021 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 021

Air Date: September 6, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Program Disclaimer

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Radio Days, Mother)

I don’t know what to do, Rabbi. Every night he listens to the radio. I can’t keep him away. I say go to the beach, play in the sun, get some fresh air. No. The Lone Ranger, the Shadow, the Masked Avenger.

Rabbi

This is not good. This boy needs discipline. Radio. It’s all right once in a while. Otherwise, it tends to induce bad values, false dreams, lazy habits. Listening to the radio, these stories of foolishness and violence, this is no way for a boy to grow up.

Joe

You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion.

Bob Metz

Good morning, London. It is Thursday, September 6th. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now till noon. No, no. Not right wing. Just right.

Wait into color, color it to black and white. Under the bed clothes, everything will be alright.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the show. 519-661-3600. If you’d like to call in and comment on anything we’ll be talking about today, and of course you can write to Just Right at justrightchrw@gmail.com. And the person who will be answering the phone, if you happen to call in, will be our producer here, Ira, how you doing this morning?

Ira Timothy

I’m just peachy there, Bob.

Bob Metz

Just peachy. Are those allergies really getting to you? I think you’ve been having a bit of problems with them, eh?

Ira

I’m popping Reactin like it was candy.

Bob Metz

Hey, the campus looks a little different this morning. Is there something going on that I don’t know about? Yes. School started. Yeah, no kidding. I just couldn’t believe the difference. I mean, coming here during the summer, it’s like a wasteland, really, and then today I’m dodging people every five feet trying to get into the parking lot.

Ira

Not to mention the great big uprise of students in all the residences.

Bob Metz

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it is noticeable, for sure. Listen, today on the show, I’m gonna talk about a number of things. Part two of a subject I introduced last week, socialism, we’ll get into part two of that.

In a subject I call fascism and frogs, we’re also gonna be talking about the subject of where no man has gone before. A look at Star Trek and some interesting new developments in that field and maybe a different look at that show than perhaps you’ve been used to hearing in the past. And if I even have time, we’ll get into a little bit about the nature of war and why we even have wars, because these are subjects that have been in the media lately. But first, I want to begin with something that attracted my attention in the National Post. And I guess I’ll call this subject stupid vacuous politics.

Are you an airhead? Then Canadian politics could be for you. And what I’m reacting to here is an article appearing in the National Post, a couple actually, both on September 1st of this month, of this year. And it was actually an editorial that appeared on the front page of the National Post by Andrew Coyne and the heading read, Why Politics Here is Stupid, which is kind of a blunt heading to say the least. Nothing can match Canadian politics for sheer vacuity, says Andrew Coyne, writer of the editorial. And he basically is looking at the political scene both federally and provincially. Now on the federal scene, here’s what he has to say. He says that the Liberals are well prepared for the fall session, having staked out a series of facile, simple-minded positions on difficult, complex issues, a plainly unattainable 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by next year, a unilateral withdrawal from a multilateral mission in Afghanistan, hints of bailouts for manufacturers, and so on. And he says, the Conservatives, for their part, seem to have lost all interest in policy.

Provincially, Coyne comments that at the provincial level, the election in Ontario promises to be the most tedious, non-event in living memory. The Liberals can hardly dare to issue a platform, having broken every promise in the past. The Tories, principled sorts, have declined to offer much of any. Now, of course, that’s changing a little bit right now, because I think we’re going to be expecting the Liberals to release that platform sometime today. And for those of you who’ve been watching the local scene, of course, the provincial politics has started to center around another issue, the whole issue of faith-based funding, which was actually brought to the front pages of the paper today by both Jim Chapman and Paul McKeever, two friends of mine, and people that we’ve had on the show here, and I’ve been on Jim’s show, and now it’s interesting to see them in a debate over that.

But that’s not the focus today, but I think that’s where we’ll be talking about next week. But just to carry on with Coyne’s generalized comments on politics in Canada, because he made some points that I do identify with. And he asks the question, is there any politics on earth that’s shallower, more boorish, less worthy of attention of serious people than Canadian politics?

His answer, he says, there is none. Canadian politics is uniquely stupid. Our politics may not be quite as crude as the Americans, as cynical as the French, as corrupt as the Japanese, but for sheer vacuity, there is none to match us. We are conditioned to deny this, to expect that politics is always and everywhere a game for morons.

But it wasn’t always quite as bad as this, and it isn’t in other countries. So Coyne goes on, he goes on to refer to the British, the Australian, and the New Zealand Parliament’s Prime Minister’s question period debates. He comments that the questions, as often as not, are actually questions, and the answers bear a striking resemblance to real answers. No, really, he says. Debate is generally at a higher level in Britain, even outside politics, but the detail and seriousness with which the parties approach policy questions is notable. I said this once on the show here a couple times, I said it several times, that if you watch BBC and you see the leadership debates there, it’s a completely different feel.

