Now I'm bitter. I'd always hoped a magazine or upscale liquor firm would ask what I'm currently reading as part of a profile of me as hip and urbane. Right now my list is as impressive as it could ever be, and finally someone asked. But they asked George Jonas, as he boasted in this space on Monday. He's not even reading any novels. Not fair. I'm reading Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. And Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. And Relativity by Albert Einstein. And A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. And All Tigers, No Donkeys by Kurt Grant about Canadian peacekeeping in Croatia. Never mind George. LOOK AT MEEEEE!

OK, mind George. He's reading Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture and calls it "a must-read." Also, he thinks men avoid new fiction as they age, instead rereading things that captivated them in their youth. Certainly I revisit old friends, like a guy Maclean's quoted (Vincent Starrett) on Sherlock Holmes, "Here, though the world explode, these two survive/And it is always 1895." Dude. And would you eat a dish, really enjoy it, then never taste it again? But I think George made an error worth discussing.

So while you photograph my good side for that ad, let me explain that I'm also happy to read things I would have loved in my youth if I'd read them then. For instance The Four Feathers. Or G.A. Henty. Or John Buchan. You know, stuff where plucky heroes determined to do the right thing prevail against long odds. The reason I don't read much modern fiction is the dysfunctional misadventures of alienated people don't interest me. If I were going to read about the life of pi, it would be the Greek letter.

I also think we read more non-fiction as we get older because the fiction worked. Good novels help us grow to understand the wonder and requirements of life. At a certain point, if we are lucky and Chestertonian, what happens is not that fiction becomes as dull as life but that life becomes as interesting as fiction. I once knew a guy who grew up at a cottage in the wilderness, backpacked around the world, got a PhD in Texas, then he met this girl and... Unless you are a baby boomer, you eventually have to stop preparing for your life and go have it. It doesn't mean you don't revisit, or visit, fictional classics to have your horizons expanded or your determination renewed. It just means you're selective about your destination.

George thinks one problem with novels is that since men don't read new books, women's and adolescents' taste shapes most literature. A worrying thought since a British radio program, Women's Hour, just put The Handmaid's Tale among the top 10 novels that transformed women's lives, along with a Marilyn French novel that says "all men are rapists." The only book on the list by a man is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles where Tess has a daughter Sorrow who dies and ... No wonder many women like Thelma and Louise; it's cheerful by comparison. But if a guy had written it, the car would have gone off the cliff with villains in it, then Arnold would have blown it up in mid-air and ...

Note that Tess of the d'Urbervilles is not recent. It's just really really bad and depressing. Since a big OECD study says male students in Canada are a bit ahead of females in math but way behind in reading, maybe we should worry about what we're asking them to read. Boys of all ages will enjoy Robert Louis Stevenson or Lemony Snicket over and over, or for the first time. We'll read fiction and non-fiction. But hold the Atwood.

Look at the novels already in my "to read" pile. Here's one called The Search for Good Government. No, sorry, that's non-fiction. But there's a John Wyndham I have read, a Louis L'Amour I haven't, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones which I think my dad once read to me (file under truth is stranger) and Conrad's Nostromo which I have not. Competing non-fiction includes the venerable Bede, an architecture classic, the memoirs of a Second World War Stuka pilot and now this book about an extinct fish that's still alive. Reading is a blast. As long as it's not transgressive, perverted and ironic.

By the way, you suave profilers, I'm enjoying A Pattern Language and Kurt Grant's book (adults only, please; it's a frank look at military life). But From Dawn to Decadence is long and unfocused, Morte d'Arthur is comically bad, Relativity has some interesting bits but Einstein was a popular writer like I'm a theoretical physicist. And wait a minute. This isn't upscale whisky in my glass. It's beer.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A Citizen headline the day the U.S. president arrived said "Demonstrators organized quickly for Bush visit." Yeah, I bet. Demonstrations are now mass-produced. They think they're raging against the machine, but they're actually part of it. Call it McProtest. The model here is not Woodstock, but Levitton, the first modern American suburb: standardized, interchangeable components made elsewhere for assembly on site quickly, cheaply and without much labour. At first glance it looks like a community, but it's not really very attractive and it doesn't hold up well. As Charles Gordon said in yesterday's Citizen, Ottawa's "demonstrations were half-hearted and formulaic."

