Mark Steyn, counting out western civilization, has reached about “seven.” In his new book America Alone, excerpted in the Oct. 23 Maclean’s, he says the Islamists won’t even have to kill us. We’ll just die off for them. Except in the Great Satan, we can’t be bothered reproducing ourselves because we’ve lost any reason for existing beyond transient pleasure. I say we may yet bounce off the mat. His thesis is, regrettably, not absurd. Listening to elite rhetoric, you’d think western Europe, and Canada, were the last word in human excellence, not the last audible word from the junk heap once called Christendom.

You must have seen the statistics Mark cites: Greece has a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman; Italy 1.2; Spain 1.1. (To stop population shrinking, given slings and arrows, takes 2.1). France nearly tops the European charts at just 1.86. But did you see the headline in Wednesday’s National Post? “‘Frightening’ surge brings U.S. to 300M people” on a story starting “The United States welcomed its 300-millionth inhabitant yesterday amid concern the country’s burgeoning population and unchecked consumption could place impossible demands on natural resources over the next few decades.”

Yuck, people. How loathsome. How… tacky. The Post story came from Britain’s Daily Telegraph, whose e-mail teaser said “Bloated America hits 300 million population/ Fears that the country’s burgeoning population and consumption could lead to an environmental disaster.” Even these organs of conservative opinion react with snobbish revulsion to the news that Americans refuse to die out. But casually letting the culture expire that gave us free inquiry, human rights and constitutional democracy can’t be made to sound like an accomplishment.

For one thing, if everybody dies, who are you going to socially engineer? As usual, Chesterton said it best: “Where there is no people, the visions perish.” How will Canada save the world without Canadians? And until we finish dying, who’s going to pay for all the social programs? Experts in a spring issue of the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Policy Options sagely advised immigration or “integrating older Canadians into the workforce” through tax breaks. Your answer to dying off from anomie is to fiddle marginal rates? As for importing millions of foreigners from very different cultures to do the work, so we can lounge about, it seems both unfair and unwise.

Besides, people who can’t be bothered to pass on the gift of life have problems worse than Canada Pension Plan funding. Our society is literally as well as figuratively sterile, and the two are not unconnected. Fashionable academics tell us there is no such thing as truth; slick politicians that there is no such thing as honour; well-fed journalists that nothing is worth going to war for. Feel like whispering that to a baby?

This spring the Citizen’s Dan Gardner, assailing Mark Steyn’s thesis, made a few good points, including: “The fertility rate of white Americans slipped below the replacement rate in the early 1970s,” and without Hispanics the U.S. fertility rate is 1.9, “the same as France.” He concluded: “No one likes to be told there is no simple answer. But that’s what the research shows … if the Pope is really concerned about falling fertility — and I hope he is — he could help do something about it by putting down the Bible and picking up a book about demographics.” But it’s a bit simple to consider “white Americans” a homogenous demographic, let alone “France.” And some might call “the Pope should put down his Bible” a simplistic answer secular intellectuals surprisingly often reach regardless of topic.

Complexity is fine. But it doesn’t preclude clarity. David Frum got it nearly right this January: “the choice to have a child is the ultimate statement of your optimism or your pessimism about the world of tomorrow. When that changes the fertility rate will rise …” Except it’s not about the world of tomorrow. It’s about life, taken as a complex whole. Does it matter or not? Modernity says not, and the results are obvious except, perhaps, to an expert. Remember that T-shirt of a weeping woman saying “I can’t believe I forgot to have children”? What do you say to an entire civilization with that problem? Besides “Goodbye,” I mean.

I say: Don’t throw in the towel yet. First, the Islamists will burn themselves out. Chronic rage is debilitating, and murderous attacks on the Anglosphere have a poor track record; so-called “demographic winter” set in first in the Axis nations than the former Soviet Union. Second, those in the West who have not given up hope have also not given up children. Kiddies don’t fit into your navel and they cramp your liberated lifestyle. But there’s more to life than hedonistic emptiness.

