Pensioners with sticky fingers

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:33 PM - 0 Comments

Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

Forgoing gardening or trips to the Canadian Rockies, Japanese retirees have taken up an unlikely pastime—shoplifting. One in four people (26.1 per cent) arrested for the crime in 2010 in Japan were 65 or older, according to a report from the country’s National Police Agency. It’s a record high, nearly equal to the number of teens arrested in the same period (27.1 per cent).

The items most frequently stolen by pensioners, according to the report, are food and clothing. And the trend is being blamed on a three-pronged predicament: Japan’s flattened economy, the eroding tradition of multi-generational households, and a life expectancy that is normally the envy of most countries (by 2050, it’s projected that 40 per cent of Japanese will be over the age of 65). “Senior citizens likely commit shoplifting not only for financial reasons but also out of a sense of isolation,” a Tokyo police official told the Mainichi Daily News. Of 119 seniors busted by Tokyo police last year, 63 told officers they had “nothing to live for,” and 49 said they had no friends. To discourage the trend, thieving pensioners are being encouraged to volunteer in their communities.

Daddy dearest

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

Robert Harding Picture Library/Alamy/Getstock

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl retired from politics nearly a decade ago, but the details of his turbulent family life are just beginning to surface in a memoir penned by his estranged eldest son. In his book, Live Your Life or Be Lived: First Steps on the Path to Reconciliation, Walter Kohl, the son of Kohl and his late first wife Hannelore, creates a damning portrait of his father as a single-minded career politician and an absent husband and parent.

Excerpts from the book, published last week in the German magazine Focus, describe in vivid detail the strained father-son relationship as the senior Kohl climbed the ladder of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party to the chancellorship: “Politics was and is my father’s real home,” Walter writes. “His true family is called CDU, not Kohl.”

Walter’s decision to publish intimate revelations while his father is still alive could further complicate Kohl’s already divisive reputation. Widely regarded as a political powerhouse, he had a 16-year tenure (the longest of any German chancellor since Otto von Bismarck) that oversaw the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany and the creation of the European Union through the Maastricht Treaty. But his reputation was tarnished in 1999 with allegations that the CDU had received illegal donations during Kohl’s leadership. The charges were never proven in court, but paved the way for then-CDU secretary general and current Chancellor Angela Merkel to advocate for the party’s break with Kohl over the scandal. Kohl officially resigned from politics when he left the Bundestag in 2002.

Now 80 and living a largely private life, Kohl is riling politicians and residents of Dresden over the possible erection of a monument in his name. Germany’s Der Spiegel reported the local CDU chapter is pushing for a plaque to pay tribute to a speech Kohl made there in December 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to hundreds of thousands of citizens of what was still East Germany. The centre-left Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Greens are opposed to the monument.

During his political career, Kohl crafted the image of a family man. But Walter claims that is a lie, and that the familial rift intensified in 2001 when Hannelore committed suicide at the family’s home in Ludwigshafen. The final straw for Walter came in 2008, when he found out about his father’s second marriage, to Maike Richter, through a telegram. He wasn’t invited to the wedding, and learned the details of the ceremony from a tabloid newspaper. After that, Walter severed all ties with his father.

Still inscrutably private, Kohl hasn’t commented publicly on his son’s book. Though Walter says he’s made peace with their estrangement, he’s still haunted by the duplicity of Kohl’s image as a once-revered politician and the absent father he barely knew. “Every boy dreams of a father with whom he can explore the world, who would go camping with him or play soccer,” he writes. “Every boy hopes to have a father who is also there for him. I was not able to reach my father.”

The rabbis versus fox

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:23 PM - 2 Comments

A coalition of 400 U.S. rabbis took out a one-page advertisement in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to chastise the media mogul for “unacceptable” references to Nazis and the Holocaust made by employees at Murdoch’s other News Corp. outlet, Fox News. “We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media,” read the Jan. 27 open letter. “But that is not what we have seen at Fox News.”

