Humble spirit sometimes manifests in high places
Are they gone yet, all those indistinguishably pretty “ it’’ boys and girls in town for the film festival who dominated the front pages recently?
Good. Because all that preening notwithstanding, this has been a truly great month for showcasing the merits of humility and pitfalls of vanity. Item 1: Let’s compare the qualities made manifest recently by Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman, as modest a man as can be found in public life, and former prime minister Brian Mulroney, a veritable Olympian in the field of braggadocio.
Last week, the Queen’s representative to Ontario quietly joined mourners in a Salvation Army shelter to pay his respects to Paul Croutch, a homeless man beaten to death in Moss Park. You don’t often find those of vice-regal rank in such surrounds, mourning those fallen by dint of mental illness to such station. So how was it their paths had crossed?
Bartleman first met Croutch at about 6 o’clock one morning two years ago, served him coffee and soup while on a Salvation Army breakfast run. “He enriched my life,’’ said Bartleman, understanding, as the wise do, that it’s usually the giver who gets and often the least among us who has the greatest lessons to teach.
Alas, we were also treated last week to the polar opposite of such becoming unselfishness and civility.
That, of course, was the publication of a book cataloguing Brian Mulroney’s disparaging opinion of just about everyone he ever met in public life, not to mention his lavish appraisal of his own monumental place in Canadian history.
It would appear Mulroney risked short- circuiting Peter C. Newman’s tape recorder with a profanity-soaked enumeration of the sins of others. The roster of unprincipled cheats, nitwits and sex kittens who troubled Brian Mulroney’s march to posterity was apparently endless. But not even that rogues’ gallery could conspire to thwart the boy from Baie Comeau’s ascent to greatness.
“ You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none,’’ he explained modestly.
Oh. Item 2: Last week, the report of the judicial inquiry into Toronto’s computer-leasing scandal also landed and the contrast in self- regard between two of its leading players could hardly have been more striking.
Aficionados of the affair will recall the celebrated interview former city budget chief Tom Jakobek bestowed on the Star’s Linda Diebel in January 2003, shortly after the inquiry began.
“ They haven’t got anything,” he said of commission investigators.
And, of course, Jakobek might have been expected to know, having informed Toronto during this remarkable session that not only was he gifted with an IQ of 142, but also owned “ a phenomenal memory.’’ How poetic, then, that when Jakobek came to be trussed up like a Christmas turkey in the inquiry’s report last week, it was by the able hand of a Superior Court judge of fetching modesty, grace and manners.
Justice Denise Bellamy started her long climb to the bench as a secretary — which apparently outfitted her with skills that went well beyond an ability to type. Observant, able to assimilate information, and ( as is often the case) underestimated. How did Bellamy prepare to write the report that branded Jakobek a liar on par with Pinocchio?
Well, she had the humility to go back to school, as it were, studying books and essays about writing. And she tried to write, not for the elites, but so her report would be accessible to the average person, in her mind’s eye the TTC drivers she often saw sitting in the back of her courtroom, taking in proceedings between shifts. In producing what has been praised as a masterpiece of its genre, Bellamy proved again that it’s one thing to have a high IQ. Quite another to have wisdom. Item 3: South of the border, the fruits of arrogance were also harvested last week when President George W. Bush was obliged to swallow humble pie and take responsibility for the inept federal response to Hurricane Katrina in the U. S. Gulf Coast.
“I want to know what went right and what went wrong,’’ he reportedly said. Which was an odd posture for a man who has occasionally hinted that he owns a direct pipeline to God. It turns out, however, that when it comes to Katrina and her effects on New Orleans, the president’s celestial cellphone must have been turned off, for he did not anticipate the extent of the carnage, reacted to it slowly, and took days to visit the hardest- hit areas.
In a splendid piece on the weekend in the New York Times Book Review, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — who said “ there is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty’’ — contrasted Bush’s showy religiosity with the more modest spiritual sensibilities of Abraham Lincoln. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln said in his second inaugural. One of them, events this month might suggest, to regularly remind mortals of the high cost of hubris. Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.