Hello readers. Look at your modern art. Now back to this Old Spice ad. Now back at modern art. Now back to Old Spice. Sadly, modern art is not an Old Spice ad. But it could be less repellent if it stopped dousing itself in self-important shock-the-bourgeoisie theory and tried to make things people would actually like.

Ordinarily this would be my cue to explain that unless you live in a cave you'll have seen the brilliant Wieden + Kennedy ad where Isaiah Mustafa tells women if their man traded his effeminate body wash for Old Spice they could wind up on a boat receiving two tickets to "that thing you love" that turn into diamonds in the hands of a shirtless Adonis who, as a final touch, reveals that "I'm on a horse." But as most caves now feature broadband even the troglodyte set have been enjoying this instalment of the new Old Spice YouTube ad campaign with unbridled enthusiasm. (watch it on www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE)

Unbridled not unbrided. So great a hit has Muscles Mustafa become that he has started making personalized messages for his Twitter followers that include proposing on behalf of one of them to a girl who said yes. My wife thinks it would be really cool if he sent her a sensual, amusing, sophisticated yet unpretentious message featuring an exotic lifestyle, classy sensitive gifts and romantic adventure. Regrettably we are experiencing technical difficulties unrelated to where I accidentally bit through the modem cable in three places while trying to brush my teeth with a bookshelf.

Look down. Now back up. Where are you? You're in an ad that's a classic soft sell in that it doesn't take itself too seriously. But it's not ironic, dark or bitter. It's just great fun. And to me a special pleasure is that not since Mickey Spillane had seven of the 10 best-sellers in U.S. history and was the fifth-most-translated author in the world have the highbrows been spritzed with such a down-market scent.

If there's one thing urban sophisticates love to hate, it's advertisements. They are meant to be the ultimate in vulgar, shallow obnoxious misuse of aesthetic talent. Yet in truth, when an ad is well done it is humane, profound and enchanting. (Classics from my youth include one asking "Does your garage door put the 'ugh' back in ugly?" a line Shakespeare would surely have envied.)

That commercials must try to please people is not, in fact, a point of inferiority by comparison with art. Ads only really work when they engage our sympathies and appeal to our better natures. And I don't see what's wrong with that, except, as noted, when it emphasizes our worse physiques in front of our better halves. I shall move on.

Another special pleasure is that the ad makes amazingly little use of computer-generated graphics. I'm not against those; to be honest I now wince a little at the original Star Wars which, those of you born in caves will recall, seemed like ultimate wizardry at the time. But in a world that seems to be turning into the Matrix at least in terms of decor, I like the fact that the vanishing bathroom stall in the Old Spice ad is done with a crane and he's showering with real water.

It's a reality thing. As I like to tell the kids glued to their little screens all day, when I was a boy we had nothing to play with but lumps of wood and bits of cardboard which, to put a brave face on our misery, we called "chess." And I especially treasure the authentic, gritty illusion-making in the "I'm on a horse" ad after reading the e-mail Quotation of the Day from Tuesday's New York Times from a woman who used to feed geese in Prospect Park in Brooklyn that "It's eerie to see a whole population gone. There's not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they've been Photoshopped out."

I have no quarrel with Photoshop, which I use as avidly as I don't use Old Spice (or body washes; we cave-dwellers figure fresh air is nature's deodorant and very rarely does anyone venture close enough to disagree). Geese, on the other hand, well, nature is wonderful and all but sometimes you have to side with the predators. I'm on a tangent. What I mean to say is that this ad is a ticket to that thing I love because we've gotten to the point where people say something real is so vivid it's like a computer effect. Whereas this ad is so real it's real. I like that.

No wait. I don't. My wife looked at the Old Spice guy and won't look back at me. And I couldn't even tell her that chiselled chest is just an artifact created by a team of geeky designers who'd have to Google pecs then Photoshop them in if I could get her attention.

Since I have yours, I won't promise you diamonds from which an Old Spice bottle rises suggestively. But I will say if you trade in your Turner Prize for some commercial kitsch, you could be smiling as broadly and naturally as me.

I'm on a hobby horse.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Look+this+back/3284798/story.html#ixzz0tqOTQCgc

The appearance of CSIS director Richard Fadden before a special sitting of the House of Commons public safety committee revealed a problem. We seem unable to think logically about national security.

