This morning I was cutting fruit for breakfast and came across an over ripe mango. For any of you who have never cut up a mango it is a challenging undertaking as they have a slipperiness that is unique. An over ripe mango is absolutely treacherous! So too are over ripe prime ministers.
An over ripe mango as a prime minister is to have a, devious and deceitful, and untrustworthy leader. Slipperiness is also an unstable condition where things tend to go side ways and bad things tend to happen. Such is the current state of our Canadian democracy.
In the heart of the Fraser Valley where I live mushroom farming is a major industry. Mushrooms are grown in temperature controlled windowless buildings in beds of manure. It is often said out here our politicians treat voters like the farmers treat their mushrooms-keep them in the dark and feed them bull---t. Now this has become a national epidemic and we are left with an over ripe mango shoveling bull---t to a whole nation of mushrooms. That over ripe mango in the PMO just keeps shoveling, and shoveling. The air is putrid, blight is taking over and nobody is willing to take away his shovel. This guy is the over ripe mango and greased pig of our national nightmare all rolled into one. Catch him if you can!
Over the years we have had various fruits in the PMO. Diefenbaker was a sour grape, Pearson, a peach of a guy. Trudeau was a prickly pear, and Mulroney-a road apple rotten to the core. Clark, Turner and Campbell were indeterminate fruit pruned in the bud. Chrétien was an overripe hybrid, but not a bad apple. Martin suffered early frostbite.
My wife is an avid gardener and composter. If I treated her with the contempt our over-ripe-mango-prime-minister treats this nation I would be on her compost heap of former relationships in the wink of an eye. Our relationship is a healthy democracy where decency prevails; where as the present prime minister doesn’t know the meaning of the two D’s of good government. He just keeps shoveling.
My wife is also “apolitical.” She quite often admonishes me for wasting my time on such an unholy concern as politics – especially when I could be helping her in the garden instead of blogging away my time!
Even though she maintains a staunch indifference to politics she is unwittingly one of the most insightful political philosophers of our time. For her the over-ripe, the discards, and the rotten are out the door and onto the compost on a regular basis. She is truly mystified as to why the Canadian electorate is so tolerant of rotten fruits and blighted ideologies.
If some one claiming to be a rose gardener shows up at her garden club and turns out to be a mushroom farmer they are shown the door real quick. They have little patience there for people who claim to be propagating roses and are really shovelers of bull---t and bone-headed mushroom farmers.
Gardeners are a militant lot and see themselves as conservators of Mother Earth and her bounty. They are a deep shade of green and in many ways the quintessential conservatives, for as gardeners they must maintain a high regard for what has come before, the present and the future. At one time this was also a core belief of political conservatives (Edmund Burke, Irish political philosopher, the father of conservatism, 1729-1797).
True conservatism as fathered by Burke has though been slain as it now takes the form of reactionary politics as exemplified by the US Republican Party and its Canadian imitators the Conservative Party of Canada led by our over ripe mango.
In his book The Death of Conservatism New York Times Editor Stan Tanenhaus puts it another way:
Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.
Whether they be seen as “the exhumed figures of Pompeii,” blighted tomatoes, or over ripe mangos so-called conservatives are ready for meltdown on the compost heap. They need to be recycled for a new and demanding season of change.
Canadians should get with it and start doing some electoral composting-mushrooms we are not.
Stumble It!
And I know you find it distressing that modern conservatism in Canada doesn't look like that of Burke or Disraeli. Of course, there were many I'm sure who felt the same way when the Liberals under Pearson and Trudeau stopped being liberal, and instead became paternalistic statists and US-bashers, barely distinguishable in either regard from the Red Tories.
At the end of the day, the labels don't matter. Post Kingston Conference, the PC's, Liberals and NDP used to be united in their contempt for individual freedom and embrace of Keynesian excess. People seem to forget that this wasn't always so. Give us back the Liberal Party of C.D. Howe, Louis St. Laurent and Wilfrid Laurier, and you can have the PC Party of Clark, Stanfield and Camp.
Nothing wrong with being a US basher. After all, it "did in" the Arrow Project.
I always find the parallels between Canadian nationalists and Quebecois nationalists interesting. Both seem driven by an exaggerated sense of grievance and paranoia. Although to their credit, the Quebecois nationalists do put as much emphasis on championing and cherishing their own culture as on negating the menacing "other". They have that on you, for sure.
After all, it "did in" the Arrow Project.
Tu te souviens.