Gladiators not needed

 Molto bene, Italia! Perfettamente!

Indeed Italy has done a wonderful thing in disrupting a Steve Bannon extreme right project aimed at converting the world to his white power conservatism.

Bannon and a British Conservative acolyte named Benjamin Harnwell had leased an 800-year-old monastery in Collepardo 70 kilometres east of Rome. They planned to use it as an Academy of the Judeo-Christian West, “a modern gladiator school” that strengthens the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian western world.

Translation: gladiators who will join the war against Muslim advancement.

Really cool. A return to the Crusades to save the holy West from the Muslims. Exactly what the world wants and needs – more hatred, more violence and less diversity.

The Italian culture ministry, listening to protest groups, has cancelled the lease, citing irregularities. The protest groups noted that the monastery had a history of improving humanity: During the Middle Ages, monks conducted scientific research there and cultivated 2,500 types of plants for medicinal purposes.

In case you might have forgotten the name, Bannon is Donald Trump’s former chief election and White House strategist and promoter of Breitbart News, an alt-right news and opinion distributor. Some critics call him a crypto-fascist.

Harnwell, 43, isn’t known for much except being a helper to conservative thinkers and leaders.

Steve Bannon is not stupid as a stone, like some of the folks he hangs out with. Actually, he is considered brilliant, able to turn mind and hand to any number of intelligent undertakings. His gladiator school definitely is not one of them.

The last thing our world needs now is more extreme right-wing politics. In fact, the last thing we need is any extremism, right or left. We are stuffed with that junk, especially in our political systems.

Hyper-partisan politics, saturated with mad dog conservatism and mad cat liberalism, are damaging the ability to govern in places that have been models of democracy. In Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal politics, we are just not getting done the things that need doing.

Listening, considering other views and compromising for the common good are missing too often in today’s politics.

In the U.S. the situation  is out of control. That country has entered a stage of devolution that could turn to outright civil war. It is no longer the “United” States.

Canada is rolling along a similar road. Party leadership controls everything, from what its members say in Parliament to vetoing a local riding’s selection of a candidate. For instance, Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould, once among Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s best cabinet ministers, have been barred from running for the Liberals in this fall’s election because they did not accept the party line on the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

Instead of tossing out anyone who disagrees with them, political leaders should be inviting challenging opinions. They need to take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, facing the greatest crisis in U.S. history, did not surround himself with yes people – friends and allies who would support blindly any policy that he proposed. He gathered ambitious people with conflicting personalities who would question and challenge and in the end do things that benefitted the people, not just the party.

Lincoln’s approach is documented in the 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Our political leaders should read it.

We, the citizens, need to reconsider our political party system. It is rotting at its core. It  puts party before principle and party before the people.

What’s needed is for us all to move to the calmer centre where we can sit and discuss, thoughtfully and without yelling at each other, solutions to our problems.

Certainly what we do not need are gladiator schools to harden our political beliefs. We need more intelligent political discussions and debate that explore options. We need ideas – whether they come from thinkers on the left or right of the political spectrum.

Politicians need to listen to and respect the thoughts of all parties. They need to find common ground in that thinking and be willing to compromise to achieve solutions that will be good for the people, not the political party.

A country in which politicians cannot work together for its people is a country doomed to fall apart.

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The germ that ate their brains

Perhaps because of our northern latitude, or perhaps because we thought we had been vaccinated, we expected Canada to escape the epidemic.

Alas, we haven’t. It is here, perhaps swept in on wind shifts created by climate change. Or, maybe it came with the same cough or sneeze that started this winter’s measles outbreak.

Whatever, sadly its arrival has been confirmed by observers on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill.

P-BED, the clinical abbreviation for Political Brain Eating Disease, has been raging in much of the western world, notably the United States and Britain. Canada, however, appeared to be immune.

The Canadian economy was burbling along with a relatively stable employment rate. Its politics were calm compared with the Mad King disaster in the U.S, or the Brexit lunacy in the U.K.

Canada’s prime minister, the boy in long pants and rolled up shirt sleeves, was saying good things and gaining attention and respect in a world gone increasingly mad. All appeared to be . . . well, sensibly Canadian.

Then P-BED struck in the form of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

First came the humiliating demotion of Jody Wilson-Raybould from justice minister and attorney-general to veteran’s affairs minister. The prime minister said it was not a demotion. He had to move her because someone had resigned from cabinet, making a shuffle necessary.

Let me pause this narrative to say that as someone who did two journalistic tours of duty on Silly Hill, being removed from almost any other cabinet post and being sent to veterans affairs is a massive demotion. Anyone who has worked on the Hill knows that.

Not long after that, Wilson-Raybould resigned from cabinet. The prime minister said he could not understand why.

Then Gerald Butts, the prime minister’s principal secretary and close adviser and friend, resigned. There were allegations that senior officials in the prime minister’s office pressured Wilson-Raybould as attorney-general to shelve criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin, a leading global engineering firm from Quebec.

Butts said in his resignation letter that he did not pressure Wilson-Raybould. He did not give a reason for his resignation but tossed in this non sequitur: Our kids and grandkids will judge us all on one issue above all others – climate change.

That’s probably true, but what climate change has to do with his and Wilson-Raybould’s resignations, SNC-Lavalin and the prime minister’s odd statements on the whole mess is anyone’s guess. My guess is P-BED.

The most obvious manifestation of brain eating disease occurred last week when Michael Wernick, who as Clerk of the Privy Council is the country’s top bureaucrat, testified before the House of Commons justice committee.

Wernick admitted there was pressure put on Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair but none of it was unlawful or inappropriate. He left the impression that she is to blame for much of the muddled controversy.

Sounding more like a politician than a bureaucrat he also said – completely off topic - that violent language is being used in public discourse and he fears someone will be shot during this fall’s federal election campaign.

Hopefully that bit of hysterics will not prompt some deranged person to go to an election rally with a gun. And, hopefully his comments on SNC-Lavalin will not encourage other bureaucrats to think t hey can get involved in partisan politics

Wernick’s delirium about a shooting was a political shot at Senator David Tkachuk, a Conservative, who earlier told the United We Roll protest caravan in Ottawa “to roll over every Liberal left in the country.”

That was a figure of speech made in the context of this fall’s federal election, Tkachuk said later.

The prime minister then jumped in to say that Wernick is brilliant and people should heed carefully what he says. Perhaps he wants Wernick to run for a seat in the election.

What people really need to heed is how to halt the spread of  the brain eating disease raging in Ottawa. It will continue to spread as the SNC-Lavalin scandal develops and will worsen as the federal election campaign approaches.

All that we poor voters can do is watch election candidates closely and make sure they know how negative partisanship can eat their brains. Question them closely and confirm that they have been vaccinated.