Danse Macabre

The ghost of a wind raises last fall’s leaves
And they wheel as if alive.
But, brittle and thin, lie still again
As we, all trapped in that fifties dance
That hopeless groping, sweet and slow
The night too young to decently go,
But too dead wasted to jive.


Youth is brief and age is long
And then you're a long time gone.

Waxworks wane in the guttering air
And long shadows heel in time.
Old hearts may flame
To remembered refrain
But it’s only reflections on opposite walls
All just new pins in old voodoo dolls
Just ritual pantomime.


Youth is brief and age is long
And then you're a long time gone.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Things Fall Apart

Ways in which Western Civilization is committing suicide:

1. We are not passing on the culture. Any civilization is, in essence, a shared culture. That means shared literature, shared history. We are no longer teaching our history or our literature in the schools or colleges. In principle, this kills any civilization within one generation.

2. We are no longer making any new culture. The arts in general are moribund, and have been for a century. Nobody reads poetry any more. Nobody is interested in contemporary painting, or contemporary classical music. Even the artists no longer believe in art, and mock it.

Burke. Decapitated. As the French Revolutionists no doubt would have had it if they could.

3. We are losing the “little platoons.” Voluntary organizations of all kinds are dying. We are all aware that fewer people are going to church. But it is also true that fewer people are joining Elks’ Clubs, or Toastmaster’s, or bowling leagues, or golf clubs. In fact, the decline in membership is greater here; churches are holding up better than other voluntary associations. These are the “little platoons” of Edmund Burke, of which he says, “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” Like a platoon in the army, these are the essential units for creating an esprit de corps, a sense of belonging to society. If an organism is breaking down on the cellular level, it is dying.

4. We hate children. We are not reproducing. The fact that it is easier than it used to be to prevent children may of course be a factor. But why, on the other hand, do we want contraception and abortion, and think they are good ideas? After all, either abortion or exposure of newborns was always an option, and accomplishes the same thing. Having children is a statement of confidence in the future; not having children is a vote of non-confidence. Darwin noticed that cultures that fail manifest this most dramatically by failing to reproduce.

5. The family, the smallest and most important of the little platoons, is dying. Our women are working outside the home. This is robbing the future for the sake of the present: the mother plays a critical role in nurturing children and passing on the culture. We apparently do not care. Our fathers are often altogether missing. One in three American kids now grow up without a male parent. No-fault divorce, punitive divorce settlements (punitive to men), and feminism have encouraged families to split up or never form, and women to have children outside marriage. The father, as much as the mother, plays a critical role in nurturing children. We know that children’s prospects are seriously diminished by not being raised by both biological parents. Again, we apparently do not care. We live as if there is no tomorrow for our civilization.

6. Our civil service is becoming parasitic. According to recent stats, taking everything into account, US federal workers now make about twice as much as workers in the private sector. The great Arab social scientist Ibn Khaldun traced the broad expanse of human history, and isolated this as the inevitable way civilizations die: the ruling class gets greedy, and starts skimming more and more off the economy to finance their lavish lifestyles. Eventually the structure collapses under the cost of administration.

Leonardo di Caprio is over to the right.

7. Cultural self-hate is everywhere, at least among the ruling class. When we do give any attention to our cultural patrimony, it is to condemn it: “dead white males,” “colonialism,” “eurocentrism,” “crusaders,” “man is a cancer on the planet,” “orientalism,” “patriarchy,” and so forth. We are flooding the agora with hostile propaganda against Western civilization. In an individual, this would look like clinical depression: “low self-esteem.”

8. We have lost our religion. If a culture shares its core values, it is strong. If it does not, it is weak. The ancient Romans understood this. If we cannot all assume we are working for the same goals, we can no longer work well together. One of us is building a tower; the next guy in the chain is pulling it down. Without shared core values, we can no longer even properly communicate. Society functions, when it does, on a series of "gentlemen's agreements" which rely on shared values. Take them away, and it is dog devour dog.

I say nothing here of causes, or remedies, except perhaps in passing. In some cases, these are clear enough. I’m just looking at the symptoms. We are in a heap of trouble here, gang.

The good news, or the worse news, is that the rest of the world is at least as dysfunctional.

Gananoque Haiku

Nothing else really matters today
Because the band is playing
And the jamboree is in town.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Letting in Christian Refugees

Yazidi refugee children in Iraqi Kurdistan, 2014.

