Suggested statement from Rideau Hall

The Globe & Mail today provided the text of what it considered would have been a better acceptance speech by our new Governor-General. With suitable apologies, here's mine.

Hey, I'm not a lumberjack, or a fur trader.
I'm a Radio-Canada journalist, and a film-maker.
I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber, or own a dogsled.
I have a limousine and a house on Sussex Avenue, and everything's cordon bleu.
And I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada,
although I'm certain they're really really nice.

I have a Prime Minister, not a president.
(Well, thanks to dual citizenship, I guess I have a president, too, come to think of it.)
I speak English and French and Italian and Spanish and Haitian creole, not American.
And I pronounce it 'about', not 'a boot'.

I would proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack,
if I had a backpack. (Those days are over.)
I believe in peace keeping, not policing,
diversity, not assimilation,
and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal.
A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch,
and it is pronounced 'zed' not 'zee', 'zed' !!!!

Canada is the second largest landmass!
The first nation of hockey!
and the best part of North America.
My Québec includes Canada!

My name is Michaëlle!!

AND I AM CANADIAN!!!

DDT and the Right's eco-lies

That cranky organ of the "pro-life" movement, LifeSite News, takes on the environmental movement this week, passing on a bizarre meme rocketing around right-wing brainpans these days. LSN's story by one John Jalsevac is headed, "Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide." It caught my eye because I hadn't heard environmentalists accused of perpetrating a "holocaust" before, but, as a quick search revealed, it's a commonplace in conservative circles. This serious if certifiably nutty charge now re-enters the blogosphere courtesy of (who else?) Kathy Shaidle.

First, the sources cited in the article, then the claims--and then the facts. One article upon which Jalsevac relies heavily to fuel his polemic is not by "Andrew Kenney," or by "Richard Kenney," as he confusingly indicates, but by one Andrew Kenny, a South African engineer by profession who claims that we're going through global cooling, not warming, and that an Ice Age is due any moment. Jalsevac's other major source is junkscience.com, a radical free-market corporate-funded site masquerading as a "scientific" one, edited by Steven Milloy, a man well-known for being a little careless with the truth.

Jalsevac dredges up other references to back his shoddy claim, and these deserve scrutiny, too. They include the corporate-backed conservative front group American Council on Science and Health (which has argued that there is no link between heart disease and cholesterol, and has enthusiastically promoted bovine growth hormone); Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, who has teamed up with Steven Milloy on occasion and who published a vicious attack on Rachel Carson in cult leader Lyndon Larouche's 21^st Century Science and Technology; a popular novelist; a New York Times journalist; the junk politics e-zine FrontPage (which, in characteristic style, accuses Rachel Carson of "ecological genocide,"); a columnist in the equally extremist publication, WorldNetDaily; and other assorted conservative hacks. Don't look for science here, but there’s all the far-right politics you can eat, if you have the stomach for it.

But on to the claims. Jalsevac quotes "Kenney’s" assertion that the banning of DDT has killed 50 million people, thanks to "the gratuitous recklessness of eco-extremists." Junkscience.com claims 80 million have, in Jalsevac’s words, "dropped at the hands of the tree-huggers." "It's the worst crime of the twentieth century," Kenny says. "Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler," shrieks sci-fi writer Michael Crichton.

Jalsevac is no stranger to that same inflated style. "With Muller's miracle-pesticide in widespread use the movement towards a malaria-free earth was progressing swimmingly until Rachel Carson erupted hysterically onto the international scene," he writes. (Unaccountably, he missed the Carson-as-lesbian speculation in some quarters. Thank God for small mercies.) He gives more than an inkling of his own agenda when, out of the blue, he begins to attack oral contraception: why is DDT banned, he asks aloud, "while the proven carcinogenic, cancer-causing contraceptive, used to prevent the creation of human life, is handed out like candy"?

But the extreme-right agenda becomes even plainer with nuggets like this, purporting to reveal the environmentalists' own hidden agenda:

Charles Wurter [sic], the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund said in October 1969: "If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT."

Of course this is entirely correct--there's nothing sinister about it in the least. At the time, environmentalism was in its infancy, under sustained assault from corporations and politicians, red-baited to a fair-thee-well and the subject of numerous shrill editorial comments. For the movement to prove its mettle on the DDT issue, with sound research and good science, would, of course, and did, give it countervailing credibility.

The quotation, from the Seattle Times of October 5, 1969, is invariably second-hand-sourced to Richard Tren and Roger Bate, both seasoned right-wing activists who have skilfully used it in classic propaganda fashion to suggest a political conspiracy. Bate is a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, whose mandate is clear enough:

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is dedicated to preserving and strengthening the foundations of freedom--limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense.

Richard Tren is a champion of water privatization, and a member of South Africa's Free Market Foundation, whose mandate is peas-in-a-pod close to that of the American Enterprise Institute: "a South African, libertarian think-tank founded in 1975 to promote the principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty."

Jalsevac ploughs on, offering up this widely-circulated lie: Dr. Wurster is "reported to have said" (note weasel-wording here) when told that DDT saves lives: "So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them..."

Wurster's organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, calls this alleged statement "a complete and utter fabrication." Dr. Wurster himself has angrily denounced the lie: "Not only did I never say it, I never thought it." It "pops up at least once a year. It has a life of its own."

In fact, a disgruntled lawyer fired by Wurster's organization, Victor Yannacone, was the source of it. After being let go, he called a press conference and "quoted" Wurster. In response, Wurster said, pointedly, "It was in part because Mr. Yannacone lost touch with reality that he was dismissed by EDF, and his remarks of May 1970 indicate that his inability to separate fact from fiction has accelerated."

Judging by the widespread use of this invented reference, the same inability continues to afflict the Right today. As for Jalsevac, he goes into fugue at this point:

Some members of the left have alleged that this quote by Wurster is false, fabricated by a disgruntled former employee of Wurster’s. And that may be so though it has hardly been proven; but either way, that statement remains in essence the clearest, bluntest expression of a theory and an attitude that has flourished ever since Thomas Malthus published his infamous work "An Essay on the Principle of Population"; individuals as diverse as Nietzsche, Hitler and Margaret Sanger have all expressed it in one form or another.

Someone should remind this ineffectual propagandist that attributing quotes places the onus upon the attributor to prove their accuracy. But Jalsevac doesn't care: even if the quote is entirely made up, as he has the barefaced gall to state, so what? It's still a good one, eh? It links Hitler, Margaret Sanger and, of course, the environmental movement, in one unholy alliance.

