March 2003
by Barry Stagg
The Parrish nonsense, conclusive of her own irrelevance and pettiness, is just one of many symptoms of fussy anti-Americanism abounding in Canadian public life in this year of war. The Iraq attack, openly planned by the U.S., is stimulating this generation's housekeepers of democracy to denounce war just as their grandparents railed against Sir Winston Churchill in the 1930's. The comparison to the peacemongering appeasers of Hitler is obvious and made in better form elsewhere. It is the housekeeping analogy that I want to explore.
The democratic housekeepers are a hardy lot but really are just a common human phenomenon: They are the people who prefer their present unearned stability to any form of unrest, however just the reason for the uproar/war. In any period, there are people who do not maintain the peace, in fact the vast majority have little or nothing to do with the armed forces, security or national issues at all. This was so in 1933, as it was in 1973 and now in 2003. In wartime of course, the opposite is true: most have some involvement, directly or more so peripherally.
In the time of peace, the housekeepers, manifesting as a cadre of intellectuals , may come to focus on the etiquette of their democratic system. Hence, the chorus of ridicule against President Bush: ' Bastard, Moron, unelected, Daddy's boy'. More typically, they pass their time divining profundity in the pedestrian machinations of statist activity: Are we getting more or less civilized by our use of ethnic hiring quotas in the civil service or are enough tax dollars being collected to fund parenting collectives and anti-pollution regulators.
These essentially liberal fixations are the core of the housekeepers opposition to overt American war against Iraq. They hold that the 'Ugly Americans' have not earned the right to these aggressions because the Americans are simply not nice enough, not civilized enough, not sufficiently deferential to the nuances of waxing and dusting that are the essential tasks of maintaining a good polished civilization.
Reducing this analogy to something more mundane and , hopefully, more obvious: The national housekeepers are like the servants in the factory baron's palatial mansion, obsessed with keeping the floors and furniture clear of the grease and grime that rubs off the visitors from the factory floor. This fixation becomes so pervasive that the great man himself gives in to their flattery and foregoes factory maintenance and security until the mill closes and , in short order, the palace becomes an empty hulk of cobwebs and vanquished hubris, not to mention the final repository of the detritus of the furniture massagers, now unemployed. The servants, fallen from their self- anointed polishing pinnacle, are now reduced to grousing on the sidewalk.
The naysayers and public scolders of Ottawa and environs are finding out that these times are not like their good old days of unfettered committee room sneering and conference communiques that condemned the very American who probably paid their hotel bills. These are serious but simple times where violence done to Americans on September 11, 2001 is being met and dealt with by classical military means . Railbirds chirp at their peril.
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