I wanted to see your utopia, but now I see it is more of a Fruitopia

Read this article in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen. I usually read and enjoy Stern's articles. This was no exception. Very perceptive and insightful. He's far more balanced and reasonable in his writings - and far less ideological - than his often peevish colleague David Warren (who I can barely tolerate). Well, that's my own opinion, anyway...

Here it is (please note that anything emphasized in boldface is my own, and not the author's):

Intellectual problems

By: Leonard Stern

Surveying coverage of Stéphane Dion’s ascension, one gets the feeling that some journalists are developing a crush on the new Liberal leader. Mr. Dion, as every news story has announced, or more accurately, celebrated, is an “intellectual.” With a PhD from the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, Mr. Dion is a bona fide member of the cognitive elite. Journalists in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor fancy themselves among this elite, too. Finally, a politician who is worthy.
While intellectuals fit in nicely at dinner parties in Westboro and Westmount, they can make for flawed politicians.
1) Sultans of spin: One attribute of intelligence is the ability to manipulate language. It’s a valuable skill, but one often used for nefarious purposes. People with high verbal intelligence – a.k.a. silver-tongued devils – make effective serial killers, demagogues and salespeople. Bill Clinton likely had the highest raw IQ of any recent U.S. president. A Rhodes scholar and former law professor, Mr. Clinton has extraordinary verbal fluency: His mastery of argumentation and persuasion propelled him to the White House. Alas, it also made him the master of spin. He could talk his way out of anything, and he did.
2) The paralysis of analysis: As noted above, those who possess high verbal intelligence are able to spin us in circles. Equally troublesome is the fact that intellectuals are so comfortable with language and ideas that they would rather talk and think than act. The biggest brain at Ottawa City Hall might well belong to Rockcliffe Councillor Jacques Legendre, who has a PhD in physics. Yet Mr. Legendre is known for his tendency to pontificate and expound and analyse and – whoa, I almost fell asleep just thinking about the councillor at the microphone.
Again, recall the Clinton experience. Mr. Clinton ran his administration like a university seminar. His cabinet was stacked with former university professors, just like himself. It was a theoretician’s paradise. Unfortunately, though, nothing much got done. Everyone was still yakking away in the Oval Office when the janitors came in and announced that eight years were up.
3) The Woody Allen factor: At least Bill Clinton had a healthy supply of alpha male testosterone. Other intellectuals, however, are often of the tweedy variety. Michael Dukakis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was so mousy and bookish that he never had a chance against George H.W. Bush during the 1988 U.S. presidential election. After losing by a landslide, Mr. Dukakis retreated to teach political science at university, where he belonged.
It is important for leaders to project not just brain power but emotional and spiritual strength as well, particularly in times of uncertainty such as war or economic recession. The smartest person in the room is not necessarily the one who possesses the ineluctable quality of leadership. Mr. Dion is often described as “owlish,” and the press corps always found it endearing that he carried a knapsack into cabinet meetings. He has doubtless been the smartest guy in the room many times. But if he’s prime minister and Canada is hit by a terrorist attack and our collective nerves need steadying, he’ll need to lose the student book bag.
The best leaders represent the best of both worlds – the soldier-scholars. Winston Churchill was one. Abe Lincoln was a gifted writer with the mind of a philosopher, but he also had a keener understanding of battlefield strategy than did his generals. The current U.S. president is neither soldier nor scholar, and his inadequacies are painfully obvious.
4) The ivory tower syndrome: For all their professed cosmopolitanism, university intellectuals such as Mr. Dion come from a narrow milieu: urban, liberal, secular. A major study released in October found that on American campuses, professors overwhelmingly identify with the political and cultural left. Almost a third of the professors surveyed think the U.S. is a greater threat to international security than is Iran or China. The liberal bias is assuredly even more pronounced at Canadian and European universities.
The problem with urban intellectual elites is that they don’t realize how narrow their world is. In his Borat movie, the brainy comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a graduate of Cambridge University, gleefully portrays Pentecostal Christians as exotic freaks. Someone needs to tell Mr. Cohen that he’s the exotic one. There are fewer millionaire Cambridge University graduates than Pentecostal Christians.
Shortly after winning the Liberal leadership, Mr. Dion began attacking Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his “far-right” agenda. One hopes that Mr. Dion was simply engaging in rhetorical excess, but who knows, maybe he really does move in circles where people think that opposition to same-sex marriage or to the gun registry automatically makes you a right-wing whacko.
If Mr. Dion wants to become prime minister, he’ll have to show he can relate even to people who have never been members of a faculty club.

Basically, I think Mr. Stern is right on. He clearly elucidates the the ugly downside of modern (or, perhaps, post-modern) intellectualism. As a "small-l" liberal myself (albeit a moderate one), what I see as liberal dogmatism and insularity bothers me just as much as conservative dogmatism and insularity, if not more so. That's the beauty of being centrist like me - you can more easily recognize both the merits and the flaws of either side of the political spectrum. So many of my left-leaning friends rail against the iniquities and misrepresentations brought about by powerful right-wing groups in America (think Fox News, for example), yet are completely oblivious to the excesses of their own bias.

