Almost from the moment it became known that a serious effort was under way to bring Narnia to the big screen, people have been debating whether Disney would trash the Christian message, or transmit it faithfully. We bring good tidings. This is indeed the Lion of Judah. The question of how the film handled, mishandled or dropped the specifically Christian elements in the book is clouded by the other debate prior to the film’s release, about whether Narnia was necessarily Christian. This debate was mysterious because the Christian message of Narnia was not something awkwardly tacked on and therefore easy to remove.

The book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is “subtle” in the sense that there are no crosses, no one says, “Hey, guys, Aslan’s Jesus, I just realized” and there are no virgin births. You don’t get a communion cup dashed in your face. But the whole structure of the story, and the world it depicts, is fundamentally Christian.

It’s not the brave children and talking animals; those are a dime a dozen in children’s books and movies. Nor is it the presence of magic per se. It too appears in countless fantasies, some non-religious and some expressly anti-Christian. It’s that the Deep Magic from the dawn of time (the Old Testament and the covenant of law with Israel) is replaced by magic deeper still from before the dawn of time (the New Testament and the covenant of mercy with all mankind) through the agonizing, humiliating, willing death of a victim without sin, of God made flesh.

How any adult alerted to the possibility that this is the key metaphor could doubt it, I do not know. When Aslan and the Witch discuss the fate of traitors it is easy for a small child to think only of Edmund’s betrayal of his siblings. But it is impossible for adults not to grasp that the real topic is sin. And the willing sacrifice of a victim without sin can only be a reference to Jesus; it has never been suggested in any other context.

As the pivot of both the theology and the plot, it is the most obvious and important place where the filmmakers could have messed up.

As Lucy and Susan sit weeping by the Stone Table, Lucy reaches for her magic cordial capable of healing any wound. Had she so much as attempted to give some to Aslan, introducing the slightest doubt about whether he had been revived by mere sorcery, it would have destroyed the integrity of the movie. But she does not. Aslan is clearly dead and beyond any mortal or medical help. Instead, the Stone Table cracks (that would be the Decalogue, for the symbolically challenged) and, as in the book, Aslan reappears to tell the girls that while the deep magic condemns traitors to death, the deeper magic says the willing sacrifice of a blameless victim will cause death itself to run backwards. Here, critically, the movie was exactly faithful.

Even so, the rewriting necessary to compress the book into available on-screen time must have offered tempting opportunities to remove rather than rephrase key concepts to avoid controversy. Instead, where it mattered, the film was neither heavy-handed nor light-fingered.

When the Witch reminds Aslan of the Deep Magic, he cuts her off with, “I was there when it was written.” No such line exists in the book, but it conveys the theology unflinchingly. And the important dialogue about Aslan not being tame, but being good, was rearranged to furnish a strong ending, but included fundamentally intact.

I only noticed two semi-significant theological omissions. First, the book’s brief references to the Emperor-over-the-Sea (God the Father) could have been equally briefly included in the film, and should have been. Less jarringly, the movie leaves out Susan and Lucy asking the risen Aslan if he is a ghost, in deliberate parallel with doubting Thomas. But on screen Aslan was so clearly not a ghost that it didn’t matter. We could see who He was.

The film carries the usual disclaimer that no animals were harmed in its production. Nor were any doctrines.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Aslan’s roar will shake Narnia to its foundations today as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe fills the big screen. My own roar is nowhere near as impressive, but I will nevertheless roar it at anyone who still claims he is just one more talking lion. I’ve long said some people should be prevented from owning tools, not legally but through social pressure, because their home-repair work is infallibly as ugly as it is structurally unsound. And I increasingly feel that many surprisingly literate people should be shunned if they do not either avoid books or, if they must read them, do it quietly and avoid offering grotesquely inappropriate opinions.

