply that reforming Haiti is easy. Its history strongly suggests otherwise. But it's way smaller than Iraq, far closer, presents fewer "clash of civilizations" issues, and is virtually secure against any outside interference except the one we, to the dismay of its neighbours, are eagerly taking part in. So how's it going?

Just before his trip last Friday, one newspaper says, Mr. Graham told reporters, "We wanted to find out what are the real political problems in Haiti. We know that we have to help rebuild the economy and have elections, but we wanted to know ... the political climate, and that we can only know by visiting Haiti."

Only by visiting? Why? All I know is what I read in the papers, but I'm aware that "large parts of the country remain under the rebels' control, and that there has been no systematic effort to disarm them." (The New York Times, April 30).

Mr. Graham went on to say that, "Nobody -- the Americans, the French, ourselves -- has any intention of going down the road we went through in the '90s with the same results."

True, as far as it goes. But worse than useless because it conceals an apparently complete failure to grasp that nobody had any intention of going down that road the first time either and they went down it anyway.

It was then, and is now, paved with good intentions. So I should be intrigued to hear Mr. Graham offer an analysis of what went wrong last time, when the West, and Bill Clinton in particular, backed a socialist liberation theologian with a penchant for gruesome political violence and somehow it turned out badly. But I doubt I will.

For when Mr. Graham returned on Saturday, as The Globe and Mail reports it, he "said that while his visit to Haiti was only hours long, he was able to see conditions firsthand and was taken aback. 'One surprise, in the sense not something that one could ever ascertain by reading reports, is the extraordinarily difficult personal situation in which Haitians are living.' He said that it was sobering 'just to drive around the streets, to see the garbage, to see the conditions, to realize that one has electricity in this city of Port-au-Prince for two hours a day on an average.' "

Yeah, that's worth going down there to discover. Haiti is poor. I mean, who suspected that?

In assessing the fatuity of his trip, I concede that politicians tend to fly around at taxpayers' expense just because they can. Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter recently gave Ralph Klein's government the old knucklebone shampoo for maintaining, in a capital city with two airports, a fleet of four private aircraft at City Centre Airport when that airport alone has four charter airlines. Asked why, the premier sneered "I'm not going to subject myself to two or three hours out of my day to get a commercial aircraft at the international airport" -- unlike, say, we ordinary schlumps. Then he conceded he hadn't sullied his august person with a commercial flight in seven years.

So why not jaunt to Haiti? It's not like you're paying for it. Besides, if you're rushing from place to place in a special plane, with aides speaking breathlessly into cellphones, people waiting anxiously for you and your brow furrowed with deep, humanitarian concern, you must be achieving something. Never mind that your government has exhausted its credibility with the Americans and the UN you prefer is weak, corrupt and anti-Semitic. You are a moral superpower.

Even so, and making allowance for Mr. Graham's tendency to look like Lloyd Axworthy without the gravitas, I still cringe at his not being embarrassed to say it was worth the tens of thousands of dollars he just cost us all to spend a few hours in Haiti because now he knows Haitians are poor. I seem to have learned more, faster and more cheaply than Mr. Graham just by reading Anthony Daniels' sad piece on Haiti in the March 1 National Post. Perhaps our foreign minister is too sophisticated to read the Post.

Can we agree on one thing, though? People who can't straighten out Haiti can't fix Iraq, solve the Middle East's problems or defuse superpower confrontations. Oh, and one more thing. People who just clued in that Haiti is tragically poor aren't off to a great start there either.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Does anyone doubt we will discover the truth about American mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq? It is not merely puzzling that this openness is not the main story. It is, for the Middle East, a tragedy. It is of course "abhorrent'' that American soldiers abused prisoners, as President George W. Bush said in an interview with the Dubai-based TV network Al-Arabiya. He also said such actions "don't represent America'' which, radical fulminations notwithstanding, they don't. What does represent America, and should be the main story, is an inquiry that has already denounced "grave breaches of international law'' at Abu Ghraib prison between August 2003 and February 2004, and "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses'' by U.S. soldiers, and produced career-ending reprimands for some and criminal charges for others, with more likely to follow over events in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the president told the U.S.-funded Al-Hurra network, this response "stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people.'' True. But Mr. Bush also told Al-Arabiya, "Our citizens in America are appalled by what they saw, just like people in the Middle East are appalled.'' And sadly, while they are surely appalled, they do not seem to be appalled just like Americans. Rather, and with the usual caveat about cultural generalizations not applying to everyone, we seem to be facing the distinction anthropologists and sociologists draw between societies based on guilt and on shame.