They fail to realize, or just actively ignore, the fact that leftists can distort, propagandize and misrepresent information & the truth just as well as their counterparts on the right. Soviet communism - most especially under Stalin - proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Indeed, history shows that governments of the far-left and the far-right amount to the same thing in the end: brutal dictatorship of the worst kind. In my opinion, there was very little fundamental difference between the likes of Hitler and Stalin; they were just two sides of the same coin. Similarly, the public face/voice they used were equally false and absurd; Pravda and Völkischer Beobachter were one in the same. I know I'm using a rather extreme example here, but I trust my point is clear...

In one of my very first posts on this blog, I denounced the growing, insidious trend of anti-intellectualism in our society. I stand by what I said then; I believe it still. Anti-intellectualism continues to run rampant in popular culture. If the likes of Paris Hilton and Joey Tribbiani are any indication, they are encouraging us to focus more on cosmetic surgery & shopping than on Chopin and Schopenhauer. [Pretty nifty alliteration there, eh? ;-)] We should be pretty and thin, often at the expense of being smart. Civilization is in deeper trouble than I thought if we persist in glorifying such ludicrous vacuousness and asinine superficiality..

Now, that being said, I found the above article a refreshing reminder of how there is such a thing as being too intellectual. While I still abhor anti-intellectualism, I'm humble enough to realize that being an intellectual (something to which I myself aspire) does indeed have its pitfalls and drawbacks. As Stern points out, being too pensive and over-analytical can often lead to navel-gazing indecisiveness - not a good quality in any kind of leader. It can also needlessly complicate things. Freud himself said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

I'll leave you now with an Apache proverb:

It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand.

Did you hear that, Meg? Guys can marry other guys now.

Given the fact that I've posted previously on the subject, I felt I just had to say something with regards to last week's vote in the House of Commons concerning same-sex marriage (SSM). In a nutshell, the ruling Conservative Party of Canada - which currently forms a minority government - introduced a motion in Parliament that would re-open the SSM debate. Their overarching goal, as you can imagine, was to reverse or rescind the legalization of SSM passed in the summer of last year, and restore the traditional definition of marriage (i.e. between a man and a woman).

Fortunately, the motion was defeated in the House last Thursday. By a pretty decent margin, too.

I'll refer you to the CBC article for more information, if you want...

All I have to say is right on! I'm glad and relieved that SSM as enshrined in law has been upheld. As you might tell, I'm a supporter of it - always have been and always will be!

Now let's just hope that the Tories (or anyone else, for that matter) will truly learn their lesson and let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie...

Would you like to take a survey? - Conclusion!

At long last my 4-month surveying odyssey with Transport Canada is over! Well, technically it's been over for a good 3 weeks; I've been back home in CP since November 18. Unfortunately, my posting of this final "survey" entry was delayed by a series of extenuating circumstances (which I'll describe below). Frustrating, since I was chomping at the proverbial bit to wrap this all up, but hey - couldn't be helped...

First and foremost, I suffered the misfortune of having my beloved computer break down recently :-( It was on the fritz for a good week before I could get it fixed. After exhausting every option/trick I knew how to do myself for a couple of days, I ultimately wound up bringing it in to a local computer repair shop for debugging/system cleanup. Since I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to my PC - I can usually fix most problems that arise myself - I resisted until the bitter end the notion of having to pay someone else to repair it. Alas, I reached the end of my rope; luckily I'm humble enough to know when I should admit defeat ;-)

All I gotta say is thank goodness for BWD Systems! Marcel, their head/chief technician, is a saint and a genius! He was very nice and helpful, walking me through the whole process along the way and explaining everything in detail. Turns out my hard drive was overrun by viruses, spyware and Trojans - 80+ in total!! Apparently Norton Antivirus is crap; it's deteriorating in quality performance and is increasingly deficient in detecting & dealing with newer viral threats, especially Trojan horses. They recommend avast! Antivirus software instead. So far, I've had absolutely no problems with it - very user-friendly & thorough! In any case, I'm very glad to have my baby back again! :-)

Secondly, while I was away in late August, we moved! Don't worry - I knew about it ahead of time! No bad surprise (i.e. showing up at the wrong house!). So, when I got back, I was distracted by the process of unpacking all my stuff and staging it where I wanted to. I'm still not done! There are a whole bunch of boxes of books & movies in my little home office here that have yet to see the light of day... To that end, I bought a nice, new tall bookcase at Wal-Mart - I simply have to assemble it at some point! It's somewhere on my "To Do" list...

Add to that the usual time-consuming stress and aggravation of Christmas shopping, as well as coming down with bad chest cold last week that just won't go away (grrr....), it means my productivity has lagging behind for a while...

Anyway, on to business. The whole survey experience was pretty good, all in all. While it had its ups and downs, I had fun overall. I enjoyed travelling for the most part - got to see more of my beautiful province, as well as a good chunk of southern Québec. Made some new friends and had some good times. Above all, I learned a lot about myself - what I'm capable of and getting a better idea of what I truly want in life, what's really important. Getting paid for personal growth and self-improvement...gotta love it!

