Thai protesters write poems and slogans using blood donated by fellow demonstrators.

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 2010. As of just after 12 Noon today, the Washington Post online is reporting “House leaders express confidence they will secure enough votes to pass health bill.”  But it still seems no one knows for sure (well, maybe?). Up here north of the Great Lakes, we watch with some amazement.

Much further away, to the far east, “Thailand was mired in political deadlock on Sunday as demonstrators used their own blood to create a giant piece of protest art and rejected the government’s offer of talks designed to end their rally.” If you’ve been wondering just what is going on here lately, Joshua Kurlantzick provides at least some helpful background in the current issue of the London Review of Books. See “Red v. Yellow … Thailand, once known as one of the most stable democracies in Asia, is in political and economic crisis.”

Naema Amed says she wears niqab for religious reasons. The niqab is headwear that covers the whole body, leaving only eyes exposed. (CBC).

Back here in the former first self-governing dominion of the empire on which the sun never dared to set, Hélène Buzzetti in Le Devoir is asking “Le niqab des solitudes … Comment expliquer les réactions si différentes au Québec et dans le reste du pays à propos du voile de Naema Ahmed?”  Not too far west the current online poll in the Globe and Mail raises doubts about the premise of Ms. Buzzetti ‘s question. The question asked by the Globe poll is “Do you support Quebec’s movement to expel the niqab from much of civic life, which some in English Canada have called pure intolerance?” At the moment, the ordinary reader response is: Yes: 80% , 9355 votes;  No: 20% , 2362 votes. (So much for the two solitudes in 2010?)

Finally, as a sign of the increasing mixing of the many old and new diversities in northern North American life, the print edition of yesterday’s Toronto Sun carried an interesting article on Senate reform in Canada, by Althia Raj of the QMI Agency (where QMI, in case you’ve forgotten, stands for Quebec Media, Inc). There is an online summary of the article in “Not a fan of our Senate? Most Canadians aren’t.” But it doesn’t have quite as much intriguing regional and other detail as the print edition.

Quebec Immigration Minister Yolande James: those who want public services must show their face. (CBC).

Both the online and print edition articles, eg, report that: “More than half of Canadians don’t see a value in the Senate as it is currently configured but nearly a quarter don’t understand what it does, according to an exclusive poll by Leger Marketing for QMI Agency …  35% of respondents believe the Senate can only be effective if senators are elected … Quebecers are most hostile to the red chamber, with about 43% supporting abolishment.”

The print edition included graphics which elaborated on key findings. Canada-wide 35% wanted senators to be elected, 25% just wanted the institution abolished, 12% wanted it to stay as is (with senators appointed by the prime minister), 5% preferred “No answer,” and 23% were brave enough to confess “Don’t know what the Senate is.”

Regionally, variations in the percentages supporting an elected Senate were somewhat interesting. As might be expected, the lowest percentage (22%) was in Quebec (where about twice as many would prefer to just see the institution abolished: see above). Quebec is still “not a province like the others” in this and in so many other respects. (And no doubt always will be? A place where most people speak French is bound to be somewhat different from places where most peoples speak English, etc, etc, etc.)

Visit of Emperor and Empress of Japan to Senate of Canada, July 7, 2009. (The 23% of Canadians who don’t know what the Senate is probably didn’t know about this either?)

The highest percentages supporting at least the elected-senator version of Senate reform, however, were in Atlantic Canada and Ontario (40% in each case) — not in the Western Canada which is supposed to be the great Senate reform advocate (39% in Manitoba/Saskatchewan, and 37% in each of Alberta and BC). The differences here are hardly vast, of course. But even this arguably enough suggests that regional differences inside the anglophone “rest of Canada” are not in fact as vast as some want to pretend either. O well. At least all Canadians already have reasonable access to affordable health care.  (And this has apparently attracted some from Alaska, even if the premier of Newfoundland still likes Florida best.)

This may be a real photo of Barack Obama indulging in the unhealthy habit of smoking, in his Alinsky-style community organizing days. Or it could be something that someone has doctored with Photoshop, etc. In our age of high technology who really knows anything for certain anymore?

MACKINAW CITY, MI. FRIDAY MARCH 19, 2010. This may or may not prove to be a historic week in the history of democracy in America. According to the Washington Post: “Pushing toward a Sunday vote that could transform the nation’s health-insurance system, House leaders announced a $940 billion compromise Thursday that would extend coverage to the vast majority of Americans, cut billions of dollars from Medicare, and impose new taxes on the wealthy and the well-insured. “

To commemorate the event that may or may not happen, our congenital observer of the American scene, L. Frank Bunting, has sent in an extended essay: “Alinsky, Brooks, Clinton, and Obama: more right-wing ‘outright fiction’ on the American left.” if you have the stamina for a long, hard look at the deep background to one side of the Obama administration’s current struggles, CLICK HERE for the full package. (Or see the USA Today category to the right of this page.)

Bunting’s piece draws on two recent columns by the reasonable conservative David Brooks, in the New York Times. In the first one, from back on March 4, Brooks contends that the now long-dead Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky (who also helped inspire the political careers of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) was “the leading tactician of the New Left,” back in the 1960s and early 1970s. And Bunting objects strenuously to this proposition.

In the second column, from March 11, Brooks argues: “In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country.” Bunting agrees with all this, even as he fervently wishes that both the USA and the world at large (including Canada) will soon enough become more sensible in our time.

Saul Alinsky, Circa 1946. Photo: Myron Davis./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

From a more personal angle, L. Frank Bunting’s extended essay on  “Alinsky, Brooks, Clinton, and Obama” delves into a longstanding fascination he has had with the still not all that well-known career of Saul Alinsky, who died of a sudden heart attack in Carmel, California at the still comparatively youthful age of 63, 38 years ago this coming June 12.

In an interview this morning, on the 8 AM Arnold Transit ferry  to Mackinac Island (where he is waiting out this potentially historic weekend), Bunting explained that there were some sides of Alinsky’s career he didn’t have the time or space to touch on, as he would have liked.  As one example, he noted that Alinsky sometimes liked to joke about going to hell when he died. But on the other hand there was his close friendship and long correspondence with the quite conservative French Catholic political philosopher, Jacques Maritain, who famously said: “I do not know if Saul Alinsky knows God. But I assure you that God knows Saul Alinsky.”

Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in the future president’s Hawaiian birthplace, early 1970s — around the time of Saul Alinsky's death.

David Brooks is an American conservative journalist who even non-conservatives can read with interest. His March 4, 2010 column in the New York Times on “The Wal-Mart Hippies” has attracted some wider attention — and been reprinted, eg, in the March 6, 2010 print edition of the National Post in Canada.  It seems to me, however, to almost altogether miss the mark.

