Go ahead. Make my list. Those savvy folks at the American Film Institute just released their 100 top movie quotations of all time and I think it could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Of course it featured many of the usual suspects, including those two from Casablanca. At No. 20 and No. 32, they were further down than I would put them, but on the plus side, that film had the most total quotations, at six.

Some people might sneer at the whole project as a cheap publicity stunt or because movies are vulgar entertainment, not true art. In response, unprintable movie quotations too numerous to print spring to mind. So let me say instead that the making of best (or worst) lists is no more invalidated by the impossibility of securing definitive agreement than is voting, say, or theology. See, the world is like a box of chocolates (No. 40). And list-making is useful for what it tells us to try (or avoid, like nougat) and for how it clarifies our ideas about what makes a good, or bad, book, movie, historical event or taste.

As for sneering at celluloid, it is as old as film itself. Before the first talkie, in 1925, I.A. Richards, who also despised best-selling novels, said films tend to produce "stock attitudes and stereotyped ideas ... the ideas and attitudes with which the 'movie fan' becomes familiar tend to be peculiarly clumsy and inapplicable to life.... No one can intensely and wholeheartedly enjoy and enter into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of the average super-film without a disorganisation which has its effects in everyday life." You talkin' to me? (No. 10). I quote movie lines a lot, and I'm not alone (unlike, say, when I burst into the Pogo jingle for extremely soft, sweet and seemly Barkles axe handles).

Lines from films usually enter popular culture because they capture an important truth about that moment or life generally. For instance, No. 2 on the AFI's list: "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse." Our understanding of the world would be poorer without that line (and spinoffs like: What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a deconstructionist? Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand). And "I'll be back" (No. 37) bespeaks grim determination. But among these truths is that life is often funny and serious at the same time.

Thus in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dr. McCoy reads Kirk the riot act about getting away from his desk and back to an active command "before you really do grow old" and Kirk replies "Don't mince words, Bones. What do you really think?" It's become a proverb in our household. As has Lieut. Savak's response to a singular lame Kirk joke: "Humour. It is a difficult concept."

The top line of all time was apparently "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a" thingamajig which, I suggest, makes the $5,000 fine the makers of Gone With the Wind had to pay to include it money well spent. It's not my favourite because (a) I'm not a girl, and (b) it strikes me as a bit too Gen X, even though I am one of those; today Rhett would mumble "whatever" and shamble off to similar effect. But if it helps people dramatically exit "dysfunctional" relationships, it's worth 10 Dear Abby columns, and I mean that in a good way.

(Among my favourite flatscreen lines is the salesman telling Homer Simpson a horrible beater on his lot "is the best RV you'll ever own... and I don't mean that in a good way," but in a piece on movies I can't quote it. But I can quote Clint Eastwood's character from The Eiger Sanction when some two-bit hood says "My superior wants to see you" and gets back "Well, that doesn't narrow the field much, does it?" It's a great insult, and a surprisingly versatile one.)

Some lines on the list clearly made it simply because a small band of enthusiasts voted them in, such as No. 92 (from Caddyshack). True immortality requires not only great wit but wit on a great subject (including the way Mae West delivers No. 26: "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?").

Thus my vote for best line ever goes to the justly famous "Round up the usual suspects." It looks cynical, but is really a perfect expression of gritty, hard-boiled idealism. As Raymond Chandler explained of the detective hero, "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Which is exactly what, at the film's critical juncture, first Rick and then Captain Renaud shed their cynical shells and do. It is a moral lesson of supreme importance.

I'd even say "Play it again, Sam" except that line somehow got famous without ever being uttered.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My goodness. What has the Supreme Court done now? I said some time ago, pace Kaspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, that one never knew what it would do next except that it was bound to be something astonishing. Taking health policy away from Parliament certainly qualifies. I did not merely fail to predict its ruling that failure to provide timely medical treatment contravened the Quebec charter of rights; I actively predicted the opposite just one day earlier on the radio. In my general failure to see it coming, I was far from alone. But I have less of an excuse than many because I have, in previous columns, warned that the gradual process whereby Parliament wrested real executive power away from the Crown over many centuries is being recapitulated at high speed nowadays as the courts wrest executive power away from Parliament. Even so, I underestimated that speed.

