Aren't There Skyscrapers in Vancouver, Too?

Canada’s Green Party candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway, 44 year old bookstore owner Kevin Potvin, stands by his 9/11 editorial of four years ago in which he wrote:

When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!' When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!' When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air.

Mr. Potvin is entitled to his opinions, then and now. I doubt they are widely shared in Canada, but you never know. Canada is a nice place and a loyal ally of the U.S., and the people I have met there really are very nice people just as they believe themselves to be. Except perhaps in Quebec when a Francophone occasionally mistakes you for a fellow Canadian Anglophone, but once they find out your monolingualism is the unfortunate result of being an American, all is forgiven.

Being an American, I don’t know much about Canadian politics, either; but if their Green Party is at all like ours – and why shouldn’t it be? – my guess is that ideology more than nationality is at the base of Mr. Potvin’s views. There is a segment of the environmentalist movement (not all environmentalist, mind you, just some) whose world-view can be summarized as follows: everything about nature is good except human nature.

Humanity, by this view, isn’t really a part of the natural order of things at all. Or if it is, it is as Agent Smith claimed in The Matrix, a virus. We spread to parts of the world unsuitable for us to live in without heating or air conditioning, screwing up the natural ecosystems as we multiply, performing all sorts of unnatural acts like damming rivers and chopping down forests for wood (to make, among other things, paper for books) and digging for coal and oil and then, worse yet, we build things – unnatural things such as cities like Vancouver and New York filled with unnatural things like skyscrapers. It isn’t hard at all for those who hold this world-view to cheer at any enemy of Western civilization, although perhaps it is a bit odd to find them also engaging in anything so decidedly unnatural and Western as electoral politics.

Here is another of Mr. Potvin’s printed opinions , this one claiming common cause with Islamist terrorists. I happened upon the article following a Google search from which I found, to my slight surprise, a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Potvin, himself. Reading the entry, it turns out that he may have written it, that is, the Wikipedia entry, himself, too.

Well, who am I to criticize self-promotion? And besides, like I said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Here’s mine. I was in the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, fortunately far enough from the crash to have escaped safely. But several colleagues of mine were not so fortunate. So I’m afraid that if I should ever encounter Mr. Potvin in person, I'm of the opinion that I would very likely feel the urge to pump my fist in his face.

Of course, I would never do such a thing, it being too natural and uncivilized a thing to do. But then, that is only one of the ways in which I, unlike Mr. Potvin, do not share a common cause with terrorists.