The main thrust of Brooks’s argument is that there are some striking similarities between the “people we loosely call the New Left” from the 1960s and early 1970s, and the right-wing “people we loosely call the Tea Partiers” today.

Even the loosest connections of this sort are tenuous, I think. And a few specific sentences in Brooks’s  column are much worse. Consider, eg: “the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.”

Whatever else, to describe the long-deceased Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky (1909–1972) as “the leading tactician of the New Left” is highly misleading at the very least — and probably much closer to profoundly mistaken. And I say this as someone who spent a few years in the early 1970s embedded with an “Alinsky-style” organizing project in the east end of Toronto, Canada, staffed by graduates and friends of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.

1. Beginnings …

Saul Alinsky remains an only vaguely known, under-appreciated, and not-well-understood figure in 20th century American political thought and action. (And especially action: “Analysis is easy; action is what counts” is one proposition I heard again and again when I was trying to analyse “the methods of Saul Alinsky.”) That may be one reason David Brooks gets him so wrong.

I certainly can’t pretend to understand Alinsky any better than anyone else. But I  think it advances the ball somewhat to acknowledge that, some 38 years after his untimely death, he is still a cryptic figure — even if the present-day MSNBC TV journalist Chris Matthews has called him “one of our heroes from the past,” and Playboy magazine once anointed him “one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.”

Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909.  He also spent significant time in California (where his father moved, after his parents divorced). But all his life he remained a kind of folk-culture creation of the windy city, much like his friend, the journalist Studs Terkel. Even the legendary dysfunctional Chicago mayor and fierce Alinsky opponent Richard J. Daley ultimately recognized that “Alinsky loves Chicago the same as I do.”

In his youth Alinsky studied archaeology — his own first and favourite analytic love — at the University of Chicago. In the early 1930s he went to work as a criminologist for the Illinois state government. (The trouble with archaeology then, he said later, was that “the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks.”) By the mid 1930s he was also working as a part-time labour organizer with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

2. Reveille for Radicals in the 1940s

Saul Alinsky in Chicago.

By 1939 Alinsky had become “more active in general community organizing, starting with the slums of Chicago.” One of his models was the “neighbourhood organizing” of Al Capone and his colleagues in the 1920s “Chicago Outfit,” as carried on in the 1930s by Frank Nitti — the subject of Alinsky’s ultimate PhD dissertation in criminology.

Alinsky’s first great community organizing success was in “the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made infamous [earlier on] by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle for the horrific working conditions in the Union Stock Yards).” In 1940, in the wake of his Back of the Yards’ success, Alinsky established the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), with a grant from the philanthropic arm of a Chicago-based department store chain. It would ultimately become an important training centre for his kind of community organizing.

After the United States joined the Second World War in 1942, Alinsky “worked on special assignment for the Treasury and Labor Departments … to increase industrial production in conjunction with the CIO and … organize mass war-bond drives across the country.” He had been offered a foreign-service position with the OSS, precursor of today’s CIA. But in the end the State Department apparently felt that he “could make a better contribution [domestically] in labor affairs, ensuring high production, resolving worker-management disputes, that sort of thing.”

In 1946, with the Second World War out of the way, Alinsky published his first book, Reveille for Radicals — which he claimed to have begun while in jail, for (at first) locally unappreciated “outside agitation” in Kansas City. In the book he “described the new community organizing strategy as ‘collective bargaining beyond the present confines of the factory gate.’”

The best-selling Reveille for Radicals did its best to explain Alinsky’s key concept of local “people’s organizations” — the kind of thing he had first put together in Back of the Yards, and would then work to replicate in “a score of slum communities across the nation, from Kansas City and Detroit to the barrios of Southern California.”

A perceptive review in Time magazine (apparently by Whittaker Chambers) pointed out that the “author has glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms. But this vision …  is no less than the revitalization of democracy.”  The book was also described as “a manifesto which called upon America’s poor to reclaim American democracy.” And the sociologist Daniel Bell urged that Reveille for Radicals “attempts to give people a sense of  participation and belonging” and “becomes important as a weapon against cynicism and despair.”

3. Rules for Radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s

Alinsky carried on with his community organizing work after the Second World War, based out of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.

For a time, the new Cold War with the Soviet Union and the domestic McCarthy scare that cast such a political pall over the United States in the early 1950s made “any radical activity increasingly difficult. In those days everybody who challenged the establishment was branded a Communist.”

Alinsky’s own attitude to Communism was: “I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology … My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they’ll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it’s a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’”

As it happened, democracy in America was not dead and McCarthyism faded. By the late 1950s, following the US Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the incarnation of Saul Alinsky with which the baby-boom generation and the 1960s “New Left” would become familiar had begun to put down roots.

In 1958 “a group of black leaders came to me and explained how desperate conditions were” in the “Woodlawn district of Chicago …  a black ghetto every bit as bad as Back of the Yards had been in the Thirties.” They “asked our help in organizing the community … At first, I hesitated … I’d never organized a black slum before and I was afraid my white skin might prove an insurmountable handicap.”

These fears proved unfounded. And the growth of the The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) over the next several years helped give “Alinsky-style” community organizing a new national profile in the USA of the civil rights era.

Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation also became involved in the 1950s and 1960s struggles of Mexican agricultural migrants in California. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers were trained by the IAF associate Fred Ross.

By the late 1960s the IAF’s organizer training resources had been bolstered by a grant from the Midas Muffler chain. And Alinsky and his organizers became involved in another high-profile struggle between the Eastman Kodak corporation and a new people’s organization called “FIGHT” (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today) in the black ghetto of  Rochester, NY.

Alinsky’s second major book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals was published in 1971. It adapted his mid 1940s message and concept of “people’s organizations” in Reveille for Radicals for a new generation. In the spirit of the times it had a sharper edge: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

The word “rules” tempts some readers to reduce the book to a few crucial propositions. Eg: “Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.” (Like the right-wing Tea Partiers today?)

The most striking theme in both Rules for Radicals and Saul Alinsky’s later thought on community organizing turned around his hopes for organizing the “White middle class across America.” You could only go so far, he finally concluded, with underclass minorities.

The ultimate goal was to connect with the new American urban and suburban mainstream, with all its continuing vague memories of the old agrarian democratic values nurtured by the family farm: “We’ll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy … I’ve been in this fight since the Depression … and in a way it’s all been preparation for this. I love this goddamn country, and we’re going to take it back.”