So stay hopeful. And welcome that 300-millionth American.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Washington is all a-twitter over Mark Foley, the disgraced gay alcoholic Republican who had to resign over “overly friendly” e-mails to congressional pages. And while I just finished complaining about too much gossip in place of news coverage, there’s a big issue here worth pondering. It’s what The Wall Street Journal online’s James Taranto has called “political hygiene”: how well parties avoid things that they would clearly see were despicable if their adversaries did them. Democrats in the United States can barely conceal their glee over this particular scandal and aren’t trying very hard, because it hits the Republicans right in the hypocritical breadbasket. Not because they had a renegade in their caucus, which could happen to anyone. What has the Democrats smelling gains in the November elections is the accusation that some senior congressional Republicans knew about the e-mails, and the sender’s unsavoury reputation among pages, but covered it up for partisan purposes, even letting him remain co-chair of a congressional caucus on children’s issues. Family values indeed.

Now a real partisan might say that the Democrats would cry cover-up regardless of the facts. And they might. Cries of “resign” are lamentably common in politics, there as elsewhere. But it doesn’t mean a lot of politicians shouldn’t in fact resign. And here there is pretty strong evidence that some Republicans knew Mr. Foley was chronically up to no good, and turned a blind eye or even winked. Certainly, and this is my key point, there is enough evidence that if it were the Democrats I would call it a scandal. So how can I do otherwise when it’s the Republicans?

I’m not actually a strong Republican partisan. I evaluate parties and policies by their contribution to conservatism, not the other way around, and the current GOP offers little in this regard. Of course their opponents might be worse, especially on national security. And I will excuse more bad things about a party if it also offers more good ones; you can’t disaggregate in politics, so you must make prudential judgments. (On the other hand, I resent being told I have to support a party just because its opponents are way worse, not least because if I sell myself that cheaply once, it invites further equally insulting offers.) But you first have to be clear on what constitutes a bad thing.

The trick is to jettison “we’re us and they’re them” thinking and adopt my very simple test for political hygiene. In any given instance, step back and ask yourself: “How would I react to this behaviour, or policy, if it were the other guys doing it?”

This recommendation shouldn’t even be controversial. Do unto others, be honest, don’t cheat etc. are traditional virtues. But we don’t live in traditional times. After decades of progressives telling us everything ostensibly noble and principled is just a sinister mask for racist, patriarchal corporate self-interest, the best we can do is John Rawls’s imaginary “veil of ignorance,” where we design laws and institutions as if we didn’t know our own position in society, on the theory that the only thing that could possibly prevent us from dealing off the bottom of the deck is not knowing which chair is ours.

I don’t really like it. Pretending you’re fair-minded strikes me as a poor substitute for the real thing. But by this point, if it’s all you’ve got I’ll take it. That most people regard all politicians as short-sighted, self-serving weasels is unfair. Some politicians are far-sighted. No, wait. I mean public-spirited. But even the better ones shouldn’t whine about the low repute in which politics is now held, because they too practice poor political hygiene. They clam up when their party makes patronage appointments; keep silent about fuzzy accounting in their platform; lose an election and savage their foes for policies they initiated or inaction on files they too neglected.

What about the federal NDP denying renomination to an MP who bucked the party on gay marriage? To be sure, most NDPers favour gay marriage. But if the Tories booted an MP for supporting it, wouldn’t the NDP accuse Stephen Harper of dictatorial control over his party? You can’t have it both ways. Actually you can, if you also praise strong party discipline in a parliamentary system and the other guys don’t. There would be nothing inconsistent or shabby in that. But it’s not where we are and you know it.

Especially given the level of popular disenchantment with politics, I find myself increasingly inclined to insist that first of all a party not disgust me. Which shouldn’t be that hard. But it does require elementary political hygiene.

