The Last Roses of Summer. . . .

Well it wasn't much of a summer. Besides there being a lot of rain (the wettest July on record here in Ottawa), personal stuff prevented me from really enjoying the summer and I only got to take Cairo to the beach twice and that was in June. 

But the weather has been quite fine lately and my rosebush continues to produce beautiful roses. The days are dwindling now but I certainly enjoy the sight of nearly perfect red roses just outside my door. Cairo is back at school and I can feel a very slight chill in the evening air. 

Have a good fall everyone

Great New Books This Week. . . .

This week I received several great book purchases through our beloved Canada Post. The first, which I got for my dad, was a remarkable copy of the First Series of the Comic Almanac by George Cruickshank. Cruickshank was one of the most important illustrators of the 19^th century and helped to originate the style of comic illustration that we came to associate with Punch magazine. He was the first important illustrator of the work of Charles Dickens and the success of Dickens’ comic novels owe a great deal to the wonderful pictures of Cruickshank. The nice thing about the book is that it had been very professionally restored and rebound using the original illustrated boards over a new buckram binding. Some people don’t like such restoration jobs even when they are done this well because they violate the original state of the book. This is, I suppose, the same as those car collectors who insist on restoring a car only to its original condition. I understand this sentiment and with some books I prefer the original condition too. However, in the case of a book like this where I really want to look through its pages extensively, it is nice to have this kind of restoration because I can enjoy the book without worrying about it falling apart in my hands. Furthermore the book is very thick, which always puts a great strain on the binding.

Another great purchase I received this week was a twelve-volume edition of the Collected Works of Charles Lamb, my great literary hero. This set was published early in the 20^th century by the Merrymount Press and is #780 of only 1000 printed. It is in remarkably good and readable condition, particularly considering that it was once in the collection of Pepperdine University. There are faint indications of original library labels on the spine but they are light and don’t detract significantly from the attractiveness of the set. I already had most of Lamb’s works in other books but this set includes a number of miscellaneous writings that I did not have as well as a biography of the writer by the editor of the set Alfred Ainger. I will spend many happy hours reading this set and enjoying the subtle and comforting wit of Charles Lamb. The only problem now is that my 20 year old will bothering me to give her my other Charles Lamb books.

The third purchase I received this week was a set of the Historical and Critical essays of Macaulay. I have been looking for a good set of Macaulay’s essays for a while but they tend to be very expensive. I got this set of six books from Dave Shoots, bookseller in Saint John New Brunswick. It is from a larger set of the collected works of the writings of Macaulay but the set of six is the complete set of the essays. Macaulay was a good friend and admirer of Leigh Hunt and learned a great deal from him as an essay writer. My continuous work on Charles Lamb includes an effort to gain a thorough familiarity with the most important essayists among whose ranks Lamb has a hallowed place.

Happy reading.  

Conservative march to the past . . .

I am growing weary, as I suspect many people are, of the disgusting cold-war style rhetoric that this government constantly employs. It is as though Harper and his closest cronies are stuck in the 1950s and they think the world is being run by a bunch of ‘pinko, commie, left-wing, pornographers,’ and it is their mission to redeem the world from sliding into a great socialist abyss. John Baird has a cat named Thatcher, and Rona Ambrose is in love with Ayn Rand, a right-wing nut case who said that selfishness is a virtue and attracts college sophomores with her irrational, arbitrary thoughts on the beauties of self-interest dressed up as philosophy. You see, the reason that the Harper government seems as though it is stuck in the 1950 is that . . . well . . . it is! These blinkered, philistines are profoundly upset that the world has moved on from the days when homosexuality was illegal, people had no rights of habeas corpus, workers had no right to join trade unions, and universal primary education was considered a right rather than a privilege. As Harper’s secret speech demonstrated to anyone with ears and a brain, these people are chomping at the bit to march us back into the past when healthcare and education were only for those who could afford it, when workers had no rights and were chained to their machines, and corporations had no regulations to ensure that they act in a socially responsible manner.

Who opposed the abolition of slavery: Conservatives. Who opposed equal rights for all religions: Conservatives. Who opposed the legalization of trade unions and workplace safety regulations: Conservatives. Who opposed the vote for women: Conservatives. Who opposed universal education and healthcare: Conservatives. Who opposed non-discrimination laws for people of color and homosexuals: Conservatives.

While radicals have continually struggled to bring the human race to a state of justice and equality, Conservatives have continually strived to drag us back into the primordial ooze from whence we came. And the struggle continues. 

Harper: J. Edgar Hoover on crack. . .