As another variation on the same theme, in the midst of FIGHT’s late 1960s/early 1970s struggles in Rochester, NY, Alinsky addressed well-off members of a liberal religious organization “and asked them for their proxies on whatever Kodak stock they held in order to gain entree to the stockholders’ meeting.”

This “proxies for people” became a new middle-class organizing tactic, which “scared Kodak, and … Wall Street. It’s our job now to relieve their tensions by fulfilling their fears … Pat Moynihan told me in Washington when he was still Nixon’s advisor that ‘proxies for people would mean revolution — they’ll never let you get away with it.’”

At this point in his career, Alinsky also confessed, he was told by various perhaps credible enough sources that a bullet was waiting for him. Similar bullets, one might surmise (with only a touch of some conspiracy-theory neurosis?) had already reached John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.

It is at least tempting to imagine that something inside Alinsky decided to save his most aggressive opponents the trouble. On June 12, 1972 he died of a heart attack, at the age of 63, during a visit to his second wife, the one-time debutante Jean Graham, in Carmel, California.

4. What was the New Left?

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1970. Photograph by Dan Wynn.

As someone who was profoundly intrigued by both Saul Alinsky and the New Left during the early 1970s, David Brooks’s 2010 image of Alinsky as “the leading tactician of the New Left” has struck me as, again, at best profoundly misleading.

At the same time,  Brooks does underline “people we loosely call the New Left.”  And it is true enough that the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s was at best a vague and amorphous political concept.

To start with, the exact phrase was a largely English-speaking invention. There were more or less parallel trends in other parts of the global village, but they did not quite use this calling card.  (The political thought of Chairman Mao in China is just one illustration.“Soxiante-huit” in Paris [and Prague], and the Red Brigades in Italy [and Red Army Faction in Germany], may be others. And then there is whatever was going on in Africa and the Middle East and Latin America at that point [see, eg, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara immediately below].)

There were as well perhaps more than subtle differences between the New Left in the United Kingdom and the United States. I still have on my own bookshelves, eg, a 1970 volume edited by the London School of Economics political science professor Maurice Cranston, entitled The New Left: Six Critical Essays. It includes extended discussions of Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, and R.D. Laing.

At least three of these UK subjects had transatlantic US echoes — Guevara, Marcuse, and (of course) Black Power. Cranston’s foreword to this 1970 volume also identified several UK New Left themes that arguably had clear enough US analogues:

* a rather vague interest in the early Karl Marx who was the “philosopher of alienation,” rather than “the later Marx, the author of Das Kapital” (whose work had already been discredited, one might say, by the Anglo-American political response to the 1930s Depression);

* a rejection of the old working-class proletariat as the revolutionary class, in favour of a “new proletariat … composed — in the words of the title of Fanon’s most famous book — of the damnés de la terre, the impoverished peasants and rural workers of the third world, the Negro inhabitants of the American ghettoes, together … with miscellaneous alienated drop-outs from the Western bourgeoisie”;

* a “glorification of violence” as a political “cleansing force” — which arguably had more in common historically with the French socialist Georges Sorel than with even “the red terrorist doctor” version of Karl Marx, but was nonetheless “echoed by almost all the luminaries of the New Left, including Sartre, Marcuse, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokley Carmichael and R.D. Laing”;

* allowing for various qualifications, at least some sort of “link between the New Left and the ideology of the psychedelic hippie movement” — which shared “antipathies towards the bourgeoisie and the affluent society, towards the square and the old,” and were “united also by certain fantasies about the innocence of man and the wickedness of rulers.”

Some 40 years later, the current Wikipedia article on “New Left” has, understandably enough no doubt, “multiple issues” editorially. Yet its broad definition seems serviceable enough. (“The New Left was an epithet applied mainly in the United Kingdom and United States to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of social class.”)

For all its faults, the Wikipedia article also does not too bad a job of further filling in the US side of the transatlantic anglophone picture.

From this angle, “at the core” of the New Left in the United States was the college campus organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), with its 1962 Port Huron Statement. Some key older (and younger) luminaries here included: the sociologist C. Wright Mills, with his 1960 “Letter to the New Left”; and then (in alphabetical order, and with no pretensions to comprehensiveness at all, of course): Murray Bookchin, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, David Horowitz, and Jerry Rubin.

The Wikipedia article goes on to note that: “Most New Left thinkers in the US were influenced by the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Similarly: “The US New Left drew inspiration from black radicalism, particularly the Black Power movement and the more explicitly left-wing Black Panther Party … the American Indian Movement” and the “Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee” (SNCC). And: Some “students immersed themselves into poor communities” and “sought to be a broad based, grass roots movement.”

Finally: “It could be argued that the New Left’s most successful legacy was the rebirth of feminism.” Its leaders were still “largely white men”  — and “women reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with their own … movement” (which would of course bring on such further luminaries as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and  Bella Abzug).

5. Alinsky and the New Left in and after the 1960s

It is altogether revealing (and unsurprising), I think, that neither the 1970 Cranston book on the New Left nor the Wikipedia article today makes any reference at all to Saul Alinsky.

At the same time, as evidence, so to speak, that David Brooks’s view of Alinsky as “the leading tactician of the New Left” is not entirely without any rhyme or reason whatsoever, there are a few vague connections. Cesar Chavez, eg, is on the Wikipedia list of US New Left luminaries. And Chavez was trained by the IAF associate Fred Ross. (Though Alinsky himself apparently initially thought that Chavez’s aspirations to organize farm workers were unlikely to succeed. Ross has also claimed that Alinsky in fact had little to do with his own or Chavez’s training.)

Similarly, there are records of correspondence between Alinsky and C. Wright Mills in the 1940s.  But nothing finally came of a proposed literary collaboration between the two men. Alinsky’s biographer Sanford Horwitt has written: “Mills must have realized that Alinsky was not particularly good at developing sociological theories or writing abstract formulations … .”

There is no doubt as well that Alinsky, in a general way, considered himself a deeply committed “radical” and “progressive,” who was clearly on the left as opposed to the right. And his work in the 1960s with black-ghetto organizations like TWO in Chicago and FIGHT in Rochester connects at least somewhat with the Black Power side of Maurice Cranston’s New Left.

Some US New Left student radicals who “immersed themselves” in “poor communities” and looked towards a “broad based, grass roots movement” probably were at least dimly aware of Alinsky’s concept of local “people’s organizations.” Alinsky and the SDS shared general concerns about the future of the “democratic society” in America, and so forth.

Yet even when all vague connections of this sort are accounted for — and all allowances made for David Brooks’s stress on the word loosely — to anyone with direct experience of the two phenomena the differences between the quasi-psychedelic New Left and Saul Alinsky’s street-wise community organizing will seem far more striking than their similarities.

