We're Gonna Whip Your Ass! (the great Canadian reality show)

Alternate title or subtitle of the show: Who Wants to be a Solomonaire?
    Like many of my better ideas (should I put irony-quotes around the "better"?) this one comes to me as I emerge from deep sleep and the grotesque empire of dreams. I forget most of the details of this dream--my dreams tend to disappear on waking, no matter how hard I try to remember them) on this occasion one item remains in my consciousness: my undergoing a particularly curious and horrific type of torture (at whose hands I have no idea) and the simultaneous panicky thought that I should NEVER tell anyone what this torture method is, lest some clever sadist out there might see it and use it.
   The rest of the dream evaporates as my waking thoughts assemble, but the analytic thought then occurs that this weird dream is some sort of wacky offshoot of a large buffet supper and the last bit of reading I did before bedtime, a quick, superficial glance at a profile of Jason Kenney in the latest issue of Walrus magazine (cover-headline: "And you think Harper is right wing: The ascent of Jason Kenney")
   Amid all this, the daily domestic agenda comes pelting in (jeez, how long since I've watered the plants...) intermixed with an almost automatic elaboration (not sure what else to call it) of a Walrus call-out (large-type thing) that the magazine's layout crew used to relieve the long grey story--a call-out restating, "Still Kenney's balancing act has come at a cost: increasingly, this country has seen its international image tarred with a mean streak."--into some extrapolations of the whole tough-on-crime tenet (over which the article vigorously wrings its semantic hands) into some thoughts about how the dramatic structure of civil and criminal trials might be improved by turning a few of them into reality shows. Details of how this would work, e.g.lawyers showboating extravagently, and the vast audience voting on the verdict and sentence, cascade into my brain remarkably fast.
    But also another panicky thought intrudes, that I won't get the details threshed out in the hour or so before the dog must be walked, or I'll get sidelined on social-media as I too often do ...

Judge Judy...

...todays G&Mail India election p.1 too...
 

So what in hell is conservatism?

Haul up any essay upon social issues nowadays and, whatever the topic--climate-change, culture-clashes, health-care or any election orgy past, present or future--you will see it almost inevitably (and usually quickly) descends into a shrill combat of left versus right. Some defective neural pattern in the human brain, it seems, hard-wires us to clatter along in the auto-default mode of Manicheism, black hats and white hats, good and evil, and the imagined road where not too far along awaits a glorious denouement with angels triumphant. Out of materials of melodrama are political careers and Hollywood millions built.
  Indeed, rummaging around for instances, I find two almost instantly in...

Last laugh at Parliament...

Again, me mouthing off, from Post's "Full Comment" (where the excitable are getting really, REALLY excited about the mud-wrestling in Ottawa...). I start with a quote, like all the best pontifical pundits:

"... my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind."

-- Not written by a wit from Canada (although Mordecai Richler loved him), and the statement is 60 years old, but it still comprises a perfect comment upon the current, farcical power-struggle.. Regardless of political stripe, I think everyone should be laughing heartily at the clownarama...

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And I still think Ignatieff is perfect in the role of Shemp.