Category Archives: Personal Essay

Non-fictional writing of a personal nature.

Personal Essay

When Christie Blatchford Came Calling

She was interested in law and order, and only in law and order. That was both her strength and her limitation.

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR ○ FEBRUARY 15, 2020 ○ Personal Essay

ON THE MORNING OF Monday February 4, 2008 I got a phone call from Christie Blatchford. I was the Director of Communications at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and Blatchford was working on a series of articles for the National Post concerning the Yellow Quill First Nation, where the AHF had funded a project.

In a few years I’d be writing for the National Post myself, but I never got to know Christie Blatchford well. I’d long known of her work, and we’d had a few conversations. Even before I’d ever spoken to her I had inferred from her writing that she was tough and to-the-point. And she was. Her vocabulary was peppered with shits and fucks, which was fine by me. I knew why she was calling: she had a hunch that with a bit of digging she’d unearth nastiness. The Executive Director, Mike DeGagne, was lining his pockets, or perhaps we were funnelling dollars to the well-connected. Something had to be rotten in the state of Denmark, and Blatchford was calling me to work out exactly what it was.

After the call I wrote a briefing note and took it to Mike. He knew Blatchford’s writing, and so he knew as I did that she wasn’t exactly a champion of Indigenous perspectives. I had a standing policy with journalists, which was to educate them as best I could about the nature and importance of our work, and to win them over to the cause. If it took days or months or even years, so be it. My door was always open to them, and so was my phone line. I’d give them as much time as they wanted. Sometimes I found myself pushing on an open door, as was the case with media folks like Marie Wadden and Shelagh Rogers, but I knew that wasn’t going to be the case with Blatchford. She was a court reporter who’d seen the worst of humanity. For years my father was an OPP court officer, so I was well acquainted with the skeptical mindset that this work engendered. In fact I welcomed the skeptics because I understood them. So winning over Blatchford became something of an obsession.

I said to Mike, listen, I think I know what makes Christie Blatchford tick. She’s drawn to the courts because it throws the drama of human morality into sharp relief. The injustice she confronts there makes her churn wth indignation, and if we can make her see that we’re in the business of addressing historic injustices, maybe she’ll become as fierce an advocate as she is a critic. Imagine that! After all, I said, inside every skeptic is a disappointed idealist. Let’s invite her to the office and put every goddamn file in front of her, nothing hidden, and let her see with her own eyes that we are not the villains she imagines—and that to the contrary we are trying to do something of positive value.

It was an easy pitch, not that Mike ever resisted my counsel. He ran a transparent operation and in sixteen years no one ever caught us with our knickers round the ankles, although many of the best put their shoulder into it. I remember sitting at the AHF boardroom table with Curt Petrovich, an investigative reporter who cast a cold eye on our organization. He went away disappointed, as they all did. I’ll be candid and admit that I enjoyed the game. I had journalism in my background and respected people who were hard headed and tenacious and challenging. Suppose there was in fact corruption. Well, then we would have deserved to be brought down, and the fact is I admire the people who commit themselves to doing it.

When I was young and contemplating a career in journalism, Blatchford was living the life that I fantasized for myself. The by-line at a major outlet, fame, house parties where the booze flowed and the elbows of colleagues rubbed. Back then journalists could still believe they were doing something nobIe, even if it was bullshit, and there was no shortage of money to help them do it. That’s all gone. I was just old enough for the dying years of the old school of journalism, where newsrooms were loud and smoked-filled and a lunch would stretch well into the afternoon. Now the business of journalism goes about in eerie silence, and the changes are so remarkable and happened so fast (at least it seems that way now) that Kelly McParland and I got talking about it one day at the National Post’s headquarters. Some of the changes reflect the decline of the occupation, but most of the change is good. The alcoholism is no longer glamourized, and while journalism remains dominated by men, chauvinism is regarded more as a bug than a feature. Editors tell me they want a more diverse workforce and admit they have a ways to go. So there’s that.

