One of the health risks of the blogging industry is SJDS, Sudden Jaw-Drop Syndrome, a sharp crack to the mandible occurring when one reads something so outrageously silly that the bottom half of one's face plunges in disbelief. I am nursing a sore jaw at this moment brought about by foolishly indulging myself in a glance at a Rick Salutin column in Friday's Globe and Mail.
Mr Salutin is a caricature of every Canadian left-wing print pundit, only somewhat more slovenly. He lives his life in a miasma of resentment over the microscopic turn to the right that Canada took under Brian Mulroney and counts every day a loss in which the Red Flag does not wave over the ruins of the White House. An examination of his recent column will reveal how tenuous the link is between left-wing perceptions and the reality of life in Canada.
According to Salutin, who shops at Mr Big and Disheveled where he never runs into Jack Layton, the three greatest worries for Canadians in January 2003 are:
(1) fear of national extinction at the hands of the USA and its culture
(2) globalization
(3) death at the hands of terrorists
Perhaps these are burning concerns down at the Death to Yankee Imperialism Bar and Grill and other low dives where Mr Salutin acquires his unhealthy pallor but even a hardened reactionary such as myself knows that they are not the principal fears that haunt our citizens. Real Canadians are worried about the wreckage that is the stock market which underpins their pension plans, crime and the unwillingness of politicians to deal with it, the decay of their urban infrastructure, the loss of purpose and rigor in the educational system, high taxes and the possibility of decent medical care when they need it. They want their kids to have a chance at a good job; they want to be safe on the street and secure in their old age and infirmity. Any political party which addresses those concerns will prosper; any columnist who thinks that cultural policy outweighs them is too silly to be published in a national newspaper outside the confines of the Morning Smile.