At the dawn of a new decade, with the 21st century and third millennium well under way, I scan the horizon for signs of progress toward the bright future we were promised of plenty, leisure, compassion, perpetual peace, keen appliances and the siblinghood of all mankind. Unfortunately, what I see before me is a label on a water jug telling me it contains no fat or dietary fibre.

In the spirit of my late grandfather's maxim that "It was better under Clovis" I reflect sourly that, during the Dark Ages, people didn't need any label on their water other than "water" because they knew what the stuff was. Now you may retort that, in Clovis's day the water was pretty dangerous. Which I concede, while noting that people back then knew that sort of thing too and didn't need a label. It's also why they drank beer for breakfast so they might not have been able to read the label by lunchtime even if they made it that far. And could read, you may be tempted to add.

Even there you are unfair. Yes, literacy was lower in the Middle and Dark Ages. But it does not follow that ignorance was widespread. Indeed, the common modern belief that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat just goes to show how fatuous our own times are. John Holywood's bestselling astronomy primer Tractatus de Sphaera not only asserted that the Earth was round, it also contained several simple proofs I defy the typical product of a modern public school to produce spontaneously. (If you want to look it up, he went by the Latin version of his name, Sacrobosco, which only goes to show how parochial and ignorant people were in those unenlightened times of universal intellectual culture and open borders.)

Do I seem to make too much of a label on a water jug? I realize it is only there because government has banned common sense so we cannot just put labels on things that need them and convey information we might want. Which isn't everyone's idea of an improvement either and was not a problem 800 years ago.

So let me look up from my non-fibrous water and consider the kind of roundup of the year's news that is now habitual, in which we identify important trends containing the word "Ignatieff " for the benefit of bored readers. Or, should I say self-important trends -- because the fact we somehow lived through a year does not automatically make it interesting to posterity.

The simple fact is that not much of significance happened in Canada in the past year. I mean not much of political or historical significance; in your own life things marvellous, tragic or merely notable may well have happened. But this lack of public significance is, in itself, of some importance. Just not in a good way. Mankind has toiled and sweated and died for the blessings we enjoy, from parliamentary self-government to material prosperity to comparative security, and we seem to be making very peculiar use of them.

To take one pointed example, what has been accomplished in the vexed area of Canada's unsustainable health-care system as the demographics turn ugly? Right. Nothing but the spouting of increasingly stale rhetoric. And on the global warming everyone who's anyone insists is real, the science is settled (pay no attention to those leaked e-mails behind the curtain) and we must do something. Which they then decisively have not done except gather periodically at immense expensive carbon-intensive elite gabfests to promise to meet again later because we're so darn compassionate. Whether man-made climate change is real or not, this is a feeble performance.

As to the looming threat of foreign aggression by insane persons in positions of power abroad, or at least able to do us significant harm, 2010 was again a year of immobile fatuity that would have embarrassed the kings of Wessex.

In fairness I must note that the fact water is now safe to drink is one thing we did get right. But, instead of celebrating it as a glorious environmental triumph driven by sensible engineering, we all insist on buying the stuff in bottles with the word "spring" on the label along with that business about the fat while fretting about trace elements of BPA in other plastic bottles and cellphones cooking our heads and stuff.

Cellphones with GPS do remind me that technology has become cooler as promised in early 20th-century panegyrics about a bright future. Tablets are on the rise and blogging is on the wane. That's good. But it's not much to show for 250 years of rapid technological progress, five centuries of "enlightenment," 1,000 years of parliamentary self-government and at least 3,000 of knowing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Oh, yeah. We also put a label on water saying it's not a significant source of sugar, fat or dietary fibre. So we didn't waste our time entirely. Happy New Year (may contain sodium).

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Well, it's time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas ... and damn the torpedoes, I'm tempted to add -- if it ain't out of keeping with the situation.

I realize this point has been made before (including by me on Dec. 20, 2002, if you're keeping score). But there is an important place for repetition in life now including not only putting up a Christmas tree but adding a sign saying "This is a Christmas tree." We also need to insist that those greetings you only get in December are Christmas cards (or, sometimes, Hannukah ones) given that those that emanated from the Governor General, the prime minister and the leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition at this festive season depicted ... a different season. One without snow. (See the following pages.)

