The attractive young lady says “shalom” and right away I know I’m in trouble. I’m just entering El Al’s special security screening, as much psychological as technological. And I can’t decide whether it’s polite or patronizing to respond with the only word of Hebrew I know (which is also “shalom”). It’s a very Canadian moment. In the face of elaborate precautions against international terrorism and anti-Semitism, I’m paralyzed by a language issue. And uneasily aware that standing speechless at El Al security with beads of sweat forming on your forehead is not a promising start to a trip. Ultimately I settle for “Hi,” and after having my luggage passed through their special X-ray machine and my brain through their special psychological understanding I am cleared to fly to Tel Aviv (on a trip sponsored by the Canada-Israel Committee). I concluded that they had other things on their minds than whether it was dorky for a tourist to mispronounce their equivalent of “Hello” (and that my airplane seat bore no useful resemblance to a bed). I turned out to be right on both counts. The story of language in Israel is an amazing one not least, to a Canadian, because of how relaxed everyone seems to be about it.

Israel’s familiar language miracle is the resurrection of Hebrew as a vernacular rather than liturgical language. As Paul Johnson’ s History of the Jews notes, when Eliezer ben Yehuda went to Palestine in 1881 and insisted he and his wife, née Deborah Jonas, speak Hebrew to each other, “Theirs was the first Hebrew-speaking household in the country (indeed in the world) and Ben Yehuda’s first son, Ben Zion, was the first Hebrew-speaking child since antiquity.” For Israel to resurrect Hebrew was at least as improbable as if the United States had sought to revive Latin in 1776. Indeed more so, for there were more people capable of conversing in Latin in 1776 than in Hebrew in 1881, and it had been a living language more recently. But, my goodness, it has succeeded.

English, unsurprisingly, is widely spoken and understood in Israel, without any sort of Gallic sneer. Only in one rustic stop on our trip north, in the closest thing they have to a proper Appalachia, did we encounter a gas station where only Hebrew was spoken and the English-language Jerusalem Post was not to be had. Which may not seem odd, since English has penetrated the cosmopolitan elites of most societies leaving the hinterland speaking only the traditional Croatian, Twee or Japanese. But remember that as recently as the founding of Israel in 1948 Hebrew was not traditional. You’d think, the adoption of an ancient language being an eccentric intellectual enterprise, it would flourish in the cities in some elaborate, stilted form and up in the hills they’d be yammering away in Yiddish, Russian, or for that matter English or Arabic. You don’t find much Esperanto in Sioux City, Iowa. Instead, in Israel, it is in the cities that large-scale immigration, like nearly a million Russian immigrants in the 1990s, creates pockets of traditional language. In the boonies it’s all Hebrew, as though 2,000 years of history just hadn’t happened.

In fact Yiddish has all but vanished from Israel. It makes me a bit sad because it is not only a marvelously expressive language but also (as Johnson’s History notes, citing Isaac Bashevis Singer) the only one never spoken by those in power. Perhaps Yiddish is felt to be the language of the helpless Jew in exile and Hebrew that of the House of David. Perhaps it is too closely linked to one side of the once-problematic Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide. But however that may be, I only heard one Yiddish word while there (the wonderful “schnorrer”) and was told the language’s only significant remaining use is by observant Jews so orthodox they think it profane to use Hebrew for secular purposes. Do not think this is a society where people are less stubborn or opinionated than Canadians.

That’s why a second miracle about language in Israel is how nice everyone was about it. Even before I arrived, I was pestering my seat-mate on the plane to teach me “Thank you” in Hebrew, followed by “Yes, please.” The flight attendant added that Israelis were not big on elaborate manners and merely barking “yes” (“ken”) would be fine. But folks were so hospitable they didn’t mind when I insisted in true Canadian fashion in adding “Bevakeshah.” When I mentioned how nice everyone was being about language, I was generally told something like, “Yes, this isn’t France.” Or, I would add, Quebec; it’s not that Quebecers have been as rude to me when I try to speak French as, let’s be frank here, Parisians. But they don’t encourage it. They switch to English. They don’t seem to want you speaking French badly, well, or at all. Israel is totally different.

