Paul Wells, The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper And Canada, 2006-

"I just said yes to everything I was ever asked to do" - John Baird

Harper knew the damage a disloyal lieutenant could do to a leader because for years that was the kind of lieutenant he’d been.

Preston Manning’s memoir of his years as Reform Party leader, Think Big, is in part a chronicle of Stephen Harper’s troublemaking years. At almost every turn, if Harper felt that Manning was making a bad decision, the young renegade felt free to agitate against his leader, whether through rebellious action or indiscreet communication. When Manning took a long time deciding whether to support the Charlottetown constitutional amendments in 1992, Harper, who was sure Manning shouldn’t, chafed at the boss’s indecision. “When these internal disagreements were eventually leaked to the media -- as such disagreements invariably are -- they gave our opponents fresh ammunition,” Manning wrote. “‘Friendly fire’ invariably attracts ‘enemy fire.’” When Manning hired Rick Anderson, a Liberal-connected Charlottetown supporter, as Reform’s national campaign director, Harper objected and was “prepared to air his objections in the media.”

In 1994 two Globe columnists, “fed by a disgruntled caucus member,” wrote columns that alleged Manning was abusing his parliamentary expense account. During the Easter break from Parliament, “Stephen Harper and several other caucus members went public with their criticism,” Manning wrote. “Even though procedures existed for handling any complaints . . . Stephen went to the media.”

There followed a special caucus meeting and several rounds of internal finger-pointing. Manning’s relations with his wife, Sandra, at whom “part of Stephen’s attack had been directed,” suffered. She felt he hadn’t done enough to defend her.

“This whole issue -- which really wasn’t about expenses at all -- was the most painful experience our family had endured to date,” Manning wrote. “What made it particularly hard to endure was that it was initiated not by an external opponent, but by one of our own.” If being a Member of Parliament meant his family would be attacked, Manning wanted no part of it. “That night, I took off my House of Commons pin -- given only to MPs -- threw it into my briefcase, and never put it on again until the day I left Parliament.”

So yeah, Harper liked Baird, because for all his pluck, the thing he resembled least was a young Stephen Harper.

Updated: Wells on Baird, today.

LZ-’75: The Lost Chronicles Of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour by Stephen Davis

Stephen Davis recalls the summer of ’75. Although I was only ten years old at the time, his memory of things rings true to me. I was watching the older long-haired kids do their thing. And the hippie girl who babysat me and my siblings told me a few stories. We all knew “Peggy Day.” And we all had at least one “Peggy Day” in our acquaintance who never returned from the adventure.

Peter and Peggy broke up somewhere around 1972, and she disappeared, having lit out for the territory. A postcard to me had been mailed from Santa Cruz, California. We’d last heard that she was in Central America, where she’d gone on a spiritual quest of some kind. So it was good to know she was alive and coming to visit Peter. He was living alone; maybe their old love would rekindle. It was a beautiful concept. But then she moved in with me instead.

I’d gone to Boston for the day, and when I returned to the island on the midnight freight boat, Peggy Day was lying there -- in my bed, really beautiful in the glow of a glass oil lamp. Beautiful, but also damaged. She was rail-thin and dark brown, her blond hair very long and braided for bed. We talked a little. She said she was hitchhiking up-island on her way to Peter’s but decided my house was closer, and she knew the key was in the mailbox. She said she’d been through hard times in Guatemala. She said she was now twenty-four years old. She said she needed looking after. I had a girlfriend who was off in graduate school for the summer, so I told Peggy to get some rest, and I had a cold shower and slept on the daybed in the parlor.

The next day, she went to see Peter, and I figured I’d see Peggy at the beach. But they didn’t show up. That night was a hot one, and I went to bed early with Tender Is The Night. An hour later, I heard soft footsteps, the screen door opening, and there she was, slipping out of her summer dress, turning down the wick of the oil lamp until it was too dark to read. We made love in the morning as well.

So Peggy Day spent about three weeks in my care, which is the only way I can put it. She had come to the island to recover from some trauma she had suffered. She was very quiet, preferring not to be specific about her experiences in Guatemala. She needed to eat fresh food, swim in the warm sea, walk in the cool woods every day, and be looked after. She was indeed quite spooked and stayed close by my side every day she was with me. Later, she told me that she’d gone to Central America with a boyfriend, but he had somehow died. I couldn’t get much info from her. She was more a mysterious presence than a person.