So Jeffrey Shaffer has recently written in the Huffington Post: “As someone who experienced the 1960s in America firsthand, I feel compelled to push back against a growing trend of snide generalities and outright fiction that’s being passed off as the truth about what happened in that remarkable period … The latest example came in a recent New York Times column by David Brooks which attempted to compare tea party followers with the New Left.”

Some of Brooks’s mistaken judgments in the particular case of Saul Alinsky as “the leading tactician of the New Left” may flow from his perhaps understandable enough tendency (as a conservative journalist) to draw a little too much of his understanding of Alinsky from recent right-wing US political writing, that takes the Palinesque arts and crafts of “snide generalities and outright fiction” about one’s political opponents to almost inconceivable heights.

To cite just one of an enormous number of such crazed literary creations, currently available on the world-wide web, consider something called “The Art and Science of Irrational Education” by one Diane Alden, dated June 5, 2002.

Note this particular paragraph of Ms. Alden’s: “In order to create the ‘new man’ for the new state, one must first capture the language. Then they must capture the institutions such as the universities. The totalitarians have done that in the United States in the last half-century far better than if we had been invaded by Russians in the ’60s. Instead we were invaded by the products of the Frankfurt School of Sociology and its generals such as Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky.”

To explain in any detail how either stunningly corrupt and dishonest or just plain appallingly ignorant and dumb the last sentence of this paragraph is (or perhaps both?) lies beyond the scope of what space I have left here. Those deeply interested can consult the Wikipedia article on the “Frankfurt School,” and/or Martin Jay’s 1973 book, The dialectical imagination: a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950.

In both cases the reader will find references to Herbert Marcuse, but none at all to Saul Alinsky. Someone who reads both these items along with Alinsky’s two major books will begin to see just how plainly absurd the notion of Alinsky as a “general” of “the Frankfurt School of Sociology” is — and begin to fear for the fate of any democratic society in which such outright fictions are treated with anything but vast amusement and polite but resolute contempt.

It is another plain truth that Alinsky himself is on record in various places about his feelings towards “the New Left.” Always concerned to show its higher-minded side, eg, Playboy magazine interviewed him a month before he died in 1972. At one point the Playboy interviewer asked: “Spokesmen for the New Left contend that this process of accommodation renders piecemeal reforms meaningless, and that the overthrow and replacement of the system itself is the only means of ensuring meaningful social progress. How would you answer them?”

Alinsky replied: “That kind of rhetoric explains why there’s nothing left of the New Left. It would be great if the whole system would just disappear overnight, but it won’t, and the kids on the New Left … aren’t going to overthrow it …  Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn’t organize a successful luncheon, much less a revolution.”

He went on: “I can sympathize with the impatience and pessimism of a lot of kids, but … it’s just idiocy for the Panthers to talk about all power growing from the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns … The only answer is to build up local power bases that can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your goals. That takes time and hard work and all the tedium connected with hard work, which turns off a lot of today’s rhetorical radicals. But it’s the only alternative … It’s important to look at this issue in a historical perspective.”

As the remark about “the Panthers” here suggests as well, there was in Saul Alinsky’s concept of building “people’s organizations” none of the “glorification of violence” as a political “cleansing force” that Maurice Cranston saw as a key feature of the New Left in his 1970 book of essays.

At one point in the Playboy interview Alinsky was talking about organizing tactics that demonstrated all “the elements of good organization — imagination, legality, excitement and, above all, effectiveness.” The Playboy interviewer jumped in with “And coercion …”  But Alinsky quickly came back: “No, not coercion —  popular pressure in the democratic tradition.”

In Rules for Radicals Alinsky also stressed, as one recent friendly commentator has put it, “that people should not underestimate the room to manoeuvre in democratic systems.” Alinsky’s community organizing, he urged himself, could only survive in democratic societies underpinned by a working rule of law. Adding the white middle-class mainstream in America to the black ghettoes and Latino barrios was the wave of his radical organizing future in the early 1970s. He remained a “conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore” (a personal style also favoured by some graduates from his IAF.) And in the very end, he liked to explain, “quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara” were “as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.”

6. Alinsky and Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) today

Saul Alinsky in his later days.

In the midst of the “growing trend of snide generalities and outright fiction that’s being passed off as the truth about” the progressive tradition in contemporary America, there are of course many growing urban legends about the past, present, and future of President Barack Obama. And a number of these also allude to the cryptic figure of Saul Alinsky from Chicago.

As a further example from the contemporary online literature of the ridiculous right, consider “OBAMA, RADICAL MENTOR SAUL ALINSKY, AND MARXIST LIBERATION THEOLOGY,” dated 4/14/07.  A few brief passages must suffice: “There is quite a connection between Obama and the Industrial Areas Foundation, a radical organization located in Chicago (Obama’s turf) and the ideological heir of Saul Alinsky, a notorious revolutionary … The radical Marxist, Saul Alinsky, was the mentor of both Hillary and Obama and his book Rules for Radicals is the bible for radicals as the Mein Kampf was for the Nazis.”

(Again, stooping to refute such lunacy gives it far more attention than it deserves. Very briefly, however, unlike Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, Alinsky was, as Playboy noted years ago, on the “nonsocialist left.” Far from any kind of “Marxist,” one of Saul Alinsky’s greatest admirers — and friends — was the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who aptly characterized Alinsky’s essential ideological posture as “specifically American.” And then, whatever the Goebbels-clone Glenn Beck may say, if you are going to pretend that your opponents are Marxists, you at least cannot rationally imply that they are Nazis too.)

Having said all this, it is true enough that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do have connections with Saul Alinsky, and the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago that he established in 1940. These connections were sensibly outlined in a March 25, 2007 article in the Washington Post — at a time when Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama were still rivals for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Hillary Clinton, in her senior year at Wellesley College (1968-69) wrote a 92-page thesis on   “‘There Is Only the Fight . . .’ : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”  She had first met Alinsky during the summer of 1968 at a church-sponsored event in Chicago (also her home town). She interviewed him two more times in preparing her thesis. It may be that only someone from such a comparatively privileged background as hers could have managed all this. Alinsky was in any case impressed by her ambition, “political literacy,” and emerging progressive values. He offered her a job as part of his burgeoning campaign to organize America’s white middle class. She turned the job down, and went directly on to law school instead. (As she would later explain, Alinsky “believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.”)

