Not revenge, just power
We Canadians are rather a mild lot. But don’t push us. We have something that some of our nieghbours below the line don’t have - backbone.
When we are unhappy with our own politicians we say so. A Prime Minister, who incidentally is not a governor of a state, has submitted his resignation when a new party letter is selected. short civics lesson for House Reps and Senators: we are not a single state, but a country of provinces and territories. Would any American politician have the backbone to tell his/her own constituents a few of these facts. I side with David Brooks in his recent article that stupidity has less to do with intelligence than with behavior.
I like what Brooks has to say about Stupidity (The Six Principles of Stupidity, New York Times, Jan, 30, 2025 )defining it as “ behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?” and elaborating as follows:
Stupidity makes us befuddled. He goes on to say “When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.” . Here is another thing, America. Canada is not a source of overwhelming amounts of drugs entering the US.
Stupidity happens when organizations put all their hopes in one person. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is getting a lot of attention these days. Remember him as someone who stood up to Hitler? He said, “The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” Of course there was a cost to standing up. Bonhoeffer died for speaking the truth so that we still be here and free.
Stupidity already has all the answers! Watch this one. Especially since there is such a blast of news that we fall behind and fail to say “Huh?”
People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. Most of us know when we have been stupid after the fact. Will any Americans wake up to the fact of what they knew already and still went ahead and elected or approved people? They are going to find out.
Brooks continues: “Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant.” Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality, Brroks says. As the writer Marilynne Robinson noted in her book, Genesis, History is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing with truth feels like a breach of etiquette”
Robert Reich, noted in a recent podcast that the press is wrong in seeing all of these befuddling actions as revenge. Instead they are about centralizing power. It’s not fun to watch and be affected by. But it’s impressive until it isn’t. Somehow all of this reminds me of Keats’ poem, Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As Sister Joan Chittister reminds us in her book, The Time is Now, we are called to be prophets, not just healer. That takes backbone.