“Omar Alghabra, Canada’s transport minister, once again showed himself to be the antithesis of dynamism. A smooth practitioner of political blatherspeak...”
Kelly McParland in National Post January 20, 2023
In my latest National Post column I say the “inclusive” teacher who told a Muslim kid to celebrate pride or get of Canada exposes not just reflexive intolerance but a deep, unresolvable contradiction in multiculturalism.
“My personal favourite [among her late father’s many fine turns of phrase]… his technical term for fixing any appliance by means of a quick smack on the top or side: ‘Repair Scheme Number One.’”
Jean Mills in Globe & Mail June 18, 2004
“O, I smell false Latin.”
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
In my latest Epoch Times column I note the eerie similarities between the stilted belligerence of totalitarian states attacking free societies from the outside and the woke attacking them from within.
“This is a barrel loaded with fish, but let’s take a brief shot anyway…”
Charles Gordon in Ottawa Citizen June 8, 2004 [specifically re young people who don’t see politicians who represent their interests but of much wider application IMHO].
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.
In my latest Epoch Times column I take aim at the government’s self-deceiving reliance on “continue” to describe things they are not even trying to do and would not know how to start trying.