Pierre Berton - Smug Minority

Copyright1968 by Pierre Berton

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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The Canadian Publishers
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eISBN: 978-1-55199-533-5

v3.1

What was it like in the olden days, Pop? I mean around the 1960s. Was it like they show it on the TV?

Well, now, son you know TV tends to glamourize history out of all recognition, sometimes. Things werent all that good, you know, back then.

Gee, Pop, when you look at shows like Tycoon or Astronaut or Freeway Pirate, well, I mean its pretty exciting.

Sure, it looks exciting and even attractive. You see those campy, hand-operated cars, as they called them, meandering down the old freeways and those strange rows of telephone poles and the cute little homes with the old-fashioned patios and you get a big kick out of it. But the people themselves led pretty dreadful lives by our standards.

Then why do they always talk about the good old days, Pop?

People tend to view the past through a fog of nostalgia, son. You know lovers spooning in the quaint drive-ins and whole families sitting around the bar-b-q. But dont forget that for most people life was composed of equal parts of boredom and drudgery. It was, in essence, a serf society run by a smug minority of well-entrenched overseers.

Gee, Pop, that sounds like the Middle Ages. Were those people really like serfs?

They would have resisted the name; but in our terms they were. In spite of the old adventures they dredge up for Freeway Pirate, historical evidence makes it clear that the masses of the people who lived in Canada in the Sixties were chained to tedious and degrading jobs which they despised; that between one-fifth and one-third of them were prisoners of a poverty so grinding we can scarcely contemplate it; and that only the wealthy had the freedom to enjoy a proper education.

And this smug minority you mention that ran things who were they, Pop?

A small, in-bred, establishment of business and political leaders who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

But gosh, Pop, why didnt the people revolt if conditions were as bad as all that?

Because the minority convinced the majority that life was wonderful.

Oh, come on, Pop. Thats stupid.

Read your history books. Youll find thats what happened. Of course the big establishment had the help of the minor establishments religious, educational, journalistic, judiciary in this brainwashing.

You mean they convinced people that serfdom was an okay thing?

Oh, quite easily. The most menial and wretched toil was held to be highly honourable. It conveyed a magical thing called status. People preferred it to happiness.

But all that poverty, Pop. Surely they didnt prefer that? Wasnt there any kind of public planning to prevent that?

No quite the contrary, son. The minority convinced the majority that public planning was bad for them. They called it government interference. They said the people would lose their hard-won freedom if they had it.

But hold it, Pop. They didnt have any freedom!

Thats right. But the minority boasted so loudly about this non-existent freedom that they convinced the majority they had more of it than any people in history.

Gosh, Pop. I mean those people mustve been real dumb to swallow that line.

Well, of course, by our standards they were wretchedly educated. The majority didnt even finish highschool. The universities, such as they were, were reserved for the privileged classes. You see they didnt pay you to get an education in those days, son. You paid them! The minority saw to that.

Pop, I just dont understand why the people didnt complain.

Because the minority convinced them that it was better that way that anything else would be foolishly extravagant besides being an invasion of freedom.

This minority you talk about, Pop: they must have been a real bunch of hypocrites to fool the people that way.

Not at all, son. All the available evidence shows that they honestly and sincerely believed all those things themselves. You see thats what made the minority so smug.

My friend and colleague, Gordon Sinclair, and I were driving down the Okanagan Valley from Kelowna to Penticton on one of those cloudless August days when everything in the world seems right. As usual, we were arguing the point that everything in the world seemed wrong.

I just dont understand you, Gordon was saying. How can you be so totally inconsistent? How can you hold the ideas you do when you yourself have made it in spades? Yet here you are claiming you want people to pay higher and higher taxes! Youre the hardest worker I know and yet you believe that people who dont work ought to get government handouts. Now youre telling me you want all the drones to go to college.

I even want to pay some people to go to college, I told him. Not just for a few years, but in some cases maybe forever.

I thought Gordon would explode. You want to pay people not to work? he cried. You want to subsidize laziness? All the things you worked for everything thats yours by right you want to give that away?

I started to say that I really didnt want to give anything away but that I was prepared to invest to a greater degree in the human product of a country which, heretofore, had done most of its investing in mines and wheatfields, oil-wells and power plants, forests and oceans in things you can see and feel; but not in the human spirit.