Aye, there's the rub. They have a distinctly suburban tendency toward stifling conformity. Some 1960s protesters sought a truly different path. Drop out, join communes, grow organic vegetables. Or tour America with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, staging happenings the machine couldn't process. Maclean's reports a similar impulse in Britain today: "mobile clubbers check the website to find out when and where the next event will be ... show up and dance wildly to their iPods or Walkmans -- creating a spontaneous club atmosphere amid thousands of confused commuters."

Not Ottawa's grim, hard-core anti-Bush protesters. David Warren rightly noted the "faces contorted with rage" and "the void within." But a Citizen editorial Wednesday made an even more important point about "the smattering of thugs whose only real goal was to get on CNN" who, by charging a police line near the Chateau Laurier, "forced the riot squad to come out. That's when the TV networks broke in with live coverage."

Look, mom, I'm on TV. How bourgeois. Worse, as early as 1971, director Frank Capra complained that "Militants ... riot, demonstrate, burn, only when TV cameras are on them." Time-and-motion pioneer Frederick W. Taylor would approve. Why waste energy? Time is money.

It's understandable in McWorld. At one time, protests were genuine outpourings of public outrage and thus important public events. And in an era of the scientific study of human behaviour, what could be more natural than working at organizing them better and packaging the message for the mass media? But like orchestrated letter-writing campaigns or politicians' sound-bites, in the end the medium becomes the message.

Mass society has even turned No Logo into a logo. And, says the latest Maclean's, " 'Apathy is so last spring' reads the website of U.S. designers Politipunk, purveyors of hip, novelty T-shirts.... (In) high fashion, this fall was all about gem tones, herringbone tweeds and style-savvy democratic engagement" including one designer "offering free Kerry yo-yos with every purchase." But now it's been there, done that; "in the world of fashion, political convictions --just like hemlines -- are seasonal." Could an ad for a new, improved detergent be less authentic?

The problem of alienation in mass society will not be solved by mistaking freedom for dictatorship. As Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's The Rebel Sell warned in Sunday's Citizen, "the theory of society on which the countercultural ideal rests is false. We do not live in the Matrix, nor do we live in the spectacle ... The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as 'the culture' or 'the system.' " So thoughtful protesters should ponder why mass-produced suburban housing and anti-capitalist modernist architecture both sacrificed the human element to the dictates of the assembly line.

The central problem, as usual, is an idea: Pervasive modern faith in social science. Socialist planners are at least as guilty as capitalist efficiency experts of seeing society as a vast machine for processing inputs of resources and human units scientifically and extruding vast uniform slabs of quantifiable human happiness at the other end. Scientific management of human behaviour does work, up to a point. But it tends to improve things bit by bit until they are totally ruined, a ghastly parody, like a mass-produced house or meal. Or protest.

Trying to get rid of all the problems of modern life with two days of cheap shots at George Bush is the political equivalent of junk food: quick and convenient, but bad for you in the long run. As the president's mother once said, "What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House."

Forget McProtest. We need to take our civilization back, one home-made soup at a time.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

We wish you a Merry Christmas. We wish you a Merry Christmas. We wish you a Merry... CLICK. For crying out loud, it's November. Malls are already tormenting me with Christmas carols, blaring from outdoor speakers no less, and merchants have been handing me beverages in Christmas-themed cups for weeks. If we don't take a stand, we'll soon be getting pumpkins carved to look like Santa. Which would be scary, but not in a good way.

Christmas is not an extended commercial, people. It's a particular special occasion. As legendary movie director Frank Capra expressed it, "At Christmas I see myself as I really am. And as I could be, if I weren't such a stinker. As the whole sick, weary, unhappy world sees itself as it might be, if it weren't such a stinker. Noel! Joy! Peace awaits. Killings, brutality, meanness is here. Cry world."