Why this digression into the world of journalism? In my ideal world I would have won Blatchford over and, who knows, we might have become colleagues and even friends. But I was operating in the real world, where neither of these happened. Christie Blatchford made it very clear to me that she was interested in law and order, and only in law and order. That was both her strength and her limitation. When she realized there was nothing lurid to write about the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, nothing to get people outraged over, no human malfeasance to press into the ready forms of her worldview, she lost all interest. One day the calls just stopped, and she moved on.

I kept her phone number and her email and I suppose I also held to a remnant of my idealism, because I sent her an email later on, when she was writing articles about Caledonia. Once again, I tried to win her over. Christie, I wrote, there’s a long history leading up to the Haldimand Tract dispute, and if you really want to understand what’s happening today, and if you want your readers to truly understand, and to be informed, you need to look at that context. Nothing is going to change in this country until we come to terms with the past, I told her. And after all, isn’t it the job of a journalist to dig, and to present all the perspectives, and to make people understand?

Christie was a lot of things, but one thing she wasn’t was subtle. She had told me in no uncertain terms that she was only interested in punishing people who had broken the law, and I guess I should have left it at that. In any case, she never wrote back. ⌾

Personal Essay

The Life of Cities

Everywhere, we are a stranger arriving into light

✎  Wayne K. Spear | April 3, 2018 · Essay

subway

EVERYONE IN A CITY is a unwritten message, a scriptless actor, a hidden quantity suspended between two moments of familiarity: the known they have left behind, and the known toward which they rush, through the tower atrium where calèches and footmen once passed. You are the next in the line, the subsequent fare, a neuron of commerce passing the bill, to a woman who pretends she is happy to see you. In a city, you befriend alleys and skylines, the shadows cast by skyscrapers, and the smell of foreign shops. You embrace the philosophy of the crane, its iron doctrine of destruction and rebirth, and you peer into the bones of a gestating condo, where love will take root, or not, among strangers of the future.

In a city, you wear your anonymity like a childhood sweater. We are all theoretical, without sin, mute yet plenipotentiary, emerging into the rush-hour light with undeclared purpose. Mere inconvenience compels us toward the sterile momentary intimacy of crowded subways. A portal disgorges us, severally, seeds to the wind. I have never seen you, and I will never see you again. The life of the city is the purest form of grace, a work of love, a perfunctory cohabitation without grievance or jealousy, without expectation or agenda, without the unbearable sweetness of hope.

We meet in moments of city inconvenience, with our burdens and propositions. You provide directions, hold the door open, carry the stroller down the stair, lend a stranger the charger for your phone. You feel embarrased to ask for these things. It is an imposition, perhaps even a mild trasngression of the unspoken compact. In the city we are, all of us, unto ourselves. We go out into the world with the requisite provisions, mindful of the hazards. The city is a living, unaccomodating beast. We accept this and get on our way.

A city is a bookshelf in a house where everyone writes, but does not read. The idea of reading, a vision of the forever- unread and unreadable, intoxicates us. But in the village, everyone has memorized the stories. There are no secrets and no strangers in the town. In town, you are an open book, a fully parsed sentence, always Mary or John or Maria. You have only one face, and you wear it wherever you go, to every human purpose. In town, you give the cashier an accounting of yourself, obliged to the currency of human curiosity, tethered to the law of ceremony and consanguinity, forever reconciling the ledger of entanglements.

The city is not better than the town. Nothing is better than another thing. Everywhere, in the skin of the earth, there are cracks and crevices. We call this place by one name, and by another name we come to know another place, or we think that we know, but nothing truly has a name. Everywhere, the road we are on will one day end suddenly, like the wrinkles of a palm. Everywhere, we are exchanging bits of data and drawing from our accounts. Everywhere, we are between two places. Everywhere, we are a stranger arriving into light.

Personal Essay

Loss

You learn, sometimes too late, what is needed for the voyage, and what must be left behind

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 29, 2018 • Essay

WE ARRIVE TO THE WORLD naked, with nothing but a connecting thread to those who, with any luck, will love and nourish us. Soon enough there will be clothing and bright light, crepundia, a crash of voices, perambulation, the blush of passing foliage, a human parade. Soon enough, a world of objects and subjects, of wordless wonders. All this, before there is a you and me, before the arrival of that indelible space that separates, all before the problematic ego, before the untidy business of living.