I cannot see the value of this pandering subterfuge. There's only one reason for sending these cards now and everyone from Tiny Tim to Ebenezer Scrooge knows what it is. So those who dislike Christmas will not be deceived by the camouflage and those who like it will not be impressed by it.

Then why deck part of the hall with boughs of surly over the fact that if Dec. 25 is not Christmas it's just a cold grim grey Saturday, and if the holiday that must not be named is not Christmas no one knows what it is? Because we should reflect briefly, before getting into the bowl of hot punch or some other adult beverage, on the deeper meaning of the strangely powerful impulse to clutter up the calendar with false dates while cleansing it of real ones.

Let me stuff a few recent examples into your stocking. In late October, I got a press release attempting pathetically to immortalize the thoughts of our minister of state for science and technology on the conclusion of National Science and Technology Week.

Just as, pace Lincoln, calling a cow's tail a leg does not make that ruminant a quintuped, calling the period on the calendar ending Friday Oct. 22 National Science and Technology Week does not make it so (nor, parenthetically, does claiming "In 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced Canada's Science and Technology Strategy" mean one of those exists either).

Calling Oct. 3 to 9 Fire Prevention Week also does not make it one. And I don't just say that because I lit a fire during that period, albeit with some difficulty. Nor, I am quite certain, did anyone without a vested interest in the matter suppose October was Renovation Month or that there is such a thing.

This impulse is comic. But it is not innocent. Julius Caesar's decision to give himself a month was certainly cause for alarm (mind you he should have renamed March given what the people he alarmed did to him on the Ides of it). And Augustus' vigorous denials that he was anything more than first citizen would have been more believable if he hadn't bagged August.

It is a sign of demented metaphysical ambition to believe that just because you are, for instance, in uneasy control of Turkmenistan you can remake the fundamental conditions of human life. In case you have forgotten his attempt to prove something can be sinister and ludicrous at the same time, Turkmenistan's erstwhile ruler Saparmurat Niyazov started by renaming himself Turkmenbashi or "Father of all Turkmens," then renamed a town, a meteor and January for himself and April and bread for his mother before creating a national holiday in honour of melons, banning car radios and lip-synching and gold teeth and extending adolescence until age 25. And Saddam Hussein decided his 65th birthday would last a year.

Mind you it doesn't always work; Nero attempted to relabel April Neroneous before his associates relabelled him "here lies Nero." And, while Turkmenbashi decreed that old age didn't start until 85, he died at 66 anyway. Likewise Idi Amin crowning himself king of Scotland didn't let him rename haggis or make Robbie Burns day a year long.

Obviously we don't live under Nero or Saddam. But the idea that we can remove from the calendar many things ordinary people have long known were there, like Christmas, and then clutter it up with things that don't exist, like Fire Prevention Week, is a minor key version of the same deranged desire to remake life through the power of the state to coerce you or at least make you pay to be nagged.

When real things happen, like celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 or extending adolescence well into middle age in the West, it's because ordinary people actually live that way, not because governments can make us celebrate melons, live longer or avoid dental work by gnawing bones.

We can fight back by observing Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19) or INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY (Oct. 22). But the best way to strike a blow for common sense is simply to insist that the thing with the ornaments is a Christmas tree, and using any Season's Greeting card showing summer to light what is, unmistakably, a Yule Log.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Not much takes the edge off my festive mood faster than the government sternly warning us not to be reckless with money. Yeah, you go first, buddy.

In the spirit of fairness, I should note two key things about Monday's warning from Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney that we're in hock up to our eyeballs. First, "the government" is a hydra with many quite dissimilar heads that do not always act in concert, and the Bank of Canada is not among the more conspicuously profligate of these hissing tentacles.

Second, his warning does fall into the category economists technically label "scarily accurate and horrible." It appears that Canadian household debt reached another record high this fall -- 148 per cent of disposable income, leaving a ring slightly higher on the tub than even the bath of red ink Americans are currently taking.

Now let me rescind both those qualifications. On the first point, the Bank of Canada may not personally be in debt. But what has it been doing about consumer debt? I'll tell you. On behalf of the government, it has been keeping interest rates low on purpose on the theory that cheap money will "stimulate" the economy.

Some other day I'll fascinate you with an explanation of why I think this whole idea is nonsense. The point right now is that the ostensible mechanism by which low interest rates were going to get us out of the recession was that when interest rates are low people can spend more because they can borrow more. And apparently people spending more because they can borrow more is so good for the economy that the governor of the Bank of Canada has to threaten us to make us stop.