This National Post piece to the contrary, of course Stephen Harper is right to give priority to Christian and Yazidi refugees from the Middle East. How can this possibly be controversial? Yet according to the piece, the Danish Refugee Council and Caritas, the Catholic charity, are refusing to help us with this.

First, as has been noted here before, there is no human right to be a Canadian citizen. Canadians have every right to pick and choose whom to let in.

We already do this, as does everyone. We give preference to those who are fluent in English or French. This ensures that they will find it easier to fit in. By the same token, we ought to give preference to Christians. Like it or not, Canada is a Christian country. We date our years from the birth of Christ. We take Sundays and not Fridays off. Christmas and Easter are national holidays. We put crosses on our mountaintops, and call our towns St. John’s. We have a lot of churches, many with excess capacity, and rather few mosques. All of these things make life more difficult and alienating for Muslim as compared to Christian immigrants. At the same time, members of non-Christian minority faiths should have relatively little problem adjusting, as their status in Canada will not be much different from that at home: Yazidis, Farsis, and Jews, for example. They too will probably find things easier here.

Of course, there is also that little matter of an ongoing genocide against non-Muslims in ISIS-controlled areas. The author of the NP piece makes much of the fact that the refugees are currently in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, and therefore cannot for the moment be killed by ISIS. Of course they are; they are refugees. But they cannot stay there forever, and they are there precisely because ISIS is seeking to kill them. To refuse them priority is like refusing to let in Jews during the Nazi holocaust, on the grounds that, after all, someone else could take them just as well. One should not hear such arguments in this epoch.

I am doubly nonplussed by the attitude here of Caritas. Apparently, they do not want to help, because they do not want to be seen as encouraging Christians to leave their traditional lands in the Middle East. Yes, it is sad, in an abstract way, but isn’t a human life worth more than a plot of earth?

Harper’s move is also judicious for the obvious reason that, if we limit ourselves to Christians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslim minorities, we are guaranteeing that we will not be inadvertently letting in ISIS terrorists. This should be a consideration. No doubt, most Muslims are not ISIS sympathizers, although at the same time there seems to be little or no local constituency in Syria for an armed fight for liberal democracy. But all ISIS sympathizers are Muslims. And there is simply no other way to be sure.

For God’s sake, let them in.

Prayers

Lord of everything, in this lonely pilgrim life
I find myself now in a rocky place, not seeing any sky
Please show me a postcard
Of the high and shining city streets towards which I climb.

My own photo: mosaic of Mary, Hagia Sophia.

Mary, our ever-mother, with your cloak as blue as the sky
Black the black your hair
Blue the china blue that’s in your eye
Blue the perfect veins between your toes
As you crush the serpent that is in my heart.
Conquer for us, Mary.

Bernini's Holy Spirit, St. Peter's.

Glorious Ghost of God,
Mysterious third,
Flame that never gutters
Adamant bird
Tumbling verse and versa between heaven and Montreal
Help me too fly high
Light as light
Away and up beyond the waters
Into the land of rainbows.

- Stephen K. Roney

That's Debatable

William James Sidis

An odd little item in the news, little noted and no doubt not long remembered: a debate team composed of inmates from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility just defeated the Harvard debate team in a judged contest. The Harvard team had just won the national championship. Apparently, the inmates also did this without having access to the Internet for research—it's against prison rules. Even books for research had to be pre-approved, and such approval could take weeks. Nor, of course, did they have anything like Harvard's library facilities.

There are various possible explanations for this anomaly. Perhaps the Harvard team did not take the competition seriously enough. Then again, the prison team had previously beaten University of New Hampshire and West Point. Perhaps the lack of distractions in a prison is a huge advantage. Perhaps the judges were biased.

But the simplest explanation is this: the smartest people in the US are not in Harvard. They are in the prisons.

And this might well be so.

Consider William James Sidis, the man said to have the highest IQ on record. He did go to Harvard—it was a family tradition. However, he left when the other students threatened violence towards him, and took up a teaching post in math at Rice. Here he was fired. He signed up for law school, but quit. Then he was arrested, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, for demonstrating against the World War I draft.

He might, in those days, have been enlisted for a prison debate team. Who knows?

