Errant predictions and my 'bucket list'.

In honor of Harold Camping's end-of-world prediction for May 21, CNBC has this fun collection of "14 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions." They're good. Some I'd not seen before. (Yes, I do collect them in a file.) But take note of the ones they missed. The impossibility of flying machines, for instance. Or that electric power would ever be generated from the atom. Or that Hitler would be satisfied with stealing Czechoslovakia.

Or that movies with sound were a bad idea. ("Who wants to hear actors talk," the kind of thing you'd expect Hitchcock to have said, but it was Harry Warner, in 1927. What Hitch said was: "It is not true that I said actors are cattle. I said they should be treated like cattle." Goldwyn was on the money when he insisted that the advent of larger cinema screens would only make lousy pictures twice as bad.

 

In 1998, Russian political writer Igor Panarin predicted a 2010 U.S. civil war that would end with some of the world's other major nations carving up the Republic. Chalk it up to the author's likely sour grapes over the Soviet empire's collapse just seven years earlier. I delight in Panarin's op-ed having appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which has been spreading misinformation at least since 1929, when it editorialized that this stock-market-crash-thingy would blow over in a few months. Panarin doesn't rank among the greats in the Errant Prophets pantheon, having given himself a lot of wiggle room: "There's a 55 to 45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he wrote. I know I'm being picky here, but I would talk with the EU about trading our newly acquired Mountain and Plains states for New York and New England.

 

This exquisitely timed bestselling crackpot theory appeared in 1999 (and was excerpted in the then-conservative Atlantic Monthly), just before the dot-com bust and the Dow's plunge to 7,286 by October 2002. The Dow reached a new low, of 6,500, in early 2009 after the onset of the Great Recession. Under Obama, the Dow has recovered 91% of the ground lost since then, leaving the authors just 22,559 points shy of where they said the market would be by the mid-2000s.

Glassman went on to succeed Karen Hughes as George W. Bush's undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, becoming the third person to try and fail in that Bush-created post to repair America's declining popularity abroad. Glassman was later named first head of the George W. Bush Institute at the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University.

Co-author Kevin Hassett was later an economics advisor to 2008 presidential candidate John McCain, whose economics policy team also included Carly Fiorina, earlier fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. who last year bucked the Republican tide and failed to win a U.S. Senate in California for the GOP, inflicted with a drubbing by incumbent Barbara Boxer. So, no, Rummy and "Brownie" were not exceptions to Dubya's preference to surround himself with incompetents.

 

With the advent of TV, Hollywood went from producing several hundred films a year to the current 100 or so. The studio chiefs were sore about the new competition. Studio exec Darryl F. Zanuck famously predicted in 1946 that TV would never catch on. "Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months," Zanuck said. "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." In 2010, the average American watches almost five hours of TV a day.

I've always been inclined to give Zanuck a break on this. TV technology had been around since the 1920s, was officially launched at the 1939 World's Fair in New York by the legendary Robert Sarnoff, but didn't find its mass audience until well into the 1950s. Reception was grainy, you had a choice of four or five channels, and the content was limited to the likes of "My Mother the Car" and "Ed The Talking Horse" until the advent of cable in the 1970s.

Harold Camping, as you know, says he was merely off by a few months, that Judgment Day will now occur October 21. I have my bucket list ready:

* Impound the assets of the Catholic Church in Canada until Rome gets serious about tracking down every active and retired pedophile in the priesthood, from monsignors to bishops to cardinals to the Holy Father himself, if it comes to that. (Of course, I'd have to be PM to do this, and that's not on my bucket list, so a bit of a quandary there.)

* Get myself appointed Stephen Harper's chief handler. I think of it as a The King's Speech scenario. I'd impose on Harper a drop-dead date for completing his NHL history, which I expect will be a marvelous tome and would also distract him for awhile from mucking about with the country. I'd arrange for at least three high-profile piano concerto appearances a year; the man's a superb pianist, and he's already given at least one well-received performance with a top orchestra. And lots of pictures of Harper with the kids, whom he overtly adores, and with Laureen, possibly being driven about on her Harley.

* Buy the Maple Leafs and turn it into a hockey team.

* Meet Nelson Mandela and George Clooney.

