'Tis the Season

Summer is a time for family reunions. This is particularly true in Canada where, anytime from November to April, a snow storm can bring the major thoroughfares to a halt. For those of us who live on the shores of the Great Lakes -- where what we call "lake effect" can bury a town and leave the hamlet down the road untouched -- this phenomenon is a daily fact of life.

During the last two weeks, we attended two family reunions -- one for my wife's family, and one for mine. There are five of us: we have three children. But at the two events there were, at last count, fifty-six attendees. At one level, the turn-out served as an example of what economists call "exponential growth." At the very least, it served as testimony to the importance of procreation.


But the context was as important as the numbers. At the first event, we found ourselves caught in a deluge -- the summer rendition of lake effect. The organizers, however, had taken the trouble to rent a tent; and, somehow, there was room under it for all thirty-five of us. At the second event, we managed to cram twenty-one people -- grandparents, children, spouses, grandchildren and great grandchildren -- into one small apartment.

The logistics of getting all of these people under one roof were not easily accomplished. While most of us live in the triangle between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, both sides of the family have Western branches. My wife and I have relatives in Calgary; and my sister and her children live just outside Los Angeles. Add to that grown children who are on their own -- our son, for instance, has just returned from South Korea -- and, not to put too fine a point on it, getting everyone -- or almost everyone -- there was a considerable accomplishment.

For some, family is a thicket of dark motives and broken promises. But, in the end, every family represents the triumph of hope over experience. When an extended family overcomes the barriers of space, time and background to come together under the sky or someone's roof, the event reminds us all that, like it or not -- regardless of skin colour, religious affiliation or ethnicity -- we are all part of the family of man. That is the indissoluble bond which ties us together. When the weather gets nasty -- or when the planet gets crowded and the logistics get difficult -- the number of people who can gather under one roof is truly remarkable. And, as my Irish grandmother -- a widow who raised six kids in the midst of the Great Depression -- used to say, "There's always room for one more."

Taking Government Private

In a recent article, The Military-Industrial Complex: It's Much Later Than You Think, Chalmers Johnson hearkens back to Dwight Eisenhower's last speech as president. "We have been compelled," said Ike, "to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions . . . We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications . . . we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

"Since 1961," writes Chalmers, "there has been too little study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight from members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and balances."

Chalmers then goes on to trace -- making reference to the work of Thomas Frank and Sheldon S. Wolin -- how modern neo conservatives have sought "to discredit 'big government,' while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defence." He gives particular attention to Wolin's analysis. "The privatization of public services and functions," Wolin argues, "manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral even dominant partner with the state." It turns our democratic institutions into "one[s] where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled."

This trend has been going on for some time now -- with both supposedly liberal and conservative governments hopping on the contracting bandwagon in the name of efficiency. But, as tales of how the Iraq War has been executed with the help of private contractors -- there are as many of them on the ground as there are soldiers; and, as the Harper government rebuilds the Canadian Armed Forces -- it is worth remembering that Harper's first Minister of Defense earned his living as a lobbyist for arms manufacturers before he entered government -- the need for careful and critical oversight becomes paramount.

Without such oversight, writes Chalmers, we "heighten the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim." And any government which seeks to obstruct access to information is suspect. Mr. Bush and Mr. Harper have not been particularly cooperative with those constitutionally established bodies whose job it is to act as the people's eyes and ears. That, I suggest, is no accident.

A New Keynes

Last week, Dani Rodrik -- a political economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government -- wrote a column entitled, "Globalizers Lose Their Faith." To my mind, the most significant paragraph contained a litany of highly regarded economists who have become skeptical about the benefits of globalization.

"So we have Paul Samuelson," wrote Rodrik, "the author of the post war era's landmark economics textbook, reminding his fellow economists that China's gains in globalization may well come at the expense of the U.S; Paul Krugman, today's foremost international trade theorist, arguing that trade with low income countries is no longer too small to have an effect on inequality; Alan Blinder, a former U.S. Federal Reserve vice-chairman, worrying that international outsourcing will cause unprecedented dislocations for the U.S. labour force; Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist and one of the most articulate advocates of globalization, writing of his disappointment with how financial globalization has turned out; and Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury chief and the Clinton administration's "Mr. Globalization," musing about the dangers of a race to the bottom in national regulations and the need for international labour standards."

It is the lack of regulation, Krugman argues, which is at the heart of the current financial crisis. In his column in today's New York Times, he writes: "The back story to the current crisis is the way traditional banks -- banks with federally insured deposits, which are limited in the risks they are allowed to take and the amount of leverage they can take on -- have been pushed aside by unregulated financial players." These players essentially lent money on the value of assets -- not on the borrowers' ability to repay; and they assumed that the value of those assets would do nothing but grow. They then divested themselves of the loans they arranged, selling them off to pension funds and individual investors. The theory was that failure would always come in small pieces; and, in that event, no one would be badly burned.

What they forgot was the lesson of The Great Depression: there is such a thing as catastrophic asset failure -- something which world financial markets are now experiencing. To government's credit, it is acting faster than it did in the wake of Black Tuesday. But, as Krugman reminds his readers, much more must be done. "The moral of this story seems clear," he writes, ". . . financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930's, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to to be updated to 21st century conditions."

Unfortunately, for the last generation, governments -- taking their cue from Milton Friedman -- have operated on the principle that financial regulation is the root of all evil. And, hence, we find ourselves in a situation similar to 1928, on the eve of The Great Depression. Wealth is concentrated in a few hands; and there is not enough purchasing power at the bottom of the ladder to keep the economic engine going. If this story sounds familiar, it's because it is. The situation is more complicated than in 1929, because fixing the problem in the United States will not be enough to set the world right. It will take international cooperation and wise policy. In the 1930's, John Maynard Keynes provided the policy prescriptions which eventually set things right. "The world," Dani Rodrik wrote last week, "desperately awaits its new Keynes."

Where Do We Go from Here?

In 1976, Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize for Economics. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Britain. And in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Thus began what Canadian political economist James Laxer has called, "the Age of Reaction." It has been a time, he writes, when "political ideas, cultural assumptions, the role of government, relations between the employed and their employees, and between the wealthy and the rest of the population have assumed a new shape."

In the United States in 2007, writes Laxer, "the relative income gap between the rich and the poor [was] wider than at anytime since 1928 (the eve of the Great Depression.) The lives of ordinary people have grown more uncertain. During the past quarter century, most people have been on an economic treadmill, precariously trying to make ends meet and to ward off the danger of crippling indebtedness."

