Category: A few great lines …

“Kevin Lynch, a powerful Ottawa mandarin who enjoyed the respect of Paul Martin and the Prime Minister's Office, was a well-known opponent of the Defence Department. “Kevin hates defence, he hates foreign affairs,” said [John] Manley. Lynch had worked for Manley when he was minister of industry and would work for him again when Manley would replace Martin as finance minister in 2002. Years earlier, when he was a senior Finance official working for the government of Brian Mulroney, Lynch had successfully urged draconian cuts to the defence budget. And, in the mid-1990s under the Liberals, Finance Minister Paul Martin had cut the budget of the Canadian Forces by nearly a third to help eliminate the deficit. Now that there were urgent priorities in the aftermath of 9-11, priorities directly related to Canada's economy, Lynch and Martin were not about to put scarce dollars into the black hole of defence.”

-Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. P. 7

“Canada has soldiers that are buried all over Europe because we fought in defence of liberty and we're not about to back away from a challenge now because we think somebody might get hurt.”

– Sept. 12, 2001

“…[Diefenbaker in 1956] was starting to see strains of disloyalty and antagonism among people who wanted nothing more than to be sought out, flattered, thanked or encouraged. The small kindnesses that motivates caucus members and inspire their families — an evening call just to chat, flowers, and a personal note on the illness, death or marriage of a close relative, a spontaneous invitation to drop by 24 Sussex for a drink after work — all of these encouraging courtesies evaporated in the recriminations and Monday-morning quarterbacking that dominated postelection discussions in the Prime Minister's Office. I carefully noted this change and saw the degree of erosion that sets in, at first subtly and then irretrievably, in the leader's base support in caucus and party when personal gestures by the leader and his wife cease. At the very moment he should have stepped up these contacts Diefenbaker withdrew, and the consequences soon became fatal. For me, another important leadership lesson learned.”

-Brian Mulroney, Memoirs: 1939-1993, Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Ltd., p. 78

“Stephen Harper is now engaged in trying to do what no Conservative leader has been able to do for over a hundred years — build a viable, long-term coalition that can win victories and survive defeats without immolating itself on a a bonfire of mutual recriminations.”

– Tom Flanagan, Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007 (p. 290)

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in conversation with Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pitt) in Vanity Fair, July 2007:

Brad Pitt: … There's a big argument going on in America right now, on gay rights and equality.

Desmond Tutu: For me, I couldn't ever keep quiet. I come from a situation where for a very long time people were discriminated against, made to suffer for something about which they could do nothing — their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white.

Then, for a very long time in our church, we didn't ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing – their gender. And I'm glad that now the church has changed all that. I'm glad that apartheid has ended.

I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostracized, treated as if they were less than human because of something they could not change — their sexual orientation.

For me, I can't imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted. The Jesus who I worship is a Jesus who is forever on the side of those were being clobbered and he got into trouble precisely because of that. Our church, the Anglican Church, is experiencing a very, very serious crisis. It is all to do with human sexuality. I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching.”

For these are the girls whose older brothers are the engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams called Northwestern and Texas Christian and UCLA. Their fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives, and their mothers the ladies with the kindly smiles and the wonderful manners who say things like, “I do believe, Mary, that we sold thirty-five cakes at the Bake Sale.” “Don't be too late, dear,” they sing out sweetly to their little tulips as they go bouncing off in their bouffant taffeta dresses to the Junior Prom with boys whose names are right out of the grade-school reader, not Aaron and Arnold and Marvin, but Johnny and Billy and Jimmy and Tod. Not Portnoy or Pincus, but Smith and Jones and Brown! These people are the Americans, Doctor-like Henry Aldrich and Homer, like the Great Gildersleeve and his nephew LeRoy, like Corliss and Veronica, like “Oogie Pringle” who gets to sing beneath Jane Powell's window trin A Date with Judy – these are the people for whom Nat “King” Cole sings every Christmastime, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose . . . An open fire, in my house? No, no, theirs are the noses whereof he speaks. Not his flat black one or my long bumpy one, but those tiny bridgeless wonders whose nostrils point northward automatically at birth. And stay that way for life! These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN — these are the girls and boys who live “next door”, the kids who are always asking for the “the jalopy” and getting into “jams” and then out of them again in time for the final commercial — the kids whose neighbors aren't the Silversteins and the Landaus, but Fibber McGee and Molly, and Ozzie and Harriet, and Ethel and Albert, and Lorenzo Jones and his wife Bell, and Jack Armstrong! Jack Armstrong, the All-American Goy!– and Jack as in John, not Jack as in Jake, like my father . . . . Look, we ate our meals with that radio blaring away right through to the dessert, the glow of the yellow station band is the last light I see each night before sleep — so don't tell me we're just as good as anybody else, don't tell me we're Americans just like they are. No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either. O America! America!