Actually he said it wasn't a threat. Mr. Carney did mention that the government might lecture us, then pass regulations to make it harder to borrow money and, finally, raise interest rates. But he added: "It's only in the context that (if ) all of those are addressed, is there an issue for monetary policy in reinforcing the activity? That is the question. I'm asking the question. I'm not supplying any hint of the answer." No, of course not.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty did even better on Monday, noting that one thing his government could do to reduce borrowing was tighten mortgage eligibility rules yet again. But, given his conversations with bank executives, "There is no reason for extreme concern right now. But there is a reason for concern." At this rate, the next thing the government will warn us about is vagueness.

Or lack of transparency. The governor's Monday remarks included the observation that "Cheap money is not a long-term growth strategy." Thanks for telling us. Now cue Friedrich Hayek's warning from 1939 that "to aim at the maximum of employment which can be achieved in the short run by means of monetary policy is essentially the policy of the desperado who has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a short breathing space."

So are you admitting your plan was just a short-run one and, if so, why didn't you tell us sooner? Didn't you trust us? And if that was your plan, and it worked, where do you get off now lecturing us about having done what you paid us to do?

On my second qualification, we should take to heart Mr. Carney's central point that you should not incur debt that exceeds your disposable income, even though the warning comes from the state. As Benjamin Franklin noted in Poor Richard's Almanac, "He that's aground knows where the shoal doth lie." But my goodness, if we're going to try to get something off the reef without delay, it should be the government.

It's a little hard to determine how the federal government's debt-to-disposable-income ratio compares to our own because it's not obvious what constitutes government's disposable income. Right now, a lot of people say federal debt is reassuringly low, a paltry half-trillion dollars, a mere 40 per cent of GDP, a bagatelle, smaller than in the dark days of the 1980s and a lot better than the American figure. Indeed, if you consider the entire GDP to be the government's disposable income, it's modest by your standards and mine as well.

If you don't think the government could, in a pinch, stuff the whole GDP into its own wallet, the matter looks less reassuring (and remember that in a real crisis the provinces, also gravely indebted, might lunge for the same GDP at the same time causing a nasty coco bonk). According to its 2010 budget, the federal government's revenue for 2010-'11 was to be $231.3 billion -- putting its debt-to-total-income ratio at an alarming 239 per cent. Of course, its books are so complicated that it has other revenue sources and a few minor, hideously immense, unfunded liabilities that demographics make way worse. But, apart from that, its financial situation is merely shocking even compared to ours.

The state's advice to smarten up is still good. Let's start with it. Ho ho ho.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently what this country needs right now is a new national strategy for immunization. At least that's the view of "public health leaders" quoted in Monday's Globe and Mail. I personally think we need to be immunized against national strategies, if I could just figure out how.

I'm not against vaccination. But what has the federal government to do with it? There's a surprisingly common reflex in Canadian public debate to suggest bureaucratic centralization as the solution to various problems that don't seem remotely likely to respond well to it.

The general problem with centralization is that, by ensuring that everyone does the same thing in the same way, it makes it far too likely that we will all make the same mistake at the same time, and it would be very hard to fix it if we do. Decentralized systems, by contrast, begin by experimenting with different approaches, so it's almost impossible for everyone to make the same mistake, very likely that someone will get it right early on, and easy for people to discover and switch quickly to the superior approach. True, a command-and-control approach might get lucky, but it is not a rational gamble given the rapid self-correcting properties of decentralized systems. Also, getting lucky is no "strategy."

On vaccination, for example, the Globe quoted one proponent's ideal that "every kid has the same access to the same vaccines all the time." But even if we could do such a thing, which I doubt, why would we want to?

If it's clear what the best vaccination approach is, we don't need a centralized strategy because sensible doctors will already know what to do. If it's not clear, a national strategy only makes sense if the federal government reliably knows best and if it has the administrative capacity to act on its superior wisdom. Theory and experience alike, including with flu vaccines, suggest that both those "ifs" are extremely iffy.

Mind you, I'm not against all national strategies. I think we should have one for defending the country. But I want a national security strategy because only the federal government can do defence, not because I consider it unusually likely to do it well.