In the West, the dominant reaction is that injustices humiliate those guilty of committing them. In the Middle East, too often injustices humiliate those shamed by suffering them. As one newspaper quoted a probably not untypical Middle Eastern journalist: "This is not humiliation of Iraqis, it is humiliation of all Arabs.'' That's not how it looks in Washington.

The American reaction reminds me strongly of the fascinating thesis of Victor Davis Hanson in Carnage and Culture that the relentless western habit of dispassionate self-criticism has, in military matters, ensured lethal domination over non-western societies for more than 2,500 years. For one thing, because it has a free press, the United States had much better ideas how to fight the second war against Saddam Hussein than the first, while he had not even improved his methods of torture, let alone realized his army had disintegrated on him. Just as, because no one dared bring Xerxes or Montezuma bad news, in the long run they faced an unmanageable amount of it.

I am frustrated by the often distorted reporting of western media outlets, including announcements every few months that recent developments have finally dispelled the deep reservoir of Iraqi sympathy for the coalition whose existence they had, until that moment, entirely denied. (And journalists who think it's culturally sophisticated to tell us public nudity is taboo in Iraq as though anyone but a few judges think Canadians routinely stroll around naked.) But doubtless there were fools in the Agora as well.

Then, as now, the wise man will ignore them and ponder the deeper lessons. The American reaction also reminds me of Mr. Hanson's account of how the Athenians executed eight generals after a famous victory for failing to rescue drowning Athenian sailors. But it reminds me of nothing in the history of the Persian Empire. They no more analysed victories than they did defeats.

In the West, let a victory be as lopsided as you can imagine and its blemishes will be subject to immediate, wide-ranging analysis. Not only were the American authorities investigating and punishing these abuses long before the story broke, but within days of it breaking the Citizen alone had published an opinion piece by in-house expert Dan Gardner on the psychology of torture and a news story about academic studies of it. We'll have a better idea next time how to avoid abuses (including, if those tabloid photos are fakes, how the British did a better job of preventing them). And because we care whether our cause and our conduct in it are just, we'll be even stronger next time.

Has the Arab world learned similar, or any, lessons from Saddam? Not, I submit, if the dominant and tragic reaction there is that President Bush must be weak to apologize, not a "strong'' man like Saddam who would rather see his people crushed than give an inch.

I hope not, for the sake of those who live in the Middle East and those brave souls seeking to reform its politics. But things don't look good. There, surely, is the real story.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Younger readers may be shocked to learn that in bygone days the sight of a tabby in your neighbour's window was something you might have to put up with even if you really hated cats. If, on the other hand, Foo-foo the Siamese Slasher made a persistently intolerable noise, regularly demolished your flower beds or hurled itself shrieking at your face and carved your flesh, you had legal remedies from restraining orders to damages. But that was in the dark ages, when the judgment of a reasonable man as to what constituted an unreasonable nuisance was all that kept the social peace. Today we have sociologists, child psychologists and grief counsellors. And, in Ottawa, cat licences. True, only about 1,500 of some 100,000 cats were registered by the April 30 deadline. But fear not. The Citizen says "city officials are promising not to impose $100 fines or to lock up the remaining 98,500 cats, as outlined under a new animal bylaw. And they say they're not discouraged by the 1.5-per-cent compliance rate."

I'm not sure what would discourage them: 1.38 per cent? 0.74? Still, if a 1,100-per-cent cost overrun doesn't discourage gun bureaucrats, I'm sure the catocrats will hang tough as well.

Speaking of wells, Kelly Egan wrote in Monday's Citizen that Ontario's new Safe Drinking Water Act says anyone serving well water to customers or guests must install a treatment system, hire a professional engineer to oversee the treatment plan, then train a staff member to run it. Again, fear not. There's a small chance the $20,000 to $30,000 price tag will not bankrupt every small rural business in the province, shut down every church basement fundraiser or entirely abolish the archaic habit of offering visitors a drink of bubonic plague or, as the rustics refer to it, tap water.

You might be wondering, as with cat licences, exactly what problem this law was designed to solve. The restaurants, church basements and RV parks of rural Ontario were not clogged with corpses displaying that telltale dampness around the mouth. In fact, I always thought people were pretty reluctant to kill neighbours or customers with acts of hospitality, and that customers got pretty twitchy about inns, amusement parks or campgrounds with high mortality rates and they, or their heirs and assigns, sued for negligence. (As for Walkerton, it had a treatment plant, engineers and government oversight.) But there I go, gibbering about common law driven by common sense as if I lived in Mercia, Canada before Trudeau or some such dystopia.