Even if you don’t agree with one side or the other or both sides, you feel like you’re watching something with a little bit of more substance to it and a little bit of more information and objectivity to it, despite the subjectivity of the positions taken. Coyne cites an issue of pioneer schools proposed as a means of helping parents, fed up with the local provision, but unable to afford private education, as one of the issues being very seriously discussed in Britain. He comments, and I quote, bear in mind this is from the David Cameron Conservatives, widely criticized as lightweights, yet when was the last time anyone suggested anything half so bold here, whether on education or any other matter? The only debate in this country is whether to spend more money or even more.

And that is so true. You never hear the issue discussed about whether we should spend less or people should spend on their own. It’s just a matter of whether the politicians are going to take the money out of your right pocket or are they going to take it out of your left pocket. So he asks the question. He says, why is Canadian politics so moronic?

It isn’t that our politicians are especially stupid, as people like Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff are all intelligent men, he says. They just behave like idiots. It’s institutional, a culture of vapidity that drags even the best down to its level, end quote. And here he refers, of course, to what we might call a systemically corrupt system. I’ve talked about corruption in government before and saying that the government is corrupt when it does this thing or that thing. And I think often people think that what I’m saying by using that word is that somebody’s evil, somebody’s doing something wrong.

That could be the case, but I think in a majority of cases it is not. It’s the system itself is corrupt and therefore even a good person, a person with the best intentions, with the best objectives in mind once they are tossed into the system as it exists now, is kind of forced into a narrow band of activity that he cannot get away from. So we say that it’s sort of systemically corrupt.

It’s kind of like saying, when you’re on your computer and it bombs on you and you say you’ve got a corrupt file, well, we don’t go around saying that’s an evil file or that it’s morally bankrupt or anything like that. We know it’s corrupt because it is dysfunctional. And in that sense, that’s one of the meanings of the word corrupt, dysfunctional. And so a lot of what we see in government is just patently dysfunctional because of the way we approach issues. And we approach issues always the same way. We’re going to rob Peter to pay Paul. It’s just a matter of which party defines which group is Peter and which party defines which group is Paul.

And then we go on this war for each other’s money when really the proper response, I think, is to let people spend their own money on the things they want to spend them on. Now, Coyne offers five basic explanations in terms of why he thinks our governments are generally systemically corrupt. And I’ve just sort of summarized them here. Number one, he says, a peculiarly rigid tradition of party discipline. Number two, the interference of provincial premiers and national debates, which he refers to as power without responsibility, and I agree with him there, which kind of creates regional politics and conflicts. Three, he says it’s the press gallery, though he offers no specifics other than suggesting that they’re alienated from the whole political situation. And interestingly, he talks about the size and the shape of the commons. He says, quote, the two sides of the house are so close to each other that they almost touch.

We’re talking about now in England, though, okay? And he says, in consequence, rather than bellow across the aisle, they’re obliged to talk to one another. They don’t sit at a row of desks like they do here.

And they recline on benches there as it was done in ancient times. And I’ve seen that. And it does seem to tend to have something to do with the environment. But certainly, I don’t think you can blame the superficial things for basically why our parliament is the way it is. And the fifth thing he blames on our boring politics is, ironically, peace and prosperity. He says, when you don’t really have a big national crisis or anything like that, our tensions generally turn to other issues. Now, interestingly, on the same day, on September 1, another article appeared in the post called, Who Wants to be Canada’s Gray Davis?

And this one’s written by David Frum. And he says, to make progress towards the only solution that makes sense, governments defer to ignorant fears. And he comments that mixing sense with nonsense is apparently the way we do politics here in Ontario. Quote this week, and this is referring to September 1, Ontario’s power generation monopoly has released a new report calling for further doses of, quote, sense mixed with nonsense. Sense, he says, in this case, is nuclear power. Nonsense is the fantasy that we can conserve our way out of our energy and environmental problems. Almost no one who has studied the issue seriously believes this fantasy, but almost everyone feels obliged to pretend to believe it. End quote.

Frum compares the costs and benefits of nuclear power versus other ways of producing power like wind and solar primarily, and demonstrates how wasteful the latter still are compared to the former. They may be emerging technologies, but in terms of being efficient either economically or even with respect to the environment, they’re not quite there yet. But his greatest criticism is reserved for the silly idea that somehow conservation will in any way address our energy needs, and I agree with him there.

It just won’t. He says, quote, most fantastic of all is the idea that the problem need not even be addressed. That by switching off lights, investing in efficiency technologies that we can somehow cap total electricity usage at current levels or even reduce them, end quote. He notes that we are already using energy far more efficiently than we did as recently as 1990. He says per additional dollar of output, Canada today uses only three quarters as much energy as in 1990.

But now here’s the key and this is what you cannot control. Canada’s total output is up at least 50% more than in 1990. So like per unit, we are all being more efficient, but that doesn’t make a big difference when there’s 50% more of us.

So naturally, you just can’t cut back that much. He says we hear a lot nowadays about conserving resources, and he says, and this is to me the point of the article, something that really differentiated it from most of the stuff I read. He says it’s important to remember that capital and labor are resources too and that they really are the ultimate resources. Labor is econospeak for human life, he says, an electric washer and dryer that shorten dish washing and washing by half an hour a day, 180 hours a year, 9000 hours over an adult lifetime, perform exactly the same function as a medical treatment that extends average life expectancies by a year.

