Weekly wisdom

"Getting an education is a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on."

--Terry Pratchett

The triumphant return of the Paranoid Style: the case of 24

I must admit to being a fan of the television series 24, but also to being a bit ambivalent about that. I imagine I don’t need to elaborate too much on the reasons for that ambivalence: the show’s explicit endorsement of torture as a necessary interrogation tool and its antipathy to issues of civil rights, to say nothing of the way in which Jack Bauer has become something of a folk hero for the pro-Patriot Act right, all sit uneasily with me. In my mind I can reconcile the show’s unpalatable politics with the pleasure of watching a fast-paced, exciting action-based drama for the simple reason that the series’ plots are so ludicrous that they are effectively pure fantasy. And with each season, the show ratchets up the absurdity to the point where you wonder what they’ll do next season to top it. (In the words of Stephen Colbert, they “crank up the crazy and rip off the knob”).


The Ticking Time Bomb

That is however a rather big cop-out on my part. The particular fantasy being peddled by 24—the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and the correlating need on the part of federal agencies to be able to act as they see fit irrespective of law and individual rights—is essentially a fallacy, and has been debunked in a variety of forums. That has done nothing however to mitigate its power as both a narrative hook and a point of paranoid fascination. Series like 24 normalize a particular conception of threat and the strategies to counter that threat. The relationship to reality is more or less irrelevant.

The “ticking time bomb” scenario was first used, for all intents and purposes, in the 1963 novel Les Centurions by Jean Lartéguy. Set during the Algerian war, the novel follows its protagonist’s desperate attempt to find and disarm bombs laid all over the city by Algerian terrorists. The initial discovery of the plot, incidentally, comes when the hero beats the fact out of an Algerian woman.

Significantly, the novel is generally credited with salving French liberals’ discomfiture at the brutal treatment of Algerians—depicting them as brutes who only understood the language of violence. Sound familiar? I would hope so, considering that 24 has accomplished something remarkably similar, insofar as the show’s various life-and-death scenarios have been considered seriously as hypotheticals in a number of high-level debates over the validity and efficacy of torture. Antonin Scalia in particular is fond of invoking Jack Bauer. (More encouragingly, a group of army officers met with the producers of 24, asking them to please stop, because both academy graduates and new soldiers in the field were increasingly taking their leads from the show).

The ticking time bomb may have originated in France’s Algerian quagmire (there’s something to taunt Republicans with—Jack Bauer was invented by the French!), it finds fecund soil in the American imagination at least in part because of the obsession with speed and expedience that marked the Cold War. Most significantly, it is an outgrowth of a discourse of “fast-response” scenarios that Elaine Scarry critiques in her essay “Citizenship In Emergency.” Scarry observes that:

“Speed” has occupied the foreground not only of our descriptive statements about our national defense but also our normative statements. Our military arrangements for defending the country have often been criticized for moving increasingly outside the citizenry’s control.

This preoccupation with speedy response has led to a situation in which “The constitutional requirement for a Congressional declaration of war has not been used for any war since World War II”; speed, she continues, has continually been cited as a counter-argument to objections about weapons policy and war-making practices sliding increasingly beyond the scope of democratic and legislative oversight.

Scarry’s larger argument—that for all the military’s preoccupation with fast-response, the only effective defense mounted against the attacks on September 11th was the democratic consensus for action reached by the passengers of United 93—is at least partially beside the point I am trying to make here. It does however highlight a broader cultural discourse that has come, in spite of evidence to the contrary, to privilege the “whatever-it-takes” attitude embodied by Jack Bauer and 24.


Conspiracy’s Bait-and-Switch

My interest here today is not so much to debunk the ticking-time-bomb scenario as to highlight the way in which 24 employs it in relation to what we’re calling the paranoid style—and how the show has really come to be almost a parody of the classic conspiracy narrative.

This point occurred to me last night at the end of the most recent episode, which ended with one of the series’ patented cliffhangers (which in the real-time universe of 24 meant that it occurred at one minute to the hour—you’d think that after six and three quarters seasons, the Jack and company would be getting squirrelly as a matter of course at the top of the hour). The plot twist of last night’s episode (spoilers to follow in the course of this post, if you haven’t seen the episode yet) was typical of how 24 rolls. Which is to say, it brought to satisfying conclusion one storyline, only to raise the stakes and reveal that there’s another, probably larger and more malevolent, conspiracy at work.

This is how 24 has developed into the acme of the conspiracy narrative. Each season unfolds as a series of nested conspiracies, like Russian dolls, or ever-widening concentric circles. And that seeming contradiction of those analogies—one getting smaller and more central, the other broadening out in larger and larger and more all-encompassing—is one of the structural paradoxes of conspiracy. It is both a matter of getting to the “center” of the plot, finding the key players and the secret(s) at the heart of the matter; and of discovering the larger shape of the sprawling yet invisible network of power and control.

To use this season thus far to explain: we began with an conspiracy against the U.S. by agents of the fictional African country Sangala, who have acquired a device that lets them hack into, well, everything on a federal grid—power stations, air traffic control, etc.—in retaliation for the President’s plan to invade Sangala and intervene in an ongoing genocide. It turns out the Sangalans have all sorts of people in the U.S. government in their pockets, and what’s worse, the formerly-thought-to-be-dead Tony Almeida (a former associate of Bauer’s, for those who don’t watch the show) turns out to be alive and has gone over to the dark side, working for the Sangalans. But then, we discover, this is merely a front: though he has been since rumours of his death been doing some nasty stuff as a mercenary, Tony has in fact been working undercover with other former colleagues of Jack’s from the (now defunct) Counter-Terrorism unit (CTU). Of course, Jack now goes rogue (which is something he has to do about once a season) in order to assist Tony and company. Together, they recover the hacking device and foil the plot to hold the country for ransom.

