Ah, the good ol’ days, or ‘Those were the days’, as Archie and Edith Bunker always sang together with such schmaltzy sentimentality during the opening theme of the now iconic TV sitcom ‘All in the Family’. The song, as well as the values which Archie Bunker espoused purported to be of a ‘Bedrock, All-American’ type of white, male-dominated, Christian, family-oriented civilization.

What the show’s unabashedly liberal agenda wanted to expose at the time was an insidiously systematic undercurrent of racism, bigotry, and sexism in American society, and hoped to change the tone of the social discourse in America as a result.

Well, it did. And how. The torrent of change which America, and the entire western world has experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s is almost too much for the social fabric of western civilization to be able to withstand and still be able to function normally. Granted, the push for women’s emancipation had begun much earlier, and was part of the evolution of western civilization from being based on absolute monarchy, feudal land tenure, rural and agrarian living, and the dominance of folk ways, folk culture, as well as the pre-eminence of Christianity as a more or less omnipresent factor in the spiritual as well as the political, social, and economic lives of the citizenry.

This changeover, which accelerated with the advent of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the French and American Revolutions, with their accompanying doctrines of republicanism, and separation of Church and State into separate and eventually, in some cases, almost mutually exclusive sacred and secular spheres, only served to speed up the process of social ferment in western civilization, and has brought us to where we are today.

And where, precisely, is that, pray tell? Well, the way I see it is that ‘the ol’ block’, so to speak, represented by the heretofore seemingly monolithic structures of male dominance, are under assault from all quarters. The white, Christian, heterosexual, middle class male has, for all intents and purposes, been accused, tried and convicted in the public forum of virtually every possible so-called ‘sin’ imaginable to humanity: Patriarchy, Hierarchy, Monarchy, Eurocentricism, Imperialism, Cultural Monolithism, Racism, Roman Catholicism, War, Genocide, Fratricide, Collateral Damage, Rape, Spousal Abuse, Child Abuse, Cultural Genocide, Narcissism, being sophomoric, lazy, oversexed, cowardly, spineless, immature, incapable of commitment, disorganized, slacker, bigotry, alcoholism, and generally a whole host of unholy sins too lengthy to enumerate.

What I’m saying is that it seems to be open season on us guys. The line of reasoning seems to go something like this: ‘Well, white heterosexual Christian males dominated everything for thousands of years and screwed everything up, so we can afford to cut them down to size and take as many chips off their ‘ol’ block’, as we please, because, after all, it’s such a big ‘block’, that it’ll never break apart and will never crack, and will never disintegrate. It’s TOO BIG TO FAIL!’

Funny, didn’t I hear that somewhere before about America’s big banks, corporations and governments of the west? Well, they’re on the ropes too, because we blithely ignored the warning signs of their possible demise when it was time to do so.

Well with men it’s the same thing. Men are hurting. We get scared and miss our parents when they die just as much as any woman does. We get hungry, angry, lonely and tired, just like anybody else, and need the support of an understanding and supportive woman just as much as she needs us. The male gender is not something or someone who is almighty and who can function as an autonomous person fully without the help of a mate.

That’s why man and woman were created to be with each other, and complement each other, to complete each other, not to compete with each other, as is the case in the current climate of gender politics. Women have been sold a bill of goods that they somehow have to ‘beat men at their own game’, and ‘muscle their way into the highest echelons of political and corporate power’, and jolly well push the men out, or at least push them around, like we increasingly see portrayed in the movies and on television, with women cops, soldiers, corporate types and secret agents all karate chopping men in the testicles, or otherwise telling them where to put it.

This is all part of the agenda being pushed by the feminist lobby in Hollywood and elsewhere to have women portrayed in positions of dominance, control, and leadership in the media, so that it will spur women to act the same way in the real world. I’m not sure if advocating for such an aggressive and conflict-oriented agenda is a positive thing for the preservation and promotion of a stable social fabric.

Not that I would want to go back to having a country populated by Archie and Edith Bunkers. The ‘good ol’days’ are long gone, so Archie and Edith can sing all they want, it won’t bring them back. However, it is incumbent upon everybody in America, and elsewhere in the west, to promote gender equality and gender peace in, well, a ‘peaceful’ way, and not have us constantly facing a barrage of post-modern pressure-cooker gender-bending conflicts which attempt at all costs to chip all the more off the ‘ol’ block’.

Our ‘block’ may be big and ‘old’ but we’re not ‘blockheads’, by any stretch of the imagination. We just need that ‘lovin’ spoonful’ from some gal that we can call our own and that we can stand by each other through thick and thin. I’ll cook supper if you’ll iron my shirts, honey. And oh yeah, I’ll vacuum if you’ll clean the toilet bowl!

Now how’s that for a ‘Bedrock, All-American Family’!

I was home alone this evening, as usual, (forty-something bachelorhood offering plenty of opportunity to contemplate Divine Mysteries), and it came to me after about an hour and a half of contemplation that this Great Recession that we’re in (or are we coming out of it, we’re not sure?), has a lot of parallels with what went on in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Somehow I got to having a conversation in my head, in a stream of consciousness-sort of fashion, with a woman I know, about primitive-style painting from the eastern United States from the early 20th century, seeing that both of us are into artistic things. In our conversation she was showing me a primitive-style painting and asking me to identify it, which I did, in an accurate way. This steered our imaginary conversation onto where I obtained the knowledge as to how to be able to identify such a painting, and I told her, half jokingly, that everything I knew about primitive art, I’d learned from an episode of the ‘Walton’s’ television show from the 1970s.

This steered the conversation onto a new tack, regarding how I always found this show to be an incisive example of Americana, in the sense that the narrator, who was the ‘John Boy’ character, speaking of the Great Depression period from the point of view of reminiscence, views with hindsight how life on Walton’s Mountain, and in America in general was in a sort of period of slumber.

By this time, my imaginary conversation with this woman had turned more into one of my famous ‘running commentaries’, wherein my inner dialogue sort of ‘narrates’ an ongoing quasi-monologue, as if I were being interviewed on the radio or television, and the host only interjects briefly to redirect the flow of the ‘commentary’, as the need arises.

I began to expound about how I felt that this period of ‘slumber’ was like the restorative nature of human sleep of which humans partake, allowing the organism to repair and recuperate from a long and arduous period of activity. This ‘slumber’ is also characterized by a transformative process, somewhat like the caterpillar inside the cocoon, becoming a butterfly and spreading its wings and flying away to a new life.

It’s as if the Great Depression of the 1930s was a necessary period of ‘restoration’, ‘recuperation’, and ‘transformation’, and also of ‘gestation’ in the history of America. This is so, because one thing which always struck me about the Walton’s TV show was the constant references in the stories of each show, as well as in the narration, of how the old traditional order of the pioneers, based on old time gospel religion, traditional folk medicine, the extended family, rural life, folk culture, and old time morality, was slowly but surely giving way to a new social order, and that America was on the cusp of a radical transformation of its social and moral fabric, which would come, of course, with the Second World War, and the ensuing peace and material prosperity.
This of course leads me to today’s Great Recession. What, after all is said and done, have all of the radical transformations in the moral and social fabric of America wrought? After the war, the country became more materially prosperous than it ever had been in history, and reached the pinnacle as the world’s most powerful military, industrial, and political entity, overshadowing all of its competitors in the process.