Consider recent bickering about whether C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories are Christian. I confess that as a child I missed the connection entirely. (Lewis once said their goal was “a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination.” I guess it worked because I’ve always aspired, like Puddleglum, to live like a Narnian even if there is no Narnia.) But once the analogy was pointed out to me I never doubted it. And if the filmmakers have not made a faithful adaptation, in both senses, it will be through deliberate vandalism or wilful blindness. This is no generic fairy tale with a few clumsy Christian metaphors tacked on; the whole thing is built on sin, repentance, sacrifice and redemption.

Hollywood frequently mucks up adaptations on purpose. For instance, when the hero of the classic Victorian novel The Four Feathers quits his regiment right before it is sent to Sudan, his friends and fiancee, wrongly thinking he had advance warning, accuse him of cowardice. In the recent film version with Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger, he did have advance warning and was bravely anti-war. Evidently the makers of the Narnia film are not going to scribble a moustache on Aslan in that manner. So what is all the argument about, other than perhaps disingenuous marketing?

Apparently many people manage not to realize books mean stuff. In college I knew a very bright guy and avid reader who claimed he’d sped-read the strange fantasy novel Voyage to Arcturus. No doubt he had passed his eyes over the text. But when I asked his interpretation of the most blatant symbolism he merely shrugged, as though reading fiction were some giant form of solitaire, a silly pastime.

If books have nothing to do with life, why would living beings be interested? Even pulp fiction has a simple message, about virtue downing a few stiff drinks and then conquering vice (or not, but if you read that sort of thing you are to blame). Conflicting interpretations of more subtle works are likely given that life is complex. But not failure to realize anything is going on.

Even Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s generally superb The Rebel Sell deplores the countercultural desire to “find Middle Earth or visit the Great Old Ones in the ‘spaces between the stars’,” as if J.R.R. Tolkien were not a great Christian writer and H.P. Lovecraft a rabid atheist. Recently the editor of a prominent Christian magazine lumped together P.G. Wodehouse, Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. Put down the book and back away slowly.

It’s like the debate over whether Mel Gibson’s The Passion was anti-Semitic. The question was vital because true Christianity cannot blame the death of Christ on “The Jews,” but for long centuries Christian teaching failed to discourage anti-Semitism while Christian tradition often actively encouraged it. But after watching The Passion I found myself wondering, with all the time people spend plunked in front of a screen, can’t anyone watch a movie any more? Most commentators seemed to sense the presence of theology, but had no idea what to do next.

Right before I saw it, someone sent me a column criticizing Mr. Gibson because “none of the Gospels describe Caiaphas, the high priest ... taunting Him on the cross, but most of those watching the film don’t know it.”

Oh oh, I thought. It sounded like not just a historical clanger but a gratuitous, malevolent rubbing in of the Jewish association. I spent the whole film worrying about this scene. Then it came. Caiaphas showed up, mocked Jesus, saying if you’re the Messiah prove it by getting down off the cross, and as he walked away Mel Gibson had Christ repeat “Forgive them father.”

So the director deliberately distorted the Gospel account to shout from the rooftops that the Jews shouldn’t be blamed. I didn’t see any commentator make this point. Pro or con, good enough or not, I could see an argument. But how could neither critics nor supporters mention giving Christ an extra line expressly for this purpose? When you watch a film or read a book you’re meant to engage in considered judgment of the moral issues, not emote randomly. And when C.S. Lewis has the Stone Table crack it’s not because it was a bad reno job.

Narnia is Christian right down to the letters on the sceptre of the Emperor-over-the-Sea. Its message may be good or bad, and the film well or badly done. But if you consider the existence of the message debatable, well, a high squeaky Raaaaaahr to you.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

King Canute never thought he could stop the tide. Back in the Dark Ages, when literacy was as rare as white teeth, people weren’t that stupid. Nowadays, however, we seem to think we can stop carbon dioxide with a regal and self-congratulatory wave of a press release. Consider, as 10,000 delegates gather at a UN conference in Montreal to be well-intentioned, that Canada signed the Kyoto Accord in 1997 and committed to reducing our “greenhouse gas” (GHG) emissions by six per cent from 1990 levels. But we actually did nothing and the emissions went up instead.

