In our Columnist section, Doug Giles takes the gentle approach as he always does. OK I’m lying. Rather, he whacks you over the head with the club of wisdom. Sometimes you gotta. In Canada, you gotta. Which is why I like Doug Giles, and why I thought Canada needs his column presented to us all, weekly, right here through ProudToBeCanadian.ca. You’re welcome. Now read his column. DO IT NOW.
Hey, lunatic-fringe-self-proclaimed-prophet-of-gloom—can you please stop with the “God struck down New Orleans because of Mardi Gras and Biloxi because of their gambling” blather?
With that line of reasoning, how would you explain the hurricane that leveled Pensacola last year? Pensacola is no South Beach, nor does it have a Bourbon Street. In fact, I don’t think you can find a city in the US that has more churches per capita than Escambia County, and yet they got the blunt end of the pool cue eleven months ago.
Go figure.
Look, I realize that drunken college girls flashing their chests for beads and grannies blowing their social security check playing the slots like a monkey on crack doesn’t fall under the things that God likes, but if I were you . . . I’d be really slow to dole out the, “this is why that happened” diktat. […]
Meanwhile, Jennifer Roback Morse writes a brilliant piece (this “brilliance” thing is a habit of hers) called Whining is un-American; and for Canadians, it is today’s must read (along with all of our columnists’ columns and my blog in addition to all the discussion forum posts, naturally).
Here’s a snippet:
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It is bad enough that the Angry Left is blaming George Bush for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But it is really unseemly for the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans to be blaming the Federal government. After all, the state and local governments in America are supposed to have the authority and the responsibility to be the first responders to natural disasters in their jurisdictions.
When I heard Mayor Nagin whining, I thought to myself, this sounds positively French. Maybe this lame attitude is part of the French heritage of Louisiana and New Orleans and all that. And then I’m chiding myself for tasteless ethnic stereotyping. And it occurs to me, I think I can recall a certain famous Frenchman who made essentially the same point.
So I go to my shelf and pick up my old friend Alexis de Tocqueville. This French aristocrat wrote his famous book, Democracy in America, after his visit to America in 1831, but his descriptions of the contrasting types of American and European attitudes still ring true. He believes that the participating in the institutions of local self-government have shaped the American character, and created a type of person unlike any that Europeans have ever seen before.
He sets up this contrast by starting with a description of the European attitude toward self-government. In Chapter 5 of Part I of the first volume, he reminds his (mostly French) readers how they view themselves in relationship to their government:
There are European nations where the inhabitant sees himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he inhabits. Major changes happen there without his cooperation, he is even unaware of what precisely has happened; he is suspicious; he hears about events by chance. Worse still, the condition of his village, the policing of the roads, the fate of the churches and presbyteries scarcely bothers him; he thinks that everything is outside his concern and belongs to a powerful stranger called the government.
Honestly, doesn’t that sound like the entitlement mentality? Down to and including the superstitious attitude toward anything they don’t see for themselves. But it gets better: Tocqueville identifies the righteous indignation of the victim:
This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger, he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue.
Had Tocqueville time-travelled to meet the current Senator and Governor of Louisiana?
And Paul Jackson’s latest column hits the shrill opportunists amongst us—well, mostly amongst the left. He’s so right about this (which is what I almost always find myself saying as I read Paul Jackson’s columns):
It would be hard to find a nastier piece of political work than Nancy Pelosi, the shrieking Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Which is saying something considering failed Chappaquiddick lifeguard Teddy Kennedy is still haunting the halls of Washington preaching high morality to one and all.
The strident Pelosi is like Canada’s own former Liberal deputy prime minister Sheila Copps during her rat-pack days without the class.
That Copps had little class only emphasizes the harridan-like antics of Pelosi.
The California congresswoman is a knee-jerk politician who comes out bad-mouthing President George W. Bush and any other Republican on each and every issue.
Tune in Fox News—the best all-news TV station on the continent—and you’ll be appalled by how shrill this woman is.
No Republican can do anything right. Ever.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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