But at what cost? Defeating the Japanese Empire deprived the people of Japan of their military capability, and therefore made them dependent on America for protection, and therefore forced them to channel all of their productive energies into the production of civilian goods, which flooded the American market, and undercut American products in price, and beat them in quality, while forcing America to spend a disproportionate amount of her industrial capacity on the production of armaments, to the detriment of civilian goods.

Defeating the Soviet Empire meant embarking on an almost orgiastic arms race, which included the now infamous SDI, or ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’ (AKA ‘Star Wars’), wherein the Soviets simply couldn’t keep up any more, much less produce the civilian goods to keep their people happy, and even less give them the individual freedoms they craved. In doing so, America had to drastically cut social spending, and scale back on its civilian social entitlements, thereby exacerbating the gap between the haves and the have nots.

So where does this leave ‘Joe the Plumber’? The recent election campaign in America which featured this erstwhile typical All American Average Guy, and his family, was quite amusing to watch. We all got to sit back in our armchairs and watch as the denizens of Americas neo-feudal corporate plutocracy fell all over themselves trying to persuade everybody else in the electorate, that they were the right candidate to defend and promote the interests of this fearless and upstanding example of a possibly propertied, post-modern plebeian peon, whose status as being amongst the ranks of the ‘middle class’ could only be described as something resembling ‘hanging on for dear life with my fingernails’.

Not to mention that the policies of both parties had contributed to getting Joe and his family to where he was in the first place, and had enabled their propertied interests to arrogate more wealth to themselves through their privileged access to the levers of government, the tax system, and the off shoring of jobs. So good luck convincing Joe, his wife and kids, much less the folks at home that you’re going to do diddly squat to improve his lot in life.

So what I see as the legacy of the ‘slumber’ on Walton’s Mountain, and throughout America, is a ‘primitive painting’, which blossomed into a renaissance masterpiece, but has since deteriorated into a state of decrepitude. Perhaps this new ‘great Recession’ is a new sort of period of ‘slumber’ wherein the great Renaissance masterwork which was the Great republic, will have once again become the ‘primitive’ work of art of the illiterate woman from the eastern United States.

What will it take for a new ‘Renaissance Masterwork’ to emerge in the Great republic? If history is to be the master of this lesson, I would think that the answer would be another world war, of an even greater magnitude than the first two, this time engaging the Arab-Muslim world, and the Chinese as adversaries.

It’s funny how when you turn the TV and the radio off, the conversations in your head and the ‘running commentaries’ come in and fill the void. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to speak with any woman any time soon to identify what type of painting I’m looking at? Do you think Miss Columbia would let me look at her prize painting in her private drawing room? Or am I just having another imaginary conversation with somebody I know in my head? God bless America. Amen.

Well folks, I can just see the feedback now. I’m already preparing to get some flack over this one, so I’m bracing for it. Writing about Adolf Hitler is always a touchy subject at the best of times. He’s still very much a lightning rod of controversy virtually everywhere in the world. There are countries in Europe where displays of Nazi symbols are banned, and Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ is also barred from publication.

North America, however, thankfully, is different. We’ve been at peace now with safe borders for many years and have never had to face the kind of severe ethnic and racial strife that Europe traversed in the two World Wars in the twentieth century. That’s why I took it upon myself to read both the ‘Good Book’ (The Bible), and what I like to call the ‘Bad Book’ (‘Mein Kampf’ or simply ‘My struggle’), the book which Hitler wrote in the 1920s while in prison after being arrested in the now infamous ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, wherein he was imprisoned for having attempted, unsuccessfully to overthrow the government.

I’ve completed the Bible, all 1300+ pages of it, and am now at page 157 of Mein Kampf, enough to make some initial observations: For a high school drop out who never finished his studies at the ‘Realschule’ (a sort of German equivalent of the old ‘Commercial’ or ‘Technical’ course in Québec, as opposed to the ‘Gymnasium’, which was the equivalent to our old ‘Classical course’), he was no slouch at being an incisive, self-taught observer of the social order of his day, albeit rather biased.

Hitler’s critique of Viennese Parliamentary democracy of the late Habsburg period, which was based on the same Westminster model as ours in Canada, was ruthlessly caustic in its denunciation of the insignificance of the common backbencher, the petty infighting, the bombastic speeches, and overall climate of cynicism and diluted meaninglessness of having potentially great statesmen and leaders lost in a sea of parliamentary mediocrity and crass self-serving self-interest.

I found myself astounded to remark that his comments, written in the 1920s, based on attendance in the parliamentary gallery in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century, could just as easily be applied to our parliament today in Canada, or anywhere else in the western world, for that matter.

Equally caustic were Hitler’s denunciations of working class poverty. He goes on at length to describe the plight of the average Austrian industrial labourer in Vienna of the early 20th century, which could’ve applied to virtually any major city throughout Europe at the time. He describes workers living in shabby tenements, living on meagre wages, never knowing from week to week and month to month if they will be gainfully employed. This, he accurately commented, engendered a cycle of reckless spending on alcohol on payday, which engendered a perpetual cycle of poverty, conjugal violence, illness, vagrancy, and even death, all of which was cause for the corrosion of the moral and social fabric of society.

Hitler was attracted very early on in his life as a young man by the anti-Semitic press, and formed a very negative impression of Jews very early on in his life, which served as the cornerstone of his racial policy during the Second World War. Hitler was very much negatively impressed by the living conditions in which the Jews lived in Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century. In the book, he describes their neighbourhood as a very dirty ghetto, with Jews in various forms of foreign-looking garb, probably Hassidic Jews, walking around, looking rather unkempt and unwashed.

Probably a lot of people’s hygiene in Europe around that time wasn’t the best, including Hitler’s but this seemed to colour his judgement of them a lot. Jews’ involvement in the field of the arts, journalism, and politics also seemed to irk him tremendously. In all this he saw a tremendous threat to the purity and survival of the German Fatherland, along with what he considered to be the insidious Slavicization of the Habsburg Empire resulting in the De-Germanization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He saw the elimination of Socialism, Jews, and a great deal of the Slavs and a taking over of their territory in the east by force as the only way for Germany to survive and thrive. He didn’t think that building a Navy like Britain had done and pursuing overseas conquest would work, because it would cause Germany to come into conflict with Britain. So he saw expanding eastward as the way for Germany to thrive.

Another incisive comment he made, which could just as easily be applied to western countries today, had to do with population growth. When talking about peoples surviving and thriving, Hitler always speaks of expansion into new lands, to till new soil, because existing soil can only yield so much to feed so many people, and Germany’s population was expanding rapidly at that time. So he said that it’s better to allow procreation to continue, and let nature, through illness or bad harvests, weed out the weaklings, thereby improving the breed, rather than doing what we’ve ultimately done, which is using birth control, and limiting the number of births to a minimum, then nursing the few people that are born, and preventing them from dying at all costs, since we have so few people being born to begin with, we don’t want to lose even a single one, thereby weakening the genetic stock by nurturing the weaklings as well as the strong.

