Assorted Links: April 5, 2008

Remembering WFB

On the occasion of his memorial service this Friday.

The Magnanimous Man

He knew that as an interpreter of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gettysburg Address, I was concerned with subjects far more consequential than any treaty with the Soviet Union. At bottom, the disagreements concerning the American political tradition were disagreements concerning the nature of the human soul. And it did not take any argument to convince Bill Buckley that, when you came to the human soul, you did not fool around. Bill never forgot that my first book was on Aristotle and Aquinas.

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One final note. In 1974 my younger son — the same who had driven Bill from Riverside to Claremont — graduated from Yale. To see him through, we had scraped the bottom of the family barrel until there was no bottom to the barrel. We simply had no money to go to the graduation. How Bill found out about this, I have no idea. But his check for one thousand dollars arrived, with instructions to go to the graduation, and later to stop at his New York home for dinner! I cannot begin to express how moving the experience was to attend my son’s graduation from Yale, thirty five years after my own.

All At Sea

In those non-refrigerated, pre-microwave days, a lot of our food came in tins. These were stored below the floorboards in the ship’s bilges. The bilges invariably filled with oily seawater, causing the labels to decompose. As a result, we never knew what, exactly, we’d be having for dinner on any given night. If we were lucky, Dinty Moore beef stew. If not, we might well dine exclusively on Harvard beets and creamed corn. Some tins contained crêpes suzette. My father, not a cook himself, loved to douse them in copious amounts of Grand Marnier. At the climactic moment, he would drop a match into the skillet, causing a Hiroshima of flame to lick the cabin top. Again, my mother’s voice was heard: “Bill, why are you trying to set fire to the boat?”

Some afternoons, my father might say, “Shall we have lobster tonight?” He’d steer for the nearest lobster pot. As a child, I found this thrilling beyond belief, for it was established lore that a Maine lobsterman could legally shoot you on sight if he caught you plundering his livelihood.

After laborious heavings on the line, the trap would come up, suddenly alive with frantic, jackknifing lobsters. The trick was getting them out without having them clamp down on your fingers. My father would then put two bottles of whisky into the lobster pot as payment. I always wondered what the lobsterman thought upon bringing up his trap to find two fifths of Johnnie Walker Black inside. Did he scratch his head and say, “Reckon Mr. Buckley’s back”?

A Founding Father

At about age 13 I became mesmerized by Bill Buckley’s column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. His intellect and good humor literally created my desire to learn. But in my first year of college I flunked Speech 101 (I refused to outline). At age 20 I told my dad the worst news he could hear: “I’m quitting school.” Having come through the Great Depression, he believed that without a college degree I had no chance of getting a good job.

“I want to be like Bill Buckley,” I told him. “I want to be able to sit around and write and think.”

My dad, perhaps the most brilliant man I ever knew intimately, gave me a two-hour lecture on how hard and time-consuming achievement is: “When you see someone’s output but don’t see what goes into it, you can make the mistake of assuming it comes easy to them, especially those who are great at what they do. They make it look so easy you think you can do it, too.” My dad was right about that.

Disturber of the Peace

It is one of Jane Austen’s universally acknowledged truths that Bill Buckley developed a fusionist conservatism by uniting libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks around the common standard of anti-Communism. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. And it is certainly not how people saw it at the time. The new conservatism of WFB, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, et al. was thought by many to be an exotic European import, Burkean in a Lockean liberal society, and romantically opposed to the kind of historical change that Americans naturally embraced.

In 1957 Samuel Huntington, provoked by this new conservatism, wrote an important article in the American Political Science Review in which he defined conservatism as the system of ideas that was employed to defend established institutions whenever they came under fundamental attack. “When the foundations of society are threatened,” he wrote, “the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones.”

[...]

Bill knew that if conservatism had any future, it had to be a hard political movement as well as a soft intellectual one. It also had to have appeal to people other than NR subscribers. And it had to succeed — or at least be protected from failure. So WFB launched a serious bid for the New York mayoralty disguised as a lark.