Sidis then spent time in a mental asylum, and emerged to a life of low-level clerical work with adding machines. He wrote and published anonymously in his free time.

So much for high intelligence leading to worldly success.

The vast majority of people are, of course, average. There is that bell curve thing. The world and all its systems are therefore built by and for more or less average people. They are not going to function well when they encounter an exceptionally smart person, Firstly, the systems themselves will almost certainly have been designed by people of average intelligence. They will seem pretty dumb and risible to a smart kid. They will not command his respect nor commitment; and they are likely to return the favour. Secondly, these systems and personnel will have had little or no experience dealing with the exceptionally intelligent. Imagine being ten feet tall: everything is built for people six feet or less. Your height will be a major disability. Thirdly, according to those who work with IQ, people are generally incapable of understanding another when their IQs vary by more than about 15 points. A person of average intelligence is not going to be able to understand how a person of really high intelligence thinks. Just as a cat, never able to grasp how a human walks, always seems, with the best intentions, to be underfoot.

It must be maddening to a Sidis.

Public enemy number one.

But there is worse. It is human nature to want to believe we are personally very smart—the smartest person in any group, if not secretly the smartest person who ever lived. As a result, unless we have a keen self-awareness and a healthy conscience, or have experienced enough humbling hard knocks, we are going to resent and envy anyone who makes us feel this is not true. By being smart, they are making us feel very bad. Rather than admit inferiority in this crucial matter, we are going to tell ourselves and anyone else around us that the offending genius is not really smart, but cheating in some way, or arrogant, or impolite, or unbalanced, lacking in some other quality, like empathy, or flat out insane. We are going to want to hurt them, if we can. At a minimum, they must submit to our complete control, to demonstrate to ourselves, to them, and to anyone else looking that we are really the superior party intellectually. They will owe that to us.

Leaving aside the alternative example of the Jews, this is just what obviously happened to William James Sidis. For survival, he was forced to completely estrange himself from his family, who sought to control him, and had locked him in an asylum. His fellow students at Harvard wanted to kill him. His professorial colleagues and students at Rice could not stand him, and drove him out.

Yet, everyone who knew him as a simple clerk, after he in effect went underground, loved him, and testify that he was a great friend.

It makes sense, then, if the most intelligent among us, especially if facing all this trouble already in childhood, before we are likely to be able to figure out for ourselves what is really going on, are going to become deeply alienated from society; perhaps especially from the educational enterprise. The message is clear: the rest of the world is out to get us. Why wouldn't we turn to crime?

Up to about fifteen points smarter than average, granted, we are going to do well. Beyond that, each additional IQ point probably brings with it more social hostility than advantage, so that with each the odds increase that we will end up in prison or in a mental health facility instead of the Ivy League.

Public emeny number two.

Besides the terrible injustice, the cruelty, and the waste of lives, this problem is properly a great problem for every one of us. If this is true, we are imprisoning or drugging into semi-consciousness the majority of people who could further general human well-being. We are punishing and suppressing the very people who could produce a cure to cancer, or end poverty, or compose the next great symphony, and so on.

It seems likely to be so. And, not incidentally, it is one clear message of the New Testament as well.

Martin Marches up His Personal Mountain

Martin will not step on any cracks
Which makes his gait look funny.
He also knows that he must take long strides
So that, to anyone following his footprints, he will look bigger than he is.
This should keep monsters away
But also attract princesses.

Few know, but Martin knows
There is a secret tunnel under Cote St. Luc Boulevard
Used only by fictional characters.
Martin would like to be a fictional character
And not have to go home.
Where his father intemperately
steps on all the cracks.

-- Stephen K. Roney

The Vision Thing

A woman of (partial) vision.

Pols say Hillary Clinton's campaign is struggling in part because it is failing to articulate a vision, a reason for a Clinton presidency. They need a slogan, kind of like Obama's “Hope and Change.”

Problem is, it has to resonate with the persona of the candidate.

A few suggestions:

Hope against hope. 

Real policies for real people. 

My village wants your children. 

It's my turn to have interns! 

Because I said so. 

“Retro” is the new “change.” 

Nice country you got there. Pity if something was to happen to it. 

The nineties called. They want their foreign policy back. 

I need the money. We've been broke since we left the White House. 

Why should North Korea be the only country whose leader wears pantsuits? 

Vision? I've still got perfect vision in one eye. 

