WAITING FOR HAMMURABI

If a slave has said to his master, “Your are not my master,” he shall be brought to account as his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear…
If a surgeon has operated with the bronze lancet on a patrician for a serious injury, and has caused his death…his hands shall be cut off…
If a man has accused another of laying a nertu [death spell?] upon him, but has not proved it, he shall be put to death…
The Code of Hammurabi

Look. Listen. A sun god handed these and other laws to the reverently obedient Hammurabi sometime around 1750 B.C. I did not make this up. It is depicted in a bas-relief at the top of the pillar on which he carved his code. Who am I to disagree with laws carved in stone: the cornerstone of the Old Testament and our legal codes today? So look well ye politicians, look well. Especially you, Stephen Harper, even as you take time out from fitting up your new iron glove that you so lovingly caress in the dark recesses of Parliament, in a stupor of gleeful anticipation that the whiff of the power of a majority government excites in the deepest, coldest cells of your cynical blood. No, no. Seeing you in your sweater at fireside has not fooled me, nor has the trumped up charge of nertu that you and your party lay at the feet of your enemies. A time of swift justice will come for you all, and it will not be pretty—many will pray and beg for a severing of ears and hands—before it is finished.

But these are idle dreams and justice delayed is not justice achieved. So let us examine these so called death spells, if only to shake loose from the shackles of blind ignorance and trepidation. Exhibit A: parliament is dysfunctional and must be dissolved. I’m sure that in his heart of hearts, that cruel place where, as for so many small but treacherous flesh eating mammals of the stoat genus, true joy only comes with a bloody, biting victory, this seems true. Harper must, in the chain mail gloves he habitually wears except when in public, with the naked, violent sense that he is right, fondle the notion that only a majority government under his command can be functional. After all, there is something vicious and small, and deeply dangerous in any man who panders to the religious right, and this is the hallmark of the morally smug and blindly intolerant holders of all the keys. That after all, is what this accusation of nertu betrays: the fervent need to hold all power.

This is the only truth in an agenda that the startlingly ghoulish Gilles Duceppe rightly characterizes as secretive, right wing and fundamentally against the values of the Quebecois and all Canadian people. And for this, we should listen to this man, in spite of, or maybe precisely because of his separatist handicap. For many reasons that I will not get into here, Quebec is the strongest, most accurate moral compass that this country has left. If you don’t believe it, remember that the Montreal Canadiens live there. In the past 100 years, they have shut the gates to every evil doer from Toronto to L.A. and will most surely do so again with the certainty of pure ethics that are rarely found but in the likes of Jean Beliveau or Bob Gainey.

Yes, yes. If Quebec is the moral guardian of Canada, the Bloc and Duceppe are its shield bearers. Even if, as yet to be substantiated rumours suggest, the freshly removed appendix of PQ leader Pauline Marois was recently delivered in a black van and a shroud of dry ice to the back of Duceppe’s campaign bus late in the night. Next to the liver, the appendix is a rich and rare source of iron that Marois must have been only too glad to pass along in Duceppe’s hour of need. And these vampirical tendencies are necessary in times of grave darkness; these are trying times for the squires of good, and we must forgive them their idiosyncrasies. But this is sick musing, and not appropriate to this voire-dire, so I will try to show some restraint by returning to the prosecution’s arguments.

The cases of nertu of which Harper has accused his opponents are wide and varied. For rendering the government dysfunctional, trying to rape and pillage the Alberta economy, attempting to create a socialist regime that would cast us forever into a sugar cane and beet trade with the likes of Cuba, appointing activist judges, and taxing Canadians into shallow and hastily scratched out graves, the opposition parties, particularly the Liberals, are castigated daily. I suppose these death spells take on a dark and menacing tone when they loom large in the minds of half-wits and hydrophobic dogs, but they only have a place in a ‘certain slant of light’ (E. Dickinson) that shines from a full moon over the Prime Minister’s backyard. For the rest of us, a full moon is a harvest moon, and Canada has much to harvest, but only if we do not fall for falsehoods in the next month of campaigning. However, we cannot do this alone, and this is why we must all press, pray, and cajole Quebec to do what I fear no other province (despite Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams' best efforts) can do: withhold a majority government from Harper at all costs and with extreme prejudice. Ergo, the Bloc. They must take the vast majority of the 75 seats in Quebec, and that, and that alone will compensate for the apparent political illiteracy that thus far is dooming the Liberal Party and keep the howling wolves of conservative values at the gates of the majority government that they so cravenly desire.**

Now. I know that some black and dirty water has gone under the bridge between Quebec and the rest of the nation, but that was then and this is now. Is it disingenuous to ask only that the Quebecois do what no other province can and hold Stephen Harper and his knights of the Orange Order in check? I don’t think so. I have always had a fondness for my French Canadian brethren, and wished bitterly that the likes of Joseph Papineau, the North West Company, Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel had prevailed. Don’t let this cheap Prince deny us accountability and become our master, this quack surgeon bleed us further, or his false and insulting claims of nertu run amok. Make this one thing so, and I promise you, some MPs will make better use of their ears, and iron gloves will be mothballed for at least the near future. Until Hammurabi or the sun god make a triumphant return, I fear that is the most that anyone can ask.


**Wolves are noble creatures. I hesitate to denigrate them by such base comparisons, but their brutal tendencies are so often emulated, it would be remiss and perilous to overlook the analogy.