“Must be something in the water.” (Robbie Robertson ) Very potent water indeed. It was the politics of the mystic. One taken in with the idea of a New Jerusalem. This concept of the “City on a Hill” which originally had a theological and apocalyptic basis would become part of the North American civil religion. The chosen land of a new Zion with the flip side containing a vision of coming destruction based on the Book of Revelation which in its wake would see a new heaven and new earth. and becomes transformed into a kind of vision of America having a redemptive role in world history, simply by being America, simply by being the kind of nation it is, without the explicit apocalyptic theological foundation. Simon de Jong’s story is one of finding a New Jerusalem within a “garrison mentality”…
“Intellectually, Simon was very serious, but sometimes he was politically naive and unpredictable,” said Ed Broadbent, who led the New Democrats between 1975 and 1989. “He took his politics very, very seriously, but he could go off on tangents that left many in the NDP caucus, quite frankly, befuddled.”…
Audrey McLaughlin remembers de Jong as a free-spirited MP who fought for what he believed. “He was always wired for sound, which was funny in some ways, and sad and naive in other ways, but he was never acrimonious,” said McLaughlin, who followed Broadbent as leader. “He expressed his views, but he was never sanctimonious. That wasn’t him at all. He was a good debater. He had a riotous, carefree life in the sixties and he brought that joie de vivre to caucus.” Read More:http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20110909.OBDEJONGATL/BDAStory/BDA/deaths
“no intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it” – fernando pessoa
Shortly before he died, he was asked what he would do if he was in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s shoes. “It’s a bit facetious, but take LSD,” he said. “See some bigger pictures.” Read More:http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20110909.OBDEJONGATL/BDAStory/BDA/deaths
But De Jong, like a few others, represents and epitomizes a Canada that has historically struggled to lift itself out of deep-seated marginality, most of it self-inflicted insularity. In De Jong’s era there was a void, non articulated pan-Canadian rhetoric comprised of myths that the population would willingly let themselves believe in. Northrop Frye termed this a “garrison mentality” which was really a ghetto vision; a paradox of a small psychological frontier within a huge sparsely populated land mass: nearly uncharted wilderness juxtaposed with the imperialistic American marketing project to the south.
As Daniel Francis argues in his National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History: “Because we lack a common religion, language or ethnicity, because we are spread out so sparsely across such a huge piece of real estate, Canadians depend on this habit of ‘consensual hallucination’ more than any other people.” Read More:http://lisa.revues.org/2624
ADDENDUM:
This something that De Jong was reaching for, something as big and majestic as the country:
One important difference is that Martin Buber defined the practice of ethics in very concrete forms, and his call to dialogue as the venue to god, became a concrete and actual program of personal and social transformation. In dialogue, the personal and the social are no longer divided into two separate realms. One becomes an I through a thou, but again, that i-thou relationship is explained in terms of communitarian structures of life in society.Read More:http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com/2011/09/dialogue-actualized.html
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It is a sensibility, by which I mean an understanding the mind forms of itself, its place in the world, its appropriate engagements, the uses to which it may, or must, or may not, or must not, be put. Our sensibility begins with a physical edifice, the garrison, but long after the landscape has ceased to be dotted by forts and palisades, except for the few that have been turned to national historic sites for the edification of domestic tourists, it persists as a refusal to admit the unknown or the unnamed. The culture and the individual are always on guard then against incursions. Some of these incursions are from within. When they arise within the culture as a rebellion or a heterodoxy they are quelled or ignored. When they arise within the individual they are summarily repressed. One distinguishing mark of the Canadian sensibility is that “must” and “must not” predominate over “may” and “may not.”
The “garrison mentality” is a reluctance to individuate, in Frye’s words, a “dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow,” a “frostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination.” As the society grows and complicates, garrisons multiply, and the poet, making a home in one or another, and internalizing its defensive posture, declines the difficult, lonely work of self-study, his capacity for which gradually atrophies. He resorts instead to a lofty rhetoric — a debased poetry — whose purpose is to stake out an argument against a rival garrison. Canadian culture, fostering these choices, and impoverished by them, thus becomes, Frye says, “a milieu in which certain preconceived literary stereotypes are likely to interpose between the imagination and the expression it achieves.” Read More:http://www.northernpoetryreview.com/articles/christopher-patton/the-garrison-revisited.html