You learn, years later, that a hotel is not a place. You learn that you came into the world with all that you needed. You learn, but it is the forever too late. Somewhere in the distance is that place you call home, or once called home, where the woman who once loved you washes dishes, or stares into the distance, or does none of these. A hotel is not a place, but you are a man filling the requisite chair, a quadrate, among the absent unknowable others who are between an elsewhere yesterday and tomorrow. You learn, too late, what was needed for this voyage and what must be left behind.

Time passes. You learn the trick of putting names to things. You understand that evenings, when you are alone with yourself, are the most difficult. This is the time when unnamed things belabour themselves to the water’s surface, demanding to be named, needing to be sorted into a taxonomy of mourning. Grief has many hands. It overturns even the most hidden of stones, reconstituting origins and descent, questioning everything, anatomizing the fossils, naming.

You throw yourself into a world that does not see and does not care that everything has changed. Everywhere is a hotel. You begin to notice strange and inexplicable things, for instance that the sky is not the familiar sky. The cashier asks you how you are, and you pretend that this is an ordinary thing to say. You pretend to believe that words still mean to you what they once meant. You pretend that the ice beneath your feet is not slippery, but the moments arrive when a footing gives way and you are certain you will go down, down into the water. I am good, you tell the cashier, and she does not take your hand because she does not see the ice or the all-consuming sea. And in that moment, it occurs to you that the hand that once would have reached out to you will reach out no more.

We come into the world with only what we need, and in time we will lose everything. Some things we will leave behind, perhaps not knowing it for a time, and in other instances there will be a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, before someone disappears into the car that will never return. There will be arrivals and departures, the passing of place to place, a remembrance of love and bright light, from an unbridgeable shore. Gratitude and sorrow, the will to go on, the human parade, an ocean that forever empties into a sea.

Personal Essay

Why Do We Dream?

Would a life of only agreeable experiences be as rich and profound as a life of at least some struggle and suffering?

✎  Wayne K. Spear | February 1, 2018 • Personal Essay

WHY DO WE DREAM? Why the dreams of stress and misery, of being lost, of wandering, missing the train and having no phone nor money, sometimes not even clothing. The dreams are always of failure and disappointment, always of appointments about to be missed. A wrong bus taken, a wrong turn on a highway that allows no going back. And there I find myself, alone, in a wilderness, sometimes at a border I must but cannot cross. There is a sense of urgency, a deadline, a nameless necessary place I cannot reach. There is no one to call, nowhere to go. What is to be done?

I pick up the boxes or the bags, or whatever burden I am compelled to carry. A wagon, or a set of luggage. Something awkward and useless, but indispensable, on a path of deep mud. A cold wind, water, rough stones underfoot. It is dark, and the rain is heavy. My vision is obscured, by snow or by fog. I am miles from anywhere, from everywhere, arms filled with something that does not help me on the voyage but which I must carry, for reasons unknown. I don’t know who has given me these possessions, if that’s what they are, or where I will take them. There is always one thing I have managed to drop or otherwise misplace—the one, critical thing. A passport or a receipt, a map, instructions, a phone number. It is gone, and though I search for it again and again, I find nothing. I cannot go home or reach my destination. I am suspended in a story with no arc and no momentum. I may well remain here forever.

The landscape changes in an instant. I am on a bus, but now I am in a boat. We reach the shore, and I step out, but the dry land is suddenly an ocean and the boat is slipping away too fast for me to swim. I call out but no one hears, and I watch the boat get smaller and then vanish. The ocean becomes desert. I drag my belongings through deep sand. Nothing makes sense. Why am I in a desert? I know only that there is an appointment which must be kept. To miss it is to suffer an unbearable blow. I must find a phone. I must let them know that I have been delayed, that I am doing my best to arrive, only give me more time. I am trying as best I can, I will tell them, and I will be there. Just give me more time.

I have this dream almost every night. A dream of terror from which I wake in a panic, my heart pounding. My mind torments me in my sleep for reasons I cannot understand. I am lost without recourse and the world I have known slips away, but there is nothing I can do. A dream that means nothing, that warns me of nothing, that solves nothing. Why do I dream?