So if you’re not spending a year doing the laundry, you’ve got that year and time to be doing something else that you would rather be doing, and that adds that much more leisure and pleasure to your life. And capital, he says, is likewise a fancy term for money, and money can be used for anything. When we spend more than needed to produce electricity, we’re wasting it. Money that could be invested in new technology, that could aid the poor, that could research new medicines, and goes instead to operate windmills to do the job that nuclear power plant could do at a far lower price.

And to call this conservation, he says, is to spend dollars to save dimes. So why do we do it? We do it because we’re making our energy decisions politically rather than economically. I remember a long time ago when he was senior economist of the Fraser Institute, Dr. Walter Block gave a speech, actually had a freedom party function, and he was talking about how, when you’re talking economically, something being economical, in dollar and cents terms, that generally turns out to be the most efficient way to do it in a number of other ways, in reality, with respect to the environment, with respect to time, with respect to energy, because that’s what economics means. Animals are trying to be economical by conserving energy in the way that they survive in nature.

So it’s really what you’re doing by being economical is conserving, and yet we try to spend money on conservation, as though we’re being conserving by wasting money. But he notes from governments know that voters with only a very hazy idea of how nuclear power works. Fear of technology, they generally associate with nuclear weapons, and so in order to make progress towards the only solution that makes sense, governments defer to ignorant fears and make reverent genuflections to nonsense, just like the Roman emperors performing cynical sacrifices to the gods in whom they never believed in, and that’s sort of a historical fact as well. You see that expressed a lot in some of those biblical epics, when you see the politicians talking in Rome, how they’re going to manipulate the masses by talking about the gods, this god and that god, and that way.

Of course they don’t believe in themselves, but if that’s what the public believes in, that’s what you give them. And at this point he reminds us of the second governor ever to be recalled in all of American history, who was Gray Davis in California, and who failed to allow market forces to govern California’s electricity crisis back in 2001 and 2002. That was when you’ll see here a lot of lefties say, oh no, that was when they deregulated. No, they’d only deregulated their retail rates, they did not deregulate the wholesale rates, and thus they had a shortage of electricity.

And to call that deregulation is a complete misnomer. It’s either all or nothing. You got a free market or you don’t have a free market.

As soon as the government sticks its finger in one place on that whole equation, then the whole thing is no longer really a free market. So it takes a great deal of courage and conviction for rational people to enter the political fray in any meaningful sort of way. And I think this is one of the greatest difficulties that I’ve had in trying to get people interested in politics, because to most of them they think politics is boring at best, irrational at its usual, and evil at its worst. That’s about all I got to say about politics.

I think where you’re seeing what’s happening in this provincial election, we’ll certainly be talking more about that next week and the whole issue of faith-based funding and religion in schools. When we come back after this break, where no man has gone before, and we’ll be telling you something new about the whole Star Trek phenomenon. Back after this.

Clip (Unknown, Speaker 1)

This is fun coming out here. I’m going to be a big star in Canada, and I’m going to do a Canadian version of who wants to be a millionaire called Who Wants $672,000.

Clip (Star Trek: New Voyages, “To Serve All My Days”)

Chekov

No. This has to be reversible. The ship’s computer can access all the medical knowledge the Federation has.

McCoy

I’ll do my best, Pavel. Count on it.

Chekov

That’s not good enough. You have to find a cure. The has to be one.

McCoy

There isn’t.

Chekov

You always have an answer.

Kirk

Lieutenant, maybe you’d better think about putting a few things in order. Just in case.

Chekov

I don’t have to. I’ll report to my station now.

Kirk

Mr. Chekov, in your condition, I think it’s best that you remain here in Sick Bay. Unless Dr. McCoy thinks it’s all right, you may return to your quarters.

Chekov

But I feel fine.

Bob Metz

If you’re a Star Trek fan, and that didn’t quite sound right to you, don’t blame yourself. It’s from an episode that has never been aired, and never will be aired on television. For those of you who are fans of Star Trek, I want to turn you on to a site called www.newvoyages.com. It’s all about a bunch of amateur people, together with some of the classic actors and co-stars in the series Star Trek, who are redoing, believe it or not, the original Star Trek versions with Captain Kirk and all that. You have a whole different cast here.

James Cawley is Captain Kirk, Jeffrey Quinn is Spock, John Kelley, or as Dr. McCoy, Charles Root is Mr. Scott, a whole list of people that you really wouldn’t know. It’s basically amateur act. Now, I know Ira, I’ve burned some copies for you, and that’s legal to do, by the way. They tell you when you download these things, by the way, go ahead and copy them.

You can give them to your friends, they don’t make profit off of these. So what did you think when you saw that? Were you surprised at what these people are doing?

Ira

I was very surprised. Looking at the production and the way the lighting, the camera work, everything was done, this would have easily seen the air probably about 40, 30 years ago. It’s actually amazing, the kind of work that they really put into this.