Not content with that woodenly-executed manoeuvre, he goes on to retail this hoary old quotation: "As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, 'Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing'." This much-ballyhooed comment is from R.S. Desowitz's "Malaria Capers," published in 1992. Desowitz never does get around to attributing the quotation, but why bother? It's good emotive stuff. At least he had the grace to assent to the environmentally deleterious effects of DDT, blaming this on overuse in agriculture. It is not recorded whether, like Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, he ate large quantities of it himself.

Finally, we have this tinfoil-helmet hokum from Jalsevac:

It is no coincidence that population control and environmentalism have always been inextricably entwined in the grand scheme of liberal ideology. Both are founded upon an [sic] pernicious belief that man is little more than a pollutant, a scum to be prevented from interfering any more than necessary with the purity of the natural biosphere.

Of course, humanity is an integral part of the natural biosphere, and environmentalists have been advocating nothing more or less than that recognition all along. Caring for the environment means caring for ourselves, and for the generations to come. But that kind of thinking doesn't play well with the corporate anti-environmentalists and their willing ideo-religious accomplices.

Now, if we can move into the light of day for a moment, here are the facts.

There never was a ban against DDT use to control malaria.

DDT has actually been a cause of malaria outbreaks. The primary reason for the recrudescence of malaria in the Third World has been the over-use, not the restriction, of DDT. Malaria-bearing pests develop resistance to pesticides such as DDT in very short order: it is estimated that it takes as little as six or seven years for mosquitoes to become resistant to any particular pesticide. Desowitz himself pointed out the vast over-use in agricultural production. To quantify this with one example: "Correlating the use of DDT in El Salvador with renewed malaria transmission, it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria."

DDT is toxic to humans. It takes a devious if not deranged mind (and several are in evidence these days, to be sure) to argue that various Republican administrations, beginning with that of Richard Nixon, are in thrall to some kind of liberal-green conspiracy. Here is what the US Environmental Protection Agency, whose Administrator is chosen by no less than the President of the United States, has to say about DDT:

· Probable human carcinogen

· Damages the liver

· Temporarily damages the nervous system

· Reduces reproductive success

· Can cause liver cancer

· Damages reproductive system

DDT is toxic to the environment. Its deleterious effects on bird populations, for instance, are well-documented, despite the assembly of selective facts by the political Right to "debunk" the sound science behind this claim. It is toxic to fish. It takes more than 15 years to break down, and its breakdown products are toxic as well.

But back to John Jalsevac, Christian conservative, in the grip of the current craze (and I use the word advisedly) to label and denounce anything that stands in the way of big corporations and the US empire as fundamentally evil, in the full-blown metaphysical sense. It's the way these people talk, and, worse, the way they think. For such individuals, it is no stretch at all to accuse conservationists of "genocide." The more stunningly outrageous the claim, the more doggedly they pursue it, amid a flurry of namecalling and fabrication.

Indeed, there's a kind of madness permeating the Right these days, as a quick glance over the blogosphere confirms: the more firmly they are in control of the world, the more frantically and frenziedly they claim that the Left is in control. Just check out, as a glaring instance of this, the orgy of denunciation directed towards one grieving mother who is being noisily anti-war these days. Bush is in the Oval Office, the "reconstruction" of Iraq is proceeding, with a pretty penny being made in the process, the US Supreme Court is about to take a hard right turn--conservatives ought to be dancing in the streets. Instead, they're almost beside themselves with anger when a single individual dares to say No.

Jalsevac's shabby little piece is just one sour note in a rising crescendo of what can only be termed right-wing group hysteria, a drift to the totalitarian edge where all dissent is treason, and where all dissenters, motivated by pure evil, look alike. This is a world of shoot-to-kill, increased "security" measures, rendition and suggested "torture warrants," a world in which the Geneva Convention does not apply and where we are urged to cower in fear with colour-coded "alerts" that never seem to pan out. It's a binary world of manic fundamentalism, God against Allah, and heaven help those who seek a better way: no smear is too vile, no accusation too wild, to use against them. We're watching nothing less than the death of civil discourse at present. How much longer before we witness the death of civil rights?

New information re London police shooting

I'm going to depart from my article-writing role and simply transmit information here. Full marks to Lotusland for this:

"ITV News has obtained secret documents and photographs that detail why police shot Jean Charles De [sic] Menezes dead on the tube.

"The documents and photographs confirm that Jean Charles was not carrying any bags, and was wearing a denim jacket, not a bulky winter coat, as had previously been claimed.

"He was behaving normally, and did not vault the barriers, even stopping to pick up a free newspaper."

UPDATE: A photograph of the victim in The Scotsman shows him wearing a denim jacket. The following are some interesting observations:

One surveillance officer admitted he could not identify Mr de Menezes because he was relieving himself as the Brazilian left his home - a block of flats in Tulse Hill where it was thought one of the bombers, Hussain Osman, lived.

"As he walked out of my line of vision I checked the photographs and transmitted that it would be worth someone else having a look. I should point out that, as I observed this male exiting the block, I was in the process of relieving myself.

"At this time I was not able to transmit my observations and switch on the video camera at the same time. There is therefore no video footage of this male."

A second officer also failed to give a positive identification but claimed the suspect had "distinctive Mongolian eyes".

Eyeless in Gaza

Thousands of insurgen...er, "hard-line activists" (these are Jews, after all, not Muslims) have poured into...er, "slipped illegally into" Gaza in the past few weeks to do their bit for Eretz Israel. Media reports are mostly content to record the surface of things: angry militant settlers confronting the soldiers that used to protect them and who are now serving eviction notices. A lot of tears and heartbreak. Americans showing up to demonstrate their opposition to the "expulsion." The fear of violence from the "hard-line activists."

The media are seeing little but a human-interest story here, a tough decision made in the name of Israeli-Palestinian peace. They are, like the "fat white woman whom nobody loves," missing so much and so much. Perhaps the framing of the story has caused this blindness. Let's review.

Gaza was taken by Israel in the 1967 "6-Day War." A total of 8,500 or so settlers ended up there, among an indigenous population of 1.3 million Palestinians. The settlers, with IDF backup, eventually took up to 40% of the land, including the obligatory roads, military installations and temporary security zones. This has been an enormous drain on Israeli resources, with very little to show for it over time.

Settlements have always been an element of Israeli state policy. Ariel Sharon, the hard-line Likud Prime Minister of Israel, a former military man implicated in civilian massacres, has been using them like pieces in a chess game, Risk pieces or poker chips--there’s some confusion on this point--as some of the religious supporters of the settlements are beginning now to understand. His withdrawal from Gaza, where the sheer numbers of Palestinians make continued occupation untenable, is being made to look like a peace offering, but it's nothing of the kind: it's a case of making virtue out of necessity.

