It is jarring to shift from news on the sickening mess in Iraq, created by an arrogant U.S. intervention, to news of the Liberal convention in Montreal, which seems benign in comparison. But they are related. Jean Chrétien’s finest moment, it turns out, was declining to join that war. Sometimes, doing nothing is brilliant.

Don’t you want to know how this nightmare happened? There is insight in a Vanity Fair article, coming next week but already excerpted. Writer David Rose interviewed many neo-cons who led the cheering for the Iraq war and are now angrily disillusioned.

Here is Canada’s David Frum, who, as a Bush speechwriter, played his part: “I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.”

Pause it there. That is the root of everything? See how brainless an articulate, well-educated person can be? What does he think an idea is? They all talk that way. They had this idea: Attack Iraq, spread democracy. Then George Bush and his “dysfunctional” team gummed it up. As if one group, the neo-cons, is responsible for the heavy lifting — getting ideas; then you call in the trades. Look, David, when you get the idea that there’s a leak in your basement, it didn’t come out of your head, it came out of the pipes. It’s related to reality.

Nothing in the numbing daily horror of that country, which they helped sow, has caused any of them to change their big minds. The idea was right. They aren’t responsible — they say this — for how it was miscarried out. If ideas fail, blame reality. This is way too much respect for ideas. It misses what they are: tools with which to organize experience, not real entities themselves. They emerge from reality and play back into it.

Most normal people sense this interwebbing between our thoughts and the world. You can’t just stick in your thumb and pull out a plum of an idea and expect everyone to say what a good boy (almost always) you are no matter what results. That is blindly religious or, in politics, blindly ideological. You used to find it on the left. I am pleased to say it is now largely confined to the right.

But enough about those masses of slaughtered innocents in Iraq. Let’s talk about my ideas. I’m so down … The word callow comes to mind. How do people get this, um, removed? Like David Frum, they might go to an expensive private school such as Upper Canada College, then an élite university such as Yale, where your first public exposure is writing for the National Review, describing how drunk you got with champagne and bliss the night Ronald Reagan won in 1980.

Then maybe go as a grad to LSE, and soon be writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal and the National Post (or The Globe and Mail) and on to your own column. Note that you’ve never done much but think, pontificate, read and discuss ideas with people like you; you have virtually no non-idea experience to test your thoughts against.

Compare this to another generation, the Keynesians and “progressives” who created the social programs that neo-cons crusade against. Many of them were also privileged intellectuals, but they had often lived or fought through two world wars and a depression. The real world had imprinted them and their ideas.

I’m sure you can think clearly despite the disadvantages of a cloistered life, but it’s a challenge. Take another cohort: the current batch of American filmmakers, who’ve often done little except watch, study and make films. Their films are based on a life of film and are filled with references to other films as their source of feeling and reality, except for childhood, the only time in their lives that involved direct, unmediated experience.

So the best moments in their films tend to be about childhood; or they look childish when they try to apply those intense moments to adult life. It’s why the finest Hollywood films today are often kid flicks. Steven Spielberg, meet David Frum.

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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.