This Hitler said, was bound to cause the civilizations that did such things to be conquered and overtaken by others. One only has to look at the Chinese and Arab-Muslim countries to see what he was talking about to see the writing on the wall! But ultimately, as the title of this piece says, Hitler’s ‘Bad Book’ led to an unparalleled amount of social destruction which, by the western alliance’s response in fighting back against its evil, led to an unparalleled level of social re-construction.

What I mean to say is that a lasting peace in Europe resulted from all of this madness. A democratic Europe emerged, which ultimately led to the European Union which we know today, which, despite its setbacks, is here to stay. It led to a democratic and ultimately re-unified Germany which, ultimately, has expanded eastward, much more economically than militarily, than Hitler’s armies ever managed to get during the war, all under the aegis of NATO and the Pax Americana, thereby, in a way vindicating Hitler’s original wartime plan.

And lastly, and most controversially, the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ was basically resolved in the sense that, because of the Holocaust, which eliminated the Jews from most parts of Europe, a ‘critical mass’, so to speak of world wide sympathy emerged for the Jewish people. No longer was it politically correct to dump on the Jews by practicing a sort of bourgeois-style of what I like to call ‘parlour anti Semitism’, the kind of which many people in the middle and upper-middle classes practiced in cocktail conversation before the war in the more upper-echelons of western society, as well as the lower orders.

A sort of consensus basically emerged that the Jews had suffered a great tragedy, that this ‘Holocaust’, or literally a ‘Burnt Offering’ had elicited enough sympathy amongst the world’s population, that it had conferred upon God’s chosen people the right once again to their homeland. So that when the State of Israel was created after World War II in the late 1940s, after the war in Palestine, just about everybody in the world recognized this new country. Pretty much everybody agreed, that the Jews had paid a hefty price for it and that recognizing Israel was a no-brainer.

So basically, like the old adage says, ‘out of evil comes good’. Adolf Hitler may have been a madman, and an evil genius, but essentially, without him, I don’t think civilization would’ve advanced to the point that it has today. So I think I’ll continue reading his ‘Bad Book’, and see what lies beyond page 157. Maybe the pages of ‘my Struggle’ have a few more secrets to divulge about the deconstruction and reconstruction of society.

I remember back sometime in the 1970s or early 80s, there appeared on the scene in Canada and provincially in Québec, some sort of government ministry with a very long title, which ended with ‘…and the status of women’. Usually it was, and I think still is, a rather junior cabinet position, and was usually staffed by some middle-aged woman politician in a suit with nice hair and jewellery.

So much for that. A funny thing has happened about thirty years later. Official government websites in Québec now all list the feminine gender first and the male gender second, across the board. We increasingly hear a lot of politicians across Canada talking about ‘women and men’ in their official sound bites and speeches, as opposed to ‘men and women’.

It’s all of a sudden all about putting women in the driver’s seat, both literally and figuratively. The number of women drivers on the RTC transit buses in Québec city has increased dramatically, as have women police officers, all due to affirmative action programs.

In the media, not a day goes by where our news, weather, or sports is not delivered by a sometimes almost pathologically good-looking and well-made-up killer boob-tube babe who has obviously graduated from university with a diploma or degree in broadcasting, communications, or journalism, and was chosen to replace the aging, paunchy and balding old geezer of a man who held the job before her.

Women are taking over everywhere you look, but one fact remains: The ‘status of men’, so to speak, is suffering as a result, and the ‘status of conjugal relations and the family’, is so even more. One only has to look at any American, Canadian, or British TV show or movie, or commercial to see the dysfunction: Women are being portrayed as brainy, beautiful, assertive, in control, aggressive, not taking no for an answer, putting men ‘in their place and taking over’, even karate chopping them and kneeing them in the balls and taking command of the situation.

Men, on the other hand, are all being portrayed as weak, indecisive, lazy, narcissistic, sophomoric, scared, predatory, violent, and generally inept at being able to save the world, much less fix a faucet. It’s sad because men are still the ones who do most of the hardest jobs, from a physical standpoint: Construction, trades, mining, military combat, forestry, working in paper mills, steel mills, oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, machine shops, and so on.

Apart from the so-called ‘collateral damage’ of civilian casualties of war, men are still the ones who bear the brunt of war to protect our freedom, and as a result of all the other jobs enumerated above, still have a lower life expectancy than women, and are likely to continue to do so. Conversely, women’s higher life expectancy has nothing to do with any sort of inherent wellspring of genetic or moral superiority on their part. They just haven’t been exposed to the same type or level of endogenous and exogenous stress, trauma, and toxic load that men have, but are starting to now, and it’s starting to show up in a decrease in women’s life expectancy.

I guess as women fight their way to the top of the heap, they’re realizing that it’s not all fun and games to exercise power and privilege; that a lot of stress and illness comes with it. In that respect, maybe men and women will come to have a healthier respect for one another, since they will now be on an equal footing: They will both be equally stressed-out and in need of a break from the worries of the temporal world, and may just end up turning to each other in the process for support, that’s if they can find the time to be in the same room to have a civilized conversation with each other!

Well folks, here’s to the ‘status of women’, oh, and to all those middle-aged women politicians of yore with suits, nice hair, and jewellery. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. I just hope that nobody has to start up a ‘status of men’ ministry. I really don’t know what I’d wear or how I’d fix my hair, or whether or not I’d wear any jewellery. (I’ve only got my university graduation ring, and I don’t look good in an earring, so that settles that!). Maybe a ministry for the status of the Canadian Family? Mr. Harper, are you listening? Do morally, spiritually, mentally and physically healthy families make for a healthy economy? Enquiring minds want to know!

Well now, it’s a new day, a New Year, and I’m now officially one day older. So what does it all mean? I didn’t even watch any balls dropping in Times Square, or ‘Bye ‘Bye specials on Radio Canada, or the usual CBC TV special for New Years Eve. I couldn’t even muster the strength to stay up past a quarter to 8 PM last night!

Yes siree folks, the end of the year for me has long become synonymous with taking stock of things, both literally and metaphorically. I usually take the opportunity of having some vacation time between Christmas and New Years to do some cleaning around the house, to get to clearing out stuff that hasn’t been attended to since the last major cleaning the previous spring.

This year, on December 30th, I went to bed at 8 PM, with two cups of strong coffee in me, only to wake up at 3:30 AM, rarin’ to go, so I did. I had breakfast, and started cleaning. I did the bathroom, the kitchen floor, all the vacuuming, including moving pieces of furniture that hadn’t been moved in months if not years, and attaching that little fine vertical sucking attachment thingy to the vacuum hose to get into all the little nooks and crannies where no sucking thingy had been for eons.

I cleaned out my filing cabinet drawers: Holy cow, did I ever dig out some crap. I was wondering why the bottom one wasn’t closing properly anymore. I thought to myself that maybe there was some paper that had fallen in back of the drawer in the inner bowels of the thing? So I pulled the drawer out until it was almost off its track and reached inside with my arm, amply scraping it on the sharp sheet metal in the process, drawing blood I’ll have you know, and found a whole rat’s nest of years worth of crumpled up paper jamming up the place. It took me what seemed to be forever to get it all out, and by that time, I was grunting, and bleeding, by the way.