Someone please explain this to me. It was certainly predictable that as Canada’s economy expanded, so would its use of fuel and its output of exhaust gasses, including the “greenhouse’’ kind. It has been so ever since man first set beard alight with this newfangled “fire’’ thing. How could the Liberals not realize this link would continue to exist until they took steps to break it or, even weirder, have this realization and stop there?

If I were in power, I wouldn’t say taxes were too high, promise to reduce them, then do nothing. My tax-reduction measures might fail though ill fortune or ineptitude. But I would have some. Now, as it happens, I don’t believe man is setting the sky on fire. But if I did I’d sure as heck try to put it out.

According to G.K. Chesterton, “We must see things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try to turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches.” Canute very probably believed in witches, but at least he didn’t think he was one. Can it be that in that respect he was well ahead of those now in power?

Some may object that according to Monday’s Citizen, “In the past few days, the federal government has announced climate change agreements with several provinces aimed at implementing Kyoto.” I saw that story. It implied that our government secretly did know what to do but waited for the vast UN gumflap in Montreal to announce it. So I went to the Environment Canada website and read the headline “Government of Canada Makes Steady Progress Toward the Implementation of Its Climate Change Plan.” Dude. But the text of this promising-sounding press release began: “The Government of Canada today released a discussion draft of cross-cutting provisions of proposed regulations that will govern greenhouse gas emission reductions from large industrial facilities.”

Uh, that can’t be it. Wait, here’s one from last Thursday: “Canada and Saskatchewan are Working Together to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” But then it says: “The Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan today announced they will provide up to $40 million for initial feasibility work on two projects that will help Saskatchewan reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The announcement was made today by federal Environment Minister Stephane Dion, Saskatchewan Industry and Resources Minister Eric Cline, federal Natural Resources Minister John McCallum and federal Finance Minister Ralph Goodale. The funding is the highlight of a new five-year Memorandum of Understanding on climate change between the Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan.”

If that’s the highlight, what’s the unimpressive bit? That it took three senior federal ministers to put a match to this damp squib? Or that last Tuesday’s press release headline -- “The Government of Canada Takes a Significant Step to Implement Its Climate Change Plan and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions” -- was the arguably overdramatized prelude to “The Government of Canada today took a significant step in implementing Canada’s Climate Change Plan when it added six greenhouse gases (GHG) to Schedule 1 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act 1999 (CEPA 1999).”

You may find it troubling that our politicians think they can persuade us this represents significant progress. I find it troubling that they have persuaded themselves of it. It’s proverbially bad when politicians start believing their press clippings. I think these ones believe their press releases.

How can we tolerate such a thing? We might quarrel with the beliefs, or specific actions, of politicians who believe in the threat of man-made climate change and acted against it, or politicians who did neither. But what can we do with those who claim to believe in it but haven’t done anything ... except congratulate themselves? At least Macbeth’s “weird sisters” used a little eye of newt. They didn’t just put out press releases about feasibility studies on cauldrons. When we talk about the crisis in governance in Canada let’s rank a pervasive air of unreality high up on the list.

We laugh at medieval people for burning witches. I imagine they, in return, would laugh at us for not realizing it was actually the Enlightenment that saw widespread thaumaturge combustion, possibly contributing to the global warming about which Thomas Jefferson wrote.

Or for thinking we are witches, who can change the climate by the mere exercise of our minds.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What’s the matter with elections? If we can’t discuss ideas, can we at least discuss why not? After years of pondering what would constitute good public policy, with results many people consider preposterous, I find myself increasingly preoccupied with why it doesn’t matter. For instance, ex-politicians Preston Manning and Mike Harris just released the second volume of their Fraser Institute series A Canada Strong and Free. And while the ideas it contains, such as private medical insurance and half-price school vouchers, are not as radical as I would like (what is?), they are almost all sensible. And quite doomed.