Barack Obama was only 10 years old when Saul Alinsky died. But Alinksy’s Industrial Areas Foundation lived on after his death (as it still lives on today). In June 1985, in his mid 20s, Obama moved from New York City to Chicago, “to work with the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Alinsky network,” associated with the IAF. The future US president was, at the time, “strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer.” His new community organizing job with the surviving Alinsky network in Chicago was “very romantic, until you do it.” He stayed in the job until May 1988, when he left for his first trip to Europe and his father’s birthplace in Kenya. Late in 1988 he too went on to law school.

The future president’s time as a Chicago community organizer apparently involved “ three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters” (a not unusual description of community organizing work). At the same time: “During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization … ”

According to Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, “who knows Obama, worked closely with Clinton and spoke at Alinsky’s funeral,” in the end “Obama and Clinton both learned” that “community organizing is crucial but not enough.” According to “Chicago organizer Gregory Galluzzo, Obama’s former supervisor, who likes to describe himself as Alinsky’s St. Paul,” either Obama or Clinton as president would mean “a government that’s more responsive to the ordinary people.” But some differences remained. As Galluzzo also told the Washington Post in 2007, “Obama’s exposure to the organizer’s liturgy taught him that wisdom can emerge from the grass roots.” Hillary more often “leans toward the elites.”

Though I wonder a bit about these judgments myself, I think the assessment of Hillary Clinton  probably makes sense. Her reason for not taking the job Saul Alinsky offered, eg — because Alinsky only believed in working “outside” the system — doesn’t ring quite true. In Rules for Radicals Alinsky wrote: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.”

You might even say that President Obama also internalized this side of Alinsky’s gospel.  And that could be part of what makes even the reasonable conservative David Brooks urge, in a March 11, 2010 New York Times column that almost makes up for all the unhappy misconceptions in his column from the previous week: “In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism.”

This finally leads me to two very final thoughts (I promise) — in a context where much else could be thought and said, if only both readers and writers had the time and patience (and sheer ability too, no doubt). The first is that, when President Obama is at the top of his game (and the United States is in one of its intermittent sensible moods), he is laying the foundation for David Brooks’s “modern brand of moderate progressivism.” And it may owe something quite important to the Alinsky-style organizing concept that “wisdom can emerge from the grass roots.”

Or, as Alinsky himself said: “My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they’ll generally reach the right decisions.”

Or, again, as the 21-year-old Hillary Clinton put it, in her college thesis: despite Saul Alinsky’s rhetoric, much of his agenda “does not sound ‘radical.’”  Even his tactics were often “non-radical, even ‘anti-radical.’ His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them.”

Second, and alas, President Obama sometimes continues to be hampered in his struggles by a largely unfortunate fact of recent American political history. The greatest misconception in David Brooks’s March 4, 2010 column in the New York Times, that is to say, is its suggestion (or implication at any rate) that many on the left in the United States (and elsewhere) — moderate or radical, old or new, etc, etc — have studied Saul Alinsky and taken him seriously.

In fact, Alinsky’s ultimate legacy to his progressive colleagues — including his closest friends in the surviving IAF — was a challenging one. Few on the right or left ever take to such things easily. (And no doubt for good enough reasons: few people really believe what they believe in the way Saul Alinsky did.) The crusade to organize the white middle class in America, so much on his mind when he had his fatal heart attack in Carmel, California, is the ultimate case in point.

In 1972 Alinsky “believed that what President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew called ‘The Silent Majority’ was living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically-active citizens. He feared the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, ‘making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday.’”

In 2010 it is probably not too much of a stretch to say that Alinsky’s early 1970s fears are close enough to what has happened in the contemporary political history of the USA, from President Ronald Reagan on. And in this sense I think David Brooks’s March 4 column finally does point to something true enough about the present situation in Barack Obama’s America, even if the often estimable Mr. Brooks gets almost all the details wrong.

It may at least be constructive at this juncture to argue that if the progressive tradition in America had paid more serious attention to what Saul Alinsky was saying (and doing) 40 years ago, there would be no right-wing Tea Partiers today. Those involved — as few or many as they are — would almost all be on the left, supporting President Obama and his “Change We Can Believe In!” It is no doubt not easy at all being President of the United States right now — or serving on his apparently somewhat beleaguered staff. But it may also be true enough that one of the many things the White House could usefully remember is what the president himself began to learn some 25 years ago, on the streets of South Chicago.

March 18, 2010.

Right-wing clichés have always played an important role in Canadian values, as these 2007 media-generalist themes from an earlier generation suggest. Right on Preston Manning and Canadian Club! (And thanks to Stacy May, at shameless: for girls who get it.)

The theory that consultants of any description will always at least try to give their clients what they want is nicely stiffened by a new “Harris-Decima survey for the [unabashedly right-wing] Manning Centre” (named after Preston and his father, etc, etc). This work of applied social science “conducted through phone interviews with 1,000 adult Canadians between Feb. 1-10” 2010, apparently suggests that “Conservatives now ‘own the centre,’ while the left ‘is a very lonely place to be’ in Canada.”

The crucial more or less hard numbers here appear to be that “five elections ago … 41% of self-described centrists voted Liberal. In 2008, 47% of centrists voted Conservative.” But just what (if anything) this means in the real world of Canadian politics today still seems obscure.

Even in the October 14, 2008 Canadian federal election, the Conservatives won less than 38% of the cross-Canada popular vote.  And for the second time in a row this was not even enough for a bare majority of seats in the unreformed first-past-the-post electoral system of the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa.

More recently, according to another “Harris-Decima survey conducted for The Canadian Press,” which “surveyed 2,936 people by telephone between Feb. 25 and March 7” 2010, only 33% of Canadians would vote Conservative if a federal election were held today. And according to an EKOS poll for the CBC, based on “a random sample of 2,467 Canadians aged 18 and over” between “March 3 – March 9, 2010,” the Conservatives would attract less than 32% of Canadians, from coast to coast to coast.

Moreover, in the March 3–9 EKOS poll the federal Liberal and New Democratic parties combined attracted just under 46% of the cross-Canada popular vote (setting aside the Greens and the Bloc Québécois, both of which are more plausibly viewed as “left” than “right”). In the February 25–March 7 Harris-Decima poll the Liberals and New Democrats combined had 45% — also what the same two parties combined won even in the 2008 federal election.

Sonia Brownell, George Orwell’s second wife, helped edit the posthumous collection of his essays, journalism, and letters which first appeared in 1968. The two people here are not the real George and Sonia, but just actors playing their parts in a play about Orwell’s last years in the late 1940s, that was performed in New Zealand last year. The real Sonia was attractive, but maybe not quite as attractive as the young lady playing her here.