What difference, at this point, does it make? 

You're so welcome, Democrats. Happy, in return, to accept the post of press secretary.

The NDP Drops Out of Contention

Tom Mulcair strikes the classic politician's pose: looking up and away, as if into the future.

It looks as if Tom Mulcair and the NDP have fallen off the knife edge. Previously in a three-way statistical tie for the current Canadian federal brass ring, each new poll now seems to show them a little bit further behind.

What went wrong?

In retrospect, I think their campaign strategy was flawed. It wasn’t the niqab issue—that should have been as big a problem for the Liberals. It wasn’t opposition to TPP—that was a Hail Mary after the numbers started falling. It wasn’t any blunder by the leader. Their problem was more fundamental: it was in trying to move to the centre to pick up moderate votes. If it is only hitting them this late in the campaign, it is because undecided voters only start to make up their minds this late in the campaign.

Political operatives always want to move to the centre as the vote nears. It is cynical, but it is the conventional wisdom. You win by managing to cover a larger area of the ideological spectrum than your opponent. You win by having the more popular stand on a larger number of issues.

This idea, besides being cynical, is probably wrong. Political operatives care very much about political ideology and about issues. They naturally assume, therefore, that everyone else does. But anyone who does care is probably generally interested in politics, pretty much by definition, and so probably already committed to one party or the other. If you are uncommitted until the last weeks, it follows that you are not a policy wonk. You are uncommitted because you are not big on politics, and are not that interested in the issues.

What are they looking for?

In Canada, specifically, they tend to look for two things. Most times, Canadians don’t like drama. They are just looking for someone who will be competent and honest and will mostly leave them alone. As Bill Davis used to say, with Canadians, “bland works.” They like a Robert Bourassa, or a Mackenzie King, an un-flashy, managerial type. A Stephen Harper.

Every now and then, though, with these long winters and such, things get boring, and Canadians hanker for a little entertainment. Then they want something that looks like vision, like change, but not too scary. They go for a Diefenbaker, a Pierre Trudeau, even a Levesque.

The NDP’s problem is, in the natural run of things, you cannot defeat a managerial type with a managerial type. If Canadians are in the mood for bland, the bland option is always to vote continuity. So, if Stephen Harper is to be defeated, he must either defeat himself by showing great incompetence of corruption, or his opponent must offer some excitement, and people have to be sufficiently bored to grasp for it.

In seeking to look safe, the NDP have inadvertently stripped themselves of any excitement. Trudeau’s Liberals, though, had some inkling this was not the way to go. There is an old saying in the Liberal Party: they always lose if they run to the right of the Conservatives. After all, if you want conservative, you naturally think CPC, not Liberal. Let alone NDP. So the Grits have put some “real change” into their platform: legal marijuana, electoral reform, deficit spending. Nothing too scary, but enough to look cool and a little naughty.

The NDP, seeing their polling begin to slide, doubled down on their initial error by coming out against the TPP. A worse move they could not have made. They figured they were losing by straying from their “base,” so they tacked back suddenly to the left. Instead, they cast off their chance to look managerial, but did it by promising no change. Making them even more boring than the Conservatives. Worse, the original move to the centre made them look dishonest and opportunistic, and the deoubling back made them look doubly insincere and opportunistic.

The Conservatives ought to be in trouble, but are still in contention. Theoretically, the NDP’s fall establishes the Liberals as the clear alternative. If you assume it’s about ideology, instead of 33-33-33, Conservatives- Liberals-NDP, we now risk moving towards 33-66, Conservatives-Liberals. NDP votes are supposed to go Liberal, not jump across the ideological sky to the Conservatives.

So far, that is not happening. The Liberals seem to be going up, and the Conservatives seem to be going up. If there is now only one left-wing party to choose from, there is also, by the same token, now only one managerial party to choose from. These two may cancel out.

In general, the managerial approach is the preferred one in Canada. The vision thing is the harder sell. There is a reason why Canadian governments tend to stay longer in power than anywhere else in the Commonwealth, or perhaps in the democratic world.

So I suspect the odds still favour Harper. The TPP may be the perfect touch, a little change, but change that enhances rather than tarnishes the image of good managerial government.

By the same token, win or lose, the Liberals would be foolish to ditch Trudeau as leader. Each succeeding election, the craving for change will grow, and he has the proper image. "Not ready yet," that's all. If that.

