Leave It To Beaver

      Well, I'm back.    My cousin is now married, and my family had what seemed to be a decent time of it all.   I won't write much about the trip here, save for these brief observations: a) that American cigarettes remain abominations of good taste; b) that American beer remains an abomination of good taste, but thankfully Canadian beer remains relatively easy to find; and c) that American patriotism, as understandable as it is given the current international circumstances, remains an abomination of good taste.   On this last point: Canadians almost as a rule are muted in their patriotism (save for hockey games and beer-chugging contests), so the super-abundance of American flags, most still at half-mast after the Reagan funeral, is a bit disquieting; it's election day here in Canada, with only a few days until July 1st and Canada Day itself, and you'd be hard-pressed to find as many flags hanging from individual houses on those days as you would on any given day in the States.   It's hard to tell after a while how much those flags are really patriotic qua patriotic symbols-- and how much they're emblems of anger, injury, lamentation, resiliency, and even xenophobia, among other things.

[+/-] Read on...

      I should qualify this slightly.    I was, after all, in New York and Pennsylvania, two states that felt most intimately the pain of the attacks on September 11th, and it'd be churlish to expect people in those states to be anything but what they currently are.   And as much as I enjoyed certain aspects of the States, it sure felt good to get back across the border, even if our cigarettes and alcohol are at exorbitantly-inflated prices.   It was like a return to modesty.   With election day nearing in Canada, it was pause-inducing to think this weekend about the number of times over the past month-and-change that all of our political leaders were within direct physical contact with voters, whether for good or for ill.   I don't think it's seriously crossed anyone's mind here that a candidate could be a target of an assassination or that there might actually be a terrorist gesture, as in Spain or even in Bali (against the Australians), to try to manufacture a political result.   Instead, we're able to move about, griping about our relatively trifling concerns, with some kind of naïveté to the dangers of international terror.   (Canada had its innocence challenged in the 1970s with the FLQ crisis, but that was, for all intents and purposes, an internal matter, and that innocence has been moreorless restored.)   Our own Prime Minister, for however long, could still be seen in scrums of reporters and protesters, potentially wide-open targets for anybody who wanted to make Canada a victim.   But thankfully, nobody seems to want to do so; we in Canada are lucky enough, at least for now, to matter not much to anybody but ourselves, so we can keep running by the older and more simple ways of doing things.   The key words in that last sentence may be "at least for now," but it's worth observing what we have right now in case the day comes when we do lose that sense of security and naïveté.   When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR famously said that the enemy had awoken "a sleeping tiger," a metaphor reinvoked regularly since September 11th 2001. Well, we can count our blessings, those of you that are my countrypeople: no one in the world seems to be worrying about waking the sleeping beaver (an animal, by the way, that woke up on its own in 1939 and in 1914).   With the election almost over, we're one of the few countries in the Western world that hasn't had as one of its central electoral issues domestic or international security.   Be thankful for that today, my fellow Canadians, as we go to the polls and cast our votes based on matters most of the rest of the world would consider wonderfully, even blissfully, quaint.

      With all that said, I'd encourage all of my fellow Canucks to read this article from the comedian Bob Robertson in today's Globe and Mail. Aside from some typical (and still amusing) observations about the process, it contains this reminder of what we should be thinking about today-- and not about silly partisanship and working our vitriol:

The world doesn't care that most of the voters of Canada will decide who to vote for based on the following major areas: (a) not fond of that little moustache (b) has a sinister smile (c) stutters too much, or (d) looks better with the cheese-factory shower cap.

No, the world doesn't care about our little federal election. In fact, there is only one time that the world cares about Canada. It is when some poor, desperate human beings become driven enough to pack up their family and look for a land where they will be safe from torture, oppression and racism and where they can prosper at whatever they do, be taken care of if they're sick, and educate their children to their full potential. When that day comes, then they care about Canada.

Be careful how you vote. You wouldn't want to let them down.

Yes, there's an idealism in Robertson's words but it's a healthy idealism, one we're better to acknowledge and to address rather than to ignore.   Canada, at least for now, has the luxury of being able to worry more about what it wants to be rather than what it has to be.    Let's not only remember that, let's take advantage of the opportunity that the situation affords.   

      For me, I know how I'll be voting today, but I want to explain a few of the considerations that are going into-- or have gone into-- the making of that decision, imperfect as the end-result may be.   Like many voters, I'm voting based on a gestalt, on an assessment of the picture entire.   I'm not voting on policies and platforms per se.   We all know that parties and politicians talk about policies rather like teenagers talk about sex-- mostly in theory, mostly in anticipation, but with very little sense of actuability.   Think back on Mulroney's once-fervent dismissal of Free Trade and then his implementation of it in the 80s; think back on the Liberal Red Book's promises, and the very few items of it that were enacted.   No, situations create policy, as if to prove the saw that necessity is the mother of invention.   I judge, then, based on the ways in which I see politicians deal with issues as they arise, how they adapt, how they address matters and how they address us in the process; I judge based on what might be called issues of social character.  Call me old-fashioned, but a government has to have a kind of moral authority, a right to lead, and it has to represent, at least in part, a kind of native national intelligence, or knowing what issues are finally most important and which ones are less so.   Such decision-making is also intensely-particular: the garrison mentality of which Northrop Frye wrote so long ago has not totally vanished.   In the end, one weighs and balances and judges.