Unfortunately, too many people in public life call for national strategies without any attempt to explain why the particular matter at hand is one where the general hazards of excessive centralization are worth running. For instance, in late 2008 two Liberal critics were hyping a "Towards a Comprehensive Food Policy for Canada" summit. Yet if there's one thing that clearly should not be centralized it's eating food, with growing it a close second.

Likewise, the April 2, 2009 NDP press release saying, "Debate begins today on a New Democrat bill to bring in a National Housing Strategy." So there's food and shelter; anyone for a national clothing strategy?

Not yet. But on April 22, 2009 a press release told me the NDP wanted a "national forestry strategy." Why? How did cutting down a tree become a national enterprise?

Putting aside other notes in my files about calls for national strategies on various causes, (often worthy, but not logically connected to the proposed method), let me note federal Liberal demands in 2009 for a "national water strategy". It is actually not a foolish proposal given the geographically extensive nature of rivers, water basins and coastlines, and the federal responsibility for the environment. But when the chair of the national Liberal water caucus asked in the Commons on Earth Day, "Why is the government having so much trouble making it happen?" it was a far better question than he apparently realized. You see, the federal government has lots of national strategies -- most of which aren't working very well. Forget 2003's effort to develop one to combat bullying defined to include "putting down another teenager, leaving them out of a conversation or mocking their choice of clothing."

Just consider the famous national strategy to reduce surgical wait times which, the Fraser Institute reports, hit their second-highest level ever this year. It is also now 12 years since then-federal health minister Allan Rock promised a national strategy to confront the shortage of nurses. And who could forget the National Energy Program and official bilingualism? And at the risk of seeming to quibble, the government already has a national immunization strategy (or two; they put aside $300 million for one in 2003 and the same amount for another one in 2007).

As a rhetorical device, creating a national strategy has some merits. It deflects criticism by conveying simultaneously that you are neither ignoring the problem nor panicking over it. Maybe we need a national strategy on national strategies. It wouldn't work, but it would reassure us that it's all under control so we could go think about something more useful.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If there were a WikiLeaks dump regarding the European Union's fiscal, monetary and existential crisis I wonder if it would be full of things like: Whoa, Nelly, we're in the soup! Who thought of this fake currency with fake historic scenes anyway? Does anyone remember Bismarck dismissing "Europe" as merely a geographical expression?

Or would there be no recognition at all that anything fundamental was wrong?

I'm not suggesting there should be such a thing, by the way. You may count me among those who think WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange should be put in jail for about 100 years with not just a copy of the New York Times but some of its staff to keep him company.

This leak was clearly both illegal and malevolent. Of course citizens have a right to know, when it comes to foreign policy as with any other activity of government. But it must be exercised through responsible members of the elected legislature, if any can be found, because it is flatly impossible to conduct national security without some kind of discretion and a constitution, formal or implicit, is not a suicide pact.

The EU, I'm not so sure about. Economically it appears to be a way of ensuring that bad policies are rewarded with immense sums of money skimmed off from good ones, that well-governed countries must pick up the tab for their incompetent neighbours at great cost in ill will, and that excessive centralization will impede any effort at reform. Politically it looks like a device for protecting the European penchant for smug elitism against popular indignation.

In defence terms, the original impulse was to so intertwine the economies of European nations, especially Germany and France, that war would become impossible. I can think of better reasons for avoiding war than that we just can't figure out how to make the weapons for both sides separately, but if that's all you got I'll take it. Unfortunately, Europe is now conspicuous for its unwillingness to use force to defend its vital interests and, moreover, its apparent determination to erase its historical identity in such a way that its inhabitants have no idea what those interests might be.

As long ago as the Nixon years there was this idea that Europe would become another major power centre in the world that would stand apart from American policy but fundamentally on the same side, in favour of liberty and decency. We seem to have gotten one out of three.

Consider the determination of the EU, whose governmental structure is a breakfast no dog would touch, to "bail out" hideously mismanaged governments including that of Ireland. But it's not bailing when you dump water into the boat. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Irish government believed the people who said the pragmatic course was to throw good money you didn't have after bad money you couldn't retrieve. Now the EU's doing the same.

The Irish weren't alone, of course. When the 2008 crisis hit, we were told without bailouts "the system" would collapse. It was nonsense. The system, in one sense, could not collapse because it is a set of arrangements for safeguarding private property rights so individuals can manage their affairs as they think best. Particular fortunes may collapse in hard times and so may firms. But the rules persist, as an exemplary instrument for allowing people to pick up the pieces and start over without wasting time and effort on spilt money.