To this point, the Supreme Court's activism had largely consisted of mandating that all important public policy be left-wing. I think most pundits and politicians understood that it was doing so, although clearly we did not all feel the same way about it nor did we all describe it in the same language. It has, to general consternation, now taken us a considerable step further away from anything that could, without doing violence to the language, be described as self-government. There is much to be said about judicial activism, most of it bad. I have said it before and will again. But not here. Here I want to single out what is special about this ruling.

Some conservatives are encouraged to see the court part company with its normal ideological allies on this matter. Not me. There is nothing surprising about a falling-out among progressives. Nor is there necessarily anything encouraging. They are fighting over how to wield, and whether to share, a power that ought not to exist at all, that of bypassing the people's representatives on key policy matters.

There is a delicious irony about liberals formerly enthusiastic about judicial activism on such matters as abortion and homosexual marriage suddenly waxing indignant at judges' presumption in making public policy. Conservatives seem to me, on the whole, to be taking a more consistent and responsible position. Like most of them, I think more competition in health care is a good policy outcome but, also like most, I disapprove of the way it was achieved. And like many, I think the price paid is too high. Perhaps I seemed disingenuous in calling for the notwithstanding clause to be invoked on homosexual marriage because I disapproved of judicial usurpation. Well, now I want the Quebec government to invoke that clause in its charter of rights on this matter and, should the ruling spread, the Canadian government to do the same. While there is still time.

Too many people have declared this ruling to be revolutionary, or in one case mundane, because of what it does or doesn't do to our current health system. What they should be concentrating on, and here the impact is revolutionary, is what it does to our system of government.

This was not really a ruling about the constitutional status of the Canada Health Act, its broad procedural fairness. It was a ruling about the efficacy of current policy. The court expressly weighed questions of fact about probable outcomes of various policy choices, and selected those it felt were best. It is now micromanaging policy.

How much training our Supreme Court justices have in economics I do not know. Whether one single member has read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, I cannot say. But when it comes to self-esteem, they evidently labour under no significant handicap. Of their capacity to govern, they harbour little doubt. Maybe they should.

Quite apart from their possible failure to grasp the complexity of planning challenges, the court also possesses a minimal administrative apparatus given the size of the task it is busily assuming. Perhaps as it assumes the other functions of Parliament it will also take control of the civil service. But this one ruling took over a year following the conclusion of oral arguments. Government has to move faster than that. How do they plan to do so?

This ruling was a constitutionally bold leap into economic and governmental darkness. The truly surprising thing is not that the court attacked the current structure of the public health-care monopoly. It is how rapidly and decisively it moved to assume a policy function. Again, and despite my best efforts to be prepared, I can only say it is truly and characteristically astonishing.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Well, here's a summer reading list from hell. Human Events, an American national weekly newspaper, just asked 15 conservative scholars to rank the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Great. Now I have to run out and get the four I haven't read. I'm serious. On the principle of "Know your enemy," I already in this space, on Sept. 6, 2002, recommended reading Mein Kampf, which is 2nd on the Human Events list. Hitler was not merely evil, but very successfully evil, and it behoves us to understand not only what evil looks like, but also how it so often manages to succeed. On that same basis I had also already read their top choice, The Communist Manifesto, their 3rd, Quotations from Chairman Mao, and their 6th, Das Kapital (fair do's: Communists slaughtered far more people even than the Nazis did, over a much longer period, in many more places).

I feel differently about #9 on the list, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I don't believe I ever read this particular one, but I've read enough Nietzsche to say I think he gets a slightly bad rap. He saw with unpleasant clarity that we could not cling to traditional Judeo-Christian morality once we discarded its intellectual and theological foundations, and also what sorts of horrors we would gradually but inevitably be driven to embrace as a result. But beneath Nietzsche's thin veneer of juvenile relish, there is, surely, anguish at the prospect, even a veiled cry of "The horror, the horror." The ideas he expresses are without doubt terribly harmful. But I think his writings are as much firebell in the night as torch in the straw. I even suspect the very lucidity of his nihilism that initially attracts the young also ultimately helps them reject it comprehensively.