One of our tour guides was extremely, even weirdly patient, first writing out the Hebrew alphabet for me and then putting up with endless stupid questions about what various signs said and how to pronounce them (incidentally, I have the distinct impression that the Hebrew alphabet is harder than the grammar but that may be only because I know even less about the latter). By the end of the week I was confidently saying not only “I need more coffee” (roughly, “Anee rotsee odd cafe”) and “bathroom, please” (“sheeruteem bevakeshaw”) but even, my favourite, “my friend will pay” (“ha chaver shale yeshalem”) which, as we were on a sponsored trip, was not only useful but mostly true. At first I thought I must be speaking this handful of words with a flawless accent because people clearly did understand and seemed impressed. Then it occurred to me that there might not be any one accent given the constant influx of people from who knows where, often bringing with them the local liturgical pronunciation.

Finally I decided the real explanation was that in Israel there is no shame in mispronouncing Hebrew words provided you’re trying. In part I suspect it’s because they’re a bit short of sympathetic gentile foreigners. But more than that, Israel has a national narrative that, as it is far more compelling than Canada’s, creates far less trouble over diversity than our shapeless, pointless multiculturalism. The country experiences a constant influx of people from America, Argentina, and for that matter Ethiopia who have every right to be in Israel and every right to speak Hebrew but who currently don’t and must be taught.

Partly for this reason, Israel’s third language miracle is that in a region where even the most trivial events are wired to ancient hatreds language didn’t seem to be wired to much of anything. And I don’t just mean Hebrew. My limited opportunities for observation suggested that while the division between native Hebrew speakers and native Arabic speakers is not exactly unrelated to certain other unresolved quarrels it is not, in itself, a flashpoint either.

During our trip we spent less than a day in the West Bank, and bits of another day in a Druze town in the Golan Heights, so I had much less opportunity to do well-intentioned harm to the Arabic language. I didn’t manage to learn the alphabet at all, though one Israeli Arab journalist insisted, pointing to his own hand-written notes, that Arabic script consists of separate letters despite the fondness of sign-makers for long lines with bits on them. But I did learn to mispronounce “thank you”, as either “soukhran” or “shokran” depending on my mood, and no one seemed to mind. Instead they took it, as intended, as an awkward gesture of appreciation for their hospitality. (Even my semi-articulate “no thank you” to a young Ramallah entrepreneur persuaded of my urgent need for chewing gum was received in a friendly way.) And I noticed that a discussion between an Israeli intelligence officer fluent in Arabic and a Druze fluent in Hebrew thanks to a lengthy security-related stay in an Israeli jail was conducted without the least linguistic animosity despite the evident motives each had for learning to overhear the other.

Canadians often feel that language is necessarily awkward here because it relates to one of the two major historical issues we do confront and you all know what it is. But, a propos of the Chinese curse about living in historic times, I think Israelis are relaxed about language partly because they have more important concerns like Kassam rockets and suicide bombers. Perhaps Canadians sweat language because we have the luxury of doing so. If so, let’s not. I don’t see what good it does, and I sure liked how they did it in Israel.

Indeed, on leaving I confidently answered “Shalom” to the security greeter and it didn’t cause any problems. Maybe they were just glad to be rid of me and my mispronunciations. But I doubt it. They all seemed so nice.

“To da.” Thank you. My friend will pay.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Woo hoo. Gonna have a nuclear war. Tens of millions dead! Countless cities laid waste! Bring it on. Yee haw. If a member of the Bush administration said such a thing it would have raised eyebrows around the world so high as to dent ceilings. So why is it unremarkable when a senior Chinese general says it? We have met the enemy all right.

Maj.-Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the People's Republic of China told foreign reporters last week that if, in response to some unspecified Chinese action (think island off east coast), "the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons.... We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese."

Chinese officials then said these were just his "personal views." Well yes. Who among us hasn't put on the uniform of his country's army and then threatened to incinerate tens of millions of Americans just as our own individual opinion?

The thunderous silence from the left that greeted the general's remarks is ominous. Progressives claim to embrace western values. Yet the selectivity of their outrage poses a menace to their own civilization that couldn't be more dangerous if it were deliberate.