* Meet Lloyd Blankfein and punch him in the nose. I've never hit anyone.  But it's all I can think of, since the law chooses not to touch him, and Goldman Sachs has been a very naughty company.

 

 

Enjoy your day.

 
"Menu for one, please." (AP)

 

Delusional loser.

You remember that "dream sequence" from "Dallas," the season opener in which we learned Bobby Ewing hadn't been killed off and written out of the show the previous season. Having decided to return to soap opera, Bobby's "death" turned was re-presented as a dream in which he merely thought he'd perished. Routine work for a certain type of screenwriter.

 
Leonard Asper, former media mogul, and his tiny, would-be comeback venture.

In that spirit, Leonard Asper did not preside over a colossal business failure, the late 2000s collapse from over-indebtedness of CanWest Global Communications Corp. CanWest in its heyday was the largest media conglomate in Canada. Its holdings ranged from the Global national TV network to Canada's major dailies in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal, among others. And there was CanWest's Atlantis Alliance group, the country's biggest feature-film distributor and owner of a clutch of specialty cable channels.

The demise of CanWest was, to hear Leonard tell it in today's Globe, an accident, a sort of Halley's Comet confluence of unfortunate timing, suboptimal luck and the inevitable outside cosmic forces over which one sadly has minimal influence.  

Yet for other observers, CanWest did implode, a couple years back, as it had to. You don't buy $3.2 billion worth of newspapers, an industry the analysts have long described as being in "secular decline" (i.e. permanent) with borrowed money from Conrad Black. (Actually, you don't buy anything from Conrad Black.)

This Leonard and his late father did in 2000, at the top of the media market - then caught up in a delusional concept known as "media convergence." Subsequently, the then-named AOL Time Warner took one of the biggest writeoffs in history (and its fired CEO took up Zen meditation in an undisclosed location). Staid phone utility BCE took a bloodbath writedown on its Teleglobe purchase and cashiered its CEO. Quebecor Inc. was forced to part with most of its founding printing business rather than slip under the waves from an overpriced purchase of the Videotron cable giant, Tribune Co. went bankrupt almost to the year after it bought L.A. Times owner Times Mirror. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News of Denver printed their last editions. New York Times Co. took a $400-million writedown on its Boston Globe purchase. The Bancroft family threw in the towel at Dow Jones & Co., selling America's largest daily, the Wall Street Journal, to (gasp) Rupert Murdoch...

Conrad Black wisely dumped Canada's largest newspaper chain, accounting at its peak for more than 50% of Canadian daily newspaper circulation - a status unequalled among supposedly mature countries - ahead of the Internet-driven chaos in traditional newspapers, compounded by a spectacular ad drought. Unwisely, Black's firms had accumulated sufficient debt that finding a sucker in the Aspers turned out not to be quite sufficiant salvation, Shenanigans ensued. Black ultimately was consigned a cell at the Coleman Federal Corrections Institute near Orlando.

But, you see, none of the above actually happened. It was a dream sequence. Or, at least, the CanWest part was. Leonard Asper is allowed to go on about his uneventful past - in which creditors didn't take a bath, ordinary shareholders weren't wiped out, and hundreds of employees rendered jobless - at extraordinary length in a chirpy profile in today's Globe and Mail. A few quotes convey the gist:

I have enough friends in the financial and business world who know what happened, and no one is saying to me, 'You screwed up'.

I don't spend five seconds thinking about debt any more. I spend my entire life thinking abut growing a company and that makes me very happy.

The "company" in question is Asper's modest 30% stake in a new fight-related specialty cable channel in a sports-broadcast field already crowded with TSN, Sportsnet, the Golf Channel, a racecar channel...But Asper has not five seconds thought of how his CanWest pissed away Dad's lifelong pursuit of shifting Canada's media centre of gravity from loathsome Toronto to the Aspers' hometown of Winnipeg.

I know these mental tricks happen. For instance, it was once reported that a tapped-out Reichmann family was sanguine about losing First Canadian Place, Manhattan's World Financial Center and London's Canary Wharf and were contentedly operating kosher vending carts in North Toronto. Mind, that report appeared next to a suburban Austin UFO sighting in the World Weekly News, so I can't attest to its veracity.

We were always treated unfairly [by other media] but I'm sure every CEO feels that way. Still, the sheer quantity of coverage was out of proportion. We were a mid-sized Canadian company - we weren't the TD Bank.

