In this paper I attempt to clarify and strengthen connections between cultural studies and left politics in the contemporary Canadian context, employing first an extended scare tactic and then re-narrativizing a few of the scenes of reason. Rather than engaging continuously and directly with Canadian practice, I revisit the Nazification of Germany, following the lead of those remarkable advocates of a working-class public sphere, Negt and Kluge (1994), whose `point of departure [for contemporary cultural studies and production] remains the public sphere of 1933 that could be conquered by National Socialism' (Negt, qtd Polan, 38). I rely mainly on historical implication followed by summary exhortation, counting on others to develop or discard or critically translate my views and strategically Eurocentric emphasis as part of their own efforts to stimulate cultural studies inside and outside the Canadian academy. As they do so, I hope that these others will continue to attend to precedents like the Birmingham School's work in England, bearing in mind Stuart Hall's caution about the portability of cultural studies across the Atlantic (Hall, 285) and the consequences of the Thatcherite assault on institutions and disciplines insufficiently aligned with competitiveness and personal independence; and that these others will continue to look south of `the' border too, but even more warily, to a country without much of a political left but with a booming culture of criminality and a thriving crime control industry which at least one criminologist sees as threatening a reprise of the Holocaust (Christie, 79ff, 163ff), a country with entrenched habits of intimidating or co-opting other sovereign states, yet a country which, as Sara Suleri acerbically remarks in Profession 93, abounds in and acts upon `standard clichés about cultural studies, which would have [American scholars] looking only at weather, advertisements, and pincushions when [they] are not too busy buying extravagant costumes to wear at the MLA convention' (17). Academic dissent can only too readily be reduced to mendicancy or transform itself into décor. Meanwhile, complicity remains a taint from which none of us is free.