Public responses versus private beliefs....

By Neil Reynolds, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2012
University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a liberal academic who voted enthusiastically for Barack Obama, now thinks – based on a rigorous morality quiz taken by 130,000 people – that the progressive mindset is, in a phrase, morally challenged. Author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Mr. Haidt says liberals need a religious revival to get back on track, a contrarian assertion that’s reverberating through the secular universe.
Mr. Haidt used his controversial quiz to identify five “foundational attributes,” moral principles that are universally respected, however practised. (The quiz – open for scrutiny at YourMorals.Org – asks disturbing questions: Would you renounce your citizenship for a million dollars? Would you give up a year of your life for a million dollars? Would you kick an animal for a million dollars?) The first foundational attribute is the capacity to care for others and, a corollary, a capacity to reduce harm. The second is fairness. The remaining three are loyalty, respect for authority and recognition of sacred things.

Whether liberal or conservative, Mr. Haidt says, Americans are strongly moved by the first two foundational attributes: caring and fairness. His analysis of the quiz results, however, indicates that liberals care more than conservatives when they perceive harm and that conservatives care more than liberals when they perceive unfairness. Liberals, alas, are ambivalent about loyalty, authority and sacred things – qualities that conservatives embrace.
Mr. Haidt, who recently reprised his argument in a piece for The New York Times, says conservatives possess “a broader set of moral tastes” and are able, in appealing to the public, to tap a richer moral lexicon. Many liberals are embarrassed by talk of sacred things – such as Ronald Reagan’s patriotic reverence for God and country. When they threaten sacred objects, “we can expect a ferocious tribal response.”
And tribal responses, he says, are what politics is all about. “Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value – be it racial, religious, regional or ideological – is under attack, they rally to its defence, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes. The key to understanding tribal behaviour is not money, it’s sacredness.”
Humanity’s “great trick,” he says, is its ability to form a circle around a tree, a rock, an ancestor, a flag, a book or a god – then to treat that thing as sacred. Thus, across America, the culture wars are now holy wars in which liberals skirmish endlessly with vociferous defenders of God, country, flag and family.
Liberals can still win elections, but Mr. Haidt argues they’ll find it harder and harder to do so. Gallup says that liberals now make up only 20 per cent of Americans, that conservatives make up 40 per cent – and that independent voters, making up 30 per cent, disproportionately share with conservatives a respect for sacred things.
Mr. Haidt’s analysis roughly parallels the findings of Reginald Bibby, the prominent and prolific sociologist who monitors social and religious trends in Canada. In his Beyond the Gods & Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters, published last year, he documents the growing chasm that separates Canadians who embrace sacred things and Canadians who repudiate them. Can these antagonists, he asks, ever co-exist?

Mr. Bibby has tracked the decline of organized religion in Canada across the years – but now detects signs of religious revival. Some of the Establishment churches in this country are on life support, but other denominations report growth, especially conservative Protestant denominations.
Although both Canadian and American researchers noted in Mr. Reynolds' piece support his conservative take on the world, we think some caveats might apply.
First, I recall working for a very wise man who, among other things owned a Chevrolet, Cadillac dealership for which I wrote and aired advertising copy. He gave me two pieces of counsel on the day I began that assignment: 1) never write an ad that is directed towards doctors, lawyers or teachers because they are the cheapest people on the planet; and 2) remember that people all across North American will tell pollsters that they like something and then go out and buy the competitor's product...simply because they are not about to release their truth to a stranger.
In this case, there might be some application of the second piece of advice. People in both countries are quite anxious to demonstrate their altruism in public, and answering in the manner that proves its existence will make them feel better, while all the time, they are voting for war, for increasing the chasm between "have's" and "have-nots", and all this while demonstrating they could care less about the poor, the unemployed, the hungry and the sick.And this laissez-faire attitude is especially true, we suggest, among the have's whose success demonstrates to them their capacity to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" while those living in poverty simply haven't tried hard enough!
Second caveat: the researchers, according to the physics research, are inevitably imprinting their subjectivity on their research, and while both Haidt and Bibby may have taken all precautions against that creeping virus, nevertheless, it has to be considered in analysing their data. Religion is a different subject for public research than almost any other. It is the most private and secret of personal preferences and there will always be those who consider both themselves (in their advocacy of it) and the institutions that represent it 'holy' however they interpret that word, and thereby cling to it more vigorously, without actually practicing any authentic faith in their own lives.
As for Haidt's "wider and deeper moral compass" among conservatives, that, in itself is a value statement, an interpretation of his data, that begs the question about its relevance to actual voting behaviour while in the voting booth.
Third caveat, the gap between truth and reality is growing in all segments of society, as we transition to a much more public offering of our perhaps silly but "personal" moments through the internet. We see it in  many public statements by political leaders, and we hear it from multiple sources in our daily discourse; we hear it from employers and from salespeople, and from mechanics and from public service workers.
And, while the truth is a casualty, hypocrisy is winning too often to be able to regard this evidence as reliable and verifiable, two qualities of reputable research in any field.
Reynolds' words, "liberals skirmish with defenders of God, country, flag and family" attempts to render the liberals as peripheral, while the conservatives are "core/central/the sine qua non" in his evaluation of the work of both researchers.
What just happened in France yesterday? The election of a socialist president. And what does that mean for the "skirmish" between liberals and conservatives?
It would seem that public talk (in response to reseachers' questions) might not be congruent with private attitudes, and so long as society requires some kind of public benchmark for believing in its own altruism, the churches, flag, country and family will continue to represent the "old chestnuts" of a once-upon-a-time healthy picture of the world. Similarly the "old chestnut" hymns are those most popular with people in the pews, as if they held a special place in the hearts and minds of worshippers.
"Old chestnuts" whether in hymns or in publicly advocated values are not necessarily representative of either moral goodness, nor religious adherence, nor are they to be regarded as cornerstones for a healthy society and culture...especially when compared with rigorous policies and laws that reduce the number of people without health care by millions, and especially when that kind of comparison was not being asked by either researcher.
Let's look through Reynolds' piece and the work of both researchers with a somewhat sceptical eye, ear and mind-set and examine our very own private attitudes and values, especially in respect of whether or not we support leaders whose lives demonstrate they care for the underclass. Clearly, those answering the questionnaires have different values that an authentic altruism that is more than rhetoric. I wonder where Mr. Reynolds would come down on that scale.