A night arrives when I lie down for sleep and I tell my mind the dream I want to have when I am gone. Where I have got this idea, I can’t say. It is an experiment, an act of desperation. I describe the dream in as much detail as I can manage. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. So I describe what I am doing in the dream, perhaps floating in water (but not drowning!) or flying in air (but not pursued!) and I choose a place, also, such as the tropics or a Mediterranean port town, Venice, or a house from my childhood. And the people I want to see there, I specify this too. What will we talk about? The happy times, things that draw laughter, beauty. All that is impossible in life, I describe. The departed will be there. I will breathe underwater. I will have dinner with the dead and a journey into space. I know that my mind has an agenda, to introduce monsters, so I interpolate the fantastic on my own terms. There will be palaces and ocean creatures and other-worldly beings, not of the menacing variety but come to reunite with their sundered kin.

They come not bearing unresolved guilt, but joy. Everything that has been buried remains buried, including the mind, submerged and inscrutable, burdened by its inheritance and longing to be set free. And so I am clear about my desire. I would prefer not to see the half-rotted faces, the ghosts, the brutal finality of cul-de-sacs. I don’t wish to be trapped or lost or set on a fool’s errand. I want to feel love, and not terror or sadness. I tell this to my mind as I prepare for sleep. I know that life is loss and pain, but if one can confect a dream, then why not a dream of happiness?

To my surprise I find that this works, even if imperfectly. The departed return to sit for tea. There is no grief, no dragging of luggage through a useless desert. I discover that the imagination invents pleasure as easily as it invents pain. Would a life of only agreeable experiences be as rich and profound as a life of at least some struggle and suffering? Perhaps, but this is invention, not life. In life, no one chooses the losses, the pain, the tragedy. In life, one is chosen.

The suffering return from their journey bearing wisdom. We whisper in their presence, awkwardly, our faces grown longer. Wherever they go, those who suffer find streets of dark water, and when we stumble upon them we phrase our greeting with care. They did not ask for the journey, and we don’t want to know too much about it, but they return holding a marvellous gem that they alone can explain. A gem from a dream of the departed who haunt them. A dream not of the day but of the relentless, interminable day. A fascinating gem that I do not want to ever hold.

Personal Essay

Life, edited

Would I even notice the absence of cream in my coffee, once my mind had let go the idea of it?

✎  Wayne K. Spear | January 18, 2018 • Essay

IN THE MORNING I make my coffee, sometimes I walk to the nearby cafe. When the barista sees me coming, she, or he, begins to make my drink: a large Americano. It is a routine whose origins I am unable to summon. There was a first time that I ordered an Americano at this shop, a first time I drank coffee. I don’t remember these firsts, I only know that they are so. Just as there are lasts.

My earliest memories of coffee are of the church basement where we gathered after service. An enormous stone building, with stained glass windows and many rows of pews, benches for the choir, a pipe organ, a vaulted ceiling. And below, a gymnasium, a Sunday school room, a large kitchen. For years we attended church on Sundays. There must have been weddings and funerals also, but I have no recollection of them. I have seen sun-bleached photos, of aunts and uncles, the happy brides and grooms whose future self will divorce and remarry, or perhaps not, retaining across the decades some small semblance of this person frozen in time, covered in wedding confetti, surrounded by those I remember as once living among us.

We went to church, as most others did. Afterward we gathered in the basement to drink coffee made in enormous steel percolators, or tea from mismatched cups and saucers, donated by kind ladies with blue hair. The same ladies who made the trays of triangle sandwiches. In one palm, the adults balancing a cup and saucer, in the other hand a wedge of sandwich nested in a paper napkin. The women in polyester dresses of harvest gold, the men in rayon jackets and chocolate brown slacks, shirts with enormous collars, the indistinct voices of grown-ups punctuated by the laughter of children. The kind ladies with blue hair appear from the kitchen, take note of the trays, and retreat. One imagines them forever baking, forever replenishing the silver trays with triangle sandwiches, even now.

