Dear Queen Person,

OK, OK, technically I'm meant to call you Your Majesty or Your Highness or something else decorous, humble and traditional possibly including Queen of Canada. But this being the age of self-esteem I just wouldn't feel validated doing that. Despite which I did sort of want to congratulate you for getting a bunch of arrogant pundits to apologize in writing because they didn't see the recession coming. How ever did you do it?

Yes, I read the news stories saying you went to the London School of Economics in the fall and asked "Why did nobody notice it?" What I don't get is how this obvious, mildly phrased query could induce the British Academy to assemble a panel of expert academics, public servants, journalists, politicians to discuss the question. I'm even more flummoxed that the panel resulted in a letter to your Queenship summarizing the discussion, signed by a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and an eminent historian, which said "the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole" then blamed "wishful thinking combined with hubris."

I realize the letter also offered a variety of excuses and a cloud of defensive rhetoric about people who did predict trouble. But hey, this is 2009. What really counts is that in the end the authors came semi-clean. Getting the chattering classes to admit the obvious is no small feat nowadays.

As I began drafting this note, it crossed my mind that monarchists out there would peddle nonsense about the advantages of that system. They might even babble that when prestige and honour attach to a hereditary office rather than its current occupant it can evoke humility without grovelling in others and elevation without arrogance in the holder, who after all knows that they have the job because of pure luck (maybe not even the good kind; you could discuss with the Prince of Wales whether his life would have been easier if he'd been born Chuck Windsor in Croyden). But I crossed that thought out. I mean, hey, in this day and age?

After all, I'm meant to feel good about myself, right, and humility is a real pain. Like deference and manners and all that rubbish. In fact one thing I really like about democracy is how the politicians always tell me I'm special and should get whatever I want. Granted, they don't always act like it, but I sure like hearing it.

It was quite an achievement to extract this letter for all its failings. It was probably even good for the pundits. J.R.R. Tolkien once said tipping your hat to the squire might be bad for the squire but it was dashed good for you, or words to that effect. Rather pointless advice when we don't even wear hats anymore except backwards where it's hard to grasp the brim. But maybe we could try doffing our ear buds or some such.

Indeed, were we to interrupt the steady stream of technologically advanced overstimulation now giving us attention-deficit issues, we might in the ensuing silence observe something odd. It is possible to yell that pundits are fools, or slam politicians for defining the term "fool" in new and remarkable ways at every occasion. It is possible to write arid treatises on the unforeseeability of the economic future due to the transcomputability of zzzzzz. I've done both. But what is very hard to do is get anywhere by either route.

It's easy to annoy or stupefy people with the right sort of prose. But it's hard to change their ideas. Besides, what Your Queenliness achieved in this business was above all a triumph of manners not of intellect. You made pundits admit a huge, hideous, embarrassing error politely, clearly and humbly. That's weird. In fact it's anachronistic.

There's the rub, isn't it? Everybody knows monarchs are offensive, elitist, undemocratic and, trump in an age of progress, out-of-date. How then can Your Majesty have managed to elicit such a refreshing outburst of good behaviour by raising an eyebrow instead of your voice?

While I'm at it, how do you manage to look so sensible in a world where, to admit the obvious, so many people spend so much time, money and effort looking ridiculous and arrogant including pundits and people with ear buds, fashion models, teenagers, politicians, journalists and so on.

We're so cutting edge and you're so behind the times. It just doesn't make sense. But there it is, and I have to write to you and admit it. In the words of the old deodorant ad, anything less would be uncivilized.

P.S. We're sorry we made fun of your hats.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

'Make next stop Mars, Apollo astronauts say" was Tuesday's headline. Gad, I thought. How time flies. Can it really be 10 years since the 30th anniversary of the discovery that the moon is a dull place not worth visiting?

Mind you, I was a bit dismayed to learn last week that NASA had erased its video footage of the original mission. I mean, of all the people you wouldn't expect to say "Moon schmoon" NASA is right up there with the League of Poetasters. (Since you ask, a poetaster is a mediocre poet, the sort whom moon-June-spoon causes to swoon and who writes country tunes rhyming "night" with "hold me tight" as if it had not been tried and found wanting. Like space exploration.)

Where was I? Ah, yes. The moon landing is one of those hallmarks, the first public event people of a certain generation remember and I am in that generation.

