I have no “Monday Morning Madness” post of my own today — there was far too much madness to go around and I could not settle on a choice. Trust me, I tried, but between Alan Greenspan saying he was “partially wrong” and there was “a flaw” in his ideology (testifying in the Waxman House of Horrors), as the world designed by worldviews like his rolls into its fifth week of intensified unraveling; John McCain unable to figure out what socialism is and whether or not he himself is a socialist by his terms; Bill Maher leading a campaign against religion; another grunge Maoist music video of an exceptionally abhorrent character known as “Presidente Gonzalo” (Abimael Guzmán) — I never knew there was Spanish grunge, assuming that I am categorizing the music correctly; remembering Osama Bin Laden’s claim that he would bankrupt America: “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah;” and claims of a Hopi prophecy about the end of the world, as well as interest in the supposed predictions of the end of the world to be found in the Mayan calendar — by the way, it ends on December 21st, 2012 — and how this lady can help you to prepare (with the help of aliens, by the way)… that’s an awful lot of madness. Somewhere in all of that there is a thread that unites the disparate elements: rationality-ideology and spirituality-prophecy, and the whole world is coming to an end because I was right/wrong.

I settled on something closer to home, something more coherent: anthropology, “savagery,” and Canadian politics.

Thus for the first time I am borrowing my MMM post from a colleague, Tad McIlwraith at Fieldnotes: for the Anthropology of British Columbia, and his post titled: “Anthropology, Dick Pound, and the Savagery Issue.”

Savage, terrorist, Native, immigrant, brown, visible minorities — the buzzwords of contemporary Canadian cultural politics. With a few minor adjustments, we could be mistaken for the U.S., Britain, Australia, or New Zealand.