In another sense, the system had already collapsed anyway. The specific configurations of assets and asset-holders that seemed so prodigious in early 2008 were revealed by year end to have been an interlocking set of illusions no combination of profligacy and obtuseness could re-establish.

Even those who understand the key economic truth that people respond to incentives sometimes don't grasp that people respond to what they think is happening, so when a lot of them realize simultaneously they've been wrong their behaviour changes abruptly and dramatically in ways you neither should nor can reverse. When the crisis hit, all those banks and investment houses did not become insolvent, they were revealed to be insolvent. Schemes for retrieving value that was never there were thus doomed to fail. And were adopted worldwide by "practical" men and women who dismissed more logical approaches as ideological.

Well, who's laughing now? The Irish government tried to bail out insolvent banks and now it's insolvent, so the EU is trying to bail out insolvent Ireland and might go bust itself. I wouldn't miss it if it did. But let's at least learn some lessons.

For instance, that make-believe economics is bad economics. And that make-believe politics is worse politics. This crisis is not threatening to destroy "Europe," as some politicians there fear. It is revealing that the EU was never really there.

I wonder if they know they're an illusion.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

It's not exactly "Give me liberty or give me death." But "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" is a serviceable rallying cry for free people today. Why, you can even order a needlepoint version online.

For those of you who think that if men were meant to fly, God would have made their clothes transparent, the motto comes from one John Tyner who, on Nov. 13, said it to Transportation Security Administration agents at San Diego airport who wanted to feel him all over because he objected to going through a full-body scanner the TSA website wrongly said wasn't in place there.

I do not know whether these scans are bad for you. I also do not suspect the TSA of wanting to see me electronically disrobed. And no one can think I'm soft on terror. But it is a great story for four key reasons.

First, a modern twist, Tyner recorded much of it on his cellphone. Forget plausible deniability. His version "went viral" and the TSA went into a half-patronizing, half-menacing downward spiral into malevolent absurdity as its further abuses and obfuscations were heard around the Internet.

For instance a 71-year-old with a metal knee implant left with his pants round his ankles in a special examination room with ... transparent walls. Who designed that, the Marquis de Sade? I certainly suspect him on the woman forced to remove her nipple rings with pliers, or the retired special education teacher and bladder cancer survivor whose aggressive pat-down broke the seal on his urostomy bag and left him covered in pee.

Meanwhile TSA chief John Pistole told CNN Sunday: "I want to be as sensitive as I can to those folks. I'm very attuned given all the concerns that have been raised" but "we're not changing the policies." Which doesn't sound very attuned to me. On Monday, facing a possible Thanksgiving boycott of the whole naked X-ray groin-fondle government program for making travel unbearably wretched and sexually humiliating, he did a fake flip-flop. He hinted emptily at openness to less invasive searches while seeking to turn members of the public against one another instead of his agency by telling five TV networks: "If people choose to opt out of the advanced-imaging technology because they're trying to slow down the process, then I feel bad for the people who are simply, again, wanting to get home for the holidays that they would be delayed because of that."

The next great thing is how American entrepreneurs jumped on the story, with satirical products from that needlepoint to underwear to hide your personal bits from the scanner to someone posting a song Comply With Me spoofing an old BOAC ad.

Third is John Tyner's reaction as a free man enjoying liberty under law: He said if the agents felt him up, he'd have them arrested. The TSA, on the face of it, was not behaving lawlessly. It has statutory authorization to molest travellers, with fines for those who object. But Tyner rightly insisted there's a law higher than man's yet knowable and enforceable by humans, against which legislated statutes are to be measured.

Yeah, yeah, some of you may be thinking. But terrorists are devious and determined people quite capable of hiding weapons in prosthetic limbs or urostomy bags (the nipple rings I still don't get). As John Pistole also argued, "We cannot forget that less than one year ago a suicide bomber with explosives in his underwear tried to bring down a plane over Detroit."

Sure. But the solution isn't to look in everyone's underwear for a bad guy. It's to look everywhere in the bad guy for a bomb. And that brings me to the fourth great thing about this story. The constitutional ban on unreasonable search and seizure (we have it too) doesn't just protect citizens from harassment. It protects governments from their own stupidity.