For instance, you know perfectly well what you’d say if the other party was hitting on the pages. So don’t expect my support if you’re doing it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Is the venerable New Democratic Party going out of style like bell-bottoms and orange shag rugs? Plainly, left-wing politics is not entirely on the way out in Canada. But does the NDP risk replacement as the locus of left-wing thought and political action? It can be argued that the NDP faces a perfect storm of a shrinking voter base, inept politicking, and ludicrous policies --the most obvious and recent being leader Jack Layton’s suggestion that, rather than fighting the tyrannical Taliban in Afghanistan, we invite them to peace talks. The foreign policy attitudes articulated at the party’s Sept. 8-10 Quebec City convention (for instance, tabling a resolution comparing Canadian soldiers to terrorists) provoked scorn across the spectrum. It might not matter if they enraged people who wouldn’t vote for the NDP even if Layton himself enlisted in the army. But editorial cartoonists not generally sympathetic to George Bush still painted Layton floating beyond Pluto in an elf suit (The Globe and Mail) or cheerleading for Lenin (the Ottawa Citizen). And veteran CBC commentator Larry Zolf declared it no longer the party of “fervent anti-Communist” David Lewis or even Bob Rae.

As for Layton, three years ago he looked fresh, energetic and engaging after two dreary scolds. Many now find him so slick he’s grating. And despite periodic surges in its popular vote and in Parliament, the party always seems to collapse just when things look brightest, and can’t get anywhere in Quebec. Its old core of prairie populists and industrial unions is shrinking. The Federal Accountability Act threatens to cut off critical funding from labour unions. And if the United Church is, proverbially, the NDP at prayer, its own demographic decline is equally ominous.

Brian Topp, co-chair of the federal NDP’s election planning committee, doesn’t see things so bleakly. He notes that in Quebec City, Layton said, “Canadians are prepared to fight wars that are right for our country. We’ve done so proudly. That’s why we’re so proud of our veterans.” Only then did Layton criticize the Afghan mission for currying “favour in Washington” and lacking “clear goals.” Topp believes such views resonate with many Canadians (while Robin Sears, the former NDP national director, admits that such “regrettable” positions appeal to many voters). What’s more, Topp claims the party was “significantly sobered” by having to “think a lot more seriously about federal fiscal and policy issues during the [Paul] Martin minority” government. It has “grappled with governance issues in a way that it hadn’t since the 1972-74 minority,” and is talking about domestic issues “much more credibly.”

As for Layton’s political effectiveness, Topp points out that the NDP vote soared from just over a million in 2000, to 2.5 million in 2006. In 2000, the party took over 15 per cent of the vote in 57 ridings; in 2006, it took 15 per cent in 155 ridings. Liberal strategist John Duffy also sees impressive NDP urban strength: “Arguably, Ottawa Centre is now a safe NDP seat,” while the party “came in first or second in every riding from the Beaches over to the Humber River in Toronto,” is strong in downtown Vancouver, and even mounted good spoiler campaigns, “taking progressive federalist votes in Montreal” from Liberals.

In sifting through this mix of factors, it helps to look at the historical record. The fact is that the CCF/NDP has seen growth in every generation, followed by sudden disaster (see chart, following page). The party gains as people disenchanted with incumbent governments (especially left-wing Liberal voters) cast protest ballots. But for precisely the same reason, its political strength tends to collapse when voters get so fed up, they switch from protesting to voting in the other major party. And given what’s happened in Ottawa lately, that suggests trouble ahead for the NDP.

Consciously or not, the NDP has emulated the British Labour party. Labour came from nowhere in the early 20th century to supplant that country’s Liberal party as the Conservatives’ main rival. With each cycle, this goal seemed to get closer. Until recently; the latest wave, in the 1990s and early 2000s, was weaker, not stronger, than previous surges. Duffy concedes that “the NDP cost us the last election.” But he adds that the Liberals “didn’t do a big face plant” and the NDP didn’t do very well, and “the two facts are related.” Expressly citing the British Labour model, Duffy concludes: “They’re falling miserably short and I don’t see any way for them to get there.”

Ottawa pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos, founder and president of Praxicus Public Strategies, has observed something that may back up the concern: NDP support is strong among those of low socioeconomic status, the non-religious, and younger childless women and single mothers. But it simply is not on the way to becoming the party of educated professional urban progressives--their obvious growth market. If so, 2006 is likely the high-water mark for this cycle because, as Duffy notes, Liberals “have a tremendously powerful argument” that voting NDP “put Stephen Harper in office.”