It was a bit of a shock that NASA not only erased the tapes of my youth off some obsolete medium, but as a bulk job in a fit of such absent-mindedness they forgot they'd done it. If I'd been to the moon I'm pretty sure I'd remember it and keep the photos. Even though other than the famous Earthrise shot they're not really worth hauling out and looking at.

Let me not seem utterly prosaic here. I would be somewhat disappointed with human beings if they had not made some sort of effort to poke around up there. But in a further attempt not to seem prosaic let me add that if we had not gone and found nothing it would have left a lot more to the imagination. In my favourite science fiction, C.S. Lewis's Perelandra trilogy, his vision of the Martian canals is as beautiful as his aquatic Venus and both, I assure you, dramatically exceed the reality in every way.

You'd better take my word for it regarding Venus unless dissolving in 900 degree sulphuric acid is on your list of things to do before you die ... like right before. And if anyone does go to Mars they have as much chance of swimming in the canals as Neil Armstrong did of getting served green cheese by the man in the moon.

One proposal that turned up this week was to send a man to Mars even though we could not bring him back. Apparently we could dump supplies periodically and keep taunting him with the prospect of more colonists showing up eventually but that would be about it.

Yeah, sure, supply drops to Mars. What could possibly go wrong? Aside from the mysterious loss of signals, crashes, malfunctions on the surface and everything else that has happened to Mars landers so far except an alien incubating inside you then bursting revoltingly from your belly. The truth is, a trip to Mars strikes me as presenting only dull hazards. The victim's main excitement would be seeing if toenails grow more slowly in lower gravity and anxiously scanning the headlines for impending space program budget cuts.

Try to follow me here: Moon = grey dust, Mars = Red dust. That's space for you. Basically empty. Void. Hence the name. Even renaming it "Dust" would represent PR audacity to dwarf Leif Erikson's "Greenland" branding ploy.

In the first Perelandra book, Out of the Silent Planet, the hero does make one startling "discovery" that is true and, once mentioned, obvious. Between Earth and Mars he realizes space, far from being dark, is in a state of permanent noon because the sun is always shining.

That observation gave me pause. I mean sure, the sun shines on the planets and a good thing too, at least as far as Earth is concerned. We'd look silly and very cold without it. But there's a kind of weird exuberant abundance in ol' Sol pumping out the rays with equal intensity in every direction.

What I'm getting at is that space makes a lavish and exotic setting for the jewel called Earth. But I wouldn't want to live there and it's not a nice place to visit. OK, I'd cheer if someone actually did make the trip and came back saying "Ha ha, we went to Mars, what a dump." But the idea that there's some relevant collective purpose to such travel is silly.

Indeed, in Out of the Silent Planet Lewis's hero takes dead aim at the idea we should colonize space so that once Earth is trashed humans can live a bit longer somewhere else. Like so many visionary schemes, it's an attempt to get rich by piling up counterfeit bills. If billions of individual lives here on Earth don't somehow amount to a worthwhile endeavour, a few million more on some far less attractive and hospitable ball of rock and gas and blazing hot acid is hardly going to do the trick. And if they do, it will have more to do with Lewis's imaginary space than the real one.

So yeah, way to visit the moon. But if you want Mars, I say curl up on a moonlit night and crack open the Perelandra trilogy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems the wise Latina woman is getting canny as well. Barack Obama's U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor just assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that "The task of a judge is not to make the law -- it is to apply the law." Can we run that by Canadian judges?

Uh, no. We don't do that messy vulgar confirmation thing here. It's all arranged behind closed doors, where elite lawyers quietly discuss with other elite lawyers which elite lawyers should be given untrammelled authority to overrule the public, periodically emerging to assure us that the result is commodious and fine. Like our Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin warning us in 2003 not to inject "partisan politics" into the appointment process because we want "individuals who embody the most valuable qualities of impartiality, empathy and wisdom. From where I sit, the current judiciary in Canada meets the highest standards in this respect." Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Sotomayor committed a similar gaffe in a 2001 lecture, saying "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Other such remarks, plus her appeals court record in favour of affirmative action, created worries that she rules on race and gender instead of just the law. But under the American system, public scrutiny has forced her to backpedal.

Of course her repentance may not be entirely sincere. But it is nice that she was obliged to address the subject. Especially because she then felt compelled to endorse without qualification the Republican stand in favour of judicial restraint.

