Smithing Canadian Values and The Chestertonian Prophecy

This business of pulling "deeply held Canadian values" direct from the thin air seeping out of politicians' butts has become too much. David Miller suggests in today's Post that the claim that "guns have no place on the streets of Toronto or anywhere else in this country" is, likewise, one such of these great glaring pieties that has been floating about in the collective Canadian consciousness all along ... From the dairy farmer in Saskatchewan to the miner-come-call-centre-coordinator in Cape Breton, this business about the guns is apparently tattooed (and has been since time immemorial) onto the very intangible matter of our souls. (Next to, one imagines, a comical rendering of a beaver wearing a beer helmet, deep in comfortable but ribald conversation with Buddy Cole ... against, of course, a backdrop of a Mac-sauce-and-blood-soaked Old Glory.)

I'm reminded of this, from GKC, written in 1923, under the title "The Terror of a Toy":

So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves... Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.

See Adam Radwanski yesterday for some intelligence upon the matter.