So ends conspiracy the first. But even as that one comes to a conclusion, Tony warns Jack of something else about to go down. What it is, he doesn’t know, but we find out soon enough: a group of Sangalans in the U.S., led by their president Juma, infiltrate the White House with the assistance of their agents and take the President hostage. Thanks however to Jack’s derring-do and the sacrifice of one of the CTU people, the Sangalans are defeated, bringing to a close conspiracy the second.

Shift to a Blackwater-style military contractor called Starkwood, and its CEO Jonas Hodges (played by a wonderfully scenery-chewing Jon Voight). It turns out that the Sangalan conspiracy was facilitated by Starkwood in exchange for allowing them to test a biological WMD on President Juma’s enemies in Sangala. The bio-weapon is now in the U.S. and Hodges proceeds to threaten the U.S. President with an attack on America’s cities. His demand is a “seat at the table,” and a free hand in shaping American military policy. However, once again the conspiracy is thwarted—this time by Tony Almeida, who manages to destroy the missiles armed with the bioweapon.

So much for conspiracy the third. But when the President has Hodges arrested, he warns her that she ain’t seen nothing yet—he was just the tip of the iceberg. And sure enough, a Starkwood employee escapes with a tank of the bio-weapon. He is cornered by Almeida and an FBI agent but manages to wound the agent. At which point, Tony Almeida finishes off the G-man, and reveals that he is in league with Mr. Starkwood. Ladies and gentlemen: I give you conspiracy the fourth.

Now on one hand, this is exactly the kind of potboiler plot twist that animates 24, in conjunction with the relentless ticking of the clock. Unless I miss my guess however, we will see over the next few episodes that Tony Almeida has been playing everyone from the start, in the service of an all-encompassing conspiracy that effectively contains all the others. The bait-and-switch that 24 constantly engages in, the false resolutions followed by the ramping up of the action and the stakes, not only follows the standard conspiracy narrative format but cranks it up to eleven (and breaks off the knob). It is, indeed, akin to the way The X-Files worked: each season ended with the promise of revelation, of finally finding the “truth” that was out there … and inevitably the next season pulled the rug out, deferring endlessly the promise of discovery.

It is this last element of “deferral” that most specifically differentiates conspiracy narratives from mystery or detective fiction, for the latter—while often engaged in investigating conspiracies of various sorts—does so in a limited fashion that ends with the detective in the study with all of the suspects, reassembling for everyone the disparate and confusing welter of clues into a coherent narrative. Well, OK—it doesn’t always take place in the study, but you catch my meaning. The point is that everything is contained. The detective (or agent, operative, or cop) scores an epistemological victory.

Conspiracy narratives however articulate a deep suspicion of the possibilities for such a victory, while at the same time evoking the desire for it. It is for this reason (as I have argued elsewhere) that conspiracy has had such currency in the postmodern moment. On one hand, the persistent deferral of revelation, which expresses in part a deep-seated suspicion of the concept of capital-T Truth, parallels what Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized as postmodernism’s rejection of “grand narratives.” But while Lyotard more or less argued that this rejection is essentially an emancipatory one (freeing us from the despotism of monolithic discourse), postmodern narratives have also frequently expressed uneasiness with the dissolution of formerly certain truths and what George Steiner famously called “nostalgia for the absolute.”

Hence, conspiracy is at its core a necessarily paradoxical motif, offering the comfort of revelation but too shot through with fundamental suspicion of its truth-value (the two mantras of The X-Files exemplify this contradiction: “The truth is out there” on one hand, but we are also enjoined to “Trust no one”—which effectively negates the possibility of reaching a stable truth). In this regard, 24 is at once the acme of the conspiracy narrative, and its radical simplification. Whatever issues of abuse of power, of the psychological toll torturing takes on Jack, or any other mitigating elements, 24 ultimately lacks the kind of ambivalence that marks the balance of conspiracy narratives. This lack proceeds principally from the series’ profoundly conservative nature, with its moral absolutes, the starkness of its black-and-white choices, the villainy of the bad guys, its disdain for liberal waffling, and its celebration of the exercise of government power.

Postscript: tea parties take a sharp right turn into absurdity

As the lead up to the Tax Day Tea Party Protests continue, the question arises: just how stupid are these people? And by "these people" I mean the rally organizers and their spokesmen. They are now enjoining people to mail tea bags to the White House and to Congress in symbolic protest. And in a particularly unfortunate turn of phrase, they are referring to this process as "teabagging." As in: "Teabag the White House!" "Teabag Obama!" And so on ...

For the sake of my more delicate readers who may be unfamiliar with the colloquial meaning of "teabagging," I direct you to a definition here. Take a moment ... we'll wait.

Yup. Sigh. It's vaguely irritating that this happens right on the heels of taking the time and thought to write out a measured and serious response to the Tea Party Protests, seeing as how this little bit of absurdity really kind of makes treating this with any degree of seriousness kind of a waste of time and energy.

Because really, the only decent way to respond is with snark, and here's Rachel Maddow doing so brilliantly. I can only imagine what kind of mileage Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will get out of this.

Some thoughts on civil disobedience and the uses and abuses of history

Sorry, another interim post here before continuing on with the issue of the paranoid style—though a post that is related, at least tangentially. One of the much-ballyhooed responses to the Obama Administration is a series of planned “tea parties,” modelled on the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The Boston Tea Party, an iconic moment in the history of the American Revolution, was a spontaneous protest against British taxation in which a mob dressed in the guise of American Indians boarded three vessels in Boston Harbour and threw all the tea in their holds into the water.