The New Criterion on WFB

As Scruton stresses, this removal is not an abrogation but rather a triumph of politics, a triumph threatened wherever the preferments of individual freedom are besieged by collectivist zeal. Bill Buckley touched and improved countless lives. He created and nurtured a score of important institutions. He was part of the tonic that revitalized the appetite for ordered liberty and helped defeat one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history. It speaks less to the irony than to the amplitude of Bill’s vision that he undertook these initiatives not to further a political agenda but to rescue us from one.

The Cell Phone at 35

One of the things that Bill Buckley made possible was the cell phone.  You jest, surely Publius.  He was a history major, not an engineer.  Well, dear friends, you engineers need us history majors from time to time.  It's the history majors that remind people that:

...there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending.

It took the genius of a group of engineers to create the cell phone and the intellectual genius of men like WFB to maintain a political environment allowing such men to operate. 

On his way to a New York City news conference on April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper just couldn't help himself.

The then-project manager at Motorola was proud of what his crew of engineers and developers had managed to create and felt the need to brag about the accomplishment.

At the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue, Cooper took the wrapping off the first cellular phone ever created and placed the world's first cellphone call to his rival, Joel Engel, then head of Bell Labs research department (which has since been acquired by AT&T Inc.) to inform Engel of the upcoming announcement.

He then walked into the news conference to tell the rest of the world.

While he had dreams of seeing a cellphone in everyone's hands, even Cooper could not have imagined the impact the creation would have on society.

The C-Word

A Conservative cabinet minister, in a moment of eccentricity or weakness, we hope, has uttered the most dreaded word in the vocabulary of English speaking Canadians:  Constitution.

Meech Lake, "the night of the long knives," Charlottetown, so-called unilateral patriation of the constitution, the 1995 referendum squeaker - have the Conservatives forgotten all the searing, gut-wrenching anxiety and turmoil of those events in Canadian history? Or, worse, are they cavalier enough to resurrect, for partisan electoral purposes, all the risks that inevitably pop up whenever the phrase "Quebec and the constitution" rears its ugly head?

Neither, we hope, and so we want to believe that there's really nothing to a recent story, in another newspaper, saying that Stephen Harper's government has been suggesting to the Quebec government that it might soon be time to re-open the constitution to address Quebec's "historical demands." The necessary pre-condition, reportedly, would be a Conservative majority government.

One reason not to take this business to seriously is that it came not from Harper but from Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who said it would be nice to give a broader context to the notion of Quebecers as "a nation" - to, in Blackburn's phrase, "put some meat on it."

Having dispensed with monarchy the Americans, needful as all men are for sacred things, deified their constitution and the men who made it.  We agree, as we often do, with Gladstone's opinion that the efforts of Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson were "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."  To have raised the Fathers of the American Republic to such a great height is well deserved, but the elevation was product not only of their genius but of the desire to build a national myth.  Every nations needs a founding and founders, luckily the Romulus and Remus of America were real and great.  Canada has always lacked so powerful a founding myth, or more accurately we have developed several myths only to see them compete and undercut each other. 

Beyond and beneath the convoluted legal rhetoric over the division of powers, provincial and languages rights lies the essence of our constitutional debates, the symbolic nature of a document that failed to serve its spiritual purpose.  The British North America Act - renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act (1867) under the Jacobin conceits of late Trudeaupia - was indeed a curiously flawed document in how it poorly defined the respective powers of the two senior levels of government, leading to interminable jurisdictional turf wars.  This was, historically, an accident.  The BNA Act was essentially written by two men in a hotel room, one of whom had too much to drink.  The identity of the drinker is well enough known, Sir John A Macdonald, the brilliant, if too pragmatic, impresario of Confederation and our first PM. 