Let me pose three simple questions. Do you think foreign governments ever attempt to gain influence over legislators in order to affect policy or acquire information? Do you think they ever do so through a combination of innocent-looking favours and appeals to ancestral loyalties? Do you think it ever works?

No sensible person could answer no to any of these questions. But taken in sequence they demonstrate that Fadden's concerns are justified.

It is true that the picture is complicated by what the CSIS head called the "level of granularity" of his charges. What he meant, in English, was that he referred with possibly spurious precision to cabinet ministers in at least two unspecified provinces and several unidentified municipal politicians in B.C.

If he does not have solid evidence against particular individuals it was both foolish and irresponsible to say it the way he did. If he does, please note, there may be security or even legal reasons why he cannot make this evidence public. But either way what he said is happening is happening, and we all know it. Right?

So I have a fourth question: Do we care? It amazes me how many people seem to think it does not matter whether foreign nations are manipulating ethnic loyalties and employing junkets to the old country and such sugar-coated bribe-like objects to suborn Canadian legislators. It only matters if someone complains about their doing so.

Not everyone has taken that position. In this newspaper last weekend Liberal Senator Colin Kenny wrote "Fadden did Canadians a service by pointing out that too many Canadian politicians are effectively on other countries' dole." If you do not agree, do you deny the bit about the dole, or that he did us a service by mentioning it? No, no, don't change the subject.

Too late. They already did. It was tragicomic to see Bloc Québécois MP Maria Mourani demand, "Who are the traitors in the current political class, Mr. Fadden?" But to be fair, the BQ makes no secret of working to dismember Canada at your expense. The far more unpleasant part came when he responded that there was no question of treason and she snapped "You don't use the word 'traitor' but I'll say it."

As Fadden tried to explain, the issue is not blunt appeals to politicians to commit treason that would probably backfire. It is subtle and insidious attempts to seduce them into inappropriate conduct without ever creating a bright line they might refuse to cross.

I'm not saying it is always wrong to accept a trip or other favour. But it is wrong to do so in ways that might be compromising, including not saying anything. When I went to Israel on the dime of the Canada-Israel Committee, I made a point of disclosing that fact in commentary about the trip. Which is my cue to mention that I was recently hired as managing editor at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Though I am not a spokesman for the Institute in this column, readers should be given sufficient information to judge whether where I stand is determined at least in part by where I sit (starting with my boss having written in defence of Fadden).

Why is this so hard to grasp? Yet New Democrat Don Davies told Fadden "You've created great consternation and anxiety, unwarranted suspicion and an unfounded stain on ... every provincial cabinet minister in the country." Bosh. No one thought Fadden meant the UK government was plying ministers of recent British extraction with crumpets and tea.

If he did something bad, it was to cast unwarranted suspicion on cabinet ministers who are first- or second-generation immigrants from countries of west, south and east Asia, especially that big one near Taiwan. Given the normal hypersensitivity of the politically correct to any whiff of bigotry, Davies' line of attack was weirdly off-target.

Afterwards Davies said, "I don't think he understands ... the damage that he's done to the political process in this country." What about the damage politicians do to it when the head of CSIS warns of foreign penetration of our political system and most of them go after the messenger rather than the problem?

To talk as though multiculturalism trumps national security brings politics into disrepute. Yet as Fadden rightly told the committee, "If I had simply said, 'There is foreign interference in Canada,' you, ladies and gentlemen, would be all at your holidays right now."

On Tuesday, Liberal MP Marlene Jennings demanded a quick review of the allegations because "Four more weeks is simply too long to allow this issue to linger." Until Fadden spoke out, she'd have let it linger for four decades.

We have a problem.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The G8 and G20 have been and gone amid much sound and fury. But all the people making noise seem to have signified less than nothing.

First, the hard-core protesters who went around smashing stuff and setting fires. You could easily find mainstream outlets for your message if you even had one; much of the mainstream press, academia and the political class are uneasy with these economic summits. You rampage because you are thugs who insist that your point of view prevail even when you cannot persuade people of it, which is either childish or sinister or perhaps both. Democracies have seen this sort of thing before on many occasions and sensible people know it is toxic.

Next on my list are critics of the police, whether they are attempting a back-door validation of the vandals or simply playing the bourgeois-radical game of "second-guess-the-cops." Some have said the police were too tough, others too soft, and at least one commentator accused them of both simultaneously.