My favorite. It's not like I was running Microsoft or Seimens or Toyota or some large, important company. Only the biggest media conglomerate in a G8 country, is all. Or perhaps Mr. Asper really has forgotten, in which case I need the name of his shrink.

Oh, and the media coverage of Leonard's ceaseless search for open manholes to drop into? The harsh criticism was overwhelmingly from stock market analysts who watched your Dad's once reliably lucrative enterprise experiementing with novel self-inflicted wounds, seldom missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to get its books in order. And trust me, Leonard, there's some odd behavior by you and brother David that got scant attention, otherwise you'd be pelted with eggs on stepping outdoors.

Hey, business reversals happen. You take the blame, you commit certain lessons to memory, and move on. What a dismal contrast Leonard presents with David Neeleman, Mickey Drexler, Lee Iacocca, even Steve Jobs, fessing up in time to the mistakes that got them fired as CEOs of Jet Blue, Gap Inc., Ford Motor and Apple, respectively. Accompanied, helpfully, by introspection we all can learn from their their harrowing experiences.

Even Harold Camping (video) has (sort of) admitted to being wrong. He got his dates wrong. The world will end October 21, not May 21.

 

GOP to Detroit, 2009: Drop dead.

Bookmark this, progressives: front-runner Mitt Romney, T-Paw, Gingrich - declared GOP presidential candidates for 2012 - wanted to shovel dirt of Motown's grave. Expect "climbdowns" in the months ahead. But their words, when it mattered in 2009, speak for themselves. 

"Paul Ryan is the Barry Goldwater of 2012."

Obama's re-election isn't a lock, but you can see it from here.

* Whatever folks think of Obama, it's getting to be part of the language that in killing Osama bin Laden, "Obama did in two years what Bush couldn't do in six." And that's even from liberals who have qualms about extra-territorial cold-blooded murder of mass-murderers who haven't first been read their Miranda rights.

* Kathy Hochul is the Dems' Scott Brown, whose upset victory in taking Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts last year was perceived by the Beltway crowd as an anti-Dem turning point. Hochul didn't just win the ultra-red NY 26 congresional seat last night, a seat never held by Dems in its four-decade history, she won by a comfortable margin of 6 points. She took a rock-ribbed, largely suburban and rural Republican district where registered Republicans far outnumber Dems, and has previously been held by longtime GOP Hill leaders Jack Kemp, Bill Paxon and Tom Reynolds. 

Hochul's opponent had a big edge on out-of-state funding, as the GOP is whining today, though Hochul's out-of-state progressive support was none too shabby - a warning of scores of vulnerable GOP seats won last year by narrow margins that can be turned if the progressive spirit of 2008 returns. Nor was Tea Party candidate Jack Davis the third-party spoiler that both he and the GOP claim he was.

Hochul ran against Paul Ryan's plan to end the social-safety net, and turned the upstate NY 26 race into a closely watched referendum on Obamacare vs. Ryancare, at least among the Beltway pundits. And Obamacare won. Big. This is a pro-Dem turning point, giving the party momentum heading into a 2012 election cycle well underway.

* The Detroit Three bailout - that is, the rescue of the U.S.-owned auto sector- is a stunning success story. GM and Chrysler were forced into bankruptcy by Obama less than two years ago to finally end three decades of mismanagement. GM is already reporting booming profits. Chrysler today paid back its taxpayer-provided loans to the U.S., Canadian and Ontario governments, at a profit to the taxpayers, and way ahead of time. (GM has already paid back its loans, and more amazing, has already returned to publicly traded status, "Government Motors" no more.) Again, two years ago these iconic giants with all their "Arsenal of Democracy" heritage, and still the guts of America's manufacturing the R&D prowess, were hurtling toward the scrapyard. Now GOPers like Mitt Romney (the GOP's most business-savvy WH prospect wrote a 2008 NYT op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt"), Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind) (the Detroit rescue "could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country"), and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex) (helping the Detroit automakers is "the leading edge of the Obama administration's war on capitalism") are going to have to explain why they were eager, yes eager, to let the U.S.-owned auto industry die. To let upward of a million U.S. workers lose their jobs. And to leave world's largest vehicle market without a vehicle industry to call its own.