More Examples ...

... of armed civilians taking down "active shooters."

Memo Re: Writing Memos

Demands on my time are moneyed and various;
Budgets are burgeoning, time lines are tight;
We shall see, we shall see, we shall see, we shall see;
Why can I no longer sleep in the night?


Tossing in bed with the clock ticking noisily
Bound up in spreadsheets I stare 'till first light
Asking for answers of some absent analyst--
Why can I no longer sleep in the night?


Now and again in accounts of the company,
Figures will jig and will not tally right,
The horror of ink setting dry yet not balancing;
Why can I no longer sleep in the night?


I hear it at times in the din of the stock exchange;
Some lonely warrior, hoarse from the fight,
Hoping and fearing that someone will hear him cry
Why can I no longer sleep in the night?


God only knows what's the final Gantt diagram;
Critical paths ever fade out to white;
Building our high-rise investments in Babylon;
Sleeping through days, and waking through nights.


They lied when they said they were schooling for leadership;
Lied when they said we could win in this fight;
Lied when they promised the whole world would satisfy;
I hope to high heaven they don't sleep at night.

- Stephen K. Roney

Read My Lips: No Niqab Ban. Okay, So Maybe You Can't Read My Lips, But Still...

I am not terribly happy to have to say it, but Harper is on the wrong side of the niqab issue.

I like his idea of revoking citizenship for terrorism. That seems to me not so much a matter of introducing two classes of citizenship, as of terra-forming the playing field. We already have two classes of citizen: those who hold two passports, and those whose commitment is solely to Canada. People have chosen this status themselves. Let them live with its logical consequences.

But on the niqab, I cannot follow him.

I understand why Canadians, and especially Quebecers, feel strongly. To wear such foreign dress at a citizenship ceremony looks like a deliberate declaration of no intent to assimilate. This concern is stronger in Quebec, because Quebec has a stronger sense of self than English Canada. There is a mainstream Canadian culture, we ought to be proud of it, and we ought to preserve and promote it.

But the niqab really is a matter of conscience for some Muslim women. Granted, Al-Azhar University, the closest thing to a Vatican in Sunni Islam, has actually banned it. Granted, the tradition of wearing the niqab predates Islam. Granted, there is no clear mention of it in the Qu’ran. But according to Wikipedia’s summary, of four established schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, two officially consider the practice obligatory.

So it is entirely reasonable for a Muslim woman to consider the practice a matter of conscience. Unless there is some overriding public interest, the basic human right to freedom of religion rules.

Granted, we might choose to prohibit Muslims from immigrating in the first place. There is no basic human right to be Canadian. But is that a step we want to take? And what difference would it make? We would still have to grant similar concessions to Canadian Muslims.

If, as some argue, it is an issue of women’s rights, then the feminist demand ought to be that women have the widest possible latitude in how she chooses to dress at a citizenship ceremony. The idea that Muslim women are “forced” to wear the niqab, in Canada, is obviously untrue, and obviously patronizing.

Bottom line: xenophobia. Let her cover her face.

The Culture of Tea

Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who, according to Buddhist tradition, brought both Zen and tea to China.

Tea is civilization. Tea is art. It is one of the most cultured things there is. Entire aesthetics, entire cultural complexes have been built on it, in countries as diverse as China, India, Japan, Russia, Korea, Sri Lanka, and England. Foods, gardens, ceremonies, poems, philosophies, music. There is a reason for this. Tea puts you in a meditative mood. Both Buddhist monks and sympathetic grandmothers have always understood this. And the growing and preparation of tea, too, is an art, every bit as much and more than is wine making.

Unfortunately, in most places in the North America, we get only the faintest idea of real tea.

Most of us have grown up and grown old on good old Ceylon “orange pekoe” black fermented tea. Nothing wrong with it. But it is far from a quality tea. It was simply the cheapest variety of tea available for export at the end of the nineteenth century, from the large, low-quality estates owned by supermarket magnate Sir Thomas Lipton. There is so much more.

I have lived in a few places now: China, Korea, the Middle East. I have visited others: India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and so forth. I have discovered that real, fresh tea from the best plantations can be a revelation. And, in the general run of things, it is a terribly cheap luxury.

Why do we so rarely find it in Canada or the US?