After a week, Peggy had gained some weight and developed a healthy glow. After two, she’d become voluptuous again, and was turning heads when we went into town. She liked being driven around the island in my old blue BMW, her long hair streaming in the breeze. At home she moved around like a sylph, soundlessly, making clever arrangements with the wildflowers she picked. I bought her some watercolors at Alley’s Store, and she began painting again. When she smiled, it was like diamonds and sunrays. But she had her darker moods, too, and when she was in one of them, it was a good time to make love to her. She said that helped.

Through all this, I managed to stay friends with Peter. He had several other girlfriends anyway, and it was all over between him and Margaret Day. Then summer began to wane, and my girlfriend was coming to the island. Peggy said she wanted to stay and live with us, maybe have a child. I told her that my girlfriend might kill both of us. There were tears, and not hers alone, as I drove her to the ferry.

After that, I didn’t see Peter for a while. Then, around the time I needed a photographer, I got a postcard from him in Los Angeles, which is exactly where I would be covering the Led Zeppelin tour in a fortnight.

So we worked it out. Peter Simon and I were on the job once again. The story was Led Zeppelin, and we had to get the goods.

John Gardner, The Art Of Fiction: Notes On Craft For Young Writers

No ignoramus — no writer who has kept himself innocent of education — has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one's argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as one's enemies. Witness John Steinbeck's failure in The Grapes Of Wrath. It should have been one of America's great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and of the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing of the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, nor interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil.

James Loney, Captivity: 118 Days In Iraq And The Struggle For A World Without War

The first Remembrance Day was declared by King George V on November 7, 1919. It recalled the Armistice signed the previous year by Allied commander-in-chief Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Germany's Matthias Erzberger in a secret railway carriage hidden in the Compiegne forest. On November 11, 1918, at 11:00 am — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — the First World War was officially over. Twenty million were dead, 21 million wounded. They called it the War To End All Wars.

November 11 is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. Martin is the patron saint of soldiers, cavalry and quartermasters. The US Army Quartermasters Corps established the Order of St. Martin in 1997 to recognize the distinguished service of quartermasters. The website reads: “Saint Martin — the patron saint of the Quartermaster Regiment—was the most popular saint in France during antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is said that French kings carried his cloak into battle as a spur to victory. Usually pictured on horseback dividing his cloak with the beggar, the image of Saint Martin as a Soldier-Provider offers a fitting symbol for Logistics Warriors charged with SUPPORTING VICTORY now and for all time.” Their website also tells us that Martin's name comes from the Latin Marten Tenens (one who sustains Mars, Mars being the Roman god of war). And that is precisely what quartermasters do — sustain armies by making sure they have everything they need to do their job: gasoline, rations, bullets, boots.

Martin was born in 316 or 317 in the Roman province of Pannonia (now modern-day Hungary). As the son of a senior officer in the Imperial Horse Guard, Martin was forced by law to join the army at the age of fifteen. While on duty at the age of eighteen, he encountered a ragged beggar at the gates of Amiens. Moved with compassion, he cut his cloak with his sword and gave half of it to the beggar. That night he had a dream in which Jesus appeared in the half-cloak he had given away. “Here is Martin,” Jesus said, “the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.” Shortly thereafter Martin was baptized.

When Martin was twenty, Julian II ordered him into battle against the Gauls. He refused. “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight,” he told the emperor. (The early Church prohibited the baptized from bearing arms or serving the military under pain of excommunication.) When Julian accused him of being a coward, Martin volunteered to go onto the battlefield unarmed at the head of the column. Julian accepted his offer and threw him into prison. The next day the Gauls sued for peace and the battle never happened. Martin was discharged from the army.

Martin travelled to Poitiers to become a disciple of St. Hilary, the local bishop, and then later joined the monastery at Solesmes. In 371, he was acclaimed Bishop of Tours against his will by the citizens of Tours. As bishop, Martin worked tirelessly for prisoners. A general named Avitianus once arrived in Tours with a cohort he intended to torture and execute the next day. Upon hearing this, Martin went immediately to the house where Avitianus was staying. Arriving in the middle of the night, he threw himself on the threshold and began crying out in a loud voice. An angel is said to have awakened Avitianus, telling him Martin was outside. “Don't even say a word,” he said upon seeing Martin. “I know what your request is. Every prisoner shall be spared.”

In addition, Martin was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Priscillian of Avila was the leader of a growing heresy that advocated amongst other things, abstinence in marriage. Condemned by the First Council of Saragossa and excommunicated in 380, Priscillian fled to Trier in southwestern Germany. A group of Spanish bishops led by Ithacius wanted Emperor Magnus Maximus to execute him. Although greatly opposed to Priscillian, Martin petitioned the imperial court in Trier to have him removed from the secular jurisdiction of the emperor, arguing this was a church matter over which the secular authority had not power to intervene and excommunication was punishment enough. When Maximus agreed and Martin departed the city, Ithacius persuaded the emperor to follow through with the execution. Priscillian and his followers, beheaded in 385, were the first Christians executed for heresy.

