WILLIAM HARWOOD
For more than thirty years I held an executive position with a performing artist whose stage show played to more Canadians in every province than any other touring entertainer in Canadian history. There are many reasons for his eventual retirement, but competition from a steadily increasing number of television channels was certainly a factor. Since that factor also affected other touring entertainers, such transferable skills as I might have possessed did not find a ready market. My employment insurance was quickly exhausted, and I was obliged to seek social assistance.
My need for government handouts occurred at a time when Alberta’s Premier was a Quisling named Ralph Kline, a self-serving parasite who was determined to remain the biggest turd in the cesspool at whatever cost. To achieve that end he pandered to the theocrats of the Christian Taliban who had taken over his allegedly “Progressive” Conservative party, to such an extent that he appointed as Social Services Minister perhaps the most dangerous religious fanatic Canadian politics has ever produced, a scientifically illiterate, unteachable theofacist named Stockwell Day. And Day’s first act as Ayatollah of Handouts was to put a contract on the old, the sick, and the unemployed by reducing welfare benefits to the point where recipients could pay rent or buy food, but not both.
It would be going beyond the evidence to conclude that Day tried to murder the hundreds of welfare recipients (including me) whose ability to house and feed themselves he took away. More likely he saw his cabinet sinecure as a tool that he could use to “convert” welfare recipients to his theofascist religion, by forcing them to seek assistance from church-run programs that dispensed an amalgam of food and proselytizing sermons. Given his belief that a book of 2,000 year-old fairy tales was nonfiction, he almost certainly rationalized that nobody would starve or freeze to death unless his imaginary Sky Führer wanted them to die. And like all religious maniacs from Torquemada to Osama bin Laden, he did not question the dogma that, “When God does it, it is not evil.”
I wrote a letter to the Red Deer Advocate in which I pointed out that, at a different point in history, theofacists such as Day and Preston Manning who were currently trying to turn Canada into a mirror image of Khomeini’s Iran would themselves have been burned at the stake as heretics. Day telephoned me, not for the purpose of defending his position, but to ask whether I considered all non-liberals pond scum. The call was accidentally terminated before I could respond to that question, but in case he is still interested the answer is that I view all non-liberals as morally retarded evolutionary throwbacks. I seriously doubt that, then or now, he was aware that his contract on the unemployed affected me personally. That does not change the reality that I only outlived Day’s attempt to kill me by accepting money she could little afford out of my mother’s old age pension. Whether any other victims of the contract Day put on us in fact died, I have been unable to ascertain.
Stockwell Day is an embarrassment even to other theofacists. When he switched to federal politics, and replaced Preston Manning as leader of the “Reform” Party, a revival of Ernest Manning’s Social Credit theocracy that had enslaved Alberta for half a century, a dozen Reform Party members refused to remain allied to a maniac they recognized as not sparking on all neurons. They forced Day to hold a leadership convention, and that convention replaced him with Stephen Harper.
Stephen Harper is not the most inept Prime Minister Canada has ever had. John Turner, Joe Clark and Kim Campbell far outstrip him for that title. But he is the least intelligent, less than ten I.Q points above the certifiable moron George W. Bush with whom he has much in common. And while Canadian history is not my specialty, I am reasonably certain that there has never been a PM with less integrity or moral backbone.
Harper is on record as wanting to place a “firewall” around Alberta to keep out such un-Albertan ideas as tolerance, human rights, equality of all Canadians, and plain humanity. But while he is merely a conscienceless parasite rather than a mad dog like his predecessor, and does not share the Taliban element of his caucus’s determination to restore heretic burning, he is assuredly a Quisling. His appointment of Stockwell Day to a cabinet post, knowing full well that Day’s rightful place is in the Cuckoo’s Nest where Nurse Ratched could prevent him from passing on his mind-AIDS to the uninfected, constituted a bribe to the thousands of mad dogs, mainly in Alberta, who continue to see Day as their spokesman and the Taliban’s Afghanistan as their ideal society.
Day is by any reasonable definition a fanatic theofascist who sees the enslavement of the human race to his prototype Hitler in the sky as a sacred duty that must take precedence over all other considerations. But if he were to be put on trial for the attempted murder of the welfare recipients he was unwilling to feed and house, would a reasonable jury find him “not guilty by reason of insanity”? To answer that, it is necessary to consider the evidence a defense lawyer would be bound to offer.
That Day is a religious fundamentalist is not in dispute. His expressed belief that dinosaurs coexisted with humans on an earth that is approximately six thousand years old caused a commentator to write, “I would like to remind Stockwell Day that the Flintstones was not a documentary.” Day has never to my knowledge claimed that the earth is flat, even though the Book he quotes as a justification for rejecting the discoveries of several centuries of scientists says that it is—in fourteen places. As a political candidate he ran TV ads denouncing the Liberal government for “wasting money” on HIV research, the rationale being that he sees AIDS as his Sky Führer’s punishment for not sharing his lifestyle preferences. As an Alberta cabinet minister, he argued against publicly funded abortions for rape victims. And he made clear that he is willing to deprive women of sovereignty over their own bodies if a majority or a referendum permits him to do so.
I am in full agreement with Dr. Thomas Szasz that, while “insane” may be a useful metaphor to describe the intellectual limitations of an individual whose mindset and observable behavior are so undisciplined that they appear to be involuntary even though they are not, “mental illness” does not exist and “insanity,” by either the medical or legal definition, does not exist. Religious maniacs like Stockwell Day may be able to rationalize that right and wrong are whatever his imaginary playmate’s dead scriptwriter said they are, “heads it’s a sin and tails it’s a virtue,” and have no ability to recognize that “wrong” means hurting someone unnecessarily, no matter what fairy-tale character says otherwise. But he is not unaware that there is a difference between good and evil, even if he has an insane (metaphor) concept of what that difference is. Would a jury see that as evidence that he is not insane? As long as there is little prospect of his crime against humanity, attempting to replace democracy with theocracy, leading to his being prosecuted, the question is academic. But I do find myself wondering.
William Harwood is the author of over 600 articles for freethought publications in nine countries, and 45 books, including God, Jesus and the Bible: The Origin and Evolution of Religion, and The Protestant Bible Correctly Translated.