The second gentleman is less well known, the inscrutable Oliver Mowatt.  One of Canada's leading lawyers at the time Mowatt was also the right-hand man of George Brown,  head of the Liberal Party and the dominant political force in what became the province of Ontario.  As Brown was a journalist by occupation and had little legal background, it was Mowatt who represented the Liberal Party as legal expert.  Macdonald's Quebec allies, Alexander Galt and D'Arcy McGee were not lawyers and left the legal work to John A.  George Etienne Cartier, the then French Canadian chef, was more a gentleman than a jurist and preferred to deal with patronage issues.  This left Macdonald and Mowatt as the legal fathers of the document.  Both men despised each other, the latter having at one point been apprenticed to the former, and were working at cross purposes. 

Mowatt believed in a decentralized federation, Macdonald wanted a constitutional arrangement as close as politically possibly to a British style unitary state.  Macdonald won the initial battle, drafting about half of the BNA's articles, but Mowatt won the war.  After leaving federal politics Mowatt served as Premier of Ontario for 23 years, spending most of that time waging a legal battle to expand provincial rights.  This legal to and fro laid out the precedents by which Canada has largely been governed since.  The wrangling of the 1970s and 1980s had less to do with real disagreements over jurisdictional authority, than awkward and halting attempts to appease the wounded pride of the French Canadians, without rendering Canada a mere geographic expression.  Faced with the unedifying prospect of once again singing, in the style of the nuns in The Sound of Music, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Quebec?" the Prime Minister has backed away from constitution talk.  Perhaps he dimly remembers the last Conservative Prime Minister who did so, and the young policy wonk from Calgary, by way of Leaside, who helped overthrow him.

The Metis Mullah Speaks

We here at the Gods listen:

Qasira Shaheen, Robina Butt and Shugufta Iftikhar have recently filed Human Rights complaints against Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy and so far their efforts have resulted in either physical assaults or a little firebomb party at their place. Syed Soharwardy has brushed off the allegations of abuse by proclaiming that "We are Sufi, they are Wahabbi" and so therefore one must assume that he feels they are less then he is because of their beliefs even though he continues to claim in public statements that he represents all Muslims. The media should take note of that before they run up to kiss his pointy shoes and get his views on the next honour killing and quote him as the founder of Muslims against Terror and make him representative of the entire community. Syed Soharwardy has never been one to  complain about being called a radical which is just fine in my books as I can poke at him all I want as long as I stick to the truth and I think he has given up on me. I am my own Imam Syed and there is a reason for it.

Liberal party cheerleader Warren Kinsella stated in his book titled the Web of Hate that "The ARA [Anti-Racist Action]  is a collection of Trotskyites, Marxists and other left-wingers who insist that force should be used to deal with fascist groups." but in recent events denounces only one side even though both groups are equally despicable. The leader of this past weekends anti-fascist and 'peace' party Jason Devine even used talking points from the pro-violence plagued ARA Toronto faction while talking to the media. I have pointed this out in previous articles and my reward has been to be called a fascist by said person and have been accused of being a member of the neo-Nazi website community Stormfront.

Having met both Darcy and Warren Kinsella, let me say that my money is on Darcy if this gets ugly....

Sir Ralph

"For God's sake, speak English."

France's ambassador to Canada was in Calgary on Wednesday night to present Klein with the Legion of Honour for his role in nurturing ties between Alberta and France, which invests in the province's oilsands.

"The Ralph Klein years have been happy years for the relation and partnership between Alberta and France," said Ambassador Daniel Jouanneau in naming Klein a chevalier, or knight, of the order.

Created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, the award is France's highest honour. Klein joins the ranks of Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and comedian Jerry Lewis.

"C'est un grand plaisir. Merci, merci. Thank you. Enough of my Diefenbaker French," Klein said to laughter from the audience.

The former premier told CBC News the award recognizes his commitment to French culture in Alberta: "The reason is I enjoy the French community. My uncle was French …. He had a son and a daughter.

"Their names were Romeo and Juliet — totally French — and they spoke French all the time, and I was so mad at them for speaking French that I used to say, 'For God's sake, speak English.'

"And of course, they would continue to speak French just to annoy me," he chuckled

"This is like receiving the Order of Canada — only from a foreign country," said Klein.