The media are partly to blame. At the press conference on Mssrs. Manning and Harris’s first volume, other than two technical ones from yours truly, every single question was about politics. Indeed, all were variants on: Won’t your right-wing lunacy sink Stephen Harper by revealing his secret agenda? Then the journalists went off to write about how politicians aren’t interested in discussing issues.

Not entirely without reason. A recent story in one of the Citizen’s sister papers noted that the president of Toronto’s Empire Club deliberately invited Jack Layton and Stephen Harper to speak at a time when an election was unlikely so they would discuss policy. An election lurched into view anyway, prompting Mr. Layton to tell the club on Nov. 7: “I had a speech written for today about how Canada’s prosperity depends on investing in people, infrastructure and our environment” but instead would speak about Gomery, scandal and politics. “I hope you will appreciate the circumstances that have led to a change in topic.”

Not me. I don’t care for the timing of this election. But the circumstance I really don’t appreciate is politicians thinking an election is no time to discuss serious issues. I very much doubt Jack Layton has workable answers to our environmental and infrastructure problems. But why isn’t an election the ideal time for him to try to persuade us he does? And not just him. In his joint address to the Empire and Canadian clubs the next day, Mr. Harper likewise shelved “many important issues on the national agenda” in favour of “the overriding question of ethics and accountability in our national government.”

Here Mr. Harris and Mr. Manning have something to answer for and indeed could do so. The former was premier of Ontario for seven years, the latter leader of the Official Opposition for three in name and seven in fact. Where were any of these right-wing ideas then?

I don’t object to people growing wiser with time; I might even try it myself some day. But it is one thing to explain that when I was a politician I didn’t do any of this stuff because ... and quite another to pass over this awkward question in silence. Ex-libertarian Stephen Harper immediately dismissed the proposal in volume one of A Canada Strong and Free for “substantially amending or replacing the Canada Health Act and transferring responsibility” and “financing, including federal tax points, entirely to the provinces” as “a non-starter,” but I’d bet he’ll immediately support it on leaving politics. So we badly need a volume from Mr. Manning and Mr. Harris exploring why, as Paul Wells recently noted in Maclean’s, ex-politicians reliably experience a mysterious surge in courage and clarity. Can the Lucien Bouchard now calling for “lucid” debate on making Quebec more open economically and intellectually be the same man who, as premier, angrily declared any attack on the Quebec model an attack on Quebec’s identity? Oh yeah.

I have a theory: Politics notoriously attracts people better at making promises than keeping them, which is why Paul Martin recently said “I really, really like campaigns,” and Bill Clinton still wows crowds with glorious speeches about the great stuff he’d do if he were president. But it is not entirely cynical. These guys really think good people wanting good outcomes is a policy proposal. As a result, they genuinely believe they are addressing issues when they explain how much nicer they are than their stinking mud-slinging foes. But there’s more. And it’s even more our fault than electing such confused people.

I believe modern democratic politics has become profoundly corrupt, not in the Adscam sense but in the sense that governments hand out enormous benefits to the middle class in return for our votes. It is not something we like to talk about, partly because we don’t really understand how it produces bad effects like driving federal budgets higher every year than anyone including the cabinet intends. But we also don’t like to talk about it because we know perfectly well we’re buying what the politicians are selling. We’re just haggling over the price. Does anyone doubt what would become of a politician who ran on eliminating subsidies for middle-class children’s university education, or cutting EI in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces?

Elections are supposed to be about the common good but they’re really about massive redistribution in favour of articulate, educated and well-organized voters and deep down we know it. I don’t imagine they’ll talk about that on the stump. Or that we’d listen if they did.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Wouldn’t it be easier, and more civilized, to discuss matters of common concern without them? No. In fact it would be impossible.

That conclusion will appear odd, if not offensive, to people taught to believe that it is wrong to be “judgemental” and that morality is a matter of personal taste. But in fact it is a contradiction in terms to say it is wrong to talk about right and wrong.