Bob Metz

I was quite amazed. I would say the special effects are far superior to the original 60s Star Trek series. Would you agree with me on that one?

Ira

Very much so, especially when they have shots of the Enterprise from outside in space, the planets, especially during one episode that you lent me, and it was from the Star Trek Farragut.

Bob Metz

Oh yes, that’s already their own spin-off.

Ira

I was very surprised to see how they were able to not to give too much away, but they were able to see that great big mountain with this big clean-on ray gun on top of it. I was very surprised about that.

Bob Metz

It’s just amazing what they have accomplished with CGI graphics and things like that. What would you say the weakness of these series are, or have you thought about that?

Ira

There’s quite a few weaknesses there. I will give a kudos for them putting together such a, for amateurs, a very well put together episode that really could see airtime. The weaknesses is definitely in the acting though. It’s very monotone, very robotic. The script writing has failed in some points because you can see that in some examples, you see things that normal Star Trek people wouldn’t, I know this is going to start labeling me as a Trekkie or something, but the way they have it written, they start doing things that you normally would never see someone in the Academy would never do.

Bob Metz

I agree with you on what you said about certainly the acting, because you’re dealing with an amateur group of people. By the way, the people who star in these, they’re doing this with their own money and their own time, and apparently the fellow that plays Captain Kirk James Cawley, he’s an Elvis Presley impersonator.

That’s what he does in his real endeavor in life, I guess. I know you haven’t seen that third one yet, the one that I just played the clip from, and I think you’re going to see a huge improvement in every regard. What is amazing, I thought, was that they got Gene Roddenberry Jr. to do the consulting for some of those scripts. They got DC Fontana to write the script for that third one, and she was a writer for the early Star Trek series. Certainly I thought that second one, in harm’s way, had a superior story, even though the acting left something to be desired. I found after watching for about ten minutes, I kind of put it aside. I was actually seeing Captain Kirk and Spock, and some of the cast members are much better.

Ira

Exactly. The great thing about this is that you can’t stop watching, not to give it to tons and tons of credits and to really put a heap of praise on it. There are some faults with it, but you just really can’t stop looking at it, because the way they do the storylines, the way they do everything, it was really passable. Everything is very Star Trek-esque.

Bob Metz

Completely, and I think they’ve done something bold to borrow on the phrase, by even attempting to do something like this. It’s got to have cost them a lot of money. There’s got to be some big budgets there.

This is not cheapo special effects. I think you’ll find the acting in that third episode, which was called To Serve All My Days. It actually starred Walter Koenig playing himself, or playing Chekov, as he did in the original. They had a younger actor, I know you haven’t seen this yet, playing him as the younger version of Chekov. He was a good actor. I think if you watch him, you’ll find this guy might have an acting career ahead of him. They brought some other people in from old Star Trek episodes as well, that people who are regular fans would notice.

Ira

Those were the only weak points I could think of, though, was the casting, the acting, and a little bit of weakness on some of the sets, too. You can tell that some of them are just like in the back of somebody’s garage. But that can be forgivable because of the fact that they, again, they’re amateur actors that are putting forth their own money.

You have to cut corners where you can. When the Evil Dead came out, the same thing there. They just went and found the ideal location and dressed it up as best they could. It’s a real credit to them that they were able to pull this off. The highlights is definitely the special effects with the CGI.

The way everything was written and one thing that always sticks out, and may surprise you, is the music. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Great selection on the music. If that wasn’t taken from any place else and it was composed, very well done.

Bob Metz

If you’re not looking at the screen, you think you’re hearing the original series. I think the actual bridge itself was a great duplication of the original. Of course, they’ve had help from the actual Star Trek folks. They’re giving them the input and stuff like that. Listen, folks, if you’re interested in seeing something new in Star Trek, and it is really compelling to watch, it’s a little bit like mixing a live stage play, I guess, in a way with the broadcast version, almost like you’re mixing it. That’s www..newvoyages.com. They also have another site called www.iftcommand.com, called the International Federation of Trekkers, where they actually take… You can join up, be a member, and I think that’s partially how they fund the shows. You can just download them.

They make great DVDs, and they’re fun to watch. That’s it for that section now. The reason I bring this up today at all is a regular listener of the show. Notice that I do use a lot of Star Trek clips on this show from time to time. I thought that is very true.

I’ve used at least 15 or 16 out of the 160 or 70 clips I’ve actually played on this show so far. Part of the reason is that Star Trek is a cultural icon. It’s a moral barometer, if you will. It’s very recognizable to people, even if they do not follow the series that directly. I think another thing about Star Trek is that it concerns itself with… It’s not really about science fiction. Science fiction, I think, has something going for it that a lot of other forms of art and culture don’t. And that’s that they can project into the future and do things you can’t get away with literalism or literal interpretation like history. There’s at least one episode, if not more, in Star Trek that deal with almost every imaginable philosophical subject you could come up with. I’ve heard so many people talk about Star Trek in the sense of why they think it’s so popular. Oh, it offers a positive view on the future.