I know, I know, that's the sort of statement that can get a fellow accused of hyperbole. But Joni Mitchell just told Reader's Digest, "Never was America so internationally hated, and rightfully so." As if they were the ones deliberately blowing up children in Iraq and subway trains in London.

So take a deep lung-full of Beijing air and, if you survive, answer me this: The Chinese communist government has done such appalling damage to that country's environment that peasants with stinging eyes and hacking coughs are daring to protest and even riot. To listen casually to their conversation, you could become convinced that our left-wingers are so devoted to the environment that they despise political and economic arrangements harmful to it. For instance, the late progressive historian Christopher Lasch sneered that capitalism's vision of long-term economic development was to leave North America a "smoking ruin." So why aren't people who consider this indictment forceful just a bit less happy with the Chinese regime? Especially as what we have here is history repeating itself as tragic farce.

During the Cold War, despoiling nature was generally held by radicals to be among the West's mortal sins, along with patriarchy, abuse of human rights and belligerence. Yet the Bolsheviks' transformation of the Soviet Union into a toxic waste dump 11 time zones wide went unremarked. (Hey, comrades, remember the Aral Sea?) After the Iron Curtain crumbled, progressive people harrumphed that, well of course, they'd always been against it, but they'd been busy protesting Love Canal, then the cat had to go to the vet, and you know... But now it's happening again. What excuse is there for this second strangely silent spring? Once could be misfortune; twice sounds like culpability.

Meanwhile, on human rights, the Chinese regime is snuggling up to Zimbabwe's Mad Bob Mugabe and selling him weapons while he starves his people, an act of diplomacy as inept as it is sinister. And it is deploying troops to Sudan -- and not to stop the slaughter. If it were George Bush, there would be comments. As there would about the massive military buildup. Which brings me back to nuclear war.

If there's one thing for which leftists earned cheap applause from themselves over many years, it was their courageous opposition to mass extermination from the sky. Down with megadeath intellectuals. Make love, not war. Blah blah blah. Now we get this threat from the Chinese, accompanying their apparent determination to invade a small country (also a sin if George Bush or Tony Blair does it) on the theory, so far as one can tell, that, while Taiwan was only part of China for a very brief part of its history, all those Beijing considers Chinese must live under one government. So where's the outrage?

Robert Frost famously supposedly called liberals people too broad-minded to take their own side in a quarrel. And while dissent and debate are unquestionably a source of strength in a free society, disloyalty is not. It does not seem too strong a term for those who claim to hate poverty, oppression, environmental degradation and bloodcurdling threats of nuclear war, but only actually mind when it's us. Even when it's not.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The newspapers tell me there's a line of golf balls with Bible verses on them. It is a pleasure to return from the Holy Land and find this teed up for me. It's like a little bit of manna on a tiny white stick. Harken unto me, O manufacturers. In the Land of Scot have you made balls bearing passages including 2 Timothy 4:7 ("I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.") That one makes some sense, since according to Hebrews 11:1 "faith is ... the evidence of things not seen." Which in my case would include not only improvements in my score but, all too often, my ball itself.

But you also used Ezekiel 46:9 ("But each shall go out straight ahead") and Isaiah 40:26 ("Lift up your eyes on high and see ... not one is missing") which prompts the immediate thought that many Bible passages must be taken allegorically, as the latter appears to contravene the rule "Lift not thy head until thy follow-through be complete." The former I do not ever expect to see fulfilled even in an allegorically comprehensible fashion.

Before I deliver my sermon on the sphere ("Blessed are they who lay up, for they shall experience bogey not triple") I should acknowledge the hazards, lateral and otherwise, of experiencing faith-related inspirations while visiting Jerusalem. I'm told Israel has a hospital ward full of tourists who were unexpectedly the second coming. So let me stipulate that I made no experiment at the Sea of Galilee respecting unusual buoyancy. (I did in the Dead Sea but apparently that doesn't count.)

I also won't bore you with the story of watching my own mother, a few years back, hit a special floating golf ball on a high, graceful arc into a pond to whose murky bottom it promptly sank. There is already far too much room in golf for Job 8:2: "How long wilt thou speak these things? And how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a strong wind?" Especially in the clubhouse after the round. Maybe I'll get it on a shirt. But the simple fact is that I am entitled to put "Matthew 3:3" on my ball.

