What a piece of work are Obama supporters

Barack Obama may be a nice guy with a hopeful message. But his supporters sure are a piece of work, aren't they?

I knew there was something about the candidate that disturbed me, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I started reading the pro-Obama (or rabidly anti-Hillary) comments on a New York Times site the other day. The comments were attached to an op-ed piece discussing Samantha Power's "Hillary is a monster" remark to The Scotsman. Actually the writer was using the monster incident as a launching pad to reiterate what a low-life Hillary is for angering Obama supporters by suggesting Obama might be a bit of a hypocrite about NAFTA.

Here's the comment that really opened my eyes:

"The way politics is played offends me as a voter. The Clinton’s are saying that perhaps those who voted for Obama are having buyers remorse and somehow Obama put a spell over us.I find it amusing that her voters are blue collar and women over 60,and Obama’s are young and educated.Hello! The future belongs to Obama’s voters! If Obama has more earned delegates and the popular vote and its taken from him behind closed doors and arm twisting,I assure you the people backing him will be outraged! There goes the hope and inspiration of our nation! This would a travesty!"

Yikes! Can we get more ageist and elitist, folks? Not to mention misogynistic. And it's pretty characteristic of the nastiness you get from a lot of Obama's youthful supporters.

Bring on the ice floes for the women over 60! And let's have a few more work houses for those rude, crude working people who don't know how to kiss the boots of their betters! How dare Hillary, that uppidy old woman, stand in the way of history!

They're young, beautiful and exquisitely educated, are they? Well, dress them in leather and give a straight-arm salute.

Obama may be okay. I really don't know. But the surly young bullies buzzing around him give me the willies.

What a piss-off

Boy!

It's really a piss-off, isn't it, when you write your little heart out...and nobody cares?

Wonder how you keep going.

But you do.

Because it's what you do.

But it's a piss-off nonetheless.

Excluded from My Culture

Norval Morriseau died today in Toronto at the age of 75.

Morriseau, an Ojibwa from north of Lake Superior in Northern Ontario, was arguably the best artist this country has produced in the past half century, perhaps ever. He was insightful, original and entirely fresh, in a way so few of our artists have been.

As a northerner, I want to exalt in his talent and feel a kinship with his creativity.

Unfortunately, because Morrisseau was an Aboriginal person, my wishes are not to be. I am not a First Nations person. Definitely not Ojibwa. And therefore, not eligible to share in the celebration of Morrisseau's life.

It is an unfortunate fact of this time and place that First Nations people have become exclusionary to the point that even those who love and cherish them and our history together cannot ever partake in their triumphs.

I am not Aboriginal. Therefore, sadly, Norval Morrisseau is nothing to me.

Although we share a history, a great history that speaks of the founding of this country, we do not share a present. They don't want me. Or acknowledge me. I am forever excluded from their life.

So, as far as I'm concerned, Norval Morrisseau might have been Finnish. Or Czech. Or Japanese.

Pity.

I might have liked his work. If I had been allowed to.

It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

Remember when you were a kid and one of your pals would give you heck for something or other? And you'd say, Well, it's a free country, isn't it?

Well, maybe it used to be, but it sure as hell isn't now.

We've given some unelected, unaccountable, self-righteous busybodies way, way too much power over individuals who can't fight back.

Consider the case of the Whitby mental institution, which has decided to outlaw smoking anywhere on its vast grounds. Under a ban that was put in place last June, the residents have to walk five minutes or so to get off the property so they can stand on a public roadway -- bothering everyone around them -- to have a smoke. They have to hide their cigarettes off-site because they aren't even allowed to have smoking materials at the hospital.

The ban, imposed on the hospital's 330 in-patients, 1,000 staff members, outpatients and visitors, is part of their mission to help patients become healthy and reintegrate into the community, says president and CEO Glenna Raymond. She adds statistics are "staggering" for smoking-related illnesses in the mental health sector.

"We knew it wasn't going to be easy," Raymond says of the no-smoking policy, put in place after months of study.

"But it was the right move to make."

Now, we don't know, but Ms. Raymond may smoke like a chimney when she gets off the hospital grounds and goes home to her family. We don't know, and we don't much care. That's her right. To smoke or to not smoke in the privacy of her own home. She's a free person in a free society and is quite free to make decisions about her health for herself.

So when she says, quite brazenly, that "we knew it wasn't going to be easy," we know she wasn't thinking about herself. What she knew was that it wasn't going to be easy for the poor slobs who live at her facility.

The Whitby facility may have done months of study. It may have the best interests of its patients at heart. The day may come when those same residents may look back and thank Ms. Raymond for making their lives miserable for a few months do that they could go on to reintegrate into the community as clean and god-fearing people. From a health and public policy standpoint, she may, in fact, be one hundred per cent right.

But unless she lives in the old Soviet Union or Mao's China, she is one hundred per cent wrong in forcing her superior wisdom on such vulnerable individuals. In a free society, the rights of adult citizens to act as they judge appropriate within the confines of the law is paramount. It is fundamental to our concept of free society. It is part and parcel of being a citizen.

When the right to be a free adult is taken away, as it sometimes has to be, there has to be a powerful justification and a compelling reason. Compromises must be sought, and the least intrusive route selected. There is no evidence that the Whitby facility tried to mitigate, in any way, the iron fist of its decision. In fact, by banning smoking on its entire, vast property, it is evident that Ms. Raymond and her colleagues tried to make the situation as humiliating as possible for the adults whose behaviour they had decided to change.