So, what kind of world is it where a party called Conservative gets from less than 38% to less than 32% of the vote, while parties called Liberal and New Democrat get 45%–46% (and other more or less left-wing parties get an additional 17%, or more), but hired consultants for a right-wing institute believe it is credible to report that “ the left ‘is a very lonely place to be’ in Canada”? Shurely (as Frank magazine used to say) this is a world that could only be seriously inhabited by Alice in Wonderland, or the Wizard of Oz?

Or, there is lately a lot of bullying — intellectual and otherwise — going on in what the academic community nowadays likes to call the “political discourse” of the true north. Those who actually believe in what the Canadian Constitution Act 1982 calls our “free and democratic society” will resist. (And for better or worse it is at least easier to ignore the bullying here, because the country does not cast such a giant shadow beyond its own borders.)

If you really want to know what’s going on politically, you just have to keep paying your closest attention to what is (to borrow the title of the fourth volume of the 1968 edition of Saint George Orwell’s collected essays, journalism, and letters) In Front of Your Nose.

Signing of a Memorandum of Co-operation between the Ontario government and the Webequie First Nation, May 14, 2004. The memorandum committed “both parties to enhance communication and understanding that may foster job creation and economic growth in the area.”

The vital last words on the McGuinty government’s new “Open Ontario” throne speech won’t be heard until the provincial budget a few weeks hence.

Some think Premier Dalton just “wants to change the channel … to forget eHealth and the HST.” Others believe that while “his path converged with Harper’s during tough times, [the] Ontario Premier’s path to recovery looks different.” Still others think Premier McGuinty has at last revealed himself as “At heart … a ‘Reddish’ Tory” (just like Bland Bill Davis, 1971–1985, and the first great Liberal premier of Canada’s most populous province, Oliver “Smile-when-you-oxymoronically-call-him-the-Christian-politician” Mowat, 1872–1896).

In the age of the return of the ancient resource economy first invented by The Fur Trade in Canada, however, one very new McGuintyesque Open Ontario theme is already grabbing a lot of attention — with various good reasons.

The Ring of Fire is an area of approximately 5,120 square kilometres around McFauld's Lake. TORONTO STAR GRAPHIC.

See, eg, this poignant passage in the March 8, 2010 throne speech: “In 2008, northern Ontario became home to our first diamond mine … Your government will build on that success — particularly in the region known as the Ring of Fire [hello Johnny Cash — and June Carter —  1963]  … It is said to contain one of the largest chromite deposits in the world — a key ingredient in stainless steel … There is no substitute for chromite … It’s the most promising mining opportunity in Canada in a century.”

In some intriguing respects, this particular “Open Ontario” theme just revives the “New Ontario” (aka “Nouvel-Ontario”) northern frontier that was in fact the big breaking news in the province a century ago. (“Remember Ross,” advised an early 20th century Grit newspaper: “He is Building up New Ontario.”) But in the early 21st century, the central Canadian resource economy is finally pushing into the exotic most northerly reaches of the modern Ontario territory. And there are without doubt some new and unusual challenges ahead.

Getting around on the new northern frontier.

Already, we have such headlines as “Dalton McGuinty bets big on mining, critics fear eco-disaster.” But when you look at the official Ontario road map that more or less matches the chromite-rich “Ring” probably the most striking feature of this far northeastern region is that there are still no roads there at all! (Or at least not of the sort that the Ministry of Transportation chooses to view as official, etc.) The bush plane — an innovation of the early 20th century — remains the essential mode of regional transit, supplemented by the ancient canoe in this vast boreal-forest geography of rivers and lakes.

Attawapiskat First Nation from the air.

Similarly, as various recent newspaper articles allude to, what Canada’s Constitution Act 1982 calls “the aboriginal peoples of Canada” continue to dominate the demography of this far northern last frontier of the central Canadian resource economy. And already we have such headlines as “Don’t let mines pre-empt natives … even as politicians at Queen’s Park hype the potential for thousands of jobs and much-needed lasting economic benefits for northern Ontario, local natives are already feeling so betrayed they have set up blockades to stop exploration.”

Attawapiskat First Nation, down on the ground.

In Ontario, as in other parts of Canada, the aboriginal population has also been growing rapidly lately. As of the most recent 2006 census more than 240,000 people “who reported being Aboriginal reside in Ontario” (only about 2% of the province’s total population — but considerably larger than the 141,000 2009 residents of all descriptions in the province of Prince Edward Island, to say nothing of the less than 110,000 such residents in all three far northern territories of Canada combined).

In 2006 as well just under 100,000 aboriginal people lived in Northern Ontario. There are similarly good reasons to believe that Statistics Canada numbers inevitably underestimate aboriginal populations. And, while there are no exact numbers of this sort, it seems a very good guess that aboriginal peoples — mostly so-called “North American Indian” — currently account for the great majority of residents in the northeastern Ontario region known in the March 8, 2010 throne speech as  the Ring of Fire.

New Northern Ontario frontier today.

As we see it ourselves, the fresh emphasis on reviving the ancient northern resource economy is just one of several intriguing and potentially forward-looking ingredients in the McGuinty government’s new “Open Ontario Plan.” But “working with northerners, Aboriginal communities and mining partners to fully realize the Ring of Fire’s potential” certainly won’t be easy.  Premier Dalton himself has said: “this represents a tremendous opportunity for us. Obviously we want to get it right.” It will be very important to do just that.

New MPP Bob Chiarelli (centre) is flanked by Ontario Premier Dalton Mcguinty (right) and Glengarry, Prescott, and Russell MPP Jean-Marc Lalonde. Photograph by: David Gonczol , The Ottawa Citizen.

Much ink is currently being spilled — and even wasted, some would say — on the March 4, 2010 Canadian federal budget. But if you live in Canada’s most populous province, and count yourself among the small but wiry band seriously interested in its regional government and politics, you may have found the two March 4 provincial by-elections at least equally interesting.

Perhaps especially in Ontario provincial politics, by-elections are not quite as significant as some commentators desperate for something to comment on sometimes pretend. The excellent Graham Murray, editor and publisher of the authoritative Inside Queen’s Park newsletter, has calculated that the seats involved in more than two-thirds of the 46 Ontario provincial by-elections held from 1977 to February 4, 2010 did not change hands.

