Civil Discourse...?

Well, that is asking a bit too much when goring the sacred ox of a newly-minted icon. All the more so with the effrontery of doing so when the singular object of the public's adoration is recently deceased. Gone to his maker with the hymnals of crowds of suddenly-converted faithful singing his praise to the heavens. We'll never know if he's as popular up there as he's suddenly become down here.

Smilin' Jack did all right for himself. An ebullient, energetic man who fantasized himself into Captain Canada, ready to leap at a moment's notice into 24 Sussex Drive, from at-long-last-achieved Stornoway. He had limitless ambition for his political future, and the public now idolizes his memory as one who had limitless ambition for their futures.

The public, would they ever have come to a pass when all of the NDP's promises might be realized, would be slow realizing that they would have to pay for all the largesse the party stood ready to dole out on their entitled behalf. They might not have recognized Canada of tomorrow in the Greece of today, but that's another story altogether.

This story, arrived at rather tangentially, is about the courage of a newspaperwoman to report events and their outcomes as she parsed them. And Christie Blatchford did a fairly good job of calling the hysteria around the death of Jack Layton - from a cause he could not affect and which is the dread of society - for the pathetic public spectacle that it represents.

Ms. Blatchford is rather good at doing that kind of thing, digging into the marrow of the bone of contention and coming up with a clear-eyed perspective. Things are so often what they appear to be, not what delusional people prefer them to be. She was hounded off a speaking stage at the University of Waterloo because she shocked the First-Nations-centric sensibilities of an audience dedicated to forgiving everything, including the violent crimes committed in Caledonia.

They, the audience, after all, doesn't live in Caledonia. They did not witness the depredations that took place there, did not interview the stunned residents of the non-native variety that suffered threats, violence, loss of property and the humiliation of witnessing one law applied to militant native 'warriors', and another entirely to them, as law-abiding citizens of the province.

That experience hadn't quite prepared Christie Blatchford for the avalanche of mail that poured hatefully down upon her self-esteem as a human being, characterized as stupid, hateful, 'old and worn', ugly, 'fat cow bitch', a 'troll', and other less publishable verbiage describing her as a living breathing piece of female anatomy best left unmentioned.

Oh, and the personal threats, the bombastic terminology that threatened to 'run you out of the city'. Interesting, but not quite of the calibre of the soberly menacing sentiment sent her way by someone whose name she recognizes as a 'fairly well-known playwright in Toronto', who wrote this zinger to her that he looked "forward to writing your obit."

So, these protectors of the reputation of the late, estimable, self-promoting Jack Layton have dedicated themselves to taking up his cudgel. A sinister one, calling into question their sanity as moderate, thinking individuals able to express themselves civilly to take issue with another thinking individual's message that has the weight of reality on its side, whereas theirs is born of hysterical reaction.

Someone who makes her living as a professional correspondent, parsing the issues of the day, and laying out facts and figures that are irrefutable simply because they have occurred publicly and cannot be denied. Her take on the issue of the public, the news media, the political elite having gone absolutely delusionally sentimental about someone who was, after all, a middling politician.

Their cretinous and viperous responses, delineating themselves as credulous fools. No contest.