Whatever her motive, Ms. Raymond is demonstrating to her patients that she has total power over them -- and that they have none. They are mere children, in need of guidance and direction from their betters. They are certainly not free adults in a free society.

This is wrong. Individual rights are important. They should be respected and defended. Stripping citizens of their dignity and humiliating them in front of their neighbours can never be right. No matter what the studies say.

The Myth of Public Opinion

One suspects that people who engage in public discourse in Ontario are part of a small, inbred and disconnected group. In fact, on a good day, what passes for public discourse may involve only 20 per cent of the population. And that's on a good day.

And that leaves a big question. What are the rest of us thinking?

The people who engage in public discourse tend to dismiss the rest of us. Who cares what we think? We're probably not thinking anything. At least nothing of importance. If we have thoughts at all, they must mirror the thinking of the 20 per cent who engage in public discourse. It just stands to reason, doesn't it? I mean, they are the makers of opinion and the purveyors of influence. They lead and others follow. That's the way it is, isn't it?

Maybe. Maybe not. There's no way to tell.

Here's the problem.

The people who engage in public discourse are predominately of two groups. The first is a core group composed of white, middle class, urban folk whose ideas, generally speaking, trickle down from dominant international media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, The Economist, Manchester Guardian and so on). This inner group is augmented by an outer ring composed of executive directors or paid flacks for a variety of special interest groups, whose ideas trickle down from international lobby groups (World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Vatican, the Soviet Union circa 1958, the Chicago group and so forth). Their conversation is essentially international, in the sense that it focuses on the values and misdeeds of the United States of America.

The dialogue takes many twists and turns. It may, at times, pretend to centre on Canadian issues and concerns. It may veer off into interesting lane ways -- are Muslims always victims; should Canada support Israel; is NATO occupying Afghanistan or supporting it; are Europeans racist pigs; should Canadian Muslim women be allowed to wear veils when they vote; should native young people be seen as violent when they move into a guy's house and beat him senseless for objecting? But the Canadian context is just camouflage and the conversation's endgame is always the same -- the moral superiority or bankruptcy of the United States of America.

The conversation is so noisy that it drowns out the voices of the average Joes and Jennys who make up Ontario.

It is extreme, representing the hardline, Cold War positions of those who raise funds or tap government treasuries to advance their causes.

And it is arrogantly contemptuous of those who don't dance on the hard-relief edge of sanity.

So Joe and Jenny, being gentle souls consumed with the daily task of putting food on the table, learn to keep their own counsel, lest they be demonized as rednecks or leftwing loonies or baby killers or worse. They go about their business, hold their tongues and watch the world unfold.

And they think their thoughts. Whatever they may be.

Since no one wants to talk to them, we may never know the thoughts of these Joes and Jennys -- until some event occurs that calls them to the surface.

Remember Meech Lake? That was a stunner for the 20-per-centers, wasn't it?

The people who engage in public discourse should take care. There may be other Meech Lakes lurking out there. Joe and Jenny have opinions, which they may or may not reveal to pollsters. They may not even talk about their real opinions to each other, for fear of embarrassing themselves. With the racket spewing from the yakkety-yak class, individual Joes and Jennys may believe they're completely out of synch with the world around them. So they keep quiet.

But the thoughts are there. You can bet on it.

And those thoughts may not reflect the opinion we see reflected every day in the media of the province.

The Day Law and Order Died

No one likes to be branded a Cassandra, but....

Maybe it's time to start thinking about how we plan to deal with a province where the old concepts of law and order have broken down.

It's nothing really serious yet, mind. Just little nigglings that give pause to the inquiring mind.

First, Caledonia. A court issues an injunction, the police try but fail to enforce it, the police back down and the court decides to go silent. Do the transgressors win? Good question, eh? Wonder what that says?

Well, fast forward to an empty piece of ground in the wilds of Frontenac County where a group of people have decided to stop a property rights owner from getting access to his property. Nothing special about that these days. Except when the court says they have to remove their protest paraphernalia, they tell the court, respectfully, to screw off. They no longer wish to participate in this thing called the Canadian legal system. The police look the other way. And the court goes silent. Do the transgressors prevail again?

Hmmm.

What next?

Wait for it.

In a world ruled by entropy, the next thing can only be more unpredictability, more uncertainty, less order.

How will we go forward in this risky world created by the overly sensitive courts?

It will be fun to watch, but don't bet on coming out of it in better shape. Disorder always favours the strong and kicks the shit out of the weak.

Public Opinion in Wacko-land

Just a passing comment, and don't read too much into it, but it's a strange thing that passes for public opinion in some of our sister countries.

The Toronto Star carried a story today about the storming of the Red Mosque in Pakistan. The story itself was depressing enough, but what about this little nugget buried about halfway down the column:


"But a major loss of life at the Red Mosque could further turn public opinion against the president, who already faces mounting opposition for his bungled attempts to fire the country’s chief justice."

Hmmmm. One wonders what it would take to turn public opinion against the extremist group causing the problem. I mean, they've armed themselves to the teeth; fortified their holy place; run about the streets abducting women; held citizens hostage and subjected them to torture; used children as shields; fired on the police; and generally behaved in a lawless, violent and dispicable manner.

Yet all this, apparently, is not enough to turn public opinion against them.

Guess "the public" just figures, Well, yes, they're behaving a bit badly, but at least they're not smokers.

Wacko-land.