Harm comes in various forms, of course. And I'm not sure why, whether it's background, temperament or pure coincidence. But it does strike me that, while not one book on the Human Events list was assigned to me as a text during my 22 years at school and at college -- forget what do they teach them at these schools; what did they teach me? -- I had read those five that seek to batter down Western civilization from without, but only one of the other five that tend to hollow it out from within.

The other one I had read (twice, in fact; it's not an easy read) was No. 10: John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Its effect was far more subtle than those listed above. Directly, all it did was legitimize deficit spending for a while. But indirectly, by loosening our inhibitions against spending money we didn't have at a crucial point in our history, it allowed the state to move massively into the business of trading social programs for votes. And while we are all budget-balancers now (except George W. Bush), in the process we so entirely lost our disgust at "smash-and-grab" politics that we would now think it odd for anyone not to campaign on giving us other people's money. We might even find it offensive.

The four I haven't read are: No. 4, The Kinsey Report, by Alfred Kinsey; No. 5, Democracy and Education, by John Dewey; No. 7, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; and No. 8, The Course of Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte. All, I would say, are more poison in the well than torch in the straw. But surely that's at least as bad.

Some people may object that this list is slanted toward books conservatives don't like. Well, yes, it was compiled by conservative scholars for a proudly conservative publication. But, crucially, it is not because they are conservative that these 15 scholars dislike such books. Rather, it is because they dislike such books that they are conservative. Liberals are free to put forward their own list of the 10 most harmful books of the past two centuries. Or, to save time, they can get Human Events' 2003 list of the "Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College" or ask for my list of "10 Books Every Conservative Should Read". But I don't think they will.

I don't think most liberals believe their opponents are motivated by ideas or that they even read books. Moreover (j'accuse), I don't think most liberals read conservative books. For most of them, open-minded is just this word. Liberals, like atheists, have to be very careful what they read. And they tend to be; it's one of the things that, long ago, pushed me toward conservatism.

I'd venture to say the average conservative intellectual has a far better idea what his opponents believe than the reverse. Certainly I'm now itching to read the other four books on that list.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In 1944, amid the roaring of the guns and the Keynesians, an obscure economist named Friedrich Hayek published an obscure book called The Road to Serfdom. Widely ignored, occasionally ridiculed, it transformed public debate by demolishing the very concept of economic planning. People had long argued whether public control of economic activity would make society fairer, more friendly and maybe even richer or be unjust, create soul-destroying dependency and strangle the economy. Hayek said it didn't matter. Desirable or not, planning was simply impossible for the same reason that, if attempted, it would destroy liberty.

To liberals his argument, or his title, seemed absurd. They were convinced that freedom from want was indispensable to real liberty, and that increased state power in the hands of well-meaning people like themselves would never be used maliciously. Hayek's argument, however, was technical not moral, though it has moral implications.

Critics of planning usually focus, and before Hayek focused almost entirely, on what one might call "first order" unintended consequences. Introduce rent controls, and fewer people will build new apartments. Prop up the price of corn in a glutted market and farmers will grow even more. Raise welfare benefits and fewer people will seek low-paid work.

Economically literate supporters of planning could reply that precisely because such effects are predictable they are manageable. You can buy the surplus corn and burn it; subsidize rental housing construction; implement workfare (or be glad welfare prices degrading jobs right out of the market). With intelligence planning can survive, albeit in damaged form, the basic free market critique. But it cannot survive Hayek.

Hayek's main point is not the immediate unforeseen consequences. It is that the staggering complexity of the economy, the extraordinary number and range of decisions undertaken every day by every citizen, cannot be comprehended by any one mind.

In a market economy it doesn't have to be. The baker does not need to know how his competitors sell at the price they do, what difficulties farmers in Ukraine face or anything else of that sort. He only needs to know that if he charges too much for bread his customers will march out his door, and if he pays too much for flour the bailiff will march in.