The story is actually a lot more involved and complicated than that, but the basic story is this: Britain’s autocratic treatment of the American Colonies, especially in terms of their arbitrary taxation coupled with the refusal to allow representation in Parliament—“taxation without representation”—was essentially what formed the basis of what was to culminate in the Continental Congress and the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party became one of those mythic historical moments accruing far more significance to itself than the actual events merited, but then that’s how history becomes myth. A rag-tag (probably drunk) bunch of angry protesters destroys some cargo; but in doing so at a pivotal moment become exemplars of cheeky American obstreperousness in the face of tradition, models for the future of civil disobedience and resistance to tyranny. All of which is fair enough.

Of course, what happens with mythic history is that it tends to get appropriated years, decades, centuries down the line by those wishing to invoke its symbolic power and associate themselves with people, ideas, or events that have become irrevocably romanticized in the popular imagination.

The current “tea parties” are a series of ostensibly spontaneous protests against the Obama Administration’s tax increases, spending, and apparent moves to expand government. They started mid-March, and there are a bunch scheduled to take place on April 15 (the American Tax Day). They have been characterized as grass-roots protests by “ordinary Americans” aghast at Obama’s policies. They are, according to their promoters, examples of ordinary joes and janes rising up like the 1773 rabble-rousers. Here’s assbutt Glenn Beck holding for to Fox News talking head Neil Cavuto:


Now, I’m all for civil disobedience and robust critiques of power and government, so while I disagree with the arguments being made by these people, more power to ‘em. Speaking however as someone occupationally preoccupied with symbolic economies, I do think it’s important to make a few observations here—probably observations made any number of times already, but since I haven’t encountered them, I’ll risk being repetitive.

It’s pretty obvious what the organizers of these rallies had in mind when they named them “Tea Parties.” That is to say, they’re evoking the spirit of spontaneous grass-roots protest against distant and unfeeling governance, tyrannical governance at that, which was acting in an arrogant and high-handed manner. The 1773 protesters have been memorialized as the embodiment of the American spirit: simple men, moved beyond the bounds of polite dialogue by anger and provocation; get-it-done individuals sick of merely talking (they spilled out of a meeting being held by Samuel Adams, who vainly exhorted them to remain calm); and finally, honest and hard-working souls driven to an extreme by and interfering, remote government.

The narrative is pretty straightforward, and it’s not unusual: it tends to get trotted out in its various incarnations by activists, pundits and politicians wanting to self-identify as somehow authentically American (just see how frequently the phrase “Founding Fathers” gets employed on both the left and the right as a means of lending weight to an argument). But as the wonderful Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan argues in her slim but powerful book The Uses and Abuses of History, we need to be alive to the ways in which the appropriations of historical myth manipulate or deform their original sources. In this case, we don’t really even need to revisit the particulars of the historical Boston Tea Party—the deviations of the current incarnation from what it represents are sufficient. To wit:

The 1773 Tea Party was not a protest against taxation, but against autocracy. Remember, the rallying cry was “no taxation without representation.” It wasn’t the taxes that were the problem: it was that the citizens of the thirteen colonies had no say in them. Taxes are onerous, certainly, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out, they’re the price we pay for civilization. Perhaps the colonies would have agreed that the tea tax was worthwhile, perhaps not. The problem was that they had no opportunity to say one way or the other. Today, of course, there is no King George taxing Americans—just their democratically elected president, who for good or for ill was elected. Which was kind of what the American Revolution was fought for to begin with.

The tax hikes that “ordinary Americans” are rallying against are (a) not tax hikes—they are the expiry of the tax cuts made by the Bush Administration. Obama isn’t taxing Americans back to the Stone Age, he’s essentially doing nothing as the Bush tax cuts run out the clock. And (b) for all the attempts to portray this as populist rage, the Obama Administration has (or is planning to) cut taxes for anyone under $250K.

Of course, there’s also the issue of the expansion of government and increased spending. Which begs the question: where was this populist rage for the past eight years while Bush radically grew the government, rolled back civil rights, instituted invasive policies of wiretapping and rendition, and took the government from a healthy surplus to a massive deficit? The protests of Glenn Beck you see in the clip above—representative of the right’s historical revisionism—are at best disingenuous, at worst overtly mendacious. They were for everything George W. Bush did, until they weren’t.

These rallies are not just the protests of the citizenry, but have been enthusiastically embraced by congressional Republicans, many of whom will be featured speakers. This is not itself wrong or really even objectionable, but it does highlight a certain amnesia, and indeed hypocrisy. Let’s remember that the 1773 Tea Party was a specifically anti-government event, and that is the spirit being evoked in the naming of the current rallies. It strikes me as ever so slightly disingenuous for elected members of Congress to join attempts to undermine government when (a) they were part of the chorus over the past eight years decrying any criticism of the Bush Administration as un-American at best, treasonous at worst, and (b) Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, in spite of nearly losing her seat after she suggested that Democratic legislators should be investigated for un-American beliefs and behaviour, is at it again; and in an almost endearingly naked retread of Joe McCarthy, Representative Spenser Bachus (R-AL) has declared that there are seventeen socialists in Congress. Those two should really get together.

Finally, there’s this whole spontaneity issue. That’s at the heart of the Boston Tea Party mythos: it wasn’t a conspiracy, it wasn’t planned for weeks with scale models of the harbour and contingency plans and code names, and it wasn’t perpetrated by the 1773 version of the Navy Seals. Although it could have been all those things, the mythology of the event lies in its spontaneity—its suddennesss. A bunch of angry guys, and one of them has an idea: “Hey, let’s dress up and injuns and throw all the tea in the harbour!” (Alternative historical theory: it wasn’t actually political protest, it was a serendipitous fraternity prank). In reality, the contemporary Tea Parties have all the spontaneity of a Martha Stewart garden party. Beyond the explicit support of Fox News, which has been hyping them since the start (and will be providing keynote speakers in the form of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and Greta van Susteren), these events have been sponsored and organized by the conservative think-tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. And lest the term “think tanks” lends these organizations an aura of neutrality or objectivity, you should know that they are operated and funded by lobbyists. They are well-organized and well-funded, and have been taking care of the logistics and publicity (with a helping hand from Fox News, of course). So any depiction of these events as “spontaneous” expressions of populist rage needs to be taken with a grain of salt or five.

