HITLER

I'm not saying that plowing one's way through a thousand page biography of Adolf Hitler is an enjoyable experience, no, but it's certainly an educational one.

Having recently finished John Toland's excellent 1976 biography of the Fuhrer (picked up for a couple of bucks down in a Sihanoukville used-book shop), the maddening thing is that I know a hell of a lot more than I used to about the twentieth century's most maniacal madman, but I'm not sure I truly can grasp the depth of his depravity.

Who can? It's almost a cliche, comparing someone like Saddam Hussein or Milosevic to Hitler, but his nefarious reputation certainly stands up well under scrutiny, like some kind of inverted, perverted Horatio Alger story run cruelly, abominably wrong.

There was so much I didn't know about Hitler, starting with the fact that he was Austrian. News to me. (Hey, I passed on Grade 12 History where all that stuff was explained!) I always thought he was a bona fide, from the cradle German, but no -- only in his early twenties did he wander into the country of his obsession, penniless, a mere sack or two his only possessions. How he then slowly but surely insinuated himself into the highest ranks of the German political leadership, eventually reigning supreme as their, well, supreme ruler -- it's scary stuff, is what it is.

Scary, because it seems to arise not from hell but from the thwarted dreams of a frustrated painter; seems like all the old cliches and speculations regarding Hitler's art school days are true -- he really was an aspiring artist, and if he had been accepted into the prestigious art schools he so craved entering, World War II would most likely never have happened.

And his infatuation with the destruction of the Jewish race -- where did that come from? Toland thankfully refrains from offering too much armchair psychology, but it's no secret that Hitler was bitterly disappointed as a young man at the Jewish doctor who was unable to cure his mother's terminal cancer. Was that enough to slowly push him over the brink? Who knows? Some questions, especially those involving the psyche of another person, let alone a demented person, cannot be answered.

How one individual can rise from nothing in a country not its own and lead it to the very brink of destruction is instructive, to say the least. It shows how gullible we are as humans, and how much power, true power, we invest in our leaders. (Which makes choosing those same leaders all the more crucial.)

And yet. Ironies abound, not the least of which something I had never considered before: that Hitler's determination to eradicate all the Jews he possibly could eventually led to the creation of a Jewish state, thereby ensuring their longevity and prosperity. What this says about humanity I'm not sure, but, at the very least, it illustrates our ability to rise up above ourselves and find the courage to start all over again, even when faced with something as monstrously inexplicable as genocide.

As for me, I'm wiped. (Reading so much about Hitler in such a short space of time will do that to a person.)

I need something jolly. I need something jovial. Which is why I've just started Patricia Cornwell's non-fiction investigation into the true identity of Jack The Ripper.

Because hey -- after Hitler, even Jack the Ripper and his limited, small-scale atrocities seem almost, well, quaint in comparison.

But who knows. One can only take so much Victorian blood and gore. That compilation of Charlie Brown cartoons I've seen floating around town seems pretty enticing right about now.

THE LADY IN THE TREE

“This not the America I’ve grown up in.”

So said the CNN reporter, standing in the darkness and the wind, staring into the faceless camera, trying to make sense of something so patently senseless. New Orleans, sinking; a city, decaying; and all of this, the looters and the snipers and the thousands of black faces crying for food and water, in America. Not the Sudan, or Niger, but America.

The subtext of his words: This isn’t supposed to happen here. It’s supposed to happen there, yes, but not here. (The ultimate irony, of course, being that our ‘there’ is somebody else’s ‘here’, and vice versa.) As if there were some kind of geographical and moral symmetry at work. As if some nations are destined from disaster and destruction because of their locales and varying levels of decrepitude, while others were exempt due to their superior structures of government, their better organization, their stronger sense of urgency and action when it comes crisis time.

Not that I’m mocking what the reporter said, because fragments of the same thoughts surely floated through the flotsam of my own brain. In some sense, I don’t think he was talking about the United States at all; he was talking about humanity, about the individual, about how we would like to believe that death and destruction are not coming for us, no, at least not today. To imagine oneself at the centre of an unspeakable tragedy is to imagine oneself vulnerable. To imagine oneself vulnerable is to invite that which would destroy us.

So we go on, trusting our governments, trusting each other, to bail us out should the heavens happen to fall. In New Orleans, and Alabama, and Mississippi, the heavens fell, and the government was not there, at least not right away, and there is only so much we can do for one another. Only so much we can do when water and food are absent from our daily existence.