The state of the planner is quite different. He must know where the baker's customers might go instead, and why, and what would happen next. To devise a master plan to coordinate everything, ensuring the flour he has assigned to every baker is produced in the right amount and delivered to the right places on time, he must understand how all these decisions feed back on one another (for instance, bakers' suppliers eat bread). And he can't. The spontaneous coordination produced by each independent actor acquiring and using the information he needs about his situation cannot be replicated by gathering all that information in one place. There's just too much of it.

As a result, any intervention looses a flood of second, third and fourth-order unintended consequences that spill back on one another. Planners must start rushing about engaging in ever-more desperately ad hoc intervention, wielding authority that cannot be resisted (or there is no plan) or foreseen or controlled by elected bodies because there is no time for orderly rules and procedures in the face of the growing chaos. And arbitrary power, no matter how well-intentioned, is incompatible with freedom. It reduces citizens to serfs.

Hayek's argument has been ridiculed, misrepresented and ignored, even after his 1974 Nobel Prize in economics. But it has never been answered. No socialist has ever accepted the challenge of showing how planners, with or without computers, could take into account not only the number of factors necessary to model the economy but their literally incomprehensibly complex interrelationships.

Plenty of people maintain an enthusiasm for planning simply by having no idea what Hayek said. And in fairness, the book went largely unread due not only to its unwelcome message but also to its Teutonically impenetrable prose style. It could have been put better, and was, in Leonard Read's little masterpiece I, Pencil. But at the intellectual pinnacle it demolished the argument for planning.

Economics has never been the same since.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The defeat of the new European Union Constitution in a French referendum should send a lot of clever people back to the drawing board. Or possibly the atlas. First, it further upsets the received wisdom that the Iraq war was a political liability. Forgive my shabby Anglo-Saxon empiricism, but supporters of the war (such as George Bush, Tony Blair and Australia's John Howard, though not Spain's Jose Maria Aznar) generally seem to be doing better than its opponents, from Canada's Liberal party to Jacques Chirac, with Germany's Gerhard Schroeder soon to follow.

More profoundly, this ponderous 448-article Constitution was Europe's answer to the Charlottetown Accord: convoluted, confusing and above all disconnected from the populace whose interests it is meant to serve by an elite itself so disconnected as not to realize the disconnect exists. And while rejecting it was a blunt instrument, it was about the only way the public had left to rein in the Eurocrats, so they used it.

It is easy to scoff at the specific objections of many French voters; some were absurd (too free-market) and others were offensive (too "Anglo-Saxon"). But there was a deep rationality behind the tendency of large numbers of French citizens simply not to trust their rulers' desire, or ability, to act in the public interest, which various suggestions that a "non" vote is at best temporary will do nothing to alleviate.

Here the trivial and the profound merge. This vote (along with the less surprising or significant Dutch one) reveals Franco-German opposition to the Iraq war as not just a partisan but a geopolitical blunder and, moreover, a partisan blunder because it was a geopolitical one. It is a grave setback for the concept of "Europe" becoming a global counterweight to the United States. Not because of technicalities, but because of the underlying reality that there is no "Europe" in the sense that there is a United States politically, constitutionally or, most vitally, in the hearts of its citizens.

It is important not to lapse into the collectivist rhetoric or thought patterns of too many political leaders. All Americans are not united either behind their current president or, more broadly, behind their nation as a powerful force in global affairs. But the gap between the extent to which Americans tend to identify, or at least sympathize, with their nation's role in world affairs and the extent to which Europeans share or even comprehend their elite's vision is now revealed as profound.

The elite pushing for a united Europe without popular support and in ways hostile to the remaining real indigenous symbols and traditions of the cradle of Western civilization was not just a symptom, but also a cause of this problem.

