Thinking about Canada, and where it's going, and what it's doing. And what it is today in these opening chords of the 21st century.
How silly is that?
Knowing that I have to get up early in the morning. Knowing that no one in this country's "thinking class" gives a damn what I think. Knowing that nothing I think makes a damn to what is.
And yet the mind can't help roaming over this jumbled landscape, can it?
It must be an obsession, this urge to scan the geography late at night. When you look at it from one angle, the country seems so full of promise and potential. From another angle, it seems so old. So woolly-headed. So peevish.
I mean, how can you have any hope when the newspaper comment boards are choked with bile and stupidity? Rightest ravings and leftist rants. All of them so annoyingly derivative. Columnists banging on about Republicans, Obama, Putin, Europe, Islam and Israel. Elected officials pilloried by reporters who find their issues in News of the World archives. Bloggers who grind old Andrew Carnegie's axe against immigrants and union bosses.
What a mess of arid thoughts and petty grievances. Does no one have an original idea?
So I wonder, in my doddering way, if all this noise really represents Canada. Is this who and what we are today? Petty, peevish and stale? Or is our so-called intellectual dialogue nothing more than a Laff in the Dark fun house, where reality refracts off a kaleidoscope of Rush Limbaugh, George Galloway, the Daily Kos and those wackos who sputter through the pages of the Star every day? None of them, apparently, having much to do with this time in this country.
Hard to tell. Could go either way.
I guess the real question is, does anyone actually care?
