Brendan Campisi > Recent Status Updates

We can recognize them as being in the modern world. But not wholly. However radical the conclusions, however heretical their theology, their escape-route from theology was theological...

Most men and women in seventeenth-century Britain still lived in a world of magic, in which God and the devil intervened daily, a world of witches, fairies and charms. If they failed the royal touch would cure scrofula...Most villages had their 'cunning man,' their white witch: they were cheaper than lawyers or doctors...

"Beneath the surface stability of rural England, then, the vast placid open fields which catch the eye, was the seething mobility of forest squatters, itinerant craftsmen and building labourers, unemployed men and women seeking work, strolling players, minstrels and jugglers, pedlars and quack doctors, gipsies, vagabonds, tramps.."

The gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-labourer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other.

"The cropper or woolcomber knew well enough that, while the new machinery might offer skilled employment for his son, or for someone else's son, it would offer none for him. The rewards of the 'march of progress' always seemed to be gathered by someone else."

“How after sponsoring the World’s Fair can we ever be the same again?” concluded Peter Newman. “This is the greatest thing we have ever done as a nation...if this little sub-arctic, self-obsessed country of twenty million people can put on this kind of a show, then it can do almost anything.”

"The birth of Marxist thought among us, or, more precisely, the birth of our Marxist thought, can only happen through the process of addressing this historical phenomenon [underdevelopment]."

"Young baby boomers were imprinted like baby ducklings with ideas about Canada that would still be reflected in public opinion surveys in the twenty-first century...In this sense, Trudeaumania was the birth of a nation..”