Oh, it’s got all these gadgets. That’s some of those reasons. Some of the reasons people don’t watch the series. But what I really think and have thought from the beginning, the reason the series was and continues to be as popular as it is, by the way, it is still among the highest rated on television demographic groups, especially among males between 18 and 55. And even today, that’s why you see it played over and over again on the Space Channel. There’s a couple other channels that play it too. Even a channel here, I think, plays.

And by Star Trek now, I mean all of the five series that they actually did. All the same things, the same reaction. These things just play over and over again. And that is because, just like mythology and parables say from the Bible, they are. That’s almost what they are. They are little philosophical messages, and that’s what really appeals. Those philosophical messages, the moral, the ethics behind what’s going on in whatever they’re talking about. Where else could you do, for example, take Captain Kirk, and you split him in two when he beams up, eh? And then you can have his evil side and his good side, and you can talk about the relationship between those two things in a very visual way that you could never do if you were doing it with reality TV or something like that. And of course, then you can make philosophic statements, and we discover, for example, in that episode, that some aggression is important for your survival.

If you’re just passive and you sit around and don’t do anything, that’s the fastest way to death. And that might be a controversial issue. They can, of course, deal with very controversial issues.

Let’s say racism, which was a huge issue when the original Star Trek came out on the air in the 60s. I don’t know if you remember the times, but here we were in London, not far from Detroit. The city was half burning with racial riots. The same thing was happening in Tampa and Florida.

I was actually down there when it was happening, and it’s a weird thing to see a big chunk of a city burning, and you’re just a tourist going by on your way to Disney World or something. But dealing with aliens and different species, you could comment on issues that have to do with differences racially and culturally here among the one race that exists, the human race. And Star Trek was able to do that. It was also the first series on television that today might be called politically correct by mixing races. We had different people on the bridge of the enterprise and things like that, and they weren’t always, they weren’t all white people like it had been up until then. And that, by the way, at the time was extraordinarily politically incorrect to do. Gene Roddenberry had a heck of a time fighting with NBC and a number of the other broadcasters to even get away with it.

And when it finally happened, of course, we find that in fact they were very much in sync with the public. I think Star Trek too is a form of art that I would call real art compared to the stuff I was talking about last week. The subsidized art.

It’s not government subsidized. It was put together with real money, with the people who were actually working on it. Something else you may not know, and I know this indirectly from other books I’ve read, but many of the writers of Star Trek were extremely, what I would call free thinkers, let us say. And many of them were very explicitly influenced by people like Ayn Rand and other free thinkers.

And it came out in many of the basic devices on Star Trek. You know, you had the prime directive, for example, which is sort of a way of saying laissez-faire. Laissez-faire capitalism. It was a policy of non-interference. Not non-involvement, but non-interference.

You leave people alone to make their own decisions and choose their own course. We had something called the Federation, which in a sense was the United Nations of outer space. Only this one didn’t allow criminal nations in its membership like our United Nations does. And Captain Kirk actually used the term individual rights and talked about freedom and that it’s the nature of man to be free and that we cannot be held in chains, that kind of thing.

You’d see issues of principles versus expediency and defenses, things like that. Now, when you get back to the science fiction aspect of it, I think, again, here, that people misunderstand what a lot of the devices, and I’m talking about the science fiction devices in Star Trek really were. For example, you have the transporter. You had the warp drive.

You got time travel. Most people would say, well, these are science fiction devices. And I’m going to say, no, they’re not really science fiction devices. They are dramatic devices used to either help convey a moral message in a symbolic way. And it saved a lot of time in terms of, for example, when you did something in time travel, you could show different outcomes of cause and effect. What if you did it this way, and then they go back in time? Well, what if you did it this way?

Then this effect happens. You couldn’t do those things in real life, of course. We suspend our disbelief, and that’s what I think they call it in theater, the suspension of disbelief, when we accept these devices without letting them interfere with our appreciation of what is real in the rest of the show.

And I know some people are unable to do this. All they see is gadgets and phasers fired and weird aliens and stuff like that, and that just turns them off. My father was like that. He could not watch an episode of Star Trek. I have told a story before about how one day he told us that he didn’t like, couldn’t watch that show because of the guy with the mask. And we were all wondering what he was talking about, and it turned out after prodding him for a while he was talking about Worf. But Klingon, he just didn’t see that guy as an alien.

He saw him as some guy walking in the room wearing a mask, and it kind of hurt the show for him. So sometimes they write it all off to being some monster show or horror fantasy that has no bearing whatever on their day-to-day life. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data is not an android. Data is a dramatic device. It allows the writers to examine the human condition from a perspective not open to them in normal, realistic drama. So Data is able to examine issues from emotion to humor to art to human behavior. And comment on them by combining the intelligence of an educated genius with the innocence of a child who questions everything around him.

And that really gives us a way of looking at ourselves through the eyes of this supposed android. And of course there’s the biggie. I’ve got so many other things I could say about this one.

I’m going to cut off with this one. Star Trek is storytelling, and it’s not explanatory. And people prefer stories to explanations.