To admit values into a discussion of public policy certainly does not automatically require accepting the entire agenda of George W. Bush any more than does admitting religion require approval of the Spanish Inquisition. Indeed, no less an icon of the Canadian left than Tommy Douglas, father of socialised medicine and an ordained minister told the Saskatchewan legislature in April 1954 that, “I made a pledge with myself that someday, if I ever had anything to do with it, people would be able to get health services, just as they are able to get educational services, as an inalienable right of being a citizen of a Christian country.” Likewise the famous German-born American theologian Paul Tillich once said that “any serious Christian must be a socialist.”

Not everyone agrees, of course, from George Bush to the Vatican. Accepting the legitimacy of values does not commit oneself to accept the entire agenda of Karl Marx either. We need to discuss them, not in order to resolve all disagreements quickly and get on with ordering lunch, but in order to conduct arguments, and understand our own positions better than we often seem to at present.

It is from the perspective of intelligent discussion, not securing an underhanded triumph for any particular point of view, that the current mania for being non-judgmental must be judged both irritating and unsound. It is the great error against which G.K. Chesterton laboured, more than any other: The self-annihilating claim that there is no truth. If true, it can’t be, which really ought to consign it to the rubbish heap of philosophy. Instead it appears and reappears in an amazing number of guises and it is all around us today. And while it is true that it this notion seems largely to be associated with those on what can and should be called “the left”, it is manifestly evident that they don’t really believe it either and, having no legitimate stake in it, should not feel uneasy at its being banished from the discussion.

Surely supporters of homosexual marriage believe it is wrong to deny gays the right to marry. Surely they believe it is wrong to be “homophobic”. Surely they believe it is profoundly wrong to call people nasty names because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin or any number of other things like physical handicap. Indeed, would they not find widespread agreement on the last part about nasty names (including from me), though much less on the question of gay marriage?

What is at stake here then is not whether right and wrong exist, but what properly deserves to be called right. How are we possibly going to make any progress in that direction until we accept that it is right to talk about right and wrong?

It is a long and difficult journey, and it would be fatuous to suppose that we can settle all questions of morality in the next few months if only we try. Indeed, history suggests that a consensus except on the most basic points, such as that murder is wrong, is unlikely to be achieved. (Even there, no sooner is it agreed that murder is wrong than people start arguing about what constitutes murder.) The end of the discussion may be more progress within than among individuals, though that too is an outcome not to be sneered at. But it all starts with legitimizing discussions about values.

To say it is wrong to call something wrong is itself wrong, intellectually and arguably morally, as well. We all have a duty not to talk drivel, even idly, let alone polemically. There are complex discussions ahead of us about what are true values, which are most important, and how to apply them to public policy. But they can’t even start until we are clear that right and wrong are neither an illusion nor a distraction but rather the central question on any issue.

Values. They’re quite simply invaluable.

[First published for the Institute for Canadian Values]

As Canada echoes to the squawk of the running politician, I proudly lay before you Robson’s Field Guide to Elections. Hey, it beats Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, crammed with fascinating regional variations among fire hydrants, airport approach lights and clamshell grapples. Or maybe not. Elections offer many fascinating sights to connoisseurs of irascible deceptive dullness. Let us start with that noisily ubiquitous inhabitant of the political meadow, candidatus obsequious. Although the plumage of all sub-species has been uniform since the days of frock coats, and all share the characteristic thick skull and thin skin, a dull red splash reveals the Liberalis polymorphus, blue the Torius amorphous, orange the Neodemocraticus paleohippeus and a distinctive Fleur de Lys marking the Blox referenda aeternalis or Canada delenda. The Civis irritatus should to learn to distinguish them because whereas Liberals believe in big government, socialized medicine and abortion on demand, so do the NDP and the Bloc. Conservatives don’t but would deliver them anyway. Political philosophy is the beetle of this ecosystem: hideous and hidden in dank smelly holes. Pay it no mind.