In particular, the offenders worthy of sanctioning were Fox News head Roger Ailes and conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who has compared U.S. Democrats to Nazis, and referred to George Soros as a “Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps” during a series on the liberal billionaire. “It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps,” the letter stated. “And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree.” Ad space for the letter was paid for by the Jewish Funds for Justice, a non-profit advocacy group that has previously received money from Soros.

The long road home

By Erica Alini - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 1 Comment

Whether it takes two days of queuing up, using a mannequin to keep your place in line, or stripping naked in the middle of the train station to protest the wait, the Chinese are determined to get home. A record 230 million people, almost seven times Canada’s population, were expected to board trains, buses and airplanes during the two weeks before the Chinese New Year, which this year falls on Feb. 3—a total of 2.85 billion trips over a 40-day period. It is the world’s largest annual human migration, and a yearly odyssey for people trying to reunite with their families for what is China’s most important festivity.

Scenes of mayhem included people waiting hours for tickets in -10° C weather, police stopping a bus designed for 48 passengers packed with 68 and, tragically, another vehicle in northwestern China slipping on icy roads and plunging into a ravine, killing 11 and injuring 22. Still, for those who got a ticket, the mood was festive, even if the trip involved a 10-hour ride and no place to sit.

'You know the price for snitching'

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:10 PM - 28 Comments

In the last three weeks, Cindor Reeves’ relatives in Liberia have been attacked by men looking for him and his wife. They abducted four children who are still missing. The following email is from his mother-in-law:

I don’t know if I will be alive before this message reach you. Last night some arm man came to my house,and toke my four ( 4) children away. They came and met some people in the house and wanted to know where C.R and [...] are,when they could’nt get good result then they ask for me and make a statement  saying we will kill those ungratful people starting with that socall mother in law [...] .Atthat moment, I wos able to recongnize the voice of one.This follow came to the house as asympthizer, He repeated we will kill them know matter what. By the grace of God I was able run through the bathroom window with alappl and a T shirt,Leaving my children behind dont know their where about now.If  Ishould survie  it will be by the grace of God.You people force me to come back to Liberia saying Liberia was save for me now see what is happening to me? now where will I run to or find my kids

Continue…

Quebec City announces arena project

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 1:29 PM - 33 Comments

Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume and Quebec Premier Jean Charest have announced plans to build a $400-million stadium in hope of attracting an NHL franchise back to the hockey-mad city. Interestingly enough, the federal government wasn’t involved in today’s announcement, which has proven embarrassing for Quebec City Conservative MPs, who were early champions of federal government support. The deal, in which the city and the province each plunk down roughly $180 milllion each, with the remainig to come from the private sector—which will also have theopportunity to invest when (and if) Quebec City gets a team.

Postmedia News

Giffords regains speech

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 1:19 PM - 1 Comment

Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been speaking in the past few days, her first words after she was shot in the head while meeting constituents a rally in Tucson. A month after the shooting spree that killed six people, including a nine-year-old girl and a federal judge, Giffords has re-acquired her appetite, and reportedly asked for toast one morning at breakfast. It’s another important stepping stone on her path to recovery, but Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly warned in a Facebook post that doctors “aren’t kidding when they say this is a marathon process.”

CBC News

Toyota vindicated by U.S. investigation

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 4 Comments

A recent report conducted by NASA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S. has vindicated Toyota with respect to last year’s recalls due to “sudden acceleration.” Of the 58 cases reported, 18 were dismissed out of hand. Of the remaining 40, 39 of them were found to have no cause; the remainder being an instance of “pedal entrapment.” One investigator says most of the cases involved “pedal misapplication”—that is, “the driver stepped on the gas rather than the brake or in addition to the brake.” Plaintiffs suing Toyota over the recall say they will nonetheless push ahead with their lawsuit.

Bloomberg Business Week

Wall Street Journal

Canadian home prices are on the rise—but just barely

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 1:13 PM - 3 Comments

New home prices in Canada rose 0.1 per cent in December, short of the 0.2 per cent increase predicted by analysts in a Reuters poll. Four of the 21 cities surveyed by Statistics Canada saw house prices rise, including Halifax, Toronto and Oshawa. However, prices fell in eight other cities. The biggest decreases were recorded in Windsor, Montreal and Quebec City. The housing market has cooled since the Bank of Canada raised interest rates and the government tightened mortgage rules.