There is a familiar academic distinction between Wilsonian "idealism" and (Theodore) Rooseveltian "realism" among makers of U.S. foreign policy. But historian Walter Russell Mead recently added a great deal to our understanding by emphasizing a major third "Jacksonian" strand in popular thinking: flag-flying, 4th-of-July fireworks, Fred Flintstones and soccer moms largely uninterested in the affairs and problems of foreigners, but deeply resentful of insults or injuries to their country. It greatly strengthens the hand of both Wilsonians and Rooseveltians that so many Americans, though little interested in the details of diplomacy, tend to rally around any administration whose plans provoke insolence or brutality abroad. But there are no European Jacksonians. No one in Europe thinks "my continent, right or wrong."

Thus the recent outburst of Eurocentric opposition to the war in Iraq was profoundly ill-conceived as a long-term strategy. It won't worry those who see the U.S. as the main source of global problems. But more thoughtful people aware of true evil in the world were not entirely mistaken in thinking a multipolar international order would be in many ways safer. Two democratic superpowers would be unlikely to make the same mistake at the same time internationally or suffer a simultaneous loss of global focus due to internal problems, on top of smaller advantages from co-operating on specific issues.

Where these more thoughtful people were dangerously wrong was in believing such a thing possible and in having no back-up plan in case it wasn't. For if there is no "Europe" to serve as a counterweight to the United States, undermining American security policy is petty, adolescent and dangerous. Which suggests the tendency of Europeans to distrust their leaders' judgment was entirely rational.

Europe is a place, not a state of mind. It's just the way things are.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Might I interest you briefly in politics? Oh dear. What a rude word. Besides, if you follow public affairs at all, you are already immersed in the stuff. Which is odder than it seems. Why are newspapers so full of politics and government? Do you ask what else they would contain besides public matters? But there's the nub of my gist. Why does "public" so often mean "political"? Why aren't there more stories about our common life that aren't about government? Partly, political stories are fairly easy: a press release, three phone calls and a story. It's straightforward he said/she said, requiring no icky background knowledge of science or something. But mostly, government gets so much media attention because it's so big. The state nowadays not only spends nearly half of GDP, but also regulates every gol-durn thing in our lives.

In 1998, American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. sarcastically called meddlesome do-gooders "the shower-adjusters of this world." The joke's on him: Monday's Citizen said: "The British government is considering regulating the maximum temperature of domestic baths." It seems the public are too stupid not to scald themselves unless big nanny hovers over them as they bathe. While I'm inclined to think the state has no place in the bathrooms of the nation, if it's in there bossing people around I do want to hear about it. But I'm not done with my question about all this government news. Indeed, I've just gotten started.

The real question is not just why government is in our faces, bathtubs and playgrounds morning noon and night, but why it is so pushy, given that it is also so incompetent. Out in Vancouver, a government-funded program is trying to give free heroin to addicts and failing. And you're going to remake society? Oh wait. You already did.

Fifty years ago, cruelly neglected by a state that, until 1958, spent less of our GDP than those awful socialistic Americans, we might plausibly be said to stand badly in need of government help to eat at all, let alone eat a balanced diet. But since then, we've had a half-century of economic growth that has left every third person with an iPod dangling from their head and made lumpy tires a distant memory, and also increasingly generous retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, welfare, health care and who knows what all. Economic growth sure hasn't made us poorer, so if we really still face a poverty crisis, the bony finger of blame points ... where?

And another thing. Government hasn't just been giving us cash. It's been making us better people. And here the results ought to be even more dramatic. Relieving want is old news, so government intervention there should mostly have altered the scale, not the direction. It's in liberating us from pernicious traditions such as stable marriages, respectful youth and concern for the lessons of the past that social workers, sex education, day care, trauma counsellors and urban planners have been carrying out a true revolution in the last half century. Aren't we there yet? Shouldn't the state now be able to scale back its activities a bit?

Instead, there's a gathering assumption that we can do nothing without government. The lead letter in yesterday's Citizen complained, "It is so frustrating that the Parliament can be arbitrarily shut down for days, have a vote of non-confidence, which is lost, and now can still inhibit any advancement for our country." Don't panic: We may be incapable of nailing two planks together without the state, but the Liberal-NDP deal includes a new housing program.