And don't worry about the displaced settlers, by the way--they're getting handsome compensation packages of up to $400,000 US. Most of them weren't there for religious reasons in the first place, but because of freely available government subsidies. Talk of compensation for displaced Palestinians, of course, is still a long way off.

The Gaza pullout also takes our eyes off the West Bank, even with the strategic withdrawal of a few hundred settlers from four tiny settlements in its difficult-to-defend northern part. Sharon, a shrewd politician, is getting his citizens out of Gaza because he has to, while the colonization of the West Bank continues apace. Settlers are 10% of the population in the West Bank, but use up 80% of the water, some for swimming pools, while starving Palestinian villages of it. The "security fence" now being built does not follow the historic 1949 Green Line, but penetrates deeply into Palestinian territory.

Israel under Ariel Sharon has no intention of giving up its 1967 gains holus-bolus. For the foreseeable future, YESHA will remain almost entirely under Israel's control. But wasn't that the plan?

Eastern Europe's impending porn war

For anyone who thought that the Hans Island row smacked a little of fantasy, we now have a threatened war in Eastern Europe, with pornography as the weapon.

It seems that an enterprising Larry Flynt type in Russia, one Alexei Mitrofanov (I've searched in vain for the pun potential here, and must confess defeat), is making a movie. This is no ordinary boff-merchant: Mitrofanov is the deputy leader of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party, and a senior member of Parliament's lower house. His flick will star a woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to the President of the Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, doing the nasty in a black helicopter high above the Pankisi Gorge with a man who looks eerily similar to Georgia's President, Mikhail Saakashvili. Coincidentally, the characters' names happen to be Yulia and Mikhail. The short film is described in the Moscow Times as "a relative quickie." [That’s more like it--ed.]

The actress in question, Elena Berkova, was once well-known on Russian TV, appearing on a reality show as the director of a marriage agency, until her screen life became known and she was let go. She's now a musician, with an album due for release this Fall. Her producer hopes that her high-flying escapade will generate a little publicity. Mitrofanov, meanwhile, is suggesting Dmitri Rogozin, leader of the Rodina Party, for the role of Mikhail. But he has apparently changed his mind: earlier he had complained that Rogozin was too expensive, saying it would be cheaper to cast Nicole Kidman.

The Liberal Democratic Party, for those with short memories, is Vladimir Zhirinovsky's outfit, well-known for wacky right-wing politics of the xenophobic variety. Zhirinovsky has in the past advocated such things as reclaiming Alaska, invading Iran, and using huge fans to blow nuclear waste into Germany. Although he had a Jewish father, he has been notorious for his anti-semitism, and has praised both Adolf Hitler and Pat Buchanan.

It appears that both Georgia and Ukraine have earned the wrath of these inventive Russian moonbats, the former for demanding the closure of Russian military bases, the latter for tussling with Mother Russia about energy prices.

Meanwhile, film-makers in the Ukraine, rumour has it, are fighting back, with a film featuring a gay porn star bearing an uncanny resemblance to Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, and another who looks very much like Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych.

Now, Canada's been suffering its share of US provocations recently. First it was softwood lumber, [That's quite enough--ed.] then North Dakota peeing in our pool. But readers are requested not to suggest, or even to imagine, film scripts starring George Bush and Fred Phelps lookalikes.

Government flexes political muzzle

Political activists in the federal public service thought they had it made with the Supreme Court's Osborne decision in 1991: the Court held that legal restrictions on the political activity of most federal public employees were unconstitutional.

But we are living in different times now. Federal public service workers have already been slapped upside the head a number of times, with various "modernization," measures. These have included a watering-down of the merit principle, and the weakening of the right to appeal against appointment—just about the only method by which bargaining agents and their members could keep a weather-eye on employer staffing procedures. Then a leaked report appeared a few days ago, appearing to threaten 41,000 jobs.

Now a "guidance document" has been circulated, courtesy of the Public Service Commission (PSC), wagging its finger at employees who want to involve themselves in political activity, and, by so doing, creating a chill that will be felt service-wide. This flows directly from yet another part of the Public Service Modernization Act, Sub-Section 113(1):

An employee may engage in any political activity as long as it does not impair, or is not perceived as impairing [emphasis mine], the employee's ability to perform his or her duties in a politically impartial manner.

The public service must be politically neutral--no one can seriously argue against such a proposition--so that, for example, senior policy-making roles legitimately must be staffed by people who at least appear to be above the fray. But the difficulty here is the vast grey area: more junior public employees who want to work on a campaign, or put a candidate's sign on their lawn. Osborne should have taken care of that, but the government is now taking a giant step backwards.

The PSC has long promoted a public service regime where values rather than rules should prevail. In many cases, as both management and labour would agree, that's at least theoretically a better approach to navigating through problems than fighting things out with exhaustive interpretations of regulations and jurisprudence. The latter is draining and time-consuming for both sides, and often serves no one very well.

In this case, in keeping with its general approach, the PSC “intends to emphasize guidelines in preference to highly detailed regulations.” But this is one issue where there need to be explicit rules of the game. To have managers judging these activities on a "case-by-case" basis, guided by unhelpful generalizations such as "the more visible the activity, the greater the chance that it will create the perception of bias," should strike fear into the heart of any activist public employee with a controlling boss.

A case going to adjudication illustrates the point well. Edith Gendron, an employee with Heritage Canada, was fired by her department after refusing to give up the presidency of a souverainiste association, "Le Québec, Un Pays." Her job has been to administer official languages grants in Atlantic Canada, a decidedly mid-level one. But someone decided that she couldn’t work for Heritage Canada, which promotes Canadian unity, while being a separatist in her off-hours.

My bet is that she'll win this one: any actual conflict of interest here is phantasmal. But it gives a pretty good indication of the discretion afforded to managers in applying their own political litmus tests. Many public employees, keenly interested in politics of all stripes, will hesitate to take risks with their livelihoods, and will absent themselves from political campaigns.

In a country headed by a Prime Minister who has been known to honk about the "democratic deficit," the new discretion apparently being offered to public service straw bosses to discipline politically-active employees is clearly inappropriate. What is needed instead is a clear and unequivocal statement of the rules of the game that everyone can understand, consistent with Osborne and the Charter of Rights. The very last place to allow management discretion is over the political rights of public service employees. After all, they're citizens too.

Creative smearing 101

David Horowitz's increasingly sad cyber-rag has recently produced an article that towers above the usual dreary FPM fare: it would make a superbly useful handout, indeed, in a university class on the art of propaganda. Were it not for the source one might suspect a kind of subtle satire, given the glaringly crude tricks of language and assertion deployed. It's well worth reading as a classic of its kind.