Yea, verily, I say unto you, I have not only heard, I have personally been, a voice crying in the wilderness. Not in the Judean desert. In the rough down the left side of the fairway. As a matter of fact, I think I wandered there for 40 strokes. Why do you think I was crying? It is true that my ball tends not so much to cross Jordan as to splash ignominiously into it. But then, Moses didn't clear the last water hazard either, so I could get his name on a ball. Or Jonah's. I cannot say for sure that a whale ever actually swallowed one of my balls, but if not it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

To those Talmud scholars who point out that Jonah got back to dry land, I say I have skipped balls over ponds and had them come to rest under trees that might have been gourds. You don't know they weren't. You weren't there. OK, so it wasn't in Nineveh; I can't hit it that far. But my brother-in-law once successfully played a ball bobbing up and down on some seaweed. Never mind Jonah; how about Lazarus?

Please don't go rending your plaid pants here. I have great respect for both golf and religion. Both speak of suffering and redemption, the futility of good works without grace, and the necessity or at least the inevitability of humility. What golfer has not staggered from the course with "tekel" ringing in his or her ears? (From Daniel 5:27, "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting," it is the original "writing on the wall" or, in this case, the scorecard.) I routinely repent my misdeeds the whole way from the first tee to the 18th green. And which will take longer to arrive, the Messiah or a teacher who will cure our slice? Oh, right. The teacher. Even Billy Graham once said God always answered his prayers except on the golf course.

So another verse that would go naturally on a golf ball is Genesis 3:17, at least the "cursed is the ground for thy sake" bit. I've also seen the thorns and thistles of Genesis 3:18 up close although I didn't eat the herb of the field. Instead it wrapped itself around the hozzle of my 7-iron causing me to duff my shot. A few experiences like that and I've found myself thinking if the moon is going to turn to blood it should do it now so I don't have to write down my score. Plus I wouldn't be surprised to learn that shank rides a pale horse.

Wait a minute. This whole Bible golf thing will never work. At least not until some kind theological liberal edits out Exodus 20:7. You know. That silly bit about taking the Lord's name in vain.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Do you realize I’ve never even made a phone call on my computer? Or owned a BlackBerry? But Og have fire. Og modern. Og see future coming. Og worried. Og laugh at recent Citizen story that growing number of North Americans have only cellphones, not land lines, to be as isolated from telephone solicitors as if they lived in a cave. There are now 183 million “mobile subscribers” in the United States and 17 million in Canada (all, I note, with driver’s licences), but a proposal last year for “a free, ‘opt-in’ cellphone White Pages in the U.S. was shelved” due to fear of solicitation. And most people don’t list their cellphones in the current mastodons-R-us white pages in Canada. Don’t they want their drapes cleaned and a new long-distance plan?

Alas they do not. The story went on that 30 per cent of residential land lines in the U.S. now have unlisted numbers, costing their owners $1 billion a year in protection money, and in Canada the situation is thought to be similar. Then it quoted the managing partner of “a research firm specializing in phone books” (Og not know this job exist) that one suboptimal result of people eccentrically seeking more control over total strangers shouting in their ears at inconvenient moments about things they don’t want is having to program hundreds of friends’ numbers into our cell phones.

“What if you misplace your cellphone, lose it, drop-kick it across the airport like I’ve done? What about old army buddies or high-school friends who would like to reach you, but they don’t have your number? What about hospitals or strangers who need to get in touch with you fast in an emergency?” She went on to predict better filters on land lines, including one ring for friends and another for carpet cleaners.

Lady, that opinion is so last Wednesday. Kids 20 years from now won’t know what a land line is. We’ll all be communicating with wireless broadband, or fibre optics, or maybe a lepton vortex traducer. But we won’t be listening to eight tracks, we won’t be sending faxes and we won’t be using phone lines. I’m not saying I like this stuff, but like Marshall McLuhan, I’m determined to understand it before it rumbles over me.

