LOOKING AHEAD???

Sometimes, according to the sages, in order to find out where you're going you have to look back and see where you've been. That's my excuse for dredging up the past in a fit of what can only be called self-indulgence. Go ahead. Indulge!

My "blog" is not setting the world on fire. There isn't even any smoke! To continue writing is a compulsion, an imperative. Does it matter than I get very little response or that when you Google my name my blog is not even mentioned.
Alas, more self-pity and I will nauseate myself. Here goes:

A few weeks ago, and I have to be careful that I don't give clues that let you identify the person, I had a conversation with a friend. The friend reminded me that she did not share my "left" views, but was in fact, a Tory, of the slightly red variety.

I consider that political bent more of a moral defect than a political opinion - but that would be intolerant of me - wouldn't it?

I tried, in a lavishly nostalgic piece to explain why I went left and stayed left. It is, I will comment, especially germane in an age when the unthinkable has happened: the neo-cons in Washington have put government to work.

Here then with a few edits, is the email I sent:
I have a problem with the marketplace orthodoxy that guys like Bush keep yammering about. He, and many of his neo-con comrades are confused. They think that capitalism and democracy always go together. The Saudi Arabians are capitalists. Would you call Saudi Arabia a democracy?

I had a great deal of time for some of the the truly pragmatic Tories we have had. Bill Davis who, and with 20/20 hind sight it was a good idea - bought a piece of Suncor. Bill Davis also put together a transportation experiment in Kingston that would have revolutionized the way we get from place to place by rail.

Peter Lougheed was another. Alberta was overflowing with oil and he set up the Heritage Fund financed by oil royalties. He used it to try to diversify the cattle/oil Alberta economy. Like Davis he was too soon with a great idea. Remember his oil seed refinery business? He got into it just at the time when there was a glut of oil seed products. The project collapsed in a sea of debt. But just think today of biofuels.

When I think of Tories I tend to think of the blue-ribbon Anglicans I grew up with. They were anti-Semitic (it was an inherent characteristic) and they were exclusionary. They also excluded Roman Catholics, along with anyone who didn't look like them.(See Country Club, Yacht Clubs, Golf Club, Resort Hotels, apartment houses on Eglinton avenue and most of Leaside etc etc.)

Perhaps a great deal of what used to be Jewish radicalism stemmed not only from social injustice, but from the marginalization of our people. That has all changed today and the Americans especially are up to their armpits in neo-con Jews. See William Kristol in the New York Times.

I suppose I clung to my radicalism for far too long. I realized, after I had run unsuccessfully in the provincial election, that the left was in an ideological straight-jacket. There is no room for pragmatism.

I is pragmatism that brings us to the present state of affairs: a Republican government holding its nose and buying shares in banks.

We shall see what affect the deeply ingrained conservatism on America has on Obama. Will he buck the hard right? Will he defy the people who vote in a close-minded bloc against stem cell research, elimination of prayer in schools, same sex marriage, and the right of a woman to choose.

My leftiness still goes back a long way. I remember Harry Truman's Taft Hartley Act which effectively put an end to growth of the union movement. I remember the so- called right-to-work legislation that really was the right-to-fire-without cause legislation. I remember things like enlightened capitalism which moved the textile industry from New England to the right-to-work southern states. Then they discovered, in a bottom feeding frenzy, that they could get it done more cheaply in Mexico. Even that was not enough. They moved to an even cheaper labour source - poor bedraggled El Salvador. Even the Salvadoreans couldn't compete because it moved again - to Honduras.

I believe that the Right has no sense of social justice and that profits always trump humanity.

Aaah - now I feel better.