Vancouver Sun

Was Quebec right to ban the kirpan from the National Assembly?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 77 Comments

On second thought

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:56 PM - 82 Comments

From their scrum yesterday, Michael Ignatieff and Mark Holland explain the Liberal side’s decision to oppose Bill S-10.

Ignatieff: We’ve taken a long hard look at S-10, this mandatory minimum proposal of the government. We’ve tried to amend it, to no avail. It’s going to add huge amounts of money to Canadian prison costs. It’s going to target young – young people, you know, a guy who gets messed up with Tylenol 3 or has six marijuana plants, gets a mandatory minimum. We just think this is not the right way to go for Canadian justice policy. It follows a failed American model so we’re going to vote against it.

Holland: Canadian churches, Canadian health care providers and those on the front lines of stopping crime and stopping victimization in this country say this bill won’t work. And this bill will burden us with billions of dollars in new costs for prisons. It will send us down the same path California walked, the same path that the United Kingdom is now trying to undo. We simply can’t afford it. It will crush us. It will steal from priorities like health care and education and at the end of the day make our communities less safe.

Of note: when Parliament resumed business last month, the Conservatives vowed that no votes, aside from the budget, would be considered matters of confidence.

'We will all be free or we will all be in jail'

By Ruth Sherlock - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 1 Comment

Photographs by Roger Lemoyne

“President Mubarak is gone!” Laughing, shouting in relief, hundreds of people, streaming the Egyptian flag above them, began running toward the big screen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last Friday. Two minutes later, the jubilation—a culmination of over two weeks of an impassioned popular uprising—ended. It was just a rumour. More than a week after the “March of Millions,” a climactic day of mass peaceful protest that was followed by a bloody—and some say government-staged—onslaught by supporters of the regime, and the transformation of Tahrir into a barricaded stronghold for the protesters, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak remains in power.

Life in Cairo has taken on a semblance of normality over the past days—shops have opened, the roads are again abuzz with activity, and many Egyptians have restarted their daily routines. Outside of Cairo’s centre, the vigilante groups—impromptu home guards stationed every half kilometre with sticks and machetes—have relaxed their watch.

But the protesters have not left Tahrir Square—it has become a city of tents, with the feel of an organized community. Men and women frisk entrants, food stalls sell sandwiches made by an army of women in the nearby mosque, and doctors give aid at established field centres. “I want to bring some change to my country,” says Rihan, a mother who has been there for 12 days. “I want to tell my president, ‘Thank you, I want you to go now,’ but he doesn’t listen.”

Continue…

Egyptian military backs protesters

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 0 Comments

In a decisive move that could spell the immediate end of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, the command of Egypt’s military has come forward to declare on state television that the demands of protesters should be met in order to “maintain the homeland and the achievements and the aspirations of the great people of Egypt.” The commander of the Cairo area, General Hassan al-Roueini, addressed protesters in Tahrir Square on Thursday and said, “all your demands will be met today.” The military’s supreme council met without Mubarak present to discuss a possible end to the crisis. The announcement could mean that Mubarak will be forced to announce his resignation as soon as Thursday night, handing over provisional power to his vice-president, Omar Suleiman.

New York Times

In defense of propping up dictators

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 5 Comments

Ever since the popular uprising rocked Egypt, European and North Americans have succumbed to a bout of hand-wringing. Why on earth did our governments prop up Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship for so long? Now, German politics professor and commentator Herfried Munkler offers a daring answer: because that was the wise policy. Munkler doesn’t have much time for “melancholy self-doubt.” “The pitfall with this kind of retrospective reflection,” he writes, is that it “creates the impression that there was a direct, clean and decent course of action, and that the only reason it was not taken is that the Europeans were paying too much attention to their own interests.” He disputes whether it would have made any sense to support alternatives to stable, autocratic regimes—unless and until those more democratic options looked ready to create credible new power structures. “It is politically unwise to bet on the development of a democratic order in places that lack the necessary structural preconditions, and where democracy is constantly in danger of turning into a civil war or an open military dictatorship. Politically speaking, the milder, patrimonial rule of an autocrat is preferable to either of those options.” That’s not the sort of viewpoint likely to meet with much approval in these heady days of hope for change in the Middle East. But it is a useful, thought-provoking counterbalance to the prevailing optimism.

