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LAUTENS: When did good times roll? Right here and now

Steven Pinker is a celebrated – so often a kiss-of-death adjective signaling the recipients are past it – Canadian-born Harvard psychologist who gave a very annoying interview on Good Friday eve to the CBC’s (frequently annoying, being straight from

Steven Pinker is a celebrated – so often a kiss-of-death adjective signaling the recipients are past it – Canadian-born Harvard psychologist who gave a very annoying interview on Good Friday eve to the CBC’s (frequently annoying, being straight from State Radio in Toronto) Anna Maria Tremonti.

Pinker’s annoying recently published book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress mocks the gloom of most certified intellectuals and even the despondent masses who think too much (Goethe: “Thinking is the great enemy of perfection”). Pinker on my rough trade: “Journalism has grown more and more morose over the decades. ... The pessimism extends to a Doomsday scenario.”

Au contraire, Pinker says: “If you had to pick a time in history to be born ... you’d pick now.” A regular old Dr. Pangloss, is Pinker, like the caricatured optimist of Voltaire’s Candide, who proclaimed: “In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.” (Pangloss was hanged.)

Pinker annoyingly employs not dogmatism but evidence to defend his view. Such as: Over the last 250 years work hours have been reduced (60 a week to under 40), homemaker’s toil from eight hours a day to two. Meanwhile literacy has exploded and longevity expanded (from 30 to 80 years, even in poorer countries to 71.) No war between great powers for decades. And much more. The whole ball of wax – have such clichés also been improved? – is on CBC Radio’s website.

Much still to do, but Pinker rebukes intellectuals’ declinism, the “vision of society on the verge of collapse, and a good thing, because anything would be better.”

Applause. We needed that. And – these words written at Easter, a joyful time for the Christian faith that has profoundly shaped our society – after thinking about questioning the professor’s vision, I made an executive decision not to.

Peace in our time. However long that may be.

• • •

Keeping with the spirit of the above, these words by Oscar Wilde, arguably the first and most influential modern homosexual icon. Much less well known is that he wrote two para-Christian fairy tales, The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince, that deserve to stand heartfelt with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

In prison, ruined, bankrupt, Wilde wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

How else but through a broken heart

May Lord Christ enter in?

• • •

Rumour, whose batting average is frequently higher than official fact, has it that West Van Coun. Mary-Ann Booth, who mused weeks ago that she was thinking about it, has privately decided to run for mayor of West Vancouver. At this writing she hasn’t responded to a request for confirmation – probably busy having a life.

A couple of my agents claim Booth has already chosen lieutenants to woo WV’s ethnic Chinese and ethnic Iranian voters.

Mayor Michael Smith rapidly squelched another speculation, that a Booth mayoral candidacy might affect his decision about a third term. Now carefully read these tea leaves:

“What Coun. Booth decides to do is her business and will have absolutely no affect on my decision to run or not,” Smith replied to my email.

“She has been running for the last seven years so this is not new news. I encouraged her to run against me in the last election as I thought the community would be well served by having an election, ... voter turnout would be much higher.

“If she and I were both candidates then voters could compare our background and experience and make a clear choice.” (Here’s common ground: Smith slammed Metro Vancouver board’s stealthy pay/retirement package, and Booth as acting mayor joined in. The beleaguered board may now beat a retreat.)

So at this point the North Shore is reeling from the possibility of being utterly mayor-less (what if they called an election and no one came?), with North Vancouver City’s Darrell Mussatto and North Vancouver District’s Richard Walton planning to retire from office. But from politics?

A confessed New Democrat, Mussatto, a strippling of 58 this year, could find a valued niche in the John Horgan government. Wild guess, but North Vancouver-Seymour Liberal MLA Jane Thornthwaite might prefer Mussatto to stay right where he is.

Mussatto’s name recognition would help if he challenged Thornthwaite, an energetic patroller of her constituency and big booster of expanded public transit on the North Shore. Partisan politics apart, which they never are, on that point Thornthwaite ironically makes common cause with the MLA for abutting North Vancouver-Lonsdale, Bowinn Ma, parliamentary secretary for TransLink.

Now if West Vancouver-Capilano Liberal Ralph Sultan would retire before he’s 112 or so, the NDP could dream of capturing a row of three traditional right-of-centre North Shore ridings. Preposterous, of course.

• • •

None of Justin Trudeau’s multiple disasters reveals his inner self as clearly as his McCarthy-era imposition of a virtual loyalty oath for his women’s reproduction rights policy as a condition for hiring young federal summer jobs applicants.

Canada’s feminist-in-chief rudely interrupted a polite objector reading from a text containing the word “mankind.”

“Peoplekind,” he corrected. Puzzled reaction. “We like to say peoplekind.” (Just joking, he said later. Well, in the world’s media he did have ’em rolling in the aisles.)

I have lived under 14 prime ministers and none has been as ludicrous as this peopleperson.

rtlautens@gmail.com

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