The story of New Orleans is a story that will reverberate, on the national and human level, for decades to come. It tells us that the people we think our looking out for us are, perhaps, no better, no more resourceful, than ourselves in our weakest moments. It tells us that there is a serious gap between the underclass in America, and their needs, as opposed to the boys in the back room, and their needs. (If New Orleans had been predominantly white, and wealthy, and full of senators’ and governors’ sons and daughters, would the response time for aid been much, much, quicker? You tell me, but I say yes.) It tells us that no nation can do battle with nature and win. All you can do is hang on.

It’s like that lady in the tree. You remember her? The one in Africa a year or two back, the one who gave birth in the branches while floods ravaged the land beneath her feet. When reduced to a human level, that’s what New Orleans was, the lady in the tree, giving birth while the tempest of life did its best to drop her from her perch. That’s who we all are, I guess – people in the trees, hanging on, hoping that our children will not be borne away by the current.

The good thing, the tangible thing, is that lady survived. The one in the tree. And so did her child. I’m not sure what that means, for her or for us or for the people of the Southern Delta down in the States, but it sure as hell must mean something, is what I’m thinking.

EXPLAINING CAMBODIA (OR TRYING TO, ANYWAYS)

Trying to explain Cambodia is like trying to explain yourself. Only with yourself you have a lifetime in which to examine and extend the contours of your peaks and valleys, whereas with Cambodia I have only this particular post. The history, geography, culture and language are beyond my means, but I shall dive into the deep end of what remains while I am still young enough and foolhardy enough to try.

At one point in time, long ago, Cambodians actually ruled southeast Asia. They built the incredible, incomparable Angkor Wat series of temples, and their culture was rich and deep, varied and exquisite. As the centuries passed, Cambodia traded places (and blows) with neighbouring Siam (now Thailand) and Vietnam for supremacy. Cambodians hate the Thais and the Vietnamese, and vice versa, and there’s centuries of historical precedent to back up their grievances. (Think how fast people on reality TV learn to hate each other; these folks had millenia, for chrissakes. Imagine what grudges could be carried within this period of time.)

Of course, the real history that anybody talks about regarding Cambodia only took place within my lifetime. Actually, almost exactly within my lifetime, because it was in October of 1975, I believe, the month I was born, that the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and evacuated the city. Think about it. A city of millions, evacuated.

Why? Pol Pot and his minions decided they wanted to create an agrarian, socialist utopia. Everyone would farm the same fields and eat the same food; there would be no hierarchical social systems in place for one class to dominate the other. (Except, of course, for the folks with guns in charge.) The entire country was forced into the fields for four years. Most people had little, if any, idea of who was in charge. Their job was to farm, and that was it. They were told who to marry. If they wore glasses, they were killed. If they had a high school education, they were killed. If they were doctors, they were killed. Any sign of education was a sing of bourgoise indoctrination. All that mattered was ‘angkar’, this mythical allegiance to a new, pure Cambodian state. Each night you would have to gather with the other cadres and ‘rat’ on the other folks you worked with, relating what ‘bad’ act that somebody other than yourself had committed. Father against son, brother against brother. It was, in short, hell.

After four years, the revolution turned in on itself, as they all do. The boys at the top started to kill each other, and when that happens, the game is over, and there are no parting gifts for the second and third place winners. In the end, Cambodia was ‘saved’ by its most hated neighbour, Vietnam, who had expansionist, imperialist tendencies of its own.

Imagine it. Between two, three million people dead. No electricity. No phones. No newspapers. No media. No government. No money. No laws. No hospitals. No police. An entire country of twelve million people reduced to absolutely nothing, ruled over by their most hated foes, who now demanded allegiance to Vietnam, who forced them to learn Vietnamese and Russian, but not English. Never English. (A Khmer friend of mine told me of how he used to sneak out at night to study English by a dim light with a small group of friends, the penalty being probable death, all of this taking place while I discovered Stephen King and wondered if Back To The Future II could possibly live up to the original.)

What saved Cambodia from Vietnam was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was funding Vietnam, so when the Soviets fell, so did the money for Vietnam. Cambodia was no longer on the top of their agenda.

In came the UN for three years, with UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority) running the country. This was the first time in the history of the UN that the global organization actually ran an entire country. They had a mess on their hands. They still have a mess on their hands, but back then was abominable. Refugees who had fled to the Thai border. A system in shambles. A people demoralized. On and on and on.