I ended up throwing out three full green garbage bags of paper into the dumpster out front of my place. Then I attacked my kitchen table. I cleared it all off of everything and wiped it down, as well as wiping off all the objects on it and soaking many of them in hot, soapy water, including the butter dish. I also pulled out the kitchen table and dusted behind it and got all the dust bunnies that were hiding there. I washed my place mats from the kitchen table, along with at least three other loads of laundry, and then attacked my book shelves, which hadn’t been re-organized in years.

I got rid of a few books that I had no use for, and straightened out the rest of the shelves, making them look a lot smarter in the process, even going so far as to find certain items which I thought I’d lost. In the process, I found my Mother’s old 35 mm camera, with a film still in it, and a dead lithium battery. So I went to the pharmacy to get a new battery, and to mail a couple of letters, but they didn’t have a battery, and I set off the alarm at the Jean Coutu pharmacy’s anti-theft security system again, just like on René Lévesque. I had to go through the embarrassing routine of emptying all my pockets again to prove that I hadn’t stolen anything, putting my coat through alone without me in it, then going out again, having put all my bobbles back into my pockets.

All that to say that by the time the post-supper hour came on New Years Eve, my body was aching from all of the bending and stretching and forcing I’d done all day, having been up since 3:30 AM, that I settled down in front of a muted TV, and listened to music quietly by candlelight until even the muted TV was too much, and I turned it off, and so was the music, so I turned it off, and the candles started burning out by themselves, which were starting to tell me something without me knowing it, so I blew the rest of them out, and tucked in for the night at 7:45 PM on Dec. 31st, 2011.

A far cry from when I was in my twenties, when I’d go and paint the town red, and stay up to all ours partying, and consuming all manner of substances either controlled or otherwise. This brings me back to my first point. I’m one day older. What, if anything has changed in my life? My standard of living is pretty much the same. Decent, but not spectacular. I’d say one notch above the subsistence/poverty level, with potential to move upwards. I’m well health-wise, most of my big health challenges of previous years are behind me, and the health challenges of old age have yet to rear their ugly head, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one, and making sure I take my meds as prescribed by my doctor, and get plenty of exercise, sleep well and eat right.

What worries me are the billions of people out there who’re not doing so well. You see them on the news every day. The Arab Spring. Floods in the Philippines, in Pakistan, in Brazil, in Bangladesh, over thirty different wars raging around the world. That’s why I’m so grateful to live in Canada. We’re very blessed to be where we are. Forget the English/French squabbles of yesteryear, that’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Both Wolfe and Montcalm may have been enemies on the battlefield, but at heart, they were Brother Masons, and as such were honoured by their fellow Brethren by a common monument. You can see it in the Governor’s Park right by Dufferin Terrace beside the Frontenac Hotel if ever you take a stroll down in those parts.

It’s a living testimonial to how the power of brotherly love can overcome all differences. And oh, by the way, I hear that both Wolfe and Montcalm have direct descendants. Apparently they both meet every couple of years on Grande-Allée for a few drinks and get thoroughly pie-eyed in the process! Now that’s my idea of taking stock of things, metaphorically-speaking, that is.

Happy New Year, and God Bless you all!

I was speaking with someone the other day who’s in the know  about the mission in Afghanistan, and the reasons that western countries are there. We spoke about democracy, rights, freedoms, and so on, then it came down to the nitty gritty: Resources.

I mentioned that I’d seen articles in the newspaper about copper and iron being mined in the region, and an oil pipeline wanting to be built across a part of the country. This recently-returned soldier scoffed and said that all of these things were window dressing compared to the real deal, which are strategic minerals, most of which he couldn’t even pronounce, which America and the Chinese are both vying for in the region.

These minerals, if and when they are secured and developed, will form the basis for the future generations of electrically-powered weapons and weapon systems, vehicles, and so forth, of the armed forces of roughly the years 2040-60, and whosoever controls them, will be the country which will be the best equipped to deploy the best-equipped armed forces on the planet so as to complete the process of global conquest, which is still currently going on, and is now pitting America and her allies, with mainland China and her allies, with the Arab/Muslim world caught in the crossfire.

So it all comes down to the art of war, as it always has. Whosoever is best suited and equipped to wage war and to compete for the spoils which will enable them to wage the next war, effectively rules the roost. This enables those countries and their allies to control global commerce to supply their armies so as to keep them deployed throughout the world, so as to maintain their access to strategic resources, so as to keep their armies deployed throughout the world! This then allows those countries to take the military technologies they’ve researched and developed and have deployed in the ‘Theatre of War’, and cause them to ‘trickle down’ into the civilian sphere, once they’ve been field tested in real world situations of war, which act as a sort of pre-market type of R&D platform, to see how those technologies will react to high-stress situations, and how they interact with a human interface, which is what it’s all about, since we want humans to use these new scientific discoveries and technologies.

Then, based on what is hopefully some sort of ‘victory’ in the ‘Theatre’ or at least in the realm of public opinion, the trickle down effect establishes a new sort of peace in the world, with those countries who will control the patents, manufacture and distribution of both the military and civilian products and services which have resulted from this process, being the biggest beneficiaries of it all.

This is where I see America and her allies still having the last word. Everybody has been announcing the death knell of America for decades, even before she rose to prominence in WWII, there were those who doubted her ability to rise to the occasion and take a role of leadership in the world. But what makes America great is that regardless of all of her internal squabbling, of which she is renowned for , (after all, America was founded by dissenters from all of the countries of Europe and more!), she is always capable of rising to the occasion when a common external threat presents itself, which can convincingly make people believe that their right to disagree with each other is now sufficiently threatened that they should put their differences aside, and unite so as to fight the common external threat.

Such was the case in both world wars, and may end up being the case again with the Chinese, if ever the Chinese ever commit the grievous enough error of embarking upon a program of naval construction, which includes an aircraft-carrier fleet capable of rivalling that of America’s nuclear-powered carrier fleet. Which seems to be exactly what is happening.

China recently launched a 60 000 or so ton aircraft carrier, diesel-powered, which was an unfinished version of a Soviet carrier that was leftover from the Cold-War. If they have their way, they’ll embark upon a program of building a lot more, and now have the world’s second-biggest military-industrial complex, after America, and growing.

This is why they’re so interested in these metallic minerals in Afghanistan. If they can control them, they can develop electrically-powered weapons and weapon systems at the same time or before America and her allies do, and therefore have a better chance of being globally dominant on the world stage, thereby potentially supplanting America and her allies as the world’s most important source of power, starting militarily and economically, then flowing from there to the spheres of language, culture, religion, politics, and sports, since all of these subsequent factors flow from the control of markets, and control of markets flows from control of ‘The Art of War’.

So the stage is set in ‘The Theatre’. The actors are ready, they’ve got their costumes on, they know their lines, and what they don’t know they can ad-lib once ‘onstage’. The props are all on hand, we’re just not sure yet who’s the stage manager and who exactly is the ‘director’ of this ‘passion play’. Something tells me he’s in the sky, looking down on it all, and he ain’t talkin’ until the appointed time when he will yell ‘action!’ and all Hell will break loose, if you’ll pardon the expression, and we’ll all be in for one Hell of a ‘good show’.