The first is absurd; it was not police burning dissenters' cars in Toronto. The second is hardly less so given the theatrical outcry that would have resulted from even one serious overreaction. But the third is also problematic. If a reasonably small number of people are bent on smashing glass, vandalizing vehicles, creating a shifting mass of unruly mobs and hoping to trick the police into breaking one innocent head, it is not possible for the security forces to stop them from doing so entirely even with severely repressive tactics.

That brings me to the non-violent protesters. You shut up, too. Not because you don't have every right to peaceful dissent, but because the real problem for the police is too much winking at the hard core by their fellow travellers. If you do not want the image of protest to be masked hooligans and flaming cop cars, you must sever the links of sympathy between the radical legal left and the radical illegal left. It does little good for cranky conservatives like me to deplore the rock-throwers; you must do it, too. You must confront them when it is happening and you must help the police prevent it beforehand and punish it afterwards. I'm not really sure what your complaints about these summits even were anyway, but I don't want to hear a word of it until you sternly and effectively disavow the radical rabble hiding in your midst with deeds as well as formulaic pieties.

When I champion peaceful dissent here, I'm willing to walk the walk. For having attempted to dispose of the critics, I'd now like to shut up the participants. Everything useful they said would have been far more usefully said at home.

You say they came and promised to be fiscally responsible? Well, the proof of this pudding is in the eating. If they get their budgets under control, they don't need to travel to exotic countries, or Canada, to stand around saying one day they'll do it. And, if they don't, their words were just so much wind over sand or, in the case of Toronto, asphalt. If they really feel the need to send a joint message they can circulate a PDF, affix electronic signatures and send it out to the press. We'll get it. We have e-mail.

I'm not just being irritable. I believe there's a kind of faux federalism behind these gatherings that risks misleading citizens and perhaps even politicians into thinking there's been a partial pooling of sovereignty into the G8 or G20, creating some kind of supranational authority to manage global economic affairs that, among other things, binds their members not to do foolish things when they go home because they promised not to in Toronto.

I am a big fan of real federalism. Certain tasks must be done by central governments because they cannot be done by subordinate ones (the classic example being national defence), while others, like education, are far better delivered locally. That doesn't mean I want a global federation; I'm with Bertrand de Jouvenel, who said he favoured world government until he crossed the Swiss border half an hour ahead of the Nazis. But the key point is that these gatherings are not a convincing attempt at it.

Federalism requires subordinate units permanently to surrender important legal powers they will be irresistibly tempted to use unless these powers are put definitively out of reach (if, for instance, states or provinces can withdraw their troops from the national army when they feel threatened or disgruntled, no war effort can survive). But the G20 neither does so nor pretends to. Promises to foreigners are even less binding than promises to one's own voters, and that's all we saw in Toronto.

At these summits even the people who had something to say said it in the wrong forum for the wrong reasons. Sound? Check. Fury? Check. Significance? Nothing good.

Let's not do it again soon.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One great thing about a newspaper column is I can criticize Barack Obama without jeopardizing my position and creating a spectacle of public humiliation. In this I do not resemble Lt.-Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

As in many other things, you may retort. Gen. McChrystal is a rock-hard warrior whose steely blue eyes drill right through you. Mine are the exact shade of brown that mystery- and action-story authors never allot to their heroes. When the general enters a room all heads swing toward him. When I do so the door swings. And when he was appointed commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the National Post reported that he only ate one meal a day "to avoid feeling sluggish". I operate under no such restriction. But it is the first difference that matters here.

Much as I despise Barack Obama, he clearly had to relieve Gen. McChrystal for his idiotic words. But he had to do it properly. Once the general's staff had openly derided "the wimps in the White House" the only way to contain the damage was for them not to live up to the characterization. And they couldn't, for the obvious reason that it was accurate.

Consider the revealing babble by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs that "There has clearly been an enormous mistake in judgment that he will have to answer to" and "The purpose for calling him here is to see what in the world he was thinking."

Yes, Gen. McChrystal made an error of judgment in allowing his views to be made public. But he was called to the White House to answer for the views, not their public expression. Moreover, it was blazingly obvious what he was thinking; his words left nothing to the imagination. It was equally obvious that he was not thinking: No former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (which oversees the Delta Force, Navy Seals and such) could fail to sense danger in allowing Rolling Stone to follow him around, record the profanity-laced commentary of his staff and print the result unless his brain was completely AWOL.

