Even Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini is becoming more positive. Almost nobody has been more negative about the economy in the last ten years than Nouriel Rubini, the professor from NYU who was seen as a clown, up until two years ago when he was among the first to identify the great big Ponzi scheme that later became known as the Global market.
He now says the rate of deterioration is slowing, the worst of the decline is behind us, and by his standards this is very positive. Even the OECD, a very European, typically pessimistic, international organization is saying that recovery - albeit lukewarm and tepid - comes next year. So what can we be pessimistic about?
How about freedom of speech. George Galloway has been turned into the poster child because the government would not allow him into our country. But of course, this is so patently absurd in its linear characterization. His feet didn't enter, his arse didn't sit in a Canadian chair, but his mouth is being heard over and over again in Canada. The usual suspects, Heather Mallick and her CBC playmates and others cannot get enough of the man who supports Hamas and why wouldn't he, they say after all Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza and that's all that matters. How you got elected. Never mind what you do after you get elected. Kidnapping and executing political opponents, shooting up weddings for having committed that anti-democratic act, known as dancing and singing at the wedding. Either way, this garbage was heard by video conference this week in a packed left wing church in Toronto. It's all good for Galloway. His arse is out, but his mouth, his words, are on the public airwaves and Heather Mallick is happy about that because she likes his Scottish brogue, which is why I think she fancies some of me, although not much of me, but some of me. I’ve got some Scottish in the coloration of my linguistic kilt but I don't mean to skirt around my opinion of wanting the door to slam on the Scotsman's fingers.
It was a political boner. It enflamed the left and forced the right to agree with the left that the government should have just allowed Sadam Hussein's favorite Scotsman into Camp Canada. There are no happy campers in this affair though, the left gets to be righteously indignant, their favorite pose, and the right is forced to be somewhat apologetic for a government they try to appreciate. I would have been fine with Galloway coming here. His support for Hamas and every other terrorist goon in a ninety minute ramble on Canadian soil would not pose a greater threat to our country than all the several days of fuss it has created. Why am I making a fuss over it? I am not actually. I am unusually moderate about this issue. I don't see Galloway as a threat. I see him as an old crank who cannot find a way to lead anything positive so he follows everything that is negative and therefore becomes a magnet for the sad sacks of this earth who have sympathy for savagery. There is no logic to it. It's not like Heather Mallick's fulminations would be supported in a CBC run by Hamas. Wonder how first union meetings would look like after the CBC became Hamas property? Now funding of course would be no problem. Hamas has bottomless oil wells to draw on for that. Perhaps that is why Heather and her cohorts are so generous with Galloway or maybe it's the usual reasons. He has called Tony Blair and George Bush, Zionist war criminals. Sometimes it doesn't take much more than that to titillate the media zombies in my favorite country and that would be Canada, just in case there is too much Scottish in my vowels today.
I don't know where that comes from. Perhaps it's from all those James Bond movies where I so wanted to be Sean Connery, or perhaps it's from my early childhood when I had no computer, no Blackberry, no Facebook, no Twitter, just one TV channel and it was CBC, the friendly giant with his rocking chairs, his puppets and chez Helene with her darned mouse, Alan Hamel and his turtle named Howard, and that's what life was like for the poor immigrant which is what I was. A poor, one-channel immigrant growing up in the blue collar hoods of Montreal. That's the way it was until I decided to get into some trading. I traded anything for everything I could lay my hands on and my one-channel universe eventually became my four-channel universe once I was able to trade some eggs for a roof antenna. That antenna gave me access to Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace and Charles Osgood and so I no longer had to be savaged by Don Messer and Rusty the Rooster. Where did I get the eggs? From a poultry farmer who needed help with his truck. Where did I get the help? From another poor immigrant who needed help with his English. See these were the days when you couldn't just dial into some government program or whistle for a social worker from the other side of the tracks. You lived or died by your wits. Some of us succeeded and others became part of the young and the witless. Heather Mallick and George Galloway have always counted on that crowd for their support. In a free society even losers have a right to their forum, low-protein escapism. They should have let Galloway in. I may not adore the left or their heroes, but I do adore the idea of people making their own choices as to which chalice they wish to drink from. Galloway is a toxic brew, but he is more toxic on the outside than he would have been on the inside. My advice to the government would have been a straight up steal from the great song writer Stephen Sondheim, and the headline used in the National Post’s editorial on this - Send in the Clown.
I'm Charles Adler on the Corus Radio Network.