Similar reasoning crashed the NDP vote in three previous electoral cycles, and if it happens again, the party has real problems. Sears and Duffy both reject the “perfect storm” thesis. But when asked if the Green party poses an electoral threat to the NDP, Sears replies, “absolutely,” and Duffy with a vigorous “yes.” If green becomes fashionable with the latte set, burnt orange could become passé fast.

[First published in Western Standard]

Oh stop it. The newspapers are full of how Michael Ignatieff has 30 per cent of some semi-committed Liberal delegates, Gerard Kennedy must sprout French, Bob Rae may not be a portable catastrophe and Stéphane Dion ... zzzzz. Can I just say “Paul Martin”? Reread the breathless copy about his battle for control of the Liberal party. Would you wrap a decent piece of fresh fish in it today? That his party could swoon over such a man might strike future historians as worth half a line. But day-today fluctuations in politics mean about as much as they do in the stock market, and those of us paid to explain public affairs shouldn’t cover them just because we can. It insults readers’ intelligence. It insults our own.

In Wednesday’s National Post someone devoted an entire column to why we don’t know what the Liberal’s weekend vote means. I can be ignorant more concisely. Besides, I’m devoting my column to why I don’t care: If Mr. Ignatieff wins we’ll find out. If he doesn’t, why waste all this ink?

Monday’s Globe and Mail had four front-page items on the vote, a two-page spread inside including three bits by (gasp) Liberal insiders, then the lead editorial, editorial cartoon and three columns. And one single-column story buried on A12 about nuclear-armed India claiming proof that nuclear-armed Pakistan’s intelligence agency helped plan the Mumbai train terror bombing. Tuesday’s Globe gave the Liberals three columns and a full news page. The top story in Wednesday’s Post showed Mr. Ignatieff’s campaign art, and quoted a middle-aged professor that aping Andy Warhol is “funky, it’s cool, it’s avant-garde ... It’s saying, ‘I’m on the edge, I’m appealing to the young — I’m part of the future.’ ” Uh, didn’t Andy Warhol die 19 years ago?

As for book excerpts on the fall of Paul Martin and the leap of Belinda Stronach, stop it, right now. To understand how overpowering ambition can ruin an otherwise decent and intelligent man, read Macbeth. To understand how a sociable blond can make men silly, who needs a book? Or wants the lurid details? There’s so much to know, and so little time to find it out. Don’t waste it reading political celebrity gossip.

Rotting infrastructure: now there’s a story. So read James Gordon’s Structures or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. Especially the bits on cement. And if you must stare in horror at politics, try Friedrich Hayek’s 1949 pamphlet The Intellectuals and Socialism, with its still-relevant warning that “it is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs and the consequent absence of first hand knowledge of them which distinguishes the typical intellectual from other people who also wield the power of the spoken and written word.” Say, Pierre Trudeau. Or Michael Ignatieff. Or Stéphane Dion. Or Bob Rae ...

Admittedly, Mr. Rae got a crash course in practical difficulties as premier of Ontario. But he escaped unmarked. Amid a fog of focus-grouped banalities about “smarter regulation” and “ecological integrity,” he just wrote in the Post that “ideas alone are not enough. You need leadership and experience at solving problems.” I only ever saw him cause them.

Across the way, Mr. Ignatieff’s The Rights Revolution contains neither the “why” of the true scholar nor the “how” of the practical man. But amid platitudes about how great it would be if things were great, he calls Canada “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” Forget jeering that he’s too American. I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment? The sort of person who now makes, or does not make, a credible leadership candidate deserves coverage. Politics as horse race doesn’t.

So forget he-said-she-said, “Tories stink, critics say,” and breathless “insider” accounts when the whole point of inside information is it’s not outside. Instead, put Wednesday’s Citizen story about another woman miscarrying while waiting in a Calgary emergency room (the Globe managed seven sentences over two days on it) next to the same-day story in Britain’s Daily Telegraph about its new Conservative leader pledging eternal fidelity to socialized medicine, the National Post September story on emergency doctors underreporting infectious diseases, and the September Globe column about the B.C. finance minister’s “soon-to-be-famous” graph of health care taking 71 per cent of provincial spending by 2017. About which I have not seen one news story.