Liberalis candidates can be hard to recognize because of their talent for mimicry. For instance, their mating cry of “tax cuts.” Paradoxically, it sounds like the Torius but is more melodious and varied. Poll-watchers have not reported “We will abolish the GST” in some years, but have noted a new strain of “over six years” requiring prospective mates to elect them twice to cash in. (See Vision, political in the index, as in, they have a vision of us re-electing them.) That they are no longer trying to buy your vote but merely rent it indicates not the emergence of a new sub-species but only the versatility of this pest.

Like the chirp of “We will decriminalize marijuana,” the Liberal tax-cut song is heard incessantly during elections but rarely between them. However, it is entertaining to see it provoke a Torius to burst from cover with a harsh “Ack that’s my idea,” or an even less appealing shriek of “Awk I am not an alarming conservative,” accompanied by alarming flapping and running in circles. This beast has a tendency to strut a short distance then trip over the foot it is inserting in its mouth. No one knows why.

The two other significant subspecies of candidatus obsequious are the Neodemocraticus, long noted for a boring sanctimonious droning sound but lately observed making a boring sanctimonious yapping sound, and the Blox, with its stunned look, grating cry of “Ou-AY” and total absence of sense of humour.

Election season brings out an even more elusive and uninteresting beast, the juvenile political aide or Puer pompus. Notable for the pallor caused by spending the rest of their life cycle indoors in pointless meetings and paperwork, they can also be recognized by their unnaturally clean-cut appearances and the air of inexplicable enthusiasm with which they slog through sleet to hear their candidate interrupt people’s dinners with stale platitudes. Scientists have been unable to determine whether the relationship between aide and candidate is symbiotic or mutually parasitic, as it is too repulsive to watch for any length of time.

The teeming life of the political ecosystem in this busy season includes a quite different creature, commentator obnox, as inexplicably excited, supercilious and lacking in self-awareness as the candidatus, but whose unshaven, dishevelled and pasty-looking plumage contrasts with the well-groomed, shevelled, pasty-looking plumage of the candidatus. Its unique cries seek to attract not voters but bylines and salaries. For instance: “Time will tell,” uttered with comic mock solemnity. The discerning unnaturalist will also recognize its various distinct warning cries such as “Make no mistake” when a thunderous cliché is approaching or “Vote-rich” or occasionally “Seat-rich” Ontario which signifies that they think you are stupid or ignorant because otherwise you’d know Ontario is big. You’re in it.

A campaign offers delights for the ear as well as the eye. For instance, that unique feature of political discourse, the boring blast. Where the lion’s roar is just alarming and the cricket’s chirp just soporific, politicians and lobbyists have a remarkable capacity to paralyse predators and prey by being simultaneously indignant and tedious, just part of their highly developed survival arsenal of mimicry and camouflage.

Instinct, or elaborate software programs, enable them to disappear at will into a verbal fog. For instance when one hears “The road ... has been difficult at times, but the achievements remarkable. Today, Canada has gone from economic laggard to leader, and we can look to the future with tremendous confidence” indicates that somewhere nearby lurks a Minister fiscalis, but it’s anyone’s guess where. Or which. Or why.

Yes, there’s much out there to enthrall the careful and patient observer. For instance this hydrant, with its lemon-yellow strictly cylindrical lower portion and shallow blue cap ...

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

"Take up our quarrel with the foe:/ To you from failing hands we throw/ The torch; be yours to hold it high./ If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields.” If ye break faith ... On Remembrance Day we remember, first and foremost, the men and women who fought for our freedom. Whatever their specific experiences, all risked physical or mental destruction on our behalf and it is a debt we must acknowledge because we cannot repay it. Except, as John McCrae said, by remembering why they fought and by catching the torch.

By “why they fought” I do not mean primarily the specific threats of 1914, 1939, 1950, 1984 or 2001, nor why specifically various individuals enlisted. I mean above all the fact that there is evil in the world. Yes, evil. It takes different forms in different eras; the “scandal of particularity” affects bad as well as good in this world. But there is a ghastly family resemblance to its manifestations. Examined closely, they all look like skulls.

