Unmentionable

It's been a surreal few days. Obscure hints, coded messages, rhymes in place of the actual links: I can't believe this is Canada. Or rather, I can. The merits of the original publication ban can be debated. I rather thought the process of jury selection was intended to weed out those whose views are so fixed as to be impervious to evidence, and in any event the examples where someone could not get a fair trial because of the publicity surrounding a case are few, if any. People are not quite as stupid as so many in the legal and political establishment seem to think they are. But to get to where we are now? It's just absurd. You cannot publish the proscribed testimony on the Web? Okay, maybe that's fair, if other media are under the same order. But to threaten people with prosecution just for linking to a site that does? Or linking to a site that links to that site? Or -- I cannot believe I am writing this -- even for uttering their names? What's the punishment for this blasphemy, I wonder: stoning? Suppose, instead of a website, the ban were broken by an American newspaper: the New York Times, say. Would the police seize all copies of this samizdat publication? Would they prosecute corner newsstands for carrying it? Would we be forbidden from telling Canadians which newspaper had broken the ban? Or what if it were an American television station? Jam the signal? Black out every mention of it in the TV guide? But wait, it gets weirder. We are told that lawyers for Jean Brault and Chuck Guité, who face criminal charges, are pushing for their case to be held back until September. We'll know Wednesday whether their motion is granted. Rationally, if it is, then the ban would lose whatever tenuous justification it once had: by the time the case was heard, the good citizens of Quebec would have had time to clear their heads. But suppose their motion is denied, or Judge Gomery decides to maintain the ban on publishing Brault's testimony, the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who by now are at least partly aware of its contents notwithstanding. And suppose the government falls. We would then be treated to a sight I venture to say has never before been witnessed anywhere in the world: an entire election devoted to an issue that no one is allowed to say anything about. That's all for now. Others have had much more to say, of course. I'll link to some of the best I've seen in future updates. As to the substance of Brault's testimony, I suspect we will not have to wait as long as all that.