A FEW DAYS ago I took advantage of the soon-to-depart walkabout weather and visited, as I do from time to time, Ottawa’s Parliament Hill. There, one may find the Famous Five monument, an exact copy of which exists in Calgary (I’ve been to that as well).
AT SOME point, without the help either of the nudge or the wink, I’ll wager you have grasped through one commonplace observation the cynical and fraudulent character of the more crude manifestations of American nationalism. Well, are you in? Good. The observation to which I refer is the Chinese manufacture of so many American flags.
THIS PAST week news arrived of a forthcoming Mel Gibson project, a Warner Brothers “biopic” concerning the life of Judah Maccabee. The announcement provoked the inevitable outrage, an example of which is Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who stated the proposed film is akin to “having a white supremacist portray Martin Luther King Jr.” The analogy however is founded, even if understandably and legitimately enough, not upon logic but rather emotion. Considered on logical grounds alone, Gibson’s fitness to portray sympathetically the life of a guerilla war hero and anti-secular reactionary religious fundamentalist is beyond question.
RARE IS the day that I do not find a piece of bad writing in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post, or Globe and Mail. This statement, I am confident, could be applied with justice to any newspaper of your choosing. The badness is delivered in many varieties, and in fairness I must observe that some errors are a product of working conditions, deadlines and the under-resourcing of bureaus and so on. Most bad writing however has as its root a more troubling fact: its creators do not know what words mean.
THERE IS an enormous store of narrative concerning the working habits of authors, much of it interesting and in my case consumed with amusement but skepticism also.
REVISIONIST CLAIMS of a website dedicated to the British fascist and politician Sir Oswald Mosley bring to mind the expression “damned with faint praise.” This, for example, cited from the historian A. J. P. Taylor: “He was never anti-Semitic — only opposed to a Second World War for the sake of Jews elsewhere. He was never unpatriotic — only indifferent to German conquests in eastern Europe … A superb political thinker, the best of our age.”
WHEN I was in high school, I had the good and (even in those days) atypical experience of passing through the classroom of a teacher who held fast to the discipline of the formal debate. Looking back, I regret that I hadn’t had more of it, and I wonder to what degree today’s students are similarly deprived by a culture which mechanically genuflects before the shrine of debate while refusing to nourish the conditions which make it possible.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 