CALL AND RESPONSE

November 2002

by Barry Stagg

The sad casualties of Liberal Orthodoxy:A Maritime Fable

A simple idea: Liberals are this era's Company men/women but the Company is Hayek's central planning monstrosity. Liberal elitism is just as easily construed as corporate orthodoxy. Statist/bureaucratic economic churning conjures up a good life for its loyalists. The worst get on top by championing the worst excesses of planned living.

Inspiration: "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" was Tom Wolfe at his iconoclastic, left-ridiculing best in 1970. It seems many middlebrow Liberals used Wolfe's satire as a serious handbook for everyday government. Canada gets its own backwater version of 1970's American loony fashion as our own orthodox political culture- the Rideau Canal Cargo Cult. Think of the Kyoto Protocol as a symptom of this moronic disease- political dementia for fun and personal profit.

This is a bit of musing about how the state industrial culture of my home provinces is getting to be a bit Gothic, at least as far as the end of cycle social frictions are concerned. My home provinces are Newfoundland and sister, Nova Scotia where I went to law school and consequently spent three years of my twenties.

A CBC program about a drunk driving fatality in Cape Breton set me up to think about how portions of the publicly paid white collar work force had developed all the predictable pathologies that go with diddling careers out of shallow pretences and absolutely not a smidgen of economic reality.

Regional Development Task Forces, Local District Planning Officers, Economic Development Managers, blah, blah, blah and where is the next bit of pretend funding coming from. Sneak a few uppers and a shot of vodka after breakfast, give a speech to some local spenders for lunch, a lurch back to virtual suburbia for the evening. That is the same kind of life style, the same nihilistic con job that people like Franz Kafka figured out a hundred years ago. Socialist ennui coupled with vain ambition-hubris harnessed to federal budgetary asininity. That is how you get alcoholic shirts and skirts spiralling to oblivion in a pathetic little universe, separate and apart from the working stiffs who struggle on in the same geography but outside the profane little cocoon of statist careerism that strokes the petty egos of its players while gradually suffocating them with the unnatural vapours of fake economics and fictional development.

So you get psycho-somatic breakdowns and mysterious jealousies and vicious little local feuds over whose wife should be the next vice-president of the regional committee for the empowerment and emancipation of the local women who all profess to be in urgent need of shaking off their chains at public expense and with travel and meal per diems for the special meetings at regional headquarters needed monthly in order to plan out the best possible course of action for the great alchemist's crusade to render a Maritime Utopia. These bits of command economy nonsense become the fuel for more and more useless and socially snobbish local politics which predictably descends into a pretty package of patronage headed for an excruciatingly ugly end, a hangover induced by the excessive imbibing of vacuities masked as economic planning and social re-organization.

That is the lot of some ambitious climbers who realize Friedrich Hayek's postulate about why the worst get on top in a statist system. As the cycle of generations comes to a close, these players reach a kind of socialist zenith where they slow to a stop and begin the tumble back into the nasty mess of confusions and perfumed blarney they have jumbled into a maze of pointless careers for each other. Hello alcoholics, hello invalids, hello stress leave. On Canada Day, count your disability benefits.


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