One day we stopped going to church. Why, I don’t know, any more than I know why we started. Nothing was said about it, to me at least. We went, and then we didn’t. As the last of many other things arrives, must arrive, the end comes but without fanfare. “Goodbye,” you say, and “see you later,” to someone you will never say hello to again.

How does a ritual become a ritual? I used to drink my coffee with cream. I would often find myself without, sometimes on cold mornings, the coffee already made, me in my pyjamas not wanting to go outside. I couldn’t bear coffee without cream, back then. I found it too bitter, undrinkable, nasty even. And against this, the going out into the cold, to get cream from the nearby convenience store. First I would have to dress. Or at the least put on a coat and boots. I would hope to find enough change in the laundry dish. If the dish was emptied of laundry money I would have to use the bank machine. It was a scenario I grew tired of repeating.

I read that a person can learn to like something they find unpleasant, like black coffee. The article said it takes, on average, fifteen attempts. I think of the first time I drank Guinness, in a Kingston pub, on a cold December night. I found it disgusting, and yet the next week I was back, drinking another. And another after that. I became curious to know what black coffee would taste like to my re-calibrated brain. Would I even notice the absence of cream, once my mind had let go the idea of it, as it had let go so many other things? Habits, lovers, misguided notions, the many sordid details.

At first it was unpleasant. But I was surprised at how quickly I was able to edit the cream from my morning ritual and not miss it. I oughtn’t have been. After all, one day I disliked Guinness. And another day I sat in the Wellington, my back to the stage where Gerry O’Kane played his guitar and sang, drinking my Guinness at the windowfront table with my friends, walking home later in the clear December air, holding the hand of a woman to whom I was not romantically inclined when we arrived at the pub hours before. Life before and after, coffee with and without cream, love and loss, weddings and funerals. Sunday arrives. I drink my coffee black, my routine simplified, no need of cream or of choirs, of expired passions, of the rows of creaking pews, the moulding hymnals, or of kind old women with blue hair, gone but not to heaven.

Personal Essay

Social Media, Conversation, and Connection

People can smell bad and have unpleasant loud voices but we can’t do without them

✎  Wayne K. Spear | October 26, 2017 ◈ Essays

THE ODDS ARE you’re not old enough to remember what it was like to be bored and lonely before the days of Facebook, so let me set the scene. In those days I watched Friends and reruns of The Rockford Files on cable television and I drank and I smoked cigarettes in my living room, or I walked the streets of my city for hours in search of diversions. One night, in my 20s, I drove to a singles party on the edge of town, circled the building twice, and went home, unable to summon the nerve to go inside. I was in a PhD program at the time and I spent my days in libraries or in front of a computer that was not connected to the world of distractions that we call the Internet. It was a good life when it was good, and when it wasn’t good it was an empty howling wilderness that I filled with words that no one else would ever read.

Many of us were already experts on isolation when Robert Putnam wrote his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. A book like that wouldn’t have been written or read otherwise. In my 30s I had a family, well after my contemporaries had done the same, and I became fully absorbed in my work and responsibilities. But your world can shrink as a parent, especially if your extended family is far away. My partner and I didn’t go out for a movie or a restaurant meal for years, and even if we had tried to arrange a social outing it would have been an ordeal. To this day a drink in the neighbourhood with a friend can require weeks of negotiation. A get-together with someone from another city (and most of my friends live in another city) requires months, and often there are cancellations and deferments. The reality of post-college life for most of us is that we’ll rarely meet face-to-face with the few friends we have. The reality is that you’ll spend a good deal of time alone. Maybe that’s why Friends was such a big hit. We all want that life, and few of us have it.

I almost didn’t write this essay because I decided instead to spend my scheduled writing time at a Meetup for writers in my neighbourhood. Five minutes was all I could stomach. I sat at the table with a dozen strangers and one of them immediately took control of the group, setting down what she believed should be the terms and conditions of the meeting. I felt as if I was at an inaugural Bolshevik congress, when all I wanted was an intelligent conversation. We should have a closed Facebook group, the woman said. We should submit our writing for critique as an attachment and not in a post, she said. And on and on, we should do this and that and not these and those. I’m allergic to the word should, so I went outside, lit a cigar, walked home, and wrote this.

