8 Lament for a Nation
9 Technology and Empire
10 A Lone Wolf by the Seashore
11 Epilogue: Defining George Grant, Redefining Canada
Chronology of George Grant (1918–1988)
Sources Consulted
Index
George Grant, 1971.
“Never go into a class without thinking that there is somebody in
the classroom who has a greater intelligence and a nobler heart
than yourself. I mean if you don’t like the young, for God’s sake
don’t be paid a lot of money to teach them.”
The siren wails. It’s very loud, difficult to ignore. The sound it makes is meant to awake and alarm and frighten people out of their normal routines and get them to take shelter in basements or, at least, under tables. Its wail is a warning that ICBMs – Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles – carrying nuclear warheads might just be on the way across the North Pole to attack and destroy major cities in North America. Thousands of such sirens are set up on public buildings from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island as part of Canada’s Civil Defence System. This particular one is mounted on the roof of a primary school on the edge of Hamilton at the head of Lake Ontario in the middle of Canada’s industrial heartland. And inside its classrooms, teachers have said, “Children, you know what you are supposed to do. Get under your desks, put your knees up, fold your arms over your knees, put your heads down on your arms, close your eyes. No peeking!”
“Miss! Miss!”
“Yes?”
“Is this a real air raid or just a pretend one?”
“Miss! Miss!”
“We’ll know in a few minutes! Just keep your eyes closed!”
On this sunny morning in May, it’s a false alarm. The year is 1967 – Canada’s Centennial Year – and there have been so many false alarms over the past few years that most people who hear it in the west end of Hamilton don’t take it very seriously. Indeed, for many Canadians the sound of the air raid sirens has become a joke – a very sick joke. Less than five years earlier, in October 1962, the Soviet Union began placing missiles in Cuba so that they would not have so far to travel to bomb North American cities. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over these missiles and their nuclear warheads was the closest the two countries came to starting a Third World War. The fate of millions literally hinged upon the ability of two men, President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, to reach a compromise. Until they did, the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which extended from October 18–29 but had a longlasting impact.
Everyone who lived through those days and paid attention to what the television commentators were saying learned that there were no safe places to shelter and hide. A nuclear war would kill most of us – either immediately from the blast or slowly through radiation poisoning. Only those sheltered far beneath the surface of the earth in government-built bunkers would be completely protected. That was something that a lot of people who weren’t schoolchildren wanted to shut their eyes to, ignore, and simply not think about. Within only a couple of years of the Crisis, many more preferred to think about smaller events, more easily comprehended things, like where they were on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. What they had felt on the days when President Kennedy just about got everybody killed was far too painful to remember. But there are exceptions. There are people who keep their eyes wide open and think about what is happening to them and the world around them no matter how hard it is to look an enemy in the face and how much easier it is to escape into television movies.
As he drives by the school where the siren is ringing on this day in 1967, George Grant is on his way from his home in the small town of Dundas to meet a young man who has made an appointment to see him at his office. George Grant is chairman of the department of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton. University professors have a reputation – especially among small-town people – for being eccentric, otherworldly and absent-minded. There’s much in George Grant that reinforces this impression in his neighbours. The house he lives in with his wife and six children at 80 South Street is a large brick house on a five-acre lot, but it’s not a suburban estate. The house is more than a hundred years old, has high ceilings and spacious rooms. Before the Grants bought it, it had been owned by the Anglican Church of Canada, and they’d allowed it fall into disrepair. As George’s wife Sheila put it, “This house would be pretentious if it wasn’t so run down.” Their automobile is slightly pretentious for a family man. When his mother died and he inherited a bit of money, George bought a dark-blue Chevrolet convertible, a car more suited to a California surfer than a Canadian academic with a handful of children. It’s slightly run down now but thoroughly reliable. Reliability is important to him. Professor Grant is not in the least absent-minded when it comes to keeping appointments. He’s always on time, so punctual that he makes students afraid of being late for classes and appointments. They do not want to annoy him. Some of them fear his sharp tongue, but many more feel so very privileged to study with him that they don’t want any classroom time to be lost or wasted. George Grant is neither rich nor powerful, but he has become famous as a man who is willing to think thoughts that fly in the face of popular opinion. He has written a book about the ways in which Canada surrendered its independence to America during the Cold War – Lament for a Nation – which has made him a hero to many university students from one end of the country to the other, and he is now writing another – Technology & Empire – which will teach them how to think for themselves. He is also a fierce pacifist, a very outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam’s civil war.
George Grant has heard the sound of air raid sirens many, many times. Only a few were false alarms. When he was a twenty-two-year-old university student in England, he’d volunteered for civil defence work and gone to live in the southeast end of London near the warehouses and loading docks. That was in the autumn of 1940 and the early months of 1941 during the worst days of the Blitz, the period when the Luftwaffe – the German air force – was trying to bomb England into submission to the Third Reich. George had sailed to England a year earlier after he’d been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Oxford University. When war broke out, he could have returned home to Toronto but he took first aid and ambulance training and then volunteered to serve as an Air Raid Precautions warden in one of the most dangerous sections of London. As an air raid warden, it had been his unpaid job to help people get settled under the brick arches of the railway bridges that served as air raid shelters for the poorest Londoners. Then, when the bombs hit, it was his job to put out small blazes set by fire bombs, summon emergency services, rescue people trapped in bombed buildings, provide first aid to the injured, and investigate unexploded bombs. Watching over the bombs with delayed action fuses that hadn’t yet gone off was the most dangerous part of his job because he had to guard them until the bomb disposal crews arrived.
Memories of that time crowd in on him at the sound of this siren. He can never forget the children. He’s a family man and his six children are an important part of his life. Like any parent – his youngest is eight years old, his eldest is nineteen – he feels the chill of fear.