Der Spiegel

Think tank questions Canadian crime data

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 37 Comments

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank, has come out swinging against Statistics Canada’s evidence of falling crime rates in a new report that supports the Harper government’s goal of being tough on crime and expanding prisons. Scott Newark, a former Alberta prosecutor and a co-author of the report, concludes that “on the central question of the state’s duty to protect citizens from crime and public disorder, Canadians are not as well served as they should be” by Statscan’s data on crime. Chief among the Institute’s criticisms is that Statscan’s Juristat report on crime statistics over-emphasizes decreases in crime rates, revises crime categories from year to year and does not factor in unreported crimes. Statscan has responded to Newark’s criticisms, saying that while crime categories do change, data is available to anyone who wanted to compare crime statistics before and after categories were changed. Anthony Doob, a criminologist at the University of Toronto, says that Newark has “cherry-picked” his data, and that “there are no perfect measures of crime.” The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s work has generally been supportive of the Harper government’s policies, and Scott Newark has previously worked with Treasury Board President Stockwell Day.

The Globe and Mail

Will millions of North Koreans starve?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 12 Comments

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has dispatched embassy officials around the world to go cap-in-hand to foreign governments asking for food aid, as the combined effects of poor harvests and inefficient collectivist farming practices threaten famine in the communist country. The move suggests North Korea may be in for a famine, a series of which have struck the country in recent decades, costing by some estimates as many as two million lives. Exacerbating the problem: Kim’s obsessive secrecy. While Pyongyang could ask the World Food Programme (WFP) for help, the organization quite rightly demands access to food distribution points to ensure it’s getting to the people who need it, and Kim prefers not to let them in. Hence the direct appeal to other countries.

The Guardian

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 37 Comments

Brian Topp figures it’s time we figure out what the rules of our parliamentary democracy are.

A good place to start would be with the New Zealand cabinet manual. Developed incrementally under many governments over 30 years, with the fingerprints and agreement of all of that country’s political parties, this manual is a well-written, publicly-accessible rulebook setting out many of the basic rules the game in a multi-party Westminster Parliament, written from the perspective of the executive branch.

The British government is currently consulting the public about a similar guide. If you dote on the details of parliamentary government – and if you’re on this website reading stuff in this section, you probably do – it’s a good read.

It’s an idea that Peter Russell, the constitutional scholar, is apparently pursuing.

Battle line drawn over Quebec arena

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 13 Comments

In case there was any doubt about the political sensitivity surrounding possible federal funding for a new Quebec City pro-hockey arena, the NDP’s Pat Martin has lashed out at the very notion. “The first rule of Canadian politics is ‘What Quebec wants Quebec gets,’ ” said the Winnipeg MP. Martin’s angry remark came after reports that the Harper government is considering changing rules to allow Quebec City to use part of the tax on gasoline to fund the planned rink. The municipal portion of the gas tax has been earmarked only for basic infrastructure, like roads and sewers. “If Winnipeg had asked Stephen Harper to rewrite the rules so we could have federal funding for a hockey arena and an NHL franchise,” said Martin, “they’d have laughed us out of the room.” The city-to-city comparison is important. Both Winnipeg and Quebec City lost their NHL franchises, but Winnipeg built its new arena, the MTS Centre, mostly with private money. Martin now fears Ottawa might help Quebec build a facility that could hurt Winnipeg’s chances of luring back an NHL team. In fact, the Harper government hasn’t decided what to do, and the NHL has not made any plans to add new franchises.