For the problem in both cases was the glaring lack of positive, rational administrative law to control every aspect of our shabby lives. Which is also why we now have laws telling us we don't mind living beside factory farms even if we think we do.

As Elizabeth Brubaker noted in the National Post, "For centuries, courts resolved conflicts between farmers and their neighbours by applying the fundamental principle, 'use your own property so as not to harm another's.'... Courts rarely enjoined minor or temporary irritants or those offensive only to unusually sensitive people. And they tended to permit activities that they considered reasonable - especially those in keeping with the character of the neighbourhood." Not including smells that would drive ticks off a badger.

In recent decades, however, provincial governments have passed laws like New Brunswick's 1985 Agricultural Operation Practices Act, saying as long as an industrial farm doesn't violate statute laws on land use, health or the environment, neighbours can't sue over stench, noise or dust. Or its 2003 version adding vibrations, light, smoke etc. to the "you'll just have to put up with it, you're not Adrienne Clarkson" list. Lest the churls mess things up in their traditional peasant manner. (Which is also why we can't have citizens counting each other and making a list of eligible voters for each election, and have substituted a centralized, computerized, rationalized permanent voters' list that is, one gathers from Tuesday's newspapers, only slightly less precise than the gun registry.)

The "reasonable man" or, today, reasonable person might be hard to find plunked in front of a TV watching reality shows less plausible than a cat licence. As for the Clapham omnibus where British law traditionally put him, those double-deckers are being phased out as unscientific modes for the public transportation of human units. But I'd look in either place before I'd try Ottawa City Hall.

Having people live their own lives provided they don't inflict on their neighbours what reasonable neighbours would, judging by the long historical record, regard as a nuisance is horribly unscientific, I admit. But it is not new. Indeed, it prevailed before we had pig farms next door, tags on our cats and $25,000 bills to offer the neighbours a glass of water.

You know. In the bad old days.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The following obscure and ancient manuscript is laid before the reader in the hope that, if only by its contrast with present enlightened views of statecraft, it may provide a modicum of both pleasure and instruction.

'The councils of the mighty here in the Great Blue Empire are much disturbed by events in the distant Assyrian deserts.

"As the turbulent rulers of this displeasing region having long troubled our borders and vexed our allies, a firmer policy was clearly required than that of the former emperor, whose undoubted gifts of mind were negated by his Epicurian temperament. An attack by zealots on our great eastern port resolved us first to a punitive expedition against a still more distant mountain kingdom whose rulers harboured them, which being satisfactorily concluded, the violence, oppression and threats by Sodang Insane, tyrant of Irate, and his defiance of persistent entreaties by civilized nations, provoked us to undertake his removal.

"Many doubted that our mobile expeditionary force could prevail there even aided by the Kingdom of St. George and many valiant lesser allies whom the liberales, formerly sympathetic to small nations, fell to scorning as a coalition of the absurd with many other indignities. And we much feared the devilish engines of war with which Sodang Insane had in the past hurled poisonous smokes at his foes and his own folk.

"Mercifully, corruption and incompetence deprived him of the loyalty even of his army, and amid the collapsed ruins of his regime we found, to our surprise, only a small subterranean chain of alchemists' laboratories. Perchance until he had better engines to deliver his lethal brews and smokes, he saw little profit in comprehensive study of such malice. Either that, or his alchemists were better at turning his bluster into gold than his gold into poison.

"Thus far a not unfamiliar chapter in our long struggle against barbarism. But here mysteries arise. The dictator Insane was much given to the slaughter of his own folk. Yet they were no sooner rid of him than many began grumbling against us. Naturally they felt some humiliation in being unable to rid themselves of this monster, this filler of mass graves. Yet when we offered them substantial control of their own affairs, provided they avoided ineptitude or viciousness, many even of the majority sect long repressed by the tyrant commenced an uprising marked by both.

"These rebels made mock of holy places, profaning them as arms depots and fortresses. And largely foiled in their efforts to kill our troops by a great imbalance not only in weapons but martial skill, they fell to slaughtering their own people and taking foreign hostages including three Orientals they threatened to roast and consume, a threat mercifully as empty as it was barbaric.

"The result within Irate was dismal. Our troops slaughtered many rebels. Yet it seems there prevails in those regions such a cult of death that their own demise is scarcely less pleasant to them than ours would be. As Ricardus Fistulae declares in the Lustratio Nationalis, "These people have an amazing ability to interpret every defeat as 'victory.'" Which makes it a vexed proposition to reach with them such a sensible accommodation as would let the majority raise their families, cultivate their crops and herds and ply their trades in peace.