"Straw-man" targets needed by parochial politicians...pandering to voters

By Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2012
I’ve spent the week in cobblestoned squares, listening to French presidential candidates argue that their country’s way of life is threatened by forces from beyond its borders. It’s a popular refrain these days: As economies falter, people fear the economic and human waves sweeping in from beyond.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has led the way, pledging to reintroduce trade protectionism, reinstitute passport checks and cut immigration. His challenger François Hollande has also suggested more protectionist policies and less immigration. As a result, four out of five French voters now believe that globalization is bad for their livelihoods, and that borders should be closed to foreign investment and immigration.
As I listened to these warnings, I couldn’t help thinking about how my week had begun in London.
On Monday morning, I paid the electricity and gas bills by writing a cheque to a French company. We buy our heat and light, as do 5.7 million other British families, from EDF Energy, a state-owned French company that provides a quarter of Europe’s electricity.
Then I took the garbage bags to the curb, where they were collected expertly by employees of the French company Veolia Environnement. Its 331,226 workers provide garbage collection, water treatment, street lighting and public transportation in 77 countries.
I hit the road, avoiding the tide of Renault Clios and Meganes and Peugeot 207s, among the most popular cars in Europe, together accounting for almost a million vehicles sold each year in the 27 European Union countries.
At the Underground station, I boarded a train built by Alstom, the French engineering company with 85,000 employees in 70 countries. They also built the nuclear reactors that provide my electricity. The train was guided by the Underground’s signalling and control network operated from a central hub in Waterloo Station by Thales, the French company with 68,000 employees in 50 countries.
En route, I made some travel plans. I’ll need to be in Munich, Warsaw and Barcelona in the next while, which inevitably means staying in one of the 5,000 hotels owned by the French company Accor, whose 145,000 employees in 40 countries run the Sofitel, Mercure, Ibis, Pullman, Novotel and Motel 6 chains.
French companies are impossible to avoid. They employ 4.5 million people outside of France and account for almost a fifth of all the investment in Europe. If you want to buy groceries in most parts of Poland or Greece or Portugal, you have little choice but to go to one of the 13,000 giant supermarkets of France’s Carrefour chain. France’s banks dominate finance across the continent – which is why they are so dangerously exposed to the Greek and Spanish crises. France doesn’t suffer the blows of international capitalism – it metes them out.
In fact, French investment abroad is twice the size of outside foreign investment in France. And if you strip away finance flows and look only at the industrial economy, French companies do 14 times more business abroad than foreign companies do in France. This is hardly a country that will, in the words of Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign speech, “dilute itself into globalization.” The French are the globalizers, not the globalized.
What about the human flood? I thought about that as I stepped off the Underground in the corner of Kensington known as “petit France” for its baguette shops and brasseries. London is home to 300,000 French citizens who take advantage of Europe’s open borders. There are two million French living abroad, an outflow that’s approaching the number of foreigners coming in.
As I had lunch with a Parisian expat scholar, I saw people heading to the local lycée to vote early in the presidential election. We now know that slightly more than half of those London French cast their ballot for a candidate, Mr. Sarkozy, who has promised to outlaw foreigners voting in local elections.
And then Thursday, a great many of those same French citizens went to another polling station to cast a ballot for the London mayor, because as European foreigners, they have full rights to vote in Britain’s local and national elections.
Mr. Sarkozy said he’d end Europe’s open borders because immigrants, notably Muslims, aren’t integrating in France. In fact, every study shows French Muslims have the highest rates of social integration, adopting the language, the family sizes and the liberal attitudes toward premarital sex and homosexuality at Europe’s highest rates, and even becoming as atheist and religiously unobservant as French Christians.
The problem is that nobody gives them jobs. And the larger problem within France is not foreign capital, but the fact that people have trouble creating jobs. As with so many countries today, their leaders are searching in vain for outside enemies when the real problem is right in front of them.
We have watched a similar movie in Canada, for decades. The federal government blames the provinces for their plight, and vice versa, when the issues facing both groups of politicians are "right in front of them" as Mr. Saunders says. And another version of this chicanery is witnessed at the municipal level, with the mayors and councils of towns and cities blaming the provinces and the federal government for their problems, when the issues facing them, about which they are legally charged with "fixing" continue to go unaddressed.
Another version in "party" politics, is to blame the other party for whatever now seems to be wrong with the effective and efficient running of the state, whether that be nation, province, city or town.
There is both an immaturity to this "blame" game and also a denial of responsibility, sometimes in serious proportions, much of which the electorate(s) seem either willing to endure or unwilling to challenge.
And now, in the U.S. presidential election, Romney often demonizes Obama for being "too european" and "too socialist" as if these countries like France, apparently about to elect a socialist president, are the model on which Obama bases his demonic policies.
There is really no force more to be feared in political life than parochialism, provincialism, NIMBY, and all of the other forms of the disease. When only "we" (whoever we is) know the correct answers to the problems, and "they" have it all wrong, we know there is too much narrow, arrogant and at the same time neurotic blindness in the proposals we are hearing. Absolute answers, known only to absolute propagandizers, even if the purpose is to paint with a wide and unnuanced brush for headline grabbing, have not and do not and will not work in any endeavour.
The catholic church has tried so many times, without apparently learning that God is not a definition of absolutes, that the practice has become redundant. The political ideologues, too, seem to believe that they have more chance of winning over the (simpleton) electorate, if they spew absolutes into their microphones.
And when those absolutes are linked to the kind of fear that undergirds parochialism, in any country, or town or village, the risk of serious damage being wrought on that (simpleton) electorate is too high.
For the French to "see" their own globalizing successes, of course, would be to render the parochial fears unwarranted, and the politicians pandering to them silent. And no politician can afford to be rendered mute, ever, anywhere.
The "straw-man" demon, against which all propaganda is painted, including the "teachings of all churches" is purely rhetorical, and does not warrant its strength in defining reality, at least the reality that requires "fixing".
And without the "straw-man" demon, against whom too many politicians are running, those same politicians are left, as that proverbial emperor, with no clothes.
How sad that our political debates have become so empty of muscle fibre, of intellectual rigour and of imaginative and visionary proposals worthy of the offices these national politicians are seeking.
If this conduct were coming from Ford or General Motors, or Fiat, there would be millions of recalls.
Too bad we do not have mid-term power to recall some of the fear-mongering rhetoric, that would and could render political campaigns at election time more worth our time and energy.