It is, of course, possible that decades of state coddling have rendered us less self-reliant. For instance, ripping out dangerous playground equipment and putting in soft ground has reduced injuries marginally. But at what cost in courage and initiative? The politicians will be the last to know.

For it is also clear that public authorities are remarkably bad at monitoring their own performances. After his government squeaked through a non-confidence vote with the aid of two independents, a turncoat and the Speaker, Paul Martin told his caucus: "We didn't just vote for a budget. What we voted for was a vision of a Canada, dynamic and leading the world. We will set the standard by which other nations judge themselves." Someone less fatuously disconnected from the public mood, such as Marie Antoinette, might say if that's what he thinks he just did, I don't want to know what he thinks he should do next.

Including adjusting my hot tap. So I'm hoping for a headline "Canadian washes without state help."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Canadian politics has become a circus complete with clowns, tawdry sideshows and even a heartbreaker in a glamorous costume. It's amusing for the peanut gallery, but a tough life for the participants and an increasingly bad deal for the audience. Start with the high-flying trapeze girl. I believe Belinda Stronach is a Liberal at heart. I never understood what she was doing in the Tory party, nor what they saw in her. It can't just have been youth and good looks; this is not the 1950s. I'm sure I had a clipping about her many proven talents around here somewhere. But anyway, she has her reward.

So does Paul Martin. He has probably prolonged his time in office by months. But at what cost to his dignity? When he tried to tell journalists his lavish recruitment of Ms. Stronach was unrelated to the budget vote, they famously burst out laughing; Andrew Coyne on CBC Newsworld said the press now treats the prime minister as "risible." Nice polka-dot pants, dude.

Country legend "Cowboy Jack" Clement does (cue wheezing calliope) an old song about a kid who runs off with a circus and loses his heart to a high-flying trapeze girl. But she's just having a fling to make her ex-boyfriend the clown jealous, so one day "His new sweetheart opened the door/ And he knew when he saw the clown standing behind her/ In front of her, there stood one more."

I don't mean Peter MacKay; in being publicly dumped, he is, as Clement also sings, "trapped in an old country song" (like She Got the Gold Mine and I Got the Shaft or The Gold Rush is Over and the Bum's Rush is On). But her leaving you for another party is too cruel even for country music.

I mean the whole clown car full of Tories standing in front of Ms. Stronach's trailer with stupid looks on their faces.

Like Ralph Klein's chief of staff Rod Love, a major player in her leadership campaign; Don Martin quoted him in Wednesday's Citizen that, "A lot of us went out on a limb for her because she represented something new and we have now found out she represents the worst of the old." So long ... sucker.

Also Brian Mulroney, Bill Davis and umpteen clever strategists and sophisticated centrist caucus members.

If this were serious theatre, I am convinced they'd now be better off. I have been saying for 11 years that the Reform/Alliance/Conservatives can only win by presenting a clear philosophical and programmatic alternative. And when your party is conspicuously represented by pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-big government urban sophisticates, it's a bit hard to do.

For 11 years, they have been shooshing me. And their reward is to stand at the trailer door with Belinda grinning from ear to ear and Paul Martin smirking behind her. So who's wearing the big grease-paint frown now?

It's bad enough being a right-wing party in which moderates don't feel comfortable. Now they're a moderate party in which moderates don't feel comfortable and an Opposition that doesn't oppose. They ride around on unicycles juggling pies and then, WHAP, they hit themselves in the face. Hilarious. Then they do a John Kerry impression and vote for the budget before they vote against it, thus positioning themselves to campaign on the Liberal platform in an election they failed to trigger. The Citizen ran a headline Wednesday, "Tories fear Stronach will reveal election strategy to Liberals." What's secret, or scary, about "Ignite hair, extinguish with fork"? And what election?

Yes, folks, step right up. In the centre ring (drum roll please), we present the incredible Torini. There is no situation, however favourable, in which he cannot inextricably ensnare himself. Watch him waver. Watch him panic. Watch him abandon his principles then frighten off voters with his tone.

Now please spare a thought for the audience, watching their faith in politicians do a dizzying high dive into a tub of sleaze while folks in the western bleachers shift angrily in their seats at the ringmaster's failed joke about reducing Western alienation as one of his 58,000 top priorities.