* The GOP-controlled House has of course approved Ryancare. So lacking in folksiness and gravitas is the GOP leadership that it long ago put the until recently obscure Ryan on a pedestal as Its one and only policy guru, the Truth, the Light and the American Way. Oops. Big mistake rolling all the dice on this Wisconsin congressman and professed Ayn Rand acolyte. (Ryan says it was the deeply disturbed narcissist author's "philosophy" that inspired him to go into politics, and he requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged.) Ryan today accuses Dems of healthscare-mongering in NY 26. WaPo's Dana Milbank administers the necessary corrective: That it's Ryan getting a taste of his own "shameless demagoguery."

Today, almost every U.S. senate Republican voted for Ryancare, too, as it went down to defeat due to continued Dem control of that chamber. Only five GOP senators broke ranks - the two Maine senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins; the aforementioned Scott Brown, who for awhile now has been voting Bay State values rather than Mitch McConnell's; Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Tea Partier Ron Paul (Kentucky). The 40 others knew they'd lose. but the GOP was determined to make a point. The Republicans' point is, "GOP to seniors: drop dead." That's not how I would put it, and the Dems won't quite put it that way next year, either. But that's how Move.on, organized labor, Daily Kos, the Kaiser Foundation and hundreds of pro-Obamacare support groups - who played a big role in Hochul's out-of-state-funded victory, will play it. Big time. And the evidence of Obamacare's virtues, even before most of it has kicked in, will be on their side.

* The L.A. Times has a poll out today that Americans want to "keep Medicaid as it is." Yes, Medicaid, not Medicare. Medicaid is for poor people, folks not like us, folks we don't see or know. Turns out Americans do care about their fellow citizens. So you know how the American mainstream feels about Ryan and the GOP's proposed dismantling of Medicare. In which seniors - my mom, your uncle - would be left to navigate a private-sector market for insurance coverage that pre-Obamacare has for decades been routinely ripping off amply-witted consumers, much less seniors deep into ALZ. There's a reason why Medicare for half a century has been called "the third rail of American politics." Mess with it and you'll be thrown across the room - or out of office. If a majority of Americans support Medicaid, GOPers have to wonder about the grave they've dug for themselves embracing Ryan's proposed destruction of Medicare, middle-class beneficiaries of which are known to every American family. David Frum, the former Bush 43 speechwriter, isn't exaggerating in saying that "Paul Ryan is the Barry Goldwater of 2012."

I jokingly referred to Obama a while back as the Lion of Abbottabad, Defender of Seniors, Rescuer of the U.S.-owned Auto Industry, Liberator of LGBT's from State Discrimination, Preventer of a Second Great Depression...

There's more. Much more. Starting with keeping more campaign promises - and he made a ton of them - and faster than any of his 43 predecessors.

This is indeed an historic presidency. What you don't hear about is that Obama has reversed the flow of power to an imperial presidency, repeatedly deferring to Congress - ending a dangerous trend dating from TR and manifesting itself especially under FDR, LBJ and Bush 43/Cheney. And you won't hear much about the Obama Doctrine, because foreign affairs - victory on the battlefield excepted - isn't an election selling point. But historians will look back at "Cairo II," Obama's logical follow-on last week from his speech, deep inside the Islam world where America needs to re-win trust, as finally an effective way to use all the tools of "hard" and "soft power" to keep American men and women from dying in distanct conflicts while still heavily infuencing the course of world events. Historians will sift through that and Obama's surprising rapid and seeming effortless success in getting Russia and the U.S. to jointly begin destroying their nuclear stockpiles, as an example to other members of the nuclear club (Pakistan, Israel, India, France, Britain...) on the road to a nuclear-weapon-free world will seal Obama's place among top 10 presidents. And that assumes he quits the WH tomorrow.

Lord knows he's not perfect. Obama should have skipped yesterday's state dinner with Her Majesty and British PM David Cameron (and Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey) and come home to Joplin, Missouri, where the death toll is 122 and rising. And only then flown back to France for the G8 summit Thursday and Friday. (He twice called off trips to vital U.S. ally Australia.) Obama and the First Lady did make an extended tour of the twister-devasted North Carolina and Alabama, which Obama's words alone transformed from a regional Act of God into a national narrative, as he did in his Tucson eulogy.

