Springtime For The Stupid: Khomeinist Scab George Galloway Returns To Canada.

The thing to remember about stupid people is that there's no point in trying to explain anything to them. They won't understand a thing you're saying. This is why they're called "stupid people." As a political phenomenon, stupid people are usually dealt with by ordinary people in liberal democracies quite effectively, by making them objects of public ridicule. The problem is that this sometimes accrues to stupid people a kind of celebrity status that any fool can quickly convert into political capital. Things can get out of hand, as the Italians have discovered. You wake up one morning and you find that your veteran national-affairs journalists have been reduced to reporting the details of "bunga bunga" orgies.

The next thing you know, police budgets are being eroded by criminal investigations into the backgrounds of buxom young women prancing around the prime minister's residence in kinky Carabinieri uniforms and saucy nurses' outfits. Then the judiciary is reduced to solemn inquiries to determine whether the public treasury has been in any way invoiced for the 74-year-old prime minister's rent-free harem of 14 showgirls that he keeps in a pensione around the corner from his villa, and whether the fees they charge for their erotic performances have been billed to the exective branch of the government. Pretty soon everybody's going all nostalgic for the days when Mussolini was running things. This is not exactly a good sign for the prospects of a liberal democracy.

That's the other thing about stupid people. They're often quite charming, but they tend to lower the tone. There's no point in trying to just shut them up because it never works, and besides it would be wrong because stupid people are entitled to the rights of free speech. Thus it is in America, the birthplace of the 1st Amendment, that the political problem of stupid people has been lately addressed by lowering the threshold of polite speech to make way for a peculiar pop-culture entertainment phenomenon called the Glenn Beck Show.

This was a uniquely American stroke of genius in the way it affirmed the stupid political identity politics of the great American melting pot. Glenn Beck provides vast numbers of stupid people who fancy themselves to be "progressive" with a simulacrum of evidence that they're not the stupid ones after all, while at the same time offering stupid people who attribute their stupidity to being "conservative" a dazzling current-affairs show that makes him look so stupid he actually makes his fans look almost smart. But lately the Glenn Beck project has begun to bore Americans to tears, and it's also outlived its usefulness to the Republican Party.

We do things differently in Canada. While the American way often exposes the limits of the free market, Canada accomodates stupid people in almost the opposite way. It's a tribute to Canadian establishment's distinct multicultural celebration of the identity politics of stupid people that much greater success is evident in the game's Canadian rules. Canada plays it like a vast affirmative-action program for stupid people that is often so subsidized by our best universities and by our biggest public sector unions that you'd think resources were limitless.

For some long while in Canada, a deafening bedlam has been emanating from stupid people whose politics are the most grotesquely tyrant-friendly, the most noticeably accommodating of antisemites (anti-Zionist variety), the most valuable to misogynists and to the extreme religious right (Islamic variety), the most vehemently opposed to Canada's solidarity with the Afghan anti-fascist struggle, and the most reactionary. The way we accomodate stupid people of this sort - because this is Canada, after all - is to encourage them to make themselves presentable as fashionably progressive, avant-garde and "left-wing."

This works splendidly because it makes this particular variety of stupid people feel good about themselves and they don't even notice what is happening (see above - they won't understand a thing you're saying, etc.). Conservatives are content to go along with the pantomime because it makes their left-wing adversaries look so stupid, which is fair play, I suppose. But it is a racket.

This brings us to the disgraced former British MP George Galloway, the greasiest spokesman for the Khomeinist tyranny in the English-speaking world, celebrity presenter for the Khomeinist propaganda arm Press TV, admirer of Saddam Hussein, bagman for Hamas, darling of the Arab autocrats' business press and shameless brown-noser to Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Tonight, Galloway will be speaking in Toronto, at the Trinity - St. Paul's Centre. He will be discussing what Canada can do "to support the Arab peoples' struggle for liberation," if you please.

To recap: George Galloway has earned a lifetime's profit from slobbering on the very boots in which the world's warmongering Arab tyrants now stand quaking. In Britain, Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party on charges that he incited Arabs to fight British troops, although to be fair he is probably best remembered for dressing up in red tights on a reality television show and drinking milk from the cupped hands of Rula Lenska, an aging celebrity whose celebrity derives from having once been a young celebrity. In Canada, Galloway is heralded as an "anti-war" celebrity and a "progressive," and now he has been invited to visit Canada yet again, this time to present himself as a friend to the risen masses of Arabs and Iranians at whose bravery and suffering he has done nothing but sneer.

It's not clear who Galloway's Canadian hosts are this time around. Not long ago Galloway's Canadian venues were being organized by Syria's unambiguously fascist party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which is part of Al-Assad's ruling junta. But it could be Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Artists Against War, or the Venezuela We Are With You Coalition. You want to make some sense out of that?

Dal Street, a proper British socialist, puts it this way: "Outside of a residual Stalinist mindset, it makes no sense at all. And from a socialist perspective it is simply repugnant." Fair enough. You don't have to be a socialist to find all this repugnant, but if you still think what is happening here is in any way "progressive" in any recognizeable sense of that gravely-diminished term, then you should probably just sit back, tune in Glenn Beck, and let him explain it to you.

Just relax. You won't feel a thing.