Kumar goes to the White House; sadly, Harold stays home

This just in: actor Kal Penn, Kumar of Harold and Kumar fame and late of House, has been hired by the White House as an associate director in the Office of Public Liaison. His job will be to act as a liaison between President Obama's administration and Asian-American, Pacific Islander and arts community constituents.

In keeping with this week's paranoia theme, I would like to observe that Penn was a terrorist and a Guantanamo Bay escapee. This appointment is obviously a blatant move on the part of the Obama Administration to bring the United States ever closer to Islamofascisocialistarianism. People, be warned.

The triumphant return of the Paranoid Style

A favourite insult of mine is a Bart Simpson coinage: “Assbutt.” This beautifully economical and redundant epithet at once conveys, with its semantic doubling, utter contempt and a scornful dismissiveness—the person on the receiving end is not worth a fouler combination of oaths, but is nevertheless an ass to the power of two.

I rarely have occasion to employ this choice insult, but lately an exemplary candidate keeps stepping up to the plate. Ladies and gentlemen: Glenn Beck of Fox News. Assbutt extraordinaire.

Yes, yes, I have been harping on this sort of thing for the last few months. After the last post on El Rushbo, I promised myself I’d get back to more personal posts and try to distance myself a little from the insanity and inanity (and Hannity) of the Fox News Alternative Universe. But it seems I’m having a Pacino moment: every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.

Truth be told however, I’m a little grateful to Assbutt and his compatriots at Fox and on the right side of the aisle in Congress. Grateful because their bloviating has taken a decidedly conspiratorial and paranoid turn. Beck is in the vanguard, but is by no means the only voice in the chorus. All of the Obama Administration’s moves, from the stimulus package to the budget to the firing of GM’s Rick Wagoner to his actions at the G20 summit, are all being characterized as evidence that the United States is moving toward totalitarianism of some form—socialist, communist, fascist, it’s unclear. But certainly, the government will be coming for YOU very soon.


Why is this good for me? As it happens, this sort of behaviour—what historian Richard Hofstadter termed the “paranoid style”—is sort of my specialty. I wrote my dissertation on representations of conspiracy and paranoia in postwar American fiction, film, and popular culture. Since defending my thesis in September 2004, I have made a handful of half-hearted attempts to return to it and rewrite it for publication in book form. There’s a sort of window of opportunity to do this: the longer you take, the more cringe-inducing your own writing becomes to you, and the more like probing the nerve of a tooth it becomes. Also, I had the added strike of having written on a more or less contemporary topic, and with the passage of time I became increasingly concerned that the whole conspiracy theory thing was becoming passé.

Because honestly, when you think of it, there was not a great deal of conspiracy-mongering happening during the Bush years. Oh, there was the usual expected fulminations, most notably with regards to 9/11—an event that big and that shattering will attract conspiracy theorists like moths to a flame. There was however very little in the way of cultural production: not much in terms of film, almost nothing in fiction, and television series pretty much universally reversed the conspiratorial trajectory of The X-Files, shifting the locus of conspiracy from inside the government to external threat (mostly, anyway—the current season of 24 is bringing it back within U.S. shores in the form of a Blackwater-style private militia). In fact, as I tended to say wistfully, the Bush Administration sort of negated the conspiratorial frisson by being so bald-faced in its malfeasance. It made one nostalgic for carefully calculated cover-ups of Nixon or Reagan.

However, all that seems to have changed. Spearheaded by Beck, but supported by the other talking heads at Fox and by such political types as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) and Newt Gingrich, the Paranoid Style seems to be making a triumphant return. We saw the first grumblings of it during the presidential campaigns: Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Obama In League With Terrorists and the Plot To Put Bill Ayers In The Cabinet, and so forth.

All that however, which might well be dismissed as simply the kind of mud one sees slung in any election, was just the warmup; since Inauguration Day, the self-appointed Paranoid Spokesmen (and women) have really been hitting their stride. And they’re doing so in interesting, albeit a little scary, ways.

I’ve been culling examples for the last few days from the news, from blogs, and online sources with an eye to possibly writing something on this topic. Certainly, I will need a new introduction to the thesis to address the years intervening between my defense and finally picking up the threads again; I’m also considering an article for a media studies journal, but am not yet sure if what I’ve been seeing will have the substance for it. I do want to offer commentary in some forum, however, so I thought I might make use of my blog as something different: a space for working through some of the issues and ideas. I’ll throw stuff up against the wall here, in other words, and see what sticks. So for the next few posts: the paranoid style redux!

Still breathing, just lazy

OK, so I haven’t posted in a full month, and I feel properly chastised. I’m in a posting slump, which I hope to pull myself out of. I’ve had a couple of ideas for longer posts running through my head, but haven’t really had the time/energy to sit down and work through them. I have however started writing one, so expect something substantive in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll catch you up. Here is how March panned out:

• Went to Barbados for a week at the beginning of the month. Yup.

• If I’d been more blog-assiduous, I’d have posted a celebration of Jon Stewart ripping Jim Cramer a new one. Brilliant. If you didn’t see it, here’s the link here.