DSM Chair: We are overdiagnosed and overmedicated!!!

By Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2012
– Do you binge out on forbidden foods [Häagen-Dazs, Cheetos] more than a couple of times a month?

– Were you extremely sad and depressed for a month or two after your mother died, or even longer?
– Does your seven-year-old have frequent temper tantrums?
– Do you get cranky before your period?
– Are you forgetting more things than you used to?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, beware. Taken from the top, these behaviours could be symptoms of: Binge Eating Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (or possibly an even more serious condition, Child Bipolar Disorder), Premenstrual Attention Deficit Disorder, and Mild Neurocognitive Disorder. All of these conditions could wind up in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), due out next year.

The DSM, which is used by doctors, clinicians, health-care providers, social workers and insurance companies, is the bible of psychiatry. It has a big impact on the way millions of people lead their lives and on the way mental health resources are spent. Now it has become the focus of a fierce controversy over the distinctions between normal and abnormal behaviour, the role of pharmaceutical marketing in the treatment of mental illness, the overtreatment of children and the medicalization of the ups and downs of everyday life.
“We’re being overdosed and overmedicated,” says Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, who is a leading critic of the DSM and of what’s known as “diagnostic inflation.”
Dr. Frances is no ordinary gadfly. He chaired the task force that oversaw the current edition of the DSM, which loosened the criteria for disorders such as autism. After that, the number of children diagnosed with these disorders exploded. The autism rate grew more than 20-fold, as severely autistic kids were lumped in with kids who were just peculiar, difficult or eccentric. Meantime, the rate of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder tripled. Today, 10 per cent of kids in the U.S. have been diagnosed with ADHD. The percentages are lower in Canada, but the trends are the same.
Looser diagnostic criteria are one of several factors that have driven the number of “disordered” children to record highs. Children need a diagnosis in order to get access to special school services. Anxious parents with difficult-to-manage children are desperate for a ray of hope. And harried family doctors want to help them. Eighty per cent of all psychiatric medication is prescribed by family doctors, who may spend only a few minutes with the patient and have little or no expertise in psychiatry.
Then there are the drug companies.
Until recently, the drugs used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder weren’t very profitable. They’d been around for 40 years. Now, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a new generation of highly profitable patented drugs, which are marketed aggressively to doctors and – in the United States – consumers. The ADHD market has become a billion-dollar jackpot.
“Drug companies will do everything possible to exploit the child market,” Dr. Frances says. The newest fad, he says, is Child Bipolar Disorder, which he describes as the product of an unholy alliance between the drug companies and fancy psychiatrists at Harvard. This condition used to be vanishingly rare. Now it is 40 times more common. “The causes behind the surge in childhood bipolar disorder are no mystery,” he wrote recently. “[They are] a combustible combination of overly influential thought leaders, aggressive drug company marketing, desperate parents and gullible doctors.”
None of this is meant to diminish the devastating impact of serious mental illness, or the relief that treatment can bring. For severely troubled kids, the right drugs are a godsend. And many children need and deserve extra help at school, no matter what their diagnosis. But over-diagnosis has serious consequences. “Giving kids a label is a real problem,” Dr. Frances says. “It weighs them down and reduces their expectations.” The vastly increased use of antipsychotics is especially problematic, because these drugs have harmful side-effects such as dramatic weight gain, diabetes and heart disease.
The irony is that even as the system misdiagnoses people who are essentially normal, the people who really do need treatment fall through the cracks. Only half of people with severe depression get treatment, he says.
Some of the experts working on the next edition of the DSM – called DSM-5, because it will be the fifth edition – regard Dr. Frances as a menace. But he has a growing number of allies among ordinary people and other professionals who think the psychiatric establishment is losing touch with common sense. People who have experienced the profound emotions of bereavement are especially infuriated that their grief at losing loved ones could be labelled (after only two weeks) as a mental aberration.
“The people working on DSM-5 are well-meaning,” he says. “They’re not corrupt. What they don’t understand is the false-positive blowback and the unintended consequences.” And if they have their way, they will eventually medicalize normalcy out of existence. What happens when every difficult kid becomes labelled as a child with a chemical imbalance, or when the normal forgetting that comes with age becomes a mental disorder? As Dr. Frances puts it, “We create a society of people who regard themselves as sick.”

