Whither Poetry? The Decline and Fall of the Political Class

In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota) challenged Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries. McCarthy was opposed to the war in Vietnam, believing it to be illegal and a 'costly exercise in futility'. When asked why he was running, 'Gene' quoted Yeats:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

McCarthy's role-model as a public figure was Thomas More, the brilliant, stubborn Catholic who resigned his post as Lord Chancellor rather than accept Henry VIII's denunciation of the Pope and self-proclamation as head of the English Church. He later went to the headsman rather than accept the King's unlawful divorce from Catherine of Aragon. He also wrote the original Utopia--a word he invented.

In the same year as Gene McCarthy's first and bravest stand, Robert Kennedy also ran for the Democratic leadership. On April 4th, mere moments before he was to give a speech to an African-American crowd gathered in Indianapolis, Kennedy received the news that Martin Luther King was gone, shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. No one in the crowd yet knew that this had happened, and Bobby Kennedy, without police or Secret service protection of any kind, stepped forth to tell them. His speech was very short. After telling them of King's assassination, and saying a few words in tribute to the fallen leader of the civil rights movement, Kennedy closed his speech by quoting Aeschylus:

"My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. Until ... in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

These were thoughtful men, men of ideals and wisdom who believed in the power of words to conjure up those finer aspects of the human spirit--those that make us more than bestial, selfish hominids and lend us the desire to reach beyond what is easy to achieve what is possible but hard. They wanted to reach out and move their listeners to a more noble sentiment, not pander passively to the status quo. Just as poetry is magical in that it frees us from prosaic utility and suggests a way of thinking not constrained by linearity, the statesman-orator must be a mage who breaks the masses from the mould of their own expectations about the way things have to be. They must make it possible for men to dream.

McCarthy and Kennedy were noble men of a nearly vanished sort, who thought that public service, that devoting one's life to considering and struggling for the common good, was a sacred thing, worthy of awe from served and servant alike. They treated their charge as leaders with reverence, believing that to rise above the comforting and the familiar in both their words and deeds was an obligation.

I reflect on these things as I consider the state of leadership in Canada today. Precious few of our leaders are capable of shaping a true vision for this country. Their concerns are more prosaic: jobs, exhange rates, health care, transfer payments, territorial squabbles between the Feds and the provinces. Not that such things aren't important, quite the contrary; the Devil is in the details, as More would have said. But leadership requires more than tactical proficiency at dealing with problems in a punctual fashion. Leadership is the marriage of vision and communication.

A visionary must have three things: the intellect necessary to understand the state and society and administer both, the courage and confidence to pursue necessary change in the face of even violent disagreement, and that intangible quality, an almost mystical instinct for possibility, the ability to disentangle oneself from the immediate and obvious, to see the forest not the trees. A great leader must take these traits of the visionary and couple them with the ability to communicate, cajole, exhort, enrage and exite others into following his vision.

Stephen Harper may have some of these qualities, but certainly not all. He is an able man, good at setting concrete goals, identifying what is necessary to achieve them and has the discipline to follow through and get the job done. But I don't think he has a vision for this country, no sense of what it should be. His approach is casuistic and scattershot. A policy here, an initiative there, motivated by a reactionary sense of dissatisfaction rather than an overarching sense of order. He has a litany of things he thinks the government should *not* do, but little sense of what it should do. And if he does, he's failed to effectively explain to us what that is.

Paul Martin was far too busy giving people what they wanted to ever step back and see what was needed. And even if he had, he wouldn't have had the cajunas to tell anyone they couldn't have everything they wanted. He was too concerned with being liked, not enough with being respected.

Jean Chrétien was an able manager, a very pragmatic mind. Countries need leaders like him from time to time, a rest from the exertions to which they're led by their frenetic visionaries. But his vision of the country, a stale borrowing of Trudeau's and consequently more uncompromising, was static and outdated.

Michael Ignatieff has intellect and charm, and speaks French and English well enough to understand both solitudes and bring them together, but I doubt he has the strength of character. A man who came to public service so very late in his life doesn't seem to me to be driven deeply enough by the needs of his country. Leadership demands a certain sense of martyrdom, and he's been absent from our struggles for 35 years. A stint as Prime Minister would be a welcome end to his admittedly illustrious career, but I'm afraid that makes him little more than a very learned trophy hunter.