“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint
“It just doesn’t work. This idea is off the tee and into the lake.”
Marc Henry, senior research manager for Angus Reid’s Calgary office, quoted in Ottawa Citizen May 15, 1999
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ridicule echo-chamber media that spent the entire hearing saying every decent person wanted Brett Kavanaugh voted down and expelled from decent society and the Republican Party was doing itself huge electoral harm over the issue, only to turn around and report that Republicans are keen to campaign on it in the Congressional midterms while Democrats want to avoid it.
“What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare.”
“W.H. Davies (1871-1940) in Leisure”, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Social Studies in Globe & Mail November 11, 2008
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome (written November 1911)
“No real Englishman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist: he is much more likely to be sorry for his life.”
Roger Kimball’s Introduction to Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics
In my latest National Post column I deplore Canada’s tendency to ignore national security threats including, most recently, an aggressive Russian submarine presence in the North Atlantic that menaces vital communications systems.
“Wisdom has never really proved to be much help to anyone (nobody ever said: ‘I can’t open this jar of marmalade - you do it - you’re wiser than me’) and yet as we all get older, we would like to think we are acquiring wisdom. But why? Is it really wise to be wise? When the revolution comes, isn’t it always the wise who get the chop first? Perhaps it’s more sensible to be unwise.”
Miles Kington, quoted as one of two “Apercus du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 20, 2008