Intellectual Scoundrels

There are those who get carried away with the passion of their own rhetoric, almost believing what they say, or write, as though driven to benefit society by the meticulous meritocracy of their wisdom. And believing their standing in the public eye to be enhanced by their generosity of vision, inviting participation of the great unwashed into the greater conspiracy of the social compact, they glow with self-admiration and satisfaction.

There is a glut of self-congratulatory prose expressed in the excerpts published in Canada's newspapers of Michael Ignatieff's recently-released True Patriot Love. One needn't be cynically disposed to groan under the weight of its flights of fancy, poetically descriptive of love of country.

What is patriotism, after all, but comfort with what we know and believe we see great value in? We are creatures of habit, we find endearing that which is familiar to us. It is what we know, and what we share with the greater community; man is a gregarious animal, needing to be surrounded by others, affirming his status as an integral member of a tribe or social compact.

People don't take lightly the presence of those who are different, who eschew what the majority value. So when Mr. Ignatieff writes: "Loving a country is an act of the imagination", that cloyingly patronizing tone simply leads one to doubt the sincerity of the effort.

When he writes of the familiarity of what we know, our experiences as we grow and mature, our comfort in the presence of those sharing the general atmosphere of society, he speaks of social comforts, but expresses them as true patriot love. And when he writes of symbols and anthems as totems of our pluralistic togetherness, as providing us with the feeling "that we share a life in common with the strangers we call fellow citizens", he's appealing to our 'better selves', blathering nonsense.

He is intent on taking the pedestrian reality of citizenship into the realm of the imaginable sublime. And that is his prerogative. But it demonstrates an appalling proclivity toward bathos, one difficult to take seriously coming from an intellectual, but completely understandable coming from a politician. Whose business it is to move potential voters to an embrace of patriotic fervour, moving one also closer to alliance with the emotional manipulator.

He plays with words to instill in the reader the sense that this is a noble personage, a man who enunciates for us all life's true needs and values ennobling us all when we cleave to the notion of nationhood, bringing us closer to the stranger who becomes no stranger when we recognize him as a fellow Canadian.

"Love of country is an emotion shared in the imagination across time, shared with the dead, the living and the yet to be born." Gagging sentimentality. Will it work? Entirely possible.

Already the Liberal Party, shed of the inestimable and pathetic Stephane Dion, having anointed his successor to his rightful place in the political hierarchy, appears to have overtaken the presiding Conservatives in public opinion polls. The electorate is such an unreliable beast. Cosset it verbally, favour and congratulate it for its ability to discern integrity and faithful adherence to Canadian scruples and values, and it's yours.

Govern responsibly, sternly oblivious to the push-pull of discrete interests and self-interested lobbies, with the greater interest of the good of the country in mind - inclusive of respect for traditions and priorities - and you've wounded a good proportion of the electorate who think not nationally but regionally, not pluralistically, but ethnically, not for the greater good, but the greatest comfort.

The vision is a fleeting one, that which is presented. It isn't addressed, in this book, to the hordes that any society is inclusive of, representing the social misfits, societal outcasts, sociopaths and psychopaths who inhabit every stage of civil life, the professions, and academic life under the guise of being removed from the fray and ordinariness of the banal, but toward the impressionable and readily enticed. Hey, that's you and me!

Who have a habit of forgetting that politicians have no compunction about appealing to the lowest common denominator, that flattery will get them everywhere, that people like to hear high-flown but meaningless phrases like "Love of country, being imagined, is not a natural feeling like hunger". Perhaps Mr. Ignatieff is right in believing that passing off his heartfelt feelings of true patriot love is the way to the hearts of voting Canadians.

Imagining them to be as clueless and as incapable of original thought and expression as he has proved himself to be. One would truly like to believe he is more intelligent than his writing betrays him not to be. Anything, it would appear, is fair in politics; intellectual skulduggery in particular. Unabashed manipulation of love of country, of sensibilities of those uncertain how to express that faith.

Being led by the words of a charlatan, one whose own love of country kept him at a distance for half of his life, choosing to live his adulthood, his career, his interests in countries other than that which he now purports to care so deeply for. Other countries with which his identification was sufficiently deep that he claimed them for his own.

His newfound commitment to the Canada we now share so profound that he must step forward and lead the nation forward toward its destiny. In the process convincing the electorate that he alone represents their best availment of opportunities. Hawking nationalism to evoke the sacred totem of patriotism; transparently self-availing.