Don’t know if they’ll be an intermission where we can take a break to use the washroom and get some snacks or something, or how many acts this show will have, hopefully no more than five, it’s usually nice when they can get to the dénouement sometime around act four or five, so that we can wrap it up and go home and get some sleep. After all, they’re going to have to have a huge ‘cast party’ after the show called the ‘truth and reconciliation commission’, where all the bouquets and brickbats are given out to all the actors, so we can’t afford to have the show drag on too long, because from what I’ve seen of other similar ‘shows’ the ‘cast party’ afterwards sometimes lasts just as long if not longer than the actual show!

So here’s to the art of war: Long may she reign in the land of the living and the dead. Just as long as we know why we’re here and what it’s all about next time somebody speaks ill of the mission in Afghanistan or elsewhere. We’re standing up for what we believe in as western democratic countries. Our military/economic strategy protects our languages, cultures, monotheistic faiths, and democratic systems of government, which includes such things as the rule of law, due process, one person, one vote, equality rights, the writ of habeas Corpus, freedom of peaceful assembly, mobility, expression, information, and a whole host of other things which the Chinese and the Arab-Muslim countries are only just starting to become aware of. The fact of the matter is that we may end up having to interface with these people in much more conflicted ways than we are already in before they are able to enjoy the full fruits of what we already have.

I think the Theatre is going to be full, both with those on stage as well as those in the audience, with many willingly and unwillingly from the audience being drawn onto the stage in the process.

All part of the Art of War. I like Art, he’s a nice guy, but when he gets mad, look out, the dirt starts flyin’!

God Bless you all.

We live in a nice cozy town. ‘It’s so clean here!’ say all the American tourists to me when they get off the motor coach in Old Québec when I give city tours in the summer months. I usually tell them that, contrary to the USA, we’re much more tolerant of higher taxes here in Canada, especially in the Province of Québec, because, in exchange, we get a lot of bang for our tax buck in the form of a high level of quality and quantity of government services, which includes, by the way, picking up the trash, which, it would seem, is not a given in many American cities.

However, this brings me to a subject which is beginning to be an issue here in our Province. The budget deficit and the debt. For those of you who might need a ‘deficit and debt for dummies 101’ lesson, I’ll make it real simple: The deficit is how much the government spends over and above what it receives in tax revenue in one year, and the debt is the accumulation of all the yearly deficits since the government started keeping track of such things way back when.

What’s fascinating to me as a native-born Anglophone Québecer, who first and foremost identifies with Canada, then Québec, is how long it has taken all the fiercely flag-waving nationalist types here in French-speaking Québec to sit up and take notice of just how deeply they have sunk into the proverbial doo doo so to speak in regards to the state of public finances in this province.

If one goes onto the website of the IEDM (Institut Économique de Montréal), it lists Québec as one of the five most ‘indebted nations of the world’. So I guess having elevated ourselves to the status of ‘nation’ has brought with it a certain litany of woe and a burden of responsibility we didn’t quite anticipate when we embarked on our much-ballyhooed Revolution which was ever so Quiet back in 1960, when Jean Lesage (John the Wise, or is that, John the Wise Guy?) promised us that we would be ‘Maître chez nous’ (Masters in our own house).

Well, it looks like the house has been mortgaged several times over. This same IEDM organization, which uses official Government of Québec statistics from the Ministry of Finance’s budgetary forecast for 2011-12, estimates that Québec’s accumulated debt, including the debts of most universities, hospitals, school boards, Hydro Québec, but excluding Québec’s share of the federal debt is in the vicinity of 234 710 000 000$ That’s TWO HUNDRED THIRTY FOUR BILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION DOLLARS, and counting.

I remember almost twenty years ago, when I was at the University of Ottawa, in the original Nation’s Capital, that in the years 1993-94, the Chrétien/Martin administration was all about slaying the deficit and cutting the debt. They were really committed to it. A lot of cuts to health care and education were made. My tuition went up just as I was going back to university. My government bursaries were cut, and my loans increased. I had to be more resourceful and scrounged for more private sources of student financial aid. It forced me to be more resourceful and to budget my time more efficiently in having to fill out lots of forms and get lots of letters of reference, and supporting documents from various sources, but I did it.

A lot of people were unhappy in Ottawa when the axe fell on their department. The entire civil service and way of organizing government administration was re-thought. The Canadian civil service has not been the same since. Some say it is understaffed and can’t do its job properly, while others say it is being forced to simply do more with less.

I get the feeling that the Québec civil service, and the 8 million citizens who count on it for all sorts of things, are, about twenty years after the federal experience, going to have to swallow the same bitter pill. There is simply too much of an entrenched sense of entitlement here in Québec and too many people living off the public feed trough, starting from large corporations, all the way down to individuals on welfare who’re able to work but choose not to for various reasons.

Nearly half the population of Québec pays no tax whatsoever, and our population is aging faster and growing slower than the rest of Canada, and we are faced with the same sluggish economic outlook as elsewhere. It seems strange, though that it has taken nearly twenty years more than at the federal level for this issue to even make it onto the radar screen. And even then those that do so risk being pooh poohed and brow beaten into submission as mean-spirited neo-conservative ideologues who’re hell-bent on dismantling all that is sacred that ‘we as a nation’ or ‘we as a people’ have ‘built together’.

There are many of the baby boomer generation and a little younger, for whom the state, state-building, and the ideology of statism, especially on the Gaullist French model, was, and still is, the ‘new religion’, which was to supplant Roman Catholicism as the balm to assuage all that ailed us as a ‘people’. We were to put our ‘faith’ in the ‘universal and all-inclusive generosity and fairness’ of the state, which would level out the playing field and which, if it couldn’t eliminate most class distinctions, it would certainly go a long way in attenuating them.

This ideology is still quite prevalent amongst the aging constituency of baby-boomers in Québec, who’ve benefitted the most from the manna of the Quiet Revolution and its state sector jobs in government administration, health care and education, and social services and who are now retiring in large numbers and aging rapidly and are beginning to require substantial amounts of health and social services, and who also are well-known to be a very vocal constituency at the ballot box.

It remains to be seen if the next Québec government, who will inherit the legacy of all previous big spending habits of all Québec governments since 1960, be they Liberal, UN or PQ, will have the testicular fortitude to buck the demographics of the province and do the right thing so as to guarantee the future solvency of this province. So far the issue is at least on the radar screen, but just about any potential Québec Premier is deathly afraid of taking on the unions in Québec, especially if you are the least bit of a nationalist and have secessionist sympathies. Pauline Marois is the leader of the mainstream secessionist PQ party, which has backed away in recent times from its left-wing allegiances, and François Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister and wannabe premier and leader of the newly-formed CAQ party (Coalition pour l’Avenir du Québec, or Coalition for the Future of Québec), is a right-wing pro-business secessionist who founded and ran a charter airline in our province before running for office, but wants to put the secession issue on the back burner for ten years while we deal with more pressing issues like the debt.