• While the contrast between Barbados and St. John’s weather was just as stark as you would imagine, the weather for the remainder of March was actually relatively pleasant. Which has me wondering if the other shoe is set to drop in April.

• U2’s new album=yummy goodness. While No Line on the Horizon isn’t the boys’ best outing, there’s a remarkable texture to the songs that has me finding new stuff with each listen. My current favourite track (it changes day to day) is “Breathe.”

• I didn’t teach on April Fool’s day this year, which made me sad. I usually manage to pull one over on my students. Last year I distributed an exam rubric with sample questions that would have confounded Einstein’s literary equivalent. This year I had to settle for convincing a former student now abroad, as we chatted over Facebook, that they’re building a nuclear reactor in Holyrood.

• Speaking of April Fool’s, Car & Driver magazine posted a joke article claiming that Obama was ordering GM and Chrysler to cease and desist any involvement in NASCAR. This in itself wasn’t that funny. What was funny was that Anne Coulter read this and immediately wrote a column attacking Obama for dictating business policy. Mmmmm, that’s good fact-checking.

That’s it. More later.

Rush's folly

I must admit, it has been really rather fun watching the batshit insane wing of the American Right go, well, batshit insane since Obama took office. Case in point:



What’s bizarre, and even a little disturbing, isn’t so much the sentiment expressed here, which we have come to expect from Limbaugh, but the way in which he has effectively stepped into the Republican message vacuum—becoming not a marginal (albeit widely heard) conservative talk radio voice, but something approximating the GOP’s point man. I suppose that on one hand this should be no surprise, considering that the best the Republicans have to offer right now are crazy-ass Michael Steele, and Bobby Jindal—whose flaccid Mr. Rogers-esque response to Obama’s State of the Union address seriously has to go down as one of the worst pieces of public speaking in history (I think that his aides looked at the contrast between Obama and Bush/Palin and came to the conclusion that speaking clearly in complete sentences was the way to go, without taking into consideration the fact that Obama matches form to content and doesn’t speak like a grade three student delivering a book report).

On the other hand though, think about this: “I want him to fail.” This, Limbaugh has said repeatedly: he wants the president and his initiatives to crash and burn. No one among the Republicans has endorsed this view, and some have distanced themselves from the sentiment, but no one has rebuked Limbaugh for it either.

On its face, this declaration is somewhat breathtaking, both for its nerve and its tone-deafness.

Let’s consider its nerve first: Limbaugh’s apologists (including the man himself) have defended his statement on the grounds that liberal and left-wing outrage is simply disingenuous—that we on the left spent the last eight years hoping that the Bush Administration would succeed at nothing, or savouring schadenfreude when they bungled their response to such disasters as Hurricane Katrina or the Iraqi insurgency. The difference here, they say, is that Limbaugh at least has the honesty to speak truthfully.

(Also, just as an aside: this is the same guy who, along with his cohorts over at Fox News, six years ago declared ad nauseam that criticism of the war in Iraq wasn’t just un-American, but treasonous).

I obviously cannot speak for all those who, like me, virulently disliked George W. Bush and his government. Were there those who silently wished catastrophe on his endeavours? I would have to say almost certainly. But there is in fact a profound difference between a shameful secret wish and its proud, loud articulation. No one in their right mind desires catastrophic governmental failure, at least not when you honestly balance your own personal feelings of resentment toward that government against the human cost of that catastrophe. No one in their right mind wants people in New Orleans to drown or soldiers to be killed just for the sake of an administration getting egg on its face.

And yet, that is precisely what Limbaugh is saying. We can translate “I want him to fail” into “I want millions of Americans to lose their jobs, their houses, to fall into poverty; I want the United States to slide irrevocably into a depression that will make the 1930s look like a Hamptons garden party.” It’s one thing to look at the stimulus package and the budget and feel that these are measures certain to fail, and work as hard against them as you can. But if you can’t change it or stop it, do you not hope that, whatever your own misgivings, it succeeds in pulling the country out of the mire?

And this is why Limbaugh’s statement—and the Republicans’ refusal to chastise it—is utterly tone-deaf. Poll after poll after poll shows that the majority of the American people see the Republicans as out of touch, and want them to work with Obama. Limbaugh, and by extension the GOP, is preaching to a small and marginal choir while the rest of the country (and the rest of the world) holds its breath and prays that the Obama Administration succeeds. Because really—to the person who has lost his house and job, and is desperately anxious about what is on the horizon, Limbaugh’s statement is as much about him as it is about the president.

Being an expert, sort of

One of the weirder aspects of this job is that sometimes you get called from out of the blue and asked to offer “expert” commentary on topics that—more often than not—you have just a passing familiarity with. This happens because the university keeps a list of professors and the various topics they might pronounce upon in the event that a journalist wants an “expert” opinion for a feature he or she is writing.

I’ve been called a few times on a variety of things, but this is the first time someone was routed to me this way. I was interviewed by the TV show Books into Film two and a half years ago about Nick Hornby novels (I think because someone doing an internet search found that I taught High Fidelity on a popular culture course at Western), and a blog entry ranting about potholes prompted a call from the St. John’s Telegram by someone doing a story about potholes. But this was the first call I got based on my stated areas of expertise here at Memorial.

This time, the subject was Facebook—specifically, a feature about Facebook on the occasion of its fifth anniversary. Seeing as how we don’t yet have a Media Studies or Communications program at MUN, I guess an English professor with a secondary interest in media (or who has, at least, taught media studies courses in the past) will have to do.