It was a holocaust, and that is not an exaggeration. An entire civilization destroyed. An entire people savaged, forced to turn against one another, to breed distrust, to trade in betrayal as if it were fruits at the market. And all of this, within my lifetime. While I collected comic books and licked popsicles and scanned the sky for odd-shaped clouds.

Whenever I get tired of Cambodia, of its poverty, of its recklessness, of its incompetence, I remember what they’ve been through. In my lifetime. I look at the faces of middle aged people and realize that they would have been young men and women when all this insane shit was going down. They would have seen their parents and brothers and sisters kill; they might, even now, live next to door to former Khmer Rouge soldiers. It is still, in so many ways, a country defined by death, but there is so much light, so much sheer goodwill, that I cannot give up on it yet. I do not know if the future is bright, but the young people I see on a daily basis are bright, and that will have to be enough. In a country ravaged by poverty, in a country where only thirty percent of people have clean drinking water, that light will have to be enough. There is no other choice.

Attempting to describe this country is like attempting to describe you. I can find the words if I look hard enough, but words are not enough. They are the blind man groping in the dark, these words, and whether there will soon be light enough for me to see and understand is something that I think about all the time. Whether the light from my students' eyes will be enough to guide them through the dark days I fear still lay ahead for this small and cursed, enchanting and blessed land.

EH?

As a kid growing up in Canada I had any number of American comic books delivered right to my door on a monthly basis, from Amazing Spider-Man to G.I.Joe, from X-Factor to Star Brand, but there was only one title that I subscribed to sight unseen, simply because I glimpsed the cover of its premiere issue at the comic shop and thought: This has to be mine. The cover featured a plethora of Marvel's finest heroes standing back and letting the leader of Alpha Flight, Vindicator, take control of the hostile situation. For those not in the know, Alpha Flight was Marvel's team of Canadian superheroes -- and Vindicator's costume was a red and white configuration of the maple leaf that adorns our flag. I saw the costume, and I was hooked.

The origins of patriotism are hard, if not impossible to define, but I had it early, even at age eight or nine. The fact that the stories were set in Canada and featured Canadian heroes was, well, too cool for words. (The first issue of Alpha Flight even had Vindicator hobknobbing with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, for God's sakes!) The realization that an actual Canadian expat, John Byrne, wrote and drew the book was a sign that my fellow citizens could go out and conquer the comics world like any other Yankee. The idea that I could open up any issue at random and, potentially, find a reference to Lake Ontario or the CN Tower was almost beyond belief. These were super heroes, and they were in Canada, my home. 'Nuff said.

A larger issue at play, of course, is that I was ecstatic that American comics were featuring Canadians. The dirty little secret about Canadians is that they secretly have an inferiorty complex regarding their neighbours to the south. We like to believe that we're bigger, stronger, better, in no need of Viagara, more peaceful, tolerant, sexier, you name it, we want to believe it. It's not easy living in the shadow of Tom Cruise, but that's what we do. (Oh, and did you know that Tom Cruise, Tom Green and Bryan Adams all went to the same junior high school in Ottawa, albeit at different times. That's a fact. Cruise lived in the Ottawa area for a few years during junior high school. And the fact that I know the Canadian residential patterns of Hollywood superstars tells you something about how deep our -- okay, my -- neurosis runs. Like when Conan O'Brien hosted a week of shows from Toronto, featuring Canadian guests, and the place, went, ballistic. Americans coming up to mock our culture and our people! Right on!!!)
Because we love it, love it when our Canadian actors and artists head on down south and kick some cultural ass. (Can you say: John Candy, Michael J.Fox, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Mike Myers, Dan Ackroyd, Kiefer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland? I didn't even mention Pamela Anderson. Do you care? Probably not. But us Canucks do. And hey, Bernard Ebbers, the greedy bastard who brought down WorldCon, is also a Canadian, which proves that we, too, can be conniving and mendacious. You better watch out for us Canadians.) We don't really care if they succeed at home, no, but if they're in a hit movie down south, woo-hoo!