"Even more puzzling is the reaction within the free lands of the West. Our many demagogues can be pressed into formal denunciation of Sodang Insane, but direct their wrath mainly against our emperor and our civilization. Let rebels in Irate mutilate corpses, or set off an infernal machine that slaughters schoolgirls; they call us wicked. Let us offer a humane settlement; they call us cowed. Let us take decisive action; they call us brutal.

"The demagogues strut and boast of their superior humanity, yet the venomous hostility to Hebrews prevalent in the Assyrian regions prompts complicit silence. And while in this affair we sought only to enforce the repeated demands of our critics' beloved Council of Nations, instead of gratitude that we deposed the tyrant before he could summon some weapon from the depths of hell, they deplore our conduct on the phantasmagorical ground that their Resolutiones, uttered without result for a dozen years, were surely on the very brink of causing all Sodang's alchemy to vanish straight up into the air. Did Insane perchance find, and release within our borders, a subtle poison to corrupt the understanding of scholars?

"Despite all, our emperor and the common folk stand firm. So I hope one day I may be able to relate to you that this miserable affair hath ended in tolerable success."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Batman!!! Da na na na na na na na Na na na na na na na na ... Sorry. I got a bit carried away. But you have to admit the Scarlet Pimpernel theme is catchy. Eh? I was just talking about Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy, and his secret alter ego Batman. So you were expecting Adam West in the Batmobile, not Leslie Howard in a stagecoach. Or maybe Joe Clark, by day a vain and pompous politician whose every venture fails ignominiously but who at night morphs into Charlottetown Man who ... um yes well... But no. I don't want to talk about the latest pronouncement by the Great and Powerful Joe, or how they rearranged Paul Martin's furniture so he could discuss with his cabinet whether they might or might not call an election they might or might not win on a platform they would probably discard if elected. I cannot dwell indefinitely on such Olympian heights. I must from time to time pay attention to things people actually care about and should.

For instance, in this Sunday's Citizen's Weekly Linda Jeays described how, seeking a fine trashy romance, she was "misled by the jacket illustration'' and the author's name "Baroness Orczy'' into purchasing The Scarlet Pimpernel and found herself gripped by a "swashbuckling adventure'' about a foppish blue-blood with a secret identity as a daring rescuer of aristocrats from the megalomaniac villains of the French revolution. In the end she wasn't even bitter that she'd read a book dating way back to 1902 or that the author, who really was a Baroness, had "pulled a fur-lined hood over my eyes and unloaded literature in the form of a fast-moving cat-and-mouse game peppered with hair-breadth escapes, the devil's own risks and the triumph of true love.''

I was also reminded of The Scarlet Pimpernel in March when I read Johnston McCulley's original 1919 Zorro, whose masked crusader for justice, by day, plays a young aristocrat so feckless that, threatened with disinheritance if he does not marry, he tries to send someone to serenade the young lady for him. It's odd, since I have never read The Scarlet Pimpernel, though I have seen the 1934 film with Leslie Howard. But it is difficult for me to believe that Johnston McCulley hadn't read The Scarlet Pimpernel, or that the creator of Batman, Bob Kane, was unaware of this pioneering superhero-with-a-secret-identity. As difficult, in fact, as to imagine that the audience or most of the creators of recent Batman movies were familiar with him.

What a pity. First, readers are deprived of a real treat when they are not made aware of books they would enjoy. Second, they are deprived of the rich experience a modern example can give to those who understand the genre, recognize small acts of homage to past masters, see deft improvements on earlier renditions, and notice and deplore inferior and derivative aspects. Even La Presse, this week, knows what a Fu Manchu moustache looks like. But do they, or the audience of Kill Bill, really know Fu Manchu?

Sure, he's an over-the-top, fantastic villain. But isn't Bill? And a modern reviewer, let's call him Brian, may be "alternately repulsed and bored by'' The Passion of The Christ, yet find Kill Bill: Vol. 1 "a cherry blossom bloodbath with dazzling samurai choreography and pink spritzer fountains of gore ... thrilling, funny and often exquisitely beautiful, with a fragile tenderness lurking beneath the cruelty.'' Give me Neyland Smith relentlessly battling the weirdly philosophical psychopath Fu Manchu. Or even Bulldog Drummond.