In their broadest brush strokes the two Eastern Ontario by-elections held this March 4 have just added two more cases in point to Mr. Murray’s larger trend. This past February 9 I averred there was no chance at all that the longstanding Ontario Tory seat now known as Leeds-Grenville would go to the Liberals, to say nothing of the New Democrats (or the Green Party). And while the very well seasoned Ontario Tory Bob Runciman has gone on to the still unreformed Senate of Canada, his carefully meditated successor Steve Clark has in fact tidily held Leeds-Grenville for what is still formally known as the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

Similarly, Wilfrid Laurier political science professor David Docherty had earlier urged that the rather different seat of Ottawa West-Nepean did have some serious “potential to be a barometer of how the [Dalton McGuinty Liberal] government’s doing.” And, joining this fraternity, on February 9 I suggested myself that if Ontario Tory Beth Graham finally “manages to take the seat for the Hudak Conservatives more than a few observers will be saying ah yes indeed: the McGuinty Liberals really are in more longer-term trouble than I have thought so far. And they may be right.” In the end, however, on March 4 the seat was held for the Liberals by former Ottawa mayor Bob Chiarelli.

At the same time, those who really like to examine the entrails of by-election birds in depth do have a few narrower numbers with which to chide the McGuinty government — or at least say that Premier Dalton ought not to be getting too complacent about his administration’s current place in the regional political firmament. In the 2007 Ontario general election, eg, Bob Runciman had managed to win a mere 56.24% of the Leeds-Grenville vote for the Ontario Tories. In the March 4, 2010 by-election precipitated by Mr. Runciman’s departure for the Senate in Ottawa, his Conservative successor Steve Clark managed to come up with a striking 66.6% of the vote.

Ontario Tory Beth Graham, on the campaign trail in Ottawa West-Nepean. She didn’t win, but she did better than the Conservatives did last time.

Similarly, in the 2007 Ontario general election Premier Dalton’s former municipal affairs and housing minister Jim Watson (who has resigned to run for mayor of Ottawa) won Ottawa West-Nepean with 50.64% of the vote. All (former Ottawa mayor)  Bob Chiarelli could manage in the March 4, 2010 by-election was 43.5%. Meanwhile, 2010 Conservative Beth Graham won an impressive enough 39.0%, up from only 31.80% for the Tory candidate in 2007. Already, it could be said, the mainstream media is probably making more of this than it ought to. (See, eg: “McGuinty Liberals win narrow victory in Ottawa by-election” and  “Chiarelli wins, but not in a walk … Ex-mayor beats Tory by about five points.”) The McGuinty government, it would seem, is not really in any very deep trouble — yet, at any rate. Still, it is no doubt worth remembering: In times like these, no democratic politician anywhere can be altogether secure. If you want to stay in office, you will have to work harder to keep the people’s trust. That is what Premier Dalton seems to say he likes. And that is, no doubt again, the way it ought to be.

[UPDATE  I: As it happened, the throne speech did not begin until closer to 3 PM. If you're up to reading the full document, which is at least somewhat carefully crafted, CLICK HERE. For Jennifer Ditchburn's Canadian Press report see "Harper takes aim at deficit with throne speech, opposition says there's no new ideas."]

The deeper question at least ought to turn around Canada’s 40th Parliament at large. Three recent opinion polls present rather different results — the sum of which again ought to be that no party has an interest in election hi-jinks for any near future. Can Parliament  do something, anything, to show the Canadian people that democracy really does work?

You don’t have to be very healthily cynical at all to say the most plausible answer is probably not. But all who value even the modest degree of a real free and democratic society we are so lucky to enjoy in Canada today have a vested interest in keeping hope alive.

That also means seconding the particular if also probably vain hopes of such irrepressible upbeat commentators as Andrew Cohen, president of The Historica-Dominion Institute: “The danger of [the just ended Olympics in] Vancouver is that our success [in our own eyes at any rate: and we did win a record-breaking 14 gold medals after all] will reinforce our culture of complacency …  Let us commit to renewing the federation with a national securities commission, Senate reform, a revival of parliamentary committees, empowering private members and a campaign to encourage Canadians to vote …  so the new patriotism means something other than wearing a red sweater or buying a coffee at Tim Hortons.”

Still more must be done as well, of course, to stop Stephen Harper’s two most recent parliamentary prorogations from becoming serious precedents for the future. Both the Liberals and the New Democrats are apparently interested in trying to make prorogation more of a power of parliament itself, rather than of the prime minister and governor general. We still wonder how practical this is. And we think there is probably more long-term mileage in democratizing the office of governor general, to help offset the all too vast array of executive power that has now accumulated in the hands of even minority prime ministers. (If you haven’t already seen our latest on this subject  — “March 6 referendum in Iceland: here’s one model for democratizing the governor general in Canada “ — CLICK HERE to check it out.)

Meanwhile, our very best wishes to all the MPs and unelected (and unreformed) Canadian Senators, who gather in Ottawa today. How wonderful it would be if they actually could set aside their own partisan careers for a brief moment over the next few months, and somehow manage to do something that would make Canadians half as proud as Mlle Rochette and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver 2010. And who knows? Stranger things have in fact happened at least once or twice in Canada’s diverse, exotic, and improbable history. It is not entirely impossible that they will happen again — and again, and again, and again.

[UPDATE  II, March 4: As widely predicted, there is nothing surprising about the new Canadian federal budget. For the key documents from the  finance department by the Rideau Canal see  "Budget 2010: Leading the Way on Jobs and Growth."  For brief commentary from Canada's self-proclaimed national newspaper see "Ottawa unveils smallest spending increase in a decade ... Restraint seen as necessary if Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is to meet his objective of paying for economic stimulus bills without raising taxes."]

Sid the Kid, from Cole Harbour, NS, is happy after he scores Team Canada’s golden goal, February 28, 2010. Harry How/Getty Images.

At least something brief should be said about the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010, now that they’re over. But just what is not altogether easy to figure out. The good news, however, is that, by and large, the news is good. (From our own Canadian point of view at any rate.)

My favourite penultimate headline comes from the Vancouver Sun: “Sidney Crosby saves Canada from nervous breakdown … Star centre scores in overtime for 3-2 win, gold medal in men’s Olympic hockey.”

For (almost) sheer objectivity, try the New York Times: “Canada did not win as many medals as it had hoped at these Olympics … but it won more golds (14) than any country in history.” Or the Los Angeles Times: “The United States will top the medal count for the first time since 1932, and it will finish with 37 medals, breaking the single-country record of 36 set by Germany in 2002 … Canada also has made history, leading the gold-medal count for the first time.”

You can’t get enough of her: Bronze medal-winning figure skater Joannie Rochette, from la belle province, poses in the NBC Today Show Studio at Grouse Mountain on February 26, 2010 in North Vancouver. Photograph by: Getty, Getty.

