Well, hello again. When the
initiative seized me to start this last series of notes, my hope was to
stimulate a debate on some of the issues. From the level of response, I
conclude that many of you are either on vacation, in total and complete
agreement with me on all the points or simply too busy to type long
replies. Some of you have commented that I must have more time on my
hands than is beneficial.
Be that as it may, the fact that I have
not been spending my time in an office lately has sharply curtailed the
opportunities I get to harangue colleagues with my ranting and you are simply
stuck with being on the distribution list. In an effort to follow your
advice, I did try to talk with Mrs. Hansford about some of this but she is a
committed Hillary supporter and feels sorry for the poor people who look like
Arabs, since they must be having so much trouble getting on planes. I do not
mean to imply that she is silly. She is not. But her mind works in
pathways that mine is totally unacquainted with. In the interest of
domestic tranquility I have decided to leave political discussions at the front
door; ergo email.
I received this from my friend Derek
Nelson and I think you will find it interesting. Derek was the very first
Canadian I met when I moved to Toronto and his warmth, strength of character
and hospitality went a long way to creating the deep admiration, respect and
affection I have for Canada and its people. I have always been grateful
to him for his welcome. He is also an exceptionally insightful and
intelligent individual. He is the only person I have ever known to use
“vitriol” in spoken discourse. And he even pronounced it correctly, which
I would have not done. As you all would expect, I called him on the
pronunciation and of course proved to be wrong: again. He said it
while we were on the second hole of the Lambton golf course so it was not as if
we were engaged in a deep intellectual discussion at the time. The link
he provided is
Once again, you have to paste this into
your browser’s address line (total time 6.0 Minutes). I do not know who
this guy is, perhaps my friends David and Joan in the UK recognize him.
In any case it is hard to get a balance between vitriol and humour when talking
about radical Islam but I think he as got it just about right. I liked
the speech but was disappointed to learn that we Americans do not have as
unique a claim to the term bullshit as I had thought. I was kind of
chuffed frankly since we use it so much. His talk set off a number of
thoughts. The first was that he should probably be starting his car with
a long stick for the next little while.
Speaking of Lambton and cars, I got a
note from my friend Rob Gemmell recently. I was very pleased to hear he
was doing well; he is truly one of the good guys. Early in my
relationship with Rob I had invited him to play golf at Lambton in Toronto.
I was doing pretty well at the time as President of Sprint Canada and had just
bought my first Porsche. I could not afford a new one but after looking
around a lot I bought a 5 year-old, red on white, 911 Convertible in great
condition. Boy was I proud of that car! Rob and I had arrived
separately and met on the first tee, after the golf game, Rob said he had to go
home and did not have time for a drink but wanted to see the new car that I had
been bragging about during the entire round. The parking lot at Lambton
was divided into two sections and my car was prominently displayed right at the
front. We walked over and Rob let me puff up and blow a bit about how
great the car was. I was pretty full of shit but he seemed genuinely
pleased for me and genuinely admiring of the new wheels. After a few
minutes of my preening he suggested he had to go back to the locker room for a
minute and then had to get going but that I should not wait for him, he would
be fine. I was insistent that I would accompany him and see him
off. He resisted but it was clear that I was not to be denied. I do
get that way sometimes; particularly when I am being gracious and hospitable
and otherwise displaying my munificence. Anyway, to shorten the story,
Rob’s car was in the back lot and after we had collected his clubs we walked
behind the golf shop where he deposited the clubs into the trunk of his
showroom quality, completely detailed, bright red, Ferrari Convertible. I
always thought that his desire to allow me my moment in the sun without doing
the normal one-upmanship showed something of his character. He would have
been quite happy to have left quietly and unnoticed if I had not been such a
dickhead. His quality of character has continued to be demonstrated
throughout the ensuing years. I have a few more Ferrari stories and one about
a Lamborghini but those will have to wait for another note.
Back to the topic: Free Speech.
Our video commentator does a great job and hits most of my hot buttons,
extremism, hypocrisy, political correctness, and oil independence but the thing
that stands out is the power and importance of our ability to speak our
minds. I made the long stick comment as a joke but in today’s world it is
actually pretty serious. What does it tell you when a minor cartoon
showing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in a Dutch newspaper can set off
rioting around the globe and cause over 100 deaths as it did in 2005? I
guess, just how interconnected we really are by global media and secondly how
free speech no longer comes without some danger.
If Greece is the cradle of democracy,
the British are responsible for launching it to full growth and vigour.
The idea that society should have a government of laws and not of men is
fundamental and we owe the reality of that primarily to the British. We
Americans have our own revered documents but the Magna Charta has to be one of
the most important documents in human history.
If our rights and freedoms can be denied
though fear and intimidation, we have simply reverted to a society ruled by the
tyranny of the strong. In our modern societies the ability of all our
citizens to enjoy the rights and freedoms granted by our laws must be
protected. And that protection must include the use of force by the
government to stop those who would abridge those freedoms. I think this
is the real conflict we have with extremism. They simply cannot allow
individual freedom if the result is behaviour that in their view contradicts
their divinely inspired standards. And of course they get to interpret
and stipulate that acceptable behaviour. Tyranny can wear clerical robes
as well as a King’s regalia.
I am not arguing that we need to tell
others how to run their countries and if they want to have a government of men
and not of laws that is their business as far as I am concerned. But
radical Islam does not want to allow us our freedoms if it somehow impinges on
their view of what is right and wrong. This we cannot allow.
Some will argue that there are human rights,
which we as civilized societies must protect. Our Declaration of
Independence certainly seems to lead us in that direction when it says,
“We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed,”
But I think the key here is government. In my
view politics is about the creation and application of power by the
government. We as a people may hold certain rights to be self-evident but
they then dictate the form of government we select; other peoples may select
other forms. We have the political obligation to ensure that our
government takes all steps to see that our laws, rights and freedoms are
preserved, within our political sphere.
What is self-evident to us is what we choose to
believe. Our beliefs are one thing our obligations another. Is it
any less arrogant for us to claim that our beliefs should be imposed on others
than it is for the extremists to attempt to impose theirs on us? I think
not. I am not arguing against human rights and I think all civilized
societies should oppose genocide in any form but I would argue that there must
be practical limits placed on the lengths we are willing to go in order to
enforce those rights outside our political boundaries.
Do we have an obligation to support with troops and
resources an endless effort to achieve the same laws, rights and freedoms for
Iraqi’s that are enjoyed by US citizens; even if the level of those
expenditures profoundly detracts from the development of our society here at
home? Bush may think so: I do not. And I suspect he really does not
either.
I think our interests in Iraq are fundamentally
economic, disguised and prettied up as moral imperatives. I know most of
the rest of the world thinks so as well. Let’s stop bullshitting
ourselves and recognize we are in Iraq because of oil. The real question
is what do we do next and for our government leaders to keep introducing
notions that our misadventure is somehow the result of the War on Terror simply
makes things more difficult. We need to decide how to get out; perhaps
not immediately, but on the best terms possible and hopefully sooner rather
than later. Nothing good can come from attempting to maintain a fiction
that has already been revealed before the entire world. The fact that our
failure has, in truth, created opportunities for our extremist enemies in Iraq
is unfortunate but we cannot remake reality. That along with what will
happen with oil is just another of the realities we must recognize as we make
our plans for how to bring our troops home. My friend Graeme thinks it
will take generations for America to recover the world's good opinion after the
damage Bush has caused. Sorrow fully, I think he may be right.
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