It always makes me sad to wander between bottles of salad dressing and aromatic candles in a modern bookstore and see how little indication modern readers get that anything worthwhile was produced more than 20 years ago. I don't blame the merchants; Chapters has done us all a great service by keeping bookstores economically viable. Besides, prompted by Linda Jeays, I recently secured the last copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel in a local branch that also had, lurking among the acres of Stephen King, the Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood.

No, it's the readers and, more fundamentally, those who shaped their taste or lack thereof who are at fault. Chapters has some superb bestsellers among the dreck, and a shelf of affordable classics that taunt me with how little I have read. But the proportions reflect what readers want. And I don't mean that in a good way.

Still, thanks to my last visit I'm part way through M.R. James's 1931 Collected Ghost Stories. And let me tell you something: I vastly prefer its old English manors, exquisite atmosphere of terror and delightful phrasing to this dreary modern production with Stephen Harper as a sinister villain planning world conquest for nefarious purposes, Joe Clark as a dashing hero and Paul Martin as a plodding, decent cop. I mean, really.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It takes a lot to make me drop what I'm reading and shout "That's ridiculous,'' especially if I'm reading Maclean's. But it happened when pollster Allan Gregg declared in their April 5 issue that "The tyranny of the majority is to be feared only when the masses are uninformed.'' Ironically, that statement is itself profoundly uninformed. Regrettably, Mr. Gregg's statement is reflected in the profound lack of interest, across our political spectrum, in any sort of institutions that might prevent governments from doing what a majority wants. (The considerable interest in institutions, primarily courts, that allow governments to do what a majority does not want is not at all the same thing.)

The problem of the tyranny of the majority, as phrased by Cicero 2,000 years ago, before we had Maclean's to enlighten us, is that "Democracy is an evanescent form of government which lasts only until its constituents discover that their vote is the key to the treasury.'' Which you'll notice is not a mistake. Not then, and not today.

In principle the purpose of the "welfare state,'' that is, a government whose principal activity is providing material benefits from welfare to pensions, education and health care, is to relieve want. However it is a fact, and not a coincidence, that most of what our governments spend goes not to the indigent but to the middle classes who are articulate, politically active and well-informed about costs and benefits (a recent Ipsos-Reid poll, for instance, reveals that Canadians with family income under $30,000 overestimate the cost and underestimate the benefit of a university education far more than the wealthier people whose children are more likely to receive one). You will notice that governments may cut welfare, but never the sacred middle-class "entitlements:'' health, education and pensions.

You will also notice that for decades people have been extracting benefits from all three at an unsustainable pace. But again the problem is not ignorance. It's an accurate understanding that they can load up on benefits and leave behind an IOU they know they will not be around to pay. And even as yesterday's extravagance becomes today's unfunded liability, it remains rational for "political hedonists'' interested only in maximizing their own material well-being to continue to try to squeeze more out for themselves than is affordable over the long run. (Mind you, it also becomes increasingly rational for governments to try to restrict our ability to discuss among ourselves how best to extract benefits from the state, for instance through election gag laws.)

I concede one sense in which Mr. Gregg has a point. A properly informed majority is not a threat to the minority if that majority understands that its true interest is in virtue. But to take that point of view requires one to believe that morality is, at its most fundamental level, about fact and not sentiment, that there really is such a thing as objective Truth and that it includes there being no group discount on Thou Shalt Not Steal. Such a definition of properly informed is unlikely to be vigorously advanced in the pages of Maclean's.

It was by the American Founding Fathers, who felt that virtue was necessary to self-government because it would not matter how carefully a constitution was crafted if the majority was determined to find ways around the restraints it placed on their political appetites. And in case appeals to American or even Roman examples should seem unpatriotic, our own Sir John A. Macdonald was no Cicero and no stranger to the art of the deal but he did warn that "In all countries, the rights of the majority take care of themselves.'' However, it is "only in countries like England enjoying constitutional liberty, and safe from the tyranny of a single despot or of an unbridled democracy, that the rights of minorities are regarded.'' By which he meant not racial or sexual but political minorities, namely whomever had just lost an election. In Canada today, what prevents an electoral coalition from plundering wealthy individuals and regions or, indeed, future generations who, while not technically a minority, have no one to safeguard their interests now?

I think everyone has a sneaking suspicion that it is wrong to take money you have not earned. It would explain why people who have plundered the treasury do not roll around cackling in their ill-gotten gains but rather speak sententiously of "social justice.'' But the fact is that voters certainly behave as though they were very well informed indeed about their capacity to vote themselves more than their fair share regardless of the long-term consequences.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]