The most disturbing part of the White House reaction is that President Obama, and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, repeated the psychobabble charge of "poor judgment." What the general showed, unmistakably, was insubordination. But the president's first instinct was not a severe yet dignified reproach. It was a big dollop of lukewarm PR pablum: "Whatever decision that I make with respect to Gen. McChrystal, or any other aspect of Afghan policy, is determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there, and that ultimately makes this country safer." He needed focused outrage at insolence toward the office of Commander in Chief, not soothing vacuity.

Harry Truman once commented that when he encountered insubordination from Douglas MacArthur over the Korean War, "I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea." It would probably have been as unsafe to try to propel MacArthur into a large body of water with your foot as to perform the operation on Stanley McChrystal. But I'll bet Truman would have made a creditable attempt. Not Barack Obama.

"No drama Obama" is increasingly clearly in the wrong chair as Commander in Chief. Which is very troubling not just for the president but for his country and, therefore, for its allies. If he had not fired Gen. McChrystal it would have given free rein to widespread contempt for the president and his ilk within the military. But firing him will only deepen that contempt unless he now takes decisive action in Afghanistan, a war he doesn't know how to win but doesn't dare lose. And he's already over a barrel with his new commander whether David Petraeus's appointment is interim or permanent.

The problem is that whoever he now picks can dictate strategy and insist on its public endorsement. The president can't say no to such demands, because should anyone decline or resign the Afghan command, no matter how decorously, everyone will know senior generals are unwilling to try to win a war on behalf of an administration that considers it more important to give radicals control of the global gender agenda than to defend friends in Israel and crush foes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Everyone. At home and abroad. Which means the president must also back his new commander even if the Afghan war strategy goes badly wrong. No amount of schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the wimps in the White House can compensate me for how much more likely this episode makes failure in Afghanistan. And it is Gen. McChrystal's fault for not keeping his big steaming yap shut.

I think more or less the way McChrystal does, without all the obscenities. But I can say it. He couldn't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The reflexive hostility to Israel on the democratic left is becoming troubling. I think well-meaning progressives need to increase their vigilance in the name of decency.

Consider the ruckus caused by remarks in which NDP deputy leader Libby Davies appeared to denounce the very founding of Israel as illegitimate. Once her comments went viral, and her party commendably repudiated them, she wrote a letter saying "My reference to the year 1948 as the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory was a serious and completely inadvertent error." But this explanation does not wash.

That her comments were serious I grant. But inadvertent? This was not some slip of the tongue like a right-winger shouting "Long live Communism" when they meant to say "Capitalism." She knows 1948 was the founding of Israel, not a subsequent war in which it acquired "disputed" territory. And she had also broken with her party to endorse a boycott and sanctions against Israel. There is deep hostility here that, one fears, is uncontroversial among many of her associates.

Then consider Fidel Castro's declaration, proudly circulated by Cuban diplomats at a typical recent UN anti-Israel session: "The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis. It would seem that the Fuehrer's swastika is today Israel's banner." And ask yourself: Where is the outrage on the democratic left?

I will not rehash old quarrels about whether Castro is a vicious incompetent or a romantic anti-imperialist hero. But anyone who reads the newspapers knows it is Hamas that is pledged to exterminate Jews, not the other way around. And putting swastikas over the Star of David is second only to the blood libel in gratuitous malevolence. So why aren't we hearing more criticism of Castro from his erstwhile admirers? You're not sympathetic, are you?

I don't believe so. I'm convinced most Canadians on the left are motivated by precisely the compassionate sensitivity to injustice and bigotry they proclaim a little too often and too loudly. And I am certain that, if they actually read the drearily revolting stream of anti-Semitic blood-libel cartoons, sermons and political statements in Middle Eastern publications and, increasingly, Islamist outlets in the West, they would be physically ill. But I also know they do not read these things, on purpose. And I don't understand why not.

Thus I appeal to the Canadian left, with absolute sincerity: Please recognize that there is an enemy to your left and it is creeping up on you.

I realize you believe you have adversaries and enemies on the right. I am not convinced you draw a sufficiently careful distinction between the merely misguided and the genuinely malign to that side but I grant that the latter do exist. Including anti-Semites in the fever swamps of the right. But they inhabit the fever swamps of the left as well. I am increasingly persuaded that anti-Semitism is an infallible badge of vile extremism everywhere. And if you look hard to your left you will see a loathsome horde dripping its slime and heading your way.