An explanation of something, whether it’s social or scientific theory, really only affects and persuades a very limited number of people. You even see politics as a perfect example, whereas a story illustrates a principle in action demonstrating it from cause to consequence in a way that’s related to experience rather than just to knowledge and to theory. And I think that’s why parables and stories are so effective in influencing people. From the Bible to the commercials you watch on TV, the principle applies. You don’t explain why the car works. You just demonstrate that it’s fast, it’s beautiful, and you really need to have it.

You sell the sizzle, not the steak, as they used to say. And these stories, whether they regard them as myths and legends, they are about truths, not about factual reality as such. And that’s what makes them timeless, because truth is a timeless quality.

Whereas the context of the day fades with time. And I really think that’s one of the reasons that Star Trek has lasted so long. Just one last story about Star Trek before I go here.

I actually attended one Star Trek convention. The first one they ever had, I took my daughter and some friends way back in Toronto, and they held it at, I think this was in the late 80s, early 90s at the airport hotel in Toronto. It was a disaster from an organizer’s point of view, and I hear the organizers got fired because of it. They just didn’t expect the crowds they got. And the special guest, the big draw at the time was Brent Spiner, and he was the featured attraction. And by the way, Star Trek: The Next Generation, was still in production at this time.

Okay, so it was the only other one there. And it was interesting, it was winter, I believe it was February, and Brent Spiner arrived late from another convention. He had just been attending in Montreal, so we were all waiting for him at about 2 o’clock, but he didn’t show up till about 4 or 5, because there were some snowstorms in the area. But he got there by 5, and there was a huge crowd there, a little bit antsy from sitting there all day. And the way it was worth it, folks, these actors can really entertain, and they can be very personable even in front of a crowd of thousands.

And what was very interesting, what he told us at the time, was that here he was, it was about 5 o’clock in Toronto, and he had to be on the set in LA at 4 a.m. the next morning to put makeup on, and then get ready for shooting around 7 o’clock. And when they tell you, they actually do not read the scripts in advance, they do not know what they are, they don’t even know what the show is about. They’re given one line at a time, and every camera angle is shot individually, so say somebody says boo to somebody and the other guy reacts, well that’s two separate shots. They have to flip the cameras around, do everything, and it’s just like almost putting silly putty clay pieces together. And it really shows you how good an actor has to be to make it look like it’s smooth. You ever see that episode where Data played three characters, Brent Spiner played his brother, Lore, and I forget who the father was, I forget what his name was, Dr. Noonien Soong or something like that.

And when you watch the show, you think you’re watching three completely different actors. So if you’re wondering why I do use Star Trek clips, you might even hear one later today, if we do get to it, but maybe not. That’s one of the reasons. It’s a very identifiable and timeless type of a show that really relates to a lot of issues. Now when we come back after this break, we’re going to be getting into part two of a subject that I talked about last week, and that was socialism and the whole Nazi and Hitler situation. We’re going to go to the other side of the coin today and talk about fascism right after this.

Ira

Did you go as a Klingon, Bob?

Bob Metz

No, I’m afraid I’m not that big of a Trekkie. No, sorry.

Clip (Saturday Night Live)

William Shatner

I’m not a Starfleet commander. Or TJ Hooker. I don’t live on Starship NCC-1701, or own a phaser.

I don’t know anyone named Bones, Sulu or Spock. Well, no, I’ve never had green alien sex, but I’m sure it’d be quite an evening.

Clip (Radio Days, Radio)

Broadcaster

This is our advance on American. It’s John Jenkins broadcasting from London, and the bombs are falling even as we speak. And the morale of the boys is good here at Ronald Connell, despite heavy losses.

Clip (Radio Days)

Speaker 1

What do you think, Martin? You think Hitler’s going to win?

Speaker 2

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of bringing new life into the world. I’ll tell you that. Come on, lights out.

Speaker 3

Oh, God, another air raid drill.

Speaker 4

The Nazis and the communists give me the reds.

Speaker 5

Stick to your fish. What do they want those Nazis to slaughter everyone on the planet?

Speaker 6

The Nazis, the communists. Will it be better off without any of them? You know W.C. Fields said, don’t you? He said to settle a war, the leaders of the countries involved should meet in the stadium. Fight it out with socks filled with horse manure.

Bob Metz

Well, that would be a unique way to fight out a war. I don’t know that they’d be one of those situations where what if they gave a war and nobody came? Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right.

I’m Bob Metz, and this is CHRW 94.9 FM. Last week I talked a little bit about, actually the subject was Hitler as a socialist, and I talked about how all the government policies and plans of the Nazis were very socialistic. They had everything, all the benefits that we seem to enjoy in Canada today from socialized health care, workers’ compensation, affirmative action.