Allen Frances will appear on TVO’s The Agenda and will lecture in Toronto as part of Mental Health Week
Finally, a medical doctor, at the centre of this epidemic of overdiagnosis (much, if not all of it based on experience with female patients) and overmedication is telling the world, "Enough already!"
We at theacorncentre.com have been arguing this theme for months, if not years, as a lone voice in the wilderness.
We have anecdotal and cultural evidence and experience with the mental health system in Canada and the U.S. and we heartily endorse the push-back coming from Dr. Frances.
However, we know that the "medical establishment" is also addicted to its own prowess in providing both diagnoses and medicinal "cures" for those multiple problems. And the patients themselves have been taught, conditioned in fact, that the medical professional, and especially the psychiatric division of that profession, has both a name and a pill for anything that ails us.
And so, it is not any single constituency, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical professional, the politicians whose war chests, especially in the U.S. are filled with lobbying dollars from the drug companies and all of there many tentacles, and the patients....all of them have to agree that we have all gone too far, that we have made a monster out of our compulsive pursuit of elixirs, what the medieval shamans called those elements that would change one thing to some form of "gold"....literally and metaphorically,
Let's try to build some over-the-back-fence relationships, both men and women, in which our irritibilities and our headaches and our backaches and our fear that we are not perfect parents can be shared, and talked about with others who see and feel many of the same symptoms.
And let's also listen to James Hillman who reminds us, many years ago, of the disease of overdiagnosis and overmedication, and instead proposed that we reach into our biographies, with each other, to learn the gifts of the pain that has been suppressed, repressed and forgotten....bringing it back to light, so that it can be mined for the "gold" of its many insights, new revelations and new hope....all from those painful experiences that were too troublesome to cope with at the time of their occurrence...
And let's agree that boys will always have more excess physical energy than girls, but that does not make them criminals, nor worthy of Ritalin...or any other medication that the school system deems necessary in order to maintain control.
Let's remove the "control freaks" from their self-constructed pedestal of power and replace them with those of us who are struggling, each and every day to ride the chaos that  brings life, surprises and vulnerability to each kitchen table and dining room table, for the opportunity to let it all hang out, in our open and courageous willingness to expose all our anxieties, thereby permitting those we love and care about to do the same....

"Branding" is not governing, nor is re-writing history

By Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail, May 4, 2012
In the last budget, for example, funding was reduced for Library and Archives Canada, the CBC, Telefilm Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Parks Canada by a government that had already scrapped plans for a National Portrait Gallery. (The government also is eliminating support for scholars in other countries who study Canada.)

