“Doughnut-Americans”
Another of mine, from June 30, 2001, on the intersectionality of obesity and what was then “political correctness” and is now “woke”.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Peel District School Board purging all books written before 2008 is a worrying red flag about what’s happening in government schools… and I do mean red.
“The clouds above us join and separate,/ The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns./ Life is like that, so why not relax?/ Who can stop us from celebrating?”
The poet Lu Yu, cited in Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh
“David S. Muzzey put the problem well when he compared the individual to the waist of an hour-glass, standing ‘at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens downward through descendants at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens upward through ancestors’. In Muzzey’s image, every historically significant man is ‘focal’, gathering the experience of the past into himself and sending forth ‘widening rays of influence’ into the future. ‘The task of the biographer,’ he concluded, is ‘to calculate the resultant of the forces’, which consist of the personality of the subject and ‘the problems of the times in which he lived’.”
John A. Garratty The Nature of Biography
“They talk a great deal about education, because it is compulsory education. Whether or no they can educate, they are always eager to compel. But as a fact their aim is the very contrary of education. It is the destruction of education, and even of experience. It is to make men forget the past, forget the facts, forget the very memories of their own lives. And if their compulsory culture spreads successfully, it is very likely that we shall be alone in knowing what was known to every man, woman and child, in the hour of our danger and deliverance.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 24, 1920, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“At forty he [the villain, Jack Bolt] was an embittered man who blamed the world for the success that had never come to him, failing to understand that the fault was his own. He was one of those who had always wanted to start at the top, and the idea of consistent effort to get there had seemed futile to him.”
Louis L’Amour The Riders of High Rock
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that political party conventions are more interesting, and more useful to voters and parties alike, if they are not tightly scripted.
“Distance doesn’t matter. It is only the first step that is difficult.”
Marquise du Deffand, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 18, 2002