There were some downsides, though. I'd be lying if I said there weren't any :-) First off, it was really starting to drag on by the end, especially with us having to endure increasingly harsher weather on site. Winter decided to come a bit early this year; standing out for 8 hours at night in the bitter cold and wind was distinctly unpleasant! Also, while it was fun at first, staying in hotels all the time got old pretty quickly. I was longing to sleep in my own bed by the end...

Moreover, there were the inevitable personal dramas that ensue when a group of people both live and work so closely together over a prolonged period. By the end, certain individuals had not endeared themselves to others. Arguments escalated, grudges festered, tensions boiled. There was the usual politicking, snubbing and behind-the-scenes intrigue; accusations of "back-stabbing" were thrown about. I won't bore you with all the mundane details. Suffice it to say that a lot of immaturity & childishness prevailed at times, unfortunately. It was sad and pathetic, really. Luckily, I was never directly involved in the worst of it (at least, as far as I know); I always tried to maintain an even-handed neutrality of sorts, and be kind & considerate to everyone in our group. That's just the kind of person I am - reflexively, instinctively nice :-) To the best of my knowledge, I didn't make any enemies during the trip!

However, there was one person on my own team that I consistently had trouble getting along with. Out of respect for her privacy, I won't give her name. She seemed to go out of her way to avoid and snub me whenever possible; our "conversations" were typically short, one-word or one-sentence answers - frigidly formal and polite. It always troubled me - despite my best efforts, I could not get her to lower her guard.

Essentially, she's a know-it-all. Now, normally, that doesn't really bother me - I can be a bit of a know-it-all at times, too! ;-) The main sticking point, though, was that she could never admit the possibility that she might be wrong, mistaken, or misinformed on a given topic (that was my impression, at least). Or realizing that constantly lecturing people and giving unsolicited advice can be really irritating. Whenever I or anyone else challenged her opinions, she would get quite testy and defensive; she refused to back down or concede a point in an argument. She would always be sniping away with petty little criticisms, looking every proverbial gift horse in the mouth and arguing any and all minor points, no matter how insignificant. Quite frustrating to deal with!

If she had the life experience and/or the education with which to back her pretensions up, she probably wouldn't have got under my skin so much. But she did not - she a tender 23 years of age, never married, and she didn't even finish her university degree (psychology, I believe)! By what measure do you presume to judge me, or anyone else for that matter?! That kind of arrogance & conceit really annoys me. Indeed, her behaviour was that of a typically impudent teenager. Reminded me of a funny bumper sticker I once saw: "Hire a teenager...while they still know everything!" Part of me thinks she might have some form of undiagnosed passive-aggressive personality disorder; in a lot of ways, she certainly fits the profile. I had to bite my tongue numerous times in order to avoid snapping at her; I dislike confrontation, and I didn't want to risk creating drama and disrupting the good professional work ethic/dynamic we had going on our team as a whole. Therefore, true to my Anglo-Saxon heritage & inclinations, I repressed my anger and other negative emotions as best I could. Lord knows, it wasn't easy at times!

To give you a concrete example, once when she was just walking back to our staging area after finishing a survey, I graciously offered her the chair I had been sitting on, so she could comfortably input the truck's measurements. Her voice dripping with snide condescension, she replied, "There are plenty of other chairs." She then deliberately took a few minutes to pull another folding chair out of the van and set it up a good distance away from me. Oooh, that really got my goat!!! A calculated snub, in my opinion. A simple "No, thanks." would have sufficed. You don't want this chair? Fine by me, but that's no reason to be so obviously impolite! Her response really left something to be desired... That kind of blunt rudeness really made me mad. I detest disrespectfulness, in any measure. Naturally, her reaction would upset me...

What really galled me about the whole situation was that she wasn't always so unfriendly towards me. At the beginning of the project, when we were in Québec, her and I actually got along pretty well! I remember having a nice discussion with her in a restaurant (with a group of us) about the nature of anxiety and depression. She even let me use her laptop the week we were in Trois-Rivières, so that I could write and upload my daily log reports to TC (back when I was still a crew chief)! By the end, though, I hesitated to ask her the time of day...! I never figured out what really prompted the change in our relationship. The only thing I can think of is the fact that, after the Labour Day break, I switched onto her team, while Danny was transferred out to replace me as crew chief. Perhaps that created some simmering resentment on her part towards me, for "breaking up the team" if you will. She didn't seem especially close to Dan, though... Maybe she simply doesn't like change of any sort. Still, you'd think after a good three months she'd warm up to me a bit, or least get used to me! I am a pretty likeable guy, I think. I just don't know...it really vexed me!!

In any case, it's all over now and I don't have to deal with her anymore. I don't believe in holding grudges - just not healthy in the long run! Besides, I can't really fault someone for their fundamental personality traits. I'm sure some of my own characteristics and idiosyncracies can often annoy or bother others, a fact to which I could easily be oblivious. So, I'm not one to judge!

Lastly, as promised many times in previous posts from the road, here they are:

PICTURES!

Fin.