Of course not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. If it were, it would make most Israelis anti-Semitic, since the inhabitants of that fractious democracy incessantly debate every aspect of public life and criticize their own government with considerable glee. Ever since Job berated God for callous incompetence, it has been normal within Judaism to question everything without standing on ceremony.

I love it. But why doesn't the left? You all know Israel investigates itself constantly over the Gaza blockade, the Lebanon incursion, the withdrawal from Gaza and everything else, and Israelis quarrel about them constantly. You all know that in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Gaza dissent brings death. Yet the very existence of Israel seems increasingly offensive to some of you.

The naive still ask why the left dislikes Israel despite its democratic openness. But darker questions are starting to arise. You cannot be unaware of the moral gulf between Israel and Hamas. And as long as you side reflexively with Hamas, you cannot reassure me that you are not culpable in a weird infiltration of hate into progressivism.

It is a relief that even an American media icon like Helen Thomas destroys her career by telling Israelis openly to "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to "Poland. Germany. And America ..." But her views cannot have been a secret to colleagues who continued to respect her until she went toxically public.

Anti-Semitism is wicked and grotesque. Please do not let it seep into the mainstream left.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The other day I was asked to take part in an event benefitting the homeless. No, that's not the punchline. It's that I ended up getting rejected because I was unable to attend the mandatory technical training first.

Some readers may think my compassion needs work. But not, please, through the sorts of cybernetic techniques Robert McNamara applied in Vietnam. The result of such a technocratic approach is a form of insanity all the more chilling for being hyper-rational. Not merely in its manifestations, but in its foundations: a relentless determination to quantify everything, however inappropriate it might be.

Ironically, whatever compassion I might be feeling for anyone or anything was being simultaneously and dramatically impaired by another manifestation of this weird modern mindset. Did you know that it is government policy in this province that we not be able to see the lake from the deck?

I am not making this up, just fixing it up. You see, a building inspector recently came to check some changes to our cottage and, on his way by, condemned our existing deck as unsafe and required us to block the view.

I realize the inspector was only doing his job. But I do not see that it is the business of the state to determine whether my deck is safe. Governments are instituted among humans to secure our legitimate rights against invasion by others, and their duty is to suppress force and fraud and act where genuine "free rider" problems lead to things like polluted lakes. (Which we have, by the way.)

Canada was settled by people who took responsibility upon themselves for constructing suitable homes, barns, vehicles and other necessities, and I can assure you that if the pioneers who broke the sod of Quebec, Ontario or the prairies had been obliged to go through today's scientific permit application process, the country would be an unspoiled wilderness from sea to shining swamp.

If you're wondering what would become of us without all this supervision, well, there's a major risk of our becoming a great nation, wealthy, confident and a bastion of freedom in two world wars. And if we sometimes have trouble judging safety, the private insurance industry is a mighty backstop. Unlike governments, insurance companies have to be right about what's safe, because they must charge reasonable premiums and offer reasonable payouts and leave room for a small margin of profit by getting both right.

Governments face no such constraint. I know. I was there, standing on a deck that was not "unsafe" in the primitive, non-technical sense of ever having been the scene of an injury even though, before we bought it, it had no safety railings at all, just posts and a top board above a yawning, vertiginous gap. We disliked this sufficiently to put in what we decided was a safe railing, leaving a space at the top for gazing at the lake.

Regrettably such things have been cybernetically de-authorized. It is now mandatory to have a railing 42 inches high with spindles running all the way up. How many of you own "Muskoka" chairs or similar furniture that let you see over a 42 inch railing? Sorry, that question does not compute.

The crowning irrational glory in my view, or obstruction thereof, is the requirement that we raise our railing by one inch before installing the spindles. See, ours is only 41 inches high so it must be raised, regardless of the expense or transparently evident lack of contribution to safety.

As G.K. Chesterton observed exactly a century ago, "These great scientific organizers insist that a man should be healthy even if he (is) miserable." My guess is they'll only achieve the latter, because enjoyment of nature is very good for us and these regulations place economic as well as visual barriers in the way of this venerable but unscientific Canadian habit.

The episode is cast in a revealingly artificial light by the ruckus over the fake lake at the G20 summit in Toronto. It would take me too far afield (but don't worry, it's just a depiction of a field within an air-conditioned building) to ask what business it is of the state to promote tourism. Or how good at it they're likely to be if they try. But people who think a puddle in a plastic basin with some canoes and a painted backdrop of what you'd be seeing if you really were in the Muskokas and the railing regulations were different are unlikely to be concerned that they're ruining the experience for the rest of us.

