From Ellis, Bob. So it Goes: Essays, Broadcasts, Speeches, 1987-1999

John Ralston Saul

The long summer day and night that I spent with John Ralston Saul and the subsequent meals that I had with him in other people’s houses after his public lectures were among the best I can remember. It’s good to talk in middle age about everything for hours on end, the way that students do, with a man who has mastered the subject; or nearly.

We swam, walked beaches, drank beer and coffee, drove here and there in my elderly blue Volvo. He kept a road map in front of him (a habit picked up from his dad, an army officer) to keep up with where we were – in bushland, cliff edges, suburban roundabouts. His obedient acceptance of what we would eat, drink, look at, were all of a piece with his mild self-mocking Canadian accent, his Woody Allen cadences, his tallness, his unremarkable sandy, spindly, hair-challenged looks (you see his face in duplicate most European summers, bicycling in the Alps), his undiluted hopefulness about humanity’s future in a world beset by deaf unthinking tyrannies.

Forget the sound bite, he says. Hold public meetings. Start up newspapers. Think up new slogans. Jest about their failings. Shame them into change. Simply say no to what cannot be borne, the way France lately has to the free trade snare, the way Russia will soon when it defaults on all its debts and the Third World then does likewise and no atomic war then occurs – nothing much, in fact, except the ruin of the IMF, and about time too. Remember that all periods of national expansion, national prosperity, national creative energy throughout history have followed a repudiation of debt.

Do not be afraid of the obvious. Do not hedge your options round with fashionable masochistic doctrines of obligation to the current fiscal fashion. Just do what must be done. Abjure ideology, for ideology is just a way of saying everything is inevitable, which is wrong, and democracy a pesky obstruction of the historically foredoomed, and government a needless wasteful burden – when government, in fact, is the only big voice people have and democracy the only way of raising it.

What at first can seem irresponsible is quickly made convincing by the swoop and range of his mind. From Richelieu to MacNamara, Plato to Mussolin, from Sun Tzu to the Gulf War, from the artistic triumph of Raphael to the maze and murk of modern art, he works out plausible causes for what happened and why things lately are getting worse and worse (in this unadmitted world depression that since 1973 has been daily denied by those selfsame corporate courtiers that daily ensure its prolongation) and why the cure, though dauntingly clear (for nothing is inevitable, and nothing ever was), must urgently, intricately, be found. Can democracy survive the present shrinkage of good public education? No. Can civilization survive when all private contracts now seemingly outweigh the Social Contract? No. Can we win back the words – like freedom, like rationality – that our enslavers now use as propaganda? Perhaps, if we are swift and clever.

Being a Canadian helps, he says, because it is a country built on the acknowledgement of unbridgeable fractious differences – English versus French, Indian versus cowboy, igloo versus bungalow, informed Canadian civility versus ignorant American bombast – and the realization, ensrhrined in its federal structure (the first such tactful constitution since ancient times), that things are very local and no one cure fits all diseases. No one cure makes sense, in fact, in two adjacent villages let alone the world. It has taught him, too, that empires are not always overt, with gunboats and governors and fluttering flags and grand parades of tanks. An empire may merely command the airwaves, or the currency, or the national debt, or the cinema culture, or the stock exchange or CNN, or those international corporations (built without shame, run without conscience, attuned to no local need) whose budgets now are bigger than those of many small countries.

Refreshingly, he does not villainise, for as a former oil executive himself he knows the kind of man that shapes and subserves the corporations and finds no particular malice in them, they are decent loyal servitors of their anointed masters the stockholders, no more, as one might wish. but he abhors their historical ignorance (history did not start yesterday, he says, history is old, and its lessons can be learned) and the many small political surrenders that daily made their marauding structures possible. Villainising does not help, he says. All men mean well. What we have to do is attack the problem, not rub salt in the wounds of its authorship. We have to do it now.

He spent time among outback Aborigines while he was here. He swam daily, fearing bluebottles, at Coogee. He filled Wollongong Town Hall and enthralled them for two hours with his darting insights, not drawing breath. He sought my wife’s recipe for fish in coconut milk. He constantly asked questions, of me, Noel Pearson, his tireless wily host Les Robinson – about Australia’s history and fault lines. Don Dunstan’s pioneering administration – in film, theatre, architectural preservation, Aboriginal and homosexual rights, the multiculture – intrigued him with its prescience. He wanted, as always, to know more.

He saw in Canada and Australia the obvious similarities, and more. Both countries were untamed, he said, yet feigned an ordered European tranquility while bushfires, blizzards, avalanches, earthquakes, inundations, yacht race catastrophes and colliding icebergs showed how unruly our two vast regions were, and why solutions that suit the manicured-garden cultures of Europe do not suit ours. We have enormous areas and thin populations, and so need different rules. We should find out what they are.

And thus it is that people of all kinds are listening to and reading him. Native tribesmen. Academic ecologists. Government bureaucrats of the Sir Humphrey sort, all over. Corporate executives who privately tell him they absolutely agree but, alas, what can they do, their hands are tied. And as in a Capra movie, the halls are filling, the printing presses pounding out his books in many translations. His historic effect, like that of G.B. Shaw, and Bertrand Russell, Orwell, Heller and Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky and (yes) Voltaire may well (just may) be educationally immense, and politically and economically and ecologically seismic. I await his next visit (in August) with a kind of amiable, apocalyptic suspense.

January, 1999

<<< Back to Events