Dear Paula,
What a leap! I was hardly endorsing Lady Macbeth as a revolutionary figure. The revolutionary figures of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are the weird sisters. But thanks for the laugh.
And thanks for the second one that comes with your choice to identify with Cleopatra. Perform the same illogical leap with that statement that you have done with mine about courage, and you’ll find yourself identifying with a Queen with a tendency to rage who hits someone below her in the social hierarchy for delivering her a report to her that she doesn’t want to hear. Well done!
To be clear, one last time, at no point was I attacking your character. I drew your attention to the discrepancy between a claim you were making about your character and actions and your actions themselves.
It’s true that I am not familiar with your body of work. And your latest comments on my website, which truly surprise me with their lack of intellectual generosity and fixation on purported wrongs to you, show me that every time I read something other than your column in the Edmonton Journal I am making the right choice.
A few of Edmonton's Raging Grannies drop by the square at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue to offer their support to Occupy Edmonton
As for the Raging Grannies, I was fully expecting you to tell me that you have met them often, and interviewed them, and reported on their activities because one “ferocious advocate of social justice” would of course be meeting up all the time with others in her city. You have given me all the evidence I need to see just how unwarranted the claim you were making for yourself in the article to which I was originally objecting.
Perhaps one day you will recognize the possibilities that you so lightly threw away, in not engaging with the Occupiers at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue — who were a good many more than nine! — and people who dropped by for visits, such as the Grannies. And perhaps you can also think about what it has meant for you to have found it so important to identify with a Queen who does not wither from age when the entire planet is withering from the choices we are permitting our governments to make on our behalf. There is a word for the relationship to ego that led you to that choice. Some acute political analysis of the choices that Peter Kent is making in Durban on behalf of Canadians might redeem you.
Yours sincerely,
A doctor of humanities
Labonneviveuse 
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