The Classroom Conservative

Why Do We Cheer?

It is a great day to be a fan of sports teams from the American northeast.  Last night, the Boston Red Sox won the world series by completing a sweep of the Colorado Rockies; a few hours earlier, the New England Patriots beat the Washington Redskins 52-7 to run their record to 8-0.  This sets up a tense week in my household, where dwells a fan of the 7-0 Indianapolis Colts.  Next Sunday, the Colts play the Patriots, and I can say that not since my childhood love for the Montreal Canadians have I cared about a sport franchise like I care about those footballers from Foxboro.  I come by this affection honestly.  In a different television universe, Newfoundland was fed a steady diet of terrible Boston sporting events.  My earliest football memories are of watching Steve Grogan and Matt Cavanaugh battle it out to see who would lead the Patriots to a subsequent defeat.  I am reaping now what was sown in heartbreak and humiliation.

   

But I have to wonder, sometimes, just why do we cheer?  In the wake of the Jes Battis/Robert Fulford controversy, I found myself again defending university funding.  I must tell you, frankly, that I earn a wage beyond my wildest dreams, but it still takes me one year and five months to earn what Alex Rodriguez was paid last year to play a single game for the New York Yankees, and of course A-Rod has just opted out of that contract to seek more.  Sure, what he does is entertaining, and he does something I could never do.  But I have four university degrees, and I have taught for more than fifteen years.  You, too, must feel this disparity sometimes and question why the struggles of multi-millionaires are so immediate to us.

   

I suspect that we are reacting somehow against the fundamental isolation of the human condition.  I commented recently while traveling how I knew none of the people in a given crowd set out ahead of me, how I was unlikely ever to know any of them.  We long for connection to others through shared experience, shared ritual.  In a less secular time, we found that at church.  I suspect more and more of us are finding it in the shopping centre on Sunday mornings, and I think that is tremendously sad.  Far more benign, I would argue, is this rooting for something tangible – along with millions of other people all around the world.  That is an activity that takes us back to a simpler time when, perhaps, all we had to worry about was whether the Toronto Blue Jays would hold off that late charge from the Detroit Tigers or whether Wayne Gretzky would score fifty goals in thirty-nine games.  That kind of rooting is what I will be doing next Sunday when Tom Brady drops back and looks downfield for Randy Moss or Wes Welker.  But I just won’t expect any cheering from the other end of the couch – and no amount of money will change that.

Walking With Americans

I am just back from a brief trip to Texas, where I spent a month previously on study leave in 2004.  I have traveled extensively in the United States, and I must admit that I have always been struck by the size of Americans – sometimes a reflection of the huge servings in their restaurants and what we read about Western culture, generally, being increasingly sedentary.  This time, the food was still more than ample, though the truly rotund were nowhere to be seen.  Still, I did not view a lot of evidence of casual physical activity.  Austin, the Texas state capitol, certainly reflects our automobile culture.

   

Home to the University of Texas, the city has an absolutely first-rate public transit system.  It has very generous facilities for students, the disabled, and the elderly – and, for Jane and Joe Public, riding all day on the bus costs but a dollar, each.  The routes crisscross the city, and if too few buses mean too much waiting, one can perhaps only blame this on the fact that ridership is not what it could, or should, be.  Most of the buses on which I traveled were half-full; certainly, I never saw a bus where anyone had to stand by choice.  It might not surprise you to know that even in this liberal city, with its fair share of environmental Al-Gorriors, the working poor were over-represented users of public transportation.  Most alarmingly, there were very few people walking, even in Austin’s downtown.  My experience on the sidewalks involved the sorts of vagrants that you might expect in any big city, but I felt really strangely conspicuous out on my feet – even though so many things were so readily to hand, people would eye suspiciously other folks who were afoot.

   

But cars?  Oh, my!  The gridlock on the interstate to the east of the city was truly horrible, even in the early afternoon.  I have experienced traffic in some of our planet’s largest cities, and the congestion outside of Austin rivaled it.  Driving back to the city from outlet shopping to the south, the line of lights at night simply lit up the sky.  Is this what we have become?  I am as attached to my little metal carapace as the next person, but I have never longed for the time that I could drive from my basement to my bedroom, as these people seem to desire.  I have never coveted a Hummer I could tow behind a recreational vehicle.  Fortunately, or not, I think we are at the end of a short-sighted experiment gone wrong, where our collective choice for automobiles has estranged us from public transportation infrastructure and given rise to a generation of people who cannot conceive of life without a car.  Even if you disagree with me in my belief that fossil fuels represent a quickly-dwindling resource, even if you think that burning up the last six inches of prairie topsoil in ethanol-driven internal-combustion engines is a good use of resources, global demand for transportation and for the sorts of conveniences we take for granted will push us to a crisis, and I suspect that I will soon look back nostalgically at a time when I could easily afford to fly to the United States on little more than a whim, rent a car for a day for my personal use, and experience little more inconvenience than waiting for the buffet breakfast, a feast of foods shipped to my hotel from all over the world.

