The Gods of the Copybook Headings One Year Blogversary

It seems like yesterday I was trying to figure out how to embed links into the text of a post, rather than have ungainly URLs cluttering up the blog, and here I am over a half a million words later still blogging.  The impression of many is that bloggers are either unemployed or seriously underemployed, while that is sometimes the case I have felt the compulsion to blog even when by schedule was impossibly tight and no inclination when I had all the time in world.  It really is like a compulsion of sorts.  Some major crisis happens and you feel a desperate need to tell someone what you think, no matter how unoriginal or uninteresting your thoughts may be, or whether anyone is in fact listening as you talk to yourself.  Blogging is kind of like being blind on a city bus talking to yourself.  Once in a while someone comes up to you and says, "Dude, your talking to yourself, get help!"  Sometimes people come up and say, that's an interesting point, but really what about this...."    The former is both an occupational hazard, as far as this is an occupation, and a reality check.  The latter is pretty much why I or anyone else blogs.  We can all talk to ourselves, the question, and hope is that someone talks back.  Otherwise I'd be watching Lawrence of Arabia right now rather than writing out this confessional of sorts.

I would like to thank all those who have read and commented on this blog over the past year as well as those who have linked to Gods.  In particular I'd like to thank to Kevin Jaegar at Trudeaupia who was the first "major" blogger to link to us.  Even though I often didn't agree with Kevin his rather simple looking blog was one of the best out there, a fact testified to by the number of blog roles he's still on.  I would also like to thank the following bloggers with whom I've kept a fairly steady chatter over the last year:  Everyone over at the London Fog, in particular Lisa and the mysterious Mapmaster (though not as mysterious as regular commenter nomdenet).  One day I'll figure out exactly what "Mapmaster" refers to, unless that is his real name.  Which, if it is, is a very cruel name for a fellow.  More thanks to Darcey at Dust My Broom, everyone's favourite nude skiing Metis engineer.  Not that I want to stereotype.  Andrew Anderson at Bound By Gravity deserves a special mention.  He's the only blogger, aside from Mike Brock, that I have a clear visual image of.  He seemed taller on TV than he does on the blogsphere.  Something about the camera adding, I guess.  The tireless Brian Neale to whom we all owe our gratitude.  Without Brian there would be no Assorted Links, no Assorted Links and Publius would have to blog about the weather or Brutus' cats.  Pushkin maybe unhappy about this, but the rest of us are better off for having Nealenews.  Keith, who is another engineer, at Minority of One, also deserves a mention. 

For some strange reason engineers like reading this blog.  I don't know why, I seem to have a kind of animal magnetism when it comes to engineers.  Very ironic given my pathetic high school math average.  You'd think a History major would attract other History majors, but no.  Most humanities majors, in my experience, are a fairly woolly headed and left leaning lot.  They also know precious little about the subjects they studied in university.  The assumption by many science majors that humanities majors are just slackers trying to get out of doing real work at a university level, is pretty much dead on.  There are a few pikers like me who'd be arguing over the importance of John Sandfield MacDonald compared to John Alexander MacDonald regardless of anything else.  We're sadly a minority.  I have it on good intelligence that Jay Jardine is a very nice guy.  I can't tell you how disappointed I am.  Anyone who reads that much Spooner should be angry.  It's a screwed up world where it's crime to travel 140 down the QEW.  Still, I'll keep voting Conservative.  You either start with what you've got and move forward or just walk away.  I'm not ready to walk away, yet. 