Consider North Korea, where peasants starve in ditches while smartly uniformed police direct imaginary traffic on 10-lane roads. As the Citizen reminded us last weekend, it is officially ruled by a dead man. Officially. Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 but was declared “Supreme Leader Eternal” in the 1998 constitution. It wasn’t a case of being stuck with embarrassing hyperbole enacted in his lifetime. They deliberately put a corpse in charge. Do we need to spell it out for you?

Of course sometimes they do spell it out. For instance, the Iranian president’s recent “I-s-r-a-e-l s-h-o-u-l-d b-e w-i-p-ed ...’’ Yeah, how about that Hitler?

Of course Nazism took a specific form. It had a program that was all-embracing economically, politically and religiously, and every bit of it was evil. Completely berserk. But chillingly effective. It seems death kills. Hitler was, unfortunately, not a fool. His mind was clear. It was his soul that was mad. Evil is insane but not “not guilty by reason of insanity.” If we choose death we are responsible. Hitler did, and I thank God and the veterans he was defeated.

Stalinism also chose death, as did its North Korean branch, whose 1950 war cost the lives of 516 Canadians. So did Maoism that killed untold millions of Chinese, and Pol Potism and al-Qaeda with its overt, boastful and quite mad love of death. Lest we forget.

Some try; consider the warm critical reception for the movie Jarhead, based on Anthony Swofford’s preposterous, but apparently true, tale of a man traumatized by lack of combat. In a favourable review, Maclean’s said: “ever since Vietnam, serious combat films have had to navigate the same moral minefield -- delivering a violent spectacle of brothers in arms while brooding on the insanity of being at war in the first place. Every war movie is now about characters stuck someplace they don’t belong, asking: why am I here?” But this is pernicious nonsense: Not all soldiers are somewhere they don’t belong or understand. Soldiers stand between us and Genghis Khan and Philip II and Napoleon and Hitler and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and they should.

People like the director of Jarhead seem to think they are the first to notice war is horrible. But older movies weren’t unaware of it. They were just (irony can be so ironic) able to deal with moral complexity, that sometimes good men must do this thing lest greater evil prevail. Right after seeing Jarhead I caught the Second World War classic The Dam Busters on TV. It ends with shots of the empty mess tables, bunks and personal effects of those who didn’t come back, the scientist behind the raid devastated that 56 men didn’t return, and finally a senior pilot with “letters to write” walking alone and pondering how to tell parents and wives their sons or husbands are dead.

Yes, it is insane that good men must go to war. But it is not insane that they do go. What is insane is the perennial urge to toss the torch into a puddle instead. In the 1930s, much of the intelligentsia reacted to Nazism by saying ha ha that wacky Hitler, and called Churchill a madman. Later, such people called Reagan a warmonger and George Bush a war criminal. (They are, perhaps, less numerous in France today.) If they were redoing St. George and the Dragon they’d be on the side of the dragon.

The culture of death exerts a peculiar fascination, including on many privileged members of our society. As sci-fi philosopher Philip K. Dick observed, the death wish “Thanatos can assume any form it wishes; it can kill eros, the life drive, and then simulate it. Once thanatos does this to you, you are in big trouble ...” Indeed. Hence the eerie contrast between McCrae’s acknowledgement that the dead can fight no more and North Korea’s insistence that they can rule. It depends what you’re trying to achieve. As G.K. Chesterton said, in the end we must all chose sides.