People have smells and loud irritating voices and ways of laughing that get under your skin like a nasty insect bite. But people can’t quite do entirely without people. When I was young I dreamed of writing for the magazines and newspapers. I fantasized about the smart dinner parties and the witty conversations that would be the collateral of my life of letters. My many writer friends would be creative and interesting and bold, and my nights would be filled with the feast of reason and the flow of soul. A bohemian life. The reality is another thing entirely, as everyone soon enough knows. The labour of writing is tedious and isolating, and for most of us it doesn’t lead to glamorous diners or even friendships. Instead, there are inboxes with messages like this:

Your a horrible writer, you dont even know what your talking about. Give your head a shake. This is the stupidest thing I have ever read. You should go back to working as a carnival barker.

Life is the same for people of all professions. Few of us bowl or join clubs or social organizations anymore, if we ever did. Less of us go to church or spend our weekends at the Legion than our parents’ generation did. We don’t drive to the singles’ dance, we look for love on Tindr. We have Meetups and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We go to the Internet for conversation and camaraderie and connection. There, we smell the virtual smells of other people, and it isn’t always pleasant or pretty. But it’s human, and we’re lying to ourselves if we think we can do without human connection.

Personal Essay

The columnist versus the commons

In my experience it is not the editors of papers but rather the readers who are intolerant of unorthodoxy

Editorials

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | MARCH 13, 2017 • Personal Essays

ALL WHO HAVE WRITTEN for the newspaper editorial section know what readers know, that theirs is a strange and, in some respects, ridiculous task. We understand how tedious it can be to discover us, once again, with our opinions of the moment. In the defence of editorialists, however, I’ll note it’s simply the case that someone must fill the area between the ads, and a fellow with something to say about the President’s latest tweet (or whatever) is a cost-effective proposition. Not only this, comment sections are as a rule popular features of a paper. As a result you are probably stuck with us, as we with you. This being so, isn’t it time we confessed to some unspoken truths of editorial, opinion, or political writing?

I have already alluded to the self-awareness of an op-ed writer, whose job subsists on the improbable and therefore embarrassing conceit that she has something useful, intelligent, and worthwhile to say on any and every topic. A columnist is someone forever sticking out his neck, a broadsheet whack-a-mole impelled by some impenetrable force that no normal person experiences. This raises the unavoidable question, What compels an opinion writer to do it? There are as many possible answers as there are people to give them, but the more credible explanations begin with the observation that newspaper columnists are human beings driven by ordinary human impulses, such as ego, need for acceptance, a desire to do something useful with one’s time in this world, and so on. Once a writer has clothing and shelter (not easily obtained by the labor of writing, alone) she moves up the hierarchy of need, where objects like belonging and love and meaning obtain. A news writer is likely to offer you all kinds of high-minded and self-congratulatory nonsense—he is defending democracy, fighting for truth, standing up for the little guy—but none of these speak to the base and universal human motivations. Taking my own case, I knew I was going to be a writer by age eight, long before I knew there was something called “politics.” From this it follows that my ultimate motivations as a writer, whatever they may be, must involve things that would be available to a typical eight-year-old. And sure enough, I recall from my earliest days a fascination with the sound of words and the shape of printed letters, the feel of paper and the smell of books, the click of typewriter keys. First came the inner compulsion to write, and only years later the ennobling propaganda.

Notice that, for the purposes of this essay, I am focused on writers of opinion pieces. Much of what I have to say will apply to novelists and journalists and poets, but these are not my concern. The relationship of a professional editorialist to the novelist is that writers start out imagining themselves the next Faulkner or what-have-you, and when this turns out not to be the case, they go in search of other pastures, arriving eventually at the opinion pages. There is a definite hierarchy of writerly ambition, with literary fiction at the top and mere utilitarian prose—things like tampon instructions or VCR manuals—at the bottom. The editorialist is somewhere in-between. It is a broad category of persons, comprising well-paid media celebrities as well as obscure bloggers. Most opinion writers work for no money and less fame, a sure indication that something beyond material gain is their motivation. I mention this because I have encountered the charge that my opinions are purchased, which is not the case. Everything I have written at the National Post, for example, is untainted by the moral filth of pecuniary recompense. Once in about 2012 Kelly McParland took me out for lunch, on Postmedia’s dime, and although the leasing of my opinions could have been put into play, no one present (McParland, Matt Gurney, and Christopher Nardi) undertook the gambit.