Laurent at Le Blog Polyscopique has done wonders for my knowledge of stats, French and Quebec social demographics.  Kate at Small Dead Animals needs no introduction.  She is the wonderfully vicious Queen Bee of the Canadian Blogsphere.  If she ever were to leave us life would be far less fun.  My thanks to her for just being her - even when she goes too far.  I haven't had any real contact with Monte Solberg but I was a big supporter of the old Reform Party way back in 1993.  I remember Monte's god awful mustache, Preston Manning's glasses and high pitched voice and Stephen Harper's hair, which hasn't changed a bit.  They were in every sense amateurs.  Manning, for part of the 1993-1994 session of Parliament, sat not in the front row of the Reform benches but in the middle as an egalitarian gesture.  He also refused to live in Stornoway, the Official Residence of the Leader of the Opposition and disdained using even basic parliamentary tactics to put forward his points.  The Central Canadian media had a field day with these "hicks" but I knew, I don't know why, that the rustic mannerism would fade and the same basic prairie populism and sincerity would remain.  After nine years of Brian Mulroney slick I appreciated real people fighting a good fight.  Call it faith, for lack of a better word, but I still believe that the CPC carries forward that basic common decency represented by people by Deb Gray, Chuck Strahl, who was very sadly diagnosed with lung cancer yesterday, and Monte.  They're a good bunch and they've had my vote for sometime, even here is darkest Liberal Toronto. 

I would also like to extend my thanks to those "crazy" Christians Paul Tuns and Russ Kuykendall.  I can't call them religious conservatives anymore so I'll just say they're both solid chaps and I wish them all the best - no matter how many times I get annoyed at Paul when he shows up on Michael Coren's show.  Some of the more recent regular visitors to Gods have been Candace over at Waking Up On Planet X, a title that always reminds me of Duck Dodgers in the Twenty-Fourth and a Half Century. Celestial Junk Blog also deserves a hat nod, if only for his recent series on Canadian aboriginals.

Before I wrap up I'd like to make a few general comments as to why I blog.  I know this post is rather long, but if you've been reading this blog on anything like a regular basis you know brevity is not one of Publius' strong points.  When my father arrived in this country two things impressed him almost beyond words.  One was the quality of the physical infrastructure of Toronto.  Everything was so new, built to such a high standard and designed with a care a foresight that are occasionally forgotten by those who today use our roads, public transit and large commercial buildings.  We take this for granted but three decades ago, not very long ago at all, a city like Toronto was an exception on the world stage.  The city and Canada were quite literally a beacon unto others.  The other thing which impressed my father, much more so than the physical qualities of Canada, was the sense of life of its people. 

Canadian courtesy is a cliche now, and was even then, but it was very true then.  There was also a basic honesty about the people he meet.  The feel of the people he left in Old Portugal was of cynicism and resignation.  Everyone is out to get you, the system will keep you in your place and all you can do is suffer, pray and wait to die.  Anyone who has listened to the Fado music of the Portuguese will know their sense of life, what they call saudade, a kind of longing melancholy.  Fado is incomprehensible to Canadians, or indeed North Americans as a whole.  It's simply too tragic and too fatalistic.  Life isn't like that to Canadians today, and certainly wasn't in the 1970s.  The sense of life of Canadians is that of a quiet and unpretentious optimism.  It is an optimism that has faded in the last thirty years.  With it has gone that honesty and openness that was so characteristic of us as a nation then.  Certainly there were bigots and cynics before Trudeaupia.  Where in the world wasn't it so?  Whenever I hear or read about how bigoted White Anglo Saxon Protestants were in the past I always shake my head.  It misses entirely the point.  What other group of people has strived so hard to over come prejudice, indeed gone too far in the direction of tolerating behaviour from immigrants groups that threaten Canada's continued existence.  There are today in Lisbon large colonies of Punjabi and Central Asians.  I can assure you their reception and treatment is much less kind than that of Canadians toward the Portuguese thirty years ago.  There are many crimes in Canadian history, though all judgments of this kind are relative.  If Canada was wrong then, who was right?

The Trudeaupian Welfare State was established as part of a program to replace the traditional Anglo-French tensions that had characterized Canadian society since 1759.  Trudeau was not the first to see the dangers of this dualistic national personality, but most of his predecessors had taken it as a given, a problem to be managed.  The first Canadian leader to seek to overcome the Two Solitudes was John George Diefenbaker.  Dief was the first Prime Minister to be of neither British or French descent.  As an ethnic German he had been discriminated against during World War One and saw many of his Hungarian and Ukrainian friends interned during the war, an injustice far less well known than the internment of Japanese Canadians a generation later.  He grasped that what Canada needed was more individualism, that the tribalistic collectivism of the past was what was keeping Canada from becoming a truly great nation.  No anglophonies, no francophonies, Canadians first, last and always.  He was the only Prime Minister, aside from Laurier and Mackenzie, to regularly invoke individual rights as the corner stone of his policies. 