It is a position that, in principle, nearly everyone shares. The famous English statesman and judicial commentator Edward Coke insisted in 1608 that "A good judge does nothing by his own whim, nor by the suggestion of his own will, but pronounces according to statutes and laws." Radical utilitarian Jeremy Bentham wanted judges to swear not "on any occasion to substitute any particular will of my own, to the will of the Legislature, even in such cases, if any, where the provisions of the law may appear to me inexpedient..."

Victorian constitutional expert Albert Venn Dicey said "The duty of a Court, in short, is not to remedy a particular grievance, but to determine whether an alleged grievance is one for which the law supplies a remedy." And Thomas Jefferson issued dyspeptic blasts against activist judges for "ingulfing insidiously" and creating a "despotic branch."

The academic school of "critical legal studies" may say law, like all political economy, is simply a matter of Lenin's "who-whom", a raw power struggle in which every argument is just an excuse (including, presumably, their own). But judges are least likely to admit to this view when they are most obviously acting on it.

Which they far too often are. The U.S. Supreme Court notoriously declared in 1965 that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations" that let sufficiently enlightened judges give you unlimited sexual freedom; it even turned out the Founding Fathers had put abortion in there without realizing it because they were hicks. And in Canada courts pluck prodigies like gay marriage out of thin air and dare us to object.

Since U.S. courts pioneered such shenanigans you might wonder why American-style hearings are worth the air they're printed on. I offer two reasons. First, what judges are obliged to say during confirmation may influence their subsequent conduct especially if their colleagues remind them of it in private. Second, such hearings let citizens and politicians engage the broad question whether the judiciary is fulfilling its own functions or usurping those of the other branches.

Of course if we held such hearings for our Supreme Court appointees the process might well be subject to the same centralized control as almost everything else MPs do, and thus turn into the usual partisan Punch and Judy show. But I'd prefer an ill-mannered discussion to none at all, especially given the growing power of courts in Canada.

In 2003, praising our appointments process, Chief Justice McLachlin boasted that on our Supreme Court "one can't really identify anybody for political reasons, left, right, or whatever." Especially whatever, since about the only information the public gets is that potential justices belong to a closed elite with very high opinions of themselves and their mandate and, one suspects, correspondingly low opinions of the rest of us.

Still, as a wise Latina woman once remarked, it is the job of judges to enforce law not create it. I'd like to hear it said here too.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Back in 1289, English king Edward I had just two pounds, 13 shillings, eight and a half pence in the bank. But it just goes to show how dumb people were back then. Why, today, the state of Ohio has a rainy day fund that contains fully 89 cents. And Dalton McGuinty just spent a quarter-billion dollars on video games even though Ontario's projected deficit recently surged from $14.1 to $18.5 billion.

Sorry, what am I saying, spent? He called his massive 10-year subsidy to Ubisoft to put a big development studio in Toronto "investing." And you can write the rest of the press release yourself: Bringing high-tech facilities to Toronto will "build a high wage and a high standard of living ... we're building Ontario's economy now and for the future." It is, to be sure, a violation of the free-trade principles we hold so dear when Americans engage in protectionism. But what's a little principle to the high-tech economy of the future?

Of course, when you get careless with principle there is a small matter of interest. Right now it's just 10 cents in every dollar of provincial spending. But give these guys a chance. Back when Bob Rae suddenly ran a $10-billion deficit, Maclean's called a $78-billion Ontario debt "staggering." It's about to roar past $174 billion next year on its way to nearly $210 billion by 2011-12. If that's investing, I'd hate to see borrowing. But don't worry. I will.

Given these numbers I ask again, why did Dalton McGuinty just spend a quarter of a billion dollars on video games? Doesn't he get enough excitement out of spreadsheets? The short answer is that once you start recklessly spending billions you ain't got, what's another $263 million? Heck, Queen's Park spends that much every 21 hours. Whee! Cackle! Whoosh!

The long answer is that Dalton McGuinty has learned nothing except the fine art of spin. Back when Trudeau was cool it was widely believed that governments had greater foresight than the private sector, so they should undertake massive investments for the long-term good of the economy. Very few people now admit to believing such a thing. But they still apparently think it, since when the recession hit governments lost no opportunity to revert to exactly that sort of behaviour, and voters seem happy with it.

It's very frustrating to watch and not just because those IOUs have my name on them (plus yours and everyone else struggling to make ends meet). It's also frustrating because, in the past third of a century or so (I count from the Fraser Institute opening its doors and its mouth in 1975) we who defend free markets have won the battle of ideas. It just hasn't translated into policy.

This hurts. Not only my wallet or my amour-propre, although I do try to keep that nice and shiny. It hurts because I'm convinced that ideas matter, that they are the main driver of historical change. And it revolts me to see them bounce off the enviably pristine, adamantine, impenetrable self-satisfaction of our premier. Especially ideas as fundamental, straightforward and vindicated by experience as those McGuinty insouciantly brushes off between raids on the treasury.

Here's how simple it really is. The company he has lured to Toronto with this walloping subsidy can now lose up to $263 million in the next decade and still make a profit for its employees and shareholders. Of course, McGuinty portrays this company as the surest of sure-fire things and he would know, he's a politician. But if it's so dang sure-fire, it doesn't need a subsidy to make a profit. And if he's somehow mistaken, it doesn't deserve one. After all, someone's got to pay that money on top of the other $113 billion they're planning to spend next year. Because spend and spin is the name of their game.

Last March the McGuinty Liberals were trying to figure out how to spend a $5-billion windfall. Now they're trying to figure out how to spend a $18.5-billion shortfall. Don't worry. They're way smart. They'll do it. They've hiked program spending seven per cent a year since 2001. Unlike medieval kings, they don't have to worry about parliament. Heck, they own parliament.

Incidentally, in the 14th century Edward I's grandson, Edward III, got so broke he had to pawn the crown jewels. But he got them back. I wouldn't count on some Dalton III getting back the car or video game subsidies. Our rulers are way too clever to have assets. All they have is "investments" that, frankly, I'd trade for Ohio's 89 cents.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake." Rather, "Qu'ils mangent les brioches" was a one-insult-fits-all piece of French political folklore pinned to any member of the ruling class who was considered drastically out of touch with the lives of regular folks. Which brings me, of course, to striking workers in Toronto.

Out of touch? The willingness of Toronto municipal employees to bury residents of Canada's largest city in stinky trash during the hottest part of the year if they aren't paid off might seem grimly realistic, especially respecting the concept of "extortion." They clearly understand that their employer cannot go bankrupt in the normal sense, because it can always reach into the pockets of the public and wrench out their cash in the form of taxation, which private firms cannot do unless they somehow persuade the state they are "too big to fail" or something else equally stupid. But the striking workers show little appreciation of "the limits of the possible" or of public patience. And that curious blindness suggests a quite different explanation.

Thomas Sowell, one of whose books neatly phrased the question as Is Reality Optional?, has suggested that beneath partisan and even ideological quarrels lurks a fundamental disagreement as to whether "the limits of the possible" is an important concept or a mean-spirited trick. Some of us consider the world a difficult place in which tradition offers valuable, hard-won lessons about how to keep war, famine and disaster at bay. Others think peace, plenty and harmony are normal and the main source of trouble in the world is deliberate malice on the part of the powerful.

I argue that striking public-sector workers, and their political and intellectual allies, are firmly in the latter camp. They believe that a world of lavish rewards for limited work and belligerent intransigence is well within our reach in every sphere of human activity if only we have the "political will."

In the short run, it seems to be working. Consider the Canada Day story in this newspaper that collective bargaining wage increases in the Ontario public sector were the same in 2008 as 2007 despite the recession, 3.1 per cent on average, while in the private sector they fell from 2.9 to two per cent (below inflation's 2.3 per cent). And according to new Tory leader Tim Hudak, public-sector employment in Ontario has grown 22 per cent since Dalton McGuinty's Liberals were elected in 2003, against just five per cent for the private sector.

The image of plump, rosy-cheeked aristocrats stuffing their faces while the peasants go hungry, and congratulating themselves on their superior moral qualities between mouthfuls of pheasant, springs all too readily to mind here. And not just here. Something big is happening to the welfare state throughout the industrialized democracies.

California is gruesomely broke, while Illinois, Pennsylvania and other states may literally be unable to pay their employees. And in Britain, the Daily Telegraph says: "The state will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year ... by almost £25 billion. Normally, income tax receipts comfortably cover the benefits bill." Yet the British government's obtuse response is to spend more money and hire more public servants, even after the MP expense scandal ignited public rage. It reveals the tragicomic inability of the ruling class, there or here, to alter its behaviour and attitudes in the face of ominous trends blazingly obvious to normal observers.