Our health-care system going up in flames despite massive funding increases, while politicians deny the very existence of a crisis they have no clue how to solve, is an important ongoing story. Instead we get Michael Ignatieff winning some delegates but not others.

Stop it, I say.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hello, all you idiots. Ready to do some dumb Christmas shopping? Oh dear. You don’t like being talked to that way? Then you’d best have a word with the Ontario government, which is poised to ban retail gift cards with expiry dates because YOU’RE TOO STUPID TO READ THE FINE PRINT.

According to the Sept. 25 Citizen, Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips will bring in a law banning gift cards that eventually expire, as those sold by most major Canadian stores do in 18 to 24 months. For some reason no other jurisdiction in Canada has yet taken this step. Mr. Phillips, according to a related Globe and Mail story, added: “In our opinion, when consumers purchase gift cards for their families and their friends, they do so assuming that they are like cash and they won’t lose their value. Consumers deserve to get what they pay for.”

Undoubtedly they do. Thus combatting fraud is a legitimate and important function of government. But when we buy a gift card with an expiry date and get a gift card with an expiry date we did get what we paid for.

As for the provincial government’s assumption about delusions I was suffering while purchasing goods and services, I would thank them to keep it to themselves if any way could be found of persuading them to do so.

Some nervous Nellies out there might feel the Ontario government has more pressing problems meriting space on its crowded legislative calendar. Like a shortage of electricity even with the province’s fading nuclear and coal-fired reactors going full blast on hot days, or growing health-care waiting lists even after shuffling resources between overstretched specialities. Faugh. Pay it no mind. We’re talking gift cards expiring after going unused for two years because you didn’t really want whatever it was anyway. The humanity.

Having taken a little walk to recover my equilibrium, I’ve discovered that my outrage expired in under 24 minutes. For one thing, a gift card you didn’t get around to using in, say, 17 months evidently didn’t address a pressing need or even a passing whim. The Globe says Starbucks is a major retailer of gift cards. Man, if you don’t need a coffee within 18 months you really don’t need a coffee.

For another thing, there’s no suggestion that the cards expire fraudulently or without warning. A gift card says stuff on it like “Must be used within 18 months” and then all of a sudden it turns out it must be used within 18 months. See if I don’t shop here again.

Since Mr. Phillips is minister of Government Services, not Consumer Affairs, would it be uncivil to suggest that he worry a bit less about merchants keeping their word and a bit more about governments not keeping theirs? Remember when Dalton McGuinty ran for premier of Ontario promising to shut down all the coal-fired generators? When environmentalists tried to redeem this green card the fine print said “Promise void where made.” And he wouldn’t even say if the promise was dishonest or incompetent, whether he’d known all along that there was no way the province could limp along without its coal-fired generating capacity or whether in his 13 years in opposition savaging the government for cluelessness he never devoted a couple of hours to familiarizing himself with tedious minutiae like Ontario’s power needs, actual generating capacity and options for adding to same in clean ways. (See: Nuclear option, dreaded.)

Maybe that’s why he thinks people don’t read fine print on gift cards. Hey, who’s got time for details?

Mr. McGuinty ran for premier promising not to raise taxes, then when he got elected he whacked the populace with heath-care “premiums” he denied were taxes until some clever person read the fine print in some silly old law that said if they were premiums the province had to pay them for its employees at which point … well, you get the idea. You go to the politician with the no-tax-hike card they gave you during the election and they point to the fine print saying “Not valid if we lied” and the ink is still wet because they just added it and you ask for your money back and they laugh so hard a tax increase comes out their nose.

The petty gall of such people promising to protect you against imaginary sharp practices by merchants is astounding. No business would dare sell joke greeting cards that say on the outside “We think you’re too dumb to be allowed to go to the store by yourself” and when you open it, it says “That’s why we brazenly lie to you during elections.”

