Page Brigette DePape stands in the Senate as Governor General David Johnston delivers the Speech from the Throne last Friday. Sean Kilpatrick/THE CANADIAN PRESS.

[UPDATED JUNE 9, 12]. So US progressive documentarian Michael Moore feels former unreformed Senate of Canada page Brigette DePape’s ejection from the fabled Red Chamber with her ”Stop Harper” stop sign facsimile last Friday was “an iconic moment for Canada.”

He goes on: “Moore said a functioning democracy should ‘encourage you to be disrespectful, to question what is going on’ … I think that Canada and Canadians probably need to put aside the full respect thing and bring out their inner hockey stick and get to work on preventing their government from turning into a version of ours.’”

Brigette DePape talks on her cell phone as she walks in Ottawa last Friday. THE CANADIAN PRESS / Mike Blanchfield.

Personally, I agree with some main thrust of the argument here, allowing for certain vague qualifications.

(And, whatever else, I definitely prefer Michael Moore’s reaction to some of the pompous things our progressive and other politicians in Ottawa have said about the same incident. I also support the “‘Stop Harper’ protest inspired by DePape” that has “already been planned for Ottawa on June 10.” But I don’t expect much to come of it, without more real grass-roots organizing than seems to be planned, and on such short notice, etc, etc.)

Margaret Mead self-portrait completed around the age of 13, ca. 1914-15.

In the very end, however, Ms. DePape’s Canadian iconic moment has finally led me in two related but still rather different and almost entirely American (er well US anyway) directions. The first relates to a famous Margaret Mead quotation that some Internet comment writer on Brigette DePape’s moment coughed up, at one point yesterday: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In fact I don’t think this proposition of Ms. Mead’s is good political science – although it is not altogether without interest. But what it finally does remind me is that for a time in the later 1930s and earlier 1940s Margaret Mead was married to Gregory Bateson. And for a time in the first half of the 1970s I thought I actually understood a few sentences in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the mosquito room, Tambunam, New Guinea, 1938. Courtesy of the Institute for Intercultural Studies.

I don’t warm to the thought of revisiting this book in 2011. But while thinking briefly about Ms. Mead’s and Mr. Bateson’s ultimately thorny relationship, I have stumbled across “For God’s Sake, Margaret … Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead” – along with a reference to Nancy C. Lutkehaus’s recent biography Margaret Mead : The Making of an American Icon.

I recommend both the last two links here to anyone interested in any of Ms. Mead, Mr. Bateson, and/or individuals as icons – American or Canadian, etc, etc.

Alison Haislip, an early 21st century American icon who knows what to do with a loaded gun!

My second direction somehow vaguely related to the Canadian iconic moment of former unreformed Senate of Canada page Brigette DePape finally comes to focus on a You Tube video, emailed to me by an esteemed colleague on the same day Ms. DePape’s moment hit the news stands in force. It’s called “Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot and Trade Show” (uh, the 7th edition of 2009, as it happens), and is hosted or presented or whatever by an intriguing young lady in a green tank top (?) called Alison Haislip.

It has taken me a while to figure out just how the “Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot and Trade Show” actually does relate to the iconic moment of Brigette DePape in Ottawa, Canada. And I want to make it absolutely clear that I find  Alison Haislip utterly enchanting.

Alison Haislip, in another iconic pose.

But I finally think this video helps clarify just what it is that Michael Moore means when he says Canadians need to “bring out their inner hockey stick and get to work on preventing their government from turning into a version of ours.”

And the fact that the enchanting Ms. Haislip ends “Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot and Trade Show” with “God Bless America” and a certain ironic tone and don’t-blame-me look on her well-scrubbed face just proves the point! (For UPDATES click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.)

UPDATE JUNE 9: Brigette DePape has now offered her own take on her action in the unreformed Senate of Canada last Friday, in the pages of the Toronto Star (in print and online). See “Why I did it: Senate page explains her throne speech protest.”Â  And note that Ms. DePape has also “started a fund to support peaceful direct action and civil disobedience against the Harper agenda.”Â  You can donate using Paypal or credit card at “The Stop Harper Fund for Peaceful Direct Action.”

UPDATE JUNE 12: For a report on the “‘Stop Harper’ protest inspired by DePape” that has “already been planned for Ottawa on June 10,” referred to in the main text above, see  “Protesting page headlines Ottawa march” in the Toronto Star:

“Some 300 people started in an Ottawa park and marched to the city’s new convention centre, where inside some 2,400 delegates, MPs, cabinet ministers and even Prime Minister Stephen Harper gathered at a Conservative party convention … While DePape didn’t organize the march, she had a starring role thanks for her own solo protest against Harper just over a week ago … she drew cheers as she was introduced to protesters and echoed her message from just over a week ago that Harper’s agenda was ‘disastrous for this country and for my generation.'”

Ms. DePape termed the event “the first of what she hopes will be many more ‘street mobilizations that eventually put a stop to the Harper government.’”

(The earliest date for altogether stopping the Harper government is October 19, 2015, when the next Canadian federal election will be held.  But as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has already said about Ms. DePape’s June 10, 2011 exertions: “I think the debate of ideas is great and I think people have the right to protest.” We can only second the motion and add “Amen.”)