A choice of stupids: “Couldn’t we find a happy medium,” said someone in the coffee line, “between stupid and, um, stupid?”

She was staring at front-page photos of a Blue Jays game. Fans with signs such as, “Come to Toronto, be happy, don’t worry,” and “SARS shmars, batter up.”

Maybe travellers will now avoid us for fear the idiocy is contagious. See the local officials crowd around Mayor Mel, beaming after the WHO climbdown as if we got the Olympics at last. With the health crisis over, said the news shows, government can turn its attention to another pressing matter — dying schools? public transit? the roads? — no, tourism!

In fact, if there was a point at which concern for health took precedence over “economic effects” among our leaders, I missed it.

From the start, their impulse was to show they weren’t afraid to eat in Chinatown. Contrast this to attitudes during the invasion of Iraq, where there were also many economic elements: oil, reconstruction — there’s even a copyright lawyer over there now so that America’s entertainment industry will get its due in the new Iraq. But while the fighting was on, full attention, from all sides, went to lives lost and endangered.

Of course the city was spooked by SARS — you could feel it everywhere — but that fear was not fully reflected on official or media levels. Could it be that worries over the tourist trade and jobs served to divert attention from the sense of terror?

Personally, I think SARS is scarier than war in Iraq, and not just because we aren’t insulated from it. I don’t think we’re insulated from the effects of the war, either, and we will see further 9/11s as a result.

But SARS’s provenance is so much murkier, and its arrival even stealthier than the bombers of the World Trade Center.

Not what we signed up for: Is this how you pictured the era of globalization — perpetual war and rampant disease?

It sounded so discreet in the runup: There would be anonymous pressure by market forces; closed-door tribunals would settle disputes, etc. There might be small flaring, à la the backward Balkans.

But who predicted the U.S. military leapfrogging through countries pursuing Islamic “terror”? Or serious breaches among the big globalizers like France, Germany, Russia and the U.S., and with disrespect from U.S. satellites like Canada, Mexico and Chile.

The spread of disease, in retrospect, was foreseeable, due to pressure on agricultural countries to switch to exports, increase production through chemicals and industrial methods in animal husbandry, with little ability or incentive to play it safe — just as in the Walkerton area, come to think of it.

Maybe most surprising has been the attack on veteran global institutions, like the UN, for refusing to back the U.S. on Iraq, and now on the WHO, which has been name-called in similar ways (run by a bunch of dictatorships, the same types who just put Cuba on the UN human-rights committee). So globalization equals deglobalization?

His own private foreign policy: I’m fed up with George Bush’s folksy personalization of foreign issues. I put it in these terms because so does he.

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” he once said of Osama bin Laden, “to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilization.” He insisted that Yasser Arafat “has to show me more,” because he, George, was disappointed. He said he hates North Korea’s Kim Jong-il personally. But: “He’s a man I can work with,” he said this week of new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

He talks as if his foreign policy emerges full-blown from an interrogation of his gut.

Most presidents say “we” about their policies, sounding at least a bit democratic. Some people say “we” even when it’s inappropriate. I just read director Peter Brook’s memoir and you’d think he never did anything alone.

But then theatre is a collective activity. But then so is politics. But then no other president called foreign peoples Grecians, Kosovians and East Timorians before his election, and so had a little something to overcompensate for in the area.

It’s the insecurity, stupid: “Saddam is your best defence, even if he is dead,” says a recent PR analysis on how to promote Israel’s interests in the U.S. today. And, “Saddam will remain a powerful symbol of terror to Americans for a long time to come.”

Surely the same advice is on the mind of the Bush team, as they prepare for the 2004 U.S. election.

The overcited slogan of the 1992 Clinton campaign was, It’s the economy, stupid. That worked not because of some mystical power in the economy; it worked because people’s lives are directly affected by the economy. On 9/11, their lives were directly affected by international politics, too, in a way that had never been true before.

For the moment, you could say It’s the economy, stupid is dead, too, or, at least, neutralized.

rick_salutin_small_24_1_1_1_1_0

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.