You can go through the whole list. And of course the name was also the National Socialists. But of course most people think about the Nazi regime as being a fascist regime, and I thought maybe this would be the time to try and distinguish the difference between the two and perhaps how it might reflect to us. And perhaps I can do it best by relating to a story that was actually originally, or a parable I guess that was actually originally told by a fellow named Leonard E. Read. And he basically argued, did you know that if you take a frog and you put it in a pot of cold water on top of the stove, then gradually turn up the heat, gradually, the frog will actually stay in the water without trying to jump out of the pot. In fact, if you turn up the heat slowly enough, it will actually cook to death without ever trying to escape.

Now I’m not going to recommend that anyone try this at home, but that apparently is the way that parable goes. And so you might be thinking, well, dumb frog, right? Well, maybe. But that has nothing to do with why the frog seems willing to die. Unfortunately, the poor frog dies simply because the change in heat is so slow that it doesn’t realize that it is in an environment which is dangerous to its well-being. And I think in the same way right now, each of us is, like a frog in that pot, very uncomfortably warm, yet comfortable, water, which is about to become even hotter. As each day passes, those who have the power to turn the heat up or down, our elected politicians increasingly choose to turn the heat up.

More laws, more taxes, more restrictions, more controls by politicians, and of course less and less control for citizens and for taxpayers. So I think it’s just a matter of time before the political waters in Ontario come to a boil. And our well-being is about to be threatened by a political environment that has a nasty name with nasty connotations, and that name is fascism. And I think it’s time most of us woke up to the fact that fascism is increasingly becoming a dominant philosophy in Ontario’s mixed economy system. I know some of you are saying, well, that’s a little strong, a little strong word to use. It’s a little too strong to apply to Canadian politics because, of course, what happened to Hitler and what happened in Europe during World War II just couldn’t happen here. And then anybody who would use that word is being unreasonably alarmist like, hey, McGuinty isn’t Hitler and Tory isn’t Hitler and Harper or any of the rest of them.

But remember the frog. Had the change in Canada’s political environment that has taken a generation to condition us to its acceptance otherwise occurred in, say, five years, we’d all be very aware of its nature. The change in temperature would have been much more noticeable. We would be much more able to sense how radically we have shifted away from the fundamental workings of a free, tolerant and prosperous society and fallen right into the clutches of the very ideology that thousands of Canadians fought and died to protect us from.

Now, of course, I’m not going to say that Ontario’s predominantly fascist, certainly not yet, but our current mixed economy, which is part capitalist, which is private property, individual freedom and choice, part socialist, which is state ownership and monopoly, and increasingly fascist state control of private property. I think it’s coming to a boil. And if we’re not careful, that frog, which is us, just might croak. Increasingly, the political direction here in Ontario is towards fascism. You see more state control of private property and private choice. It’s important for us to realize and recognize that politically the distinguishing characteristic that separates a socialist policy or communist, which is essentially the same thing, state ownership and control from a fascist policy is not to be found in their similar philosophies. They’re both state control. They are both on the left. It is totally incorrect to say that fascism is extreme right wing.

It is no such thing. Fascism is the other side of the socialism coin. It is a left ideology and it is the general result of all left wing ideologies. I don’t think you’ll find too many communist nations that don’t eventually turn quite fascist because they’re forced to for a number of reasons. But what separates communism and socialism from fascism is the role in which private property plays and how they look at it as the means of production. Whereas socialists would uphold the doctrine of government ownership and control of the means of production, which means no private property, total government control.

Fascists, on the other hand, simply uphold the doctrine of state control. Dispensing with the need to consider the status of property at all. After all, in practice, control is ownership. Look, you might own your car, but if somebody else is telling you where to go with it, how to drive it, what you can do with it, don’t they really own it? Does it really matter whose name is on the title deed?

And that’s sort of where we’re going today. For example, you might compare a control over private property. You might think this is strong, but when our politicians banned smoking in public places in bars where you had a choice to go in, if you wanted to or not, smokers should be in a free society, allowed to associate, even if it’s not just in their own home. Regardless of what you might think about smoking, but that is a policy that one might call fascist, and it wouldn’t make a society fascist, but that policy by itself would be because it’s state control over private property over something that would otherwise be legal in most cases. And so though they may call themselves socialist, conservatives, or liberals, don’t be surprised by most politicians’ very eager support of all kinds of fascist policies. Rent controls, for example, is a fascist policy where you’re telling a landlord who owns his property what he can actually charge people to rent from him, versus instead, why not just have the government take over the guy’s building and they can charge what they want then?

What would the difference really be? Of course, and this is what Hitler understood, he said, and that’s why he was anti-communist, because he understood that if a person didn’t have a personal interest in the property that their name was on, they wouldn’t look after it. This is one of the major things you see in socialist countries, the deterioration of the public, the commons, really, because if everyone owns something, then no one owns it, and no one really has an interest in protecting it. Official bilingualism, for example, I would consider a fascist policy because it talks about the kind of language you can use in day-to-day parlance. Pay equity laws would be one.