      My riding was used by one party to enact a political assassination, even if the target was a person I never particularly respected.   This demonstrated callousness by that particular party, and it demonstrated, too, an insidiousness of process.   I won't vote for a party that is led by a cadre of pseudo-Maoists, let alone a bunch of usurpers.   This isn't a matter of loyalty to the previous leader.   The question is much more crucial: how can we trust a party that doesn't care about its own stability and rules-of-order? Or, put more bluntly, if they'll treat the former king this way, how will they treat the rest of us?    The protestations of caring about "Canadian ideals" ring very, very hollow indeed when the Prime Minister has played Bolingbroke to his predecessor's Richard II and thus displayed a lack of concern with matters of propiety, civility, and inclusion.   Like Bolingbroke (and Macbeth), Mr Martin has political blood on his hands, and he demonstrated before he called the election a ruthless amorality that I will not endorse.   He demonstrated all-too-well why he cannot be trusted with governance: for him, and for his followers, the end -- his political rise-- justified the means taken to achieve that end, and this speaks very badly of how he will lead: with indifference, with cynicism, with utterly-selfish regard.   Add to this a number of other factors (a recent record of incompetence, flip-flopping of extraordinary dimensions, a cynical indifference to political sensitivities, and so forth), and it's clear to me: I cannot, will not, vote Liberal.   I will not reward usurpers and purgers, for as much as they preach about visions of a nation, those visions are tissue-paper thin.   Such people are the first ones to issue the public the Judas Kiss.   I've seen it in spades in my riding.   So, that's that: I won't vote Liberal, I won't endorse Martin, and I sure as hell won't vote for Tony Valeri whose own survival as a candidate in this riding reeks of insidious intent.   The Liberal red in this riding is blood red, and as far as I'm concerned that's the antithesis of what I want Canada to be and what I deem Canada to be about.

      I won't vote Conservative, either.   As much as Mr Harper has tried to play nice to the camera (and move his party ostensibly toward the centre), there's a shiftiness about his political machinations that I find disturbing.   His is a party without a substantial platform, a party born of something like a corporate takeover.   The Conservative party right now isn't the party it once was: it's a makeshift assembly, and there are a number of things about this assembly to give any center-of-the-road thinker the shivers.   The desperation for victory turned this party toward relative non-issues (child pornography, same-sex marriage, etc.) that were demagogic and evasive rather than genuine and substantial.   This is, in part, because the party hasn't figured out (and so doesn't know) what it's really about-- let alone what it would do.   I seriously doubt the Conservatives would be the Great Canadian Satan that the Liberals would have us believe.   I do, however, doubt the wisdom of their members. I do pause at the fringes of the party so frequently seething like single-minded zealots.   I do worry about electing a party that scoffs so ignorantly at environmental concerns (like the Kyoto Accord) and that would align us more closely with the highly-questionable Bushies downstairs.   And, perhaps most importantly, I distrust a party that so selectively revises its own personal history for the sake of political presentability.   Harper's own words on Canadian involvement in the Iraq War have been the epitome of convenient mutability.   Harper's done a good job of selling himself as the moderate, but it's a sell: it's revisionist history, and one has to wonder what sort of revisionist historicism would come into play if these people are given the keys to government.   If Mr Martin is the guilt-tainted usurper, Mr Harper is the Eddie Haskell of the neighbourhood-- or, rather, he's the seemingly nice guy who wants to borrow your house for the weekend, but one can only imagine what his less-than-trustworthy friends will do with the place.   No, not Conservative.

      That leaves Smilin' Jack and the NDP, really, so I guess that's where I'm going this time around.   Why? Because they're the underdogs.    Because at least the NDP, blunders and all, hasn't seemed to betray its own convictions for the sake of seeming electable.   Because I like the idea of having a stronger sense of relatively-conscientious opposition in a mercifully-divided Parliament.   Because I think the other parties much worse options, at least right now.   Because, in my riding, Tony Valeri needs to be taken out to the woodshed and paddled within an inch of his political life.   Because the NDP, however naïvely, has behaved more inclusively than exclusively in this campaign, and they don't reek so thoroughly of the stench of political saliva.   And they've actually talked about idealisms, about lowering tuition rates, about environmental matters and so forth.   Sure, they can talk about such matters so freely because they know they won't get elected.   It is, however, about expressing what I want Canada to be and what I want it to be about, and that's, finally, a country that at least aspires toward self-betterment.   I don't want people to think I'm buying the Layton spin that he's the only one who's been positive while the others have gone negative.   That's simply not true.   But on scale, on the gradations of the Great Canadian Political Butterslide, they're the least offensive to me, and the most positive, at least this time around.   And, as much as it doesn't matter as a point of personal action, I'd rather have a national party like the NDP having the king-making power rather than the Bloc Québécois.   So, it's not a ringing endorsement, and it's not an affirmation of belief in NDP policy as a whole, but it is my endorsement, such as it is.   Alas, sometimes one is left with only limited options, none of them entirely satisfactory.

      But that's where I am today, and that's how I see things. I should add one more thing here: I'm also voting NDP partially out of spite for Mr Martin, but not in the way you're likely thinking. In recent weeks, the PM has tried to cajole people into accepting an either/or decision by saying, outright, that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Conservatives (and that a vote for the Bloc is one for the Tories, too).   This is the rhetoric of fear-mongering, and, sorry, but I refuse to accept such manipulative, cynical (and cynicizing) logic.   So, Mr Martin, my vote for the NDP is my own very minor way of telling you that I don't appreciate this sort of "you're with me or against me" posturing, and that this is not what I want Canada to be about.   You had the chance to appeal to our higher capacities and you didn't.   So consider my vote a polite way of saying, "I will not serve."

      To all our leaders: next time, give us a real choice.   Have the courage to lead rather than to pander.   We're a country-- when all is said and done-- more blessed than cursed, more fortunate than not.   So let's exercise our luxury to work on what we can improve and on what we represent.   A little well-tempered (and generally quiet) idealism is a good thing.   Goodness only knows how long it will be until we'll have to be sleeping with one eye open.