doublegunshop.com - home Forums COEXIST Artist beat up by.............muslims !

Truck XL model Ford 150, stripped down. Motor vehicles to me only transportation, not much interested in them other than that. I am actually enthused though because of obvious technology advances from my 2002 Silverado, more power and better mileage. I carry heavy loads, often 1,600 pounds in the box, and similar load on trailer. A button on dash to change from high range to four-low is appreciated.

My "consumerism" meant we're indoctrinated to buy anything touted by the best advertising agencies. Two of my friends, one very close, were principal political strategists for the Progressive Conservative and Liberals Party of Canada, finest and to my mind most ethical in the business. I don't know the distance of Marxist-Leninist from theirs---or Carville's or Rove's.

The very close friend and mentor, for the cynical, was Dalton Kingsley Camp, who worked for conservatives all across the country, a national treasure, now deceased with highest journalistic prize in his name. The other went from advertising agency, PM press secretary, big embassy post in Washington, VP of one our biggest banks, now consulting freely in dozens of roles to strengthen communities,including editorial board of our best magazine Walrus.

They both came from the same village in the potato-growing region of neighbouring New Brunswick. They were close friends.

Dalton thought of it as a punk's game, too.

"In the bloodless wars of politics, the wounds are to pride and place. In such activity, men easily exaggerate their relevance to it. More than that, once caught up in it, the significance of politics becomes disproportionate to their lives. To many, I suspect, their importance to themselves, as to others, lies in their being politicians. One would wish it to be the other way round-that their importance as politicians lies in men being themselves, true to their best impulse and finest ideals, less concerned with the victory of a party as they are more concerned with the survival of their own personality and nature. But party politics feeds and flourishes upon the blood of sublimation. Every man must serve another's larger cause, giving or lending himself in whole or in part to another judgement, a further condition, a greater good, a lesser will, a common motive and purpose, and these replace his own criteria, the immediacy of his own conscience, until his own moral nature becomes a mere accessory to the cause, which is no more than his neighbour's, but the product of some ill-defined greater good and lesser evil. In the trackless waste of politics, men lose their purpose, and the stars by which they once steered vanish in the bottomless sky of other men's aspirations. They wander like nomads, from oasis to oasis, quenching their thirst from the wells of power and warming themselves by the abandoned fires of those who have come and gone before." - Gentlemen, Players and Politicians.