Indeed, they're far more likely to think I'd appreciate their efforts better if I'd had the appropriate technical training.

But alas, the social engineers lag behind their woodworking counterparts so there I sit like a rotting deck in a damp forest with real flies, a shockingly backward specimen of unsafe self-reliance whose compassion is now, technically, homeless.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published on Mercatornet.com] To Kill a Mockingbird is a magical book. That is the word. From the moment of its publication 50 years ago it radiated magic. To this day you may with confidence place it in the hands of anyone, anywhere, of any age, race or gender and know that if they do not love it, they have missed something transcendent.

The first thing to be said to clarify the magic is that its portrayal of childhood is wonderful. I mean this not as a stock word of praise from an author afraid of blundering stylistically if he writes “magical” again. I mean it literally: Mockingbird captures the wonder of childhood.

Once Scout and Jem befriend the visiting Dill, their familiar world cracks open with a series of delightful fissures caused not by the shattering impact of evil, though it surrounds them, but because it is expanding wonderfully and must do so. They are able to have a series of new adventures undreamed of before it all started yet somehow perfectly natural once they are happening. And this, to me, is one of the outstanding features of a good childhood.

I should interject autobiographically that I was fortunate enough to have a happy childhood including reading many books whose spell never entirely faded. Mockingbird was not among them, and when I first read it in my early 30s I was inclined to add to my very short list of regrets about my life that I didn’t read it as a kid. Try as we might to become again as little children, almost nothing that happens to us as adults seems to have that luminous quality of immanence that pervades a happy childhood, where every day or week may bring some new, unexpected wonder larger and richer than we have yet experienced.

On reflection I’ve changed my mind on that point. Part of the magic of the book for me when I did read it was its uncanny capacity to conjure up overpowering flashes of childhood (including the plan to lay out lemon drops that Boo Radley would follow “like an ant”). I believe I relished these far more for being an adult.

If all the book did was remind you of what childhood excitement felt like it might be at best a minor classic. But it did far more. It made sense of that excitement.

Mockingbird has had its share of detractors. Not just racists who objected to its obvious and compelling refutation of their position but critics and other authors who found it childish, naive, unworthy of study. At the risk of seeming all these things myself, I would suggest that their real problem is that the book is hopeful.

When a Virginia school board was considering banning it as “immoral literature” in 1966, Harper Lee wrote a stinging letter to the editor whose key passage was “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

That response underlines the two key reasons the book is so important. From an American, and especially southern American perspective, the book is an act of statesmanship. Not some Yankee ridiculing of mean rednecks, it was a key part of the redemption of the South, a reminder that however deep the currents of racism might run, there were other currents deeper still (a magic from before the beginning of time, one might even say) that were incompatible with it.

Generations of southerners, including Confederate soldiers, might have been at once honorable and Christian and bigoted. But it was an unnatural combination and in their hearts they knew it. Indeed, the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s depended upon finally getting white southerners to admit to themselves that they did know it.

This deep magic is not limited to time and place. In reminding white southerners of this thing they always knew about their particular situation, Mockingbird reminds all of us of the things we always know about our situation whatever it may be, knowledge we cannot evade but struggle to heed. Atticus Finch is not just a man who knows what he must do. Almost anyone can manage that. Atticus Finch is a man who knows he must do it, and does it, and we wish we were more certain that we were like him.

Atticus stands for truth against the mob. He faces down his own fears and therefore other men’s viciousness. He meets with triumph and disaster and treats these two imposters both the same, and so shows his children what the meaning is of a world that keeps opening new and marvelous vistas for them. And again I use “marvelous” with etymology aforethought: The world is full of marvels and Mockingbird knows it.

Its particular and often dark marvels make it to some extent a “coming of age” book. Within its pages we see Scout growing up a little; three years is a long time when you’re six and her childish conceits about “hants” and so forth become a bit more mature within its pages. Outside its pages, in part because of the flashback narrative technique, we sense what sort of adult she will become, in large part through the influence of her father and other adults, both good and evil. And thus we know that “coming of age” is not just a matter of growing bigger and more self-aware, or self-absorbed, while eventually discovering girls or boys.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is above all about morality, about becoming one of those who does take responsibility for what is right and wrong. In this context it has been suggested that Mockingbird’s “coming of age” theme is tragic, as the characters come to grips with failure. Such critics clearly missed the magic. What Harper Lee tells us in this story is that success and failure cast lights and shadows in this world but take place within us. Atticus is never a failure even when he fails. Nor will his daughter be.