Those politicians sure are a bunch of cards. They should be dealt with. (Warning: joke expired 24 years ago.)

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Last week I thought it too soon to draw lessons from the shootings at Dawson College, the shock and grief too fresh. Now I want to try to draw them using old-fashioned “if/then” reasoning. I feel lonely on both counts. So sit down and listen to a story from the Sept. 25 Maclean’s: “Deron Johnson is in hospital in New York City after allegedly trying to snatch a gold chain from a wheelchair-bound woman. Margaret Johnson, 56, was on her way to a shooting range at the time, and when her chain was removed, Margaret pulled out a .357 pistol. Deron is now being treated for a gunshot injury and faces a charge of robbery. ‘There’s not much to it,’ Margaret says plainly, ‘Somebody tried to mug me and I shot him.’ ” You go, girl.

If you successfully ban guns, then life gets a bit scarier for all those not well-placed to engage in fisticuffs with the young and the ruthless. It’s not a conclusive argument for concealedcarry laws. But it will not do to claim that gun bans enhance public safety, then shudder at the vulgarity of counter-arguments that if every fourth biddy packed heat then muggers would be more cautious.

A gun ban may have beneficial effects that outweigh such drawbacks. But to discuss the subject rather than emoting or posturing about it, we must weigh them. Especially since Johnson versus Johnson is not an isolated case. In Britain the Blair government’s near-total ban on guns was followed by a dramatic rise in crime, including gun crime. It may be possible to argue that the two were unrelated, or related by factors not present in Canada. But if you refuse to discuss awkward issues then you’re not actually arguing.

Some believers in gun control do argue that if the Dawson shooter had three legally registered weapons, including a pistol, then we need a complete ban because registration isn’t enough. They should have to address the historical point that when the long-gun registry was brought in we were promised that it was not a prelude to confiscation. Perhaps that assurance was ill-advised, as policy or public relations. But if “It hoodwinked the rubes” is thought advantageous in a policy, then the country will suffer.

An even bigger problem for gun-ban advocates is the gap between legislating a ban and enforcing it. And here we must grapple with the role of incentives. Strict controls make it harder for everyone to obtain guns. But they also increase the advantages to criminals and psychos of evading controls. It’s not much fun trying to shoot up a restaurant full of armed diners (or a school with armed teachers, a point not lost on Israelis). But if you know they’re helpless … well, ask Britain’s increasingly brazen burglars.

The requirement for rationality goes both ways. So I admit the United States has a very high rate of gun ownership and of gun violence. But since liberals deplore “simplistic” analyses, I ask them why almost equally well-armed Switzerland is boringly safe. And why has a gun ban been effective in Japan and tragically futile in Jamaica? Might culture matter? Indeed, do advocates of gun control believe that many Canadians are so crazy that they are only prevented from shooting their fellows by an inability to obtain weapons? If not, then what is the use of a ban?

One interesting recent reply is that guns allow bad or deranged people to kill a lot of their fellows quickly. But history’s most notorious or prolific killers, from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer, generally used slower, more hideously intimate methods harder to detect and stop. If gun bans force evil people to be quieter and more cunning (which I concede is a very big if) then they might do more harm than good even in this respect.

Speaking of evil, our discussion must also include my wife Brigitte Pellerin’s argument on Tuesday on this page that the most notable thing about the Dawson College shooter is not that he was armed but that he was wicked. If Canadians, like Americans, have been rodded up for centuries, yet mass shootings are a recent phenomenon, then maybe we need moral rearmament, not material disarmament.

Finally, there’s the startling claim in Jeff Snyder’s Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control that self-defence, including with firearms, is an inherent human right, not a privilege granted because on balance it is socially useful. Too weird? Well, how many of you think, say, that the right to be free from racial discrimination is justified only by socioeconomic utility and might readily be abrogated if it failed to satisfy that test?