Guantanamo's detainee population may be a fraction of its peak Bush 43 size, but the facility is still functioning - a rare and important broken promise. Obama did try to relocate the remaining detainees to a new, unused prison in his own home state of Illinois, but ran into a wall of NIMBY objections, and gave up rather than imposing his will, which he should have done. (It would have been the right thing to do, and also protected his left flank.) Obama has also clung to Bush 43's national security techniques, including rendition. He was vindicated in doing so by the Osama nin Laden kill, an effort he ramped up, to be sure, but which relied on intel work pre-dating his administration. But the Obama explication, dating from 2009, that it didn't make sense to scrap in its entirety what the Bush 43 administration had pain-stakingly learned about America's enemies and how to fight them over the previous eight years has run its course. It needs to be repudiated.

Obama ramped up American forces, to about 100,000, in the feckless Afghan venture with nothing but a sharp escalation in U.S. Afghan military deaths to show for it. Karzai is as reliable an ally as Diem was for JFK, maybe worse. Between now and next summer, the Afghan operation, like the Iraq occupation, will be significantly wound down - out of political necessity, if nothing else. As the Viet Cong were fighting a nationalist cause for their homeland - an unwinnable proposition for an outside force, as the French discovered - the Taliban is fighting an ethnic nationalism cause in its Afghan homeland, which eased the Soviets into bankruptcy and the end of the 73-year-long Soviet experiment in Russia. Americans don't support this war, as they did support the vastly more disastrous Iraqi misadventure initially. Now that Osama is dead, time to declare victory, go home, and let the Afghan warlords who run the place and their poppy-growing sharecroppers carry on with their business. Which, as it happens, is supplying heroin to Europe, not America. Let the Europeans launch their own "War on Drugs" in Afghan, and instead step up support for Mexico's hot war against drug lords south of the Rio Grande.

You remember Reagan's "Morning in America" ads. With their friends in Hollywood, the Dems have vastly more and better material to work with and I only hope they're starting now. (Obama has made a start on building what the Dems hope will be a record $1-trillion warchest. (Yes, trillion, which makes you shake your head about a "democracy" so dependent on politician-supplicants.)

Those ads will pretty much write themselves. Even the visuals are compelling. "This what America would look like if the Republicans had been in charge." And you have shots of boarded up GM factories with workers leaving for the last time. Obama greeting world leaders at the G20 in Pittsburgh who hated America, and weren't shy in expressing their contempt, before Nov. 4, 2008. Talking heads of everyday Americans in Fort Wayne on the relief of having their 20-something kids still carried on their own health insurance policies, thanks to Obamacare. American G.I.'s coming home from Baghdad, and this president, unlike his predecessor, deigning to join the honor guard at Dover Air Force Base, with minimal media present, finally, to mark the return of flag-draped coffins.

"It's dignity in America again." You could get Eminem to point defiantly at the camera and say "This is America. And this is what we do." But actually, Chrysler had to dub Eminen's voice. And they say Obama himself has a pretty good speaking voice.

Related

Ezra Klein: Voters like their single-payer healthcare. (WaPo)

Gail Collins: Democrats Happy Dance. (NYT)

David Frum: Paul Ryan has GOP Headed To Worst of All Possible Worlds. (NPR)

E.J. Dionne: A headline you won't see: "Big Government Bailout Worked." (WaPo)

Dana Milbank: Paul Ryan gets a taste of his own shameless demagoguery. (WaPo)

Jonathan Chait: Buffalo's special election not a a fluke: enthusiasm for Dems is back. (New Republic)

Jerry Zremski: How Hochul won in Buffalo, and why it spells trouble for the GOP. (New Republic)

 

 

Breaking: World to end, narrowing G.O.P. field.

I'm obviously a day late on this, and I've shamelessly stolen the New Yorker's headline above - I can't improve on that. The magazine's Hendrik Hertzberg, long-ago Dem presidential speechwriter, assumed that all the genuinely devout contenders would be swept up into the Heavens, along with the God-fearing portion of the electorate, helping assure an Obama re-election. (Some God-fearing, or worshipping, at least, folks like me are in the Obama camp, but we're hard to spot without our "I'm with stupid" T-shirts.)

