Pardon me but I won’t join in the hand-wringing about “cynicism” arising from the Gomery-sponsorship nexus. (A typical news report: “Canadians are growing ever more cynical about government, politicians and the democratic process.” The NDP’s Bill Blaikie warns of “a very real danger that it increases cynicism.” His leader, Jack Layton: “People are going to lose faith even in voting.”) That widespread reaction seems to me rational, logical and healthy. I mean logical literally. You could put it in a syllogism:

A. All federal political parties share similar traits and feel comparable pressures;

B. One of them will form the next government;

C. Therefore, the next government will be similar to this one, and those that preceded it.

Based on this reasoning, why would you want to slog through another election, or vote in it? To challenge this chain of thought, you would have to, as they used to say in Aristotle’s logic classes, contradict one of its premises, probably “A.” You’d have to demonstrate, ahem, that your party is different from the other parties in ways that would release it from “C,” the likelihood of similar scandals. Singing Nananana, nananana, hey hey hey, goodbye, in Question Period, as the Conservatives did this week, doesn’t really fill the bill.

Let me dig deeper in the ditch of cynicism. Another version of its source is the way prominent public people tend to claim certainty about things they have no way of knowing. Stephen Harper and the rest say: Throw these guys out, we will be better, we will be different. But they give us no reason to believe it, especially if you recall the scandal-ridden days of the last Tory government. Same types, same system, cut from the same cloth.

That know-it-all tone creates cynicism about other public figures, too. I’m thinking especially of journalists and pundits, another group in big credibility trouble. CBS is trying to revamp its post-Dan Rather nightly news and may eliminate the “voice of God” type of anchor. There’s nothing wrong with the voice of God, if you’re God. But most of us can spot the fakers. Why don’t those guys ever evince uncertainty, not just the veterans but the young ones?

Last week, Evan Solomon of CBC News: Sunday responded to a mild question from his co-host by barking, “Absolutely!” as if he’d just stepped off Mount Sinai. Young hip George Stroumboulopoulos on Newsworld’s The Hour is always telling viewers what to think about even tiny, distant news items. Then he interviews CanWest’s canny old Don Martin about how phony politicians are. Martin smirks, but gives no evidence, thus melding his authority with cynicism itself.

The ultimate arrogance is the claim to know what is going to happen, since, as many a first grader will tell you, Nobody knows the future! It would be reassuring to at least hear that acknowledged by our leaders. In First Democracy, his new book on the learning curve of democracy in ancient Athens, political scientist Paul Woodruff writes sagely that all “government is by ignorance, and guards itself accordingly.”

It’s odd, by the way, that the only national leader who offers any relief from that know-it-all, cynicism-engendering tone is Paul Martin, who always projects a certain uncertainty, mostly through his stammer and his haunted, unsure demeanour. It definitely doesn’t come from his words, which try, maybe too hard, to sound certain: “I am utterly convinced that . . . ”

The original cynics were a gaggle of contrarians in ancient, democratic Athens who thought the only thing that mattered was living a virtuous life, usually in outdoor poverty. When Alexander the Great visited one, and asked how he could help, the answer was: Get out of my sunlight. That kind of earthy integrity sounds like the opposite of what cynicism means today. But in fact, the early cynics were unimpressed with all the grand talk and philosophy of their time: about politics, the cosmos or the soul. The only thing that really counts is what you do, was their point, not what you say. We will judge you solely on that. In which respect, they weren’t so different from today’s cynics.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.