Let's start with the title, "Exploiting the Dead." What could Ben Johnson, Managing Editor no less of the e-zine in question, be referring to? Is this a reference to 9/11, shamefully misused by the Bush Administration to rally the nation to war in Iraq? Or could it mean honking about the noble sacrifices of soldiers sent overseas on false pretences, as in: "But [Casey Sheehan’s] death was an act of patriotism and human compassion, one which should tinge her understandable maternal grief with deep pride"?

Well, no: we're talking Casey's Mom here, Cindy Sheehan, anti-war and mad as hell about the loss of her son. The woman presently camped out near the Bush ranch.

Here's how the piece begins: "Antiwar extremist Cindy Sheehan...." "Extremist?" Well, it's code, setting a benchmark: Johnson considers opposition to the war by a bereaved mother to be "extreme." Indeed, one might be forgiven for suggesting that, in context, the phrase "antiwar extremist" is probably tautological. Anything other than somnambulistic assent to Bush's foreign adventures has to be "extreme" to the FrontPage crowd: everything's relative, after all.

But moving on a little, we come to this: the mainstream media, we are informed, have failed to recognize Sheehan's "long history of extremist rhetoric, her close association with far-Left and anti-Semitic figures, or the way she has seemingly rewritten her own history." Now, "seemingly" is stock ass-covering stuff, referring in this case, no doubt, to the false impression deliberately created by Matt Drudge in his selective editing of Sheehan earlier. But such weasel-words, including "apparently," and "possibly," sometimes in combination, are slipped in here and there throughout the text when Johnson has no facts to back him up.

That's a side-issue, though: one's appetite is thoroughly whetted by the references to "extremist rhetoric" (that e-word again), and her "close association" with sinister figures--including antisemitic ones. Reading on with anticipation, this is what we get.

Not buying the exhortation to be "proud" of her son’s death, Sheehan has involved herself in "shrill, anti-Bush and anti-American activism." Note the gender codeword "shrill," invariably applied to women who insist on speaking out in protest. She presently "spouts extremist rhetoric alongside many of the Hate America Left's most potent bomb-throwers." "Bomb-throwers?" Surely Johnson is being figurative. Most likely in this case it's a calculated use of connotative language, suggestively linking anti-war activists to terrorism, although the expression occasionally refers to the very type of over-the-top writing that Johnson himself is eagerly deploying.

Sheehan, Johnson assures us, manifests nothing less than a "hatred of President George W. Bush." How is that "hatred" expressed? Well, she had the temerity to suggest that Bush stole the election in 2000. Yup, that's about it. Hatred exemplified. Johnson maybe senses that he doesn't have much here, so he hurries on, referring to Sheehan's "antiwar animus." Why can't people simply be opposed to the war? No, they have to have an animus, by which I take it Johnson is not referring to the Roman notion of the rational soul, but rather to "a feeling of ill will arousing active hostility." She's obviously aroused it in him.

Further on we have this: Sheehan "has taken advantage of her status as an aggrieved mother to spread her poisonous brand of far-Left politics." It couldn't be, of course, that losing her son to the Bush war machine might have enhanced her anti-war beliefs just a tad? No, she's cynically putting the death of her own son to use. Leftists don't have feelings; they have agendas. It all comes down to a character issue, as we've seen throughout the right half of the blogosphere over the past few days: since no one can genuinely believe leftist ideas, there's something morally suspect about anyone who utters them. So, later on, we are told that Sheehan uses "her son’s coffin as a political soapbox" (nice metaphoric image, there, Ben). Her grief can’t possibly be genuine: she’s clearly not interested in Casey except as a prop for her own "extremist" views.

But Johnson excels even more when it comes to making associations, an essential element in the propagandist's repertoire. It seems that Sheehan once endorsed a left-wing initiative to keep military recruiters away from high school student directories in San Francisco. There is apparently some law against denying such access, but this, says Johnson, did not deter her or her "ideological comrades." Hmm, "comrades." Isn't that what Commies used to call each other? Why, yes! And then there's Medea Benjamin, "mastermind behind the violent anti-World Trade Center riots in Seattle," who "enjoys a close working relationship with Cindy Sheehan as part of the professional antiwar fringe." Ah, those masterminds on the fringes. In the shadows. Skulking. Then this:

Benjamin's anti-American foreign policy views are seemingly shared by Kathy Kelly, with whom Cindy shared the stage during antiwar protests.

Let's situate Sheehan here: she appears on the same stage as a person who "seemingly" has the same views as the mastermind. She (Kelly, not Sheehan) has "spoken at numerous campuses, often with radical Islamists, and has supported the Nicaraguan Sandanistas [sic]." So this means that Sheehan is now connected to radical Islamists, admittedly through a degree or two of separation. Then we have her close ties to the notorious anti-war radical David Fenton. Sheehan once appeared in an anti-Bush commercial--which was distributed by Fenton Communications (gasp). And some of her statements are distributed by an organization called the Institute for Public Accuracy, which is a member of the United for Peace and Justice organization, which was founded by--a Communist! A few more degrees of separation there, but no matter. Johnson’s on a roll.

He gets more creative as he goes along. Sheehan "appears" to be "possibly" advocating that soldiers in the field disobey their officers. How so? By saying, "Refuse to kill innocent people." This must be encouraging mutiny, because "no U.S. officer can legitimately order" innocent people killed. That speaks for itself, and no further commentary is needed. But where Johnson rises brilliantly to his occasion is in his accusation of antisemitism.

Beginning with the sub-head "Blame the 'Murderous Thugs' (Jews)," he refers to a comment that Sheehan made, as follows:

[M]y first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC [Project for the New American Century] Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel.

This, Johnson suggests, links pretty well to "the line taken by David Duke and his ilk." May I suggest another source, Ha'aretz? Perhaps not even Johnson would be so intrepid as to accuse a prominent Israeli newspaper of antisemitism--although, with him, you can't really be sure. In any case, this is followed by Sheehan's quoted comments about Paul Wolfowitz ("[I]s there yet any sane adult in this country whose skin does not crawl when this murderous liar opens his mouth and speaks?") and the US administration generally: "Our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs....gangsters who lust after fortunes and power." Johnson’s simply stellar conclusion:

It is possible her target is "merely" capitalism. But her vicious rhetoric leaves open the possibility that she makes room at her altar of hatred for Jews, as well.

That one leaves me speechless.

But he doesn't stop there. Sheehan, in a press scrum, apparently "took a question" from a genuinely shadowy far-right journalist, Greg Szymanski. Well, cheer up, Cindy: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used to take questions from Dan Rather.

Interspersed with a dossier of damning evidence like that, Johnson finds time to indulge in that all-too-common right-wing substitute for argument, gratuitous insult. Even her voice is mocked ("Cindy, like, totally sounds like she's from Vacaville"), while reference is made to her "venomous vacuity," and that obligatory rightist recognition code "moonbat" is inserted into the text as well.

