Id+Ego=Jihad

So Premier Dalton McGuinty created a crisis, then  prorogued legislature and resigned. It's hard not to frame this triple-hit as avoidance fueled by cynical confidence in public forgetfulness. Under these conditions, rightists have only to iterate jobs-taxpayers-jobs-union fatcats-jobs into the void. And when Ontario's right wing -- friend to Canada's masters of proroguerie -- cries foul and calls for an election, the left wing will face the charge of political cynicism for standing by the current minority government or running with the rightist opposition. Thus, what would be a source of power for other political parties -- the leverage to support or bring down a minority government -- becomes a political liability for Ontario's left-centrist party.
     How is it that other parties, despite traditions of greed and corruption, don't suffer such derision? Because just as a healthy person needs a balance of id, ego, and superego, so a three-party liberal democracy cannot function without a strong left wing. Regardless of political bent, everyone intuits that the left embodies his or her conscience. No matter how often we choose to ignore it, everyone needs assurance of that "eternal jewel", ready, ultimately, to be cashed in.
     Even the most avaricious and narcissistic need assurance of their own neglected humanity. So the act of reviling the faintest whiff of practicality in any leftist party's decision is an act of fear: fear, regardless of political stripe, for our very soul; our innate call, beyond sectarianism, to enlightenment, epiphany, jihad.
     Late in 2001, a student described in her journal the true nature of jihad (a word tainted from that time, some say indefinitely, by right-extremists) as the daily struggle of the soul to seek and express itself, a deeply private revolution that drives every decision that everyone makes every second of life: to have or forgo the cookie, exacerbate or relieve gridlock, vote or not vote. There is even a jihad of reading inherent in Northrop Frye's description of any literary work as an "apocalypse", reading as "the last judgement of mankind." In other words, every moment is an opportunity to evolve. And the left, the political arm of that impulse, is the voice of civilization. By railing against the left every time it does (or might do) something pragmatic, all people, regardless of belief or opinion, acknowledge that inner voice.