Hi, I Still Tax Books!

I have two vivid memories of the run-up to the implementation of the Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST) in January 1991.  The first is from the comedy troupe Double Exposure.  Reflecting the suspicion that this new, broad-based tax would be more detrimental to the purchasing of essential goods, Linda Cullen and Bob Robertson sang: “GST/ Very sneaky and it’s very near complete/ Only thing not affected is the caviar you eat.”  The second is an anti-tax poster that was distributed widely at the time.  It featured a head-shot of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney with a wide grin and a caption that read “Hi, I Tax Books!”  The GST marked the first time a tax had been imposed on reading, and more than fifteen years and four Prime Ministers later, we still do.  That is a national disgrace.

   

The idea behind a new national tax on consumption was that it would be fairer because, in part, it would be transparent, replacing a myriad of hidden taxes on goods.  I will leave it to economists to discuss whether fifteen years of price indexes, inflation statistics, and retail sales figures prove this to be so.  The GST is the only tax at the till in Alberta – and, while we still mutter about it plenty, we’ve accepted it. The debate has become simply what the GST should be.  Should it be its original 7% with a broad-based income tax reduction?  Should we chase it down to the federal government’s target of 5%?  Now, for a variety of complicated reasons that we need not discuss here, I am for lower taxes and higher user fees.  But all but the most rabid socialists – think Toronto Mayor David Miller, for example – think our taxes should be heading lower.  So, my argument would be that if we achieve goals of our public policy by raising certain taxes, like the taxes on cigarettes designed to make smoking less attractive, why not selectively eliminate taxes to encourage beneficial things at a time when our overall level of taxation is likely to fall?

   

Why not eliminate any taxes on books, therefore?  Statistics show both that book sales fell after the introduction of the GST and that a home full of books is the best predictor of future literacy.  I think, anecdotally, we can all agree that people could and should read more, and so why wouldn’t people buy more books if they could more easily afford them?  There would be an obvious benefit to libraries and other groups that further support literacy.  Moreover, I’m not picky about what people read as long as they do, so let’s cut the tax on all books – from supermarket checkout aisle paperbacks to academic clothbounds.  You have been reading a lot lately, let alone experiencing, the sticker shock when comparing prices Canadian retailers charge for products also offered in the United States, even though our loonie is now worth more than the greenback.  This problem is quite evident in our bookstores, as a glance at some recent titles that have interested me will reveal.  Camille Deangelis’ novel Mary Modern, for example, can be purchased for $24 in the United States while you have to shell out $30 here.  The Falling Man, Don DeLillo’s novel of 9/11, costs $26 south of the border and $32 in Canada.  Fredric Jameson has a collection of essays called The Modernist Papers.  Had I purchased it last week when I was in Texas, it would have cost me $40.  Back home, it is $46.  Finally, The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin’s book on the American Supreme Court, goes for $28 in the United States and $36 in Canada.  If the publishing industry could ever redress this wrong, and we could back up this gesture with an elimination of the tax on books, we could do something quite dramatic, quite quickly in this country to support literacy.  As for the cost, critics of humanities research point to how difficult they believe it to be to support projects outside the sciences because of what they perceive to be challenges to measuring results.  Spending some money to put more books – even science books – in people’s hands?  That is easy to measure, and who could oppose that?

Dumbledore Is Gay... And There's Nothing Wrong With That?

Before we begin, allow me to say what is perfectly reasonable in this situation.  It makes no difference in this world if Albus Dumbledore, hirsute headmaster of Harry Potter fame, is gay.  If J.K. Rowling puts more than, say, a dozen characters in her novels, it stands to reason that, by even the most conservative estimates, one of her characters is homosexual.  A small number will be left-handed; a small number will have red hair.  Although it is pure fantasy, the world of Hogwarts School must bear some similarity to our own: that’s how these books work.  Oh, before you ask, I will tell you straight out (sorry, no pun intended) that sexual preference has nothing to do with Dumbledore’s merits as an educator.  It is politically correct to stress that I know gay people; I have gay friends; I admire gay thinkers and artists.  Yadda, yadda, yadda, indeed.  PC-ness has nothing to do with any of this.

