ROUGHLY THREE YEARS ago, on a visit to the office of then Senator Consiglio Di Nino, I was shown a voting card signed by the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance members who on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 created the Conservative Party of Canada. Acknowledgement of this anniversary — ten years ago, exactly — was understandably absent from a voluminous Throne Speech which noted the approach of several other anniversaries, including Confederation and both World Wars.
WHILE WRITING this I received an invitation to Washington. At the end of the message, this: “in case of a federal government shutdown, the event will be canceled.” All these years later, I was left thinking, could it be 1995? Only, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America, the intervening years providing sources of irony as well as of discouragement. Mostly however discouragement, as I notice that the Continuing Resolution is a continuous thing, alright, but more like an irresolution.
I‘LL FOREVER BE SURPRISED by current day apologists of Richard Nixon, who are able (much like admirers of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton) to side-step quite a bit of nastiness to put forward the triumphs — in this case concerning China and the Soviet Union and the often cited “détente.” And indeed this was the chief tactic of Nixon himself, who discounted the Watergate disclosures and who preferred to talk instead about his efforts “to build peace in the world.”
IT WAS separation from his wife which in 1974 brought the Welsh political columnist Alan Watkins to the first-floor Islington flat of his son, and thereby to the acquaintance of the Telegraph columnist Frank Johnson, who occupied the floor below. Out of the friendship between this witty pair came the popularization of the phrase “the chattering classes,” to designate that portion of the bourgeoisie which earns its daily bread by talking. This week one is likely to summon the well-remunerated speaker and federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in that connection, and in doing so an opportunity arises to look into this important matter of verbal performance — not only as it pertains to the aspiring Trudeau but to his category of persons in general.
IT’S SLIPPERY on that field where we kick around notions of respect and tolerance. The teams in Quebec’s match of the turbans, which I’ll call Team Multiculturalism and Team Integration, each make valid points. They are also punting to the stands, not to the actual goal.
TO UNEARTH SOME latent implications of Edward Snowden’s recent act of whistle blowing, and the landscape of surveillance it has brought to the fore, I propose the following thought experiment. You are to imagine a world in which the infrastructure of potential effective and total citizen invigilation by the state and its proxies is realized, and additionally in which the potential to abolish the private life of the individual is at hand. My question is this: do you think the people of that world should care?
I WAS NEVER an enthusiast of Frank magazine, but no one living in Ottawa at the height of its notoriety — from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s — could entirely ignore it. By the time of its demise it had sunk, in my view, to the mental and moral level of a frothy mob. Good satire is a matter of discernment, knowing just who to attack and on what foundation. An example is condensed in the brilliant coinage The Puffster, Geoff Heinricks’ name for the journalist-turned-trough-feeder Mike Duffy. In the ’90s, he was the subject of an ongoing satirical campaign which culminated in a defamation lawsuit (a common occurrence at Frank) later settled out of court. “Puffster” economically and comprehensively summed up the self-regarding Duffy, capturing in one word his swollen ego together with his lack of moral and intellectual gravity.
OVER A LUNCH with the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, I had a conversation last week in North Bay about Idle No More and social media. A thread which ran throughout our discussion was anger — in particular the anger of native people, much of which is directed toward the federal government of Canada.
LAST WEEK the Conservative Party of Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Keith Ashfield, improvised some lines in an otherwise scripted event staged to cheerlead the 2013 federal budget. At the Morena family home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, he complimented eldest daughter Grace, observing that she is ‘a great cook’ who will one day ‘make a wonderful wife for somebody.’
MUCH HAS BEEN made this week of President Obama’s deference to the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on which he has sworn his oaths inaugurating a second presidential term. Cornel West, who has taken especial affront to Barack Obama’s exploitation of King’s “prophetic fire for a moment of presidential pageantry,” has for months now referred to the present Oval Office occupant as a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.
IN HIS 2004 NOVEL, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines an alternative history issuing from the 1940 defeat of incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the isolationist and America First candidate, Charles Lindbergh. An instance of the genre uchronia, a compound literally meaning “no time,” The Plot Against America supplies in a US setting roughly what Camus’ La Peste did over a generation earlier in a fictional 1940s Algeria: a depiction of human rot inexorably overtaking a previously sane (one is tempted in this connection to say sanitary) society.
I HAD JUST finished reading the New York Times article “Republicans Reconsider Positions on Immigration” when confirmation of President Obama’s Florida victory arrived. Had more Republicans heeded the advice of Florida’s Jeb Bush, this article, and the contest it describes, might have concluded differently. Having absorbed this uncontroversial bit of information, Republicans are at last coming around to the Bush and company point-of-view, which ten years ago was summarized as “The Big Tent” and the Party of Lincoln, and whose current mantra is the phrase path to citizenship.
I‘VE TAKEN IN all the US presidential and vice-presidential debates. Over the years these have become highly rehearsed and scripted affairs, meticulously polished and doubtless focus group vetted and — well, who knows what else the candidates do these days. Computer modelling, maybe. Virtual reality simulations. Testing on non-human animals. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that media experts and pollsters and psychics are also consulted. The result of all this engineering is debate not unlike processed food: enjoyable, but who knows what’s really in it.
IT IS FASHIONABLE among the political left to affect dislike for Walt Disney movies, mostly on the grounds of Disney’s crude commercial tactics and their representations of peoples of colour. And yet, let’s be honest; haven’t we all thoroughly enjoyed at least one Disney movie? There is perhaps only one Disney story, variously told, and that is the story of the underdog who, against all odds, triumphs. This is the gist of every Disney movie I have seen, from Cinderella to Matilda. Only the characters and the settings change. The subject may concern a soccer team, or a princess; the setting may be early America or ‘The Orient.’ Nevertheless, we get a certain unmistakable sort of story, a recognizably ‘Disney’ story. Careful marketing dictates that it shall be thus, but marketing only discloses what seems to work, not why it works. Why do we enjoy a Disney movie? And why is the left reluctant to admit they do enjoy it?
LAST WEEK the vice-presidential candidates for the 2012 USA federal election appeared in a televised debate. The ABC news journalist and debate moderator, Martha Raddatz, posed the following question:
RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is, indeed, historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country ….
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 