Tag: History

You Are Now Entering Fairyland

Nothing is more important to any politician – left, right or centre – intent on a little social engineering than creating new myths that bear little resemblance to actual history but which prop up the political needs of the day but this is either funny or unsettling:

“Real nationalists don’t want destroy, they want to build,” said Mr. Harper, who even at one point quoted Quebec’s nationalist conservative premier of the 1940s and 1950s, Maurice Duplessis. “The real nationalists aren’t afraid of reality, they want to improve it, and that’s what our government is doing”… Mr. Harper finally found a sympathetic ear Saturday night. “There is nothing more precious than the family farm, which represents so well all the values on which our country has been built,” he said to rapturous applause.

Is it just me or wasn’t Duplessis sort of, you know, a quasi-fascist thug whose name has been mud since he got the boot. And wasn’t this nation built on military garrisons, state chartered resource-stripping monopolies and colonial policies that lasted well past the days of being a colony? I suppose you have to tell the people what they want to here but there has to be a limit, one would think, well before the point of the giggles.

Next thing you are going to hear is about how the Erie Canal and wagon trains opened up the route to Alberta.

I Went And I Didn’t Blog It…


Team GX40

…but now I am so I am a big loser. We zipped across and I didn’t even take a picture for you:

  • TnT ties! Reminds me of how I felt on 16 June 1990.
  • Got made fun of by a US border guard again and got the chilly and very professional treatment from the Canadians on the way back. The difference in style still is weird.
  • Note to file: Fairgrounds Inn in Watertown is good. I am coming to the understanding that there is a thing called New York Italian that is different from Canadian Italian and Italian. It is also different (thankfully) from East Side Marios phoney baloney roadhouses. It is just a family restaurant that offers food of their fathers with a comfort diner angle. Not unlike the best small Chinese-Canadian places in a way – the Shanghai in Ottawa or the Lucky Inn in Pembroke come to mind. Anyway, encountering an excellent cream, red pepper, parsley, garlic and mushroom sauce on a $5.99 dish is dandy. Plus eight pies, most of which have confounding undescriptive names like “Kentucky Derby Pie”. Here is a link to lists and lists of “You haven’t lived in Watertown if you haven’t…” stuff.
  • The Antique Boat Museum at Clayton, NY was amazing as well but on a dreary 10C day likely not the best for photos. It reminded me of another principle of difference in small museums on this side or the other. Yesterday was family free day. Otherwise we would have had to pay at least $30 USD for us as a family. That ticket price shows up in the quality of the facility and exhibits – you are paying to support not just enter the place. And I now have a keen desire to have a woodstrip sailing canoe from 1910. 250 boats in all including mid 1800’s first nations canoes and dugouts.
  • We then proceeded to hang around the Salmon Run Mall at Watertown, mainly because of the George Rhoads of Ithaca sculpture. Here is a site about his ball-drop clangy pieces. There is a short short movie of the one at the Ithaca Sciencentre here.
  • Got canned Indian pudding, Beal St. BBQ sauces and even oyster chowder at the Hannafords. Nice having a New England grocery store so close by.

You are permitted to use this space for World Cup chat today. Gotta conserve post templates, you know. Only got so many. Big hopes for Serbia v. the Netherlands for a good game.

Sammy Pepys

The ever excellent John Gushue (no relation) notes today is the 383rd birthday of Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Minister of the English government in the 1660s. He also notes the live blogging of his famous diary. Yesterday, 344 years ago, Sammy had a bad day but one that interestingly illustrates the problem of avoiding the service of a warrant of sorts circa 1662:

One time I went up to the top of Sir W. Batten’s house, and out of one of their windows spoke to my wife out of one of ours; which methought, though I did it in mirth, yet I was sad to think what a sad thing it would be for me to be really in that condition. By and by comes Sir J. Minnes, who (like himself and all that he do) tells us that he can do no good, but that my Lord Chancellor wonders that we did not cause the seamen to fall about their ears: which we wished we could have done without our being seen in it; and Captain Grove being there, he did give them some affront, and would have got some seamen to have drubbed them, but he had not time, nor did we think it fit to have done it, they having executed their commission…

Where Do You Place 9/11?