   

I am, simply, dismayed by Ms Rowling’s “outing” of her character this weekend.  You see, once an author publishes a book and its dissemination begins, her control of her creation ends.  Authors like J. D. Salinger may grumble that we misunderstand The Catcher in the Rye (1951); authors like Stephen King may detest film versions of their works – like Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant The Shining (1980) - and seek full control over further adaptations.  But they still have no business telling us how to read their works.  Meaning is created by the interplay between author and reader: how would you see the Potter books if you were, yourself, a young child in boarding school? how about if your parents had just died? how about if you began the series as a perfectly-well-adjusted adult wondering what the fuss was all about?  The magic of reading is about bringing your own dance partner to the party.  When an author goes out of her way to explain what is simply implied, we call that “overdetermining,” and this takes all the fun out of reading.  Did Margaret Mitchell tell anyone that, five minutes after the end of Gone with the Wind (1936), Rhett Butler came back for a forgotten garment and Scarlett O’Hara made him an offer he couldn't refuse?

   

You have to wonder if Ms Rowling has lost sight of the fact that her characters do not really exist.  She now behaves more like an anthropologist or an historian, bringing to the public newly-unearthed “facts” from Hogwarts like she was undertaking an archaeological dig there.  Sure, it exists in her mind, and she has every right to imagine those things that did not go into the books, but so do I – and so do her many, many, many fans.  If it is not in the books, it does not exist.  An author’s comments about her thoughts or motivations may help us in understanding what she wrote; one of the great joys of literary scholarship is interpreting author’s letters, discovering discarded drafts.  But an author imagining an entire “backstory” is an abuse of authorship - unless, of course, she wants to write another novel and let that stand on its merits.

   

Now, I gather that Ms Rowling does intend to publish the backstories that shaped her characters.  I believe, at one time, she was planning an encyclopedia, of sorts.  This will be a sure hit with her fans.  But she should proceed with caution.  I am, for example, a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley” books.  Many of you will know this series from the second film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), with Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow.  In adapting the novel, director Anthony Minghella made explicit the homosexual longings of Tom Ripley where, in the original work, they were simply implied.  Over the course of five outings (sorry, no pun intended), Highsmith crafts Ripley as a delightful sociopath – think, say, a more endearing Hannibal Lecter.  But, ironically, in light of our current discussion, Highsmith married off her protagonist in the second book, the less engaging Ripley Under Ground (1970), and dented some of the ambiguity about his longings, his frustrations, his motivations.  Although Ripley has an unconventional marriage, to say the least, you cannot read the subsequent books without abandoning some of the things you thought about the first.  Sequels can limit the original, and Ms Rowling has had a great run of luck going back to the well.

   

A generation of children grew up with Harry Potter.  They began when his tales were brief, and they followed his creator as her books grew more sophisticated and complex.  No child ever again will enjoy this gradual development.  The end has been written, the films have framed the imagined landscapes, and the author continues to tell us what to think.  Gay advocates have expressed disappointment that Dumbledore’s love for Gellert Grindelwald was not made explicit in the texts.  Indeed, if there was a point to be made, that is where it had to be.  This exposition after the fact is more than a bit sad.

Don't Hate Me, Christie Blatchford, Because I Blog

Since the Globe and Mail moved Lynn Crosbie to the weekdays, Christie Blatchford has been the mainstay of my Saturday paper. (Is Lynn Crosby still on Tuesdays?  Or is it Wednesdays?  I could not get the Globe delivered at my house consistently before 8am, and so I gave up on Monday through Friday.  But I miss Dr. Crosbie terribly!) Ms Blatchford lives her stories, and when you read her you read what she feels.  She is wonderfully rumpled and grumpy.  Sadly, she’ll never see this compliment because she used her space last Saturday to pledge that, having read two or three blogs, she will now read no more.

   

As the argument goes, people have an urge to express themselves, but like Emily Dickinson, say, they should have the good sense to keep their thoughts sequestered during their lifetime.  Ms Blatchford would rather we all go back to keeping diaries, presumably with those adorable little locks and keys.  Once in a generation, perhaps, someone will unearth hidden gems, run them by an editor, and earn for their author a wider, posthumous audience.  While it is only sensible to share a concern with the proliferation of on-line writing -- I mean, really, who wouldn’t benefit from a little editing? -- publishing scholar Felix Pollak once said that if everyone had a magazine, there would be no wars because dissemination is, itself, a wonderful pressure valve.  If you just listen to people, they won’t want quite so much to blow you up.