Not that this is a particular Canadian thing, this loving and loathing of our neighbours. The great realization (one of many) that I've had while living abroad is that everybody hates their neighbours, from the Japanese hating the Chinese to the Cambodians hating the Thais and Vietnamese. The little guys are scared and envious of the big guys. Each thinks they're better than the other, but is secretly afraid that they're not. It's human, is what I've realized, so it puts Canada's own somewhat odd compulsions and neuroses into a larger global context that makes them seem normal, quaint, almost sedate. Nobody in Canada is really causing anybody down south any harm, so the Americans leave us alone. (And yet, I wonder what would happen if a terrorist entered the States from Canada and did some serious harm. I wonder if our otherwise friendly border relations would suddenly take a darker, more cynical turn, becoming similar to other countries around the world. I don't know.)

What I do know is that I loved Alpha Flight as a kid. I loved the fact that in Superman II they were on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. (Especially since my hometown is about ten minutes from Niagara Falls.) I loved Ben Johnson kicking some ass in Seoul and even loved him when he came back from his drug suspension and tried to kick ass again, but failed, miserably. (One of the most surreal moments of my life was resting between reps on the indoor track at York University during the winter track season and having Ben Johnson come and sit down on the high jump mat beside me, the two of us taking a breather from our respective workouts, him saying nothing, me saying nothing. This was a guy whose picture used to be in my locker, and now he had become the dude I saw working out every day at the track. Life takes us places, doesn't it.) I loved anything with the Canadian flag that proved that we were good, strong, able.

I'm older now. I see the dark side of patriotism, the onslaught of nationalism. I wonder if it's ultimately even necessary, this identification we have with the lands of our births. I'm starting to see the world as my home, which may be naive, or it may be mature.

But still. You can take the kid out of Canada, and all that. Because coming up soon it's the Winter Olympics, see, and Canada has a hockey gold to defend, right, and, well, let's just say that I won't be putting down the flag anytime soon. That would be unpatriotic, eh?

WHY THE SIMILAR HAIRCUT STYLES OF LANCE ARMSTRONG AND THE DALAI LAMA CONTAIN THE KEY TO LIFE

I had my hair hacked off yesterday, giving my freshly shorn scalp an even shorter appearance than my usual Michael-J.-Fox-in-Casualties-of-War cut. Part Lance Armstrong, part Dalai Lama, is how I look at it. A few of the folks around town who recognized me from before -- shop clerks, street kids -- gave a little giggle when catching sight of my awesome new fro. This is the shortest they've ever seen my hair, and, hell, it's the shortest I've ever seen my hair, outside of baby pictures; not to laugh would almost be an insult, I suppose. Besides, as a foreigner in a foreign land, you get used to the laughter of strangers. You better, anyways, because you're going to get a lot of it.

Living abroad, you hear that laughter (or its kinder, more subdued counterparts) quite often; it's part of the deal. Not only expected, but necessary. Necessary because it reminds you that you are not one of them. I could learn as much Japanese or Cambodian as a native speaker, marry a native, dress and walk and talk like a native, perfecting even the accent, but I would never, ever belong. Period. Plain and simple.

But isn't that what we all want? To belong? The older I get, the more I realize that so much of humanity's acts of empathy and aggression are designed to show that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, or long to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and will whatever it takes to acheive those goals. We are all too often on the outside of those concentric rings, and we desperately want the people inhabiting those rings to notice us. To accept us. To crave us. And if that acceptance does not come forth, well, welcome to the wonderful world of neuroses, ladies and gentleman. Check your sanity at the door and make yourself comfortable. There's plenty of space, and plenty of company.

Not that it has to be like that. For some reason or another I've stumbled across the work of Albert Ellis, a 94 year old psychoanalyst trained in the Freudian tradition and now about as far away from Freud as one can possibly imagine. Put simply, he believes that most of man's problems arise from the fact that we are thinking creatures who dwell on what we think about. Who ponder and obsess over problems, so that the problems we have are not the actual problems themselves, but our own problematic and perpetual investigation of that initial problem. (Got that?)

Ellis believes that, based on our own values and belief-systems, we've developed a number of erroneous ideas about ourselves and our own interior lives, which can bascially be boiled down to: We need acceptance and love from others in order to have value; we need to achieve to attain inner peace; and the world is an unfair place, and this is not right.

Ellis's solution? Get over it. Accept yourself (and others) unconditionally, regardless of any outside accolades you may or not may not receive. In other words, what matters is what you love, not what loves you (to quote Nicolas Cage in Adaptation). The world is an unfair place? Why, yes. So it is. To think otherwise is to see ourselves at the centre of the world's whims and plans, and that is folly indeed, so far better to accept that life is all too often cruel and unfair, and adjust your own expectations accordingly.

