Sometimes democracy can seem so boring. Especially when compared to the strongmen of the non-western world.
For instance, here’s an image of a dramatic non-democratic leader in his early years:
That’s impressive. That’s Moammar Gadhafi, who’s still in power and who is presently seeming just as defiant as in this image here, although he now wears goofy glasses, has silly hair and dons clownish clothes. As silly as he might appear, he still knows how to grab the spotlight. Back in the 1970s he was staring down we evil western imperialists. That got him a lot of attention. This time he’s killing piles of his own people and vowing to fight to the death. That gets attention too. This might all seem morally appalling, but it’s certainly exciting stuff.
Then there’s the dullness of democracy. Here’s a quintessential image from today:
Not quite as defiant, eh? Not a lot of drama here. And certainly neither of these gentlemen is sending fighter-bombers to attack his own people. On the left is Stan Struthers, Manitoba’s agriculture minister. On the right is Gerry Ritz, Canada’s agriculture Minister. And the two had just, this morning, announced joint funding of $26 million to help Manitoba hog farmers adapt to tough new provincial regulations that will stop winter manure spreading and gravely constrict the amount of phosphorus in manure that can be spread on land.
It was a smiles and friendly words to each other, with nary a snotty statement aimed by either at his counterpart. As Ritz noted to me afterwards, when I noted to him that the two levels of government seemed to be getting along extremely well together, “Stan and I always have good discussions about the wheat board, but at the end of the day we all recognize the fact that we’re in this together. It’s a team approach. When it comes to agriculture it’s a shared approach. We look at each others’ strengths and work with those.”
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Well, there you have it: good will all around. Typical of a democracy.
That’s a good thing, most people will think, because that kind of cooperation might be able to keep the hog producers of the Red River valley alive for a few more years, and allow us to go on being major exporters of pork. This is, after all, an incredibly good time to be a commodity exporter. Almost everything right now has very high prices, so for farmers with crops and meat it’s a good time in the world.
As I have so often noted in this space, the era we’re living in now seems to me so much like the early 1970s that it’s eerie. So many conditions are the same. That image of Gadhafi above I pulled from a presentation I made a couple of years ago, in which I argued that we’re living in an era that’s likely to either mimic the 1970s or the 1930s. Two years ago I wasn’t sure which it was going to be, and I’m still not sure. It sure seems a heck of a lot like the early 1970s, with skyrocketing crop prices, high meat prices, oil prices surging high, the Middle East making us all scared, and economic stagnation afflicting the democratic western world.
It’s uncanny how many circumstances are the same as the early 1970s, although it makes sense if you string everything together. High commodity prices put lots of pressure on countries around the world, and what causes recession here can cause war and unrest elsewhere. I hope for the sake of we who live in western Canada we get to re-live those good bits of the 1970s, when crop prices were high and cash from the rest of the world flowed here, rather than the other way around, which is more typical.
Most of all I hope that our politicians keep smiling and getting along, like Gerry and Stan in the picture above. The nice thing about democracy is that we can generally blunder our way through these tempestuous periods without bloodshed, handling the stresses and strains as they come up. As we’ve seen from the character in the image atop this post, non-democracies don’t get the chance to unelect their leaders. What they get is defiant buffoons, dragging everyone down.
So let’s raise our voice in praise of political dulness! It’s a heck of a lot better than the alternative we’re seeing too much of overseas these days.