Sure, we can sometimes find something different. But it is rarely high quality, and invariably pretty stale.

Happily, I have discovered the solution. I have found an Indian online source, Teabox, that deals directly with the best plantations and air ships anywhere. Having tried their stuff, I can recommend it unreservedly. Their shipping seems to be free if you buy above a certain amount—only thirty bucks for me here in the Gulf-- their customer service is fantastic, their prices are only about what you pay for the old orange pekoe at Loblaw’s, and they really know their tea.

Convinced? If so, please take the trouble to use this link to have a look for yourself. No, I will not make any money from it, but they will give me a discount on my own next order. Besides one tea connoisseur helping another, it would be a nice, painless way of showing your appreciation for this blog.

LINK TO TEABOX

(Send me a comment if the link does not work.)

All There in Black and White?

It seems incredible, but it looks as though CNN photoshopped pictures of Christopher Mercer in order to make the shooter in the recent Roseburg mass killing look more Caucasian. Besides the skin tone, look carefully at the nose and lips in the two pictures.

Just Another Godforsaken Highway in the Rain

I sought escape down random roads, but I sought in vain
For every town in every place seemed more or less the same
Just another Godforsaken highway in the rain.

These also were the words, no doubt, of Eriksson the Dane
As winter whipped his cabin, or the maelstrom came
He sought escape down random roads, but he sought in vain.

Or Cartier of St. Malo, who attacked the trackless main
He brought his wandering with him, to the land God gave to Cain
For every town and every place seemed more or less the same.

And some have sought for only love, like lovely Marion Crane
But found instead some old motel that bore the owner's name
Just another Godforsaken highway in the rain.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Roseburg and Guns

The deadly English longbow. For national defense, every English freeman was drilled in its use. It could take down a knight on horseback. Result: human equality.

Another mass shooting in the US, in Oregon, and another general call for tougher laws on gun control.

First point: appearances to the contrary, and for what it is worth, mass shootings in the US are not becoming more common. They are becoming less common. Nor are there actually more mass shootings in the US than in other developed naions. Apparently, there have been more proportionate to population in Finland and Norway.

Second point: tougher control of guns will probably do little to prevent mass killings. If it amounts to anything less than banning all guns, the killers will just adapt accordingly; they will use a different model. Security checks are of slight use; they will only catch previous offenders, who will then, being criminals, probably acquire what they want on the black market. As for the mentally ill, we are totally incapable of predicting who is dangerous and who is not. Banning all guns would obviously be unconstitutional in the US, even if desirable.

Nor would banning guns necessarily reduce mass killings. How many people were killed on 9-11? How many guns were used? How about at the Boston Marathon? How about suicide bombers? Why wouldn't the method simply adjust?

Third point: banning guns is not desirable. The Second Amendment exists because an unarmed citizenry is vulnerable to an oppressive government. The historical evidence is plain that a yeomanry armed with the longbow, effective against armoured men on horseback, was the critical factor in the development of human rights and then democracy in England. From there, the British right to bear arms, enshrined in the British as well as the US Bill of Rights, spread it throughout the Anglosphere. The right to bear arms was an important protection for blacks in the South in quite recent years.

Fourth point: if we want to reduce mass shootings, there is one simple thing we could do that probably would be rather effective. Ban publication of the name of the shooter, or his or her photograph, or any details that would allow him or her to be identified by the public. The public has no legitimate need to know these details; they probably have little interest. This would withdraw the single strongest motive behind the killings: the chance at fame.

Fifth point: it is no coincidence that these mass shootings always take place in advertised “gun free zones.” Such places are a natural magnet to mass killers. Would you post a sign on your front lawn saying “no guns in this house”? Why not “no dangerous dogs, no alarms, and doors are unlocked”? I suggest that any institution that enforces such a “gun-free” policy is implicitly taking responsibility for protecting the safety of all on the premises. If someone gets shot in a “gun-free zone,” they or their family should be able to sue the institution. Big time.

A recent Rolling Stone article claims, more or less against this, that no mass shooting has actually been stopped by a civilian bearing arms in the last thirty years.

