Month: November 2004

Pieces of Memory

I have small moments of memory that persist like character flaws, fragments of memory that run like three second movies taken from my early childhood. Standing outside a store in Toronto in rain, being carried at night on my father’s shoulders looking past the parking lot lights at a deep black night sky perhaps for the first time, getting a needle, a sun bear cub living in a cage on a low shelf in a department store at a mall in Sydney when I was in grade one or maybe even earlier when I was in Mississauga before we moved in 1970.

These memories are reflexive, of their own accord but there are not that many. They cycle. Some are of early dreams, one or two definitely from when I was in the crib. Right now, reading a shareholder’s declaration draft, the chill in the office and the sound of grey rain on the window snapped me back to 1966 or so when the world was all knees and hold my hands.

Moral Majorities

The US after this election is witnessing the results of an effort which has taken the best part of forty years through which socially conservatism has become mainstream. It has been a comprehensive effort which has worked its way through the media, economics, academia, the churches and government to succesfully make that which was utterly unappealing in the mid-60s pop culture today. The rise of country music, pick-up truck manufacture, shift in church attendence, an attack on prudent taxation and an assertion of moral cause for whatever one does are all aspects of this shift.

What is the centre and left to do? One thing it must do is start. Fortunately in Canada, we know that any rightist thought beyond the centre is marginal, as recent elections show. Where 51% of the US population votes for the God-fearing friend of commerce, Canadians can’t get up enough interest in them to get them into the 30% range – because we know they are nuts or are Albertans. Our centre and left (known in the States as the far-left/liberals/socialists/pinkos) only have a problem merely of fragmentation as opposed to purpose. Yet, it is still at risk…so perhaps setting some general principles of the true moral majority would help as ground work for the 2016 US election when the House, Senate and White House might all reasonably be expected next to fall back into our southern neighbour’s Democratic hands:

  • You have to express and assert moral values. The centre and left must recognize that it is the steward of the moral core of liberty and learn to express that convincingly. Currently, the right is asserting a faith-based conception of politics which is set up as opposed to “realty”, whatever that is supposed to mean. One principle that is key in understanding the success of the US right is that the abandonment of thought is not the fulfillment of any relationhip to faith. It is just abandonment to unthought so get into that Bible and point out that Jesus had no time for the bankers and bean-counters in authority, knocked down the temple and wanted the feet of the poor into some reasonable footwear. The centre and left also need to erode what are described as faith-based approaches through asserting that faith and reason are not anti-thetical, that morality and thought is better than morality and not thought. As you Mom said when you couldn’t find your bike – God gave you a brain for something…USE IT!

  • Fiscal prudency. Since the earliest days of Margaret Thatcher, the core economic principle of the right has been imprudence. Favouring the few, wasting natural resources for today, cutting taxes mindlessly and racking up public debt are all rightist economic cornerstones. As a result, the centre and left need to embrace prudence…no, not Prudence, just prudence. Being the best money managers, safe-guarding of the public purse, keeping an eye on the long term, are all key. It is a wide-open field and frankly the one you’ve been sitting in the middle of for years, all the while being told by the misfits, the foxes in the chicken coop, that you are incapable. You believed them. Maybe because of the suits, who knows. Calling this new approach something grand and geographically friendly yet obtuse, like, say, the Houston School, will help. It will not cause fear and may be allowed to infiltrate for the required decade or more without anyone noticing, taking time for adherents to become pundits and then policy makers.

  • Last, the centre and left in North America have to come to believe in themselves. In Europe this is easy having been ravaged by the extremes of the Nazis and Soviets for decades. It is only in the last three years that North America has taken to consider itself the victim of the world. In asserting itself as having risen from that great wrong it has been uneven, a bit unsteady so that we now see that liberty has been protected by cutting back on it fencing it in. Time for the bloom to force itself again. It is good to be free and the centre and left have to make that meaningful again. Next time someone craps on “liberals” say “did you say Liberace? Why would you say that about Liberace? I suppose you didn’t care for Ed Sullivan either, or apple pie and you believe cheating on your taxes isn’t much like cheating on your wife. Are you still cheating on your taxes? Har-har-har!” You can take it from there. Look around your leftie life, stake out what is good and wholesome and, then, proclaim it as the salvation for the nation. A good lesson to remember from the right on this point is it doesn’t have to be true, you just have to say it a lot. It is, though, likely true.