Probably I am in a minority, among commentators and Canadians, in the answers I give after weighing such questions. But I shouldn’t be so alone in attempting to weigh them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Ahoy, me hearties. ’Tis almost talk like a pirate day. On Sept. 19, let’s all say Arrr! Any lubbers not adequately conversant with this terminology (that means “Huh?”) can tack over to www.talklikeapirate.com/howto.html for a few pointers, including a video on the Five A’s explaining how the vital term “Arrr” can be employed to convey anything from obsequious acquiescence to contemptuous defiance to drunken incoherence.

Some of you may be thinking Short John Lack-of-Silver had best ease off a few points on the rum, talking of fripperies instead of advising us how to make that Osama bin Laden walk the plank or stop methane bubbling up from the sea like pitch between deck planks in the horse latitudes. But belay that talk while ye clap your spyglass on two points that line up to guide us into harbour.

First, where in the code is it written that we can’t have fun, shipmates? Part of the charm of hoisting some grog and squawking “Pieces of Eight” is that it tips the black spot to all the forces of grimness, from the politically correct to the Islamists, who recoil in horror at levity.

It also maroons the scurvy swabs swiping childhood nowadays, by thunder. Did ye hear the Hold on to Childhood broadside by the Daily Telegraph broadsheet in old London Town against the Nervous Nellies, Gadgrinds and electronics peddlers stealing children’s innocence? We want the little matelots running around making up games and dreaming of adventure, not sitting in rows bathed in strange pale light as though someone had clapped them in irons down in the hold, rushing about in structured recreational sport play like slaves on the rope walk, or toiling over figures as if chained to oars in the galley. But how can kids have fun if adults have forgotten how? Answer me that. In a funny voice, if ye please.

Now here’s the second point, me hearties. There was more Moby Dick than Jolly Roger about G.K. Chesterton’s appearance, I’ll warrant. But did he not say, plain as potatoes, that “Modern people would get on perfectly with their movements for symbolism, only they have quite forgotten everything that they want to symbolize. They have found that they want flags exactly at the moment when they have found that they do not want nationalities. They cry out that there ought to be more temples almost at the same moment when they cry out that there ought to be no more gods. Few generations have desired festivals and pageants so much as we desire them; our only disadvantage is that if we get them we shall not know what they mean.”

He’s right, by thunder. We cling to old rituals tattered like the sails of a ghost ship because we can’t make new ones worth the name, and rush through life like the Flying Dutchman never finding a port with comfort and good cheer. Take that Saint John Baptiste Day over Quebec way, when people celebrate the total rejection of their religious past. Could one in 10 say who the Baptist was, let alone what he has to do with hauling down the Union Jack?

Yet they can’t create a festival of dreary secular promiscuous nationalist collectivism comme nos ancêtres vive la révolution tranquille, now can they? And ye can talk a blue streak about Gingivitis Week or World Day to Combat Desertification or International Orangutan Awareness Week or World Turtle Day or World Poetry Day or World Television Day, rip me liver if they ain’t all real examples, but ye’ll never get folks broaching a cask and dancing the hornpipe over weevilly biscuits. And blow me down if the International Years of the Potato and of Planet Earth ain’t the same, but I’ll wager a marlin spike no one knows or cares which.

As for the official gay pride parades sailing the main today, shiver me timbers if I see the use of a government-sponsored celebration everyone pretends to applaud for fear of the thought police.

Any true pirate has to admire the way they plundered the treasury, then swaggered down main street defying anyone to object. But there’s no festivity in this festival. Or in anything else we’re meant to celebrate by hoisting a glass of dealcoholized beer and lighting a no smoking sign. So avast there. If we cannot outrun the king’s flag, it doesn’t mean we have to salute it when we’re luffed and forced to heave to.

Perchance ye’ve a mind to go dig up the old festivals. Aye, if we only had a map where X marks the spot. But memories fade and old shipmates die and codes get lost. And besides, in the modern world we’re fair becalmed, me hearties. So keelhaul me if it ain’t at least a gag to put on a character and a voice and inject some laughter into daily living. It might even lift our sails a bit.

Arrrrrrrrrrr!