That great voice of contemplative thought, the NYT op-ed, published a really interesting essay yesterday by Joseph J. Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Entitled “Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History”, it posed that interesting question from a historical perpective. What caught my eye most of all was that, even though we are four and a half years past 9/11, we may be only read these sort of thoughts now. Here is the full essay in a non-subscription-only format:

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility. Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

His last point is interesting. The terrorists would like the US and other free nations to fall into the belief that freedom is at risk. This is different that saying freedom is under attack, of course. But reacting as if it is at risk creates the real danger, Ellis argues:

It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Of course, there is nothing as interesting as someone who agrees with something you have written before. In the fall of 2003, I was very surprised to find that the relative fear level of 9/11 was considered greater than in the Cold War, the latter end of which framed my youth. In March 2004, I thought about it again and did so again in October 2004.

Where do we stand now that we have learned that 9/11 will not be repeated annually, that we have seen great changes or perhaps only admissions as to the way we are watched and interogated when suspected, that we now know that giving people the right to vote will not ensure those people will vote for what you want? I don’t mean this as a telling “gotcha” sort of comment so much as an invitation to ask yourself it is now acceptable to consider and perhaps reconsider given almost half a decade of subsequent history.

Lost Email

Arther recollects the emails he sent and received on 9/11 but did not retain. It reminded me that I have lost or, recently, abandoned sets of email three times. The first was an error of cleaning up a hard drive, the second was turning off an intranet and the hird a deliberate closing of an account. Like this blog, each had thousands of notes and conversations from many, many people. As information it was great stuff, giving the ability to trace an argument over months, to track how a project developed but it was also a bit of a millstone focusing importance on the past as well as the flow and the source. It was authoritative but in relation frankly to mostly low grade content and gave too much weight to what was rather than was would be.

I don’t know why that resonates with the fact that I’ve come across an interesting couple of themes recently in that book I’ve been reading on the Anti-Federalists of 1787. Some of them thought two things were necessary for them to get their message across – anonymity and a free press. By anonymity they meant the ability to write under a pen name so that the readership would not be able to pre-judge through status. By a free press they meant one without commercial pressure from the Federalists, one where printers would print and distribute all pamphlets equally. In this way virtuous public opinion could be best generated:

Public opinion was even more crucial than it had been in any other republic. “In a confederated government of such extent as the United States” it was vital that “the freest communication of sentiment and information should be maintained.” Centinal envisaged the public sphere of the print as an important means of cementing a nation together. Print afforded a means of achieving social cohesion without a stron coercive authority.

Ratification proved the danger of allowing the press to become a tool of a party or faction: the suppression of Anti-Federalist writing facilitated ratification in a number of states. Centinal complained that “the liberties of that coutnytr are brought to an awful crisis,” for it was precisely the Federalists’ ability to dominate the press that allowed supporters of the Constitution to isolate and “overwhelm the enlightened opposition”…

I don’t know what the connection is between the emails of 2001, this blog and the press of 1787. This site has over 2000 posts and many more thousand comments. But I do not really treat it like an archive as I rarely recollect that I have written something before. It is also practically anonymous as I have met only a very few of you comment makers in real life. It is also one of millions making them as a group, like personal email repositories, practically inaccessible for any real purpose – so free and so available that they are unfunctional as tools for the advancement of ideas into the community for shared consideration and development. This is even the case of the so called A-listers – that notion spoken of in 2003 but not really much any more: people who thought they were important because of hit counts seemed to think that that would bring authority and a means to make change.

I will have to think about whether there is anything to this.

Whiggery

I am surprised by the interest I am apparently sustaining in reading Saul Cornell’s book The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828.

One thing I am learning a bit about is whig republicanism, a movement that probably (if I knew anything) can be dated between roughly 1660 to 1820 in the USA and UK. It is pre-romantic but post-divine right. Something about meritocracy combining with disinterested civil duty. Natural leaders leading the three classes with respect for the roles of each of the three classes. They never fully organized in the UK and never really led the American revolution but heralded the transition to democracy…sort of…I think.

