David Akin's On the Hill

Bothwell: Penguin History of Canada - The Depression

2008-12-22T19:38:30-05:00

"MacKenzie King hadn't expected to lose the [1930] election; he resentfully vacated his office and retired to his country home, Kingsmere, north of Ottawa, to await events. Bennett was the one, therefore, who had to confront a problem so far beyond his imagining that it would undermine his health, his government, and his career. Canadians' choice of political leadership in 1930 meant that it was the Conservative who would offer the first solutions for the Depression.... (p. 328) That was just as well, for King had absolutely no idea how to fix the Depression, and it may have made matters worse that he was a trained economist, for orthodox economics had no solution to offer. (p. 334)

- Robert Bothwell, The Penguin History of Canada, Toronto: Penguin, 2006

Graydon Carter on Nelson Aldrich on George Plimpton

2008-11-14T19:37:33-05:00

As literary lives go, Plimpton’s was a doozy. Well born, well bred, the father of four, a witness to the great, the good and the gifted, he epitomized the ideal of the life well lived. He sparred with prizefighters and competed against the best tennis, football, hockey and baseball players in the world, and along the way he helped create a new form of “participatory journalism.” He palled around with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and William Styron, and drank with Ernest Hemingway and Kenneth Tynan in Havana just after Castro’s revolution. He also edited and nursed that durable and amazing literary quarterly, The Paris Review, which published superb fiction and poetry and featured author interviews that remain essential reading for anyone interested in the unteachable art of writing. For someone like me, who grew up in the Canadian provinces, Plimpton was, like Bennett Cerf before him, the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as “Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan."

And on Canada Day ...

2008-07-02T15:41:15-04:00

... I happened to be reading (or re-reading, I can't quite remember) Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Risingnnan, reading it as the wood smoke from our fire at Rainbow Falls Provincial Park high on Lake Superior's north shore swirled about it. I'd have posted this yesterday but Canada Day found me a few metres from the Trans-Canada Highway but kilometres away from a decent wireless signal that would have let me made a phone call let alone connect to the Internet (yes, Virginia, there are still places in Canada where there is no high-speed wireless Internet).

Tony Judt on accepting the 2007 Hannah Arendt prize

2008-03-21T10:42:46-04:00

"...if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it "banal"—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.... But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing.

Pankaj Mishra

2008-02-18T22:20:34-05:00

"The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made. Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the metropolitan West.

Atwood on Huxley

2007-11-19T20:09:28-05:00

And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?... And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Naipaul

2007-11-09T07:14:59-05:00

There is only one kind of narrative fiction that Naipual understands to be properly modern; a sort of late Victorian, realist, slightly constipated fiction with a thoroughly old-fashioned narrative, an economic use of words, plenty of natural description (countryside, gardens, townscapes) and so on. The nonsense of post-Joyce, post-Svevo, post-Musil narriative, the 'literature of exhaustion' once celebrated by John Barth, can and should be flushed down the latrine. ; - Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Where Does He Come From?", in The London Review of Books, Nov.

Unexpected War: Kevin Lynch

2007-10-18T06:55:53-04:00

And, in the mid-1990s under the Liberals, Finance Minister Paul Martin had cut the budget of the Canadian Forces by nearly a third to help eliminate the deficit. Now that there were urgent priorities in the aftermath of 9-11, priorities directly related to Canada's economy, Lynch and Martin were not about to put scarce dollars into the black hole of defence."

John Manley

2007-10-18T06:50:01-04:00

"Canada has soldiers that are buried all over Europe because we fought in defence of liberty and we're not about to back away from a challenge now because we think somebody might get hurt."

Mulroney Memoirs: Leader's personal gestures

2007-10-18T06:40:53-04:00

The small kindnesses that motivates caucus members and inspire their families -- an evening call just to chat, flowers, and a personal note on the illness, death or marriage of a close relative, a spontaneous invitation to drop by 24 Sussex for a drink after work -- all of these encouraging courtesies evaporated in the recriminations and Monday-morning quarterbacking that dominated postelection discussions in the Prime Minister's Office. I carefully noted this change and saw the degree of erosion that sets in, at first subtly and then irretrievably, in the leader's base support in caucus and party when personal gestures by the leader and his wife cease.

Harper's Team: 290

2007-09-22T13:06:15-04:00

"Stephen Harper is now engaged in trying to do what no Conservative leader has been able to do for over a hundred years -- build a viable, long-term coalition that can win victories and survive defeats without immolating itself on a a bonfire of mutual recriminations."

Desmond Tutu

2007-09-13T19:42:21-04:00

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in conversation with Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pitt) in Vanity Fair, July 2007:

Brad Pitt: ... There's a big argument going on in America right now, on gay rights and equality.
Desmond Tutu: For me, I couldn't ever keep quiet. I come from ...

