"moral anarchy" and other holiday parables...

Bill Moyers' excellent piece about "moral anarchy" in the US is a worthwhile way to pass fifteen or twenty minutes over the holiday season. It's a bit dense in places, but then again critiquing the social order of the United States isn't light stuff.

bam-bam is coming home...

Last week, while in Toronto for some work and a fair shake of holiday season merry-making, a friend mentioned an odd little story to a group of us gathered for a Christmas party. The players in this tale were a family living in a rural patch outside of Ottawa, a wayward deer they had taken in after its mother had abandoned it by the roadside, and finally the 'by the book' provincial bureaucracy that was forced to separate deer from family because they didn't have the proper permit to keep such a creature, no matter that it owed its life to their care. The whole thing looked like it was going to end badly, leaving the poor deer (domesticated to the extreme) to flounder in a zoo setting (where it wasn't really wanted), with the poor farm family left to pine for their darling deer and shake their heads sadly at Queens Park and its "urbanites-know-best" condescension toward the whole affair. A holiday season buzzkill if ever there was one.

Yesterday the PREMIER of Ontario, yes that's right, Dalton McGuinty himself, made a personal visit to the family's rural environs to announce to much media fanfare that Bam-Bam is coming home. Though it won't happen by the time the turkey is served, the homecoming should take place just shy of 2007, meaning a small glass of bubbly might be in order for this most unusual of family reunions to ring in the New Year.

A true Christmas miracle...and great (though admittedly unusual) political photo-op.

quotation for a saturday afternoon...

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand."

- Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

if you can't shout anything nice...

best reality tv ever...

CBC got a lot of slack for its first experiment in reality tv, a failed show called The One, but yesterday it got top marks for the best thing since Survivor: The Liberal Leadership Convention.

After a nail-biting day on my couch, glued to the tv, I was handsomely rewarded with what was dubbed by many pundits as a quintessentially Canadian outcome: the "darkhorse" in the running (or underdog, to mix my mammalian metaphors) Stephane Dion, took the leadership of the Liberal party after a series of reversals, upheavals, defections and despite beginning the whole thing squarely in fourth place.

For a second there it looked as though Michael Ignatieff would up the dramatic ante by shedding a tear or two in the agonizing lead-up to the final ballot announcement. Viewers were treated to live televised close-ups of the two finalists side-by-side, a beaming Dion seemed to know it was in the bag, whereas Ignatieff did all he could to turn a wince into a passable tv smile. The whole time a video-montage of ex-Prime Ministers was being screened in the convention hall to push the announcement time to the 6pm time-slot, a prime time media trick to maximize the national viewership.

Everybody agrees that Dion has his work cut out for him. He seems to be a genuinely good man, and has a lot more on-the-ground experience than many of the other candidates, most notably in cabinet as both intergovernmental affairs minister and minister of the environment in previous Liberal governments. Above all this, he looks like everybody's favorite nephew or kind and brainy uncle (depending on which side of the generational divide you happen to find yourself on), so if not a second coming of Trudeau, at least he's not another "you-must-love-me" apologist like the well-meaning Paul Martin, and certainly not a cold intellectual in the mold of our current PM who, I gather, has no idea how to deal with the new head of the formerly headless Liberal party. Now it gets interesting...