And in a recent article entitled, "A Nation in Debt," -- in The American Interest -- Barbara Defoe Whitehead chronicles how, in this same period, "the institutions that encourage thrift have moved uptown, catering to upper income Americans with an ever expanding array of tax advantaged opportunities to invest and build wealth. The potential "small saver" has been left behind as prey to new highly profitable financial institutions: sub prime credit card issuers and mortgage brokers, rent to own merchants, payday lenders, auto title lenders, tax refund lenders, private student loan companies, franchise tax preparers, check cashing outlets and the state lottery. Once existing on society's margins, these institutions now constitute a large and aggressively expanding anti-thrift sector that is dragging hundreds of thousands of American consumers into profligacy and over indebtedness."

And the contagion is spreading to Europe and Canada -- as any recently cashiered auto worker (one out of seven jobs in Ontario is related to automobile production) can verify. The government of Stephen Harper has bet its and the country's future on Friedmanesque economic theory; and, like the Bush administration to the South, it has squandered the surpluses which it inherited.

Indeed, as Douglas Peters, the former chief economist at the Toronto Dominon Bank, wrote in The Toronto Star last week, "it appears that this was exactly what both the U.S. and Canadian conservative governments intended. The purpose of the tax cuts was to make it more difficult for governments to raise spending and introduce new programs." The people who bore a visceral hatred of government set out to make sure it would fail. Now the bill for this folly has come due. World markets -- which these folks raised to iconic status -- are teetering; and the future of the planet hangs in the balance -- as we fight wars in the Middle East, the largest repository of the stuff which is a major cause of our economic and planetary woes.

We are at a precarious moment. But, as Al Gore also reminded us last week, there is a common thread which runs through the multifaceted problems we face, "which is deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over reliance on carbon based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges -- the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China," said Gore, "to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet."

Gore suggested that the way out of our morass is to rebuild our electricity grid and take advantage of renewable energy sources -- wind, solar and geothermal. It would be an expensive project. But oil at just under $150 a barrel is expensive; and it kills jobs, not to mention the lives which have been lost in the sands of the Gulf. Gore believes that we can do this in ten years -- the same critical path which President Kennedy set to put a man on the moon. It would mean abandoning Friedman's economic model; and it would mean taxing carbon, or as Gore put it, "we should tax what we burn, not what we earn."

That, coincidentally, is the policy on which Stephane Dion has staked his and his party's future. There will be an election in the United States in November. There will be an election in Canada shortly thereafter. During the Age of Reaction, Laxer writes, "in the developed countries . . . democracy has been in decline, increasingly replaced by a plutocracy in which money dictates political outcomes." No one should be foolish enough to believe that money can, or should, be banned from politics. But, if the Obama campaign has proved anything, it is that small donors have a voice. The question is, can the non-plutocrats once again grasp the levers of power? And do they care enough to fix the mess Mr. Friedman, Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan -- and their hundreds of thousands of acolytes -- have left us?

Standing Firm -- and Doing Nothing

Like the case of Maher Arar (see my post of September 29, 2006) the case of Omar Khadr is deeply troubling -- and Canada's two major political parties bear responsibility in both cases for violating the rule of law.

Khadr was fifteen years old when he was captured in Afghanistan and accused of killing a U.S. Army medic. His father had encouraged him to go fight for the Taliban; and the Canadian government clearly was uncomfortable with the elder Khadr's presence in the country. But Omar was a Canadian citizen -- he was born here -- and, thus, he should have been accorded the rights of any other Canadian citizen who found him or herself imprisoned in a foreign country. Having said that, there are some foreign countries which pay little attention to Canadian requests for humane treatment of its citizens. But, in this case, the country was the United States -- which officially holds that it is a nation of laws, not men.

When Canadian officials first met with Khadr, according to The Toronto Star, "he was lying in a military hospital bed in Afghanistan with two gaping holes in his chest -- the exit wounds of the bullets which were shot through his back before his capture by U.S. Special Forces."

Khadr was no innocent. He had been living with Taliban forces along the Pakistani border; and he well might have known about upcoming attacks. And, therefore, over the next two years, he was questioned more than forty times, in an effort to extract information from him. What is at issue, however, are the methods used in those interrogations, the acquiescence of the Canadian government in those methods, and the legitimacy of the legal process upon which Khadr -- now twenty-one years old -- is about to embark.

On July 10th, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that Khadr had been subjected to what the Americans called their "frequent flyer program," a regime of sleep deprivation -- where the prisoner was moved every three hours for a period of three weeks. This information would not have come to light had not the Supreme Court of Canada ordered the release of the report. Also mentioned in the report was Khadr's claim that he had been tortured.

Khadr's claim carries some weight, in light of the fact that one of his first interrogators at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan was convicted for his role in the death of an innocent Afghan taxi driver. Add to that the revelations about what went on at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, and three U.S. Supreme Court rulings which have rejected the process behind the tribunals under which Khadr is to be tried, and it is not difficult to see why many have concluded that Khadr is about to enter a kangaroo court.

In spite of all this evidence, Prime Minister Harper claims that Canada has no "real alternative" than to let the process at Guantanamo play itself out -- even though Britain, Australia and other nations have sought and received the right to remove their citizens from Guantanamo and subject them to the legal processes of their respective countries. The reason for Harper's position, says an editorial in The Globe and Mail, is clear: "What Canadian Court would accept any statements made by a 16 or 17 year old under such duress and without being allowed to see a lawyer? (He was denied a lawyer for the first 27 months of his incarceration.)" The prospect that a Canadian Court would set Khadr free is a prospect Mr. Harper would rather not face.

Some claim that Harper has replaced Tony Blair as Mr. Bush's poodle. The truth is that Mr. Harper, like Mr. Bush, is a true believer -- who holds that extraordinary circumstances put the leaders of democracies above the law. And, sometimes, being above the law simply means not responding to injustice. But, yesterday, the World Court charged Umar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir -- the president of Sudan and a sitting head of state -- with war crimes. In the aftermath of that event, there are those who suggest that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld should have grave reservations about travel abroad after January, 2009. Mr. Harper might also consider that advice. Mere private citizens could find themselves incarcerated for a long time.

Whose Partriotism?

Last week, the American election campaign was all about patriotism -- specifically, who was the better patriot, Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama. To answer that question, as David Greenberg pointed out in Slate, it's important to realize that McCain and Obama were arguing from different premises and definitions.

McCain's definition of patriotism, best articulated by Ronald Reagan, has been popular for the last twenty-five years. According to Greenberg, Reagan's patriotism "rested on a steadfast protectiveness of American values in the face of enemies -- proven through a muscular nationalistic military posture." It was "impatient with critical perspectives" and "advocate(d) an unhestitant participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegience and even public prayer."

