tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post584282794438904247..comments2024-03-28T10:07:24.955-04:00Comments on Northern Reflections: A Long Twilight Struggle Ends In TwilightOwen Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06464860078574618579noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-17319872341812314952020-01-07T17:29:04.804-05:002020-01-07T17:29:04.804-05:00I lived in Montreal during the summer of 1967, Mou...I lived in Montreal during the summer of 1967, Mound -- the summer of Expo 67 -- Man And His World. Back then we were open to the world. We welcomed it. Other countries were to be explored, not shut out as enemies. How things have changed. Paranoia is now the order of the day.Owen Grayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06464860078574618579noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-52959374762610848492020-01-07T17:11:04.876-05:002020-01-07T17:11:04.876-05:00I regularly wind up dwelling on the same concerns ...I regularly wind up dwelling on the same concerns expressed by our friend, Sal. How do we turn our country around, put it back on the path we once happily followed. <br /><br />There is much written today about populism and nationalism. They're mainly cast as hostile, mean, nasty. We forget that both come in two flavours - positive and negative. Today the negative prevails. This is evidenced in xenophobia, paranoia, cultivated and carefully stoked fears and appeals to base instincts, a focus on "the other." That's the stock in trade of the Republican Party and America's dominant rightwing media.<br /><br />Progressivism embodies positive populism. Its focus is on the state acting primarily for the benefit of its citizens, recognizing that a more prosperous and engaged people are the greatest asset any nation can have. Positive nationalism is similar. We immersed ourselves in it during the 1967 Centennial. It was an expression of pride in what we had built and inspired us to do better in the future. It wasn't about glorifying the state by tearing down other nations, other peoples. It was about accepting all citizens as our fellows, not just those of our immediate political stripe. It was the engine for building social cohesion.<br /><br />How do we change course? How do we get back on that path? I don't have much confidence we will. Perhaps that option stands foreclosed. The world is hurtling into dangerous and very much uncharted waters. In so many ways we are stretched to the breaking point. We declare a state of emergency and then go back to business as usual, unwilling to even contemplate the measure and urgency of the moment. This Canada, so wealthy and advantaged, cannot rally behind even paltry climate change efforts such as the carbon tax. We play politics with our survival. This cannot end well.The Disaffected Libhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13135599782685108764noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-65927168074582791132020-01-07T14:02:24.639-05:002020-01-07T14:02:24.639-05:00The evidence of decline is everywhere in the Unite...The evidence of decline is everywhere in the United States, sal. If we don't want to succumb to the same politcal disease which is destroying that nation, we can at least start by recognizing that the present Conservative Party of Canada is not conservative at all. It is a northern version of the Republican Party.<br /><br />If we follow the Republican formula, we too will succumb to the nihilism which now runs rampant in the United States.Owen Grayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06464860078574618579noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-82351976983467775642020-01-07T13:50:23.555-05:002020-01-07T13:50:23.555-05:00.. as a Canadian (and I do not use the word 'p..... as a Canadian (and I do not use the word 'proud' .. since the word was abducted) I see Americans through my own special & personal filter. Of course they are of a vast spectrum & mosaic. I keep the peoples somewhat seperate from the 'Nation' itself.. ie the USA is a vast geographic entity.. just as Canada is. It was rare for me to encounter the difference between Americans and Canadians.. but I did here and there. One obvious and immediate difference was the black people down there.. hispanics. The sheer size of cities, such as New York or Detroit or Los Angeles, the downtown cores, ghettos, the obvious wealth, the glaring poverty.. the overall population density and development was stunning to me. <br /><br />Today I see Canada drifting, indeed arriving as a sort of proxy for a USA that dumbfounds me with its ignorance. That I find sickening. As I watch the debacle of the USA now mired in the sheer stupidity and greed that Trump, McConnell, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity represent perfectly.. I see Canadian politics trying to mirror that astonishing failure. I see that as a disease. That our RCMP could accept shooting peaceful First Nations protectors and protesters defending their unceded lands is Kent State, Chicago, Watts executed in miniature. Election Fraud, black ops departments within political parties, even our governments. The corruption is sickening, the abandonment seemingly from birth of scum like Pierre Poilievre, Denise Batters, Jason Kenney, Harper. How we can put the brakes on .. of Canada's descent into hell is my question. How to diagnose or triage this country and Canadians is my burning question.. how can we treat an infected country before it becomes fatally overrun by political & religious parasitic zeolats... who have zero coherent morality or ethics ?the salamanderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06853337802990122289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-30131044910749513692020-01-07T10:59:23.408-05:002020-01-07T10:59:23.408-05:00Ultimately, Mound, all empires are guided -- if th...Ultimately, Mound, all empires are guided -- if that's the word -- by triumphal fools. History is full of the rubble they create. We are witnessing the death of another empire. And its demise has come -- as it always does -- from within.Owen Grayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06464860078574618579noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35117130.post-75070569229137371092020-01-07T10:50:49.573-05:002020-01-07T10:50:49.573-05:00Has there ever been a more grotesque example of hu...Has there ever been a more grotesque example of hubris, Owen? I recall when, back in the mid-Clinton era, I stumbled across the web site of a group calling itself The Project for a New American Century. That was the nest from which the neoconservative eggs hatched unleashing on America and ultimately the world the likes of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Francis Fukuyama, Elliott Abrams, Scooter Libby and more. Once Cheney persuaded George W. to make him vice-president he shoehorned all that malignancy into the Bush administration. As I read the PNAC manifesto I imagined it could have been written out of the Reichstag Fire. They were clear that their agenda required a truly seismic event to have any chance of being implanted as American policy. 9/11 was just the thing. When the conquest of Iraq turned into a quagmire, PNAC dissolved. It's manifesto, however, was largely adopted to become the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine forbade any nation or group of nations from reaching the point where it might challenge the US economically or militarily and expressly reserved the right to use force against any upstart that offended its terms. WTF? The Disaffected Libhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13135599782685108764noreply@blogger.com