   

I am not against people who write without an editor: I am against people who write without having read anything, without having read anyone else, without having thought very much.  I think our magazines and newspapers have as high a percentage of these people as does the blogosphere.  I blog because it is good to write constantly.  My academic work requires such painstaking preparation and lead time, I often forget the joy of writing, itself.  In preparing this blog, I catch myself falling into cliché, into little habits of expression I need to see and expunge.  I blog because writing is like playing a musical instrument.  And how much fun is it, really, to strum a guitar alone in the dark?

Plagiarism, Where Is Thy Sting?

In last weekend’s Globe and Mail, Mark Kingwell got a little turned around about plagiarism and what to do about it – and ended up, somehow, suggesting that we do away with grades, altogether.  I think he was kidding, but you never really know with him.  The issue of plagiarism in the university is a very knotty one.  When students have not been taught how to cite sources properly in secondary school, they roll into higher education without the tools to do battle, intellectually.  Is it fair to expel them, under these conditions, for breaking our most sacred rules?  Do I have the time to start from scratch and teach them everything they should already know as well as all the things I’d like them to know?  This does not even address those little darlings who download essays, whole cloth, from the internet and submit them to me with their names on them.  There is a dedicated circle of hell for those students.

   

I am all for professors taking greater responsibility for the issue, though we cannot take all the responsibility for things that should begin in grade seven, or earlier.  But we certainly can be less lazy about the assignments we set our students.  Each semester, I prepare unique questions that ask students, usually, to compare two works: it is thus impossible for them to find an essay on the internet that answers my specific question adequately.  I seek further to ensure this fact by asking my students to respond, directly, to a quotation from a critic who has published on these works. A plagiarized essay of comparison could never replicate exactly the issues and arguments implicated in my question.  The added advantage of this approach, of course, is that I am teaching my students to deal with other people’s ideas.  I encourage them to believe what they say is as valid as what Fredric Jameson has said, or Shari Benstock, or Terry Eagleton, or Stanley Fish, or Sidonie Smith.  I require them to challenge the opinions of these esteemed scholars, and when you are arguing with someone it is impossible to claim to have had their ideas, isn’t it?

   

The answer, in part, is about the questions we ask.  But it is also about how and where we ask them.  There has certainly been a movement away from the in-class essay and the final examination.  It is unfair, I am told, to restrict the time students have to prepare their responses to questions.  My reply is, and always will be, that the world for which we prepare our students does not grant them unlimited time to accomplish tasks, and so why should I? What I can do is calibrate my expectations to the conditions under which I assign the task.  After all, an old professor of mine once claimed that there is something good for the soul in sitting down to work something out with a question sheet, a booklet, and a writing utensil.  That was true then, and it is true now.  The clock is ticking, after all.

Shooting SSHRC Fish in a Barrel: Robert Fulford’s Unfair Fight

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is, in many ways, the lifeblood of our universities in this country.  Tax dollars and tuitions pay the professors and keep on the lights, but if you want to visit an archive or do some fieldwork, you had better save your Aeroplan miles.  While scientists have a number of their own funding agencies with, undoubtedly, their own quirks and pitfalls, anthropologists and philosophers rely for the most part on SSHRC support.  I have served on a national committee that gives out “standard research grants,” awards to full-fledged professors, and I can tell you that you need to have achieved real results previously even to apply; the proposals of our academic superstars are vetted comprehensively in order to make the cut.  A relatively small percentage of eligible researchers apply, and a relatively small percentage of these applicants will ever be successful.

   

I am not sure that readers of the National Post would understand much of this from Robert Fulford’s piece in last weekend’s paper.  Mr. Fulford examines the work of Dr. Jes Battis, an academic who took his post-doctoral fellowship down to the City University of New York.  Dr. Battis researches and teaches popular culture – and, according to the piece, has distinguished himself in part by looking at gay and lesbian themes in television programming.  What seems to bother Mr. Fulford most is that Dr. Battis has a long and distinguished record of attracting research funding, and the most conspicuous result Canadian taxpayers have gotten for this investment is a tattoo and a nose piercing.  We know these last details only because Dr. Battis put it on his blog; SSHRC’s confidentiality guidelines seem to have thwarted Mr. Fulford’s other enquiries.

