Our country needs an election. We've crossed the line. Pre-scientific mediaeval primitives are running the government, and they're wrecking our home and native land. Magic thinking has trumped science, a crude far-right ideology subbing for spells and potions. Real scientists get purged; real mathematicians resign. And real people are getting hurt.
Unlike the case a few centuries ago, millions of Galileos are now railing impotently against our sovereign, who has decreed that the sun orbits the earth. King Stephen I enjoys, however, the fervent support of yokels with pitchforks who can see this for themselves every day. They don't need a telescope to know which way the sun goes.
Killing the long-form census is like excising a portion of the brain in order to induce amnesia. In medicine, that would be called criminal malpractice. In politics, it's malfeasance. Vandalism. Our Supreme Ruler has all the destructive urges of a foul-tempered little boy in a sandbox. There will be serious consequences for ordinary folks, but the King will just put up a few more portraits of himself. He must be thanking his angry old testament God that the Liberals put the hapless Iggy-Jiggy in charge, a man without a discernible principle, position or plan, presently munching barbecue and pretending to be what he isn't.
All taxes are bad taxes, says the King, but he has no difficulty looting the treasury to pay for the continued stimulation of the population's reptile brain.* $9 billion for a brand new prison system to warehouse unreported criminals; another $9 billion for jet fighters (with an untendered contract), no doubt in case we have to go to war over Hans Island; $1.2 billion to finance that dry-run for police state politics, the G-20; and a few million more to produce a voluntary long-form census of no statistical value.
Even some on the Right are asking a few of the proper questions, summarized here as WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF?
A creationist with anger issues heads up Science and Technology, a mendacious statistical illiterate is in charge of the now-headless StatsCan, and another creationist, as noted, is planning to build prisons to house invisible felons. And a crude, loud-mouthed thug has now been appointed House Leader to shriek and bully any dissenting plebs into silence.
If it weren't for the harm done to our country, including the legitimation of unrestrained police violence in Toronto and the loss of our corporate memory, we might allow ourselves to be mildly amused by a government that resembles, policy-wise, a mash-up of the Keystone Kops and the Inquisition. But our foreign policy has become an embarrassment, and our domestic policy is in tatters. Ministers routinely interfere with arms-length agencies, or attempt to exile Canadian citizens,(claiming "royal prerogative" with entirely straight faces), while the King padlocks Parliament--or just tells it to go fly. The man who laughs has simply not yet heard the terrible news.
It's nothing less than our civic duty to run this horrific gang of subliterate hoodlums out of office, by any means necessary and as soon as possible, to get the hands moving clockwise again. We're in serious trouble, folks, and it's time for the craven politicians of the Opposition to gird their loins.
Here's one post-modernist who suddenly has a hankering for a swift return to the rule of law and the security of statistics and the scientific method. (Somewhere my late father and sparring-partner, a rationalist to the end, is smiling.) I'm not just angry; I'm terrified. And I happen to believe that a majority of my countrymen and women are feeling the same way about now.
Get off that stupid bicycle, Iggy. Help end this waking nightmare. As for the rest of us, who says we can't pick up a torch or a pitchfork ourselves when the occasion demands?
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*"Lacking language, its impulses are instinctual and ritualistic. It's concerned with fundamental needs such as survival, physical maintenance, hoarding, dominance, preening and mating. " Sound like anyone you know?