Don't mince words, Frank. What do you really think?

What he really thought, of course, is that it's a wonderful life. But it takes some effort to remind ourselves of it and behave as if we entirely believed it. That's why we set aside a special time to do it.

Such powerful emotions, like those of Remembrance Day, are too intense to sustain all year long or even for a month at a time. Any attempt at doing so would quickly fade into pretence.

Some people think they have no need of special occasions because they are so splendid they can radiate benevolent goodwill toward their fellows all year long. They generally become politicians, put on poppies in October while underfunding the military, then take away our plum pudding because it contains ingredients we don't really want to eat but are too stupid and weak to avoid on our own. And a Merry Christmas to you too.

Others feel that the entire rest of the human race fails so conspicuously to measure up to their own elevated standards that, having no trespasses to forgive, they scorn to entertain the thought of forgiving those of others.

They generally go about all year with a grimly unpersuasive air of frosty Nietzschean triumph.

Still others love the sharp, poignant smell of money floating on the air in the waning days of autumn. Forget Santa, just gimme the sack.

The rest of us Cratchits understand that we really should think more of our fellows and less of ourselves than we can manage on a routine basis, so that sincerely wishing them a Merry Christmas for a brief period in the year is enormously better than nothing.

Of course, Christmas must involve shopping because it involves giving gifts. And I grant that it has become complicated by a tidal wave of prosperity that has left today's children awash in wealth before which Louis XIV would have goggled in disbelief.

It is hard to touch their hearts with a simple gift now that most presents involve less sacrifice to the giver and less benefit to the recipient than they once did. But one thing has not changed: The only way most people can be better off exchanging gifts than keeping the money and spending it on themselves is if their kith and kin know them so well, have cared enough to know them so well, as to give them things they wanted without realizing it.

It's why money and gift certificates don't cut it. And it's why we don't need an extended shopping spree; when we know the person, we know the gift. So in the spirit of keeping Christmas in the right way, and at the right time, here's a handy list of ways to tell we're not there yet.

1) You have not yet put on your snow tires. (If you are prudent, the fact that you have put them on does not prove it is Christmas season. But the fact that you have not definitely proves that it isn't).

2) Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving. (Even with their late date for that festival, there is a gap between the leftovers from the first improbably vast turkey on the table and the first serving of the second.)

3) People are wearing poppies.

4) The kids are still excited about their Hallowe'en costumes.

5) Your spouse wants you to mow the lawn one last time.

6) Those aren't snowflakes falling, they're leaves. Or a gentle rain. Or golf balls.

7) It's not mid-December.

8) It's not December at all.

Good King Wenceslas looked out, and saw it was November. He said, "It is not Christmas yet." Is that hard to remember?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The way technology is developing, soon we'll have R2D2s just about everywhere, if we don't watch out. Monday's Citizen, for instance, says scientists are working on a robot cockroach. Does not compute. In what way is the current biological cockroach so insufficiently disgusting and pestilential that we need the vermin equivalent of Robocop: bigger, dirtier, scarier? If you made it of pleasing aspect and fresh pine scent, to play music while vacuuming your house, I could see the appeal. But purists would surely quibble that it wasn't technically a robot cockroach.

In any event, these guys didn't go down that path. Their robot cockroach is so realistic it even smells like a cockroach. Perhaps you didn't know cockroaches smelled. But other cockroaches do. And this device, whose job is to infiltrate colonies of cockroaches then influence their behaviour, needs the right "perfume" or the disgusting little beasts will smell a rat. No wait, they'd like that. They'd smell a boot.

The ultimate goal is to have Roboroach "leading unwanted pests out of dark corners to where they can be eliminated." Here I got confused. Why not just give it laser beams so it can eliminate them where they squat? Or rather, since the green, matchbox-sized InsBot already has laser beams along with its sensors, why not give it more potent ones so it can Arnold the roaches: "Tehminated." But then I never understood why the Lost In Space robot wasn't given some slightly more useful anti-peril feature than the capacity to wave its arms going "Danger danger" either.