Just for starters, we’ll soon store our personal call lists in our computers and download it into our cellphones as needed. I can already link my cellphone to my computer with a USB cable (the up-and-coming universal standard that ... what’s this? A laptop “firewire” port?). And for less than a month’s phone service, I can purchase software that will permit me to use the mobile phone as a modem. Unless, of course, I go ye olde wireless route instead.

Very shortly, your cellphone and your computer will be not just buddies but mother ship and pod, like Thunderbirds 2 and 4. Your wireless headset will link to the computer at home and elsewhere to a “cellphone” that is, essentially, a smaller portable chip platform. Actually, in about 10 minutes the headset will have the chip in it; you can already get a one-gigabyte smart drive in a Swiss Army knife. (Og once worship computer with gigabyte hard drive. Back of cave now full of that junk.) Then you’ll get voice activation and a heads-up display and the whole earth will be a hotspot for the headset, in the brief period before we get chips implanted in our heads.

In short, I probably won’t have to retire to Bedlam; it will come to me. But not as a telephone solicitor. I don’t know that hordes of old army buddies are looking for me (or that strangers need to contact me fast in emergencies; what’s that about?), but if so they can find me by my website. You do know how to google, don’t you?

Sympathizing with Chesterton’s neighbours who didn’t want house numbers, I do like the fact that instead of an impersonal phone number that changes every time I move, I now have a website and personalized e-mail address that, by the time you’ve finished your latte, will probably also be my Voice-over-Internet Protocol phone “number.” But I’m more than a bit unhappy that Montreal has parking meters that send real-time wireless alerts to the ticket dude the second your time expires, and that Aspen has wireless pre-paid in-car meters. Soon, the parking meters will be talking to me or, more probably, my computer. “He’s let the time expire.” “Well, isn’t that just so like him? Just yesterday, the washing machine told me he’d left his damp socks in there since Thursday and...” Then they’ll go off and play in that computer poker tournament.

Og remember when men talked to each other using voice. Og sad. On top of which I think my ear is ringing.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

JERUSALEM - The problems of the Middle East are clearly horrendous. But by coming here, I have learned something important. And bad. The events of the last 12 years have convinced a significant portion of Israeli public opinion that “there is no one for us to talk to on the other side.” How would you like me to persuade them otherwise? I am here as a guest of the Canada-Israel Committee, in case that affects your judgment about my judgment. We have seen a number of officials and commentators, including some Palestinians, and others whose profession is not public policy. Some were not “hawks” or right-wingers on other issues, let alone ultra-Orthodox, and seemed bitterly disappointed to have been driven to this conclusion. But driven they were.

The background is the upcoming unilateral “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, the forced removal of all the roughly 8,000 settlers there and the destruction of their farms. It is painful for Israelis for several reasons. Economically, these settlers are very productive farmers. Theologically, withdrawing them seems finally to give an explicit “No” to the question of a Greater Israel, and could lead to violent resistance, to Jews killing Jews. But there is also bitter non-biblical argument that withdrawing now, in this way, is strategically unwise because it rewards the violence of the “Second Intifada.”

Normally this claim would be persuasive, and it is for a sizable minority. But a decisive share of the Israeli centre rejects it because they have come to the bitter conclusion that the Palestinian leadership, and many of its supporters, simply do not react rationally to incentives. Israel is moving unilaterally in Gaza, and in the West Bank (establishing “facts on the ground” by building the security wall and expanding many settlements), because it feels it has no one to talk to.

To the claim that this disengagement will teach the Palestinians that violence works, the reply is that everything seems to teach them that, including disastrous defeats. Many feel as though they are trapped in a zombie movie, facing adversaries who are neither clever nor agile but are insatiably aggressive. The Palestinians deserve far better, and should curse the leaders who led them into this impasse. So should Israelis, as it poses hideous long-term difficulties; the situation of the Palestinians is both grim and unjust. But just because something is bad doesn’t mean it can’t happen, especially in this part of the world.

There is obviously no shortage of people the Israeli government could talk to about what for the sake of convention I will call the Middle East peace process, from smug outsiders to various local players. The problem is that much of the Israeli public thinks the outsiders are fatuously indifferent to their security while those more directly involved are either incapable of keeping their commitments or, worse, insincere in giving them. They can easily get yet more soothing assurances from Palestinian leaders about dealing with the violence in their own time and their own way. But why would they want to?