I must admit that when it comes to the state of public policy in Canada, I have learned not to be optimistic. Canadians put up with obnoxious political rubbish and mistreatment and frequently encourage it by our acquiescence in its intellectual foundations. Even so, I hope and believe public patience is being exhausted by such self-satisfied trough-gobbling given current hard times.

The commoners do appear sulky. For instance on Canada Day, amid the usual bumph about how grand and unknowable Canada is, the Globe and Mail noted that, "Voter turnout in last month's Nova Scotia provincial election dipped to an all-time low." So someone's not too thrilled with the state of public play. Just the citizens, mind you. But the routine appearance of such numbers across Canada, the Anglosphere and western Europe could be mistaken for exactly the sort of warning sign the Ancien Régime should have heeded.

Instead, their arrogant attitude remains: "Qu'ils mangent les poubelles."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It's difficult to know what to make of events in Iran because I don't know what has happened in the last seven seconds. Quick, someone tweet me.

Oh, didn't you hear? Coverage of this semi-revolution was another triumph for the new media. In the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, Andrew Keen described a conference of big-time tweeters in New York, unpronouncably called "@140conf," where a CNN anchor was berated because "While Twitter automatically exploded with tweet after tweet of rumor, falsity and fact" and "the streets of Tehran were jammed with furious Mousavi supporters, CNN's major news story on Saturday June 14 focused on American consumers' confusion about the domestic switch from analog to digital tv signals."

OK, so I don't care about the latter. But I didn't learn a lot from various twits sending out 48 billion news reports a minute from Iran full of events, rumours, plans and various other electrons either. What did it all mean?

Here, I submit, is where the old media wins, at least if we're smart. The old slogan attributed to the Chicago City News Bureau was "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Actually I trust my mom. But when a twit tells me Iran is having a revolution I think checking it out makes sense. And how is Twitter going to do that?

I'm not saying the "Main Stream Media" has given us a good feel for what the Soviets used to call "the correlation of forces" within Iran. I certainly wasn't impressed by this New York Times E-mail teaser on June 15: "NEWS ANALYSIS/ Iran's Leader Emerges With a Stronger Hand ... Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory demonstrated that he is the shrewd front man for a clerical, military and political elite more unified than at any time since the 1979 revolution."

I concede that it's no easy task to say "what's really going on" in Iran. I suspect the theocracy is falling apart and I certainly hope so. But we don't really know whether the regime has forfeited much of the support of ordinary people or whether it ever had it, and we also don't know if it needs it. I doubt the Iranian government knows either, especially after its persistent and largely successful attempt to prevent the spread of information, including obstructing or expelling western journalists. But Twitter does not help our mission here, does it?

I'm not knocking Twitter (you can even get a feed off my own website). It's doing two very good things in this crisis. First, it lets Iranian dissidents plan and share rumours faster than the state can possibly react. Second, it furnishes the raw material for foreign news stories. But it's just raw material.

Someone still has to filter it, check it, then publish a reliable summary. Like the piece by Stratfor chairman and CEO George Friedman, published online at Mercatornet.com on Tuesday. He makes a discouragingly persuasive argument that most Iranians do not support the protesters, based on detailed factual insights of the sort most newspapers and TV news outlets did not offer because, pretty obviously, no one on their staff knew any of it. But they could have, and should have.

Friedman even makes the unhappy point that when we had access to the protesters, they seemed overwhelmingly English-speaking and tech-savvy. In short, it was a revolt of people like us. Of whom there don't seem to be enough in Iran. In this regard Twitter may actually have confused us.

It gets worse. I think the seductive lure of immediacy to a society with ADD makes Twitter seem far cooler than it is as a tool for news gathering.

Consider Paul Reiser's complaint from Couplehood: "Here's my thing with the news: I don't know what I'm supposed to do. ... Now, if you told me that tomorrow a bus was going to go sailing off the Himalayas, I would get involved. I'd pick up the phone and warn them. 'Don't get on the bus. Didn't you see the paper?' But if I read on Sunday that something happened on Saturday, what can I do? At best I can call to console. 'I only just now heard.'"

