Reprinted with permission from Mike Deadder.

Kids love war.

Kids – especially boys – like toy guns, toy tanks, and toy soldiers. They love making explosion and rat-tat-tat machine gun sounds. They love dressing up like knights and vikings and manufacturing weapons out of bits of cardboard, string and wood.

When I was a kid I obsessively drew pictures of war. My drawings were full of fighter jets, tanks, and of course, explosions. As I drew I would make sound effects, imagining the battle in all its fantastic detail.

To a child, war is exciting, full of adventures and exploits. The explosions of bombs and missiles are like fireworks on steroids. And war is full of cool machinery and gadgets: sleek jets, powerful tanks and night-vision goggles.

Kids love war, until they experience one in real life.

Many adults have a love affair with war too. In adults, the childish love of gear and explosions acquires a grown-up taint: a dislike of Muslims, perhaps, or reflexive invocations of the “war on terror” or the need to “bring the fight to the enemy”, or maybe a messianic desire to bring “democracy” to the world.

It’s no surprise that George W. Bush hasn’t experienced war in real life either.

***

In every childhood sandbox and on every busy beach, there are children building sand castles. These elaborate constructions (which are sometimes populated by green army men who make rat-tat-tat noises as they battle each other) are always threatened with demolition by the one kid whose primary goal is to wreck stuff.

He – and in my childhood experience, it was always a “he” – isn’t very good at building sand castles himself, but he excels at destroying them, to the dismay of their creators.

Those who can create, create. Those who cannot, destroy.

Perhaps this is why artists – creative people – are frequently in the forefront of those opposed to war.

I watched part of today’s Democracy Now program over lunch. It focused on the victory of Hamas in yesterday’s Palestinian parliamentary elections, a remarkable upset victory over the ruling Fatah party.

This issue deserves a complete post, but in the meantime, I’m struck by the odd similarity between the election of Hamas in the Israeli-occupied territories and the election of the Conservatives here in Canada. From the interview with Mouin Rabbani, senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group:

JUAN GONZALEZ: What do you see [as] the meaning of this vote? Was it more of a protest vote against Fatah, or was it really a marshalling of greater support for Hamas?

MOUIN RABBANI: It was both, and some other things. I think Hamas’ biggest success in this election was that it was able to appeal well beyond its core constituents, Palestinians who endorse both Hamas’ political agenda and its ideology. It was able to position itself as a protest party of choice, thus appealing to a vast number of Palestinians who do not necessarily agree with its political program, but wanted to see the monopoly on the Palestinian political system that’s exercised by the Fatah Movement broken, and that appears to have happened.

Substitute “Conservatives” for “Hamas” and “Liberals” for “Fatah”, and he could be talking about Canada’s election. (By no means am I comparing Hamas with the Conservatives, two groups whose ideologies and thankfully, tactics, could not be farther apart. It’s the parallels between the motivations of voters in the occupied territories and Canada, and the timing, that is interesting.)

Cons: 124 Libs: 103 BQ: 51 NDP: 29 Indy: 1

This is an open thread for discussion about the election now that the results are in.

Alevo just sent me an article about a payday loan company in Winnipeg that was charged with levying criminally-high interest rates:

Winnipeg police charged a payday loan company Thursday with levying criminal interest rates, and verbally accused payday loan companies across Canada of breaking the law. “All payday loans companies basically operate in the same manner,” said Winnipeg police detective Len Terlinski.

I wrote about this issue a year ago in a post called Easy Money. I wonder if these charges in Winnipeg will have any effect on payday loan companies across the country. I’m tempted to print out a copy of this article and bring it to my local PayDay loan companies for comment.