Whether many Albertans will admit it publicly, they miss this guy.

Audits Are Racism

Auditors are bigots.

Canada's largest native organization is accusing Conservatives of spreading falsehoods about aboriginals as Ottawa steps up audits of reserves and vows to publicize its findings.

The Assembly of First Nations issued a terse statement yesterday criticizing a new Indian Affairs policy that begins July 1. Under the policy, all transfers to band and tribal councils will contain a clause allowing the department to audit the money later to determine whether it was well spent.

According to the AFN, the announcement from Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl "plays on the false impression that has been spread about first nations and accountability. Those who believe the myths might like the idea that 'something is finally being done,' but they would be wrong again."

In the spirit of the Liberals' controversial First Nations Governance Act, which was abandoned in 2003 after fierce AFN opposition, the audits will also report on whether bands have appropriate management, financial and administrative controls.

There are times when I wonder, honestly, whether the most humane thing is just to scrap the Indian Act and stop all funding to aboriginal reserves immediately.  However wrenching the cutting off of funds, it would end the welfare traps that these reserves have become.  Is cold hard indifference really worse than a compassion so corrupt it resists the merest scrutiny?

The Mob Killed Sonny Bono?

It did seem just a little too convenient that an experienced skier would fly right into a tree, didn't it?

Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.

"It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There's zero evidence in this autopsy report... to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.

"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins," Mr Gunderson told the paper.

The former agent, who has been researching Bono's accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes - so they had him killed on the slopes.

Bono, an experienced skiier, was ambushed on the slopes by hired hitmen, who beat him to death and then staged a tree collision, Mr Gunderson said.

From hippiedom to hitmen, the sad trajectory of a minor Sixties icon.

The Empire Buys Back

Tata to buy Jaguar and Land Rover.

India's Tata Group, in fact, wants to take off Ford's hands not only Jaguar but Land Rover, the British matron of sport utility vehicles in which Queen Elizabeth II has been known to flog through the gardens behind Windsor Castle.

The importance of one of India's muscular conglomerates riding to the rescue of British legends -- and paying as much as $2 billion to do so -- isn't lost on either side of the ex-empire.

The Tata deal, which could be sealed next week, "has made us all proud," said Debashis Chakraborty, a government official in Kolkata, the onetime capital of the British Raj.

Neither Indians nor Brits have failed to appreciate the historical ironies involved. In Britain, though, the reaction has been more mixed, with optimism that Tata Chief Executive Ratan Tata will be able to help restore the brand to its former glory spiked with faint regret that it took an Indian giant to do the job.

"I think Sir William Lyons would be turning in his grave, quite frankly," said Barrie Birkin, a longtime Jaguar owner from Matlock, in the Derbyshire Dales, referring to the legendary co-founder of the company who presided over the marque's preeminence in world motor sports and luxury car design through 1972.

Given the rapid decay of British cultural values in Britain, the Indian elite is probably more British - in the best sense of the word - than most Britishers.  This century will be dominated by India and China.  We know that the Chinese don't know cricket.  From this we should understand that one of the central goals of Anglo-American foreign policy over the next thirty years is to prepare and support India to assume its role as the dominant English speaking power of this century.  There is always the possibility that the neo-Madarins governing China will lose power or reform themselves into liberal democrats.  Just as likely is that a powerful strain of nationalism will re-assert itself, transforming the PRC into a modern version of Wilhelmine Germany.  A strong India is not merely a good thing, but a vital thing for the survival of basic western values.

"Mugabe: I will quit, as long as I do not face prosecution"

Like Che cowering before the Bolivian Army in 1967.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

The opposition said the MDC leadership is in direct talks with the highest levels of the army but it is treating the approach with caution because they are distrustful of the individuals involved and calling for direct contact with the president, fearing delaying tactics.

Those fears were reinforced last night when at one point Zimbabwe's election commission abruptly halted the release of official results from the Saturday's election for "logistical reasons" and the police raided opposition offices.