He wrote those words in 1994, when I was busy installing my first (external, 14.4k) modem. But all E-mail and Twitter have done is let us know, or think we know, on Saturday night that a bus went off the Himalayas 12 minutes ago instead of 12 hours. It doesn't cross the critical barrier between learning after and before it happened, so it doesn't let us do any more than we otherwise could have. And for that worthless immediacy we pay in certainty.

The result is not harmless. We only have so much time, and the more of it we spend chasing titillating rumours the less we spend properly informing ourselves. Worse, we can accustom our mental palate to intellectual junk food.

Uh, hang on. This just in: Situation in Iran unclear. Maybe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Modern art has clearly gone badly wrong. But how did it take socialism with it? Consider this passage from William Morris. “I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life.”

A horribly reactionary sentiment, you may say. Or splendidly so. But Morris was not just a famous craftsman, designer and leading light in the Arts and Crafts Movement who tried to bring back quality, taste and genuine human fulfilment in a world of mass-produced cheap junk, offering sandalwood, ivory and topaz to a world of pig iron and cheap tin trays. He was also a passionate and famous socialist.

In this he deserves our sympathetic attention. I say so first because his stuff really was nice. Consider the famous Red House designed for him in Bexhill in 1859, a hobbit house if ever I saw one. It’s exactly the sort of thing real people including real workers would want to live in, entirely unlike the ghastly buildings and hideous sculpture, paintings and music foisted upon us by the Bauhaus and neotranspostmodern art.

Second, Morris may have been a socialist but he was no modernist. In his first public lecture he insisted that “there is only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure: both because the lines of a man’s body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong.” His socialism, like his art, was a reaction against modernity not an endorsement of it. He thought capitalism had made life ugly and wanted socialism to make it beautiful again; his inspiration was backward not forward.

In this he was not as unusual as he might seem today. In 1960 in The Unfinished Revolution Harvard scholar Adam Ulam tried to explain why revolutionary Marxist-style socialism appealed not to advanced industrial societies but to those just entering the most wrenching phase of modernization. The key, he said, was its promise somehow to leap over the socially disruptive part and get back to the organic and harmonious condition of pre-industrial society (real or imagined; my point here is the attractiveness of the vision rather than its practicality) while obtaining the wealth and geopolitical power only capitalism brings.

Morris’s novel News From Nowhere, however insipid and naive, presents precisely such a vision, the Middle Ages without the dirt or violence. As socialists will, he badly underestimates the complexities of actually creating wealth. But this persistent wish that we could all get along better and live more fulfilling lives in nicer surroundings should be condemned for impracticality, not ugliness.

This impulse is conspicuously absent from modern art, which has clearly become totally disconnected from the real life of the people. Nothing that wins the Turner Prize, or any kind of public acclaim from the smart set, would be allowed into a normal person’s living room even to be consumed in the fireplace.

Obviously popular taste has its drawbacks as well. Any snob worth his finishing salt can mock the decor of a suburban rec room, or the paintings of Elvis, ships or flowers on real velvet that too often adorn the upstairs spaces. But at least they try to be nice. Morris thought socialist art should too.

So what went wrong with socialism? Just as modern artists are overwhelmingly leftist, modern socialists are overwhelmingly modernist. Flaps over offensive art, especially if state funded, invariably pit conservative philistines against the political left as well as the literati. But socialism was meant to bring art back to the people, not expel them. Socialist realism, now apparently extinct except on the walls of Harvey’s restaurants, may have been awkward and ugly but at least it tried to celebrate and appeal to ordinary people.

No such claim could be made, even drunk, about Jackson Pollock. And while Le Corbusier famously called a house a “machine for living”, he lived in a garret and ate in bistros that would have appealed to William Morris far more than the junk the trendy “Corbu” and his ilk foisted on the gullible rich and the very poor. Aside from public housing, corporate high-rises and a few modern houses from the 1960s, with flat roofs, round windows, crumbling disconsolately in upscale neighbourhoods like abandoned sets for Peter Sellers’ The Party, there has been a total divorce between high-tone architecture and the “vernacular” style of houses people actually want to live in.

Modern art neither teaches morality nor aspires to. Its shocking of the bourgeoisie has become stale and lucrative and its message of futility is futile. No one is listening. And anyway, William Morris-style socialist art was meant restore meaning and beauty to people’s lives, not pound them relentlessly with the hideous futility of human existence.