This leads me to a second common misconception, that opinion writers are under the control of media owners and/or editors. The problem with this notion is that it posits a totalitarian world of invigilating Big Brothers and thoroughgoing thought control, a proposition which requires efficiencies well beyond contemporary newsrooms, including Postmedia. I know as fact that editorial staff have been cut to the point at which articles now get published with only the most cursory review. My opinions have never once been censored or silenced by an editor, but then again I have yet to call for Marxist-Leninist revolution or Juche in the classroom or other beyond-the-limit measures. For reasons I’ve never understood I got a few letters over the years accusing me of subservience to Jonathan Kay (the former National Post editor), but we spoke only twice in the years he was there, and as I recall them our conversations went something like the following:

– How are you?
– I’m doing well. Some weather we’ve been having.
– Yeah, some weather.
– Etc.

This is as good a place as any to note in passing that the “provocateur” type of columnist, Ezra Levant for instance, often turns out to be mild and unobjectionable when you meet him. (People you have only known from television also tend to be smaller than you imagined.) Opinionists are no more anti-social jerks than any other segment of the population, and it is revealing when we suppose people with whom we disagree to be bad people. Nor are comment pages run as a matter of course by zealots. In reality, editorialists intuitively sense where the boundaries of respectability are and go about their business accordingly. The term for this is self-censorship, which is nothing to be proud of but neither is it necessarily an evil. The person who decides not to tell her grandmother about the great sex she had last weekend is self-censoring, and good on it. I can remember the times when I decided not to write something that I wanted to, and invariably those decisions had to do with considerations such as decorum or libel—for example wanting to call such-and-such politician a “lying piece of fucking shit” but deciding against it. Jon Kay and I had, and have, real disagreements, especially as concerns Indigenous people, and it happened that we took them to the pages of the National Post.

In my experience it is not the editors of papers but rather the readers who are intolerant of unorthodoxy. To write opinion pieces is to be denounced as a Bolshevik and a mouthpiece of the dividend-drawing classes, in equal measure. No matter what you do half of your readers will decide that you are a dangerous left-wing radical and the other half that you are a reactionary war-monger and capitalist-apologist. My friend at Macleans, the columnist Terry Glavin, collects insults the way our parents’ generation collected the porcelain Wade figurines that came with their tea. Most of the email an editorialist receives is incoherent if not deranged, so much so that a writer for the newspapers soon enough comes to regard his mail-bag as a kind of freak show offered up by Providence for his amusement. Along the way, many editorialists and would-be influencers confront the unpleasant fact that they have gone into the business under the false expectation of serious and important conversation. At 25 years of age the budding columnist envisions a milieu of movers and shakers, but by 35 hers is a world of Internet trolls and inboxes stuffed with cut-and-paste invective. Whatever one says to the contrary, the first time you are attacked it is arresting. Until you have been denounced by a stranger in a public manner, you have no idea how it will feel. Some of your detractors will go to great lengths, probing into your history and your finances and your family for something to hurl against you. But the other surprise is how quickly the attacks become routine and tiresome, even absurd. To read a newspaper comment section thread is to witness a form of human entropy, and since one grasps the point the very first time, I saw no use in reading the comments ever again.

On the subject of comments, a number of truisms occurred to me quickly. The first is that many judgements about a columnist’s work are based on the headline alone, which is supplied by the newspaper’s headline editor and not by the author of the article. But even in those rare cases when a reader has attended to your words, his judgement of your writing will almost always come down to the question of whether or not he agrees with what he takes to be your politics. If he disagrees, then you will be dismissed as a stupid and incompetent hack, a lousy writer, a fool, a fascist, etc. If she agrees, you will be praised, but either way the thing is meaningless. What you will likely never encounter is actual criticism, which is to say discernment of the strengths and weaknesses of your position, as well as of the mechanics by which it is articulated. For years I waited in vain for the person who would say: “I disagree with your politics, but I think you’re a good writer, and here’s why…” (or the inverse: you’re absolutely right, but a shame about the writing). Everyone is sorting out whether or not you are on their team, so that they might stuff you into the appropriate conceptual drawer. After this there is nothing to do but string together the appropriate adjectives and press send.