Experiments suggest roaches will follow InsBot into the light because their "desire for companionship is stronger than the need for dark." It's a bit sad, given that sociability, even with other roaches, is the first faintly desirable quality I've ever heard attributed to a cockroach and now it's to be their downfall. But science marches on, squashing bugs as it goes.

The Citizen said "this is only the first application..."; scientists "say they will soon be using robots to stop sheep jumping off cliffs, prevent outbreaks of panic in guinea fowl and encourage chickens to exercise." Huh? But according to Guy Theraulaz of the Center for Research on the Cognition of Animals in Toulouse, "A lot of chickens don't move at all and die as a result. They need to be encouraged to run around. Robots could do that." True. They could go around the farmyard scattering corn for the chickens to scurry around eating, along with bugs. It might not give them the pecks of Schwarzenegger, but should make them fit enough to expire of culinary causes.

Or, if that's too primitive, a robot that imitates a predator, transferring the panic attacks from the guinea fowl to the chickens? Call it flee-ercise. Other than that, I have no useful ideas on guinea fowl panic attacks as I wouldn't know how to soothe one even if scientists can, as Mr. Theraulaz hopes, "develop sensors to detect when birds start moving abnormally."

As for the sheep, "when one sheep jumps off a cliff to escape a predator, the others tend to follow. Mr. Theraulaz believes his team will soon be able to identify flock leaders and give them collars equipped with receivers. They will then train these sheep to stand still, or move, when the receivers emit a signal such as a sound or an electric shock."

Why not just get one of them carbon-based guard dogs? And meanwhile design the cyber-roach to get its biological fellows to jump off cliffs, succumb to panic attacks or expire from lack of exercise?

On the bright side, soon they'll have robots crawling up your intestines. Italian and Korean scientists are developing a tiny robot (the National Post said "wasp-sized," a phrase I'd avoid in the marketing stage) with a miniature camera, remote control and six little legs that could go where the sun don't shine, then stop or backtrack to check out suspicious spots. It sure beats an old-time colonoscopy.

So yes, science can perform wonders. But we still have to figure out the old-fashioned ways which are frivolous, which are pernicious and which are highly desirable even if they don't sound that great at first. I say let's try to work with nature not against it: A device to let the blind see would be good; implants or, worse, genetic modifications to give ordinary humans eagle eyes or chemical-sensitive antenna would not.

So I'm all for a robot to detect and maybe one day treat colon cancer, but I have no use for a poultry cyber-Simmons. Even once they've worked all the bugs out.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

And the lamb lies down on ... the Outaouais. Yes, the Outaouais. Or at least at the Casino du Lac Leamy theatre. Some people will have no idea what that opening line was about, and if I throw in Gabriel and Genesis they'll be thinking Old Testament, not the finest concept album in the history of rock 'n' roll.

By the same token, many of my fellow Earthlings will respond to an outburst of "Hey hey, we're the Monkees" with a worried look, not a cheerful "People say we monkey around." Music is like that. But The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which tribute band the Musical Box will perform Thursday and Friday at the Casino, is something special.

My perspective is skewed by a familiar phenomenon: most normal people think the music of their early adolescence had a magic that has since been lost. "Progressive" rock -- back when it was an artistic rather than a political term -- peaked in the middle of what in my case passed for a growth spurt, so it is not an entirely objective judgment that nothing since has matched mid-'70s classics like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, the Who's Quadrophenia, King Crimson's Red, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick or Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, etc., any more than it is that the Eagles' Johnny Come Lately evokes a dance in the Annadale High School gym in Tillsonburg or, for another demographic, Stompin' Tom Connors' Tillsonburg triggers, "My back still hurts when I hear that word."

Besides, as my familiarity with Stompin' Tom lyrics makes painfully clear, I'm now working my way backward, not forward, through Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. to Louis Jordan and Run Joe. By the time the old rockin' chair gets me, I'll probably be digging Bach. Or those hip Gregorian monks.

Let me try to mount a more than purely nostalgic defence of Genesis's greatest album.