Martin hurried back to Trier as soon as he heard the news in the hope of saving the remaining Priscillianists. Once there, he refused to concelebrate with the bishops who had ordered the executions. Fearing a public scandal, the emperor promised to release the remaining prisoners if Martin shared Communion with Ithacius. Martin reluctantly agreed but then was so overcome with guilt for agreeing to this compromise that he resolved never to attend another bishops' assembly.

It is believed Martin died in 397 at the age of eighty-one. He was buried, at his request, in the Cemetery of the Poor in Tours on November 11.

Irony and paradox. A young man who disobeys a direct order to kill becomes the patron saint of soldiers; a pacifist conscientious objector who leaves the army in disgrace is turned into a warrior icon charged with supporting-victory-now-and-for-all-time. The quartermasters have taken the cloak of St. Martin away from the beggar and wrapped it around the institution of war.

Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis In The Life Of God

There has been something Promethean about the critical labor of turning Christ the Lord back into Jesus of Nazareth, but the transgressive daring of the historical critique must not eclipse the enormity of the original literary offense itself. And that offense, that effrontery, cannot be appreciated unless the God of Israel has first been confronted in all his untamed and terrifying intensity. That of all gods this god should be imagined to have become of all men this man; and that, repudiating everything he had always seemed to be, he should have had himself put to death by the enemy of his chosen people — this is a reversal so stunning that it changes everything back to the beginning. The Rock of Ages cannot die as God; but as God Incarnate, the Rock can be cleft. God, shattered, can descend to death; and when he rises to eternal life, he can lift his human creatures up with him. Victory is postponed in the Christian revision of the Jewish epic no less than in the Jewish original. Yet because that victory is assured, even the poor, even the meek, even the grief-stricken and scorned who in this world must hunger and thirst for justice may count themselves blessed. Theirs, because he made himself one of them, is the kingdom of heaven.

E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

Hemingway is a magnificent artist whose work will outlast Malraux’s because it more clearly honors the literary act for its intrinsic value. But he too has written a political novel expressive of a national myth. His novel as conceived happens to accord perfectly with the American abhorrence for political theorizing, big systematic solutions, and utopian dreams. His aesthetic places the artist’s idea of himself centrally in the American heartland. The notion that we are the self-reliant independent entrepreneurs of ourselves is a national heritage. Working people in the United States, unlike their European counterparts, refuse to identify themselves as a class. They tend to define themselves not by their work but by what they own from their work, or by their ethnic background, or their social activities. For the independent entrepreneur of himself there can be upward mobility, at least across generations, and there is the road—he can hit the road when things go bad, pull up stakes and move on. All this, including the writer’s idea of what he can allow in his art and what he cannot, celebrates our great operative myth of rugged individualism. It is the myth tied to American historical accomplishment. It is a constituent of our freedom. Given a nation of self-reliers, you can make the case for American exceptionalism.

The economic metaphor for this myth is the “free market.” In politics it is a dependable source of a candidate’s appeal. Presidential candidates tend to run as outsiders even though they may come from well-established political dynasties. The current president [George W. Bush] has no patience for the United Nations, wants to go it alone, and has gone to war alone. He advertises himself as the rugged individualist par excellence. Of course, none of this cynical exploitation of a means of our national identity is Hemingway’s responsibility. But it is at least possible that his long-standing popularity with the public and among young writers might be due in part to his service on behalf of a prevailing societal myth. Entrepreneurial self-reliance had come in for some rough treatment from Melville in Moby-Dick, from Dreiser in Sister Carrie, and from Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, but Hemingway found its most romantic face. Distrust of society, a principled loneliness, have been preponderant motifs in our fiction ever since Robert Jordan withdrew from hope for his life and for the antifascist cause and waited for death as he looked out over the barrel of his machine gun on the last page of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

From “Malraux, Hemingway, and the Spanish Civil War,” in Creationists: Essays 1993-2006 by E.L. Doctorow.

Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex

Praying? Well, yes — metaphorically speaking. As you doubtless know if you’re reading this memoir, there is One True Religion; but I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I was a follower of N’Yar lath-Hotep, or The Sleeper, or any of their nightmarish ilk. My prayers are secular, humanist, and probably futile. It’s one of my character flaws; I was a lot happier when I was an atheist.