Obama's definition of patriotism was perhaps best articulated by Adlai Stevenson during his presidential campaign of 1952. Speaking at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunt, Stevenson told the American Legion, "True patriotism is based on tolerance and a large measure of humility." It, Greenberg wrote,"respect(ed) dissenting speech in the service of collective improvement."

The former definition lends itself to symbols like lapel pins and flags. The latter is diverse and not easily reducible to a symbol or a motto, like semper fidelis. It is not surprising, then, that Stevenson was soundly trounced by Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

The problem with Reagan's and McCain's definition of patriotism, however, is that it can -- and has -- been used to justify abridging the Constitution. It was generally accepted during the McCarthy period. And it reared its head again during the Watergate Crisis, when Richard Nixon declared, "When the president does it, it's not illegal." And, during the last eight years, it has been this definition which has been used to justify the prison at Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and the War in Iraq itself. It is no accident that the legislation which was passed after September 11th -- legislation which curtailed various civil liberties -- was labelled The USA Patriot Act. Anyone who questioned the legislation was attacked by the Bush Administration for his or her lack of patriotism.

But as public support for the war has gone south, so has the traditional Republican definition of patriotism -- so much so that members of the military, who typically accept it as doctrine, have begun to give voice to the other definition. In a recent opinion piece on truthout.org , Michael Winship quotes Air Force Reserve Maj. David J.R. Frakt -- a military lawyer -- who argued last month that his client, Mohammed Jawad -- an Afghan imprisoned at Guantanamo -- should be released, because the two weeks of sleep deprivation he had endured amounted to torture. "After six and a half years," Frakt said, "we know the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo: some of them are terrorists, some of them are foot soldiers, and some of them are just innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the detainees at Guantanamo have one thing in common -- with each other and with us -- they are all human beings and they are all worthy of humane treatment." Frakt was arguing for tolerance and humility.

Some will argue that, during a war, a nation can ill afford tolerance and humility. But a nation which proclaims "we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" cannot afford the folly of the last eight years. If Mr. Obama wins the election, he will have convinced his countrymen to accept a different definition of patriotism.

Oh, Canada

Today this country marks its 141st anniversary. For a nation which was cobbled together out of a collection of dissimilar colonies -- one which has always considered itself a nation rather than a province -- the fact that the marriage has lasted for one hundred and forty-one years represents, indeed, the triumph of hope over experience.

We owe at least some of our longevity to luck. We have been blessed with an abundance of natural resources and space. Lately that has meant that, in a world gone wild for commodities, we have prospered. And all that space has given us room to blow off steam when we got on each others' nerves.

But we also have survived. We have done so in the darkest of winters; and we have done so despite geographical and cultural barriers -- by, more often than not, finding a way around them, instead of confronting them head on. It's not a particularly heroic way to solve problems; but it leaves behind less scar tissue. In the process we have built institutions -- first a railway, then a telecommunications system and, finally, a publicly financed health care system -- founded on the principle that survival requires sacrifice -- at times, unequal sacrifice.

That ethic of sacrifice has been under attack for a generation by those who have maintained that self interest is in the public interest. They have told us that such is the way of the newly globalized world -- and it is time we got with the program. But in a country which is (geographically) the second largest in the world and which is home to a surprisingly small population, self interest has always run up against the needs of the community. And, most of the time, the community has triumphed.

However, as James Travers points out in today's Toronto Star, we live in an era when our community is now the world. We can no longer afford, he writes, "to live in splendid northern isolation." Besides having obligations to our fellow citizens, we have an obligation to the planet and its citizens. This means we must work to establish trading systems which fairly distribute our own and others' resources; we must sell our oil and reduce the greenhouse gases it generates. Most of all,we must work to see that the grain and other foodstuffs, which have made us wealthy, feed an increasingly hungry planet.

The challenges are more than daunting. But they were just as daunting in 1867, when this seemingly impossible country looked like it would be the victim of American Manifest Destiny. We are not perfect. The Prime Minister's recent apology for the treatment of native children in residential schools should remind us of that. On the other hand, our belief in "peace, order and good government" -- as prosaic as they are -- have got us this far. Those values have built a considerable nation. They also have their place in the world of the 21st century.

Fasten Your Seat Belts

The upcoming federal election could be one of the most significant in Canadian history. That may seem like a risible claim, because neither Mr.Harper nor Mr. Dion are charismatic personalities. But, with the introduction of the Liberals' Greenshift platform, the next election will not only be about the environment, which the American scientist James Hansen says has reached a "tipping point." It will also be about the Canadian tax system -- and that has far reaching implications for public policy in this country.

The plan still needs work. As Carol Goar reported this week in The Toronto Star, if Dion's plan is adopted, it is not clear who will win and who will lose. "Putting a price on pollution would hurt some regions more than others," she wrote. "The impact would be particularly severe in the industrial heartland, which is already reeling from high energy prices and a sputtering economy; and the western oil sands, which spew huge amounts of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere." On the other hand, Goar pointed out that Dion's policy shift would "transfer wealth from the rich to the poor; from the oil patch to the rest of the country; from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low income Canadians." It would be the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which shifted wealth down the economic ladder, instead of concentrating it at the top of the economic mountain.

Roosevelt faced bitter and howling opposition -- from those who accused him of being a traitor to his class -- and Dion should expect the same reaction. It started even before the program was announced. Last week, Mr. Harper -- the leader of a party which (according to columnist James Travers) is "an unsettling mix of defensiveness and aggression"-- called Dion's plan "crazy" and "insane" -- a policy which would "screw everybody."

So the debate has begun. Well, the potential debate has begun. The truth is that debate is not the Harper government's strong suit. Bob Rae has observed that, rather than rebutting proposals with facts, this government counters with accusations which are the equivalent of "you're fat and you're bald."

Roosevelt came to power in a moment of crisis, armed with superb communication skills. And country squire though he was, as the American journalist Bill Moyers wrote, people like his father -- who only had a grade six education -- always felt that they had a friend in the White House. What the "the quality" never understood was that there were a lot more people and a lot more votes in the elder Moyers' social circle.

Stephane Dion has not displayed strong communication skills. And it would be a mistake to underestimate the power and sophistication of the Conservative propaganda machine. But if Dion can convince Canadians of what Martin Luther King (and Barak Obama) have called "the fierce urgency of now" -- and the necessity of a Canadian New Deal -- voters may, indeed, buy his Greenshift.

Most elections are pedestrian affairs, about replacing a tired government with a new one -- or floating in a self satisfied stupor. But, occasionally, nations undergo profound changes. We used to make our living selling furs. Then we sold wheat and the resources under our feet. After World War II, we converted our defense plants into factories to meet consumer demand. Like it or not, the world changes. The next election could change our part of the world as we know it. However it turns out, it's bound to be a wild ride.

