All About YOU!

You can save thousands of dollars a year on your taxes! You can make thousands of dollars a month in your spare time! You can ensure your future – it's not too late to start!

It's never been cheaper to lose weight! You can lose twenty pounds by Easter! You can firm that butt! You can firm those thighs! Those washboard abs you've always wanted could now be yours!

You can make thousands of dollars just by placing classified ads in newspapers! You can make thousands of dollars in importing without risking one penny of your own
money! You can make thousands of dollars buying real estate with the vendor's money!

Now you can have a brilliant white smile! Your hair can have body and sheen! Your skin can be clear and soft!

You can ensure a comfortable retirement by investing in mutual funds! You can share in the huge returns on tech stocks by investing in mutual funds! You can ensure peace of mind by investing in ethical mutual funds!

Your marriage can be saved! Your sex life can be saved! You can start a new career in the fast-paced high tech world of computers in only six months!

You can remove stains! You can remove built-up dirt! You can remove harmful bacteria!

You can promote understanding and fight alienation by using inclusive language! You can help the homeless by buying a toque! You can protect the environment by using your recycling box!

You can sleep better and save money in a beautiful automatic bed! You can ensure your family's future by buying life insurance for pennies a day – you cannot be refused! You can get money for your house without giving up ownership!

You can own valuable collector plates! You can own valuable collector spoons! You can own valuable collector thimbles!

You can do whatever you want! You can achieve any goal you really want to achieve! If you never quit you can never be beaten!

The key to success is the power inside you! The key to success is the drive inside you! The key to success is the desire inside you!

You can become rich and famous by hitting a ball with a stick! You can become rich and famous by grinning into a television camera with your hair carefully combed! You can become rich and famous by telling people they can become rich and famous!

Yes, you can!

All About YOU! © John FitzGerald, 2000

Forgive us, environment, for we have sinned

This last weekend that emptiest of empty gestures, Earth Hour, was held for the second time. In dishonour of it we are re-posting NEW IMPROVED HEAD's 2007 article about Live Earth.

No sooner are we finally willing to admit that God is dead than we’re lining up to worship a new one. Atheist books are finally showing up in the bestseller lists and the churches are collapsing under the weight of the damages they have to pay to people they’ve abused, but people are lining up to worship at the altar of the Environment.

Last weekend (July 7, 2007) had Live Earth, where musicians preached to us about how we need to be more responsible stewards of the environment. The musicians at Live Earth wanted everyone to sign the following commitment:

• I will change four light bulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) at my home.
  
• I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.
  
• I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.
  
• I will forward a Live Earth email message to five friends.
  
• I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I’m not using them.

You know, you musical types could conserve more energy than that commitment ever will just by committing to holding one less concert a year, eh? Funny how that never got into any commitment.

Well, as Ambrose Bierce once wrote, a Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. It appears that to Live Earth an environmentalist is someone who follows the teachings of Al Gore insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of mindless consumption.

I mean, look at that “commitment.” Order your Escalade with an energy efficient radio and you are virtuous. Change four crummy light bulbs and you are SAVED!! The environment will be HEE-YULLED!! It’s the old religious con: follow these easy rules and you’ll be saved some time way in the future; in the meantime, give us money. But instead of putting money in the plate you just keep on buying CDs as if you were going to listen to them on a solar-powered player.

Environmentalism even has its own form of that Roman Catholic institution, the indulgence. In the old days rich people used to establish orders of monks and nuns in their wills on the condition that the monks and nuns spend all their time praying for their benefactor’s soul in purgatory. Some bright spark in the Church realized that with all those monks and nuns it had lying around, it could sell prayers to those without the cash to endow religious orders, and the indulgence was born. Even today, to get someone’s soul prayed for by the congregation at a Roman Catholic church you slip the priest a little cash.

The environmentalist equivalent of the indulgence is the carbon credit. In their original form, carbon credits made sense. Countries assigned quotas to businesses establishing the amount of greenhouse gases they could emit. Businesses which were able to reduce their emissions below their quotas were then allowed to sell the unused part of their quotas to businesses who were having trouble reducing their emissions.