First, one thing I like about country music is lyrics worth listening to: The subjects are not tiresomely predictable and the words are often moving or funny (say, Miller's Caves). Likewise, The Lamb avoids doggerel or incomprehensible pseudo-symbolism about rings of smoke through trees and Californian hotels, and relies upon genuine poetry (Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats) and real humour -- as when the hero fails to seduce a girl using a paperback sex manual and makes the classically American utterance, "I got unexpected distress from my mistress. I'll get my money back from the bookstore right away."

Moreover, it is a concept album. Not just a collection of tunes, it sustains a story over four of what used to be sides of an LP. It has been said that the dominant emotion of rock music is frustration, which is probably why I listen to it less as my life gets less frustrating. And sure, in The Lamb the hero Rael is bored, horny and frustrated. But in the end, Rael's jarring discovery is that the brother on whom he could never rely, whose undisciplined self-indulgence at crucial moments was his constant undoing, was actually himself. It's a message many teens need to learn to grow up, and it's well told.

Then there's the music. The Lamb is symphonic in the key sense that for four "album sides" it maintains its momentum. It's not just that the individual songs are powerful or beautiful. It's their coherent progression that vastly increases their impact. Even the bit that sounds like the sort of modern jazz where someone forgot to oil the door hinges creates a tension then purposefully resolved into a singularly beautiful melody to advance the story.

Even as a teen I said two of the albums I particularly liked would still be listened to in 50 years: Wish You Were Here and The Lamb. As to other favourites, like Spirit's 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus or David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, if you can't hear what I hear in them, I am a bit sorry for you, but have no inclination to argue. But when it comes to the best of Genesis, things are very different.

I know. It's only rock 'n' roll. But I like it.

The Musical Box performs The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Thursday and Friday at the Casino du Lac Leamy. Tickets & times, (819) 772-2530

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Pardon me while I do an end-zone victory dance. Oooga chacka!! Oooga chacka!! Bush Bush Bush! (Now please imagine me doing a back flip and not landing on my head.) Not only did my candidate win, but I predicted his victory in this newspaper three weeks ago. A PhD in U.S. history didn't keep me from understanding why George Bush was more popular than the chattering classes and polls suggested. And by roughly how much: Exactly two weeks before Nov. 2, I predicted on the radio he'd win 281 Electoral College votes. Thank you. And on that basis, let me explode some myths about American politics. 1. The electorate is evenly divided. Wrong. Gay-marriage bans were on the ballot in 11 states from the deep red South to the swing states of Ohio and Michigan to strongly Democratic Oregon. They passed easily in every one. In Oregon (Oregon!) more people opposed gay marriage than supported John Kerry, including majorities in all but two of its 36 counties. Ohio even banned civil unions, by a far wider margin than it elected George Bush. It's not America that's divided. It's the Democratic Party. In Canada, all the Liberals and half the Conservatives may be liberals, but in the U.S. half the Democrats are Republicans. Thus the party nominated a brie-nibbling goose-huntin' hawkly dove of a pro-choice Catholic elitist common man, hoping activists and swing voters would read the ink blot differently. But it's hard to run when your left and right legs are going opposite ways. So the Democrats didn't just lose. Their margins of victory shrank in some key blue states; their congressional minority dwindled further; from the Rockies to the Atlantic south of Illinois, they are unwelcome and no relief is in sight. For if George Bush is as unappealing as his opponents and many Canadians believe, what happens when the GOP runs an attractive candidate?

2. The election was singularly bitter. You want bitter, try 1800. Or 1860. Or one of William Jennings Bryan's campaigns. Or Nixon-McGovern in 1972. Only the far left was really bitter, and they reliably call any Republican incumbent the worst president ever. Look what they said about Reagan, Nixon or Hoover. (Or Lincoln.) Even so, I want to stress that John Kerry did not just his nation but his party a big favour by conceding gracefully. Senator, you're no Al Gore ... and I mean that in a good way.