Reflections on Fatherhood

Last Sunday was Father's Day. Barak Obama used the occasion to speak on the subject of absent fathers -- a subject about which he knows something. Citing American statistics, he said, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; they're nine times more likely to drop out of schools, twenty times more likely to end up in prison."

As someone who taught high school for thirty-two years -- admittedly north of the American border -- I can verify anecdotally what Obama said statistically. I cannot count the number of times I have wished that a student had a stable, responsible father in the house. That father need not be the child's biological father; but his absence leaves a void that's hard to fill.

Sometimes that void is filled -- as seems to have happened in Obama's case -- by extended family. That happened in the case of my own father. He was the last of six children. His father died when he was two. His eldest brother quit school early and went to work during the Depression to help support the family. My uncle lacked a good formal education; but he possessed a native intelligence which my father relied on often. When my father returned from World War II and had the opportunity to go to university, it was my uncle who told him that there was a future for engineers. His advice put food on our table for nearly thirty-five years.

My dad must have picked up other tips from my uncle because, even though he never knew his father, Dad has done a masterful job with five children, eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren. I talked to him this weekend -- as I do every weekend; and I still seek his advice. He's almost ninety now. And, like Mark Twain, I am amazed at just how smart he has become over the years. It's more than being smart. It has everything to do with wisdom.

Unlike my father I have had -- and still have -- a template to work from. When I have been flummoxed about how to raise our three sons, I have sought his counsel. And perhaps that is why they have inherited his sense of humour. Our boys gave me a card this Father's Day which my wife particularly enjoyed. "On Father's Day," it read, "wear this button to show your position of authority in the family!" The button proclaims, "I am the boss!" However, when you open the card, it reads, "But don't forget to give it back to Mom tomorrow."

Which leads to the conclusion, I suppose, that the trick to being a good father is marrying the right woman. I know my Dad would say that, as do I. And, for all those kids who grow up without fathers -- and there seem to be more of them every year -- everyone of us should resolve to be what my uncle was to my father -- a wise and stable source of counsel in an unstable world.

Something's Rotten in the State of . . .

There is a distinct fragrance surrounding "Canada's New Government" -- and it's not the sweet smell of success. Perhaps it's simply because the government is no longer new. But the Party of Peace, Order and Righteousness is beginning to look sleazy. Even worse, it's beginning to look incompetent.

Perhaps that explains the new set of attack ads which the Tories launched this week against Stephane Dion. They come as no surprise. After all, the Conservatives rented a large bunker eighteen months ago to produce this kind of stuff. And, with no election in sight, there was a need for the operation to justify its existence.

What was surprising was the new venue -- the screens on gas pumps -- to catch the eyes of Southern Ontarians as they filled up their gas tanks. That new wrinkle speaks to the sophistication of the Conservative propaganda machine. This government may not be very good at governing; but it does know how to get out its message -- a message which is clearly meant to distract public attention from an accumulating series of failures.

The now-you-see-it-now you don't federal surplus, the Cadman Affair, the election funding investigation, the NAFTA leak during the Democratic presidential primary, the resignation of Maxime Bernier -- and the ever widening circle of government contacts which Julie Couillard cultivated -- have begun to take their toll.

In his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich -- who writes a weekly column for The New York Times -- documents how the Bush administration sold the lie that Iraq was allied with Al Queda and about to use nuclear weapons against the United States. Every time someone from Washington's inner circle -- former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- cast doubt on the story, the White House did not attack the message. Instead, they attacked the messenger. Rich's analysis has recently been confirmed by former press secretary Scott McClellan.

The Harper government is operating from the same playbook. There is no election. In fact, Dion has not yet revealed the policy which is the target of the ads. But the ads themselves appear to be a further development of the message which Finance Minister Jim Flaherty brought to the Economic Club of Toronto three weeks ago: the Liberals are wide-eyed radicals who will once again plunge the country into deficit -- a strange message from a party which inherited several years of Liberal surpluses and managed to blow through them in two short years.

The playbook is not a new document. Its author was Joseph Goebels, who started from the premise that the truth of a message had nothing to do with whether or not the public bought it. Even the biggest of lies would sell -- if they were repeated often enough. Tyrannies and democracies have been operating on that principle ever since. Add to that tight control of government information, and you have what Toronto Star columnist Jim Travers calls a prime minister who is "building stone-wall defences around his own exposed flanks."

The Tory propaganda operation is impressive. But, eventually, the narrative falls apart. As Rich makes clear, that happened for the Bush administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Despite Bush's claim that "Brownie" was "doin' a heckuva job," the public -- says Rich -- remembered the old line from the Marx Brothers, "Who are you going to believe -- me or your own eyes?"

Despite the new ad campaign, recent poll numbers suggest that the public is beginning to believe its own eyes.

So Much for the Conventional Wisdom

Barak Obama is the Democratic nominee for president. His rise has been remarkable -- so remarkable that, in truth, I never expected to see what I saw last night. But the greatest gifts are the ones which seem impossible.

Almost forty years ago, I headed to the School of Education at the University of North Carolina. Early one Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk (luckily, I had awakened early to study) when a key turned in my lock and in walked a black man -- mop in hand -- to clean my room. We were both surprised. I didn't expect janitorial service on Saturday; and he didn't expect a student in his room, since most students left their dorms to go home for the weekend. Because home for me was in Montreal, I spent my Saturday mornings -- before the library opened -- in my room.

It was on those Saturdays that I got to know Douglas McNeil. On that first Saturday, he called me "Mr. Gray" -- even though he was old enough to be my grandfather. And, what bothered me more, he couldn't look me in the eye. It had only been five years since the signs "Colored" and "White" had been removed from water fountains, restrooms and restaurants in the South. What I soon discovered was that the signs were still inside peoples' heads -- as they had been for generations.

Three months later -- as part of my training -- I began teaching at a high school in Greensboro. It had been fifteen years since the Supreme Court had ruled that school segregation was illegal. But the school I taught in had 2,200 students -- forty-eight of whom were black. Another high school, on the other side of town, had 1,600 students -- and there wasn't a white face among them. Still, when we needed a halfback for our football team, a transfer was easily arranged; and there was one less black face among the 1,600.

In fairness, efforts were being made to change things. The Greensboro schools were on the cusp of implementing a busing plan to achieve better racial balance; but opposition to the plan was building and becoming increasingly vocal. There was also an attempt to shift staff between schools -- at least for the purpose of professional development. I remember one lunch hour, when one of our teachers returned from the school on the other side of town, claiming that he had spent the morning "learning how to be a nigger."

