Allow me to depart briefly from My Town to voyage south and put the question: “Diane Colley-Urquhart, what were you thinking?”

The popular Calgary alderperson (yes, technically alderman, but I prefer person) and Tory candidate for the provincial byelection in Calgary-Glenmore lost resoundingly on Monday, Sept. 14 after fatally stepping in it over the weekend at a candidates’ forum. In what might have been the most ill-advised bit of candour ever uttered in the course of a political campaign, Colley-Urquhart responded to a question about whether she would break with her political party if the needs of her constituents diverged from the Tory line with a smile and a “no.”

Certainly this negative monosyllable couldn’t be singlehandedly blamed for her finishing third after the Wildrose Alliance and the Liberals, but given other controversies that dogged her campaign and the widely stated assertion that this showdown on Tory home turf was a de facto referendum on Premier Ed Stelmach’s leadership, well, it couldn’t have helped.

I, for one, am glad that Colley-Urquhart didn’t try to finesse a non-answer because it offers an object lesson and a neat segue to the topic that’s been weighing on my mind lately — politics: is it wrecking our lives?

I’m probably naïve, but there was a point in my life where I thought of government as something always going on in the background of real life, and now politics — the strategies involved in gaining and guarding power against all comers — seem to have become the increasingly clamourous primary activity of leaders across the country and around the world.

For instance, have Canada’s major political parties stopped campaigning for a second over the course of Stephen Harper’s tenure as prime minister? At the moment it looks like we might be able to forestall our umpteenth election this century, but you can’t postpone arrogance indefinitely and it seems unavoidable that somewhere between Harper’s cold-blooded, calculating leadership style and Michael Ignatieff’s apparent eagerness to pick out new drapes for 10 Sussex Dr. that all of us — including the 1.6 million Canadians without jobs — will be sweating another election call before long. In the meantime, the government tiptoes around the big decisions in hopes of not cheesing off too many voters.

Besides, we know the real business of government is to protect the deserving from the undeserving. In Alberta, as in many other jurisdictions, politics has an ugly tendency to take its toll on the already disenfranchised — hey, it’s not like they vote, right? The national pastime of appearing to be doing something without actually doing anything seems to be maintaining the status quo for the moment, but we all reap the whirlwind of non-decisions eventually.

And even at that it could be worse. Down south, the Obama administration won a decisive mandate last year, but the sore losers in the GOP have done such a good job of whipping up a frenzy of “politics” among the superstitious — and possibly racist — masses that their new super-cool president can’t even talk to the nation’s schoolkids without being accused of trying to indoctrinate them into his Communist-Islamofascist secret army. Why? Because some fat asshole on TV said so. Almost 10 per cent unemployment, 50 million Americans without health insurance, a multi-trillion-dollar deficit, two disastrous wars on the go and the White House lawn is full of wingnuts screaming incoherent crap about birth certificates and death panels shoveled into their heads by reckless, unaccountable, and obscenely rich media mouthpieces.

Two commemorative events back here in the River City last week put a poignant sting in my usual touchy cynicism. The first was a gathering at Riverdale Hall to remember the wonderful Vanessa Hughes, who passed away last June after a lengthy, breathtakingly graceful battle with cancer. I hope to say more about Vanessa at some future date once I’ve had more time to accommodate the fact of her absence into my understanding of the world — it hasn’t fully sunk in yet that, after 20 years of episodic but consistently delightful friendship, I will not see her again.

The other event was a fundraiser for the Joe Bird Memorial Foundation, an arts endowment named for the beloved comedian/musician/actor/man about town who left us last April. The honorees at both events were barely into their 40s when they died, an injustice compounded by the energy and creativity with which they lived. Sadly, it often takes rude jolts such as these to jar things into perspective, to remind us to make much of time and to draw strength from the radiant exemplars of constructiveness and community-building in our midst. I doubt either Vanessa or Joe thought of themselves that way, but the fact that people feel moved to carry on in their spirit says something about the impacts they made respectively. And despite the sombre undertone of the memorials, the joy that Vanessa and Joe both embodied inevitably permeated the atmosphere at both events.

Remembering them certainly made me want to put aside my habitual pissing around for the betterment of my surroundings, however small. I wonder if that bit of circumspection would resonate much with someone who thinks politics is their job. After all, there’s always another election just around the corner.