Philip Roth

2007-07-13T09:55:04-04:00

For these are the girls whose older brothers are the engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams called Northwestern and Texas Christian and UCLA. Their fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives, and their mothers the ladies with the kindly smiles and the wonderful manners who say things like, "I do believe, Mary, that we sold thirty-five cakes at the Bake Sale." "Don't be too late, dear," they sing out sweetly ...

Jeremy Waldron

2007-04-06T19:53:40-04:00

“The nature of thinking is one of the most important concerns of [Hannah] Arendt’s social and political theory. Thinking is the “habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention” in inner dialogue, in a sort of conversation with oneself, where every mental reaction is subject to ...

Noah Richler

2007-04-03T06:57:56-04:00

[RICHLER:] “Do you think that the nature of immigration has changed?”

[M.G.VASSANJI] “People who came earlier on escaped war, they came in boats, they left their countries, and knew they would not see their home again. There was no looking back. Now we live in a different world. We come ...

Nicholas Kristof: Aid

2007-03-13T13:01:43-04:00

…Robert Calderisi, a humanitarian who has had plenty of experience in Africa, calls for aid cuts in The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working. Calderisi is a Canadian who spent three decades at the World Bank dealing with development problems. His book is more focused on Africa, while ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

2007-02-14T21:36:48-05:00

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" The Great Gatsby,, (p 118, Collier)

Jane Jacobs

2007-01-08T06:55:30-05:00

Expansion depends on capturing and using transient energy. The more different means a system possesses for recapturing, using, and passing around energy before its discharge from the system, the larger are the cumulative consequences of the energy it receives.

– The Nature of Economies, p. 47

"Count Ignatieff"

2006-11-06T22:49:33-05:00

“…we’d love to run against pretty much any of [the Liberal leadership candidates]. I can’ see Gerard Kennedy or Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae or Stephane Dion — all smart, decent people — selling with a forty-yeard-old plumber in Peterborough who makes forty grand. The spectrum o ffirst-tier leadership candidates ...

NY Times: "New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path"

2006-11-06T07:51:15-05:00

“…critics say the automated calls are a twist on push polls — a campaign tactic that is often criticized as deceptive because it involves calling potential voters under the guise of measuring public opinion, while the real intent is to change opinions with questions that push people in one direction ...

Garry Wills: A Country Ruled by Faith

2006-11-04T05:47:05-05:00

“The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of ...

Caroline Moorehead on Australia

2006-11-04T05:42:07-05:00

“In recent years, a continent born of immigrants — 1.75 million during Queen Victoria’s reign alone — has effectively redefined itself as the most excluding nation in the world toward refugees and asylum seekers. Its immigration policies in the last five years have become the envy of those in the ...

Col. Mike Capstick

2006-10-24T08:32:56-04:00

“…importantly, the [Strategic Advisory Team-Afghanistan] initiative is explicit recognition that the character of armed conflict has undergone a major transformation since the end of the Cold War and that traditional concepts for the use of armed force are insufficient to establish a lasting peace.”

– Col. Mike Capstick, “A Year ...

Senator Colin Kenny

2006-10-24T08:28:49-04:00

“Canadians spend $343 apiece on the most important role of any society – defending itself, and advancing its citizens’ interests abroad. The Dutch, who aren’t exactly known as warmongers, spend $658. The Australians spend $648. The British spend $903. We need to get our military spending to 2 percent of ...

Jonathan Rauch

2006-09-16T06:18:35-04:00

National prestige is diplomatic capital; the more unpopular America becomes, the higher the price of foreign support. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s deputy secretary-general, recently said that suspicion of the United States has grown to the point where “many otherwise quite moderate countries” are inclined to oppose anything we favor.

– ...

John Kenneth Galbraith

2006-08-24T13:11:38-04:00

...the conventional wisdom [is] the structure of ideas that is based on acceptability . . .

-The Affluent Society (4th Edition), p. 16

John Kenneth Galbraith

2006-08-24T13:06:14-04:00

Keynes, in his most famous observation, noted that we are ruled by ideas and by very little else. In the immediate sense, this is true. And he was right in attributing the importance to ideas as opposed to the simple influence of pecuniary vested interest. But the rule of ideas ...

John Kenneth Galbraith

2006-08-13T19:41:28-04:00

If inflation is to be prevented without massive unemployment, there remains only teh control of demand, which, when required, must be primarily achieved by fiscal policy — by the federal budget, with effective emphasis on increases or decreases in taxation … When demand is exerting inflationary pressure, it is far ...

Norman Levine

2006-04-20T21:29:07-04:00

‘With your education, you could have been a doctor,’ Mona said.

‘It’s true,’ she said to Emily.

‘But I’m a writer,’ I said. ‘How many doctors has Canada got — thousands. How many writers? A handful. It’s easier to be a doctor than a writer..’

– Norman Levine

“Why Do ...

Michael Ignatieff

2006-02-20T06:09:02-05:00

“…what has succeeded the last age of empire is a new age of violence. The key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that order are warlords; and the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism.”...