I am, of course, hardly an expert on digital technologies of communication, unless you count the final chapter of my undergraduate thesis in which I talk briefly about the internet as a postmodern labyrinth apropos of cyberpunk novels. My entire expertise vis a vis Facebook is that I'm a subscriber. That being pointed out to the reporter however, I did gamely offer intellectual-esque commentary. The article is here, but if you just want to read my sound byte:

“One of the greatest appeals is being in contact,” said Chris Lockett, English professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. “One of the appeals about Facebook specifically, too, is that it does sort of cross issues of time and space, so what a lot of people talk about, both positively and negatively, is once they go on Facebook they find themselves quite suddenly in contact with people they hadn’t spoken to or thought about in years. You don’t necessarily talk to them on a regular basis over Facebook, but you do get this constant stream of information in the news feed over what they’re doing and what’s going on. You get a sense of other people’s stories in a very passive way — you don’t have to go out and look for them.”

I don’t know why the reporter needed to have a professor to say something that is essentially common sense, but then I guess that’s what I do—give my “expert” imprimatur to stuff you already knew.

I’m thinking of having that put on my business cards.

Puttering about on a stormy Wednesday

Well, we're being hit with our first major storm of the winter, and the Avalon Penninsula is closed. Everything! I've been listening to the CBC all day so far, and they keep reading off these ridiculously long lists of closures. I suppose they are obliged to be specific, otherwise it would make more sense to simply say what isn't closed. Which is, apparently, nothing. The airport is effectively shut down, all our ferry services are suspended, and they've been clocking gusts of up to 100km/hr.

So, I have had the pleasure of a snow day mitigated by the looming task of digging my car out. That, I will be addressing once I complete this blog post. I've been putting it off in the hope that the wind dies down a little ... which doesn't seem about to happen. Sigh.

In the meantime, I've been puttering around the house. After a year and a half of living here, I finally got itchy to start improving my new place. I don't have the capital to take on the tasks I really want to do (i.e. hire a contractor to gut my kitchen and put in an island and tile floors, or remake my sunroom--currently essentially a storage space--into an actual pleasant breakfast nook).

Hence, I'm starting modestly. Of the three upstairs bedrooms, the rear two have been unused space--mostly, I've just been storing my books in boxes, lacking the shelf space for them. Shortly after Christmas, I retasked the middle bedroom as a workout room and invested in weights and a bench (moving all the boxes into the rear bedroom).



And then, after several frustrating visits to Home Depot in which their panel saw was out of order and therefore unable to provide me with the cut plywood I needed, I finally was able to buy my supplies and build the shelves that will help turn the rear bedroom into a study / reading room / guest room.

Now, I should point out that to say I'm not particularly handy is like saying that Dick Cheney bears a mild antipathy to liberals. So I'm quite pleased with what I've managed to assemble:







These do not, it should be noted, bear a close inspection--I lack as a carpenter the kind of eerie perfection that someone like my father brings to these kind of projects, where every line is plumb and the entire thing knocks together almost without a need for glue or nails. There was a lot of spackling and cutting little shims to plug of the shortfalls in my measurements (measure one, cut twice is my motto). Fortunately, my time working as a painter through summers in my undergrad gave me, if nothing else, a talent for making imperfections if not go away, at least hide pretty well.

In addition to now having an upper floor of my house that I am quite pleased with, and will use now for more than sleeping, this process was quite fun. It took place in increments, a couple of hours after work over about two weeks. Plus, it gives me the confidence this summer to rip up my grotty deck and rebuild it.

Red Dawn was a conservative film? Who knew?

I’m not even sure where to begin with this one: The National Review has come out with a list of the best “conservative” films of the last twenty-five years. I leave “conservative” in scare quotes, because it is unclear how they’re defining it. Most of the films listed (though not all) seem to be there because of a single aspect of plot or theme that exemplifies a conservative preoccupation—so Juno makes the list because its title character decides against having an abortion, Ghostbusters makes the list because of William Atherton’s depiction of a “regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA,” and The Lives of Others seems to be there because it was enthusiastically endorsed by William F. Buckley.

Anyway, here’s the list in descending order:

25. Gran Torino
24. Team America: World Police (seriously)
23. United 93
22. Brazil
21. Heartbreak Ridge
20. Gattaca
19. We Were Soldiers
18. The Edge
17. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
16. Master and Commander
15. Red Dawn
14. A Simple Plan
13. Braveheart
12. The Dark Knight
11. The Lord of the Rings
10. Ghostbusters
9. Blast from the Past
8. Juno
7. The Pursuit of Happyness
6. Groundhog Day
5. 300
4. Forrest Gump
3. Metropolitan
2. The Incredibles
1. The Lives of Others

Again, not even sure where to begin, though I’m tempted to say that if these are the best conservative films of the last 25 years, then conservatives obviously don’t make very good films. Certainly, the most unequivocally conservative entries here—300, Red Dawn, We Were Soldiers, Heartbreak Ridge and Blast from the Past—unequivocally suck. The one possible exception to this statement is Forrest Gump, a film that makes me gag but one I’m willing to grant has redeeming features (a good soundtrack, if nothing else). That 300 is on a list of supposedly “good” films at all (and at #5, no less!) brings the entire endeavour into question. That the film is described as “a stylized story about the ancient battle of Thermopylae and the Spartan defense of the West’s fledgling institutions” makes it even more laughable, considering the fact that Sparta was as dictatorial as any despotic regime of the 20th century, exercising absolute control over its citizenry, and ultimately responsible in the Peloponnesian War for the destruction of Athens’ “fledgling” democracy.

Some of the rationales offered for defining the above films as somehow inherently conservative are similarly hilarious, and occasionally baffling. Take, for example, the description of United 93:

“Minutes after terrorists struck on 9/11, Americans launched their first counterattack in the War on Terror. Director Paul Greengrass pays tribute to the passengers of United 93 by refusing to turn their story into a wimpy Hollywood melodrama. Instead, United 93 unfolds as a real-time docudrama. Just as significantly, Greengrass provides a clear depiction of our enemies. United 93 opens as four Muslim terrorists pray in a hotel room. Several hours later, the hijackers’ frenzied shrieks to Allah mingle with the prayerful supplications of United 93’s passengers as they crash through the cockpit door and strike a blow against those who would terrorize our country.”