And some who choose life must then give theirs because others have chosen death. It is that we remember on Nov. 11. And pledge to keep faith, in war and peace, by choosing life in all its dimensions.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My next business venture will be T-shirts saying "I went to North Carolina and got spots." What? You don't want to buy shares in the company? But I really did get spots, and it was great. Perhaps I should clarify. We were driving through coastal North Carolina seeking golf and passed a couple of signs saying "Fresh Shrimp and Spots." It sounded better than "Oysters Shelled or Shucked" with the implied, or inferred, subtext "Not necessarily all toxic." So once we located a nice friendly golf course whose remaining alligator was said to be hibernating, I asked the woman at the snack bar why exactly folks in those parts thought an offer of "spots" would prove commercially viable. She replied that they are a local seasonal delicacy, an ocean fish that runs in October (though some don't run fast enough, apparently).

She added spontaneously that her church was having a fish fry featuring spots that very day. And since she was having some brought over to the clubhouse she would happily save me some. At this I can hear noses wrinkling among the Canadian commentariat. But it is a mistake to assume these folks are unsophisticated just because they are friendly, patriotic, God-fearing and unfazed by alligators on the course that might be dozing.

For one thing, they had a telephone at the ninth tee linked directly to the snack bar so you could order up sandwich and coffee at the turn and hit your ball into the huge predator-enhanced pond on 10 without losing a minute. A truly sophisticated 21st-century golfing experience. Plus Wilmington has about the only nice airport I've ever seen and both it and our charming no-fuss seaside inn had a different sort of spot: wireless, hot and free.

Maybe not everyone would have enjoyed being given bread to feed the alligator whose idea of hibernation turned out to be swimming ominously about looking predatorial. Which made me wonder about the claim there was only one. But they all said if you don't bother them they won't bother you none, or words to that effect. Apparently the females (note the plural) get a little irritable in mating season but I wasn't planning to get close enough to an alligator to obtain precise data on either gender or disposition.

Spots were another story. So I called ahead to the clubhouse and, sure enough, when we finished with the ninth hole (or it finished with us) they had tender deep-fried spot waiting on a plate. Seeing as we all weren't from 'round there they offered us cutlery as genuinely nice people don't embarrass visitors. (When we mentioned the Freedom Fries on the ninth tee phone-booth menu they said they didn't dwell on it in front of "our Canadian friends" on the theory that everyone from Quebec City was a communist.) But as good guests we ate it with our fingers, following their advice on avoiding a mittful of bones. It was delicious. And I ask you: How many of the people pontificating about softwood in Canadian papers have done so, or would if invited?

It is curious that most Canadians with an interest in world affairs tend to take the same dim and distant view of "flyover America" as Noo Yawk City Democrats, despite believing the entire country is filled with Clampetts so stupid they vote for George Bush. I say these people's taste for home-grown tomatoes and home-grown values indicates greater wisdom than the average urban sophisticate can muster. But in any event it's an important socio-economic category, as a sociologist might put it, ("there's a lot of down-home folks there" is how it goes in English), and it's hard to have an intelligent view of America while regarding the country as full of exactly the sort of people one neither knows nor wishes to.

Some Canadian commentators on the trade dispute and other irritants in the relationship deplore the ignorance of foreign lands displayed by "Yanks," which is a bit much given that Yankees are only found in New England. The U.S. is actually very diverse and you would have to be quite ignorant, if deposited somewhere at random, not to know within five minutes whether you were in New England, the Midwest, the Deep South, and so on.

Everyone is no more of one mind there than here. But by its concentrated nature, foreign policy tends to reflect a discernable national character. To the extent that one can generalize, given that even the most industrious cultures have lazy members and we all share some of the deplorable qualities associated with the title of Human Bean, Americans are genuinely friendly, civil and decent. As the historian Henry Steele Commager noted, they "reversed the whole history of language to make the term 'stranger' one of welcome." But don't presume upon their hospitality, because they are not fools. And don't go picking a fight with them if you can avoid it because they are amazingly tough. The idea that our government can slap them around with a pinewood two-by-four is preposterous and if commentators got out more they would realize it. Especially if they could stand hitting their tee shot while a big old gator swims by.

Maybe I should sell T-shirts saying “Don’t tread on them.” I don’t know if they’d sell like spots but people here might usefully buy a few. Shirts or spots, I mean.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]