In its original form the carbon credit was a sensible way to deal with the inevitable errors in estimating reasonable quotas, and with differences between industries in the difficulty of reducing emissions. It encouraged companies to cut emissions and increased the probability that the country as a whole would meet its target for emissions. It wasn’t going to save the atmosphere all by itself, but neither is forwarding a Live Earth e-mail going to.

But the indulgence-sellers quickly got into the carbon credit business. Now you can issue carbon credits if you promise to plant trees. The idea is that if someone emits a tonne of greenhouse gases, he or she can pay a company to plant enough trees to remove a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air – assuming that the trees don’t die and aren’t cut down (for the new high-tech headquarters of the tree-planting company, for example). And assuming that they actually get planted.

Carbon credits like these of course paid for a large part of the anti-environmental excess which was what Live Earth was in practice. The performers travelled a total of something like 200,000 miles by jet to get to the concerts, and corresponding indulgences were purchased to save their environmental souls.

Salvation is easy! that's what the religious are always telling us, anyway. You want to go to heaven? Then just stop making them graven images. And cut down on that coveting. You want to save the environment? Then change four light bulbs. Or light four votive candles and save both your soul and the environment.

Given that the religious haven’t even managed to keep their simple promise not to make graven images, I don’t see much hope for any huge surge in public transit ridership as a result of all those commitments people made at Live Earth.

Making life tolerable is hard and requires courage, but religion tells people that if they don’t worry about this life but instead worry about the next one, everything will be peachy in the end. Improving the environment is hard and requires dedication and a willingness to live with the idea that our standard of living might have to be reduced, but the religion of individual environmental action tells us that if we don’t worry about the environment as a whole but only about the mundane trappings of our daily individual lives the environment will be peachy in the end.

Religion’s had a long and successful career, but we’re still pretty sinful. Promising to be good isn’t going take carbon dioxide out of the air, either.

Forgive Us, Environment, For We have Sinned © John FitzGerald, 2007

Everything I needed to know about life I learned at the race track

Where have all the values gone? Sometimes it seems that everyone in the world has become so confused by the claims of competing ethical systems that he or she has retreated into a little personal world in which his or her own little desires take priority over everything else.

It's not that people are averse to shared values. Oh, no – people's hunger for a dependable set of values leads them to do things like take up new age philosophy, become activists for social causes, or simply return after long absences to the religious denominations in which they grew up. However, if these were to be sources of dependable values we long ago would have had some dependable values.

We need to look elsewhere for values, a place where values may be tested against the harsh reality of everyday life. I know the place.

I owe much of my solid ethical foundation to the thousands of hours I have spent intensely engaged in the handicapping of horse races and in the wagering of money on the horses which seemed to me to have good odds. From those thousands of hours I have learned certain immutable truths which will provide anyone with a solid framework on which to mount their conception of the good life. Yes, if you want values, go to the race track.

People at the race track are engaged in a search for Truth. And at the end of every race some people find it. A look at this successful search for truth is obviously going to be of great help to those who so far have spent their lives in unsuccessful pursuit of it. So here
are some of the Great Truths I have learned at the race track:

1. It's better to be right than to be wrong. At the track you get paid when you're right and don't get paid when you're wrong. Outside the track, not only do people not get paid for being right, they often get fired for it. Is it any wonder modern life is characterized by spiritual malaise?

2. Saying you're right doesn't make you right. At the track you don't get paid just because you claim that you knew who was going to win the race. You have to have documentary evidence. Outside the track, much of social life consists of people telling us how wonderful they are. They can do that because corrupt contemporary values prevent so-called polite people from asking for documentary evidence. Eventually people start to believe the propaganda.  Puis voilà – Brian Mulroney.

3. Talk is cheap. I once read a magazine article about how forecasts of the demand for electricity in Ontario had repeatedly been inaccurate. The article featured photographs of some of the forecasters, all of whom worked out of Toronto, and I immediately thought "Of course they didn't get it right. I've never seen any of these people at the track."