That, incidentally, is the entire entry—I’m not leaving anything out. Someone explain to me please how this qualifies as de facto conservatism?

Team America: World Police, to my mind the most bizarre choice, is there because it mocks left-wing Hollywood types. Someone forgot to mention to the list compilers that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are equal-opportunity satirists, and if Alec Baldwin et al come in for mockery, heavy-handed American foreign policy (it’s there in the title, people) takes the brunt of the film’s derision.

Here’s what was said about Braveheart: “Braveheart taught that freedom is not just worth dying for, but also worth killing for, in defense of hearth and homeland. Six years later, amid the ruins of the Twin Towers, Gibson’s message resonated with a generation of American youth who signed up to fight terrorists, instead of inviting them to join a ‘constructive dialogue.’ Liberals have never forgiven Gibson since.” Oh, right—that’s why Mel Gibson no longer gets a fair shake from liberal Hollywood. It’s all about Braveheart. I remember the left-wing rage upon seeing stalwart American youths in the recruiting lineups shouting “FREEDOM!” in bad Scottish accents …

What I think irks me most about this list is the simple fact that the vast majority of what gets produced by Hollywood is conservative—by which I mean, not that we see a lot of films with overt conservative agendas, but that popular film, like popular television, is inherently conservative in its general themes and stories. Good people and good acts are rewarded, transgressors punished, law and order function as transcendent principles, the overriding ethic is individualist rather than collective, America (or its Spartan proxies) always wins, and the obvious end-point of every romantic comedy is marriage literal or symbolic. Representations of sex, violence, and alternative lifestyles (ranging from single parenthood to homosexuality) have of course become more pervasive—but that conservative deep structure persists. Nowhere is this more evident than in the classic slasher film: it may be filled with explicit sex and gory violence, but the killer—be he Jason or Michael Myers—ultimately acts as the moral absolutist, only sparing those who abstain from immoral behaviour.

It gets to the point where it’s the films substantively deviating from this deep structure that prove most disturbing and, often, the most compelling. But even to say this is a bit disingenuous, for if this list demonstrates anything at all, it is the fallacy of this kind of classification. The best films, like the best art of any kind, cannot be classified so simply as merely “liberal” or “conservative.” Based on the jumbled criteria cited in the list, I would have to say that, for example, No Country for Old Men is certainly not a conservative film. Does that make it liberal? Of course not. What it is, is a film that raises a lot of questions about morality and the nature of evil, of the consequences of our actions, and the possible futility of taking up arms against a sea of troubles. As I’ve blogged before, many conservatives have seen in The Dark Knight’s depiction of the Batman’s vigilantism a vindication of the Bush Administration’s choices to operate outside domestic and international law. While that element is undeniably present, to see it as the sum total of The Dark Knight’s message is to miss the point of the film, which poses the Batman’s vigilantism not as an absolute good but a vexed ethical and moral dilemma for which there are no easy answers.

I suggested to my students this morning that one of the ways we know great art—or even just good art—when we see it is that it changes the terms of our discussion with it, and forces us to expand our vocabulary to engage with it. The problem with this list is that it tries so very hard to reduce our vocabulary. Incidentally, this irks me on behalf of the intelligent and principled conservatives I have known in my life. To reduce The Lord of the Rings to something like “The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War” or Juno to a straightforward pro-life message, or Narnia’s White Witch to someone who “runs a godless, oppressive, paranoid regime that hates Santa Claus … a cross between Burgermeister Meisterburger and Kim Jong Il,” bespeaks a reductive and simplistic brand of conservatism that rejects nuance as waffling and ambiguity as weakness.

And, seriously—300?

There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner

Watching the news these days is a daunting prospect, so dire are the forecasts on practically every single front.

If we as a species have any one great redeeming feature, I think it’s a sense of humour, and an ability to laugh in the face of disaster … or at the very least, to poke fun at doomsaying. To do it musically is even more of an accomplishment.

A number of years ago, I found in a sale bin of CDs an album titled Twentieth Century Blues, a collection of Noel Coward songs covered by contemporary musicians. This is a brilliant collection, not least for Sting doing “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” Space’s version of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and Vic Reeves singing “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” Listening to these songs, one is reminded of Noel Coward’s rather singular wit, a subtle combination of pathos, cynicism, and antipathy toward the snobby British upper-crust of which he was eminently a member.

My hands-down favourite song in the collection is Robbie Williams singing “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.” Unfortunately, this is the only video I can find for it, but it’s a decent rendition. And I’ve included the lyrics below, which are exemplary of Coward’s particular brand of humour. Listen, read, and enjoy …



There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner
Noel Coward

They're out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They're dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent.
They're nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They're filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,
In Dublin they're depressed, lads,
Maybe because they're Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Misery's here to stay.

There are bad times just around the corner,
The horizon's gloomy as can be,
There are Home Fires smoking
From Windermere to Woking
And we're not going to tighten our belts and smile, smile, smile,
With a scowl and a frown
We'll keep our peckers down
When reminded of something that Nelson said.
While the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We'll wait until we drop down dead.

They're nervous in Nigeria
And terribly cross in Crete,
In Bucharest They are so depressed
They're frightened to cross the street,
In Maine the melancholia
Is deeper than tongue can tell,
In Monaco
All the croupiers know
They haven't a hope in Hell.
In far away Australia
Each wallaby's well aware
The world's a total failure
Without any time to spare.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
Suffering and dismay.