So perhaps Mr. Legault would have the spine to take on the unions and face the inevitable backlash of street protests and potentially violent clashes between protesters and police as the painful but necessary transformation of our society would be undertaken. What Québecers would have to admit is that it would now be their own kind that was now clamping down on them, and not an outside force speaking another language, which in years gone by was the default scapegoat of choice when one had to blame somebody in this Province for why it wasn’t going well, we could always point our fingers at English-speaking people and conveniently assign blame and lay it at the feet of Wolfe and his acolytes.

Now things have come full circle. Large segments of French-speaking people in our province have become very prosperous, along with their English-speaking compatriots in Québec and the rest of Canada, in large part due to the timely, if perhaps overdrawn intervention of the secular state in their lives, by making access to doctors, colleges and other institutions of higher learning more accessible than in any other time in our history, thereby allowing an unprecedented number of people to rise out of the mire of poverty, by allowing them to be healthy, get educated, start a business, get a good job, own property, become consumers, and so on.

The intervention and indebtedness of the civil state has undoubtedly facilitated the creation of vast amounts of temporal wealth by citizens, corporations, and everybody else that became prosperous through its interaction with the government. But in doing so, the government has incurred vast amounts of debt, trying to be all things to all people, all the time, in all circumstances. This is one thing that the Church never deigned to aspire to: It got involved in health care and education and social services first of all out of a sense of duty dictated by the Gospels and the overall sacred writings in Scripture. To do unto others as we would have done unto us. To care for the widow and the orphan, and whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me, and so forth. Secondly, it did so because of the gaping void left by the absence of the presence of the civil state.

However the civil state, with its non-sanctified, secular understanding of things, arrived on the scene, and declared that all persons have ‘rights’, and ‘liberties’, and ‘freedoms’, and that said affairs are ‘universal’. I get the impression that they’re only as universal as the civil state is able to continue paying for them. As it is, debt service is the third line item on the Québec provincial budget after health care and education. Something tells me that line item number three is getting bigger and bigger because line items one and two, especially one, are growing at an alarming rate.

Hospitals were once, not long ago, ‘hospices’ where one went to die, not to be cured. We may be headed back to such an arrangement for a certain percentage of the population in the not-too-distant future, if the debt situation plays out as I see it.

Yes, our town is very ‘cozy’, and ‘clean’, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But storm clouds are gathering on the horizon. My advice to all those who are out there and reading these words: save your pennies, and buy yourself some private supplementary health insurance. I already have, and I only earn less than 25 000$/year. My coverage doesn’t cover everything, but enough so that I’d be safe if I was injured and needed supplementary benefits on top of my EI sick benefits or Workers Compensation, and needed the services of a private physiotherapist.

Don’t think that the government you grew up with will be there for you when you retire. You may not be able to retire at all or in the way you hoped or expected to. Be prepared to continue working until you’re 65 and beyond. Make healthy choices, look after yourself. Don’t expect anybody, least of all the government to do so for you in the not-so-distant future. Men of money, power, property and prestige are at this very moment deciding our fate. Some of them are right here in Québec city and they speak French.

Many others, however, are in far off places such as London, New York, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Rome, Berlin, and Los Angeles. The decisions they’re making will directly affect just how ‘cozy’ and ‘clean’ we continue to be here in Québec city, and will ultimately determine how much tax we pay, or not, and how many government services we get, or not, as the case may be. But I can tell you right now, it won’t be some shrill-sounding union boss shouting into a megaphone or protester with a bandana covering their face on Parliament Hill in Québec city that will ultimately determine the outcome of the looming debt crisis in our Province.

It remains to be seen, however, if, after all is said and done, if the trash still gets picked up in Old Québec so as to keep up appearances for the American tourists when they step off the motor coach at the Chateau Frontenac. We wouldn’t want to make out that we weren’t ‘cozy’ and ‘clean’, on top of being ‘polite’, now would we?

Watch this space. Film at eleven. See everything. Free potato peeler if you call now. Operators are standing by. Have your credit card ready. Don’t miss out on this special once in a lifetime offer. Call now!!!

The basic principle behind imperialism is what we call ‘core/periphery development or exploitation’, otherwise known as ‘heartland/hinterland’ development. It goes something like this. A ‘core’ or ‘heartland’-type society, which is, or was a repository of military might, administrative know-how, economic power of sorts, usually financial, commercial, and industrial, decides at some point in its history to develop, or exploit a ‘peripheral’, or ‘hinterland’ society or several societies, which are sources of raw materials,(be they animal, vegetable and mineral), labour, as well as acting as potential markets for the ‘core’/’heartland’ country’s products, investment and so on.

All empires were and continue to be developed like this, either via military conquest, or economic and linguisto-cultural domination, or a complex combination of the two of them. This includes the current situation with the three remaining imperial wannabe groups on our planet: The Americans and her allies, which includes Canada, The Chinese, and the Arab-Muslim world.

All three of these groups seek global domination of some sort. The Americans seek it through the use of their military-industrial might and domination of the high seas, coupled with their domination of the global flow of information, knowledge and pop culture through such things as Hollywood, including a multitude of global information and entertainment conglomerates which dominate the production, storage and dissemination of music, popular entertainment both on television, the movies, the web, newspapers, radio, new media, as well as continuing to being world leaders in university research in a wide range of fields.

The Chinese seek world domination through their increasingly dominant control of the global manufacturing sector, which is bringing in billions of dollars of foreign currency into their capital markets, and allowing them to undertake a major expansion in their military-industrial complex, allowing them to now rival that of America in the quantity and quality of research and development funds allocated to the development of new weapons and weapons systems, especially in the field of naval construction and deployment as well as aerospace.

China now has aspirations to become a world power on the high seas, and seeks to potentially one day overshadow America’s ability to project power on the world’s oceans by beginning to build an aircraft carrier fleet. Their first carrier, an old Soviet-era model which runs on Diesel, was recently launched, and nothing leads one to believe that the Chinese do not seek to be satisfied with just that one. They will surely embark on an ambitious program to build either nuclear or perhaps alternative-fuel-powered carriers, if the technology can be perfected, and they can access the resources to do so in a timely fashion. The Germans are already working on the development of a military-spec hydrogen motor for naval applications, and the Chinese have industrial spies everywhere around the world.

Whomsoever is able to control global commerce on the high seas, and access to the world’s resources by having a Navy capable of gaining privileged access to the trade ports of the planet and its resources, will more than likely obtain a stranglehold on power on this planet. This is why, to date, despite China’s overwhelming stash of foreign, especially American currency, it still can’t claim to dominate America, since America still holds sway over the sea lanes of the planet to protect all of the traffic in goods carried to markets throughout the world, including China’s merchant fleet, which, like everybody else, relies on the benevolence of the United States Navy to ensure that its vessels are able to navigate the sea lanes of this planet safely.

The Arab-Muslim countries of this world seek more of a religious and ethno-linguistic and cultural domination of this planet, and are more using the tremendous amount of wealth generated by their control of the world’s petroleum reserves, to propagate Islam, Islamic revolution, and the Islamic lifestyle and way of being, thinking, and doing throughout the world. Their message is very simple and fundamental. It catches on wherever there is a more or less socio-economically developed society, which has yet to be greatly affected by the effects of western-style ‘progressive’ secular-humanistic materialism, consumerism, liberal democracy, feminism, and so on. Or, if such trends do seem to be emerging, Islam comes and fills the fundamentalist breach in the ideological spectrum, co-opting and/or acting as a brake on any overt attempt to overly secularize or westernize whatever civilization it dwells in, acting as a cultural ‘buffer’ between the west and the society in question.