Some will think this scatter-brained and some just copying. But that is what it is going to take to get that 51% needed to keep out the fringe. See, you don’t have to befriend the Ayn Rand set, with their calls to stop pampering children by keeping the out of the work force. You just just have to convince that nice centre-right family on the next street. There you go. You know them. Invite them over for cups of tea, leave out the Toronto Star and New Yorker, maybe put on play a little reggae quietly and see what develops. Remember, you have a decade or two to pull this off so no rush. Find some friends and start a circle – avoid the word “cell” as you do this, please. Adopt the bollo tie as your secret sign. Next time you see someone wearing one, give them a wink. The revolution has begun.

Hey, Did You Guys Hear About This?

Thanks to the night writers who stayed up for…nothing. Three states up in the air still and Ohio law appears to say, from what I heard at 2 am from the Secretary of State from there, that there are ten days to count the provisional votes. Power vacuum. If this was 1807, Canada would attack right now. Given that we would be crushed, crushed, crushed, now all we can do is send them the pamphlets we have collected from tours of legislative assemblies suggesting it is time to reconsider the Queen.

Moments Later, Still Before Coffee: So one strategy for 2008? How about relocating one million New Yorkers to five New New Yorks, model towns scattered amongst the swing states.

10:29 pm

I am under a denial of interest attack. Why can’t people in Ohio all vote before noon? Is it too much to ask?

On the upside the Daily Show is doing an hour long special.

Update: Gmail lives again.

Update: Why isn’t Alaska’s Peter Tosh memorial ballot measure being reported during this two hour break in anything interesting? Here is what it is about:

Would legalize the cultivation, use and sale of marijuana for persons 21 and older; the state and local government would regulate marijuana like alcohol and tobacco; doctors would be able to prescribe drugs to all patients, including children; public use laws could be enacted by the government as well as laws in the interest of public safety.

Interesting to see that Utah’s same sex marriage proposition (as it were) passed without the popular wording “that marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman…or some women…related or otherwise”

Good Night: 198 Bush to 188 Kerry not counting another 18 for Kerry in Oregon and Washington. Which really makes it 198 Bush to 206 Kerry.

Miles to go. Larry King, who does not need sleep because he is an ALIEN, will be still talking at breakfast and Ohio will still be uncertain. Certainly it would be easier to be a Bush supporter at this moment than a Kerry one but it could all come down to the split allocation of electoral votes in Maine. What the hell did the neighbours do, portland? On the upside, the sofa is there for you and yours, our token political refugees.

Congratulations to Ian and Tessa who singlehandledly out-Ezekiel-ed the Mennonites of Lancaster County with tales from both the Book of Mormon and sin-centrals NY/Cali, swinging to the Democrats those confused but mightily good folk who run lovely train museums.

See you in the recounts.

Election Eve

Just 24 hours until I am stuck in front of the TV, ignoring the kids, eating junk food, forgetting I need to sleep, acting like a sports fan all for an election. I love an election.

And apparently the US election loves this the internets and especially this small bit which has misled people needing the real goods on Kerry’s policies or wanting to find a reliable US election pool. To those lost and finding themselves here…I have nothing for you but the comfort of letting you know that you are not alone, that the internet is a wasteland.

I can’t recall if I followed the 1996 US election on-line. I think I did and it slowed. I do recall the whole web-thang slowed down a whole lot the next time four years ago. Will the infrastruture be robust enough for all the new streaming audio bandwidth, the video and the incessant click-click-click of millions of nerds updating their RSS feeds every 23 seconds. I bet I’ll be listening to radio by 9:43 pm. Radio, the king of media.