Sunday shopping laws, when we had them. Censorship certainly is. Gun control, minimum wage laws, forced union dues, hiring quotas, discrimination laws, drug prohibition, these are all fascist policies. And I guess it depends how many you have, whether you want to decide whether we live in a fascist state or not. What each of these policies has in common is that each represents a control on private property, contract, or choice. And whether you agree with them or disagree with them, both in theory and practice, these controls can properly be referred to as being fascist. And once a society has enough of such policies in place, there is very little that can be done to prevent the same type of catastrophe that enveloped Europe during the Second World War. Now, of course, one, two, or three, or even four, fascist policies is not a fascist state make, necessarily. Just how many have to be in place before we can no longer avoid that label. I suppose it’s a matter of personal judgment. And I’ll leave that one for you to decide. Right after this, we’ll come back to talking a little bit about war and why we should be knowing a little bit more about war.

Clip (Dennis Miller)

When were nuclear weapons taken off the table? What is this like? Our mother’s good China syndrome? We’re just never going to use them? And you know something? Don’t say you’re never going to use it. What good does that do? You got to act flaky about it.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The High Ground”)

Picard

History has shown us that strength may be useless when faced with terrorism.

Bob Metz

There is another one of those Star Trek clips talking about terrorism and war. And it’s from the future and here we are in the past, quite relative to Star Trek. I saw an article in the National Post, an article, a full page feature, was called Why Study War? Written by Victor Davis Hanson, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution down in the United States. And I guess he was expressing some concern that North Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters and really don’t understand how wars are conducted and that the state of affairs is very troubling, he says, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war and especially now in an age of weapons of mass annihilation more than ever. And he says, this is particularly true in the academic realm, that the academic, it’s a tremendous neglect of a study of war.

It’s even more acute today than it has been in the past. I’m sure my guest, John Thompson from the McKenzie Institute who was on the show and who studies this very subject and terrorism and stuff like that would agree. Yet he says popular culture displays an extraordinary enthusiasm for things military. There’s a military history channel. Hollywood churns out a whole steady supply of blockbuster war movies, whether it’s Saving Private Ryan to 300, you have historical reenactment societies at stage, history’s great battles, from the Roman legions to the Wehrmacht.

And I have friends that are really into this thing too, doing the historical reenactments and they go to all the events that are held all around North America. And the author comments that the public itself may be drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice and because of an interest in technology and things of that nature. But he asks a question and he says, this is one that really needs to be answered and that’s why do wars break out and how do they end and why do the winners win and the losers lose?

How can we best avoid wars or at least contain their worst effects? And this is an interesting comment he makes. He says, quote, perhaps what bothers us about wars though isn’t just their horrific lethality, but also that people choose to wage them, which makes them seem kind of avoidable, like a flu virus or, unlike rather, a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls are unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war is very utilitarian and, as British strategist Basil Liddell Hart put it, quote, war is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that some good may come of it. War or threats of wars have put an end to chattel slavery, to Nazism, to fascism, to Japanese militarism and Soviet communism.

And finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. Well, that’s an interesting comment. I really don’t think that when you are saying that you have to do evil in the hope that some good will come out of it, I don’t think that’s evil.

I think that’s good. I think it’s a misnomer to call the person who’s playing the defensive role evil. But if there’s one thing I’ve been learning from history, we never seem to learn from history. And just to briefly comment on a quick summary of really what does cause war, I refer you to Ayn Rand again who wrote a terrific essay called The Roots of War, in an essay that appeared as long ago as June 66. And she said that statism is the cause of wars, the belief in the things I was just talking about, fascism, socialism, things like that. Because statism, which is basically more government rights and group rights rather than individual rights, is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves people no choice but to fight to seize political power. You’re either going to be robbed or be robbed.

You’re going to be either killed or killed or you have to kill yourself. There is no peace within an enslaved nation. In full dictatorship, statism takes the form of bloody purges, sort of like in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. In a mixed economy, which is what we live in, it takes the form of pressure group warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from other groups.

And does that sound familiar to you? I think we call those, that pressure group thing, we call them elections here in the country. And in order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate and destroy one another. Statism needs war. A free country does not. Statism, whether socialism or fascism, survives by looting. A free country survives by production. So Rand’s conclusion and her summary on that whole issue is that laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and therefore the only system that bans force from social relationships. And by the very nature of its basic principles and interests, it’s the only system that’s really fundamentally opposed to war.

And then she reminds us of this. Quote, let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history. And that was a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

99 years. So remember that private citizens, whether rich or poor, businessmen or workers, they’ve got no power to start a war. Only governments can do that.

And yet, it is not limited government that today’s peace lovers are advocating. Think about that for a minute and keep that in mind for the rest of the week. We’ll be back next week talking about faith funding, religion and the whole kettle of fish that’s just opened up this week in the election. So, between now and then, be right, do right, stay right, think right and act right. Take care. We’ll see you next week.

Clip (Saturday Night Live)

William Shatner

I speak English and French. Not Klingon. I drink Labatt’s, not Romulan ale.

And when someone says to me, live long and prosper, I seriously mean it when I say get a life.

My doctor’s name is not McCoy, it’s Ginsburg.

And tribbles were puppets, not real animals. Puppets! And when I speak, I never ever talk like every word is its own sentence. Thank you.