Thanks for this post, Bob. Frye was quite ready to make his political sympathies–and antipathies– known. I remember him introducing Harold Bloom to a packed house at the University of Toronto just after Reagan had been elected president for the first time. There was something in the title of Bloom’s talk concerning “creation-by-catastrophe,” one of the gnostic concepts he was using at the time of his Anxiety of Influence. Frye, dead-pan as usual, stated that it was particularly appropriate to have an American critic speaking to a Canadian audience on the theory of catastrophe in light of the election results that had just taken place in Bloom’s homeland. The audience, needless to say, broke up.

In response to Mike’s recent posts (here and here), here is a passage I ran across in Frye’s essay “Crime and Sin in the Bible.”

Most of us, I assume, would share the assumptions about liberty and equality . . . that have been formulated at least since John Stuart Mill’s time. We take for granted the principle of equality of all citizens before the law and the principle of the greatest amount of individual autonomy consistent with the well-being of others. To the extent that the laws are bent in the interests of a privileged or aggressive group; to the extent that citizens live under arbitrary regulations enforced by terror; to that extent we are living in an illegal society. If we regard our own society as at least workably legal, we also take largely for granted that the real basis for the effectiveness of law in such a society is an invisible morale. The law in itself is compelled to deal only with overt actions, so that from the law’s point of view an honest man is any man not yet convicted of stealing. But no society could hold together with so loose a conception of morality; there has to a sufficient number of self-respecting citizens who are honest because they like it better that way.

Under Bush and now under our own Stephen Harper, and in both cases in the interests of the same “privileged” and “aggressive group”–the wealthy and powerful–cynical and dishonest leaders are actively undermining their societies. As Frye says, whatever legal system you have, you need “a sufficient number of self-respecting citizens” to make a viable democracy. It is this “invisible morale” that makes all the difference. What happens when it is the government itself that is undermining that morale, when governments themselves have no self-respect and are, to play with Frye’s wording, dishonest because they like it better that way? If we are not vigilant, as Michael suggests, we will find ourselves– if we are not already there– “living in an illegal society.”

Further to Bob’s post citing Frye on the interchangeability of the Liberals and the Conservatives before the advent of the C.C.F.  From Stephen Leacock‘s “The Great Election in Missinaba County” in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Let me begin at the beginning. Everybody in Mariposa is either a Liberal or a Conservative or else is both. Some of the people are or have been Liberals or Conservatives all their lives and are called dyed-in-the-wool Grits or old-time Tories and things of that sort. These people get from long training such a swift penetrating insight into national issues that they can decide the most complicated question in four seconds: in fact, just as soon as they grab the city papers out of the morning mail, they know the whole solution of any problem you can put to them. There are other people whose aim it is to be broad-minded and judicious and who vote Liberal or Conservative according to their judgment of the questions of the day. If their judgment of these questions tells them that there is something in it for them in voting Liberal, then they do so. But if not, they refuse to be the slaves of a party or the henchmen of any political leader. So that anybody looking for henches has got to keep away from them.

Bruce Meyer has a review of Yann Martel’s What Is Stephen Harper Reading? Frye not surprisingly is included in Martel’s list of recommended works:

The works that Martel has chosen to send to the Prime Minister are wide-ranging in their content and their reader impact. Some have a Canadian angle, from Milton Acorn’s collection of poems The Island Means Minago, or Tomson Highway’s hilarious The Rez Sisters to Voltaire’s Candide, in which it is said that the “French and English are fighting over a few acres of snow.” Others are rather deep but essential reading for any individual who seeks to lead, such as The Meditations by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

If heavy-duty fare is not to Harper’s taste, there is, buried within the selection, a curriculum of books that would do a high-school student a world of good: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination (do you think a busy prime minister would take books with him to a desert island?), William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (though the temptations of barnyard politics should have been foreseen by Martel), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (just in case funding cutbacks lead to unforeseen menu changes).

Harper has both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in economics from the University of Calgary, so it’s hard to imagine that he’s read many of Martel’s recommended works beyond what might have found its way onto his high school reading list more than thirty years ago.  And as he “governs” without Parliament whenever it’s politically expedient for him to do so — witness two dubious prorogations of Parliament in one year — it’s a stretch at this point to think of him reading much beyond tracking polls and various public relations scenarios intended to convince skeptical Canadians that he really is just a cuddly moderate.  Thanks to Harper, we only occasionally have full parliamentary representation in this country.  But in its place we do have tightly-scripted government funded feel-good ad campaigns!  It’s difficult to conceive of Harper as being anything other than a narrow special interest politician with big oil behind him.  But please note that Canada is a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol and has legal obligations to meet its targets.  And yet, Canadian greenhouse emissions currently exceed by 35% our commitment to reduce them. That is, we are 35% above our Kyoto targets to reduce below 1990 emissions levels. Under Harper, we are not reducing our emissions.  We are increasing them.  The Alberta tar sands produce some of the most environmentally degrading oil it is currently possible to produce.  With just .5% of the world’s population, we account for 2.5% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, with a rise that has topped out at 20% during the Harper years.  Per capita, we are among the very worst carbon polluters in the world.  It’s therefore not hard to see who Stephen Harper is and what he really represents.  Whatever he’s reading, it’s clearly not what he needs to be.

Is this also a good time to point out that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is likely to have read most of if not all of the books that Martel recommends?  Ignatieff, in contrast to Harper, is the recipient of 11 honorary degrees thanks to his extensive scholarly output over the years, including teaching posts at Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Harvard.  Ignatieff has written a number of books, which include scholarly works, popular works of social concern, three novels and even a couple of screenplays.  You can see Ignatieff’s bibliography here.  There is no bibliography of books written by Stephen Harper.

Because any educated imagination is willingly engaged with the (cough) “real world” — which is really only the awful place where awful things happen to people on the nausea-inducing assumption that it is necessary — it will also bear witness to a truly depraved mind.

Marc Thiessen was on Jon Stewart’s show last night.  Thiessen is a former Bush speech writer, a tireless apologist for torture, and now a “columnist” for the Washington Post, a once great newspaper being run into the fevered swamps of neoconservative paranoia by editor Fred Hiatt.  It is a stomach churning experience to listen to someone like Thiessen and to know he wields power and influence.  But it serves as a reminder of just how wretched a place such a world is — and why.  For the rest of us, it’s got to be about vigilance.  We can start by making a point of knowing what the rogues, the frauds, and the closet sadists are actually up to.

In Canada, the entire unedited interview can be seen here.  In the rest of the world, it can be seen here.

Update: From then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace on “American fascism” in 1942:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.