There are times, even now, when I wonder if anything has changed. Watching newscasts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I had my doubts. And a month ago, on another BBC newscast, the correspondent interviewed a man from Georgia who was sporting a T-Shirt, the front of which displayed an image of a monkey eating a banana. He laughed and said, "I think his ears look just like Obama's." I keep hoping that people like him and my former faculty colleague are extinct. But, like some prehistoric fish from the ocean depths, they keep finding their way to the surface.

Be that as it may, what happened last night was not just historical. It gave one cause for optimism. Barack Obama has shattered the conventional wisdom -- and, whatever happens, the world will not be the same again.

Not that the rest will be easy. Some, like Gwynne Dyer, have concluded that "It is now a near certainty that Obama will be the next U.S. president." Maybe. But the really hard part is about to begin. As historical as last night was, history is not on Obama's side. And I fear that the architects of schlock are gearing up for a nasty and brutal campaign.

Time will tell the story of the upcoming presidential election. But this morning there is hope -- and I rejoice. And, somewhere, I know that Douglas McNeil is rejoicing, too.

A Case of Bait and Switch

The buzz in Ottawa this week has been all about how Maxime Bernier engineered his ignominious exit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, the ripples from the story spread beyond Ottawa: they made the hourly newscasts on National Public Radio in the United States. Bernier -- like Gordon O'Connor and Rona Ambrose before him -- was another minister whose lack of experience and judgment made him too small for his portfolio.

Amid all the sound and fury, it was easy to overlook a more important personnel change which the Prime Minister made last week. He announced that his chief of staff, Ian Brodie, was leaving the government -- and that he would be replaced by Guy Giorno, who used to do the same job for Mike Harris in Ontario. Giorno is more than competent. He will not let information slip out and become part of the American election campaign, as did Brodie. And he will not leave sensitive government documents on a lady's coffee table, as did Bernier.

But the appointment of Giorno signals the government's philosophical and policy direction more clearly than anything the prime minister might say. Giorno's job was to put Harris' Common Sense Revolution in place, by employing more or less the kind of shock therapy recommended by the professors in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, and chronicled in tragic detail by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine.

However, long before Klein wrote her book, Dalton Camp was warning Canadians about what was to come. Back in 1999, in a column in The Toronto Star, Camp wrote that the country's two "conservative" superstars -- Alberta's Ralph Klein (no relation to Naomi) and Ontario's Mike Harris -- were not who they claimed to be. "We need to understand what the present rulers of Ontario and Alberta are all about, and it is not tax cuts. It is an effort to limit the role of the federal government, lessen public confidence in it, and destabilize Ottawa's existing relations with the provinces." But there was more. "The two premiers are wired to private interests and remain aloof from serious public interest issues and politics. The premier of Alberta would cheerfully privatize the provincial school system; both he and Harris would welcome the creation of a right-wing political party, subservient to corporate Canada (and America) and committed to their agendas."

Given what has happened since Camp's death in 2002, this all sounds pretty prescient. Two years before he died, in a lecture at The University of Waterloo, Camp returned to his argument that these so called "neo conservatives" were not conservatives at all. Citing Tom Wilson's book, No Ivory Tower, Camp argued that, as Wilson said, "The term neo-conservatism is a misnomer, unless we mean to turn away from the established meaning of conservatism," which is, "opposed to unbridled individualism, and stresses instead the beneficent and necessary functions of community." He then quoted Adam Smith, who Camp claimed neo conservatives have never read: "Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. . . . The affluence of the rich suppose(s) the indigence of the many." Great property and great inequality were the twin legacies of the Common Sense Revolution, which Giorno worked tirelessly to implement.

Klein and Harris are gone; but, under Harper, Giorno gets one more kick at the can. And what does Harper get? According to James Travers, in The Toronto Star, "More than a fresh face for a tiring party," Giorno is, "the wise guy Ontario strategist Harper needs to make wedge politics work in the province that decides federal elections."

Camp did not trust the new conservatives. "Until we survive the reign of Harris and Klein," he wrote, "the nation is in peril and no Canadian is safe." The Prime Minister's appointment of Guy Giorno should remind all Canadians of the sense of foreboding which Camp took with him to his grave. An old advertising man by profession, he knew what bait and switch was all about.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

George W. Bush caused something of a political firestorm last week when, in an address before the Israeli Knesset, he rebuked those who would talk to Israel's and -- by extension -- his country's enemies. In a passage which many saw as a direct attack on Barack Obama, Bush said: "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The ghost of Neville Chamberlain haunted the last century -- and it continues to haunt this one. And, while waving a piece of paper around and declaring "peace in our time," will not guarantee peace, the fact is that all conflicts end with a piece of paper -- after the belligerents have sat down and talked across a table. Often this occurs after particularly dreadful deeds. Such agreements -- like Roosevelt's and Churchill's alliance with Joseph Stalin -- are products of pure convenience. Sometimes they lead to a new relationship, which usually takes a great deal of time and patience. After all, while both sides like to claim a "special relationship," it is no exaggeration to say that, in 1776, contacts between the United States and Britain were more than a little strained.

Bush argues that talking to one's enemies is a sign of weakness. But the Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, James Baker, has declared flatly that it is necessary to talk to one's enemies. Bush's present Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has said that it is necessary to talk to Iran. And high level negotiations are presently going on with the third member of what Mr. Bush called "the axis of evil," North Korea.

Recently a number of political ads have featured "the red phone" at the White House. Many may have forgotten that John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agreed to set up a direct line of communication after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Both men saw that talking was preferable to fighting -- and neither saw talking as a sign of weakness.

How does one account for the change in perspective between then and now? In his book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich reviewed the conditions which existed in the United States before September 11th, 2001. He focused particularly on the narcissism of the baby boom generation -- of which the last two presidents are charter members: "A decade of dreaming was coming to an end. The dream had been simple -- that Americans could have it all, without having to pay any price, and that national suffering of almost any kind could be domesticated into an experience of virtual terror akin to a theme park ride or a Hollywood blockbuster." Unlike their parents, these men had not known sacrifice: they were used to getting what they wanted. And refusing to talk to someone you didn't like was the childish reaction of someone who got his own way and who was impressed with his own reflection in a mirror.

Lest Canadians try to take some comfort in what they think is their own moral superiority, it is worth remembering that our present prime minister is used to getting his own way -- and his unwavering support of Israel translates into refusing to talk with Israel's enemies. This is a radical departure from traditional Canadian Mid-East policy. As Linda McQuaig pointed out this week in The Toronto Star, Canada's "attempt at even handedness has utterly disappeared under Stephen Harper, who lavishly celebrated Israel's 60th anniversary with promises of Canada's 'unshakable' support, while utterly ignoring the fact that this is also an anniversary -- although a very different one -- for Palestinians." She noted that, in 1948, Canada's Justice Minister, James Ilsely, expressed concern that the UN plan to partition Palestine "didn't sufficiently answer 'the very strong moral and political claims' of Palestine's Arab community."

