I Don't Accept Guilt Either

The Michaels, Mark & Me

May 10th, 2009

Michael Ignatieff and Michael Coren both hold the same views of our native Indians. The Michaels believe that we should feel responsible for the deaths of the two little native girls at the Yellow Quill reserve in Saskatchewan last January, because we wicked white men introduced the fire water to the poor but noble savages.

Which as most of you readers know, I believe is total horseshit.

In Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff’s much touted and barely read book True Patriot Love, he opines thusly:

To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.

No, Iggy. It is NOT a story about us. It is a story about a corrupt way of life that breeds substance abuse through a lack of self-reliance, and it is the story about two little children that had no reason to believe they were in any danger at the inept hands of their drunken lout of a father. This is not a story about me, and it is most certainly not a story about you, you arrogant Harvard professor/Canadian of convenience. How do I know this is NOT a story about me? Because from the time I understood the difference between “reservation” and “real world”, I have chosen the latter and railed against the former as being a hotbed of lethargic iniquity. Not a damn bit of good can come to any child of the rez system, so long as touchy-feely do-gooders like Ignatieff and his ilk continue to feed the depravity out of some kind of racist white guilt.

I’m not as eloquent as Mark Steyn, who probably rarely-if-ever uses the term “horseshit”. Yet we seem to be pretty much simpatico on Ignatieff’s hypocrisy.

As to the idea that it’s “a story about us,” no, it’s a story about him: the vandalism he does to the memory of Kaydance and Santana Pauchay, the tasteless opportunism of cashing in on their fate by conscripting a grimly particular episode to the cheap generalities of societal guilt, the horrible glimpse inside the husk of a man once genuinely engaged by Iraq and Bosnia and reduced by ambition to peddling what he knows to be bilge.

To be sure, one could argue that it is “about us” in the sense that Christopher Pauchay wouldn’t be taking his daughters for 50-below midnight strolls in diapers had the white man not unloaded the boat half a millennium ago. Or, alternatively, it’s “about us” in the sense that the lavish government “compassion” and neo-segregationism of the last half-century have inflicted far more damage on Canada’s Aboriginal population than the bead-sellers, mythical smallpox bearers, Victorian imperialists and Christian missionaries could have accomplished in their wildest dreams. I naturally incline to the latter view, which is no doubt “racist.” But isn’t the real racism Ignatieff’s? In seeking, by his weaselly language and revolting argument, to burden all of us with Pauchay’s actions, the Liberal leader is being the quintessential New Racist: he and I are sophisticated human beings who are accountable for our actions, but Christopher Pauchay is excused. To Ignatieff, Pauchay is not fully human, but something closer to a lame animal whom one cannot reasonably hold responsible for his moral choices. If I had to be on the receiving end of whitey’s condescension, I think I’d rather be a “noble savage” than an incorrigible one.

So what has this to do with talk show host Michael Coren? Some of you may remember my appearance on his show back in march, when the subject of Christopher Pauchay’s sentencing circle came up.

Michael was pulling the whole moral relativism that surrounds the alcoholism of the native population, and decrying that us honkeys had a hand in the deaths of Kaydance and Santana. While I can’t exactly remember what I was doing in January 2008, I am fairly certain I was not out in Yellow Quill, either forcing booze down Pauchay’s throat or dragging his nearly-naked daughters out into -50 temperatures. And I will not be tarred with the brush of guilt on account of my white skin and green eyes.

Were you? Was Coren or Ignatieff? Of course not. The deaths of Kaydance and Santana mean nothing to them, or really to the rest of us beyond another tragic tale in the news, yet they must be seen to be making the appropriate mouth noises concerning the natives. The drunk, slatternly and morally corrupt natives whiling away lost lives in government funded (but not enforced, never enforced) concentration camps.

If Christopher Pauchay had been a typical Canadian in Brampton or Fredrickton who had committed this grievous act of negligence, he wouldn’t be pitied and my disgust would be shared by others. I wouldn’t be pooh-pooed for pointing out that he is a corrupt man in a corrupt system, yet should still be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. No, because he is one of the red men, we must coddle him and flagellate ourselves for ever having been born in Canada, descendants of wicked Europeans who raped and pillaged their way across Pauchay’s virgin lands.

To this, I cry horseshit. I didn’t kill those babies. Neither did Michael Ignatieff, Michael Coren or Mark Steyn. And I will not do penance for a crime of someone else’s commission.

Posted by: Right Girl