Free Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff

country should be all right. As soon as democracy loses its connection to place, as soon as the location of politics is no longer the union hall, the living room, the restaurant and the local bar and becomes only the television screen and the website, we’ll be in trouble. We’ll be entirely in thehands of image-makers and spin doctors and the fantasies they purvey. Politics will be a spectacle dictated from the metropolis, not a reality lived in the small towns and remote communities that are as much part of the country as the big cities. For all the talk about the Internet as the enabler of democracy, the Internet could cause us to lose the aspect of politics that makes it truly democratic: the physical contact between voters and politicians. YouTube videos and ads are no substitute for an encounter between real flesh-and-blood human beings. If the Internet takes over politics, there will be no reality check, no moment left when a voter gets the chance to look at a politician in the flesh and make the decision to trust or not to trust, to believe or not to believe. Politics has to stay corporeal because trust is corporeal.
    I think back now to the Knights of Pythias Hall in Springhill, Nova Scotia, the Sam Hughes Legion Hall in Lindsay, Ontario, or the Floata Seafood and Chinese Restauarant in Vancouver’s Chinatown. These and countless others were the scuffed-up venues of our country’s democracy. On the walls there were the flags and banners, the portraits of the Queen and former prime ministers together with the insignia of the local Lions or Rotary Club. When you walked in, there would be tea and coffee urns together with sandwiches on a table at the back, banquet chairs spread out in a semicircle around a podium and the party faithful ranged in front of you, many retired and semi-retired, the farmers in baseball caps, the union men in T-shirts with their union local on them, the women in sensible dresses and shoes. There was an air of quiet decency about them and a polite skepticism that you were there to overcome. They were the delegates and they had the power.
    Four times a day, sometimes more, during that long leadership campaign, I would stride into one of these venues and soon be shaking hands with complete strangers, trying to figure out who they were and what they wanted to hear, giving a short stump speech, taking questions,signing some posters and then moving on to the next airport, the next hall, falling asleep in the next hotel room at the end of a long day.
    To get a hearing with them, you had to know what they wanted to hear. The professionals call it “reading the room,” and when good politicians read a room right, they will have the audience in the palm of their hand. When they get it wrong, they will die a slow death up there under the lights. I died my fair share of deaths until I learned to unlearn everything I had known up to that point. I had to unlearn being clever, being rhetorical, being fluent, and start appreciating how much depends on making a connection, any connection, with the people listening to you. I learned to find some story from my own life that would tell them, in so many words: I
know
you and you know me. In Quebec I would talk about the dairy farm my uncle and aunt (mostly my aunt) ran in Richmond. In the Maritimes I would talk about my great-grandfather from New Glasgow and my grandmother born in Fredericton. These roots, which had been a little abstract to me before, became real to me now. Out west, I talked about my dad’s time laying track in the Rockies. I did what all politicians do: I tried to make my story their story.
    In appealing to delegates, I was also talking to members of a party that had just been thrown out of office and was struggling to regain its confidence and sense of direction. I told each delegate in every room that I was the candidate of change and renewal. I was untainted by the scandals that had damaged the party brand. But I was also a loyalist,