Canada and Other Matters of Opinion Read Online Free Page B

story, barbed for impact. The many, many books, the editorships and articles, have sharpened a considerable talent. He has the instinct of a gossip wedded to the mind of a true chronicler: one who sees the arc of an age through the multitude of its particulars and personalities.
    And, finally, he writes against the profound echo of what, as a child, he glimpsed and his parents felt and fled: the horror of the Second World War, and the catastropheof the Holocaust. I have said he is cheerful, and my guess is that this is the cheerfulness of someone who has seen all that is the worst of us, felt some of it in his own Jewish legacy from those dark times, and determined there were only two faces with which to stare back at the world: an angry one or a determinedly embracing one.
    He chose the latter, obviously. He is both a student of the world and—in one of his own terms—a jester. The world here is mainly, as I have said, ours, Canada. He has done a fine job of seeing a consequential part of it, has fashioned some of the very tools others in his trade now deploy. He has inflected the public record of this country, and he has lived a mixed, charming, various, replete life. He has known everyone who is anyone and passed on the highlights of that ranging acquaintance to his readers.
    He has earned his cheerfulness.
Here Be Dragons
is a much more than worthy picture of ourselves, and a work of genuine wit and insight.
MICHAËLLE SHINES BY DEFAULT | October 1, 2005
    I hope it’s not awkward to bring this up, but the office of the governor general is a ceremonial post.
    It’s useful to remember this, if for no other reason than to scatter the cloud of incense hanging over the installation of Michaëlle Jean this week. The jaded cynics of thenational press corps went into full rhapsody mode, with reviews of her speech that whizzed past being merely complimentary and only halted at reverential because, I suppose, there was no higher place to go.
    My
Globe and Mail
colleague John Ibbitson came as close to producing a swoon in print as, outside the delicate prose of the romance novelists, it is possible to do. Of Ms. Jean he wrote, “She is the becoming Canada,” a tribute made more plangent by being set off against the “old faces [and] old men” of those who hold real office in this country, one of whom—old face notwithstanding—actually appointed her.
    Over at
The National Post
, the remorseless logician Andrew Coyne, who a few weeks back greeted the appointment of Ms. Jean with as blistering a denunciation as I can recall, started his piece with a surrender notice. “You are my Commander-in-Chief” was the least fervent whisper of his
billet-doux
.
    All that was missing from some of the commentary was a burst of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Lawrence Martin, in
The Globe
on Thursday, essentially positioned Ms. Jean, so late of two citizenships, as a new Joan of Arc of federalism.
    Her arrival on the scene would topple the separatist dream, “turning the André Boisclairs of the world into ghosts.” (At the time of this writing, in October 2005, Mr. Boisclair was considered the rising star of separatism. He became leader of the Parti Québécois in 2005, but resigned in 2007 when the PQ came third in the provincialelection.) Her speech, according to Mr. Martin, buried all the controversies that attended her appointment, even the one with her dressmaker. It’s a rare speech that quiets the Haberdashery Wars.
    This is the kind of unleashed adulation that is normally on display only in the backyard of MuchMusic when Jessica Simpson or Shania Twain pay a visit to the teenagers, and recalls nothing in the political world so much as the ancient transports of Trudeaumania.
    And, lest it be forgotten in the sunrise glow of Michaëlle Jean’s installation, every major speech she gives from now on, she will give as a figurehead. The voice will be hers. The words will be those of the prime minister who has dictated them. It is