The circus can be fun. But not when it busts loose and turns the whole town into a sideshow hall of mirrors where every apparent exit just leads to another nightmarishly distorted reflection of us in the people we've elected. And we're not getting any help from the trained seals with red balls on their noses.

So Tories, listen well, let me tell you a story. At the end of that old song, the guy quits, leaving a note that ends "Goodbye cruel circus, I'm off to join the world." It's time to grow up, realize tinsel is not real gold and flashing blue LED ice cubes are not real magic, and start taking conservatism seriously as a philosophy and a political movement.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Stephen Leacock is one of those things you're supposed to cherish if you're Canadian, like Margaret Atwood or the Commissioner of Official Languages. I don't care. I like him anyway. His acute sense of the absurd, his keen ear for language and his fearless inventiveness make him a true comic genius. His failed attempt to open a bank account, in "My Financial Career," is an unsurpassed depiction of intimidation in the face of large, impersonal modern institutions. Let Kafka's protagonists succumb in tediously lopsided contests against vast shadowy conspiracies. This is just man against self and losing badly.

Leacock also turns a phrase with Wodehousian virtuosity. In his satire of the Mariposa election contest between cynical vote-buying Liberal and Conservative candidates, when doomed independent clean-government candidate Edward Drone "tried to put up a streamer across the Main Street with DRONE AND HONESTY the wind carried it away into the lake." Those final three words plunge his campaign into exquisite ignominy. Also not to be missed is his account of protracted goodbyes in the era of the motor car, in which George Washington's Farewell Address ends "I have grown old in the service of this country and there is something wrong with my ignition."

Finally, his description of the country barber shop ends with the customer stripped to the waist so "The barber can then take a rush at him from the other side of the room, and drive the clippers up the full length of the spine, so as to come at the heavier hair on the back of the head with the impact of a lawn-mower driven into long grass." Successors like the Goon Show or Monty Python extend, they do not transcend, such surrealism.

Despite all these virtues Leacock is unfortunately best known, especially at second hand, for his merciless satire of parochial small-town life in fictional Mariposa that still offends many in the real Orillia. But it is the least noteworthy material in, for instance, A Treasury of Stephen Leacock (combining Literary Lapses, Sunshine Sketches and Winnowed Wisdom in one volume). The Mariposa material has lost some of its lustre partly because such small-town life, omnipresent in 1912, has all but vanished from the Canadian scene. Also, it was so well done so long ago that, like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, it now seems hackneyed. A more serious complaint is that it displays a bit too much malice; a satirist should help redeem human folly not just condemn it. But mostly Mariposa is simply eclipsed by his other even funnier work.

For instance, partly because his day job was professor of political science and economics at McGill, Leacock is brilliant at capturing and refracting professional cant. His venture into the increasingly popular "statistical forecast business" is sterling economic gibberish overlaid on the timeless truth that, the world being so complex, "our conclusion upon the whole is that we don't know what business is going to do next month, and we don't believe that anyone else does." And in another flawlessly turned phrase, a farrago of nonsense about Brazil's currency, the milreis, ends, "Some people think this is a good time to buy it, but if it was ours we should sell it. We wouldn't want it round the place." Meanwhile "All Aboard for Europe" mercilessly contrasts the travel brochure with the real experience of sailing to Europe. And he equally masterfully spoofs genres from the detective yarn to the ghost story to the compressed survey of great knowledge for the modern businessman.

A number of his best pieces deal not with the age then ending but with then-dawning modern life; "My Pink Suit" for instance seems more topical today than when he wrote it. The specific slang in "Studies in the Newer Culture" is now obsolete but the satire is evergreen. Still others cover timeless follies, like "French Politics for Beginners" or when, where and how to deploy various standard fishing anecdotes, including telling "The Story of the Fish that Was Lost" when returning with a sorry catch the largest of which "looks as if it had died of consumption."

In short, you will laugh aloud at Leacock. Not because you're Canadian. Because he's hilarious.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]