5 Feet of Fury

I pitched this story to the National Post three years ago. They turned me down.

Oh well.

Is Canada’s second-largest theatre festival, which draws hundreds of thousands of spectators a year, really dedicated to a man who stood for dictators and exterminations? (…)

Yep.

“[Shaw]’s critically acclaimed by the establishment,” Mr. Beck said on one show. With perhaps his own outdated notion of Shaw’s influence in today’s schools, he added: “Ask your kids if they learned this: Who dreamt up the gas chambers, the death chambers? … George Bernard Shaw dreamt them up to get rid of the undesirables.”

Mr. Beck’s idiosyncratic and iconoclastic point of view – in many ways, he and wittier conservative provocateurs such as Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn are the true heirs to the Shavian polemical style – has been spread by his many followers online, who have linked Shaw’s musings to Barack Obama’s health-care reform and what one blogger called “Sarah Palin’s ominous warning about Death Panels.”

Nice try, Globe & Mail.

But the ideas of Beck, Steyn and Coulter are a) not socialist or utopian, and

b) not supported by my extorted tax dollars and sanctioned by Canadian school boards