3. The Electoral College is quaint, bizarre and anti-democratic. In fact its function is clear and useful. By giving each state as many electoral votes as it has congressmen (proportional to population) and senators (two each), it requires a campaign to appeal to a wide variety of voters, not just pump up a narrow base. Our own system has an effect so similar that if we'd used theirs in our last election instead, the Liberals would have won 157 of 334 electoral votes (or, if each jurisdiction had as many senators as it currently does rather than two each, 198 of 413). Whereas if we elected our head of government by direct popular vote as many people seem to think Americans should, you could win with three quarters of the votes in Ontario and Alberta and just a quarter elsewhere. Does anyone want that? Right. So no more drivel about powdered wigs or anointing.

4: Americans vote their wallets. I've said it before but it's worth underlining: Americans vote on values. And if, in this regard, they differ from us in ways we find baffling, it should worry us, not them. Would it not be strange to condemn their free-enterprise economic system as rapacious, then complain that in politics they concern themselves with what's right, not what's profitable?

5. Americans are belligerent losers because they vote on national security and, in doing so, prefer peace through strength to appeasement. If we were casting ballots with as much practical impact on global affairs as Americans are, I believe (and hope) we would cast them in a similar manner. A new poll says half of us don't believe political power grows from the barrel of a gun. We'd feel differently if Uncle Sam weren't standing between us and the bullets.

Myth No. 6. Bush wins by mobilizing ignorant morons with three teeth. Actually he just won the first majority of the popular vote since his father in 1988. He got eight million more votes this time than last. So I'll see Karl Rove's four million evangelicals and raise you four million regular folks.

Discard these six myths and a Bush victory should have been predictable well in advance. And I did predict it. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The U.S. presidential election has become so obscure we may not know who's going to win for weeks afterwards. Its dynamics are unbelievably murky: John Kerry looks weak in some states (Michigan and Hawaii) that should portend a Republican landslide, yet is doing well in others (Ohio and Pennsylvania) that should have Mr. Bush packing for the ranch. For what it is worth, I still predict a fairly solid Bush victory, based on the children's and Halloween mask polls among other things. But it's not the only election on Nov. 2, and may not be the most interesting one.

Americans are also voting for one-third of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives, as they do every two years. Odds are long that the Republicans will regain control of both Houses of Congress, in which case a President Kerry would be unable to implement most of whatever his agenda is meant to be. The president proposes, but Congress disposes (and the nation dozes, as the old saying goes). So George Bush couldn't bring back the draft even if he wanted to, as the U.S. Constitution vests such legislative matters in, of all things, the legislature.

President, Congress ... and that's not the half of it. In various states voters will decide on marijuana and doughnuts (no, they're two separate issues) and nearly 200 other ballot initiatives, including 57 that resulted from citizen petitions. In 11 states, they will vote on gay marriage, including in the key swing state of Ohio where, if voters say yea, a ban on it will go straight into the state constitution without requiring legislative action. Such measures have been described as cynical ploys to boost voter turnout for the presidential contest, but even when they are, they are far more as well.

In some cases, voter turnout is stronger for such referendums than for the White House. And in Maine this year, voters will pass judgment on whether hunters shall be allowed to bait bears with pizza and doughnuts. Which, to cast my two Canadian cents into the discussion, sounds pretty darn mean.

Whatever devious plans the operatives may have, voters cast votes on an often bewildering list of such initiatives primarily because they believe, with reason, that these local initiatives will have more influence on how they are governed than the votes they cast for representative, senator or even president. For one thing, it's a lot clearer what you're going to get. Who knows what John Kerry's Iraq plan might be? But in Maine, say yes and it's no more inviting bruin to a party then plugging him. Period.

For years, I struggled to persuade the deep thinkers of our own Reform party that ballot initiatives and referendums were not compatible with the underlying structure of parliamentary self-government. But they make sense in a system where the people, through a written constitution they can amend, are sovereign. And they offer an important lesson even in a system where Parliament is, or was, sovereign. It is that in the end the people should decide the rules under which they must live.

In Canada, there are two major forces at work in the opposite direction. One is judicial activism, on which I have nothing new to say at the moment except once again to cite Ted Morton's chapter in the new book Divorcing Marriage, where he says "The most fundamental question is: Why is government based on the consent of the governed no longer good enough?" Indeed.