The crocodile in the vestibule here is the Holocaust. It makes Israelis acutely aware of the insane anti-Semitism that swirls around the Middle East (starting with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel and Holocaust denial). And they know perfectly well the world didn’t care while the rail cars were rolling to Majdanek and Belzec. So when interlocutors overseas or from the Palestinian Authority say that essentially they still don’t care, it creates an insuperable, senseless obstacle to further discussion. I had the chance to ask some Palestinian negotiators whether they had been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, and not one had. (Anwar Sadat went, and paid with his life for making peace.)

I am not Jewish and have, as far as I am aware, no Jewish ancestors. But I have stood in the Hall of Remembrance and wept, for all mankind but also for the Jews in particular, and I know the names of the six main death camps. “Empty rail cars. ... What have you done with the Jews?” If you do not understand that the first condition of a “settlement” is “No Second Holocaust,” you are not someone the Israelis can, or should, talk to.

I knew the Middle East was a hideous mess. But I discovered something new that matters for peace and a decent life for Palestinians. Israelis must be persuaded that there is someone for them to talk to, not just a zombie that lurches relentlessly toward them. Right now many do not think so. And I do not know what to tell them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If the stress, heat and noise of modern urban life are getting you down, how about a little Summer Moonshine? Relax with P.G. Wodehouse in the bucolic calm of Walsingford Hall in the county of Berkshire, where the sun is shining, the inhabitants are puttering about playing tennis, reminiscing about the old days in Poona, and bathing. Uh, except young Tubby Vanringham, just icily informed by his ex-fiancee that the houseboat has been rented and its tenant “will not want to look out of his window and see strangers – fat strangers – hurling themselves past it.” Alas, all is not well in Walsingford Hall. Indeed, though his wife floats serenely above it all, proprietor Sir Buckstone Abbot is so strapped for cash the wolf is “practically glued to the door.” His daughter Jane, a pillar of strength in dealing with the unavoidable paying guests, is secretly engaged to a penniless cad named Adrian Peake. Tubby and his fiancee are estranged. And the dreadnought Princess von and zu Dzornitzchek, only prospective buyer of Walsingford Hall, will not be amused to find that the stepson she evicted from her life some years back has gotten his revenge by writing a play about her and is now at the hall seeking to detach Jane’s affections from the vile Peake and transfer them to himself.

P.G. Wodehouse may have left behind his most memorable creations, Bertie Wooster and the incomparable Jeeves, in crafting this tale, but his powers of intricate plot and sparkling dialogue are in full bloom. Even Lady Abbott becomes ruffled by the appearance of her long-lost brother Sam, unleashing plot complications that include no fewer than three main characters having their clothes stolen simultaneously in an attempt to stop a fatal set of legal papers being served on the hapless Tubby. Mind you, Wodehouse assures us, her assertion that “you could have knocked me down with a feather” was quite untrue as “The feather had not been grown by bird that could have disturbed her balance for an instant.”

If Wodehouse does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as wits like Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward it is only because he surpasses them all in description and, above all, dialogue. When Sir Buckstone’s secretary recoils on hearing the family name of Tubby’s brother Joe, the latter observes “You seem startled and revolted.” Later, urging his host at all costs to keep Peake far away (“Is he the sort of chap who would be in league with chaps?” Buck asks. “Exactly the sort.”) Joe asks “‘Have you any dogs at Walsingford Hall?’ ‘Eh? Oh, yes, a couple of dogs.’ ‘If Peake tries to get into the house, set them on him.’ ‘They’re only spaniels.’ ‘Spaniels are better than nothing,’ said Joe.” Finally, urging Sir Buckstone to summon the courage of his days hunting big game: “‘Many a time, no doubt, as you made your way through the African jungle – ’ ‘There aren’t any jungles in Africa.’ ‘There aren’t?’ ‘No.’ ‘Negligence somewhere,’ said Joe.”