Dief, however, was an unphilosophical populist.  He had his heart in the right place but his ideas rarely reached any level of sophistication.  His lack of experience running anything larger than a small law office made his time as Prime Minister something close to a disaster.  Dief bungled so many things, the Bomarc missile, the SRC and Radio Canada strike, the Coyne Affair (involving Andrew's dad) and even the day to day management of the Public Service, that his basic message became obscure.  Somehow power just slipped into the hands of the Liberal mandarins and Pearson became PM in 1963.  A dithering and weak leader Pearson survived five years as first minister largely because of his sincerity and modest popularity.  Under his bland rule the under workings of Trudeaupia were established, most notably CPP and Medicare.  Canada, a growing consensus in government circles began to believe, needed to be kept together by an ever expanding federal government.  We would be bound together in statist chains.  The ethnic divide of French and English would not be conquered by an appeal to Canadians as individuals.  Individualism, after all, was the message of the past.  The bien pensants decided to fight collectivism with collectivism.  Two cultures could destroy Canada, but two hundred?  Being English or French would matter less because both groups would become minorities in their own country.  Tolerance would be both a necessity and an ideal.  The problem of course is that collectivism is still collectivism.  Two hundred cultures may not provoke a two way civil war, instead they may replicate the Balkans on a wider scale. 

The establishment of Trudeaupia was made possible by two basic forces of history, ideas and emotions.  The intellectual spirit of the age was toward greater government intervention, a belief that the problems of society could be re-engineered in ways not entirely dissimilar to those of the natural sciences.  At an emotional level the Trudeaupian state was an expression, however misguided, of the generosity of the Canadian people.  Why should some starve in the second richest nation on earth?  Why should there be hatred of others?  Was not brotherhood a noble ideal to be aspired to?  It's Christian origins being kept obscure, of course, religion being a divisive force its exclusion was seen as necessary for the new Canada to thrive.  Religion also provided an alternative to the state.  If you can't co-opted them, the separation of church and state now an unquestioned principle of free societies, just supplant them.  What few expected was that the Canadian character would be changed by the welfare state and multiculturalism. 

That basic energy and compassion that was so startling to those from other countries, even Britain, was drawn from a sense of economic independence.  When men no longer need, or even can, fend for themselves they lose far more of their self esteem than anything their parents might have done to them as children.  A confident optimism is not a character trait of a dependent, economically or psychologically.  Compassion also rested on independence.  In the Old Canada you had to choose to help some else.  Making it a duty, via the state, removed the element of free will.  In this I agree with Catholic teachings, though for very different reasons, free will is the essence of humanity.  When force is used against us, however "noble" the goal, part of our humanity is threatened.  Given enough time it can be destroyed.  The most generous societies have always been the most free.  This is not only because free societies are richer, it is also because they are more benevolent. 

When another human being is an unchosen obligation, a millstone round the neck, the natural tendency is toward resentment.  When we choose to help another person we are affirming our own personal values and our own sense of self.  Charity can, and should, be selfish, though not in the common understanding of selfishness.  The end result of free choice is benevolence toward our fellow man.  The end result of force is resentment and rebellion.  The sometimes nasty anger that underpinned Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution, which was noticed and promptly distorted by outlets like the Red Star, was the end result of thirty years of the increasing application of force (the state) in private affairs.  A large group of "angry white men," who happen to pay the bulk of the taxes in this country, were fed up with being treated like blank cheques.  They did not so much object to helping others, nor were they quite so angry at the extent of what was being taken from them, they were angry at being taken for granted and used.  Atlas groaned in 1995.  Sadly he did little else. 

The basic reason I blog, however arrogant this will sound to some, is not only that I want the Old Canada back, I want to continue where it left off.  I don't want to reverse the social progress in race and gender relations over the last forty years, which would have come with or without Trudeaupia.  I want that old energy and old benevolence that made Canada a beacon undo others.  I want to go back to 1967 and extrapolate that line into the future.  Not going back to the greatest that we were, but to the greatest we are destined to become.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings