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As the death toll from COVID-19 climbed, as the economy struggled and the planet warmed, Americans gathered a fortnight on from an insurrection to swear in a new president. 

"We did not feel prepared to be the heirs

of such a terrifying hour

but within it we found the power

to author a new chapter….

Now we assert

How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was

but move to what shall be…."

The break-out star of the inauguration of President Joe Biden was a twenty-two-year-old poet, Amanda Gorman, who captured the idea that democracy is a verb, one we must earn. 

As The New Yorker suggested, "Democracy…is an aspiration—a thing of the future."

The inaugural address itself — and frankly the entire day, from the twilight memorial service to the morning mass to the evening's concerts — felt like a gentle balm from a parish priest as president. 

The young senator who came to the capital nearly a half century ago, who was known as a talker, a self-confessed "gaffe machine", used sparing words to simple but solemn effect.  His message was one of unity and, in their own way, his words were healing. 

The simplicity of the commonplace felt reassuring; a press briefing — calm, not combative, occasionally dodging but never belligerently so — felt like a relief after four years of vitriol, viciousness and vile behaviour.  We faced a real trauma, awakening to fresh hell unleashed on Twitter, children in cages, rights upended, racism glorified and the rule of law abased. 

As former President Bill Clinton once said, "there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America."  A woman — a biracial Black woman at that — sworn in to the second-highest office in the land became a fitting symbol of that sense of progress correcting the errors of the past. 

As Gorman said, today:

"…being American is more than a pride we inherit

It's the past we step into

And how we repair it…

So let us leave behind a country

better than the one we were left with."

She quoted from Hamilton — "For while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us" — and The Bible, and even paraphrased the "skinny Black kid with a funny name" who became a president. 

But for me, it was her reference to TH White's The Once and Future King retelling of the Arthurian legend, which invoked the Second World War — "Might does not make right!  Right makes right!" — that hit home:

"…one thing is certain;

If we merge mercy with might,

and might with right,

then love becomes our legacy…"

After four long years, the elderly president — priestly, simple — reassured us but the young poet compelled us forward: 

"When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid,

The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light,

if only we're brave enough to see it.

If only we're brave enough to be it."

Photo Credit: KSAT 12

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


Apparently the premier of Ontario wants to shove explosives up someone's ass and it is not controversial.  And while you may say beep that, we have far more important problems like the beeping inability of beeping governments to deal with the beeping epidemic of beeping COVID, and increasing eruptions of incivility in public life, I say potty mouth does as potty mouth is.

Many things need to be said about Ford's comment including its blame-shifting and indeed rhetorical incompetence.  But first is that it should not have been said.  Which is always difficult to argue without repeating it.  As in: "I'd be up that guy's ying-yang so far with a firecracker he wouldn't know what hit him".

Yes, really.  The de facto head of the provincial executive branch, the man in control of the police, said those exact words in public, they were widely quoted, and nobody cared.

OK, not nobody.  One municipal councillor objected that Ford was "perpetuating rape culture", which isn't quite my point since people in Ontario do not routinely detonate gunpowder in executives' bowels.  But she is right that Ford was explicitly proposing to commit a sexual assault, and that it is shocking that more people were not offended.

Instead the general feeling seems to be that I sound like a maiden aunt, or rather an elderly relative who self-identifies as a woman.  That beeping ship has beeping sailed you beeping beep.  Well if so, it should be brought back to port, because reputable people should not express themselves in public the way its crew habitually might in a tavern.

Some years back I began compiling examples of the growing willingness of mainstream media to print obscenities, initially with a decorous asterisk or two then increasingly full frontal.  But I gave up because with social change coming faster and faster, the examples were overwhelming me.  (As Thomas Sowell warned years ago in a quotation I can't now locate, it is imbecilic for adults to want "change" without specifying the direction because it could be anything from the Second Coming to the Third Reich.  Or the premier's fist up your butt with a banger though Sowell, for all his prescient pessimism, apparently didn't see that one coming.)

There's lots wrong with Ford's utterance.  For starters, one rule for me and one for thee.  If I publicly expressed a desire to blow his guts out over his handling of the pandemic, or anything else, I'd probably receive a visit from any police officers not busy ticketing people for taking their kid to see grandma, even if there were no practical possibility of my accomplishing the task.

For another, it makes no sense.  If Doug Ford were to stick fireworks up my ass and set them off, I would have a number of reactions but bafflement as to what had just "hit" me would not be one of them.  It is not an operation you can perform in secret.  Which might seem irrelevant, or at least nitpicking, but I beg to differ.

When the utterances of public persons make no sense it is because their thinking is incoherent.  As for instance with endless flipflops on pandemic measures, from closing borders to wearing masks to closing schools.  At some point we really ought to be asking to see this "science" they keep invoking, including on the trade-offs between reducing COVID transmission and the mental as well as physical health costs of isolation, anxiety, financial ruin etc.  But we don't, because we no longer expect politicians' words to make sense.  At which point we should not be surprised that their actions don't either.

I am aware that philosophers from Hegel to Wittgenstein and Ayer have devoted much attention to the vexed question of the relationship between speech and thought, most of it tending to leave us less incapable of either.  But just as habit is second nature, and what we think all day is what we become, what we say shapes what we think, so if we babble we flail.  And the premier is doing both.

Apart from all its other defects, his proposal to violate another human being deflects blame from the real villain, the one who's been running our pandemic response all along including our effort to acquire vaccines.  Namely Douglas Robert Ford, the 26th premier of Ontario.  If you must cuss someone out, let it be him, because he's the clod who messed it up.

For my part, if I were going to insert anything into anyone's orifices without consent, which I'm not, it would be soap into Ford's mouth, because a society and a polity in which senior public figures talk this way cannot be a decent one.  As a certain annoying Jew said 2,000 years ago, we are poisoned not by what goes into our mouths (or now, apparently, other orifices) but by what comes out.  And as I had occasion to observe in an online debate with a foul-mouthed academic, vulgarity matters because just as false words proceed from a false mind, foul words proceed from a foul mind.

That professor promptly blocked me, which I thought rather proved my point.  But if any of you do want my advice on COVID-19 despite its prissy avoidance of apertures, detonations, nudity or blasphemy, we should prioritize protection of the vulnerable while avoiding broad quarantine measures that do far more indirect harm than direct good, in an atmosphere of courteous, mature acceptance of responsibility by those with power.

I hereby invite Premier Ford to insert any contrary suggestion into that same location where a simian sequestered fruits consisting of an inedible hard shell and a seed.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.