Then the crowning chutzpah on Johnson's part: with a flourish, he brings up the Cherie Quarterolo email, the one allegedly from a pack of grandparents, aunts, uncles and (my favourite) "numerous cousins," reminding me, for no good reason, of Rabbit's innumerable friends and relations, mostly unnamed as well.

But here's the good bit: the email states, in part, "The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect." "Thank goodness," Johnson says, with the straightest of faces, "someone in the Sheehan family puts family, country, and dignity above political motivation." Support for Bush, in other words, is part of the natural order of things, not political in the least. Only the Left has politics. Are we seeing here the first glimmer of a new piece of code? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, there is this to Ben Johnson's credit, and it deserves in fairness to be highlighted: he seems to have little time for the arguments that allege diminished capacity on Sheehan’s part. Bravo, and I mean it: he doesn't call her "insane," or paint her as a helpless tool in the hands of sinister others, but instead does her the honour of treating her as a fully-fledged moral agent.

Only that, of course, could be the foundation for his lengthy McCarthyist smear, complete with emotive language, weasel-wording and guilt by association. But perhaps he might be urged to exercise a little caution, at least in the latter respect. No one, including himself, can avoid being found guilty with such a broad-brush technique. Remember, we're all six handshakes away from Osama bin Laden.

Sheehan's public service

Angry in the Great White North continues his obsessive campaign against Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved Gold Star Mother presently camped on George Bush's doorstep to protest the war in Iraq. A whole slew of commentators, including myself, have savaged him for this, but the beat goes on.

Some of those other voices deserve to be quoted:

David: "Congrats, I say, for trying to mislead people into thinking a grieving mother is crazy or is using her dead son for a political agenda. It takes time, patience, and a whole lot of hate. you have my pity."

A Hermit: "Ex POW's, Purple Heart recipients, Vietnam vets, Iraqi vets, covert CIA operatives, now grieving mothers...All fair game for the Bush smear machine if they dare speak truth to power."

I wish I'd said that.

But I think MWW has best put her finger on the flaw in the Right's approach with this succinct comment, in response to a question put to me:

" 'I think the interesting point is why this one mother's grief and eventual protest (note statistics I posted above) rapidly, with the assistance of the media, becomes a political issue.'

"Did you ask the same question about Terri Schiavo's mother?

"No.

"I didn't think so."

She raises an intriguing point indeed. Where was the indignation over at Angry's, on Faux News and elsewhere, about the politicization of the Schiavo case? The cynical manipulation of the issue by the hard Right? The endless soppy commentaries?

But, that being said, there's more to all this than simple tu quoque. I would suggest that we need to look at these debates in a different way.

What we have in the Sheehan imbroglio is simply a continuation of the war debate with a personal focus. What we had in the earlier case was a continuation of the "right to life" debate with a personal focus. There is a lot happening in such debates: the personal is the political, with a vengeance. And it is an error, I believe, to attempt to extract one from the other, even if the possibility exists of scoring cheap political points against the opposition by doing do.

Moralizing about the form of the debate is really just an extension of the debate itself. To what extent was Terry Schiavo "used?" To what extent is Cindy Sheehan being "used?" One can build a better case for the former, given that Terry was in no condition, after all, to speak for herself. But I fail to detect, in Cindy Sheehan, any indication that she has been put up to her statements and actions by "the Left," "hard" or otherwise.

I hasten to add that I do not think commentators such as Angry are necessarily suggesting that there is an anti-Bush plot here by sinister forces using Sheehan as a meat-puppet. Nevertheless, we need to be careful when we use the word "used." Indeed, that is at the centre of this raging surface debate.

"Used" means a number of things. In the hands of the Right in the Cindy Sheehan case, it acquires a moralistic flavour. The suggestion is that Sheehan is not a free moral agent, or, if she is, she's too whacked-out to stand on her own in her strong (and consistent, pace Matt Drudge) opposition to the war in Iraq and to President Bush. She's overwhelmed with grief, the Right piously avers, before trashing her in countless talk-shows and screechy newspaper columns and blogs. She's not…herself. Indeed, assuming the mantle of the psychiatrist, Dr. Angry diagnoses Freudian displacement, although he thankfully does not go on to prescribe electric shocks.

Of course, once establishing Sheehan as less than fully capable (a very far from complete task, but the Right seems unaware of that), it is only a short hop, skip and jump to attack the morality of the Left in rallying around her. It seems cruel and cynical, after all, to promote and encourage someone in her condition. It's a bit like urging the town drunk to sing for the crowd, isn't it. Or urging a punch-drunk pug into the ring with the words, "Go for it, Joe. The bum can't hurt us."

This is a great rhetorical move: ad hominem on the grand scale. One gets to dismiss the arguments of Cindy Sheehan because she's damaged in some way, and one can then rule the arguments of the anti-war crowd out of order, not on their own merits, but on moral grounds. They’re using her. Dirty pool. Never mind the anti-war position itself, we don't want to hear it: this is a character issue.

But of course it's not. The war is what is really being debated here, and debates are seldom fought with Marquess of Queensberry rules. Support for and opposition to the Iraq war are based upon facts, suppositions, analysis, emotion, politics, you name it. I happen to be in opposition, so here's my own take on Sheehan and what's happening here:

She is a bright, articulate, angry woman who is mourning what she believes is the needless death of her son. She has taken a stand, and is grieving publicly, not uncommon in other cultures, but remarkable in our own, where the expression of grief, other than at formal occasions like funerals and memorial services, is considered to be a private matter.

But entering the public domain under her circumstances is a political act. It is a new site of struggle for the sides in the Iraq debate. The advantage is to the anti-war side: here's a grieving woman who refuses to wrap herself in the flag and be thankful she's had a little face-time with President Bush. She dares to say the death of her son in Iraq was not worthwhile.

For Sheehan, the Iraq war does not gives his death the meaning that the state would like to ascribe to it. She dares to dream that something will be done about both the war and the President. She hopes, perhaps a little too optimistically, that people will rise up. She believes that her personal grief might have meaning in the public sphere, not just be hers to keep to herself. (She brings to mind Chuck Cadman, who entered politics after his son was murdered, as a direct consequence of his death. Did anyone trash him for that?)

Sheehan speaks truth to power, and the shocked reaction of the Right is to mount a furious personal attack. They've called her every disparaging name under the sun. They probably have investigators combing her credit-card records by now. An unsigned letter attacking her, allegedly from her extended family, is now going the rounds of the right-wing blogosphere. But that's part of the debate, even if it shouldn't be. As for her supporters, of course they are using her, in a very real sense, because she has offered herself up to them as a personal living testament to the iniquity of the war. And of course her circumstances in themselves feed into a strong element of the anti-war argument. What's wrong with any of that?

