the blog quebecois

I consider Trevor Lautens, along with Mark Steyn and David Warren, one of the best political writers in this country. He published a column in the Winnipeg Free Press Thursday that Terry O'Neill featured in The Shotgun; I've taken the further liberty of reprinting it here, as Mr. Lautens speaks eloquently and precisely to my feelings of malaise these past months.

UNFORGETTABLY, though I've forgotten his name and can't find his exact words in 45 years of my notebook-diaries, a U.S. senator once said, in surveying his career: "I began by wanting to save the world. Then I wanted to save the United States. Now I want to save... (some local slough or woodland)."

Derivatively -- and what better time than Canada (nee Dominion) Day to quote or misquote an American? -- I once loved Canada. Then I loved my neighbourhood. Now I have some regard for the tree-clad slope behind my house.

It is partly my property, partly my neighbour's -- I met him after just 18 years of residence and he proved to be an agreeable fellow, though neither of us has felt an urgent need to communicate again in the intervening two years.

Possibly a metaphor lurks here. Or not. In what used to be regarded as old age (in my case, 70 is the new 90), Canada looks too big for intimacy, too big for the imagination. It has to be broken up into small pieces to be lived in and through. In its larger cities, even downtown is a place too far.

Politically, the country is uninhabitable. Pride in today's Canada is embarrassing, if not repelling. I won't be there for the fireworks tomorrow.

You can stay while I tilt my kitchen chair back and reminisce, or leave now.

There seemed to be a fresh new dawn in the 1950s, that decade scorned as boring and repressive by those who weren't there for it. The Canadian vocabulary unashamedly included kindness, thankfulness, manners, and such, and citizens quite often even put those words into practice. The actual and linguistic horrors of lifestyle, fulfillment, liberation, orgasm (good, better, best), closure (what of importance is ever closed, especially the death of the loved?) and that tool of the institutionalized New Bigotry, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, all gratefully lay far ahead.

Of course, there were unfairness and prejudice, but also -- still in the glow of triumph over evil in the last war, whose righteousness we may ever universally agree upon -- a strong sense of hopefulness, of better days ahead, real wrongs being really righted.

More than an aside on that war: In a Times Literary Supplement review of David Dilks's The Great Dominion: Winston Churchill in Canada, 1900-1954, Nathan M. Greenfield writes: "The Canada Churchill knew is almost unrecognizable, especially to those who have followed the country's reduction in military capacity. The Canadian army rushed to England in 1939 was the only army that could defend Britain in the months after Dunkirk."

Canada's wartime gifts to Britain "totalled one-quarter of those under the more famous American Lend-Lease Agreements -- and Canada's population was one-twelfth that of the United States." Furthermore, Canada supplied 44 squadrons in Britain by 1944, and had built 100 of the Royal Navy's ships and 1,223 of the 5,000 tanks the Allies shipped to Britain.

Since then, countless brains have been addled by an approved high-school textbook that ignored the soldiers and reduced the war to two consequential issues -- women's work (invaluable, certainly) and the expulsion of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast to virtual internment camps.

I've long admired what I call the Class of 1920, those born a few years on either side of that year who ground through a devastating depression, fought and won a war and, hardened into smartness, brilliantly provided Canada's leadership for decades.

Now Canada is uber-enlightened and people are afraid to go out at night. (One never knows, a crooked MP might be lurking in the shadows.)

Dismiss all this as an old man's grumbling if it makes you feel better -- or the mutterings of one who confuses happier times with his youthful self, an argument I grant has some merit. But, when not in danger of being overheard, people of my generation agree with me that it's not just rosy nostalgia for youth. Objectively, life in Canada really was better before the Hippies and the Me Generation and Generation X, and even, amazingly, human rights commissions and liberal judges secretly terrified of their ambitious and even-more-liberal young law clerks.

One finally learns that a single act of personal kindness and civility that lightens a heart and makes life more endurable is more virtuous than an act of Parliament. (To quote myself: All great crimes begin in committee.)

One also learns -- a subversive belief, unpopular and deserving of quick suffocation lest it gets around -- that the displacement of God and enthronement of Man has had only dimly understood but devastating social consequences. To think that we are the universe's highest beings should fill us with the greatest alarm and dread if we look around and, especially, inward. (This, as I always feel obliged to state, from a non-Christian, non-church-going, gin-swilling blasphemer. But that doesn't mean I'm stupid.)

So other hands will have to wave the flags tomorrow. The Canada I cherish -- still -- is a private and mystical one, somewhere up that backyard slope of wild greenery, where a chickadee announces his pert importance over a flower born to blush unseen.

The comments that this inspired at The Shotgun are well worth reading, too.