At one point U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano babbled "I think we all understand the concerns Americans have about that. It's something new. Most Americans are not used to a real law-enforcement pat-down like that." No. And I'll tell you why, you dim bunny: They aren't criminals, and they rightly resent being treated as such. It keeps them from getting where they're going, gets them groped, and diverts the attention of security forces from the obvious bad guys.

Indeed, mentioning the Detroit incident was in especially bad taste since failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was reported to American authorities by his own father among others and they let him on the plane anyway. They're too busy pulling citizens' pants down to do their homework on patterns of behaviour and suspicious individuals. But Americans have had it with that.

A nation capable of tea parties 250 years apart can also make the state take its hands off their junk and lay them on real terrorists. And sell needlepoint online about it.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Did you see that scoop in the Postmedia papers this week about an Alberta woman who got workers' compensation from a court because serving ice cream made her arm hurt? How did we get to the point where difficulty handling small quantities of frozen dairy products creates a legal entitlement to public money? It must be all this progress we've been having.

I don't know about you. But I'm pretty sure I'm descended from people whose problems with food were (a) there wasn't much of it (b) most of what there was had gone a strange colour and started to smell three months earlier and (c) the stuff that wasn't rancid tended to fight back. Try announcing to a peasant harvesting grain by hand that if repetitive motions make your arm hurt you should go ask the king for coins. Or that a hunter should get cash because of those bowstring-induced blisters on his hand, or that a fisherman's sore back from pulling in nets carried a common law remedy.

I'd ask where's your beef over the fact that physical work can create soreness except I'd probably be told it never arrived because the guy carrying it tipped over and fell right into a lawyer's office. So I'll put aside this heartless approach and instead pursue what smells rather like a gravy train. Which now that I come to think of it also sounds like a dangerous thing indeed: If it derailed on a soft shoulder there'd be a tidal wave of hot, salty sludge liable to create hypertension and lawsuits.

At one time, as noted, the principal health hazard from food was eating too little of it. Later, after some progress, it became eating too much of it. But that was before a keenly honed capacity for inhaling the stuff (not literally -- see the Oreo story below) would get you judicially mandated extra airplane seats. Now you get money for not coping.

Seriously, folks. These days if we can cultivate sufficient ineptitude with food almost anything might be a meal ticket. The ice cream of doom is just the beginning. Before us lies a veritable cornucopia of mandated benefits. Consider cherry tomatoes. Those suckers explode. (Thus one of my rules for success in business is never eat a cherry tomato in a suit. True, you rarely encounter a cherry tomato in a suit. Except, if this nonsense keeps up, a lawsuit.) Meanwhile bananas have been infamous since vaudeville days but I still think you could get laughed into court if you slip on one.

Or take the humble celery stick ... please. Once upon a time the worst that could happen was being forced to eat one to lose weight, only to end up with a mouth full of what appeared to be polymer-reinforced string soaked in weak cucumber juice. Now, surely, you could get a lucrative repetitive strain injury from all the chewing. And what about things that are hard to slice like, say, meat, or vegetables, or bread? Then there's waiters carrying trays, sommeliers experiencing

stress-related disorders from being polite to guys faking knowledge of wine to impress their dates, short-order cooks feeling the heat ... is there one single food that's safe to serve or eat?

I don't think so. Some are too hot, others too cold, some too sticky and others too dry. For instance my wife has expressly authorized me to mention her recent harrowing experience with an Oreo: reading one of those exchanges now posted online about the bizarre corrections to text messages by a small white cellphone (produced by a company I won't name because it's a food) caused her to inhale sharply at an inexpedient point in the cookie consumption phase with consequences only an eye ear nose and throat specialist could love. I would say these bloopers are worth looking up, while warning that the ones that most often get posted are bleepers not suitable for children, except you might laugh so hard it hurt and I wouldn't want your lawyers to know I'd suggested anything of that sort.

I would also certainly not want to be overheard today suggesting that if serving ice cream makes your arm hurt you should put some ice on it. Frozen water poses far too many dangers, from hypothermia to hurt factor due to slippage to melting and inundating coastal cities. Suggesting you try switching hands would presumably be discrimination against the antiambidextrous, while suggesting you switch jobs would be shocking discrimination against the monoculturally gainful. Besides, what job doesn't make things hurt?