Anyone know more about the whigs and can you recommend any reading?

Gomery Schlomery

I was thinking as the torrent of anguish flying around the Canadian bit of the internet began to subside this afternoon about scandels as we have them here. They have tended not to be in the British style about sex or in the US style about power. They tend to be about cash:

  • There were all those allegations about that friend to both the Christian Democratic Union Party of Germany and Brian Mulroney:

    That would be the same Karlheinz Schreiber from whom Mr. Mulroney was later — wrongfully, as it turned out — accused of receiving kickbacks in connection with Air Canada’s $1.8-billion purchase of aircraft from Airbus Industrie. The false accusation prompted Mr. Mulroney’s famous lawsuit against the government of Canada, in settlement of which he was eventually paid $2-million. Much of this was documented in Mr. Kaplan’s 1998 book, Presumed Guilty, a passionate defence of Mr. Mulroney’s reputation…

  • Saskatchewan’s Tories of the early 1990s were not so fortunate as…

    14 Conservative members of the legislature and two caucus workers were convicted of fraud and breach of trust for illegally diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from government allowances in a phoney expense-claim scam. The party was destroyed by this scandal

    Having worked on a breach of public trust case, I was very grateful to these guys for creating such a solid body of legal precedent to work with.

  • A number of Buchanan’s Conservatives Nova Scotia’s in the 1980s always seemed to be in the courts and/or the locally known “bagman” it seemed before the Westray diaster put all that in perspective if not entirely in the past. [Google, by the way, is a rotten historian as there is little to be found on the topic.]
  • And, as we all know, it was not only Tories as Jeffery Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail in February 2004 about Trudeau’s Liberals:

    And, of course, there was patronage. When running for the party leadership in 1968, Mr. Trudeau said, “I’m not against helping a friend of the Liberal Party when I get a chance.” Generally, however, he disliked the grubby
    business of patronage. He couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in politics for the hope of reward.

    He learned — and wound up filling the Senate, agencies, boards and commissions with Liberals, ending his prime ministerial career with the greatest single-day orgy of patronage in Canadian history. His Quebec ministers met Thursday mornings in a dining room adjacent to the parliamentary restaurant to exercise political discretion on behalf of supporters and party friends. Mr. Trudeau’s ministerial fixers in Quebec
    included Jean Marchand, Marc Lalonde, André Ouellet and Francis Fox, now responsible for Quebec in Mr. Martin’s office.

There must be others. Any other bouts of sticky fingers from Canada’s past?

The Pope In Halifax, 1984

I suppose my recollections are not as profound as others, me not being Catholic, but it was quite the thing when the Pope came to my town in September 1984 at the beginning of my fourth year of undergrad. I don’t have any photos but neither does Google Images so I don’t feel so bad. Here’s the CBC archive of the event – check out Knowlton Nash on the Popemobile.

I don’t really remember being all protestant and cynicalmyself but that is because some of my pals were quite protestant and cynical about the whole thing, the taking over of the Halifax Commons, the weeks of building the massive staging, being somewhat penned with about 200 others in small squares with plenty of Popemobile room in between and all. We kept thinking how much it was all like a concert. At the Friday night youth rally, before the rains of the next day, conveniently located half way between the university zone and the downtown taverns for afters, he kept opening his statements with (in a heavy Polish accent) “Yoou Yooung peeople of Haallyfax…” and we would fill in, loud enough to get scowls from the neighbours, “…reeely knoow how to paaarteee.” One pal, Will, was quite pleased that he could be outside but near St. Mary’s Bascilica watching the Pope perform the Saturday service there on a screen – as he had watched from the tav next door with an excellent view of the church walls, tv coverage above the bar, beer in his hand. Being a fellow traveller he was able to tell him mother truthfully he was in a crowd just outside the service and stayed there right the way through.

At the end of one of his days in town, he Popemobiled at a faster clip down Coburg past our university to the Bishops house where he was staying, thin crowds in the warm evening waving as he headed to bed. We all waved night-night to the Pope.

Update: The Pope passed away mid-afternoon Saturday our time.