And to those who claim that Canada should have no dealings with terrorists, it is also worth remembering that the late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin proudly admitted being referred to by British newspapers and Members of Parliament as "Terrorist Number One." McQuaig concluded, "If Harper isn't willing to be a tiny bit even handed, it would be helpful if he'd at least stop trying to play a role in the Middle East tinderbox."

Obama's commitment to talk to Israel's enemies does not mean that we will have "peace in our time." But it's virtually certain that unless the next American President sits down with his country's adversaries -- as Reagan did with Gorbachev and Nixon did with the Chinese -- there will be no peace in anyone's time. The next president will have to stop looking at himself in the mirror and look outwards -- to what is increasingly an unstable world.

Life on a Fact Free Diet

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty showed up last week at the Economic Club of Toronto and waxed lyrical about Canada's economic outlook. Actually, he didn't spend much time talking about the future. Instead, he launched into an attack on the opposition Liberals. His speech left his former colleague, Garth Turner, furious. "In the most partisan speech I have ever heard a finance minister give," Turner wrote in his blog, "the guy said -- flat out -- that the Liberals would raise the GST, usher in a massive increase in the gas tax and max out the country's credit card."

To be fair, Flaherty has not yet put this year's bills on plastic. However, as he is fond of reminding his audiences, the cupboard is now bare. Earlier this year, when he was engaged in a rhetorical battle with Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail: "In the war of words between the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa and the McGuinty Liberals in Toronto, please remember one salient fact: The Harper government and finance minister Jim Flaherty inherited a wonderful surplus and a declining debt from the outgoing federal Liberals; the McGuinty government inherited a big deficit from Conservative Ernie Eves and his finance minister, Mr. Flaherty." We have been down this road before.

If Flaherty's speech illustrated anything, it's simply that he likes to ignore salient facts. As Les Whittington reported in The Toronto Star, the Bank of Canada has concluded that "the economy is barely limping along in the April to June period and will grow by a weak 1.4% for the year as a whole." But Flaherty refused to acknowledge that things were less than bright. He "stressed that no one is predicting a decline of output in Canada." Once again, he ignored the news from the province whose finances he used to steward -- even as General Motors was about to announce the closing of an engine plant in Windsor, with the attendant loss of 1,400 jobs.

Flaherty has known considerable success in his life. A native of Montreal, he graduated from Princeton and Osgoode Hall, where -- after receiving his law degree -- he became a personal injury attorney. But often the price of success is that, as one rises up the ladder, one spends less and less time with the common folk -- the kind of people who sat high up in the cheap seats at the old Montreal Forum, where Mr. Flaherty used to watch his hometown Canadiens play hockey.

He clings to a vision which has long since been discredited. His solution for all economic problems is to cut taxes. The consequences of such a simplistic policy are all around us. The fools (who have an aversion to facts) have been in charge for sometime now -- a phenomenon Mr. Flaherty fails to appreciate. He appears to enjoy the company of fools more than the company of the folks in the cheap seats.

The Shrewd and the Secretive

This week the Harper government killed CAIRS -- the Coordination of Access to Information Requests System -- a public database which tracks the number and kinds of requests made under Canada's Access to Information Act. The death was a quiet affair. According to Dean Beeby of The Toronto Star, "in a notice last week to civil servants on the Treasury Board website, officials posted an innocuous obituary: effective April 1, 2008, 'the requirement to update CAIRS is no longer in effect.'"

This was also the week when the government announced its new "communication strategy" -- which is essentially its old strategy -- that all government communications are vetted by the Prime Minister's Office. What is new is that communication of independent government agencies -- like the Auditor General's Office, or the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission -- are now subject to the same screening process. Auditor General Sheila Fraser immediately fired a warning shot across the government's bow, putting Mr. Harper and his courtiers on notice that she would not submit to such a policy.

Increasingly, all manner of oversight seems to be in the government's cross hairs. As Jim Travers -- also in The Star -- wrote this week, "Distrust is a constant when a party long in opposition comes to power. But Conservatives are turning a common reflex into the steady erosion of the few pillars still supporting trust in public institutions."

Whether it is opposition parties in the House seeking information about exactly what "financial considerations" the Conservatives offered Chuck Cadman; or the sacking of Linda Keen of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission; or Elections Canada's investigation of the so called "in and out" campaign financing scheme, the pattern is the same. The Conservatives regard the oversight mechanisms built into our system of responsible government as black flies in the woods: they need to be exterminated if one is to live comfortably in this northern climate.

In retrospect, none of this should be surprising. After all, this is the government which invited David Emerson into its inner circle a week after he had been elected by his constituents as a Liberal -- and which brought Michel Fortier into the same circle, even though he had not been elected at all.

Former Conservative (now Liberal) MP Garth Turner revealed in his blog last week that he brought up the cases of these two gentlemen in his first private meeting with the Prime Minister. "Within a day," Turner wrote, "his chief of staff had threatened me with expulsion from the caucus. His party whip had read me the riot act. I'd been told to issue a media release recanting my comments, and to immediately discontinue this blog. In other words, to obey." Turner was expelled from the caucus, sat as an independent, then eventually joined the Liberals. But he still maintains his independence: "Does this mean I agree with everything Stephane does? Hardly. I am still in Ottawa as a representative of the people, who must faithfully give voice to the people and report back to them." Mr. Harper, on the other hand, has made it abundantly clear that his caucus reports to him. He insists that all branches of government follow his instructions.

We live in an age when greatness is equated with the acquisition and accumulation of power. Perhaps it has always been thus. But Leo Tolstoy (whose thoughts on greatness grace the masthead of this inauspicious publication) knew that greatness rested on three principles : simplicity, goodness and truth. The conventional wisdom was a lie. Mr. Harper has been seduced by the conventional wisdom. Several adjectives accurately describe the Harperites -- shrewd and secretive are two of them. But "democratic" isn't part of the litany.

Zimbabwe's Kurtz

At the beginning of the last century, Joseph Conrad published what is generally acknowledged as the definitive analysis of what colonization had done to both Africans and their European masters. "The conquest of the earth," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

Conrad embodied that conquest in the character of Mr. Kurtz, who was admired in Europe as a paragon of virtue. But as he travelled upriver, into the heart of the Belgian Congo, "many powers of darkness claimed him for their own," until "he had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land."

