Truthing the Game

Before I get to the meat of my post, I would like to congratulate the entire University FreshCo team on a job well done. Our store's opening day set a record for the chain: no FreshCo anywhere has been that busy on opening day, or indeed on any day. We did three and a half times the normal Wednesday volume. I hope we can sustain the momentum.

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A couple of "must-reads" have cropped up on my sidebar over the past week. Catelli has posted an impassioned lament of the state of the Canadian political "game". The rules for this "game", he says, are bass-ackwards: you win power and lose respect when you lie, but lose power and gain respect by telling the truth. In a society that claims to value truth and respect, this makes no sense.

And it never will, according to the second must read I've found this week. John Michael Greer has outdone himself with his latest: "Alternatives to Nihilism" instalment. Democracy, said Winston Churchill, is "the worst system of government except all the others that have been tried"; corruption of near-universal human ideals is but one reason. Greer asserts that America made a colossal mistake about thirty years ago. Through the Seventies, it embarked on a path towards sustainable living, but abandoned that path when politicians bribed them with visions of unearned prosperity. "I'll make you richer than he will" has been the central claim of election campaigns in both our countries for nearly three decades now. And "richer" always refers explicitly and solely to monetary wealth.

I have long believed that money, in sufficient quantities, is fantastical, more myth than anything. Witness: The United States of America is plunging further and further into debt at a rate of about $188 million AN HOUR. How far down the hole do they go before it caves in on them? I've been waiting and watching with ever-increasing disbelief as the hole gets deeper and deeper with very little consequence so far. The sun is barely visible from that depth, but that's okay: you can still see faces by the eldritch blue light of Facebook and your television projects its own Gleeful glow.

We don't want the truth. Why would we? The truth hurts. Who wants to be hurt? Not me. Not you. Harper knows this; he also knows that even though Canada is (so far) relatively unscathed by the economic tumult enveloping the developed world, its people remain deeply insecure and uncertain about the future. He has therefore made every attempt to brand himself as a competent and steady 'hand at the wheel', and insisted that any outcome to this campaign short of a Tory majority will very quickly result in chaos.

And Ignatieff has obligingly stepped into the trap. Little wonder: Iggy is an academic, and in that world, honesty still has some currency. An arrangement with other parties is entirely legal and above board...yet it still manages to smack of Machiavellian maneuvering...of playing the game.

Both the Libs and the Cons are playing games here while accusing the other of game-playing. It'd be funny if it weren't so...petty. Meanwhile, has anybody looked outside? The hole's getting ever deeper.