In the Schiavo controversy, while I felt an immense sense of tragedy and outrage at the way she became a political pawn for the Right, I can't really, on reflection, blame grassroots conservatives for being galvanized by one of those difficult cases that focuses the on-going debate so sharply. Was it cynical for people who genuinely share "right-to-life" beliefs to take part in the public discussion on the matter? Why would it be? (Whether it was cynical on the part of certain politicians is another matter entirely.)

When Marc Lepine, urged on by his private demons, murdered fourteen women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal that awful snowy day on December 6, 1989, he killed women because they were women, because they were "feminists" who chose engineering over more traditional roles at the time. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women talked publicly about violence against women; the men’s White Ribbon Campaign started up; memorial services were and continue to be organized--and a certain sector of the Right accused all and sundry of cynicism, of cheap political capitalizing on a human tragedy. But for those who are feminist and pro-feminist, why would this so very non-random slaughter not rouse them at their very core to mourn and to act on their beliefs? There is nothing cynical or cheap in that.

Let us all recognize, then, no matter where on the political spectrum we are located, that situations will arise that are profoundly personal, on one hand, but have a public, and therefore political, face as well; and that, once public, they will become a focus of discussion in a context that extends far beyond the personal, almost by definition. Cindy Sheehan is the latest flashpoint for the war/anti-war debate; in fact, she has provided a way of currently shaping that debate. And it's the debate that counts. Why not continue it, and avoid being diverted by speculations about the motives of those whose politics we dislike? All sides ought to be grateful for people like Sheehan, who perform the public service of re-presenting the profound cultural, political and moral issues at play, no matter what the personal cost. I, for one, salute her for it.

Ottawa Police on the job

Ottawa police yesterday scooped up Sophie Lamarche-Harkat, spouse of Mohamed Harkat, who has been held without trial on one of Canada's infamous security certificates for nearly three years. Could her "crime" have been that she has been speaking out noisily and publicly, and collecting money on behalf of her husband, who is now facing deportation to Algeria and torture on arrival?

One of the indefatigable Sophie's many activities has been to set up a bail fund for Mohamed, prior to an upcoming judicial review of his detention. The aim is to raise $50,000 on the off-chance that bail is actually granted. While at the bank attending to the account at about 10:15 a.m. yesterday, she was arrested by between six and eight of Ottawa’s finest, handcuffed, held for hours at the Elgin Street police station, told she could be arrested again at any time, and released at 4:00 in the afternoon without charge or condition. The ostensible reason for the arrest was, reportedly, an allegation of fraud related to a draft deposited in the account.

But this does raise questions. Does it really take half a dozen or more officers to arrest one peaceful woman doing business in a bank? (Remember, this is the same Ottawa Police crying poor and demanding an 8% rise in their 2006 budget. It would seem, from this incident, that they have a lot of time on their hands.) If there wasn't even enough evidence to warrant laying a charge, why the overkill?

I'll be keeping a close eye on this matter, and updating readers on developments.

Left behind

Over in England, columnist Nick Cohen has left the Left, following in the weaving footsteps of Christopher Hitchens. He writes with that peculiarly British mixture of stylishness and smugness that is taken for wit and wisdom these days by far too many of the culturati.

But I shouldn't be so dismissive, because, in fairness, Cohen has put his finger on a fundamental moral problem, one that may not, in the final analysis, be fully resolvable. Applying an overly-simplistic (and selective) "right vs. wrong" moral code to a world in which every decision has myriad positive and negative consequences is a very dark glass with which to view current events. Moreover, imposing such a code has led to unspeakably terrible consequences.

Those who strive in one way or another to implement social justice, who embrace a vision of egalitarianism, peace, inclusiveness, and unity-in-diversity, have not done overly well when it comes to constructing the machinery to do so. And that's because, in my humble opinion, it's not a matter of building machinery. Such efforts are doomed to fail. What we need, rather, is infrastructure, both literally and metaphorically.

But I'm running ahead of myself.

Let's have a closer look at Cohen's apostasy (since he uses religious metaphors, so shall I), as outlined in a recent article. "[What] a large part of the mainstream liberal-left don't and won't confront is that they have become the fellow travellers of the psychopathic far-right," he says. He introduces his point-man W.H. Auden, a fine poet whose odyssey into Christianity, like that of T.S. Eliot, marks a classic reaction to modernism. In latter days, Auden did wring his hands a lot, and with good reason.

The excesses, no, the bloody mega-crimes of Stalinism, as it turned out, were not the products of feverishly creative former-day Jamie Glazovs and George Jonases. They were real. Unimaginably real. By the time Khrushchev made his famous and self-serving speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the fat was already in the fire. Hungary followed in a matter of months, with an exodus from the Communist Party and its entourage; then we had to wait a few more years for Czechoslovakia and the sudden end to the Prague Spring in 1968 (my personal tipping-point, if you want to know).

But it then became too easy to accuse the Left of complicity, a tactic that continues unabated today, and which turns on a fundamental misconception. Certainly, the people on the Left, like people anywhere in the political universe, can harness themselves too securely to visions to see what's going on. No political stripe has a monopoly on naïveté and illogic. (No religious stripe, either: I recall a former companion's Catholic schoolbook, and an exercise question that leapt out at me: "What was the Inquisition? Defend it.")

It is wrong, though, to be overly self-assured in these matters. Margaret Thatcher served tea to the butcher of Santiago not all that long ago. The US had propped up frightful regimes, and indeed has installed quite a few of them, including the aforesaid butcher. When I see all the hand-wringing about Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, for example, I remember when one was cynically used by the US against that Great Satan, Iran, and the other coalesced from remnants of a US-financed anti-Soviet mujahideen.

But this is wide of the point I am attempting to make. There is, on all sides, a kind of tactical moralism that is brought out when needed to savage political opponents, and which bears no relation to morality per se. When the less-literate portion of the Left ran around many years back calling anyone to the right of Tommy Douglas a "fascist," and when people here in the blogosphere insist that Ed Broadbent is a Communist ally of Islamism (I kid you not) and millionaire businessman Paul Martin is a "socialist," one has to realize before it's too late that a verbal fog has descended, one so thick that the analytical equivalent of cutting blades and oxygen tanks is urgently called for. The aim of such tags is to shame, not to describe. It's hyperbole, in other words, but some, far too many, come to believe that it's factual.

I'm with Cohen when he writes: "The least attractive characteristic of the middle-class left - one shared with the Thatcherites - is its refusal to accept that its opponents are sincere." It's a characteristic of many, in fact, who hold strongly to their beliefs. It has tactical value, too, since it makes those charged with insincerity defensive, divagating from the topic at hand. Those accusing others of political insincerity are all too often insincere in doing so.