Where and how these three ‘tectonic plates’ will come into contact with each other is anybody’s guess. The fact of the matter is that they are already in many ways. It’s just that they have yet to collide in any sort of cataclysmic way which would cause a major eruption of armed hostilities between the three parties.

The way I foresee the future playing out of these three ‘core/periphery’ relationships and their overlapping with each other is roughly as follows: As the title of this piece belies, the true ‘security’ of the American homeland, in the sense of its people’s security of the person through the obtention of gainful domestic employment opportunities, will continue to be tenuous, probably for several decades to come. What I see emerging, especially if the recent flow of American expatriates into Canada is any indication, is that the social and economic friction and corrosion which is occurring in America will be permitted to be wilfully allowed to continue, even to be accentuated.

The powers that be in America, who’re driving the foreign policy agenda forward, want, like the British, French and other imperial powers before them to make sure that Americans domestically are not too comfortable living in the homeland. They want as many of them as possible to pick up their belongings and seek out greener pastures in foreign lands where America wields influence and power, either as soldiers, diplomats, labourers, trades people, professionals, academics, and so on. They want the world to be populated by Americans who will bring with them the English language, the American way of thinking, of doing, the Christian religion, and so on.

These people are and are to be the vanguard of the emerging new Pax Americana. And the frontier, contrary to what Frederic Jackson Turner spoke about in the early 20th century, will not be the frontier of yore, but the new New Frontier, not of Kennedy’s mind, but that of Reagan, Kissinger, Bush, Clinton, and of the Council on Foreign relations, the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, the OECD, the G8, the G20, and so on.

This frontier is currently being opened up and developed in such ‘peripheral’ countries as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and a whole host of ‘stan’ countries where Islam is present, and so are many mineral resources which are strategic to America’s and her allies’ future domination of the world. These resources are currently being eyed by both the Americans and the Chinese as potential sources for the production of the electrically-driven weapons and weapons systems of the next several decades, which will ultimately determine the outcome of who will dominate this planet in future generations.

I see the Arab-Muslim peoples of this world as being the middle-men acting as either pawns, or shrewd power brokers in their own right, between the two last remaining geo-political forces on this planet, as they vie for supremacy over bragging rights over whose language will be spoken, whose culture will predominate, whose system of spirituality and faith will prevail, and lastly, whose political system will predominate to facilitate the economic development of the planet’s animal, vegetable, mineral, and human resources, which ultimately will act as a vehicle for the predominance of language, culture, faith, and so on.

I see the Americans and her allies coming out on top, with the Chinese and the Arab-Muslim world having substantially improved their lot in life in the process, albeit with the loss of tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of lives in the process through war, famine, genocide, natural disasters, economic calamity, environmental devastation, disease, pandemics, and so forth.

It’s not easy to predict the future, especially not in today’s world. But everybody is sounding the death knell of America and her presence on the world stage. I’m saying, though, that this is just the beginning of something brand new, an all-new Pax Americana. One built out of the wreckage of the old. A new American Revolution, one just as glorious yet bloody and full of carnage, which shall bring out in her people, her allies, yea in all of humanity, all that is great and glorious of the human condition, and all that is depraved, despotic, and causes us to despair of the salvation of our immortal souls.

God Bless America, God Bless the coming of the Kingdom, as foretold in days of old. God bless her allies and her friends, may He make his face shine upon them and be gracious to them. And may God have mercy upon her enemies, who will have chosen to do battle with the Great Republic and her allies, her loins girded with the firmness of faith, her arms equipped with the instruments of war in the arsenal of democracy in its unquenchable thirst for victory, and her brow anointed with the pledge of a nation whose flag promises oneness under Almighty God, and liberty and Justice for all. Amen.

You know it used to be in our province that if you wanted to hear some good preaching or to be instructed in the right and proper ideas and ways of thinking, being and acting, you’d go to Mass on Sunday and listen to what your parish priest had to say about the prevailing topics of the day.

The clergy didn’t hesitate to comment on anything and everything, and were the principle arbiters of public and private morality in all spheres of people’s lives in Québec. Everything from how we should dress, who we should consort with or not, what we should or should not read, what to think, how to vote, and so on.

One famous saying which came out of this period, in regards to elections was that ‘heaven is blue and hell is red’, being a not-so-veiled reference to Québec voters not to vote Liberal, whose party colours were red, symbolizing secular reforms, and social and economic progress in living standards, which the clergy were afraid would pull the faithful away from the faith.

This is precisely what happened. People in Québec throughout the twentieth century, like elsewhere in Canada and the western world, had an overwhelming thirst for an improvement in their material living standards, and to rise out of the mire of economic deprivation, which they’d known for much of their history living in this land.

The problem is that this desire for social and economic progress and its concomitant association with rising out of poverty, also became equated with being Catholic and obedient to their clergy and their faith. Most Québecers began to equate being poor and subservient with being Catholic churchgoers, whereas being socially and economically emancipated and prosperous began to be associated with throwing off the yoke of their faith and their religion, and embracing the ‘new religion’ of such things as big government in the form of the secular state, then later the very powerful and populist secular religious ‘liberation theology’ of secessionism, which still lingers residually in our province, along with a certain religiosity concerning the defence and promotion of the French language.

However, the overpowering and overwhelmingly dominant hegemonic discourse which has risen up to supplant all of these other heretofore ‘wannabe’ forms of ‘religion’, is a commercialized form of commoditised popular culture. In the new Québec, culture is the New Theology ‘par excellence’ and its promoters and defenders are its new ‘high priests’. In Québec, ‘culture’ is now sacrosanct. Around here we cannot do enough or too much for the cause of ‘culture’, and anybody who publically takes a stand against the idea of having more as opposed to less ‘culture’ in the public domain, whether it be art galleries and exhibits, festivals, shows of all sorts, is branded, for all intents and purposes, as a ‘heretic’, against the ‘new secular religion of culture.’

What I’m driving at, essentially, is that people such as stand-up comedians and musicians especially, have now elevated themselves to the status of being the new ‘priestly caste’ of our province, stand-up comedians especially. Not a day passes where some stand-up comedian in Québec isn’t coming out with some new travelling show which he or she is taking all across Québec, usually with some sort of theme which seeks to raise awareness about some sort of pet cause of theirs, whether it be handicapped people, mental health, some sort of disease or sundry social injustice, the ‘awareness raising agenda’ has been totally Balkanized by this merry band of ‘wannabe’ ‘stand-up pseudo-preachers’.

The worst of it is that Québecers have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. In the old days, when Roman Catholicism was dominant, at least the clergy were genuinely interested in saving our souls, and had our spiritual well-being at heart. As well, the price you had to pay for your seat at Church and what you put into the collection plate was a pittance compared to the price these people are charging for tickets for people to go see their shows and to be ‘sermonized’ about whatever pet social cause they happen to be plugging that year, and end up lining their pockets with the proceeds.

