“Oh look, I see one!”
“No, that’s a red-tailed hawk,” says the resident birder. “Red Tories have a white underbelly and a red-brick crown that rivals that of the vermilion flycatcher. You know one when you see one.”
I do not see them.
I see hardline conservatives perched everywhere. Their view of humanity is deeply sour and their first urge is to punish. But since many aversions spring from something we dislike in ourselves, I understand that we all have a punisher living inside us and it’s our decision whether we want to let the spiteful little creature out to prance. Shorthand: call it your inner Cheney.
Love is better than anger, Jack Layton said, but the two aren’t opposites. Calm is better than anger, I’d say. And conservatives are rarely calm. They’re more like Toronto drivers and cyclists, coiled and ready to spring. They feel deeply but think shallowly.
Here’s a case in point: Stephen Harper vs. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau on the matter of the Boston bombings.
Harper attacked Trudeau for his response to Peter Mansbridge’s questions in a CBC interview last week. Mansbridge asked, in his ponderous way, what Trudeau would have done had he been prime minister on the day of the Boston bombings.
Trudeau’s response, made as the Boston news was unfolding, was entirely sane. He’d offer his condolences along with practical help. But he wouldn’t jump to conclusions. “Over the coming days,” he told Mansbridge, we should look for “root causes. We don’t know if it was terrorism or a single crazy or a domestic issue or a foreign issue — all those questions. But there is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, at war with innocents.”
And then he explained what has been painfully clear to Canadians and many Americans since the Twin Towers attack. “Of course there will always be more targets, more shopping centres, more public events, more gatherings than we can deal with.”
In other words, if Canadians want to stay Canadian and occasionally venture outside the house, they have to think deeply about terrorism and what drives it. The surrender of the West begun by George W. Bush, with constant surveillance, arrest without trial, torture, drone murder and two pointless wars, has not prevented terrorism. It has worsened our lives, coarsened our discourse. The terrorists’ aims were partly achieved.
But Harper, trying to look statesmanlike in the U.K. for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, which one notes was otherwise attended by has-beens from the Nixon and Cheney eras and shunned by those in power, attacked Trudeau. The correct response, he said, is “to condemn it categorically, and to the extent you can deal with the perpetrators you deal with them as harshly as possible.”
And this is why, as I hang hotly onto every piece of Boston news, I ignore the lowest form of news, the rote responses of politicians. They condemn murder categorically. But who doesn’t?
Harper’s a punisher, all right, but he suffers from a worse affliction, the belief that complicated problems are easily solved.
Hardline conservatives are hostile to science, art, literature, history, foreign cultures, courtroom trials, criminal rehabilitation, spending on preparation for the future, and most of all, root causes, the things that one has to dig very deep to comprehend. It’s like a surgeon removing metastasized tumours without checking the site of the original cancer.
Terrorism is the most complicated of tangles but trying to untangle it is a potential lifesaver. I cannot understand how the Boston bombers looked into the eyes of the innocents they were about to slaughter and walked offstage but I am mightily interested in why — and how — they did it.
It’s arduous enough dealing with the murderers whose motives are clear. Yes, their punishment gives us pleasure. But the ones who mystify us are the ones strolling across our public spaces, possibly with bombs in their backpacks.
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