Winnipeg Free Press

Welcome back Khadr?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 4 Comments

The saga continues. Omar Khadr, the Canadian teenager/convicted war criminal who has spent the past nine years locked inside a Guantanamo Bay jail cell, is applying for clemency—a move that could see him back in Toronto sooner than expected. In October, the now 24-year-old pleaded guilty to “murdering” a U.S. soldier on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and was slapped with an eight-year sentence. As part of his plea deal, Khadr is allowed to apply for a transfer to a Canadian prison after serving one more year at Gitmo, but his lawyers have confirmed that they are now asking the head of the U.S. Office of Military Commissions to shorten his punishment. If approved, Khadr could be allowed to apply for his Canadian transfer before next fall. Ottawa has already said it will not oppose the application.

Toronto Sun

We're raisin' our own now

By Amy Rosen - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 1 Comment

You can’t help noticing the raisins garnishing the cheese board at the tasting bar at Reif Estate Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. They’re a little bit different, larger and darker-looking than their California kin. But that’s to be expected, as these are no ordinary raisins. In a Canadian first, the purchase of two Simcoe County tobacco kilns resulted in the first-ever production of Canadian raisins last year. Made from Ontario-grown seedless Sovereign Coronation grapes and produced by Reif Estates, they’re thicker-skinned and a different texture than your average Sun-Maid—and boast a complex flavour befitting the viniferous surroundings.

“Originally, the idea was to make an appassimento-style wine that involves the drying of grapes that is common in a region of Italy where they make Amarone-style wines,” explains Reif Estate winemaker Roberto DiDomenico. DiDomenico and Reif Estate owner Klaus Reif, a 13th-generation winemaker who immigrated from Germany in the early 1980s and bought his uncle’s Niagara winery in 1987, had some contacts in Simcoe’s tobacco country. “We learned that there would be some kilns available as the tobacco industry has been waning,” says DiDomenico. They purchased two refurbished kilns that were shipped up to Reif Estates in the spring of 2009. And that’s when the process began. Almost. Explains Reif, “Our grapes that we use for the appassimento winemaking process were not yet ready, so we had these two kilns sitting here and we thought, what should we do with them now?”

Wine is made from grapes with seeds while raisins are generally made from seedless grapes. Niagara is wine country, but as luck would have it, a friend of Reif’s, John Klassen, who grows table grapes for supermarkets, happened to stop by the winery for a visit. “He was telling us that his grapes were ripe, but the supermarkets didn’t want them anymore,” says Reif. With those plump, juicy Sovereign Coronation grapes destined for the birds, Reif said, “Bring them in; we’ll try to make raisins.” (While most raisins are made from green grapes, these Niagara raisins are made from red grapes.) DiDomenico and Reif put the grapes in the tobacco kilns for three to four weeks to raisin-up.

Continue…

India and Pakistan renew peace talks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 1 Comment

Officials from India and Pakistan announced on Thursday they would resume peace talks which have stalled since the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, in which Pakistani militants killed 163 people. Renewed talks were set to happen after the foreign secretaries of both countries met on Sunday. The United States is eager for the two countries to resolve their differences over Kashmir province, so that Pakistan can divert its military capabilities from the Kashmiri border to the Pakistani frontier with Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency. Both nuclear-armed countries nearly went to war over the disputed Kashmir province in 2001, and the peace talks, which began in 2004, were making progress until the Mumbai attacks. India has said that talks could not be a possibility until Pakistan brings the attackers to justice. The renewed talks are expected to address issues of counterterrorism and improving economic relations between the two neighbours.

New York Times

Quebec bans the kirpan from the National Assembly

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 8 Comments

The Quebec provincial legislature voted unanimously on Wednesday to ban Sikhs from carrying their kirpans into the National Assembly. The Liberal government supported the motion tabled by the Parti Québécois a month after four Sikh men, who had been invited to testify in favour of the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab when receiving government services, were prevented by security from entering the government building while wearing kirpans. PQ MNA Louise Beaudoin asked Sikhs to make a “little bit of effort,” emphasizing that while multiculturalism may be a Canadian value, it is not so in Quebec. The Bloc Québécois has similarly raised the issue of the kirpan at the federal level, but there is little appetite for such a debate. Liberal MP Navdeep Bains wears a kirpan in the House of Commons, and has criticized the Bloc for raising the issue.