What I find ironic is that Québecers swear up and down that they’ve ‘freed’ themselves from the power of the clergy and its influence in ‘telling us what to do and how to think’ etc.. The way I see it, Québecers have simply traded one set of clerics for another, the new ones charging them more of their hard-earned money so as to be ‘sermonized’ not-so subliminally about a whole slate of secular social causes, none of which add up to a coherent collectively-construed and driven agenda of public morality or ethics.

And, to boot, these new ‘clerics’ are in no way being held accountable for their public and private behaviour the way Roman Catholic clerics are having every single aspect of their public and private lives scrutinized and held up to the microscope for criticism by the secular media. On the contrary, these people are considered ‘stars’ and at the forefront of the ‘progressive awareness-raising’ movement about all of the various flavour of the month pet social causes being peddled in the public forum.

It just goes to show you how ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’. We’re still a clerically-dominated society here in Québec, we just don’t acknowledge it anymore, or worse yet, don’t want to admit it, or more likely are completely oblivious to it in our mostly ignorant, secular era of media-driven ‘culture’.

Personally, I think I’ll stick with going to Mass on Sundays and getting my ‘preaching’ from an authentic source. I also know that the organization I’m frequenting on Sunday morning has the interests of my immortal soul’s salvation, and isn’t about to deny that I have one to begin with that needs saving.

The Church may have committed some errors and abuses of power in its day in our province, but it’s been around in one way shape or form since New France was founded in July of 1608, when Champlain founded what was to become Québec city, the Province of Québec and Canada over four hundred years ago. Nobody can take that away from us as people of faith and people of the Mother Church.
I think that post-modern Québecers are now very temporally rich, but spiritually poor, and it’s beginning to show in the form and substance of our social fabric and the tone and quality, or lack thereof, of our public discourse. I can only hope that as the twenty first century continues to emerge, we as Québecers, both English and French, will look to the faith of our forbearers as a source of inspiration, not as a poverty-stricken and subservient vestige of a by-gone era which should be forever relegated to the dustbin of history, but instead elevated to a truly sanctified position of honour deserving of a people who for so many generations, put their faith in a loving God of their understanding, and a true ‘priestly caste’ of clerics whose first and foremost objective was and still remains, the eternal salvation of our immortal souls.

You know, I was lying in bed the other night, trying to get to sleep, wondering why I still slept alone at the age of forty seven. I could only attribute so much of it to my modest income, Roman Catholic faith in a secular world, and English language in a majority French society.

After a while I came to the conclusion that I’m alone because of my outlook on life and the values I espouse. It used to be that a man was the uncontested breadwinner in the family, and the woman’s contribution to the family income was mostly secondary and/or of a non monetary nature, and was considered part of her duties as wife and mother to devote her time and energy towards supporting her husband in all of his endeavours, and to manage the household’s assets, both temporal and spiritual, for the benefit of the whole family.

All of this changed in the 20th century, when women entered the labour force in North America and other parts of the west for the first time in a big way, especially in the two world wars. These two conflicts required such a huge mobilization in material and human resources, that men alone could not achieve victory. Women were required to perform many important tasks, both at home and in the theatre of war.

This simultaneously opened up new vistas of opportunity for women in the fields of paid employment, but like all ‘solutions’ to all ‘problems’ everywhere, it creates new ‘problems’. In this case, society found that the social fabric of western civilization was now under more strain than ever from the rising tide of women’s desire for social, economic and sexual emancipation.

The old code of chivalry, such is it is, always dictated that men were knights and gentlemen, and women were ladies. This being the case, a lady by nature, or at least by custom, deferred to a gentleman’s authority, power, and to a certain degree, his social and economic status. In exchange, a gentleman deferred to his lady’s more genteel ladylike nature, her grace and virtue, and gave her full latitude in matters concerning the management of the household, and the moral, religious and educational upbringing of their children.

This is generally where the concept of all of the ‘opening of doors’ for women has come from over the years, and precisely why feminists in the 1960s and 70s started to refuse to have doors opened for them. They felt that men were physically opening doors for them but metaphorically keeping them shut to them in the professional sphere, as women more and more started coming onto the labour market as business people and professionals.

This is where the old system has broken down and has become irrevocably fragmented. On the one hand you have traditional women who like being catered to, and have no ambition of having a professional career. They perhaps look forward to working part time two to three days a week in a small time job to supplement their husband’s main income, but their main objective is to have children and to raise them. These women generally are more traditionally-minded, and like having ‘doors opened’ for them in the old-fashioned way, and are more likely than not to believe in God and to go to Church on Sundays.

Then there are women who want a career, and maybe one or two children, if that, maybe none, and want to focus on their professional life, career, business, etc. These women may or may not like men to ‘open doors’ for them the old fashioned way, and may even be the principle breadwinner in their family, and are often divorced or have had two or more common law partners by their mid to late forties, and by that age are often single and no longer looking for a conjugal arrangement of any sort.

Then there are the even younger, post modern women in their twenties and early to mid thirties, who’ve grown up with little to no influence of traditional society from before full-blown secularization of the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, and have had virtually no positive role models to speak of to set the example of how this civilization could be beneficial to them.

They’ve grown up in the full glare of divorced or divorcing parents, sex scandals in politics, the Church, sports, the corporate world, waning interest in politics, religion, marriage, the nuclear family, and so on. They’ve also been raised in an aggressive climate of women’s rights, homosexual rights, secularization of society, fragmentation of the social order in all spheres, the breaking down and reordering of social, political and economic structures of all kinds, which has only served to reinforce a sense of entitlement as well as opportunity to take advantage of the social turmoil and chaos to move their cause forward and to fill the breaches being filled by the retreating waves of traditional social structures.

These women often want it all. They’re bright, brainy, beautiful, and purport to be well-bred, and can talk a mile a minute in English and in French as well as possibly a third or even fourth language to argue virtually any point in their favour. They’ve got degrees in law, medicine, engineering, business administration, accounting, pure and applied sciences, you name it. Many have figured out the system and now are taking advantage of the best of what the old and new have to offer them.

They want the physical ‘doors to be opened’, as well as the ‘metaphorical doors’. They now expect men to still defer to their feminine characteristics (not necessarily their true ‘lady-like’ virtues in my opinion), such as their beauty, charm, and seductiveness, to cater to them and to treat them like princesses in both the boardroom and the bedroom, and nevertheless expect men to surrender their power and authority to them in the workplace when it comes to competing for scarce managerial jobs.

Such is the lay of the land in the post-modern world. No wonder I still sleep alone. Most women with my education earn two to three times more than I do, and are either already in a common law relationship, which I don’t want, are too young for me, and probably don’t want to go to Church on Sundays, and probably want to find a man who wants to have kids with them which, for various reasons I don’t want to do, or are divorced and don’t want to get re-married in the Catholic Church or can’t by law, or any number of other reasons.

So I think that I’ll get married to Holy Mother Church. She’s eternally young, doesn’t care whether I open doors metaphorically or physically for her, already has all the kids she could ever want or hope for, I don’t have to have a big salary to provide for her, we already love each other unconditionally, like the love I have for God my Father, so what else could a 47 year old bachelor hope for?

Let the bells ring and the heads roll, ‘cause Pete ‘bye is gettin’ hitched!