In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the prideful inability of people in public life to admit an error and apologize even though, weirdly, it would be better PR than their flailing efforts at spin control, as well as better statecraft and soulcraft.
“What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted – a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are – a chance to strive for some sort of order.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“You know the old saying, that rogues are generally fools also.”
Mr. Ball in Silas K. Hocking, “A Perverted Genius,” in Douglas G. Greene, ed., Detection by Gaslight
“the Yiddish proverb that all cats like fish, but few are prepared to get wet.”
Deirdre McMurdy in Maclean’s March 10, 1997
“Fred Durkin, big and burly and bald, knows exactly what he can expect of his brains and what he can't, which is more than you can say for a lot of people with a bigger supply.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Might As Well Be Dead
“Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in playwriting; The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the place drives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a flare up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played – if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’ What is the alternative to working ‘inside’ the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about ‘Burn the system down!’ Yippie yells of ‘Do it!’ or ‘Do your thing.’ What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of ‘murdering fascist pigs’ when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide?”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.”
Narrator’s internal monologue in Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped [by paid he means, obviously, they get their just comeuppance]
[This family profiled in a bleating story] “are fond of placing interesting quotes on the wall, and there is one they could really use that my teenage daughter’s competitive ringette team follows: ‘Don’t wish it was easier, make yourself better.’”
Letter from David McGruer in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 4, 2007 [the family in question had all sorts of sob stories about how the difficulties in making ends meet but in the letter writer’s opinion were not making some obvious efforts that would help]