The government spared the National Gallery, the national museums in Ottawa and the Canada Council, but the net effect on the ability to explain history in an unfiltered way through people and projects funded by public institutions was reduced by the cuts.
By contrast, the government found money in a “restraint” budget for projects that will allow it to highlight those scattered and fading (or faded) remnants of our history that suit the government’s political agenda: recreations of the War of 1812 (a political civil war on each side and a cross-border military conflict), medals commemorating the Queen, and yet another royal visit, this one offering Canadians (or at least the handful of them who will care) the emotional surge of seeing their future king and queen: Charles and Camilla.
"Branding" is a contemporary word for marketing your wares (services, goods, policies and images) to your various niche markets. The exercise sees, for example, three generations of men in Florida learning to grow oranges, to demonstrate that Tropicana is a family-oriented company producing a "family-oriented" and healthy product, orange juice. Coca-cola, the owner of the Tropicana brand knows that this message will appeal to those needing to restore their sense of confidence in the centrality of history, especially family history, currently undergoing a revival through such websites as "Ancestry.ca (.com)". Branding, however, is a very short-term expression of the creative genius that dwells in the major advertising agencies, where these "ideas" are conceived, incubated, gestated and eventually "delivered" at the moment believed to be the one likely to produce the maximum benefit to the client, by spiking sales and making records, thereby increasing stock prices, executive bonuses, hiring need and capacity and rich contracts and contract extensions for those "artists" at the centre of the process. Branding is another word for gyrating into a reputation that evokes warm fuzzies and open wallets from the buying public. And it is, like fashion, one of its prime clients, forever twisting up and down, inside out, right-side-up and upside down, to find the right formula for the business equivalent of the Roman candle so popular at fireworks shows. Sometimes, even a trickle of objective truth emerges from the campaigns to "brand" a service, a product or a company's identity. Maybe there is a real piece of technology in the Ford Focus, for example, that helps drivers park their Focus without using their hands.
However, to apply this modus operandi, that of the advertising/marketing/public relations guru's to the operation of a national government, responsible for spending public dollars "in the public interest" and not specifically or generally in the "self-interest" of the people in office, is makes less than a mockery of the centuries of public debate, personal duals, fields of soldiers fighting for beliefs, principles and values far larger and more important than any of the individuals whose names appear on the plaques, or on the treaties, or in the history books. History is the cumulative, and the summative record of how a country came to be, and how its people have defined themselves through the plethora of incidents, speeches, debates, books, including both fiction and non-fiction, newspapers and electronic communication of the public discourse. And, yes, that story includes the formation and the policies and promises, both kept and dropped, of political parties. However, make no mistake: political parties are not synonymous with, or identical to, nor should or can they be, with or to a national identity. And never should they attempt to square that circle!
And what's more, the hubris that attempts to generate a presumption of identity of a political party with a nation, and then even more pseudo-herocially to foist that scam on a generally forgiving, generous and unsuspecting public is, in a word, unforgiveable.
And the reason it is unforgiveable is that is leads on to attempting brain-washing, the re-writing of history and the gathering of the instruments of power into the hands of an oligarchy, the party that sees itself as "the state"....Individual political leaders have even been heard using the heinous phrase, "L'etat, c'est moi!" to depict this belief and addiction to power.
Louis XIV began his personal rule of France in 1661 after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin.[3] An adherent of the theory of the divine right of kings, which advocates the divine origin and lack of temporal restraint of monarchical rule, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling the noble elite to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis' minority. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution. (from Wikipedia)
We all know that the current Prime Minister is neither a reader, nor a student of the wide landscape of history, preferring as his tribe of scribes says, to "cherry-pick" from its vineyards; however, in that blind and selective application of memory could lie his own petard...on which history may impale him and his government.
Mr. Harper, just a brief sketch of the difference between "branding" and "governing"....

• those selling a product have few if any restrictions on the limit of their rhetoric, including the stretching of, ignoring of and even denying the truth, whereas government is expected to tell the truth
• those selling a product have a history of requiring regulations, watchdogs and consumer protections which healthy governments have built, for their own safety, which your government seems intent on dismantling
• those selling a product/service studiously research the contributions of their competitors, knowing that in those offerings lie many of the best of that industry's history, and much to be emulated, whereas your government's contempt for the opposition, as you see them, is tantamount to an undeclared war
• those selling a product need sales and a public reputation that builds trust in the brand, and that trust must be earned, and not bought, even though their exercise in corporate profit-seeking is measured in dollars of sales and investment, whereas your government's list of preferential donors is based exclusively on the self-interest of their ambitions and your government's co-dependence in delivering to them what they demand
• finally, those engaged in private business engage in mergers, acquisitions, stock purchases and business expansions that seek to evade and avoid all government regulations, including taxation and national responsibility whereas your government is and must be committed to the national interest, an abstraction with which you meddle at your peril, because our national heritage is, and will remain, much larger and more enduring than your political ambition, notwithstanding the epic magnitude of that ambition...

As the letter writer in today's Globe and Mail put it, in summarizing the first year of the Harper government:

It may have been a good year for Prime Minister Stephen Harper (One Year Of More Ups Than Downs – editorial, May 2), but it wasn't a good year for truth, fairness, kindness, social justice or honest government. Or don't you care about any of that?

Steven Moore, Tamworth, Ont.

Willy Loman...as pathetic then as his rich patrons are today

By Lee Seigel, New York Times, May 2, 2012
Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “Harvard Is Burning.”

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” now on Broadway in a Tony-nominated revival — and starring a heart-shattering Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Willy Loman for the ages — is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature. Yet as I sat through a recent performance, I wondered why the play was revived at all.

