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COMMENTARY
July 1, 2006
Dominion Day
I like to start all Dominion Day columns with a renewed expression of outrage for how the Trudeau government did in this fine proud word, “Dominion”, in 1982, as part of a longer-running Liberal Party effort to flush our national heritage, and replace it with glib and paltry reflections of their own deracination and sleaziness. I remain, as I was born, a native of the Dominion of Canada, and this is our Dominion Day, to which there is so much more than paper Pearson flags, and picnic faces painted in red maple lipstick.But now that I’ve got that out of my system, let me move on. We cannot revive the dead, nor should we mourn indefinitely, nor lament except what was worthy of lamentation. If we could return to the past, I would not hesitate to do so. But we can at least visit our past, in reconceiving our future. A nation includes a landscape, to be sure, but the world has many landscapes that have hosted a succession of very different nations in their turn. Beyond the hard and simple facts of geography, a nation consists primarily of men and women -- of those dead, those living, and those yet to come. Canada, as every nation, is a compact of all these, in a movement through time -- passing the torch among them. It is dropped, sometimes, sometimes it is snuffed, and sometimes it may be re-lighted. The life of a nation, as of a person, is an act of faith -- of good faith, or bad. It is a quarrel with blind fate (“a lover’s quarrel with the world”, in Auden’s fine expression), a struggle against all forces in man and in nature that conspire to our extinction: Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep ... The words of the Canadian John McCrae were written on a foreign battlefield. He was a doctor who postponed his fellowship in pathology to fight in the Boer War; a man who for his holidays worked his passage to Europe as a ship’s surgeon; a skilled draughtsman and a Shakespeare player; a distinguished teacher and practitioner of medicine who then signed up for Europe -- along with 45,000 other Canadians, in the first weeks of the Great War. A man who, going to war again at the age of forty-two, left this note to a friend on his departure: “It is a terrible state of affairs, and I am going because I think every bachelor, especially if he has experience of war, ought to go. I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience.” A realist; hardly a warmonger -- as all great patriots before him. A man who left his own skin north of Boulogne. Geography explains little. Kipling: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Thucydides: “The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men.” The very best of Canada is now on the field by Kandahar, doing what Canadian soldiers have always done, building order against tyranny at the risk of their own lives, and slicing the heads off dragons. It is an act of good faith that gives me hope for Canada again, this bold commitment to do our share of the damage against a ghastly enemy, now in Afghanistan’s poppy fields. (For this, Grits and Tories alike are due praise.) Call it if you will our legacy from the Crusaders -- another proud word, not to be denied -- I will speak without shame about valour. A country is made of its men and women; the women as much as the men. The Canadian women of my childhood were mostly pillars of strength -- not the hysterical, irrational, and "girlish" creatures who are the products of our cheap feminism, today. They wept appropriately to an occasion of mourning, but did not shriek or wallow. I think of Mrs Glynn (gone this last year), Miss Taylor, Mrs Carson, Mrs Wrigglesworth, Mrs Clow, my aunts, my mother, my two grandmothers (not one of whom I can imagine in army boots) -- soldiers of the peace. Few nations ever produced such women. The best way to celebrate a lost cause is to win it. Beyond our symbols, that need to be restored, we must restore the nobility in our men and women. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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