On the surface such a romantic comedy has much in common with The Importance of Being Earnest. In the final reconciliation scene (it gives nothing away to say a Wodehouse tale ends happily) Tubby assures his fiancee that on top of everything else “‘I’ll never say “Yup” again.’ He had said the one thing needed to complete her happiness, removed the one obstacle that stood between them.” But such a promise is quite alien to Oscar Wilde. Wodehouse’s lovebirds’ misunderstanding had concerned a willingness to trust, and their reconciliation a willingness to change, particularly his losing habits she found painfully vulgar. It touches profoundly on matrimonial happiness, quite unlike the question of one’s Christian name.

The wit sparkles and the plot dances and Wodehouse himself claimed his stories involved “ignoring real life altogether”. But it’s not true. They give sublime pleasure by assuring us decent, resourceful people who conduct themselves with grace and wit will overcome life’s myriad difficulties and end up happy.

If you fancy such a vision, you can still book a room at Walsingford Hall. For as it turns out, the vulgar, penniless process-server was actually… well, you’ll see. And there’s no better way to spend a summer weekend.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So it comes. A major terror attack against a key U.S. ally, accompanied by wild rhetoric. What are we going to do about it? The first suggestion of the usual suspects will be to cut and run, to draw the curtains, hide under the bed and hope the bad guys go after someone else. It is the one thing we must not do. To treat these atrocities as a fresh argument, to suggest that Britain should now change its Iraq policy, or that Canada should now bolt from Afghanistan, or even to call it vindication of an earlier argument to avoid such engagements lest it provoke such an attack, is shameful.

To criticize either venture as unjust, or imprudent, is another question. But to refuse to fight someone because they might hit back is the ignoble creed of the bully -- and bullies are cowards.

It is far from clear that the London bombings even vindicate the argument that invading Iraq would provoke terrorism, let alone that, if true, this argument ought to have frightened us off. Had the United States not toppled the Taliban after 9/11, or left Saddam Hussein in place, would the enemies of the West and of modernization have been less aggressive? What provoked 9/11? If you answer "Andalusia," you admit that nothing we can plausibly do would placate our adversaries. And Osama bin Laden did give that as part of his "explanation" for 9/11.

Osama bin Laden also famously said people naturally back a strong horse. Which in his intellectual circles is probably true. And if so, it has pretty obvious implications.

Of course we should not allow our adversaries to dictate our strategy. But in devising it, we certainly should estimate their probable responses in light of how they think. If they consider us decadent and weak, anything we do that might tend to appear soft in their eyes will almost certainly make them more aggressive. (Including the media's gleeful tally of the "mounting death toll" in Iraq as though it would not be more than a little peculiar if the total number of deaths decreased over time and as though the Allies had not had more killed on D-Day alone than the U.S. has in two years of war and insurgency in Iraq.)

If the British government were willing to leave Iraq because London was bombed this time, what demands do you expect to accompany the next bombing? And if our own government were to abandon Afghanistan because London was bombed, what will it do when Montreal is attacked?

Yes, Montreal. Those who took responsibility in London warned all crusader governments to withdraw from Afghanistan. That means us. They hate us. They want to kill us. It is no misunderstanding and it is no joke.

A story in yesterday's Citizen on the kidnapping of the Egyptian chargé in Iraq, who has since apparently been murdered, said the group claiming responsibility "condemned Egypt for allying itself with 'Jews and Christians.'" Note that they dispensed with the customary verbal legerdemain of "Zionists and Crusaders" and blurted out their hatred of who we are, not what we do. Would anyone on the left like to comment? Here is real hate loose in the world, hairy and howling. Does it seem a good time to babble about vibrancy? Blame America first? Poetically compare the U.S. to a shark and France to a seagull? There are dead bodies in the streets of London.

I won't call the London bombings a tragedy; they were an atrocity. But I was never among those who assumed that it was OK to take a strong stand against terrorists and their sponsors because they couldn't hit back. So the fact that they have struck back is not, to me, evidence that our policy is mistaken. I am against these people because they are evil, not because they are weak.

As it happens, I am not impressed by their strength. Given the power of modern technology in the hands even of an imbecile, and the porosity of open societies, I think it's remarkable how little harm we've suffered from terrorists, at least so far. But in the end, what does it matter? What if the bad guys are strong, even stronger than us? Is that a reason to give in? Shall we fight weak evil and grovel before the powerful kind? I doubt it's prudent and, even if it is, it's prudence purchased at far too high a price.