In the nineteenth century, Cecil Rhodes embodied European colonization. He did not meet Kurtz' end. In fact, he returned to Britain -- enriched by diamonds, not ivory -- where he established the scholarship fund which has helped educate the likes of Ontario's Bob Rae and America's Bill Clinton. Along the way, he also bequeathed his name to that part of Africa which we used to call Rhodesia -- where, eventually, his descendents established a system of apartheid, which ensured that the colonizers would remain rich while the natives would be discarded -- after they could no longer do hard labour.

In time, in Rhodesia and South Africa, the natives (led by well educated and committed men) rose in rebellion. They smashed the legal system which had separated the races; and, in the case of Rhodesia, they renamed the country. In South Africa, Nelson Mandella was elected president, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and -- his job done -- retired. In Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe was elected president; and he is still there twenty-eight years later -- even though the little information available suggests that he and his party lost the last election.

The results of the presidential vote have been suppressed for a month, while Mugabe has ordered arms from China -- and roving gangs of thugs have scoured the countryside, breaking heads and legs, attempting to persuade the population to vote the right way in what, Mugabe insists, will be a second run-off election.

To some degree, this is the result of Britain's failure to support her former colony. As Gwynne Dyer has written, "Britain did nothing when the local white minority illegally seized independence." And, even though the mother country "promised to provide large amounts of money to buy out the white farmers . . . it reneged on its promise." Mugabe has fumed at Britain ever since, telling his audiences that he is the best candidate to look after their interests. Tony Blair's former International Development Secretary, Clare Short, added fuel to the fire when -- in what Dyer calls "a famously stupid letter" -- she claimed, "we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish, and, as you know, we were colonized, not colonizers."

To this day Mugabe argues that there is a European plot to recolonize Zimbabwe. In the meantime, unemployment is around 80%; and inflation is currently running at 160,000%. According to Dyer, "70% of working-age Zimbabweans have fled the country in search of work;" and, for those who stay, the average life expectancy is "in the mid 30's." In the midst of such chaos, Mugabe continues to hold court. Like the central character in Conrad's novel he "lack(s) restraint in the gratification of his various lusts . . .there (is) something wanting in him." Like Kurtz, one suspects that he is "hallow at the core." It is one of history's deepest ironies that the man who evicted those who had oppressed his people should, in turn, become their oppressor.

But Zimbabwe is a land locked country. The tools which Mugabe requires to maintain his regime must be delivered to him over land. If his neighbours refuse to grant him access to those tools -- with the support of the international community -- his regime (like the one he overthrew) will wither and die. It would be fitting if, as Mugabe left, he would recognize "The horror! The horror!" But such confessions belong in the realm of fiction.

The Price of Hunger

Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I traveled to Haiti. While in Port-Au-Prince, we visited a community clinic -- located on a hill, an hygienic island in a sea of shacks with corrugated tin roofs, no running water and buckets for toilets. During our visit, there was one of those tropical cloud bursts which are quick, sharp -- and leave the air more oppressive than before the deluge. The nuns who ran the place distributed and administered common medications to their destitute neighbours. As we left, they cautioned us to step carefully down the path to the street, explaining that the contents of the aforementioned buckets were regularly dumped on the path; and the rain would speed the waste on its way to the gutter.

We did as instructed; and, as we reached the street, a woman and a small child were sponge bathing in a large puddle -- like a fetid prairie slough -- where the path met the road. I thought of those people last week as I read of the food riots in Port-Au-Prince where, according to the New York Times, "children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece and went without any food the following day." On the days when there is no food to be found, they eat patties "made of mud, oil and sugar."

According to David Olive, in The Toronto Star, "Already this year the price of rice, one of the world's critically important food staples, has increased a staggering 141 percent. And one particular variety of wheat jumped 25 percent in a single day during that period." The problem has touched us in North America, too. The cost of eggs has increased 24 percent in the past year; and the cost of dairy products has increased 13 percent. But the average annual income in Haiti is about $500 (U.S.). Haitians are part of the one and a half billion people on this planet who survive on less than two dollars a day -- and as food prices have spiked, they have quite literally been left to eat mud.

Those who analyze world agricultural production tell us that the number of acres in cultivation has actually gone up. But all the planetary problems we face have come to bear on the question of whether or not people have enough to eat. More acres are planted; but Australia, for instance -- which used to be the world's second largest wheat exporter -- has endured several years of drought, probably (say a number of scientists) one of the consequences of climate change.

In an effort to halt those consequences, American farmers have increased their corn harvest. But that grain is now used to produce ethanol; and, ultimately, it finds its way to gas tanks in wealthier countries, not to the stomachs of the poor. And, if some of that corn does find a human destination, it is used to feed cattle, which provide meat to the growing middle classes of China and India.

Because of the misguided public policy of recent years, we are now reaping our own harvest of desperate and violent protest. According to Jeffrey Sachs, who serves as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, "It's the worst crisis of its kind in thirty years . . . and it's obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there's more political fallout to come." As Lynda Hurst reported two weeks ago in The Star, "According to the World Bank, 33 countries are now vulnerable to social unrest and political instability because of food insecurity -- and that has implications for all the rest."

At the recent "Three Amigos" summit in New Orleans, Mr. Bush, Mr. Calderon and Mr. Harper once again sang the praises of free trade. It's passing strange that they never -- to my knowledge -- make any public statements about fair trade. However, all three gentlemen appear to be well fed. Perhaps that fact accounts for the omission.

Whatever the reason, as someone told me just before our visit to Haiti, "Hungry people are dangerous people." One cannot appeal to their better angels if they face a fundamental choice between a slow, painful death from starvation or a short, violent death from a bullet.

The picture which accompanies this post was taken at a garbage dump in Port-Au-Prince, where many of those hungry people were scavenging for food.Those who are selling the same old snake oil will have lots to answer for. As Bob Dylan warned us forty years ago, "It's a hard, hard rain's a gonna fall."

Dodging Icebergs

Over the years, David Brooks has expended a great deal of editorial ink gently -- and at times not so gently -- satirizing the baby boom generation, of which he is a card carrying member. Last week, in The New York Times, he pointed out how we, who used to insist that the world was our oyster, are becoming "hippocampically challenged." Citing a common experience of those of us on the other side of sixty -- not being able to remember the name of an old acquaintance -- he detailed the "evasive vagueness" we employ to save face.

He then suggested that what happens to individuals also happens to countries. He wrote that "great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget they've forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments."

All true in a tongue-in-cheek way. But in an article for the May 1st edition of The New York Review of Books, British historian Tony Judt claims that we in North America have not learned the lessons of the century we have just left behind. "In the West," he writes, "we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise."

Not that we haven't built memorials to twentieth century history. But, says Judt, "the twentieth century we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nastalgo-triumphalist -- praising famous men and celebrating famous victories -- or else, and increasingly -- they are opportunities for the recollection of collective suffering."