Eh? Canadians will immediately want to say, “but what about Kevin Vickers?” The assault on Parliament, of course, like the recent incident on a train in France, happened outside the US, and so will not show in US statistics. But they also would not appear for another reason: something is called a “mass shooting” when at least four or five people are killed. When there is a civilian nearby with a gun, things are unlikely to go this far, and they did not in either of those cases. Rolling Stone's evidence actually works against its point, and shows what a disaster gun free zones really are. For what it's worth, BuzzFeed cites a variety of other cases in recent years where armed civilians prevented mass killings.

Two action items, then: ban all publicity for the killers, and put the kibosh on gun-free zones.

By contrast, just calling for more gun control is revoltingly cynical.

Irish Montreal

Homes, Goose Village

Jerusalem is built as a city

Strongly compact.

It is there that the tribes go up

The tribes of The Lord.

We left ship for land at Bonsecours
The little city shimmering with fever
A hundred suns reflected on tin roofs.
Yet angels welcomed us
And far and up away we saw a cross.

Spring flood in Griffintown.

Where we began, the land was so bog low
It flooded with the snow melt every spring.
Yet generation by generation, we have climbed toward the cross, always in our sight.
Block by block, sometimes with full barrow, against snow, sometimes on our knees.
Past better shops, universities, art museums, widening areas of green.

Until finally last fall we made the summit.
The city looked lovely below us,
More beautiful than we remember.
But around us,
We discovered only graves, as far as eye could see.  

- Stephen K. Roney

Children, Goose Village, 1910.

Politics and the English Language: The State of Play

The Emperor's New Clothes.

It is starting to look as though the long, ugly reign of political correctness may be finally coming to an inglorious end. Theoretically, it should have ended long ago, for long ago everyone started denying they were for political correctness. Yet there continued nevertheless to be a list of things you could not say, and indeed a still-growing list. Even in the last couple of weeks, there have been stories of university administrations urging the use of new sex-neutral pronouns like “ze” and “xyr.” We have been hearing more and more about “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions,” have we not? Only within the past few days, I have seen separate sources deriding the terms “niggardly” and “Eskimo” as racially pejorative, although neither is.

Yet, here are three signs that things may have just passed the tipping point:

1. Polling immediately after Ben Carson's “controversial” objection to a Muslim president showed his support rise sharply instead of falling. This was supposed to end his campaign.

2. The University of Chicago has, in cooperation with FIRE, issued a new call for the right to free speech on campus. This is a dissent from campus “speech codes,” coming from a highly respected institution.

3. A NYT report (yes, NYT, usually reliably to the left) says school boards across the US are moving away from “zero tolerance” policies.

When it happens, it should happen quickly. The whole thing has been held together by fear and repression. Nobody dared to buck these speech demands alone, because alone they risked being crushed. But let the secret get out that most folks are really secretly against them, and all heck can break loose. If one person gets away without without serious repercussions, others will be prepared to try it. There can very soon be such a large torrent that social justice warriors will have no hope of exacting a punishment for anyone.

Perhaps Donald Trump burst the bubble. He had enough money, he could afford to take the hit. He did, too—he lost a lot of business for his comments on illegal immigrants from Mexico. But he kept on regardless, refused to retract, the incident popped him into first place in the polls, and the social justice warriors haven't even tried to punish him for any comments since. They begin to understand it would only help him.

So now the jig is very nearly up. It will take a while for everyone to realize that the game has changed, but probably not all that long. Jeb Bush sure didn't get it, when he demanded Trump publicly apologize to his wife for pointing out that she was Mexican.

Being slow on the uptake on this seems currently to be hurting the NDP's poll numbers in Canada. They thought supporting the right to wear a niqab during a Canadian citizenship ceremony was an easy pander. Turns out the general electorate, not just in Quebec but across Canada, are overwhelmingly opposed, and see this as a key issue. It would seem to be purely symbolic, but that's the nature of politically correct tyrrany. It is as if Canadians are angry, not so much about the specific issue, but about PC-ism in general.

I can recall similar flips in the past: Oliver Stone's “JFK” unintentionally managed to almost instantly transform elaborate conspiracy theories from the supposedly smart and chic way to look at the world to a laughingstock.

The Winter Cherry

after Chuei Hu

Last year, on this mountain,
Poetry was a cherry garland on her shoulders,
Redder as her face grew deeper red.

I return; she is nowhere, only dreams.
But look--in verses, cherries are in blossom.
Surprising, vivid pink against the snow.

-- Stephen K. Roney