   

Now, as readers of this blog will know, I admire Robert Fulford’s work a great deal; as readers of this blog will guess, gay and lesbian readings of television programs play a large role in neither my research nor my classroom.  But the element of this story to which I object is how the National Post cherry picked a couple of provocative titles to question both the specific relevance of SSHRC and the general relevance of research in the social sciences and humanities.  As a result, Dr. Noreen Golfman, president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, was forced to weigh in with a letter to the editor in the subsequent paper, trotting out the obvious and blistering defense of all that we do.

   

Do I want to be thus grouped with Dr. Battis?  It is difficult for me to assess his work from this distance: not that he asked me, anyway.  But I will say that if it is anything like it appears, I would not be interested in it.  (I doubt if he would be interested in mine, either.)  If, having moved on from the postdoctoral ranks, he takes a faculty position and seeks further funding, he will have to continue to justify it, in part, to people who work on queer studies and contemporary literature – as well as to people like me who work in other areas and look at his from the outside.  In the meantime, if I thought that most or many or even a good few of our university professors contributed to society primarily by somehow using their research funding for body art, I would be more than concerned: I would be ashamed.  But they do not.  And so there is no need for me to be.

Get Out of the Vehicle!

An afternoon drive through many Canadian cities will reveal a curious phenomenon: a long line of vehicles queued outside Tim Horton’s.  I have written before about the difficulties in our service economy.  If you don’t have a job in Alberta, you probably do not want one.  In part, then, this train of eight-cylinder behemoths huffing and puffing can be attributed to how difficult it is to get served inside or outside our country’s national coffee chain.

   

I wonder, though, if you have to be a rabid environmentalist to bemoan the obvious waste of resources beside “drive thru” windows.  As a child, “drive in” service was a treat at, say, A&W.  But was it inevitable that this fun would lead everyone from banks to pharmacies to cut a hole in the side of their establishments so they could toss their merchandise to waiting customers too busy (or, frankly, too lazy) to get out of their cars?

   

I refuse to use them.  I will park, turn off my car, and walk into the store.  I will stand in the (often excruciatingly) long line, survey my options, and try to interact with a human being who is not wearing a headset.  If you cannot get served in the “drive thru” in less than a minute, certainly, you are being more responsible by turning off your vehicle.  But even if you are, like many of my fellow Albertans, the sort of person who loves to hear your F150 idle and could care less about resource management, how about the management of human interaction?  There is nothing wrong with buying something face-to-face now and again, is there?  You are not saving time, so what’s the point?  It is like Bill Maher said recently, in parody of the many pharmaceutical commercials that feign concern: “Ask your doctor if getting off your ass is right for you.”

Radiohead, In Rainbows

The last time Radiohead released a new album, I was returning from an early trip to the airport as the electronics store opened, and I became, on the morning it was offered for sale, one of the first people in North America to buy Hail to the Thief.  I believe it cost me $14 plus applicable taxes.  Unless the economics of the music business have changed a lot since I left the retail sector, it probably cost the store about $10-12.  The wholesaler ensured that the chain made a profit before it ever reached the store, leaving the record company what remained to cover its production, marketing, and distribution costs.  Somewhere at the back of this equation, Radiohead made some money.

   

With the release of In Rainbows, Radiohead now becomes the latest act to try to shift the paradigm of music distribution.  The album was released today on a website linked from the band’s official site, and by registering and entering my credit card number, I was able to download compressed versions of the ten files that make up the songs on In Rainbows.  Now, I have to tell you that the connection between the radiohead.com site and the inrainbows.com site was just tenuous enough to give me pause when I opened up my credit to the internet.  I also hate the zip technology that requires me to unpack the files.  It took me a few moments to convert and copy the files to iTunes.  But, all in all, I cannot complain about the transaction.  It was less cumbersome than buying a CD.  But none of this is the most subversive part of the sale.

   

You see, Radiohead left it up to me to decide what I should pay for the album.  When I clicked on the hotlinked “?” on the site, it reminded me a number of times that it really, really was up to me to decide the value of In Rainbows.  Some people have suggested that the music is now almost a loss leader for bands like Radiohead, who make their money on tours and merchandise that are only buoyed by the actual songs I listen to as I cruise the halls here at work.  But with every cent of the purchase price going to the band – they even charged me 45 pence to cover the administrative costs of the transaction – can we say that this tenuous model is less lucrative than keeping the record company and the various wholesalers and retailers in on the transaction?