CBC News

Friending Japan

By Erica Alini - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

Dave & Les Jacobs/Getty Images

Japan, Russia, China and South Korea are the only countries in the world where Facebook isn’t the most popular social networking site, founder Mark Zuckerberg said last year. And now Facebook is bent on making friends with at least one of them—Japan.

Despite the country’s record-high Internet literacy and obsession with techy gadgets, Facebook never caught on there. Japanese have remained loyal to homegrown social networking sites like Mixi and Gree. With a share of around 20 million users each, they dwarf Facebook’s latest figure of 2.93 million users in Japan.
The California-based company is eager to tap into the lucrative Japanese advertising market, and recently partnered with Recruit Co., a Japanese marketing firm, in a push to increase membership up to 30 per cent of online social networkers, according to Taro Kodama, head of Facebook’s Japan office. To build numbers, Recruit launched a new service on Facebook last fall allowing senior college students looking for a job to connect to alumni from their institutions.

But some industry watchers predict Facebook will struggle to get the Japanese to embrace the cornerstone of the company’s money-making strategy:  profiles featuring personal information. Facebook encourages users to sign on using their real names instead of pseudonyms. That, contends Japanese technology journalist Munechika Nishida, runs counter to Japanese desires for privacy. Facebook also tends to recreate the outgoing party culture of American colleges, with a goal of building huge networks, notes Nishida. Sites like Mixi, by contrast, are aimed at connecting smaller groups with similar interests—”a culture that is more like students talking in the girls’ restroom at school,” she told the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.

For Silicon Valley firms, expanding into Asian countries where local technology and competitors are already well-established can be an uphill battle. But it’s not impossible. Apple, for instance, is finally breaking through in South Korea, where iPhone4 sales have taken off to the dismay of Samsung, the local industry champion.

Pull the other one, Pullman

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:08 AM - 64 Comments

Anyone who has read an interview with children’s author/grumpy village atheist Philip Pullman will surely have sensed that he was a bit of an a-hole. He proved the hypothesis, with the cataclysmic decisiveness of a Shaq slam-dunk, in a January 20 address concerning austerity-driven public-library closures in the UK. It is the speech of someone who believes every jot and tittle ever put to paper about his infallible genius; since the chief evidence of this genius is the success of his books in a degraded, semiliterate global publishing marketplace, Pullman naturally spends a lot of time blaming his nation’s library crisis on (a) modern publishing and (b) the market economy. Given such confusion, or perversity, it comes as no surprise that the supreme hero of his plea for untrammelled intellectual freedom turns out to be Karl Marx, who foresaw our sorry state oh so long ago.

Has Pullman no shame? No writer who had a trace of vulnerability to it would play the tattered, grimy “It’s like the Christians burning the Library of Alexandria all over again!” card less than a minute into a speech about libraries. That event was perhaps the single worst setback for the intellectual advancement of Western man; this would suggest to most sober people, people with some sense of perspective, that references to it should probably be guarded by a sort of Godwin’s Law. That, in other words, it should be used as a metaphor only under grave circumstances.

So what are the circumstances particular to this case? “Here in Oxfordshire we are threatened with the closure of 20 out of our 43 public libraries,” says Pullman, expecting us to recoil in anguish. The county of Oxfordshire, Canadian readers should note, has roughly the same population and geographic size as the city of Hamilton, Ontario. [NOTE: Commenter Mackie caught me in a metric-Imperial error here, for which much thanks; Oxfordshire is about twice the size of metro Hamilton geographically.] Residents in Hamilton will be delighted to note that Hamilton is served by 24 public library branches, which should make that city a slightly less sandblasted hell of ignorance than Oxfordshire is about to become (since we’re not counting Oxford University’s Bodleian Library—it’s the supreme example of its kind, and open to private scholars for reference purposes, but they don’t have story time for tots there). 24 isn’t a small number by Canadian standards, incidentally; Winnipeg’s library has just 20 branches, Calgary’s and Edmonton’s 17 each. Little did we all know we were so culturally deprived.