The recent secret speech given by Stephen Harper is reminder of why this man is so sinister and so frightening. He says we wants to ‘teach us a lesson,’ and if he gets his vaunted majority I am sure he will. It will be a scary lesson about how quickly people in a supposed democracy can lose their rights and freedoms and how well a Conservative government can devastate a modern society and turn the clock back to the ‘good old days’ when children worked in factories. Harper’s suggestion that the judges in Canada constitute a radical left-wing conspiracy demonstrates what he really thinks of this country. Unfortunately, too many Canadians are profoundly ignorant of actually event and hold the same kind of antiquated, cold-war era notions.

If these are the kinds of things that Harper says in a semi-public meeting imagine the kinds of things he says in genuine privacy. Oh for one video tape of Harper speaking to John Baird and Pierre Poillievre behind closed doors as they engage in their homophobic, sexists, racist, right-wing conspiracy theories! Such a transcript would finally expose Harper for what he really is and end his political career once and for all. The funny thing is that people are so often excoriating left-wingers as being crazy, conspiracy-minded, whackos. Yet few people seem to mind that Canada’s Prime Minister is like J. Edgar Hoover on crack. So it goes. . . 

My political naivety . . .

I think that I suffer from a certain degree of political naivety. I grew up in the US amidst the Vietnam war and eve as a kid I had a sense of how people were appalled by what they saw as an unjust, neo-colonial escapade. Yet when the first gulf war began and I was involved in the anti-war protests, I was just monumentally shocked that the West was able to perpetrate another such all-out war less than 20 years after the war in Indo-China had ended. And then I was still shocked when the US was able to instigate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which were so obviously more blatant efforts by the West to control geo-politics through a brutal war effort.

In the past year I have done a great deal of research for my book which has involved reading about the French Revolution and the British reaction to the events in France. Such research demonstrates that the same types of ideological efforts at defending war and oppression have been going on for centuries. Yet I am still shocked that average people are largely uninformed and utter incapable of seeing through the lies of the rich and powerful who perpetrate wars in their own interests while average people do the fighting and dying.

But my naivety continues because I am totally shocked that any Canadians are willing to support a government that is not only incompetent but self-interesting, mean-spirited, and profoundly corrupt. It just shocks me and I can’t get past it. I continue to be amazed that people will let their biases allow them to stand up for the most shockingly atrocious actions as long as those actions are committed in the name of their ideology.

So it goes . . . 

Harper and the Election Law. . . .

Anyone who doesn’t think that the Prime Minister selfishly broke his own law by calling the election last year must be far too partisan to have any sense of reality. The law passed by the Conservatives was quite clear and he broke the law in a crass partisan effort to benefit from circumstance, the very thing that the law was supposed to circumvent. But this is just typical Harper attitude, he cares little for the law or even for respectable fair-play. Rather, he cares about power and how to get it. The truth of the matter is that the court should not only resolve that the election was illegal but that the results should be overturned and a new election held with Harper being disqualified from running or holding a seat. This is exactly what Canadians would demand if the same thing had happened in a foreign country and we should demand no less from our own laws and constitution! 

However, don’t look for the Court to recognize the serious breach of law that has occurred here. Few people within the establishment have the courage to call members of parliament to the same standards to which the rest of us are held. And they don’t want to be responsible for the messy clean-up that would have to take place when thousands of Canadians sue Harper and the Conservative party, holding them to financial account for what was an illegal election. And given that we usually can’t get our Courts to hold our own government officials to account, is it any wonder that governments in countries like Iran or Sudan can get away with almost anything?  

If I am wrong, by the way, about what the court will decide, I will happily eat crow. 

New Liberal Ads from a Left perspective. . .

I haven't really seen how other leftists are looking at the recent ads by Ignatieff and the Liberal party but I think the ads were a fairly good way to go for the Liberals. By keeping it fairly positive and trying to say that Canada needs a government that tries to build rather than tear down the Liberals are certainly creating a different image than the Conservatives have created in recent years. Even though I am not a big fan of Ignatieff, the country could certainly benefit from a leader who is not so quick to poison the political well. 

There is, of course, an irony in this portrayal of Ignatieff being sold in the new ads. Ignatieff's now famous support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his stated support for "indefinite detention, coercive interrogation, targeted assassinations, and even pre-emptive war," place Ignatieff squarely in the realm of Harper and Bush on some pretty significant ways. But it also demonstrates Ignatieff as what he is, a child of the traditional noblesse oblige, cold-war, centrist who is quick to stand up for Liberal Values at home but not so quick to stand up for them elsewhere. Let us not forget the history of Western imperialism folks, it was perpetrated with the support of even the left wing parties in many countries, parties that knew that they and their working-class supporters stood to benefit from many of the imperialist escapades. Of course, the Conservative party can hardly attack Ignatieff for political positions that they themselves hold with even greater fervor. 

Still, given my basic political disagreements with Ignatieff, I will still give him a fairly high score for political strategy and a willingness to de-poison the political discourse.