I'm not saying it would be easy to advise a statesman confronted by overwhelmingly powerful evil. But I do know what Winston Churchill decided in 1940. And I agree with Dwight Eisenhower that a soldier's pack is never as heavy as a slave's chains.

Should we not fight these people because they are strong? That is the mentality of the bully and the coward. This is a war. Whose side are you on?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Good morning, class. Last week we examined how the rich trove of artifacts from ancient Egypt still presents serious problems of individual interpretation and overall meaning. We turn now to the equally puzzling case of Kannada. We have no shortage of objects from this late second millennium civilization. But we face grave difficulty developing a comprehensive understanding of it. Slide 1 shows a typical early 21st-century plastic bag of a sort that persists in extraordinary quantities, though how so much of it wound up in landfills on the other side of the world has yet to be explained. It is clearly the product of a technologically advanced civilization, both from the materials and the lettering on the attached tab, in Roman script, known from excavations of the Cro-soft culture to indicate a rudimentary but serviceable portable computing device with communications capabilities. So why is the bag itself prominently stamped with primitive hieroglyphics?

The first, a triangle composed of three arrows, suggests a religious doctrine of a closed, harmoniously cyclical cosmos. The number "04" within it, in the more advanced script, may indicate a mystery cult in which a trinity was set before the masses, but acolytes were told of a fourth, central truth. Perhaps that, despite the Great Circle of death and rebirth, this particular item would probably end up in a Chinese landfill. We're not sure.

The next two emblems may depict sacred child-rearing practices. A young child and an infant wear what appears to be ritual headgear while a diagonal bar, presumably indicating disapproval, superimposed over the baby but behind the child may suggest an age limit. An eccentric alternative hypothesis is that they convey some sort of warning.

It is hardly credible that persons sufficiently advanced to be able to use such computing devices would need non-verbal safety instructions as elementary as "Do not suffocate your own child with this sack like a dunce." But the accompanying script does appear to suggest either that the commoners were in the habit of doing such things or at least that the priestly caste supposed that they were.

(Slide 2, a related paper artifact, non-verbally depicts a Kannadian baffled by assembly of a simple item using a fixed-position communication device to receive enlightenment from a temple of home furnishing.)

We use the term priestly caste functionally, of course. It means not all persons devoted to advocating a religion, let alone one necessarily involving a deity, a fixed moral law and reward or punishment in an afterlife, but those persons widely acknowledged to hold the secret key to the central myths of the civilization and invested with ceremonial garments appropriate to public rulings on them. In Kannadian society, at least in the Plastibagean Era, the dominant cosmology seems to have been the cult of Char-Tur, a jealous God.

Some data suggest the cult of Char-Tur was long unknown but then spread rapidly. But others argue for geographical diversity, noting persistent regional millennial expectations that an Easter Island-like icon, "The Khlyne," was about to perform some mighty feat of defiance of Char-Tur. Some Char-Tur ceremonial objects bear so many features suggesting marriage rituals that many scholars deny they could have any other meaning. Yet they do not depict a man and a woman, while certain oracular pronouncements relating to Char-Tur justified xenophobia toward the Bouch people as so backward they still married men to women. Of course, not all religious dogma is to be taken literally. But what is to be done with this contention remains unclear.

Some archeologists even insist there were two "McLellans" and only a dating error led to identifying one upholding traditional marriage with one taking the opposite view just five years later. Others believe that, despite egalitarian rhetoric, Kannadian leaders ruled like Pharaohs, noting that the supposed hieroglyph for accountability, "Shapiro," faded quickly. They also point to the official, treated with some outward respect, whose function was to persuade the people that being fit and healthy was better than being a sickly bladder of lard. We cannot be certain whether either officialdom or the masses really thought the latter dim enough to need such advice yet wise enough to follow it.

We aren't even sure why these people apparently celebrated two opposed national days yet, on the latter, performed a hymn originally composed for the former.

In short, the Sphinx is not the only puzzle out there and Kannada is not yet in the bag.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]