I grew up depending on public libraries for my first exposures to culture and history, and my family has worked in them for three decades. Probably the only significant amount of volunteer work I’ve ever done in my selfish, lazy life was in the public library in my hometown. This entitles me to dismiss, without any fear of reasonable contradiction, Pullman’s claim that small countryside lending libraries cannot be managed by volunteers. It is simply a lie—one delivered with a maximum of sneering contempt. “What patronizing nonsense,” he says as he delivers one of the most patronizing orations of all time.

It’s true that you can’t use volunteers to manage a large library that serves the diversifying media needs of every imaginable customer in the year 2011, but not every cluster of shacks on some windblown sheepfold can expect to have a library like that, and to lack one is not a misfortune if your foremost concern is with reading—with the precious private “space that opens up between the reader and the book”, to use Pullman’s own words. What’s needed by the reader, as such, is a lot of books, selected and organized with a modicum of intelligence, and the free run of them. Everything else is detail.

I share Pullman’s biliousness at seeing public libraries fall victim to an economic crisis caused by financiers, demented property-flippers, and short-sighted Labour governments. But then, he doesn’t have much to say about Labour. That would be class treason, one supposes. And, anyway, he is much too busy poking fun at Tory cabinet fatty Eric Pickles—while simultaneously complaining about the injustice of ad-hominem attacks.

Whenever the “how dare you tamper with my favourite public service” argument is made, and no less when it is made on behalf of what may actually be my own favourite public service, I always wonder what actually existing utopia the arguer would like us to imitate. What country has the perfect, pristine, progressive library policy, and what makes it so? Pullman not only fails to identify any candidate; he is apparently furious at the idea that some particular policy about libraries, set by those responsible for their funding, should exist at all. “The leader of the county council said in the Oxford Times last week that the cuts are inevitable, and invites us to suggest what we would do instead,” said Pullman. “…I don’t think we should accept his invitation. It’s not our job to cut services. It’s his job to protect them.” How readily, in the hands of an experienced prose artist, is irresponsibility magnified into an ideology.

One cannot escape the suspicion that Pullman believes libraries somehow grow out of soil festooned with magic library-beans. Doesn’t he know that the crucial figure in the history of public libraries was Andrew Carnegie—perhaps the most satanically successful apostle of the free market that ever lived? Carnegie’s fortune was used, for most of 50 years, to build a magnificently appointed public library for almost any community in the English-speaking world that wanted one. Six hundred and sixty of them were erected in the UK alone. Libraries as we know and use them are, essentially, Carnegie’s creation—a by-product, every bit as much as the plume of a smokestack, of the highest of high capitalism. Pullman should probably just die from embarrassment at having abused industrialists and classical liberals in such a context.

Pullman might, for the sake of argument, be right to argue that we have let the riotous, gore-jowled beast of the market into every cranny of human life, and that we have much to regret in this. But, again, what is the alternative? Socialist states, as much as flint-hearted capitalistic ones, need to make their inflow match their outgo in the long run. They cannot provide every thing that humans might regard as worthy or beautiful. To say so might seem like belabouring the obvious, but, remember, Pullman splutters with rage at the very mention of scarcity and is doubly angry that the wicked Tories have, in a difficult time, left choices about resource allocation up to local councils.

I don’t think Pullman favours some economy in which money was outlawed altogether, however that might be accomplished, but he is obviously eager to rewind the clock quite far. He gripes about “the transformation of human craftsmanship into mechanical mass production”. You’ll notice that this is a tidy, accurate description of the Gutenbergian technology that made Philip Pullman CBE a rich man. He is certainly rich enough to imitate Carnegie on the miniature scale of Oxfordshire—were he passionate about libraries as actually existing entities, rather than as deflowered symbols of right-wing ravenousness.