Those who would impose their brand of religion on the rest of us are still in the "ground" game, another bum apocalpytic prophesy come and gone. Meanwhile, Mitch Daniels of the non-looney wing of the G.O.P. has ruled himself out of contention; former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain has ruled himself in; and snake-oil peddler Paul Ryan is thinking about it. Ryan's non-Shermanesque denial of interest in matters presidential is a triumph of sophistry.

Oh well, Dems will have to find another way to win. The stunning, near-instant unpopularity of newly elected G.O.P. governors in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere can't hurt. 

 

Does sex sell?

It could just be me, but the more Jennifer Aniston contributes to the objectification of women, the more it seems to me that Fate conspires to expose her slender silver-screen talents for what they are. Aniston's biggest box-office success, the $484-million grossing Bruce Almighty, was a long eight years ago. More recently have come a string of critical duds: He's Just Not That Into You (2009), and 2010's Bounty Hunter and The Switch (opening weekend box-office "a dispiriting $8.4 million," said The Hollywood Reporter) 

In between the zenith and current nadir, Aniston chose to market herself as perhaps the most flesh-exposing supposed A-list actor ever:  

 

 
Clockwise from top left: Vanity Fair, September 2005; GQ, January 2009; SmartWater campaign, 2010; Jennifer Aniston fragrance campaign, 2010.

Sorry, Ms. Aniston, but anyone can disrobe. Genius is Audrey Hepburn as an icon of sexuality swathed head to toe in Givenchy.

So endth my Victoria Day weekend rant. 

Victoria, as it happens, was one of the most sexually charged women to draw breath, notwithstanding the misnomer of the "Victorian Era." 

"Oh! To feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great a delight to describe! He is perfection," said the longest-reigning British monarch of her consort. "When day dawned," Her Highness recalled of another occasion "(for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen."

 

A bridge too far, apparently, for a city not ready for the big time.

Toronto City Council on Wednesday deferred approval of a long-planned pedestrian and cycling bridge across railway tracks giving access to historic Fort York just west of downtown.

The motive force of the deferral is Councilor David Shiner. Between the two of them, Shiner and Esther Shiner, his mom who also served for an eternity on council, advanced the progress of Toronto in some way. As a lifelong Torontonian, I just can't think of a single instance of it. Recalling that one of worst mayors - one of Canada's worst-ever mayors - also came to us by way of North York (that would of course be Mel Lastman), I think of FDR's father's poor regard for Democrats. "I'm not saying all Democrats are horse thieves," FDR would tell friends with a roaring laugh. "But all horse thieves are Democrats."

That's how I feel about North York's contribution to the governance of the larger Metro Toronto.

The proposed bridge's completion was timed for an anniversary of the War of 1812-14, a milestone in Canada's path to independence. The occupying British were uncertain whom Canadian settlers would side with in the dispute. The aboriginals of the region and the Canadians of European descent chose Britain, chose to fight for the future independent Canada rather than seek union with the newish United States.

British forces over-ran Washington, setting fire to and gutting the White House, which was hastily whitewashed and that's how it got its current name. In retailation, the Yanks burned down most of what there was of the settlement of York (later Toronto).

Thanks to Shiner, the bridge now will now be completed at 2015 at the earliest, well past the anniversary. Its current estimated cost of $22 million will rise. If the bridge isn't built, the three years and $1.5 million that has already gone into its planning will have been thrown away.

This is the un-vision that so often characterized Toronto's past, prior to David Crombie's mayoralty beginning in 1972. Only then did we stop tearing down our historical heritage for "box-on-box-on-box" office towers (Frank Lloyd Wright's dismissive expression). Not that we've entirely stopped giving our predecessors' hard work the back of our hand. Even now our neglect for where we came from is evident in Fort York bridge controversy and the 11th-hour rescue of Casa Loma.

What folks like Shiner don't get is that iconic structures define a city. Both locally and on the world stage. The proposed bridge is not some frippery. It would serve a rapidly growing forest of condo towers and other new residential neighborhoods which, no matter what you think of the "curtain of towers" now blocking the view of the waterfront, is an improvement over the derelict former industrial lands on which they've been built.

