The Mallick-Palin Affair

Yes, there are federal elections underway on both sides of the border. The number of sources for political commentary and opinion are limitless. There is little need for one more stranded opinion, although there is room for opinion on what the outcomes of these elections may hold for the NAmerican secessionist movement. Consider such a post “pending.”

A minor explosion has occurred on the Canadian political landscape that has jumped the border into the CNN newsroom and is now blipping on the American political landscape. I refer, of course, to the dust-up over the Heather Mallick-Sarah Palin affair.

What is most interesting and yes, nauseous, about this sordid event are the pissing contests underway in the Con and Lib camps of the Canadian blogosphere. The Cons are predictably outraged. The Libs are likewise predictably outraged that one of their spokespersons should be called out as a “pig” by CNN. The self-righteous wrath of some Libs questioning the Cons’ lack of civility is comical.

The notion of "civility" in the Canadian political blogosphere is, by and large, a quaint linguistic remnant of a ghost era or a principled objective to be pursued at some point beyond the present. Neither camp has the foggiest comprehension of what it entails, let alone being able to spell it. The mutually-supportive fallout around the Mallick/Palin soap opera may just be the most evident example of this mutual embrace to date. Excusing the out-and-out naive and stupid, one is amazed that some of the self-proclaimed enlightened Libs are so thick between their ears as to their own hypocritical conduct. Witness the outpouring of wounded pride that flowed into Red Tory's post entitled "When Brownshirts Attack!"

The meta-context is that a military coup was inflicted on the peoples of NAmerica on September 11, 2001. The ongoing prattle about which type of political personality, representing supposedly differing political philosophies, will best serve this condition is just that...prattle. The cult of personality and related attacks against those personalities, in both camps and in both Canada and the United States, merely abets the illusion of contributing towards a tattered democracy and its principles. Literally, it is the fog of war.

We witness first-hand a clash, on the political extremities of neanderthal Con knuckle-scrapers and redundant Lib wankers and apologists. Both are caught in the headlights of an unwelcome future and a gutted ethos for how to deal with it. Somewhere in the middle are liberals and conservatives, decent, small human beings (a goodly proportion likely “trash”), who may wish for nothing more than a reasonable and acceptable explanation of why the fabric of their world is unraveling at an alarming rate and why that world is being steam-rolled by a freight train of maniacal entropy. That middle ground constitutes every general's and mainstream politician's worst nightmare: the center will not hold.

The political option of "the lesser of two evils" has quite possibly never been more pronounced, on both sides of the 49th. We have the hillbilly version and the oh-so-slick version. It is a 21st century Prisoners' Dilemma on steroids.

We make our beds and we get to sleep in them, when maybe what we should really be contemplating is burning them.

What awaits us is, indeed, a delicious banquet of consequences.