Now, if someone was any good at forecasting, wouldn't he or she be down at the track making money off that skill? Forecasting a horse race is a piece of cake compared to forecasting demand for electricity – the forecast is for the very short term, and most of the factors affecting the race are known.

The problem with the track, though, is you've got to risk your own money. When you're forecasting demand for electricity it's not your money that's at risk. You can take bold new approaches to forecasting, you can adhere to conventional approaches, or you can just flat out do a half-assed job of it – it makes no difference in the end. If you're wrong, no deduction will be made from your paycheque. They'll just put something in the annual report about unforeseen circumstances and raise the electricity bill. In other words, the entire electricity-consuming population suffers in your place.

Similarly, you can call yourself "Chainsaw" and take bold steps at the company you run without ending up out of pocket when the company loses market share as a direct result of your actions. The employees you laid off and the shareholders will end up out of pocket, though. The superiority of the race track's values is evident here.

If people were required to have a financial interest in the positions they took on public issues, that at the very least would shut up the sports broadcasters, which accomplishment alone would realize a signal improvement in the quality of life.

4. Fairy tales don't come true. The popular mind is perhaps less puritan than it used to be, but it still holds dear the puritan ideas that success is a reward for moral superiority, and that the best way to acquire moral superiority is to work hard and want to succeed. We are continually told that success comes to the hard worker rather than to the intelligent one, and to those who want to succeed, rather than to those who know how. We have practically erected a religion of motivation, the central tenet of which is the belief that if you really want to achieve something, you will achieve it.

The argument of course is that if you really want something you'll learn how to achieve it. But what if the skills required to achieve it are beyond you? Isn't that a rather obvious flaw in the argument? Or perhaps it's only obvious to those of us who have spent many hours among the intensely dedicated devotees of the track. They all want to win so bad it hurts (oh, man, it can really hurt on nights when all your tickets ended up on the floor and you're riding the bus home with all the other guys whose tickets all ended up on the floor and most of you are slumped forward thinking about how the triactor you missed in the last race paid two grand, and how you threw out the winner in the seventh that paid thirty bucks to win, and how you missed the $200 exactor in the fifth by a nose – a nose can get really short at the harness races, by the way – and the rest of you are announcing that all the drivers and trainers and owners are crooked and all the horses are on drugs – oh, the desire to win can really hurt), and every night the average racegoer goes home with less money than he or she came in with.

5. Success is not a moral quality. Outside the track, we worship success. Successful people are considered to be superior to other people in many ways. Most importantly, we believe that success is always a consequence of skill. At the track, though, we know there are many routes to success.
Anyone who's had his or her money on a trotter going off at very short odds because of its exceptional equine qualities and watched it bump its nose on the starting gate, go off stride at the beginning of the race as a result, and finish thirty lengths back knows that there's more to achieving things in life than passing a success fitness examination.

Speaking of the harness races, people would have saner views of success if they understood what the phrase "get up off a garden trip" means. Many a harness horse beats superior horses simply because it had less work to do during the race. A horse has a garden trip when it races behind the leader – in the pocket, as they say. At the end the leader often tires and the horse in the pocket, relaxed after having
been shielded from the wind, darts out and waltzes home in front ("gets up"). Sound like the role your boss plays on projects?

Yes, an acquaintance with the world of competitive zoology quickly highlights the moral defects of modern society. So grab your bankroll and head for the nearest racing establishment. It's time for society to get on the right track!

Everything I Needed to Know about Life I Learned at the Race Track © John FitzGerald, 2003

Our Two Founding Lies

I recently came across my copy of an important Canadian book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. It was written in 1965 by George Grant, who is known reflexively to many Canadians as a distinguished historian. The theme of this book is the supposed loss of Canadian sovereignty resulting from the election of the evil Pearson in 1963.

I could summon up no memory of earlier readings of the book, but the many notes in my copy suggested I had been interested in it at the time. I therefore decided to give this distinguished historian a second chance. What I discovered on re-reading the book was a distinguished load of twaddle.