But he loses me when he makes the very sort of claim that he criticizes. Putting words in our mouths, he writes:

It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives.

And:

[W]hen confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, [the Left feels] it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

I admit that I find myself wondering about Cohen’s political motives when I read frankly bizarre stuff like this:

Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance?

But I’ll do him the honour of believing he is sincere, if at times incomprehensible. What he evidently lacks, however, is the ability to understand that the world of Realpolitik is not a moral world, and that we must salvage what morality we can as we navigate it. I'm not here arguing for cynicism, although simplistic universal moral schemes arouse my suspicion: instead, I'm advocating for realism.

Suppose one is confronted by the geopolitical reality that a dictator is behaving harshly to his subjects. While his country is technologically advanced and largely secular, any whisper of opposition is treated with outrageous cruelty. The moral issue is, in a nutshell, What to do? If you have the power, do you invade, replace him, and set up your very culture-bound notion of proper governance--at the cost of tens of thousands of lives? Do you impose sanctions, killing a huge number of children in the process, and then claim that it's "worth it?" Do you practise "constructive engagement," whatever that is? Do you weigh the moral odds, as it were, rather than making easy moral equivalency arguments or dismissing morality altogether? Do you perhaps question the motives of those poised to invade, noticing that there appears to be a convenient and selective set of morals brought into play whenever the US has far more concrete geopolitical objectives?

All of this should ideally go into the mix of a serious political--and moral--debate on the solution of difficult problems affecting human rights. But it rarely does. Instead, two levels of argument, moral and realist, become inextricably confused. Just examine the fatuous arguments against the notion of root causes: somehow, looking for reasons is equated to looking for justification.

I've never held with “tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,” myself. That bespeaks a moral flabbiness, if not the abandonment of the very notion of morality itself. But I'm entirely in agreement with “tout comprendre,” or at least as much as possible. I prefer explanations to metaphysics. My morality comes into play when I've understood the situation well enough to make a judgment, trying to avoid simplistic binary thinking, because there aren't just white hats and black hats contending out there, much as some would like it to be otherwise.

Speaking of binary thinking, here's Cohen again:

But arguments have their own dynamic. If you start by refusing to look Baathism or Islamism in the face, the logic of blaming everything on Tony Blair and George W Bush pushes you into making ever more excuses for the extreme right.

Excuses? What excuses? Strawmen vs. strongmen, black versus white, evil versus good. In the very same article, Cohen says:

The reason why one million people marched through London without one mounting a platform to express solidarity with the victims of fascism was that it never occurred to them that there were people in Iraq who shared their values.

He just can't seem to decide what form of duplicity grips us. Here we are, making excuses for the Ba'athist regime one moment, and merely lacking moral imagination the next. Perhaps neither is true. Just perhaps we did the calculations, asked out loud where the WMDs were (the original excuse, you will remember, for going into Iraq--the human rights concerns took centre stage only when the WMDs could not be found, and it's not a little cynical to plead for retroactive moral justification now).

Maybe we asked ourselves and others whether casting around for Iraqi players to enact a version of the first US Continental Congress was really going to solve the problem of governance in Iraq for all time. Not because Iraqis are incapable of yearning for liberty and human rights, but because a foreign model, imposed by war and occupation, might prove worse than the disease it was meant to cure. Thus far, 25,000 dead civilians and a ramped-up civil war may prove that our analysis was not that far off.

So now we find ourselves in a deepening global quagmire, and the best Cohen can come up with is:

Even if people think that the Iraq war has made Britain a bigger target, they are still confronted with a fascistic cult of murder and self-murder which allows no compromise.

One cult, no compromise, attack first, and sleep uneasily. Not the vision of the future that appeals to me, and certainly not the one shared by the Left. We dare to remain optimistic; our vision of the future is more than boots stamping on the human face forever, either in the name of Allah or in the name of "anti-terrorism."

Second-last word to Cohen:

Indeed, it is impossible to imagine what a serious left-wing candidate [for the leadership of the British Labour Party] would look like and what his or her programme might be.

If I might suggest: someone who combines a strong moral vision with a realistic view of the world, and finds Bush's world-view somewhat cramped quarters in which to take up residence. Someone who will not lie to the people to protect oil and geopolitical positioning.

Back to my earlier comments about machinery and infrastructure. If a Left programme is to rise from the ashes of our astounding failures, it will only do so through a different kind of thinking. We can no more build a Utopia-making machine than we can be planet-managers, trying to run the vast and complex mechanism of the environment ourselves. Rather, in both cases (and it's really only one case) we should avoid doing harm, while striving to create the conditions within which the vast potential of humanity can be realized, and the precise and complex balances of nature can be preserved.

Nothing less than a new mental and social infrastructure is required. If we believe in a greener and more egalitarian future, we can't order it into being, with rules and central planning. People will build it for themselves, given half a chance: the Left strategy must be to find out precisely how that opportunity can best be created.

So, for Labour Party leader? Someone with a programme, but not a blueprint; with a government that encourages, not directs, that decentralizes decision-making so that decisions actually fit the circumstances, that encourages community without homogenization, and values over rules. And, finally, someone who means what s/he says, and says what s/he means: a better world is possible, there is an alternative, and let's get to work on the plan, folks, the sooner the better, "before the whole sh*thouse goes up in flames."

The pitchfork strategy

If the Right excels at anything, it's demonology. The Good Guys have never fought people: they fight images, images of pure evil that erupt into history out of nowhere. It is an article of faith, in fact, that these malign forces have no causes: they are simply there, hating our freedoms and our Way of Life--and they all look alike.

Witness the crude racialist cartoons of the Other, visual and verbal, whenever the Good Guys go to war; or the religified discourse, hellfire and all, that sprang up around the same-sex marriage issue; or the deliberate confusion of mild social reformers with Stalinists; or the ludicrous attempts at present to link "the Left" with a mediaeval, misogynist, homophobic, ossified, punitive form of Islam for whom bin Laden appears to be the current spokesman.

For quite a while, I thought the latter was merely the kind of verbal flim-flam one uses in cheap debate: an audacious and sweeping ad hominem, meant to silence opponents before they ever open their mouths. Or to knock them wildly off-course when they do: "No, I don't approve of execution by paper-shredder! No, I think that amputations for theft are an atrocity! And stoning women! And flying planes into buildings! But I thought we were here to discuss pay equity." "Sorry, time's up." That kind of thing. We've seen it before, although the rhetorical density from the Right seems to be increasing exponentially. But there's strategy here, too, if poorly-articulated.