This is particularly true in the United States, he writes, where "we have forgotten the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. In much of continental Europe, Asia and Africa, the twentieth century was experienced as a cycle of wars. War in the last century signified invasion, occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction and mass murder." In contrast, "the United States avoided almost all of that. . . . The U.S. was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swaths of territory as a result of occupation or dismemberment."

But, he says, those who have experienced war know that it touches everyone and everything. Even among the victorious "the very structures of civilized life -- regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges -- disappear(s) or [takes] on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself become(s) the leading source of insecurity. . . . Behaviour that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances -- theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of others' suffering -- become not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself." War leaves the battlefield a no man's land. But it also eats away at the social fabric of the home front. And, in the end, it dissolves the bonds which hold a nation together.

We have forgotten what the twentieth century should have taught us about war; but we have also forgotten what it taught us about the economy. For the last twenty-five years, the best and the brightest have told us we live in a "new economy," where the old rules don't apply. But, as the tech and housing bubbles burst, wealth was increasingly concentrated at the top of society; and now the world financial system hangs in the balance. At the same time, we have -- in Pat Moynihan's words, "defined deviancy down;" and the institutions we relied on -- schools, the health care system and the family -- have buckled under the strain.

We have chosen to live in a state of willful ignorance. How else to explain -- in Richard Reeves apt phrase -- the "high I.Q. fools" who predicted a brave new world of peace and prosperity? One thinks particularly of Paul Wolfowitz (former Deputy Secretary of Defense and former President of the World Bank) who confidently predicted that, after an American victory in Iraq, oil would sell for $20 a barrel. This week oil hit $115 a barrel. Wolfowitz was trained as a mathematician. Clearly, he missed something.

This was also the week when we memorialized one of the first significant events of the last century -- the sinking of the Titanic. Equipped with the latest technology and piloted by a superbly experienced crew, it was said to be invulnerable to the elements.

History is a social science, not an exact one. So its predictive powers are not always reliable. At the very least, though, history helps us dodge big obstacles, like icebergs. Try as we might to forget them, they are still out there -- floating in the North Atlantic.

Assuming Responsibility

In his book, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, Christopher Moore reminded his readers that Canadian parliamentary democracy was based on a fundamental principle which, in the 21st century, strikes many as romantic and quaint: "In the middle of the nineteenth century, responsible government meant that the survival of the prime minister and his cabinet depended, day by day, on the verdict of a vigilant Parliament. Members of Parliament were chosen by, close to, and dependent on (for those times) a broadly based and well informed electorate. Contemplating the results of the election of 1997," Moore wrote, "I found myself wishing we lived under conditions more like these."

He is not alone. Last month, Mr. Justice John Gomery -- the man who was the bane of the Chretien and Martin governments -- turned his guns on the man and the party who roared against Liberal self dealing and obfuscation. Pointing out that, for years, power has been transferred from elected members of Parliament to the unelected advisers in the Prime Minister's Office, Gomery asserted that, instead of reversing this process, the Harperites have accelerated it. "I suggest this trend is a danger to Canadian democracy," he told the government operations committee; and it "leaves the door wide open to the kind of political interference in the day to day administration of government programs that led to what is commonly called the sponsorship scandal. We have a government where one man seems to have an ever increasing influence upon what government policy is going to be. If you look back historically at prime ministers in the past, I don't think they had the same hold over their party and Parliament that the present prime minister has."

The Harper government is notorious for keeping its elected members on a short leash. All government communication is controlled by the PMO; and policy announcements belong to the Prime Minister, not his cabinet. Moreover, whether the policy is Afghanistan or consumer protection, the same PMO routinely sits on information. Increasingly, the only way to pry that information from the government's hands is to apply for it through the Access to Information Act. Former Ontario cabinet minister Sean Conway -- who now teaches at Queens University -- has said, "It is one of the assumptions of a democratic society that its citizens are going to be provided with timely, relevant and understandable information." Mr. Harper and his minions, says Conway, "are doing something quite destructive to one of the key pillars of democratic society."

And the government is not the only body who is acting irresponsibly. Mr. Dion and the Liberal opposition have failed to hold the government's feet to the fire. As Jim Travers wrote in the Toronto Star, "An opposition leader who even temporarily abandons the core responsibility of holding the government to account needs to explain the reasons for directly or indirectly endorsing ruling party policies on war, the economy and climate change." Dion has refused to do this; but his reason is obvious: according to the polls, Canadians don't want an election now.
The result is that government policy becomes law by default.

So, ultimately, the responsibility for our situation rests with us, the electorate. We give the government -- which needs to answer for the vanishing federal surplus, for the hot air behind its environmental policy, and for the "financial considerations" it offered Chuck Cadman if he voted to bring down the previous government -- a pass.

John Kenneth Galbraith -- a man for all seasons -- wrote, "There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose." If we understand the concept of responsible government (and insist that it be practiced in all seasons) we will always be on the right side.

By the Awful Grace of God

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It had been five years since the historic March on Washington, and four years since he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. He was in Memphis to lead a strike of sanitation workers.

Some interpreted his presence there as a sign of his diminished status. He was, after all, far from the haunts of the powerful. But anyone who had followed his career knew otherwise. For, while he marched against racism, he also marched against poverty. "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age," he wrote in 1967. "It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time for us has come to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

In the years since his death, some -- citing King's personal failings -- have dismissed him as a hypocrite. But they fail to note that King was at home in the temples of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor. And, despite the rising tide of violence -- which threatened to engulf the Civil Rights Movement -- King remained true to his faith in non-violence. "Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time," he said when he accepted the Nobel Prize. For, more than anything else, the challenge of the time was " the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence." Non violence was the way to achieve and maintain justice: "the foundation of such a method," he said," is love."

Robert Kennedy, who was running for president when King was killed, spoke to a largely African American crowd on April 4, 1968. Kennedy's biographers claim that, after the death of his elder brother, he read the plays of Aeschylus, with whom he had little acquaintance -- until November 22, 1963. And it was to Aeschylus that Kennedy turned, knowing what would follow King's death :

He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep,
Pain that cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Kennedy's words have a particular poignancy, because he, too, had a date with an assassin's bullet some two months later. For those of us who came of age in that time, King's death marked a turning point. As Jesse Jackson has said, that day has divided life into two segments: before King and after King. His death marked the death of our innocence and the birth of a new cynicism.

But that dichotomy is too simple. We have, in Dickens' phrase, lived through the best and worst of times. Perhaps every generation does. But the challenge every generation faces is to arrive at some kind of wisdom, "by the awful grace of God." The jury is still out on the question of whether or not we have learned anything.