1 August 2008

Old Enough to Know Better


The inspiration behind what gets words, fucking near 1,000,000 of them so far, typed into this imaginary press, in case you missed it, is Paul St. Pierre, one of my wicked country's great men. Allow me to quote a paragraph from his last book, Old Enough to Know Better.

In the heady, in many ways unusually happy days just after the war, probably a clear majority of Canadians, saw government as a force for change and improvement of our lot. We hadn't yet found the perfect political formula nor could we agree on which was the perfect party but we were sure that once we cleared up those details, our government would be forever our friend and protector. By century's end, we had come to the conclusion that our main opponent in life was our government, an attitude best summed up by a Chilcotin rancher whose line cabin burned to the ground in mysterious circumstances. "Do you have any enemies?" the police asked. "Can you think of anybody who wants to do you harm?" A quiet man by nature, he thought for a time and then said, "Only the government."

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