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My colleague Susan Riley just returned from summer vacation dismayed that nothing had changed in Canadian politics. To be fair, we have sunk a few more inches into the mire, and at least we avoided sudden disaster. But our politics do seem to be suffering a peculiar vapourlock that, as so often, gets filed under “Ideas have consequences.” Or, in this case, the absence of ideas. Consider Jack Layton’s recent call to bolt from Afghanistan, negotiating with the Taliban as we flee. It looks bold and controversial, but it’s just politics, crafted to attract media attention and play to his base. And tragicomically, it’s bad politics. If the NDP is ever to move beyond its 18-per-cent electoral support, it has to make arguments, not demands. Only its core supporters thrill to unconstructive negativity. Everyone else cringes.

Mr. Layton could have said his party is so committed to gender equity that it supports the Afghan mission despite the other concerns. Or so committed to pacifism that it supports withdrawal despite the Taliban being homicidal homophobes. He could then have explained what possibly painful implications either line of reasoning had for, say, Darfur. But he produced no line of reasoning at all.

Nor did Gilles Duceppe in seeking an emergency debate on foreign policy because “Harper is taking the same alignment that Bush is taking.” Now there’s a condemnation that doesn’t require thought. Or permit it. As leader of a major Canadian political party he’s singularly well-placed to start a debate without needing anyone’s permission. He just has to say something worth debating.

Well, then, how about the Liberals? Won’t their leadership race give us a candidate of change? Oh yeah. Right out of spin central. The Sept. 4 Maclean’s cover announces “THE IGNATIEFF MANIFESTO,” over a photo of the candidate in mid-oratory, fist clenched, lips pursed, penetrating blue eyes fixed on a distant but glorious future. “EXCLUSIVE” it goes on, “The most intriguing new face in Canadian politics reveals how he’d change the country.”

Not how he’d try, whether he might succeed, or why if the country’s so great everyone’s obsessed with changing it. I thought Pierre Trudeau transforming Canada was like the ultra-great thing of the past 40 years that made everyone want to be the next sexy, brainy, nonchalant radical. But then shouldn’t we keep what he created or, if Brian Mulroney threw it in the alley when no one was looking and Jean Chrétien didn’t bother retrieving it, go get it back? Or are we now into perpetual revolution, like skinny undergrads swooning over Trotsky in 1963?

I confess that Mr. Ignatieff impressed me at the spring 2005 Liberal party convention (except his pseudo-denial of political ambition, in retrospect cunning and contrived).

So I decided to read his book The Rights Revolution and was crushed to discover he’s a windbag who takes three paragraphs even to get something wrong, anaesthetizing you with equivocation before banal radicalism overwhelms judgment and he endorses arranged marriages or says children are “frequently” better raised by strangers than their parents (see pp. 102-03).

Don’t mistake ponderousness for profundity. Instead, try to decipher: “In the new century, most families that survive do so not by jettisoning the values of their parents, but by reinventing them and rebalancing the division of labour.” (p. 110) Written before the new century even started. His Maclean’s manifesto, and the longer version released yesterday, are equally a vapour of vapidity, a mist of mediocrity, a cumulonimbus of cliché, full of “Canadians believe” and “bold” and “nation-builders” and “The country … does not want to be divided, it wants to be united” that make you so drowsy you barely twitch when he calls for a “national food policy.”

In that same Maclean’s Paul Wells quotes Mr. Ignatieff as saying that politicians “are in the dream business.” Yuck! When “dreams” become a business they get mass-produced by consultants, yielding a sticky mass of focus-grouped cotton candy about “united, prosperous, sustainable and successful on the world stage” that can’t please anyone because it can’t offend anyone. It plays to a different, larger audience but contains no more genuine argumentation than Mr. Layton’s sneering, no admission that reasonable people might find any of his proposals difficult to implement or genuinely contentious, and nothing for them to discuss. No wonder voter turnout is down.

I harbour no illusions about political discourse in days of yore. But couldn’t one politician today reason frankly from principle to policy, offering hard choices instead of mindless strings of phrases that are designed mainly to make the demographically representative focus-group press the green smiley button instead of the red frowny one?

We need a vacation from vacuity.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]