While “Death of a Salesman” has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions, the American middle class — as a social reality and a set of admirable values — has nearly ceased to exist.
Certainly few middle-class people, or at least anyone from any “middle class” that Loman would recognize, are among the audiences attending this production. What was once a middle-class entertainment has become a luxury item. Tickets for the original run, in 1949, cost between $1.80 and $4.80; tickets for the 2012 run range from $111 to $840. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 10-fold increase, well beyond the reach of today’s putative Willy Lomans.
Then again, in 1949, the top marginal tax rate was 82 percent. The drop in that rate to 28 percent by 1988 helped create a stratum of people who could afford to pay high prices for everything from inflated theater tickets to health care and college tuition.
Ever tightening financial straits for the average American and the erosion of social safety nets have given the lie to now quaint values like hard work. Perhaps elite intellectuals like Mr. Miller himself unwittingly created an atmosphere hostile to such middle-class attitudes. Mr. Miller later wrote in his autobiography, “Timebends,” that he had hoped the play would expose “this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”
Yet “Salesman” is full of empathy for Willy. Mr. Miller remembered worrying in 1949 that “there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play’s ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy.” He recalls with somber pride that the play’s first director, Elia Kazan, “was the first of a great many men — and women — who would tell me that Willy was their father.”
No wonder those first audiences’ identification was so strong: they recognized Willy’s search for humanity within his profit-driven job. Mr. Miller recalled that after performances during the play’s first run, “some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping.”
It’s hard to imagine a similar reaction among audiences today. Not only have the industries that employed the salespeople, factory workers, middle managers and others in the plentiful, humbler realms of mid-20th-century capitalism begun to dry up, but today’s capitalists no longer share Willy’s belief that he could attain dignity through his work.
In 1949, Willy’s desperate cry — “the competition is maddening!” — must have chilled theatergoers for whom competition still had a mostly positive connotation. In 2012, a fight to the death for shrinking opportunities in so many realms of life renders the idea of fair competition an anachronism. It is a sign of the times that sitcoms, in which trivial, everyday conflicts are comfortably resolved into neighborly harmony, are giving way to the Darwinian armageddons of reality TV. It is as if the middle class were being forced to watch the gladiatorial spectacle of its own destruction.
In our time of banker hustlers, real-estate hustlers and Internet hustlers, of suckers and “muppets,” it is unlikely that anyone associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. Even what’s left of the middle class disdains a middle-class life. Everyone, rich, poor and in between, wants infinite pleasure and fabulous riches.
Mr. Miller’s outrage at a capitalist system he wanted to humanize has become our cynical adaptation to a capitalist system we pride ourselves on knowing how to manipulate. For Mr. Miller, Willy’s middle-class dreams put the system that betrayed them to shame. In our current context, Willy’s dreams of love, dignity and community through modest work make him a deluded loser.
Perhaps there is a simple, unlovely reason “Death of a Salesman” has become such a beloved institution. Instead of humbling its audience through the shock of recognition, the play now confers upon the people who can afford to see it a feeling of superiority — itself a fragile illusion.
Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “Harvard Is Burning.”
In another life, while attempting to bring Willy Loman 'to life' in grade twelve English classes in northern Ontario, I found Willy verging on contemptible, and was barely empathetic to him. His life wandered in and out of reality, through delusions passed along to his sons, somehow innocently but nevertheless complicitly supported by his naive and stereotyped spouse, and mother of his sons, Linda. He did not represent a healthy life, not a healthy person, nor a healthy society in which appearances trumped reality.
When men walked out of the theatre in the first run of the play weeping, I could easily understand; their lives were being exposed for their shallow cardboard nature hung on the pride that the Mayor of some town "spoke to me" as if that proved Willy's importance in his own blind eyes and gave him gravitas in the eyes of his bewildered sons.
Miller successfully ridiculed Willy's existence and through him the nature of the society that produced millions of Willy's.
Today, not only is the middle class hollowed out of existence; it has been replaced by a ticket purchaser whose riches deem him and her both unknowable to Willy and unwilling to get to know Willy, and all those other "losers" whose success in some way paved their path to riches, and to another level of delusional existence, based on the square footage of their mansions, the sheen on their BMW's and the carelessness of their social conscience.
And we have, the rest of us, complacently and somewhat tragically, permitted this tectonic plate shift in what we consider 'normal' as the 'rich get richer and the poor get poorer' in an endless drama driven by the collision of hubris and apathy or even ennui.
Today's theatre-going public does not know Willy Loman, and does not want to get to know Willy Loman. He lives "over the tracks" of their gated communities and provides another example of the "greatest loser" for their own hubris...another sign that the divide between what is real and authentic and what is illusion has become clad in fashion that everyone wants, yesterday not today, and  for which millions are almost compulsively scrambling, in their misguided perception that those big houses and those shiny BMW's and those expensive theatre tickets are proof of their "value" ... when all the while, we know that those "images" paint a far more dismal and tragic picture of wanton disregard for what really matters in their lives and in the lives of millions who are starving literally.

Veteran Environmentalist:"Mommy, why does the government think you are a terrorist?"