Sounds simple, his philosophy does, but I prefer the word pragmatic. So much of our lives -- whether it be through relationships or work -- seems to centre upon how we want others to perceive us. It's an odd game of inverted mirrors that leads to a measurement of self-worth entirely reliant upon other people's views of ourselves. It's like we're all constestants on Trump's The Apprentice, eager and anxious and striving to show that we are smarter, more beautiful, more on-the-ball than anyone else, and for what? The great prize on The Apprentice is that you get the soul-enhancing award of helping Trump design apartments for rich people who don't need another apartment anyways. The great prize in life? We get to spend our days and our years constantly trying to assert our own individuality and ambition to strangers who aren't even thinking about us at all in the first place, because they're too busy trying to assert their own individuality and ambition to the stranger that is us, who isn't worried about them, either. It's like we're a people obsessed with the accolades and awards rather than the achievements themselves; we'd rather have the Academy Award than the work that won it.

The answer?

Not sure.

But Ellis is cool, that man is, 94 and going strong. Unconditional love and respect for yourself. Understanding that so many of our problems have to do with our own embellishment of the original problem. Realizing that life is harsh and unfair, but we can deal with that by altering how we encounter and asses this cruel and indifferent world.

Now I'm starting to see why this haircut of mine works for Lance Armstrong and the Dalai Lama. When you're on the bike, nobody gives a shit about your hair; it's the performance that counts (which is why cyclists keep short hair in the first place, to gain windspeed.) When you're the Dalai Lama, you know that people aren't flocking to your talks to check out your mane; it's the words that count.

Simple.

Simple is good. Life is so hard, so complex, that perhaps it's better that we keep ourselves (and our hair) as simple as possible.

PAPER BIRDS

Early this morning I awoke from a strange and distant dream. Already fading, it is, like cotton candy on my tongue. So sweet. So transient.

(Please! Please stay. This is what I would say to this dream, if it were a person, if it were tangible. If this dream goes, dissolves, fades, then I fear that a piece of me will go as well, to where I know not. To that place where dreams go to die, I suppose, that section of our soul that is reserved for all those late-night thoughts and theories that die a short and lonely death, blinded by the harshness of morn. That place we access, occasionally, in those lonely hours before the rise of dawn. That place I long to understand and translate. That place.)

I had returned to my old elementary school's gymnasium, except that it wasn't the one that I actually remember, the one I used to play crabwalk soccer in, the one that housed my Grade 6 graduation dance, but another one, a dream-one, yet somehow even more authentic than its real-life counterpart. Up on stage, my father and other fathers were doing a little dance to the delight of the audience. At a certain point Joyette Heron, all grown up, approached me as I sat in my chair. (Joyette, the only black girl who attended my elementary school, and one who once, near the soccer posts, lifted up her t-shirt and, unsolicited, flashed me a glimpse of her tiny, burgeoning breasts, giving my eight year old self his first up close and personal sight of female nipples.) She handed me a rather clumsily constructed paper bird. I thanked her with a great deal of emotion, realizing, for the first time, that it must be my birthday. Why else would she be giving me paper birds?

The dream was so vivid, so real, so dense, that I did not want to awake. I wanted to wallow in this dreamstate for another, two three hours -- not because that particular dream itself was particularly alluring, no, but because it was other, and that otherness has a depth and a clarity that the 'real' world lacks. That the 'real' world rejects. I wanted to run down the corridors of that dreamschool and knock down its walls, gain entry to the basements and cellars that dwelled within.

My groggy, almost-sleeping mind started to make connections, forge links, construct theories. I imagined a series of corridors connecting dreams to dreams, visions to visions. Those moments of clarity we have in dreams, those intensities of insights -- they are not random, I thought, and they are not lost. They can be found, those moments, and they can be harnessed, and, upon awakening, can be used to alter the very nature of reality itself. If we walk down the corridors long enough, dream will give way to dream, one after the other, each blending into the next, each adding a layer of complexity and confusion that will form their own intrinsic alchemy. If our subsconscious selves are nothing more than the eclectic brew of the twisted madmen that populate our dreams, then perhaps that potion can be digested and synthesized, and ultimately utilized for a larger, nobler purpose.

These were the thoughts I had, insane but logical (as dreamthoughts always are), as the soft pull of sleep tried in vain to tug me further down, while the light of morning, dim but insistent, urged me to rise up and face a more harsh and tactile world.