Cycling is the future, for fitness, recreation, commuting and fresh air for all of us to breathe. Enabling and encouraging Torontonians to form a stronger attachment with our history is the future, as we gain a better appreciation of how differently things could have turned out. Iconic structures obviously are attractions for domestic and external tourism. They signal a city's embrace of innovation, in design and engineering, among other virtues.

Shawn Micallef at spacing toronto has an angry call to action on the Fort York bridge I commend to your attention:

The Fort York pedestrian and cycling bridge is the kind of thing that makes a city a real city. This isn't just some neighbourhood bridge (though it's at the centre of 30,000 residents) or a fey Jane Jacobs cuddly urbanist's wet-dream project or more dipper waste. It's the the big boy and big girl kind of thing cities that matter all have. A Fort York bridge is a prerequisite to being a real city the way, when I was a kid, I only really respected cities with teams in all 4 major North American sports leagues (Toronto was an exception because I knew [and know] we'd get that goddamn NFL team one day).

Every city that matters has a Fort York bridge. Some of them were poor, some had their empires run out, some were bombed to dust during the war, and some are economic embarrassments, but they all built their own Fort York bridges, and we keep talking about them.

What's Micallef he talking about? Among other things, the many world cities defined by their bridges. To wit:

  
The Charles Bridge crossing the Vitava river in Prague, begun in 1357. (Photo by Paolo Margari.) Like Vancouver's Lions' Gate, San Francisco's Golden Gate and Paris' Pont Neuf and Pont Alexandre III, this bridge defines the Czech capital perhaps more than any structure save the castle that terminates one end of it. The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge made an end of that community's long-held status as America's second-largest city, since the connection now made physical and legal union with Manhattan and the other three boroughs inevitable. Bridges make history.

Pittsburgh, which wins The Economist's vote as America's most liveable city, has gradually emerged from the decline of its mainstay steel industry with a new industrial base of medical and tech research and two of the world's great universities. It has also long fancied itself "the City of Bridges," which fair enough: It boasts more bridges than any city but Venice.

Canadians do "get" bridges.

 
The planners of the Bloor Street Viaduct (1918) are locally famous for their far-sightedness in planning a double-decker span to someday accommodate a subway - and the Bloor-Danforth TTC line now does traverse the Don Valley thanks to that foresight.

 
The Amsterdam Bridge at Harbourfront is named for one of Toronto's sister cities. It provides a unique view of one of the waterfront marinas by enabling pedestrians to walk over and look into the sailboats, a vicarious experience not to be missed. And the bridge itself is a visual delight in the subtle way it's lit at night.

 
 
The Humber River Arch Bridge, designed by local architects Montgomery and Sisam Architects and Delcan Corporation (bridge engineers) in the style of Santiago Calatrava, is an aesthetic joy in every respect, as EB commentor Darwin O'Connor has noted elsewhere. It has not incidentally boosted the economy of west-end Toronto, reinforcing a western counterpart to the east-end Beach conceived by creative city planners who built an elegantly lit Beach-like boardwalk with a a very few tasteful concessions that has tangibly improved the city's standard of living.

 
Calgary has recruited Calatrava himself to build the Peace Bridge that will become an integral part of that city's remarkable existing network of pedestrian and cycling trails, a rapid, easy link between the busyness of Canada's second-largest head-office town and the respite of parkland once far beyond the reach of a lunch-break seeker of serenity.

 
As the Peace Bridge is the future, so is Manhattan's High Line (a.k.a. "a park in the sky), originally an elevated commuter line dating from the 1930s, is a relatively new addition to New York's favourite attractions. Given its unusual location, much of Manhattan's industrial heritage is visible only from this prospect. It also offers a treasure trove of amenities, from flowerbeds tended by the city and by local residents to discreet ampitheatres and seating areas.

It's notable that the High Line, now a must-see for urban planners worldwide, was a citizens' initiative. The persistence required of local residents to transform this long-standing eyesore into a civic jewel is documented here.

We continue in this town to suffer at the hands of people who do not "Dream big, act big," as Daniel Burnham, that greatest of architects and urban planners, long ago exhorted us to do. With few exceptions, such as those shown above, we wallow in mediocrity and a staid status quo. I think we must have fewer statues, gardens and fountains than any city of our size on the planet. (Recent visits to Detroit, of all places, have re-confirmed this.)