Tzeporah Berman, Globe and Mail, May. 02, 2012 
Tzeporah Berman has been leading environmental campaigns in Canada and internationally for over 20 years. Her first book, This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, was published last fall by Knopf Canada.
“Mommy, why does the government think you are a terrorist?”
The question came from my son the day after the news media reported that the federal government was contemplating changing the definition of domestic terrorism to include environmentalism.
I spent the past couple of years working internationally and came home to what I thought was an important debate over Canada’s future energy landscape. With Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s open letter attempting to silence Canadians who want to participate in that debate and attacking those concerned about the rapid expansion of the oil sands, pipelines and tanker traffic, I realized that what we are facing is a much bigger issue of democracy and freedom of speech. When this was followed up with an attack on environmental charities, many opinion leaders recognized we are experiencing a witch hunt.
With the 2012 budget, I watched in horror as the government in Ottawa gutted the environmental laws that protect our air, water and fisheries. Many of Canada’s opinion leaders are now wondering if we are dealing with an all-out war on nature.
As I reflect on the events of the past few months, I realize we are engaged in a fight for the soul of Canada.
Do we want to reinforce and renew the Canadian values of tolerance, fairness and doing the right thing in a changing world? Or do we now define “Canadian” as intolerant of anything other than oil, unfairness to other economic sectors, vulnerable countries and our children, and decidedly doing the wrong thing in the face of overwhelming evidence?
This year the International Energy Agency warned that “on planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change. … Delaying action is a false economy: For every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
This federal government wants us to believe that unfettered development of the oil sands and the gutting of environmental laws is in the national interest, and that those who oppose this definition are radical extremists influenced by foreign interests or worse, terrorists.
I am a Canadian and a mother. I believe my children deserve an environmental, economic and energy policy that is designed in Ottawa and not in the oil patch. I believe that all Canadians have a right to free speech and deserve to be encouraged to engage in issues critical to the country’s future.
Dozens of environmental organizations and first nations tell me that the response to the rollbacks and attacks has been dramatically increased membership, donations and support. The glimmer of hope on the horizon is that the outrageous acts of the past few months are waking Canadians up to the changes being wrought on our cultural, physical and economic landscape.
What Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tories need to remember is that no government is infallible. In 1957 the then-Liberal government faced a backlash in the polls widely attributed to the lack of public debate over TransCanada’s pipeline proposal and the Liberal government’s arrogant handling of the project. Perhaps it would benefit Mr. Harper to remember that he would not be the first prime minister in this country to lose an election over a pipeline.
It may seem like an idle question, having little or no meaning...yet, what is the difference between the corporate money that flows into this country from "outside" in marketing, advertising and investing to get Canadians to invest or purchase goods and services and the money that people from around the world contribute to non-profit charitable organizations interested in preserving the environment?
I have not heard a single peep out of a single government minister about the former, but have heard loud outcries from government ministers, including the Prime Minister, about the latter. Strange, eh?
Nevertheless, if Ms Berman is now considered a terrorist, there will be literally millions of terrorists lining up with her, in the fight to protect democracy and our natural heritage.

French Feminist takes on "ayatollahs" of breast-feeding in new book

By Ingrid Peritz, Globe and Mail, April 29, 2012
"The Conflict," already a bestseller in France, is kicking up a fuss since its publication in English this month. In it, noted French feminist and intellectual Elisabeth Badinter argues that today’s generation of women face a new form of oppression: Being a perfect mother.
Ms. Badinter argues that yesterday’s patriarchy has been replaced by the tyranny of a suckling baby, and the pressures of “natural” parenting in the form of drug-free childbirth, co-sleeping, and cloth diapers. Moreover, women’s decision to step out of the workforce to devote themselves to their children is setting the cause of equality back to their grandmother’s generation. On parenting forums and blogs, the book has been praised, dissected and debated.
Ms. Badinter, who describes herself as a “spiritual daughter” to Simone de Beauvoir, is a retired professor at the elite École Polytechnique in Paris and has been active in the women’s movement since the 1970s. She and her husband, former French justice minister Robert Badinter, have three grown children.
Ms. Badinter spoke to The Globe and Mail from her home in Paris.
The full title of your book is The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Can you explain how you reached your viewpoint?
We call it modern motherhood, but it reminds me of the motherhood of my great grandmother’s generation. It’s the model of motherhood as a full-time job, the notion that as soon as you become a mother, you owe your child absolutely everything. So the child becomes the centre of the life of the mother, and even the couple. As a result, mothers’ duties have become considerably heavier in the past 10, 15 years, to the point where women believe they have to start over like it was in the old days, with things like breastfeeding on demand, 24 hours a day.
You are especially scathing about breastfeeding, which you say subjects women to the “despotism of an insatiable child.” Breastfeeding’s benefits for babies and mothers are widely recognized. Where do you see a problem?
Women should be told that they have a choice. That they’ll probably be as good a mother or as mediocre a mother whether they breastfeed or not. If a breast is given out of a sense of duty, the baby feels it. The mother isn’t happy and the baby senses absolutely everything. So it’s far better to give a bottle with pleasure than a breast out of duty.
What worries me is what we’re seeing these days in Scandinavian countries, for example. It’s no longer possible to say you don’t want to breastfeed. You are viewed very, very badly.
Each woman has her own representation of her body. For a lot of women, breastfeeding is absolutely wonderful. For others, it gives them a feeling they’re becoming a cow. It’s not funny at all. It’s tolerance that I would like to pass along.
You’ve gone as far as calling pro-breastfeeding advocacy groups “ayatollahs.”
There are many ayatollahs of breastfeeding. Like the representatives of the La Leche League. Their message is picked up by the media, and it becomes an official truth.
In maternity wards now in France, nurses and midwives say you absolutely have to breastfeed, it’s very good for the child. And if you answer, “Well, I don’t really feel like it,” they say, “But Madame, Don’t you want the best for your child?” Then it starts. You’re off on the guilt track.
You extend this notion of “natural” mothering by critiquing the ecological movement, which you say is responsible for pushing everything from natural childbirth to cloth diapers to co-sleeping. You call it a “moral cause that worships all things natural.” How does this pose a problem for women?
These movements are robbing women of their time and freedom. If you have to wash diapers – can you imagine how much time it takes, how disgusting it is? We’re returning to ancestral practices. In some maternity wards, women are told it’s better not to ask for epidurals during labor. We’re putting pain back at the centre of motherhood. We’re treating the notion of the divine curse of painful childbirth as wonderful. This systematically turns our backs on all the progress that new techniques, chemistry and medicine have brought.
You also argue that young mothers today are in effect rejecting the agenda of their feminist mothers. You call it a settling of accounts with their mothers.

