Mon Mar 7/05
Gone to pot

Sailing along the 401 yesterday afternoon en route from Montreal, and fresh out of CDs to listen to, I decided for some reason to subject myself to Cross-Country Checkup. Prognosis: negative. As I listened to caller after caller twist the tragically simple story of the four ill-fated RCMP officers in Rochfort Bridge into phantasmagorical other things — an indictment of the gun registry, proof positive that we shouldn't legalize marijuana — the word "meltdown" came to mind. A significant portion of Canada's radio station-calling population has lost the ability to think.

Arriving back in civilization (no knock on Montreal — I was wilfully incommunicado), I was pleased to see that the cause had already been taken up. Colby Cosh had made his point on the rapidly deteriorating Shotgun (and in some rather cutting comments to this thread), then on his site (also using the word "meltdown"), and then in an absolutely terrific Post column today (doesn't seem to be online). For me, these two paragraphs are a devastating, punch-to-the-gut indictment of the velocity at which obsessed anti-drug individuals and special interest groups, the RCMP included, attempted to co-opt this tragedy for their own purposes:

The truth is that those cops were at the Roszko farm to carry out the most mundane police duty imaginable: to help a bailiff repossess a truck…

That debts will be honoured is the sort of reciprocal expectation we rely on, unthinkingly, every minute of our lives. On mercifully rare occasions, we resort to the law to make it work. And in enforcing the notion of honouring freely assumed obligations, policemen do something truly honourable. How crass is [RCMP Commissioner] Mr. [Giuliano] Zaccardelli's dream of a "drug-free Canada" compared with the simple vision of a civil society where people pay what they owe.

Beautifully said, that. But at the risk of using the Rochfort Bridge tragedy for my own purposes, I fear we have a full-blown crisis of intellect in this country. It's not just the speed-dialers on Cross-Country Checkup who are incapable of reining in their reactionary impulses; politicians can't make head or tail of this thing either, and to me that's the most frightening thing that James Roszko has unearthed.