My object in the preceding is not to elicit sympathy for the editorialist. No one who insists upon broadcasting his unsolicited opinions to the world deserves coddling. Criticism, abuse, insult—we ask for and therefore deserve all of it. Of course there are, or ought to be, limits to this arrangement, such as injunctions against violent physical attacks. An editorialist should not be subject to credible threats of harm, whether in the real or virtual world. When you write for a newspaper, especially a national one, you have something that is denied to the great mass of people, a voice which is carried over the air. Perhaps no one will pay any heed to you, but you nonetheless will be perceived to have a measure of power and privilege, a perception which can be invidious. I have always felt a keen awareness of this, and it has made me sympathetic to the critics, up to a point. Many times I have been the fellow yelling at the television, to no use, and I know how it feels. One of the terrible shortcomings of our age is that we have made it possible for corporations, media conglomerates, politicians, and celebrities to pound their nonsense into our ears no matter where we are, but we have not made it possible for the common citizen to be heard even on matters that effect her deeply. If the revolution ever arrives, it is probable that the talking heads and the spokespersons and the pundits will be rounded up and shot, which is after all an unanswerable retort. ⌾

Personal Essay

Trumpists Triumphant

So much has been written of the current President that it feels almost a work of uselessness to sprinkle one’s grains on the ash pile. And yet, to a degree unmatched by his recent predecessors, Mr. Trump makes one feel both compelled to speak and, at the same time, exhausted by the thought of doing so. I’ve wondered what it would have been like to live under the regimes of, say, Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-il, and the Trump administration provides a measure of insight into an important psychological aspect of authoritarianism. That aspect is the inescapability of the Dear Leader, the tendency of the regime to smother and exhaust its critics and their faculties. This raises the question of whether or not the President will succeed in his evident work of discrediting and confounding his critics, including those within the state who function in a constitutional capacity as a check and balance. Assuming the Trumpists do prevail, what might the world look like? That is the topic of this essay.

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Fiction, Personal Essay

The End of the World

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They often ask me, How will it end? They, the people, the ones who think about such things; and it, the world, I presume, the earth but also everything upon it. They ask me because I know, because I have seen the future. I alone have seen it, not in a dream or a vision but in math. Dreams and visions may deceive, but math is pure. It does not lie. So they ask me, How will it end?

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Personal Essay

The Presidential Apprentice s01e03

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The Presidential Apprentice        “You’re hired!” s01e03         11/22/2016

TEASER

FADE IN:
NEW YORK MONTAGE

ORANGE MENACE (V.O.)

New York is a tough place, and that’s why I love it. I also love a good show. In this town everything is show business. You want to make it big? Then learn how to put on a show. I’m talking real drama. I know show business, and look where I am today. The White House!

FLATLINE

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Fiction, Personal Essay

A New Dawn (pt. 1)

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In the beginning the mouth the tongue in trough formation wet pressing to palate pinching at the pill a pharyngeal propellation with proprioceptive reflex viz contraction of orbicularis oris and adduction of labia yielding the involuntary spasms of peristalsis the bolus inching oesophagusward bypassing trachea via shunt of the epiglottis all egress occluded etc as we take our leave of the nasopharynx, the levator palatini, the oropharynx, and so on.

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Fiction, Personal Essay

Mr. Twoskies Goes to Ottawa

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“A dynasty in the making” was the headline on the day Mr. Twoskies gave his speech of acceptance in the House of Commons. Billy, the father of Mr. Tim Twoskies, had been a politician also, presiding over the affairs of his First Nation for four consecutive terms. It’s said the apple falls near to the tree, but Mr. Twoskies was now more than 1,500 kilometres from the fly-in community where his father had been Chief years ago.

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