The Right, and this needs to be said up front, is still in the driver’s seat, globally speaking, even if neo-liberal "benefits" to the Third World have by now been debunked, short-term pain has given way to long-term pain, deregulation has actually killed people, and the Invisible Hand is around too many throats to ignore any longer. Even the World Bank has its apostates now. The Right is still in power, but it's looking around wildly to shore itself up, now that its gospel of privatization and globalization is wearing a little thin.

What to do? People are starting to ask tough questions, as Zamyatin did of Lenin: "OK, I've seen the broken eggs. Now, where's that omelet of yours?" So the US administration does what it always does when it's in a jam--waves the flag and starts a war. Or two. Find the demons, wipe 'em out. Call on all the old values. Patriotism. Bigotry. Get a bunch of working people with no future into the forces to go and fight your battles for you. Commiserate with the parents. Nail down the reconstruction contracts.

But that's only half the job. Order on the home front is essential too, to keep the opposition in line once friendly voting machines have done their part. Remember, those demons are tricky. Positively supernatural. They're everywhere, not just Over There. They could be your next-door neighbour. Hell, they could be you. Their agenda is clear: Same-sex marriage. Hanging gay teenagers. Amputation. Rehabilitation. A woman's right to choose abortion. Stoning. Women's equality. Burqas. Abolishing capital punishment. Mass-murder. Peace. War. They're a sneaky bunch, and we have to be ever-vigilant.

Never mind, you can always tell the home-grown demons. They're easy to spot. There's a simple test: they're always supporters or members of a political party conservatives don’t like. They like to congregate. In the States, they're Democrats. In Canada, they're Liberals, or NDP, or Green. (To quote one of the blowflies over at Small Dead Animals, "Gulags and mild social reform are one and the same." I didn't make that up.)

The head demon has taken an Arabic name, for now. Nobody, not all the President's technology and all of his men, can seem to locate him. They can't even find his recording studio, but you know what demons are like. Meanwhile the Left--you know, the people who don't like Bush, or Stephen Harper--are hauling out the pitchforks. We hate our freedoms. We practise stoning in our spare time, waiting for The Day. Our values are the same as his. Think I'm kidding? The frantic and increasingly mad David Horowitz even wrote a book about it.

But there's strategy here, as I said. It's not a conspiracy, just a case of small minds thinking alike, and fools seldom differing. The technique to achieve it is the well-known Big Lie: just keep repeating that "the Left" is in bed with the beheaders and stoners and bombers, and people will start to question why we oppose the war in Iraq. Why we support public transit. Why we like medicare. Why we think the world is getting warmer. Why we're in favour of more social housing. Why we find Stephen Harper scary. Why we oppose tax cuts.

O tempora, o mores! Pass the horn-polish, Comrade Omar--it’s getting warm in here.

Fiftieth post

All right, to be totally self-indulgent, I've given some thought to the first milestone along what I hope will be a long and winding road, and this post is the result. So far I've explored only one section of the Alpha Quadrant of the blogosphere, to change the metaphor to a more appropriately twenty-first century one (or twenty-second, to be accurate). But boldly I go, where so many, many have gone before.

As a refugee from Usenet, I had been looking for something that would provide me a little writer's discipline, avoid the time wasting cyber equivalent of phone-in talk shows with their flamage and assorted grotesqueries, and encourage a harder look at current events. I like writing an article nearly every day, usually first thing in the morning, and I like being part of a group of progressive bloggers.

The daily blogging ritual does indeed encourage the development of Sitzfleisch. I'm a writer and consultant by profession, and an anthropology student in some of my spare time, so I have the concentration required to get into a subject and do the late hours. But blogging has proven an excellent way of getting the day started properly on a consistent basis. And it's made me look at the news in a different way, how it's constructed, where the humour and the tragedy and the fault lines are. It's kept me from filing it away in the little boxes we all construct in our minds when we aren’t really paying attention.

On the other hand, I have found myself doing far too much blogsite visiting, and wandering off into the various Comments sections where the old Usenet habits appear to prevail. If I could just stick to the sites themselves, and scan the variety of commentary therein, then by a little later in the morning I could begin to devote myself to honest toil. Balance and moderation in all things. Maybe someday.

I've met a wider variety of people than I would have thought possible generating matter here in the blogosphere: amiable right-wingers, vituperative religious narcissists, Ann Coulter wannabes, political illiterates, sound progressive commentators, graceful stylists, American nutcases, American wits, and much in between. I've met people who would be great to share a few beers with during a late-night philosophical discussion. And people, frankly, that I'm proud to have as enemies.

But how does one keep up? There are literally millions of sites out there. So many blogs, so little time.... It's hard enough to get my New Yorker and Harper's and Sunday NYT read when they arrive. I'm gnawed by the suspicion that I'm missing the really good stuff, lost in the stacks of an infinite library with a lifespan too short to do more than read titles.

Bloggers, I quickly discovered, are obsessed with traffic. In other words, they (no, in all honesty, we) crave an audience. We aren't writing for ourselves; these are public diaries, we seek attention. So a plethora of devices has been made available to help us get more widely known and to check to see if anyone cares. We cling to the ladders in this new hierarchy: I'm not sure I like being a "slithering reptile on the TTLB ecosystem," but it beats being an "insignificant microbe." I'm proud to have outgrown my crawly amphibian days, and hope someday to be a large mammal. Such are the strange vertical pathways lit by ambition.

More than a few people in the blogosphere seem to have a lot of hours at their disposal. In a foolish moment I registered on Blogshares, but I have no idea how to proceed from there, even though I was given start-up money, and a gift of shares from some welcoming soul. It seems to me that I might more profitably use the time required to learn this game by becoming an effective day-trader. More generally, the blogging rate of some is nothing short of prodigious. They crank the stuff out by the yard, day in, day out. Where do they find the time? Some of it's good, too.

While Usenet eats its young, the blogosphere has proven to be a place where help is freely given. There seem to be technicians standing by to grapple with almost every problem in a timely way. Given that most of this appears to be offered on a volunteer basis, I am tremendously impressed. In fact, even if I am wrong on the latter, and suitable emoluments are being dispensed, I promise to remain tremendously impressed.

Finally, blogging has something of the feel of treading water about it. You post what you think is a fine polished piece, it appears on blogrolls here and there, you might even get a few comments--and then it disappears into the memory hole, while new posts bubble up all around you. Must keep writing...can't sink...got to...keep...blogging....Let it go more than a few days, and I think you could experience something very like death: the chatter of life carries on unceasingly, but you just aren't there anymore.

There's a commercial for hair colouring on TV right now where a woman asks, "If I start colouring, am I stuck?" I've just started blogging to cover the grey, and I guess I am. Back to the good stuff, political and cultural commentary, tomorrow.