IF BOBBY HAD LIVED

If Bobby had lived, he would have done it all: ended the war in Vietnam, rescued the underclass from another generation's worth of poverty and despair, united a country that was fundamentally at odds with its own conception of itself. If Bobby had lived, there would have been no Watergate, no IranContra scandal, no Monica, no Iraq. If Bobby had lived, America would have been rescued from itself by itself, by this man, this Kennedy. If Bobby had lived.

These are the kinds of sentiments one has after reading Arthur Schlesinger Jr's. 1976 biography of Robert F.Kennedy, the man he knew so well. (Schlesinger was an adviser to both J.F.K. and R.F.K.) It is almost astonishing to read about how loved, if not revered, Robert Kennedy became in some quarters of the United States; those who think that Bill Clinton or George W.Bush are the focus of a certain hysterical level of hero worship should go on back and check out what Bobby Kennedy lived through in the final years of his life. (This is not to say that Bobby Kennedy was universally beloved; like Clinton, Kennedy had his fair share of detractors, too. But boy, did Bobby Kennedy become something else.)

What allowed Bobby Kennedy access to the hearts and minds of so many Americans? His name, of course; the afterglow from his brother's premature death, most certainly. But it was more than that, deeper than that. Kennedy was the first American leader to show a concerted, passionate engagement with the poor. With those left behind. Not only in America, but all over the world. He had a will and a voice that gave voice to those who had, until then, remained voiceless. He had an aim, Kennedy did, and it was not directed at power for power's sake, but power for the elevation of the underclass.

As somebody living in the early cusp of the twenty-first century, and as a Canadian, no less, it's difficult, if not impossible, to truly understand the intensity of the late sixities in American life, but Schlesinger's book paints a pretty convincing portrait of a nation looking for a leader, almost desperate for a leader. Lyndon Johnson was stubbornly sticking to the war in Vietnam, and it's clear that America was, by then, not buying what he was trying to sell.

Kennedy agonized over whether to run for President against Johnson; his brother, Teddy, told him that now was not the time. When Johnson finally decided not to seek reelection, it was clear that a gap had opened, a gap that Kennedy could, if he defeated his own Democratic rivals for his party's nomination, fill.

He never got the chance, of course, slain by an assassin's bullet immediately after winning the
California primary. (Or was it multiple assasins? I, a certified conspiracy nut, will remain mum on this one.) Kennedy was fatalistic about the possibilities of his own murder; he knew, all too well, what had happened to his older brother, and he knew what could happen to him, and if it did, well, so be it. Life was not about fearing death.

From my perch in Phnom Penh, I've become more and more attuned to the manner in which politics plays a part in people's lives, the way that leaders can shift and sway the tide of history itself. This is a country where, if I even mention the prime minister's name in my class, the air stops, and the tension emerges, and the anticipation mounts: What will be said, and why, and to what end? It starts from the top, is what I'm trying to say, and everyone here, at every level, knows that the top is corrupt and craven and something to be feared, not loved.

Robert Kennedy was loved. I'm not saying a leader necessarily has to be loved, but Kennedy was not loved for something insubstantial or photogenic -- his looks or his family's legacy -- but rather for what he stood for, and what he died for. He was loved because he had a genuine concern for those most of society neglected to acknowledge, let alone advocate for. He was loved because he seemed to embody, to personify, what a leader should be and can be.

As I scan the world's landscape of leaders, from the Putins and the Paul Martins, the Bushes and the Hun Sens, the Chavezes and the Blairs, I see leadership, yes, and madness, certainly, but do I see somebody to love? Do we need somebody to love? Perhaps not. Perhaps looking for love in a leader is akin to looking for control in a parent: necessary, yes, but not the fundamental requriement for the job.

And yet.

It starts at the top. When we see the best in ourselves represented, if only fleetingly, in the eyes and actions of our leaders, something alters. Something within us implores us to do more and be more. A leader should represent not what the country is, but what the country can be. Politics is a game, and politics is power, this I know, but politics is also the means by which a citizen can understand what they and their brethren are supposed to eventually evolve into. When I read a biography of somebody like Robert F.Kennedy, and the eloquent eulogy given by his brother Edward Kennedy (who has, all too often, given eloquent eulogies for his fallen family members), and I scan the present-day political landscape, and I see who leads us, who guides us, it makes me mourn all the more for what could have been and has now been lost.