I don't recall Ian Smith asking for immunity.  Then again he was a gentleman and not a megalomaniac thug.

He Still Annoys Us

A mash note to Pierre Trudeau.

It takes incredible charm to win the trust of a younger generation, and far more charm to marry a member of that younger generation - Trudeau, 52, wed Margaret Sinclair, 22, in 1971 - without being classified as a pervert. To my parents and others, that marriage only confirmed their belief that Trudeau was one of their own.

But if that generational feat was impressive, what about Trudeau's resonance with my generation, we who spent his entire political career playing in sandboxes and eating snow and ignoring Parliament unless forced to tour its buildings?

We begin slowly, lest example breed.  It does not take incredible charm to win the trust of the young, as many perverts can attest.  It requires only accepting their young conceits as a new form of wisdom.  Youth desperately seeks adult validation, despite outwardly rejecting it.  Any old man who tells them that they are right, especially when that old man is the Prime Minister of Canada, is bound to become their hero. 

The theory behind Trudeau's bilingualism policy was brilliantly simple: Canadians would surely understand each other culturally if they literally understood what the other was saying. If everyone knew everyone else's language, the very idea of an "other" would no longer exist.

Which has turned out brilliantly of course, two referendums and forty years later we're just as divided.  A generation of gushing anglos sent their children off to La Belle Province to learn French and Canadien customs, only to be ignored by the natives.  Benign contempt was something the Francophones could appreciate, listening to groveling mea culpas for the sins of Wolfe was simply annoying. 

This same politics of inclusion is central to some of Trudeau's other major legacies. As justice minister, he persuaded government officials to stop hanging out in Canadians' bedrooms, clearing the Criminal Code of laws against homosexuality and legalizing abortion in some cases. In his final years as prime minister, he established the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As a kid, and one prodigiously talented at spending time in my own world, I was clueless about the significance of these moves, and probably about the very existence of them. But later on, I marveled at Trudeau's pursuit of social change.

[...]

Even Trudeau's condescending and controversial gestures have an endearing, and enduring, quality. Chumming around with Fidel Castro, pirouetting behind the queen and sliding down banisters in Buckingham Palace, throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin in Moscow, wearing sandals in the House of Commons.

"Oh, Trudeau, you scoundrel," my parents and their friends seemed to say as they chortled and reminisced, "we can't stay mad at you."

Except of course for the people of Alberta, who revile his memory, or the millions of Canadians then harmed by his disastrous economic policies, or the millions now who worry about the social impact of official multiculturalism.

The strange result of Trudeau's enduring appeal is that I can't stay mad, either, even though I was too young to get properly mad in the first place. His charisma is such that I feel like I was there - even though, at the time, I wasn't paying attention.

This is how the Old Canada, for all its vices - mostly dull ones too - was lost, by gushing perpetual adolescents who saw a kindred spirit.

The Last Joke

Speaking of Seventies' hits that out stayed their welcome.

The Royal Canadian Air Farce, one of Canada's longest-running comedy troupes, will be grounded after next season, CBC announced on Tuesday.

The venerable weekly sketch comedy TV show, known for its topical mix of political and social satire, will produce nine regular episodes in the fall before ending with its traditional New Year's Eve gala special.

"It's just time," original cast member and producer Don Ferguson told CBC News on Tuesday afternoon.

"We've done pretty much everything we wanted to do. The ratings are still good. I want to be in charge of my own exit."

Ferguson also said he didn't consider what day had been chosen for the announcement.

"I didn't even realize it was April 1 that we were doing this, that it was going to come out…. It's not a joke, but it's a great date for us to announce it. April Fool's Day, why not?"

The secret to the show's long run, he added, was keeping the audience the main priority.

"We've only ever worried about [each] week's show and how the audience is going to respond to it," Ferguson said.

"If we can make real, living, breathing Canadians laugh about what's going on in Canada and the world and life in general, it's a great gig."

Go back to any episode of Air Farce from the 1970s or early 1980s, and replace the word "Trudeau" with "Harper" and you'll have the script for last week's show.