Indeed, I find myself sore from all the typing required to compose this column, especially because I was also eating a late dinner and had to make this odd stretching motion past the keyboard that aggravated an old injury, a broken stiff upper lip. I'd be well on my way to riches except I feel thirsty and what are the chances, in these enlightened times, of my getting and drinking a glass of water without doing myself in?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that we've observed a day of solemn remembrance of the war dead, the wounded, all who faced the horrors of combat or stood on guard, let us recall the noble cause of liberty under law they bravely served, and contemplate how desperately we still need such courage and resolve in a menacing world. Then let's have a good belly laugh.

No, I haven't taken leave of my so-called senses reading newspaper stories about Iran and Saudi Arabia seeking seats on the UN's marquee women's rights organization. Nor am I simply recommending that we laugh in the face of death, sneer at doom, and chuckle at catastrophe ... though sometimes that seems the best plan when petrified by the spinelessness of the West facing mortal perils. Rather, I'm suggesting we all fight back by watching that Volkswagen Polo ad on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad4fagTyaM4.

Go ahead. It's only 22 seconds, and I promise they'll be well spent. I'm not being frivolous here. Or rather, I'm being seriously frivolous. For those of you ill at ease with the Interwebs, the ad shows a grim-looking character in one of those black-and-white scarves silly campus progressives think stand for global justice, coming out of his apartment, getting into his car, driving past innocent Westerners having normal days, parking outside a cafe, pulling out a detonator as we glimpse his suicide vest, then pushing the button only to have the resulting explosion entirely contained within the car, after which the slogan "Polo. Small but tough" appears on the screen.

Wait, some may say. There's nothing funny about terrorism. It's deadly serious.

It kills and maims and leaves devastated kin and friends. It can paralyse societies.

I assure you I know all this, and support the most vigorous possible efforts to make terrorists become dead. But humour is not a frivolous pastime, an empty hobby for fools and children, to be put aside when serious things happen. It is a way of seeing the world that illuminates faster than poetry and gives much better light. It draws the most essential connections in the most unmistakable form.

Laughter is the most potent political weapon in a democracy because once people see what is funny about a candidate or office-holder, that person's career is finished ... unless he or she sees it too.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, drove many people mad because he was not only seriously right-wing, he told better Ronald Reagan jokes than almost anyone else, like confessing during a crisis to "burning the mid-day oil".

Because he got the jokes about his supposed laziness, and enjoyed them, people knew he understood his failings and was on some sort of guard against them.

Contrast Jimmy Carter, dour, petulant failed president and post-presidential embarrassment.

Now consider Islamist terrorists of the sort plainly lampooned by Volkswagen to sell cars.

Their attitude was perfectly captured by Ayatollah Khomeini's dictum "There is no humour in Islam"; which I consider not merely blasphemy but a serious political weakness. Islamists might snicker at our agonies but they cannot really laugh at us because they do not understand us. And they absolutely cannot laugh at themselves because they do not understand themselves either. They are blinded by hatred and we can see.

Communist regimes had the same problem, by the way. The Soviet system generated endless subversive jokes, but its official pronouncements were not just humourless in their critique of the West, they were entirely unaware of their own chronic tone of self-parody that made them instantly, memorably and indelibly unbelievable to all but malevolent halfwits.

I repeat: I know that terrorists kill and maim and traumatize and bereave. But I also know they are for the most part stunningly inept.

Be glad those who hate us are so stupid they fail to overwhelm our often pitifully feeble security measures.

And rejoice, also, that in a free society a grave national security blunder triggers not just sombrely indignant prose but editorial cartoons, comedians' rants and YouTube videos that make us laugh because they are so true, and show us what is wrong and how to fix it.

Islamists never do that. If you haven't seen it, go online, find Patrick Henry's It's in the Koran; song spoofing radical Islamist haters, and consider whether, despite everything, we will triumph because we can write this sort of song and they cannot.

Now think again of the war dead, the solemn Vimy monument, those cemeteries in Normandy, Ottawa's tomb of the unknown soldier.

And remember that our soldiers fought, and fight, so we may be free, to speak truth to power and laugh without fear.

There is humour in the West, inexhaustible, joyful and mighty. We mock anyone and anything. We joke and we see. So go ahead.

Watch the ad and laugh freely.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]