   

You might wonder how much I paid for In Rainbows.  Well, I paid five pounds, about the equivalent in Canadian dollars of how much the iTunes Store charges for a download.  Interesting, isn’t it, how quickly I adopted a new economic model and used it to guide me when all guidelines were lifted?  How may people, I wonder, paid a single penny?

   

But what is more interesting to me is how this new method of distribution, and how all electronic delivery of music for that matter, ignores the commodity value of collecting.  The use value of music, the practical worth of it to distract us, to inspire us, to help us get through a day at work, could just as easily be achieved by my humming the songs or even waiting for them to come on the radio.  The commodity value of music, the esteem we derive from collecting and displaying it, from taunting our friends with rare artifacts, is forgotten entirely here.  I don’t even have an album cover; I had to download an image from the website to paste into my iPod.  Now, I should tell you that I was given the option to order, for more than $80, a vinyl version, a traditional CD (with bonus tracks), and various other items that would appeal to the collector.  But these objects will not appear until December.  In the meantime, does this not strike you as a crude way to divide commodity value from use value, a crude way to divide collectors from pimply-faced internet pirates?  Is a jewel box, some liner notes, and a CD to hold in my hands now too much to ask?

   

If I am equivocal about this new development, the most important thing, certainly, is that I really like the album.  Gone is the raw anger of Hail to the Thief, and some people might welcome that.  Gone, as well, are the frantic, ambient beats of Kid A, and some people might lament that.  This music is decidedly more introspective, more driven by guitar, bass, and drums, more melodic.  It is still Radiohead, undoubtedly, but they have forged ahead – and, as you have seen from what I have written above, they have dragged the whole music industry with them.

So Farewell, Then, Western Standard

While on study leave in Halifax, I’d often visit Atlantic News on Morris Street.  If I was ever a little homesick for Alberta, I could pick up there a copy of Ezra Levant’s Western Standard.  I cannot imagine they moved many copies there out on the edge of the ocean, but it was still like a chinook blasting through my favorite maritime newsstand, and now its print edition is falling silent.  With a sixth sense for trouble, perhaps, I didn’t renew my subscription.  Just as well, then.

   

Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate Ezra Levant.  I admire people who are ideologically consistent through and through.  I am a bit of a pragmatist at heart, believing like Ralph Waldo Emerson that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  But Mr. Levant’s mind is far from little, and instead he has become a bellwether against which the rest of us can measure ourselves.  (Forgive me the mixed metaphor.)  I have disagreed with what he has written as much as I have agreed with him.  But I could always rely on the man to present the view from the hard right, and I have plotted out my own, often more moderate stands from such consistent positions.  On the other hand, in his eulogy for the Standard in the National Post, Jonathan Kay called Mark Steyn “the English-speaking world’s best columnist,” and for my money Andrew Coyne is Steyn’s only peer.  (Mr. Coyne is so good that even if my Post wasn’t almost free – thanks Telus Mobility perks! – I’d still pay for it.)  Mr. Steyn anchored the Western Standard from its back page.  But all the horses in its stable weren’t always so strong.

   

In the current New York Times book review, Jonathan Rauch discusses George Nash’s four types of conservatives: the traditionalists, the libertarians, the nationalist neo-cons, and the religious right.  My conservatism tries to balance the first two: essentially, I like to solve things myself, and when I cannot I rely on the best of past practice.  I am not for reimagining the university or creating a new bureaucracy.  But, for my taste, I got too much of the latter two in the Standard: whether some old guy was hectoring me about abortion or whether my surrogate mom was railing against women in the workforce or whether yet another malcontent was complaining about the justice system, it was sometimes just too much for me to take.  What I did appreciate, as Jonathan Kay also pointed out, is the diversity it injected into the flood of paper that comes through my front door each week.  For while the Globe and Mail – and, of course, the CBC on radio and on television – can always be counted upon to say the “right” thing, they seldom bring us anything from the right.

   

I have devoted most of my adult life to researching the history of magazine publishing, and so I understand what Ezra Levant meant when he said that he planned to air his “views elsewhere in the media” and perhaps, there, “actually make some money.”  But I can attest that the larger story of publishing has always been punctuated by minority protests that grab our attention, like, for example, the hilarious Libranos parody Mr. Levant brought us in 2005.  If the Standard wasn’t exactly an exclamation point in the Canadian media, it was at least a semicolon: so much more than a bump in the road for the oh-so-comfortable establishment of the mushy, middle-left.