The other pernicious force loose in our politics is more subtle: the increasingly frank wish of politicians to remove contentious issues from their hands into those of impartial commissions of experts who they appoint based on ideological sympathy, but for whom they then disclaim any responsibility. Most recently, federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh told Western Standard magazine: "What we are trying to do is take politics out of health care so that experts make decisions as to whether the Canada Health Act is being complied with." Why? Why not the people we elect? What are we, chopped liver?

The U.S. system, rowdy and fractious as it often is, continues to embody the other idea. It not only lets citizens vote out a president they don't like while denying his marginally less unappealing opponent a compliant legislature, it also permits them to vote directly on what anyone they send to Washington can make them do or stop doing.

It's an inspiring spectacle. Especially if the folks in Maine stop that rotten pizza trick with the bears.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You know, I have nothing against Belgium. And not much for it. I read once that it has only one forest left, which depressed me. Still, I'd be willing to check the place out if given good reason. But I'm not holding my breath. Any more than I am for an articulate, coherent and salable platform from the Conservative party. Stephen Harper's Belgian proposal might have some merit. It certainly won't do to complain that politics is banal and predictable, then flying body-slam anyone who says anything unexpected. My complaint is that there is no more evidence of political philosophy behind it than behind the Reform party's kaleidoscopic series of positions on important issues, generally untainted by any reference to established conservative thinkers, principles or tradition.

But listen for a moment to Abraham Lincoln (courtesy of Ted Morton in Daniel Cere's and Douglas Farrow's new book Divorcing Marriage) on the worst decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1857's pro-slavery Dred Scott clunker: "I do not forget the position assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case, upon the parties to a suit, as to the object of that suit ... At the same time the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

Has anyone in the Conservative party said anything as coherent or principled about judicial activism today? Or as persuasive?

It seems that the Conservatives, like to some extent the NDP, have become unhealthily fixated on the Liberals' ruthless pragmatism about winning and persuaded themselves that they, too, must tear loose from the restraint of principles. I think it's an error even when it comes to the Grits, whose firm-but-flexible philosophy has at its core the principles of as much social spending as the economy can sustain and as much independence from the United States as our national security can sustain (whether they have made the latter calculation properly of late is another matter).

In any event, the Liberals occupy a particular niche in our political system, and seeking to cram one's own party into it as well offers neither benefit nor honour. The Tories, like the NDP, are meant to be a party of coherent principles, and if it is difficult to win on that basis, well, no one said the job would be easy and besides, it is impossible to win otherwise so they might as well give it a try. For them, to paraphrase Socrates, "The unexamined philosophy is not worth articulating."

Take the Federalist Papers. Yes, I know. It's hard to toss all 85 of them across the aisle during question period. But to persuade their countrymen to ratify the U.S. Constitution, the three authors who wrote as "Publius" offered no shallow expedience. Instead they presented a comprehensive discussion of political economy not only successful in its immediate purpose but useful to this day. Likewise, Washington's Farewell Address contains a celebrated and still compelling warning against permanent alliances like, say, the United Nations, as well as a less-celebrated and to me less-convincing but still thought-provoking warning against partisanship. Whereas in place of an articulate discourse on the political philosophy of language, with Belgium as an illustration, Mr. Harper gave us Mulroney warmed over.

We were deprived even of an explicit statement along the lines that: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one party to hoover up votes in Quebec by any means possible without regard for the antiquated emotion known as 'shame,' a decent respect to the public opinion polls of mankind requires avoiding any discussion of the principles that might or might not underlie positions whose potential adoption hinges on future considerations of unmitigated expediency." Instead, the bus full of tired, bewildered constitutional tourists roared off to Spain, leaving the voters behind.

If basing policy clearly and explicitly on principle interests the Tories, I could offer them a useful list of books, including Dicey on our own constitutional order. It would, however, get very long indeed before it reached Belgium. I have nothing against the place. It's just that there are far more interesting things to see and ponder.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]