Somewhere along the way, socialists seem to have become disgusted with the vulgarity of common people in whose name they still claim to speak. In 1905 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle dramatized the misery of working-class immigrants with a horrific scene of dirty, dangerous work in a meat-packing plant, and prompted an immediate, irresistible public demand not for socialism but for better regulation of the food industry. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair later said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Later socialists seem to have developed an ill-concealed desire to hit it there on purpose which modern artists all too obviously share.

In a much-mangled line from Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut said an abstract painter “with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid.” Why would socialists want to join in? But try to imagine Jack Layton, Ted Kennedy or your favourite local socialist suggesting that the state only subsidize art regular working stiffs understand, or talking like William Morris above.

Despite their supposed opposition to “elitism” it’s impossible, isn’t it? However did socialism get so ugly it could be a piece of modern art?

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

In light of the Ontario government's a brave new plan to nationalize children, might I submit a modest proposal of my own? Forget kindergarten and after-school programs. The state should pick up your kids from the maternity ward and return them with an MA and a social conscience 22 years later.

No, really. The Toronto Star characteristically gushed about Dr. Charles Pascal's new report, "Ontario parents of 4- and 5-year-olds should be able to leave their children at school from 7:30 in the morning to 6 p.m." creating "the so-called 'seamless day'... Research has shown that, especially for younger children, the fewer transitions, the better." A day later the Globe and Mail chirped about making "the neighbourhood public school the hub of every community, where parents will get everything from prenatal advice and nutrition counselling to childcare for those under four, full-day kindergarten, and before and after school programming" so "parents can minimize the difficult transitions that disrupt their own lives and the lives of their children ..."

So let's get serious and dispense with a bunch of other disruptive transitions like rushing the kids home at night and back to the bureaucrats in the morning. Who could object?

OK, teachers' unions squawked about having to share their turf with those wretched "early childhood educators" and threatened legal action. But they can be bought off. The only really sour note was my friend Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada saying parents would rather look after their own kids and complaining "What this suggests is professionals can do a better job than parents." Silly girl. Of course it does.

Behind all this prattle is one central assumption, so let's cut to the chase. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1920, "the latest light on the education of the young ... assumes that a child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother." It still does, assuming that a close and nurturing bond naturally exists between public employees and young people that is absent or defective between them and their parents.

Whatever the solemn media greybeards think of the program's details, has one of them raised the possibility that children might, as a rule, be better raised and educated by their own parents? Even the Globe's Margaret Wente kicked off her critique of the report: "Who could possibly argue against more kindergarten for our kids? Not me. You might as well denounce apple sauce and motherhood. Kindergarten is a lot of fun, not to mention a safe, convenient place for mom and dad to stash the kids while they go to work." So much for motherhood. And Dalton McGuinty and the experts know it. So why pretend?

It might be thought tactful to avoid blurting out anti-family sentiments and spooking the vulgar masses. But they are openly voiced when the hicks are assumed not to be listening. Like John Kenneth Galbraith's would-be bon mot in 1973 that "the modern household does not allow expression of individual personality and preference" because it "is essentially a disguise for the exercise of male authority."

Or Michael Ignatieff's claim in The Rights Revolution that: "So-called family values, as propagated in the rhetoric of North American popular entertainment, pulpit sermonizing, and political homily, are a downright tyranny. ... Nature and natural instinct are poor guides in these matters. If good parenting were a matter of instinct, families wouldn't be the destructive institutions they so often are." Whereas social science is ... um ... gee ...

This is no mere fad. Seventy five years ago Chesterton called the family something "now never mentioned in respectable circles." When parents are mentioned in discussions of the Pascal report, it is almost universally to note what a relief it will be for them to be rid of their offspring for a whole day. The Globe editorialized that the report's social science might be unsound but "no doubt the Ontario plan would make life easier for working parents. ..." And this newspaper headlined a Wednesday story, "McGuinty plan called 'great' for parents, tough on day cares," though it did warn that some need to warehouse their kids outside these bourgeois working hours. Indeed. But since we are all gender communists now, let's stop pussyfooting around.

Even my initial proposal was too timid. Forget maternity wards. The state should cultivate children from conception in nutrient-rich artificial wombs, care for them through college, guarantee them jobs and social security as adults, furnish pensions for their senior years and wrap things up with government nursing homes, euthanasia clinics and cremation.

Talk about convenient.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]