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There's something soothing about Bush and Day So I've been out of the country for 18 years and I'm not caught up yet with the Canadian political thing. Course these guys are so deliberately dull my eyes glaze over, my head dives nose-deep into the sand and my mind screen gives off only white noise every time one of them opens his mouth. But women, it is charged, are stupid about politics. We elect the guys who are going to substitute as Daddy/Husband, who will pick us up when we fall and give us free therapy. Period. We don't consider anything else. Just comforting talk from cozy, caring bureaucrats when we come in to pick up our cheques. Thanks. Therefore, in a Herculean effort to pay attention, I was complaining about Chretien plunging our debt-ridden ($585-billion worth of debt I know about) country into an expensive early election, when the Liberals are running at 50% in the polls, with their closest competitors 30 points behind them. "He's being a crafty politician," shrugged my daughter. "He's afraid if he waits any longer, Stockwell Day will gather steam." "And that makes it OK?" I said. She shrugged again, and looked at me with her characteristic bemused pity. "It's the way it is," she said. "That doesn't make it right," I snapped. "So he's a power-mad egomaniac, and we get to pay for his moral bankruptcy?" She shrugged a third time. "Pretty much," she replied. Or at least I think the conversation went like that. By the time it was finished I was in a knot of impotent fury. Women are emotional creatures, so it's probably a good thing we let the guys pay attention while we work on our nails and our school board elections. Strategy is beyond us. We think it's stupid. Which made me think about Stockwell Day and George W. Bush. There is something soothing about both of them being, well, a little light in the loafers, resume- wise. I don't find that "scary." Quite the contrary, I find Al Gore and Chretien and his thuggish gang scary. But what about the confluence of this parallel between old money and the Wild West? This I can wrap my pitiable mind around. Just that fact alone reassures me that they will whittle away (whistling I hope) at the smothering layers of regulation, steadily reducing the judicial invasion of private life and bureaucratic maze that stifle us, wrapping us in a hazy state of OK'ness, while the guys with their hands in our collective pocket thieve and plot, regulate and misrepresent, using our money. This is why. Both of them have family history and experience in the very depths of WASPdom. The Bush family is from darkest Greenwich, and Kennebunkport, and the Days are a Westmount family. Stockwell went to Westmount High, and his cousin, Penny Day, a very sweet little girl indeed, grew up beside me in Rockledge Court. His aunt and uncle, Happy Day and Izzy Day, used to visit Knowlton regularly, and hey, in the '60s, no one who wasn't a fully-paid-up member of the tribe was allowed in Knowlton. Happy Day, can you get any more goofily lime green and pink plaid? But both men fled the suffocating conformity that world demands. And fled, eventually, to oil-patch country, to test themselves against the Wild West, where people had to pull money directly out of the ground. They both failed repeatedly in various endeavours. Then they found something they were good at, Bush at baseball, Day as a youth counsellor and pastor. Both men converted to an emotional branch of Christianity, guided, at least in part, by their wives, thereby abandoning that curious complicity that ruling-class Anglicans have with God. Now anyone who has become born again does so only because he realizes he can't do it alone, and that Final Authority is actually way way way off shore, not incarnate in liberal bureaucracy or the stuffy smoke-filled tap-rooms of the super-wealthy. You won't get there till you die, in the meantime you gotta have faith that God knows what He's doing, and therefore listen hard to what He, in that still small voice, is telling you. This alone is a wonderful humbling act, which in an odd paradox, gifts the individual soul with the ability to trust in the inherent goodness of his fellow man. Of course, every intellectual sucking on the public tit thinks this is absolute rubbish. Man must be forced to be good by lots of rules and lots of carrot-on- a-stick subsidy. But entrenched money and rules are what Old WASPdom is about. Day and Bush know exactly what an excess of money and rules do. They turn people into automatons, incapable of independent thought or action, unable to do without the constantly flowing spigot of other people's money, and unable to respond to any situation without calculating the effect it will have on their future safety. We cannot legislate or fund the risk out of human life, and when we try, we invite corruption and stagnation into our midst and say that this is "the way it is."

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.