Essays
A Culture of Reticence
The past is another country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (A mosaic from Hadrumetum, in Tunisia, an important pre-Carthage Phoenician city, which depicts Aeneas surrounded by Clio, (history), and Melpomene (tragedy). This...
The Luring of Children
A Bookseller’s stall in Kutaisi, Georgia Now the ‘Luring of Children’ is a provocative title for an article in a non-political periodical like The Ironist. It comes from a picture, (above), that I took in Georgia (the country), recently, at a bookseller’s stall in the...
Unsung Heroes of Art History
An Ode to Snail Amidst the splendor of art history, nestled obscurely amongst majestic portraits, mosaic goddesses, and epic battles, an unlikely yet constant character appears time and again: the humble snail. Yes, those slow-moving, shell-carrying...
What can We Believe?
The Need For Critical Thinking Children, quite rightly, expect adults to look out for them. Maybe, when we grow up, we continue to expect others in authority to look after us. Or we WANT to believe they care. The more fools we are. Last night my bank called and said...
Supreme Irony
It is a supreme irony that the Ontario public school system, at least in its Peel District school board, should fall victim to wokeist activists of the ‘cancel culture’ persuasion, militants unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion. Recent news reports of a...
Play
If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...
Such Trifles
The Russian writer, dissident, and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1917-2008) was an outspoken critic of communism in what was then called the Soviet Union, and was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag for eight years for critical comments he...
It was a Golden Age
We have the great Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “the highest law in the land” we are told. Ask Jordan Peterson and Tamara Lich if we have rights and freedoms.
The Sober Second Thought
Stopping the Creeping Cancer under Wokeism. Henry Goulburn, PC, one of the British negotiators at the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 (which ended America’s illegal attempt to seize Canada), remarked: “I had no idea of the fixed determination which there is in the heart of every American…”