I found, to be exact, a spurious argument for the myth of the two founding peoples. Grant argues that Canada was founded when "the two original peoples, French and Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be part of the great Republic." His evidence for this assertion is – wait for it – the Constitutional Act of 1791! He writes:

The constitutional arrangements of 1791, and the wider arrangements of the next century, were only possible because of a widespread determination not to become part of the great Republic. Among both the French and the British, this negative intention sprang from widely divergent traditions. What both people had in common was the fact they both recognized that they could only be preserved outside the United States of America.

Well, let's review exactly what those constitutional arrangements of 1791 were. What happened was that Quebec lost its western half, which became Upper Canada. This was done so that the Loyalist settlers in Upper Canada could have English laws and institutions, especially the English system of land tenure (Quebec still had seigneurial tenure).

So what Grant represents as a union was in fact a division. What he represents as an accommodation was in fact a repudiation. The Loyalists rejected French law and institutions and the British government removed them from Quebec's rule.

Upper and Lower Canada shared the same Governor General that all the British North American colonies did, but were otherwise separate. They remained separate till the establishment of the United Province of Canada (one of those "wider arrangements of the next century") in 1841, when the British out them back together with the idea of creating unity by overwhelming the French and assimilating them to English culture.

So Grant represents the divisive act of a colonial power as the voluntary union of two peoples, and he represents a union imposed by a foreign power for the purpose of eradicating French culture as a voluntary partnership between French and English. The obvious nonsensicality of Grant's ideas of course did not keep the Progressive Conservatives from adopting them as policy almost immediately. The Tories' promotion of these ideas culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements, so Grant shares the blame for the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party following the referendum on the Charlottetown agreement.

The myth of the two founding peoples also undermined Canadian sovereignty, although Grant thought that preserving the supposed union of the two founding peoples was what Canadian sovereignty was for. However, once you believe that the essence of Canada is that it is a union of two founding peoples, you really don't need sovereignty.

The Tories, for example, could promote free trade as enthusiastically as they promoted Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Free trade, after all, wasn't going to imperil the union of the two founding peoples, especially when Quebec was keen for it. Free trade was going to cost the two founding peoples considerable freedom to act as they wanted, but those valuable British and French traditions were not going to be endangered.

Of course, the loss of Canadian sovereignty through free trade and the WTO was also facilitated by the other myth which competed with the myth of the two founding peoples. This competing myth was the idea of multicultural Canada, or of Canada as the community of communities. Canada's mission, according to this myth, is to furnish a place for ethnic groups to co-exist in harmony.

I call this a myth for the simple reason that, like the myth of the two founding peoples, it fails to describe reality. Most members of most ethnic groups consider that the interests of Canadians as a whole are superior to those of their own ethnic group. The one ethnic group where this is most likely not true has also firmly rejected the idea of a multicultural society, and many of its members long to separate from a country in which individual rights take priority over group rights.

As Grant notes, the idea of multicultural Canada was a favourite of the Cité libre crowd, and when they took over the Liberal Party, the Liberal party took over the idea of multicultural Canada. It became the party of multiculturalism.

Of course a multicultural Canada is not threatened by loss of sovereignty, either, and the Liberals have enthusiastically supported the WTO's depredations on Canadian sovereignty. The members of Canada's ethnic communities have lost sovereignty, but Canada still has a ministry of multiculturalism.

Interestingly, Canadians are increasingly coming to think that Canadianism is synonymous with anti-Americanism. We don't want to be like those vulgar Americans whose national myth is one of self-reliance and liberty. While the two myths of Canada fail to describe Canadian reality, they have at least succeeded in persuading Canadians that the autonomous life is not worth living.

No, we will stick with the Two Founding Lies of contemporary Canada. Although they have cost us sovereignty and the occasional problem like the country nearly falling apart, they both allow us to remain smug and self-righteous about the wonderful union of two peoples/community of communities that Canada supposedly is, and if being smug and self-righteous isn't Canadian, I don't know what is.

Our Two Founding Lies © John FitzGerald, 2000