Public will can change all this on a dime. Toronto writer and resident Stephen Williams described Toronto in the 1950s as "an outdoor Woolworths." I wish I could report that we have progressed mightily from that time and that accurate description of it, but we have barely begun. It doesn't have to be this way. We can write our 44 city councilors and say enough to second- or third-best for our city.

I'll be writing to mine, and here's a list of who you might contact. Actually, I'm going to let all 44 of them know how I feel, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

 

 

 

 

I'm just not that into what you're saying.

Anglo-EU translation guide, via Andrew Sullivan:


Billed as a British-European guide, the euphemisms on the far left in fact have much in common with the "softly softly" means by which we North Americans convey potentially hurtful sentiments. It's understandable that residents of the Far North have so many words of "snow"; more regretable the Japanese have so many words and phrases for "no." Americans tend to be best a flat-out candor: "What part of 'idiotic' am I not making clear?" "And your point would be...?" (That after your long presentation of what you consider a brilliant proposal.) Diplomacy aside, aren't we best-served having a genuine reaction and promptly?

 

The staying power of Stephen Harper.

Susan Delacourt writes this weekend on how the durable Harper Conservatives are here to stay. (Toronto Star). I beg to disagree with my esteemed Star colleague, whose point of comparison is Mulroney's Tories. They lasted nine years - not bad, given that the natural lifespan on governments in democratic jurisidictions is a decade or so.

When someone says anything is here to stay, reach for your wallet.

The "permanent governing majority" Karl Rove worked so hard to create, twisting the Constitution all out of shape in the process, lasted all of five years.

A few weeks after Obama won the WH, his party having two years earlier captured both houses of Congress, an esteemed publication and author that will go unnamed had committed to print a tract on "The Death of U.S. Conservatism." Uh huh. A year later we had the Tea Partiers and the Dems lost their filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and a year after that had lost the House.

Decades later, I still haven't seen an improvement on then U of T professor Abe Rotstein's conviction that "Every dogma has its day." And every democratic government too, to the extent it's driven by a dogma or set of values and practices.

At his best, Harper is a competent administrator.

He too often is not at is best, as in the boneheaded decision to scrap the long-form census for no better reason that to placade a small ultra-libertarian element in his base that regards the census as an invasion of privacy. Real leaders do not cater to the fringes of their parties, as Bush did in vetoing stem-cell research in 2001, ushering in eight lost years in one of the world's most promising fields of scientific inquiry. Actually, the (formerly) world-class Canadian census is (was) a tool used primarily by business to understand the market it's trying to sell to. So Corporate Canada can thank a handful of hicks in the supposedly defunct Reform wing of the current CPC for that setback to its profitability.

Harper's undergrad is in economics (he has no post-grad experience). Yet he cut the regressive GST, in 2006, rather than the progressive income tax, which the overwhelming consensus of economists said was the far better thing to do in relieving Canadians' tax burden. That was bad economics, as Harper should have learned the first year of his University of Calgary studies.

Again, that was bone-headed, and there are too many examples of that - including our U.S. lapdog foreign policy in Afghanistan and near climate-denialism in Ottawa - to qualify Harper and his government as being either on the right side of history or particularly long for this world.

The man has no vision for a greater Canada or what Obama (80% approval rating in Canada) has long described as "a perfectable union," echoing the Founders's own commitment to progress. As the Scriptures tell us, "Where there is no vision the people perish."

I get genuine conservatives, who conserve the best of the past and are wary of what the path of good intentions might be paved with, yet who strive, when the proof finally is compelling, to advance our progress. I'm one of those folks myself. What I don't get is people like Harper who devote their entire adult lives to government, mostly informed by a distrust and even loathing for it.

Harper, as it happens, has forgotten more about the NHL - about hockey generally - than most NHL coaches, players and owners know. My prayers would be answered if he took up the NHL history he's long been working on full-time, and left national governance to folks determined to make a reality of our potential brighter future.

As it stands, his prime ministerial epitaph is going to read: "He was around for awhile." I don't mean to be gratuitous, because a head of government could do much worse (Bush 43, for instance). Most PMs and presidents have been mere caretakers, and that's not so bad. But this country's poised for much better, more daring, more innovative and, for close to two-thirds of voters, more progressive times.