Daughters are saying to themselves, “My mother wanted a job, children, a husband, leisure time. And she got it all wrong. She killed herself doing a double-day of work, she hit the glass ceiling – since women’s salaries never matched men’s – and she was always stressed out and tired. And who paid the price? I did. In the end, she didn’t give me enough, either time or attention.”
So young women are saying, “I have a job but I’ll stop for two or three years to raise my child, because I want to give him the best.” I fear that this modern-mother movement is a step backwards, simply because if it carries the day, then I don’t see how we’ll attain equality between the sexes, or equal salaries, or the independence of women.
Women forget that children stay home for 15 years, 20 years. You’re an active mother for maybe eight or 10 years of that. But we have a life expectancy of 85 years. So what do you do when the children leave?
What are the risks of putting child-rearing first?
A frustrated mother who is denied her own desires and ambitions is not good at all for her child. Can’t there be a balance for women between working outside the home and raising kids? Can’t it be possible to find your own definition of a good mother?
The good mother doesn’t exist. She’s a myth. It’s utopian. If you stayed home full time to look after your children, when they’re 16 or 18 years old you’ll hear, ‘Oh, my mother was always there, she was always present, but she was a burden.’ And if you’re not there and you worked, you’ll get the other criticism, ‘Oh my mother was never there. she was always rushed.’ I’d say that if the good mother exists, she is as rare as Mozart. And honestly, we may be mothers, but we’re human beings – we have our limits, our own neuroses, our own subconscious, our own particular history. Whoever we are, we want to do our best. If women think they always do exactly what they’re supposed to for their children, they’re wrong, because we’re not gods or goddesses.
Where do fathers fit in the picture?
For fathers, this is a bargain. We fought like crazy 35 years ago to involve them in childrearing. The bottle was very practical from that standpoint. Bit by bit, they did more – even if they never did as much as women. But we should have continued that battle. Because now we’re told that a little baby has to be fused with his mother, that the father has nothing to do with it, and in the end what purpose does a father serve in the first year of a baby’s life? There’s breastfeeding and there’s co-sleeping. I don’t find co-sleeping great for closeness between couples.
What was your overarching goal in writing your book?
The goal is for to say, for heaven’s sake, don’t make this new trend of parenting a model for everyone. It might suit some women, but not all. And to those who don’t feel like adopting motherhood as a full-time job, don’t believe you are bad mothers.
Whether it's breast-feeding or choosing a career over full-time motherhood, or any other decision, is the real question not a matter of degree? Is there a possibility that multiple models of motherhood, including the one best suited to each specific woman, might be a social and cultural goal?
The world is, it seems, full of ayatollahs on everything from capitalism versus shared responsibility, to militarism versus 'turning weapons into ploughshares', to contempt for Islam versus co-operation between and among faith communities, to austerity versus stimulus spending, to national isolationism versus international collaboration, from destroy the union movement to preserving collective bargaining.
Those who speak for one side of the debate seem to have to demonize those on the "other" side, and we have generated, globally, what Margaret Atwood called, when she referred to the Canadian political landscape several years ago when she looked at the threat of Quebec's separatism...the dialogue of the deaf. 
With everyone shouting (literally and metaphorically) no one is really listening to the nuances where the potential agreements can and will be found. Similarly, feminists who now attempt to demonize contemporary mothering approaches by calling them regressive, and a return to our "grandmothers' time," serve neither the children of today, nor the mothers who are doing everything they can to be the best mother they know how to be.
Why the addiction to perfectionism?
What is generating this neurosis?
And indeed, what can the fathers of the world do to provide some leaven in the mix, so that their spouse-mothers do not shred their nerves and their psyches in an over-commitment to really what amounts to an idol, the perfect mother?
Just because we have produced instruments that measure and remember everything, virtually without defect, until they simply implode at the end of their lives does not mean that we have to adopt that model of existence, no matter what role we are talking about. And in the messiness of parenting, and it will always be somewhat messy, there is clearly no perfect answer. And those who claim there is are deluding themselves and anyone who listens to them.
We could all contribute to a more modest and more moderate "way" by adopting the principle that power and influence and wellness do not stem from over-powering anyone or anything, but rather from accepting our own vulnerability, our own imperfections and our own access to abundant grace of the universe.
We are not, and never were, chasing "Atlas" or any other archetype of power and perfection, and the more we commit to such a pursuit the more we model the Icarus character, who flew too close to the sun and the wax holding his wings together melted and he plummeted to earth.