– Portnoy's Complaint, (New York: Random House , 1969), p. 144-145

“The nature of thinking is one of the most important concerns of [Hannah] Arendt’s social and political theory. Thinking is the “habit of  examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention” in inner dialogue, in a sort of conversation with oneself, where every mental reaction is subject to criticism and in which the inner critic is also held to answer back and forth.

Arendt speculated that, in many circumstances, moral conduct seems to depend on this “intercourse of man with himself.” A person contemplates murder, for example, but says to himself or herself: “I can’t do this. If I did, I would have to live with a murdered for the rest of my life.” But thinking is also one of the most fragile features of human consciousness. Part of what Arendt meant by the banality of evil is the possibility of wrongdoing that opens up when this inner dialogue is no longer an importnat feature of people’s lives, so that the prospect of who I would have to live with in myself is no longer a concern.”

Jeremy Waldron, “What Would Hannah Say?”, New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007

[RICHLER:] “Do you think that the nature of immigration has changed?”

[M.G.VASSANJI] “People who came earlier on escaped war, they came in boats, they left their countries, and knew they would not see their home again. There was no looking back. Now we live in a different world. We come by plane. We hold dual passports, we have e-mail, we have telephones, we have families that are split all over the world.”

“And today there are few currency controls — “

“Yes. Now economies are interlinked so that when people come to Canada they spak the old language and even refresh it, so that it doesn’t happen that Gujarati disappears, just as English or German won’t disappear. But for me, the redeeming feature is that every year immigrants are not coming to an insecure country, they are coming to a country that is sure of itself.”

– Noah Richler, This is My Country, What’s Yours?, p. 29

…Robert Calderisi, a humanitarian who has had plenty of experience in Africa, calls for aid cuts in The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working. Calderisi is a Canadian who spent three decades at the World Bank dealing with development problems. His book is more focused on Africa, while [William] Easterly [author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforst to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good] concentrates on aid in general, but they make similar arguments and, in some respects, have similar prescriptions. Calderisi emphasizes that the problem of aid is not just a matter of quantity:

Almost everyone in North America and Europe who shares my ideals believes that more aid, along with additional lecturing on governance, will help Africa. I want to puncture that illusion. Africans need breathing space much more than they need money. Not a Marshall Plan, but real backing for the few governments that are fighting poverty, plus political support for the millions of Africans who are resisting oppression and violence in the rest of the continent.

At the end of his book, in a chapter offering a series of specific recommendations, Calderisi suggests cutting direct aid to individual countries in half. He explains: “Contrary to conventional recommendations, direct foreign aid to most African countries should be reduced, not increased.” In his view “most” African governments are using aid corruptly, ineffectively, and wastefully. Helping people who seek different political arrangements at least offers the hope that governments may change their ways or be replaced.

Both Easterly and Calderisi argue that the world concentrates too much on amounts of aid given and not enough on how well it works …

…Several studies have shown no overall connection between aid and growth. But one very important study, by the economists Craig Burnside and David Dollar in 2000, found that aid did boost growth in countries with good governance. So that conclusion has become the new conventional wisdom, and it's partly behind the effort in the US Millennium Challenge Accounts, a new federally sponsored aid program, to channel assistance only to countries that are less corrupt and better managed.

Unfortunately, Easterly repeated the study by Burnside and Dollar but drew on a larger pool of data. This time he found no evidence that “aid works in a good policy environment.” Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the International Monetary Fund came to the same conclusion, and they also suggest a reason. After closely examining the evidence they concluded that “aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country's competitiveness.”

From Kristof, Nicholas, “Aid: Can it Work?” in The New York Review of Books, October 5, 2006, p. 41

Amartya Sen has some thoughts about Easterly’s book.

“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
–The Great Gatsby, (p 118, Collier)