(New York is more exact on the Canadian record than Los Angeles here. For the final exact medal counts see the Vancouver Sun. And if you want to know how Canadians far from Vancouver felt about the Canadian record, see the response to the Toronto Globe and Mail’s online question: “By setting a new record for gold medals won at the Olympics, did Canada make good on its goal of owning the podium?” As of 12:35 this morning more than 90% of respondents were saying YES!)

Nothing is perfect in human life of course — which is just one reason why Canadians say “sorry” so often. For some critical balance I think myself that the Montreal guru L. Ian Macdonald was right when he said it should have been “on the podium” not “own the podium.” There really was not enough about the French fact in Canada, in both the opening and closing ceremonies. And there were just too many Mounties at the end (even for a “Maple Leaf Forever” revival).

All this having been said, Vancouver deserves vast credit for hosting the 2010 winter Olympics in a way that has engaged so many Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and made them proud. These Olympics could mark a positive turning point in the endless progress of the elusive Canadian identity. If they do, Western Canada will deserve vast credit for this as well.

You can’t get enough of this either: “Canada's Sidney Crosby rejoices after scoring the winner in overtime as Canada beat the United States 3-2 in the gold medal hockey game at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.” Photograph by: Yuri Kadobnov, AFP/Getty Images.

(Though in its progressive Pacific coast and not its Stephen Harper incarnation, some will want to hasten to add. And I should add too that I am saying these things as someone who has lived in Toronto most of my life.)

Finally, hosting global village events like this can sometimes show you just who your real friends are on the international scene. Having watched various TV coverages of Vancouver 2010 and scoured the web sites of newspapers around the world, I think there can be little doubt that Canada’s truest and most understanding friend nowadays is indeed the United States of America next door (believe it or not, etc). Here’s hoping as well that this coming fall enough of our fellow North American best friends forever will remember that they did so well in these Olympics too, under their history-making Democrat president, Barack Obama, from Hawaii and Illinois.

Canada's (and Quebec’s) Joannie Rochette cries after finishing her routine in the women's short programme figure skating event at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics February 23, 2010. Rochette's mother died just days before the start of the women's Olympic figure skating competition. REUTERS/Andy Clark, National Post.

BUCKHORN, ONTARIO. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2010. Now that “Canada owns the rink with mauling of Russia,” the anglophone hardhats up here on the fluted edge of the Canadian Shield are relaxing a bit. At Pete’s Lunch by the locks this morning, it was also pointed out that we now have seven gold medals — just as many as the USA (or Germany for that matter): and at the top of the heap in this department at least.

On an allegedly deeper level, my neo-socialist cousin from Mariposa e-mailed me this morning about some remarks by the New Democrat professor at UBC Michael Byers: “I think that Canadians are changing, our society evolves. Perhaps we’re becoming more self-confident than we used to be … But it’s not a sudden development. It didn’t happen over night. These are trends that take place over the course of generations, and the Olympic Games provide an opportunity for these trends to manifest themselves in a more salient way.”

“Salient” … now there’s a word that can make people up here raise their eyebrows. And of course our American cousins are still gloating: “So much for Own the Podium: US is a juggernaut at Vancouver Olympics.” (But as usual nowadays, they’re still more friendly than our former UK imperial masters across the sea.)

For sheer nastiness — only vaguely redeemed by the truth that hurts — it seems the Russian journos have now jumped into the lead (to make up for their country’s mere three gold medals so far, no doubt): “The abject cruelty shown by Canadian soldiers in international conflicts is scantily referred to, as indeed is the utter incapacity of this county to host a major international event, due to its inferiority complex, born of a trauma being the skinny and weakling bro to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost to the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps.”

So … we’ve still got a lot of work to do, of course, of course. Yet apparently even Forbes magazine down south has been saying that: “As the world assembles in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, the 21st century is shaping up great for Canada,” which “has avoided many of the problems that currently bedevil the US.”

Well … maybe … Old Earl down the road to Scotsman’s Point, who always votes Liberal, was also moaning over lunch about at least a few apparent troubling political side-effects — of the sort that currently bedevil the US too. Just moments ago, he e-mailed what he claims are four more or less relevant items from the net today (or yesterday): “Conservatives re-open gap over Liberals” ; “Conservatives enjoy three-point Olympic bounce” ; “Ignatieff ’stupefied’ at suggestion he wouldn’t root for Canada” ; and (less directly to the point, perhaps, but still interesting?) “Own the podium — or let down majority of Canadians.”

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir perform at Vancouver, Monday, February 22, 2010. They finally became both the first Canadians — and the first North Americans — to win the Olympic ice dance gold medal. John Mahoney / Canwest News Service.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of it myself. I’m hoping the ultimate truth will descend from the late winter sky at some point, when I’m out in the bush cutting firewood, for the old Quebec heater we still have, in the original part of the house. Meanwhile, I agree with Earl about the potential political side-effects. But I’m not entirely unhappy … at all.

Subject to further divine revelation, I think it reminds me most of what Bud Grant, the old American coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the CFL (and then more famously of the NFL Minnesota Vikings) used to say, long, long ago: “Canadians should be more like Texans.” That does seem to me at least part of what’s happening, in some degree at any rate. And I don’t think it’s an entirely bad thing, at last. Setting aside the obvious objections, it could even be the beginning of something that’s almost entirely good. (In both official languages, at last as well.)

Iceland’s current head of government Johanna Sigurdardottir, who is “the one and only openly lesbian Prime Minister in the World.” This is not, however, why the President of Iceland has refused to sign her government’s UK-Netherlands payback bill into law, triggering a national referendum on March 6, 2010.

In the midst of all the deep excitement about the Vancouver Olympics 2010, who cares about the fate of some obscure arrangements for dealing with an obscure branch of the global financial crisis of fall 2008, in the upcoming March 6, 2010 referendum in the very small if also rather ancient northern nation of Iceland?

For better or worse, our resident Ontario historian Randall White has cared enough to send in a 900-word introduction to the Iceland referendum — and how it might even shed some light on our current struggles with democracy in Canada.

CLICK HERE for the full article or see “March 6 referendum in Iceland: here’s one model for democratizing the governor general in Canada,” under the Canadian Republic category to the right of this page.

(But be forewarned: As Dr. White explains, neither the referendum in Iceland nor its potential relationship to democratizing the office of governor general in Canada has anything at all to do with the otherwise somewhat intriguing political fact that Johanna Sigurdardottir is both “Iceland’s first female Prime Minister, and the world’s first openly gay leader.” (Cabinet ministers in Ontario, municipal councillors in San Francisco, and mayors of Winnipeg of course don’t count here: you have to be the leader of a country, even if it is one with a very small population!)