If like Han Solo we explore the world around us we’re bound to see “a lot of strange stuff”. But that’s not the marvel. Nor is it real growing up. The magic, the expansion from childish wonder to the adult kind, is realizing that life means something, something incredibly important and boundlessly joyful: The fundamental structure of the universe is moral not material.

That is the magic at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird. And it has only gained in brilliance in the last half century.

One major lesson of history is that humans are frequently vile chumps. Unfortunately, because we are the audience as well as the topic, the lesson often fails to sink in.

I strongly suspect the same problem lies behind our frequent inability, or unwillingness, to draw obvious historical analogies. Presumably we all know exactly what to do the next time Hitler demands part of Czechoslovakia. But we nevertheless stare in bafflement, or worse, at North Korea or Hamas. Why?

Consider this luminous passage about appeasement I just encountered while rereading Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint's 1972 book Total War for a seminar I'm teaching on America at war. "Hitler's ravings," the authors say, "were passed over and he was regarded as a man who would make bargains and stick to them because it was difficult to see what to do if he was really a totally different kind of person."

Does this observation not shine a brilliant light on what's happening today, starting with Western regimes begging the Chinese government to help them do something about North Korea sinking a South Korean warship?

I would not say Western governments are completely unwilling to understand the North Korean regime. It is so evidently insane you just look stupid denying it. On the other hand, our would-be statesmen consistently insist that the correct response to any North Korean behaviour, comparatively tame or psychotically violent, is restraint by us. Is it not clear that the North Korean regime does not react well to restraint?

It may be objected with some justice that Pyongyang doesn't react well to anything, but, if it did, it wouldn't be to empty words or carefully harmless sanctions. That tyrannically insane government couldn't care less if the country's entire population starved to death, and they laugh at our reproaches. So what impact are mild sanctions or hollow condemnations meant to have? In short, Western policy toward North Korea is in substance (or lack thereof) driven by assumptions with nothing to recommend them except the difficulty of seeing what to do if they are unfounded.

When it comes to the People's Republic of China, the problem is considerably more acute because China is both stronger and less clearly insane (though Hitler was pretty obviously demented and people didn't let it affect their judgment that he was reasonable). But China is unlikely to be a useful partner in reining in North Korea because the Chinese are its strongest backer. And they are its strongest backer because....

Oh dear. How very many unpleasant ways there are of finishing that sentence and how few pleasant ones. So we assume that China's rulers have limited, reasonable geopolitical ambitions and a fundamentally peaceful diplomatic orientation not because anything they ever do supports that assumption, but because it is difficult to see what to do if they are really totally different kinds of people.

My ruminations on this disquieting subject earlier this week were rudely interrupted by the latest news that Israeli efforts to inspect a convoy headed for Gaza resulted in pacifists attacking IDF members with clubs, knives and guns and getting shot.

Now it is perfectly obvious that Israel is not going to permit uninspected cargoes to enter Gaza and it is obvious why: Gaza is ruled by Hamas, which is sworn not only to destroy Israel, but also to exterminate Jews. (See, again, Article 7 of the Hamas Charter, where rocks and trees erupt in anti-Semitic fury.) No one but Israel would ever be asked to let such an entity import uninspected cargoes for murderous purposes; not only would Canada not permit it under similar circumstances, but also we would not ask Syria to stand for it, or North Korea.

Admit it. If a convoy of activists insisted on bringing uninspected cargoes into North Korea, attacked customs officials who tried to inspect them and got killed, there would be no outcry. We'd soberly note that nations have a right to protect their borders, urge restraint, and perhaps make a grovelling submission to the Chinese government to help us persuade North Korea to shoot the next bunch with smaller calibre weapons.

So what's the deal with Hamas? Why does the press insist on running headlines like "After deadly raid, Israel stands alone" and "Israel's alliances hit the hardest" and "Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis"? I'll tell you. It's because Western diplomats, politicians and journalists pass over Hamas's ravings and members of the convoy chanting about Muhammad's army coming to kill Jews and insist on regarding Hamas as an organization that will make bargains and stick to them because it is very difficult to see what to do otherwise.

So what do we learn from history? So little that, if Hitler did demand the Sudetenland again, we'd probably give it to him.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]