There are bad times just around the corner,
The horizon's gloomy as can be,
There are black birds over
The grayish cliffs of Dover
And the rats are preparing to leave the B.B.C.
We're an unhappy breed
And very bored indeed
When reminded of something that Nelson said.
While the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We'll wait until we drop down dead.

There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook's absolutely vile,
There are Home Fires smoking From Windermere to Woking
And we're not going to tighten our belts and smile, smile, smile,
At the sound of a shot
We'd just as soon as not
Take a hot water bottle and go to bed,
We're going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.
Land of Hope and Glory!
Wait until we drop down dead.

Happy birthday, Papa Darwin

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced from the same laws acting around us."
--Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species

It’s Darwin week: Thursday marks the 200th anniversary of the great naturalist’s birth, and a host of radio shows, newspaper columns, television specials, and yes, even blog postings, celebrate, ruminate and mull over his contribution to the world today and the always-ongoing controversy that the theory of evolution inspires.

Freud famously observed that there had been three great blows to the human ego, delivered by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself (a modest one was Sigmund). I find it interesting that of these three, Darwin is really the only one who still gets up people’s noses. A handful of flat-earthers aside, there’s really no one out there suggesting we continue to teach the Ptolemaic system; and while Freud has been more or less jettisoned by psychology, he nevertheless lives on in the thriving therapy trade (I like to tell my students that Freud’s greatest sin wasn’t the appalling gender politics of theories like penis envy or the Oedipal Complex, so much as the fact that he effectively made Dr. Phil possible).

But Darwin still stokes the fires of controversy. I find this interesting because of the three, he is the one whose theories seem to me the most intuitive and unremarkable. I imagine that this is because I grew up on books about dinosaurs and paleontology, about the sudden extinction of the great reptiles and rise of the mammals; my geological time line has always been on the scale of hundreds of millions of years, and human beings have for me always been relatively recent arrivals. The Copernican Revolution, on the other hand, has always fired my imagination, especially in terms of such books as John Banville’s novels Dr. Copernicus and Kepler or popular histories like Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers—outer space has, in other words, always been site of discovery, whereas evolution always just seemed like common sense.

All of which is why, on occasions like this week, I regret my otherwise wonderful circumstances as a professor at a Canadian university. Why, do you ask? In a word, because I never have occasion to run into people who want to argue with me that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools, much less people who advocate Creationism. Though universities can foster a special breed of wingnuttery all their own, I never find myself in the vanguard of the culture war arguing with religious fundamentalists or people convinced that Obama is a secret Muslim.

(The exception to this last example was when my friend Jen, who has a great TV blog called Nik at Nite, was talking a lot about Sarah Palin in the run-up to the U.S. election—in the context of Tina Fey’s brilliant portrayal of her—and had a stunning flood of comments attacking her for attacking Palin, and a great deal of the “you’re a Canadian and therefore have no right to talk about our politics” kind of thing. I commented in a few of the back-and forths, but when someone made the Obama-is-Muslim accusation, I jumped in with both feet-- because really, where was I going to have that opportunity again?).

I would like to have those arguments. I honestly have no objection to people believing in Creationism or Intelligent Design, but I do object rather emphatically to the suggestion that to be fair and equitable we need to teach one or both in schools alongside the Theory of Evolution. I won’t rehearse the usual arguments against Darwinism; suffice to say they tend toward the facile and disingenuous. My perspective is more of a disciplinary one. Were I confronted with someone asking me if I thought Intelligent Design should be taught, I would say yes—absolutely. Just not in Biology class. Teach it to your heart’s content in Religious Studies, in Sunday school. What the advocates of ID argue is that it is a perfectly acceptable alternative theory to Evolution and should therefore be taught in tandem.

This is where their suggestion is disingenuous. The fact of the matter is, if you are religious with any degree of devoutness, you have a de facto belief in Intelligent Design. That is to say, if you believe in an absolute divinity or omnipotent being at all seriously, it follows that He, She, or It had a hand in the creation of the universe and all of its denizens. There is of course a range of beliefs within this proposition, from the notion that God wound it all up like a clock five billion years ago and has left it to run its course, to a sense of immediate and constant divine intervention. But the point is: if you believe in God, you believe (or at least accept) the premise of Intelligent Design.

Nor is this at all problematic or reprehensible, but is a matter of religious faith and personal belief. To suggest however that what is essentially a matter of faith has a place in science class is simply ludicrous—and it is ludicrous because it fails spectacularly to meet the criteria defining academic disciplines.

Every discipline is more or less in a state of flux; not a huge or visible state of flux (in fact, most disciplines appear static or even stagnant), but in a constant state of negotiation as new work, new research, new ideas are tested out within a community of experts. What defines a discipline at any given moment is a critical mass of accepted practices, knowledge, and standards, and the criteria for determining them. Now, fields like Philosophy and Literature are not subject to the kind of empirical testing that is standard in the sciences, but we nevertheless proceed along similar lines by way of peer-review and accepted standards for how we do research and produce scholarship.

The issue of empirical testing is fundamental to the scientific method, and effectively has been since Galileo. Much remains in the realm of theory—relativity remained just an interesting idea for some dozen years until a comet passing through the solar system provided an opportunity to observe concrete evidence. And Evolution as a theory has undergone massive changes, and no biologist worth his salt will claim it has been worked out to the last detail. It remains however, as far as the balance of experts in the field declare, the best theory explaining how we biologically arrived where we are—and evolutionary biologists work to arrive at the point where what remains in the realm of theory can be empirically verified.

It is this last point that is the rub, for that kind of empiricism is fundamentally at odds with religious faith. Faith is just that, and proof positive that your belief is true sort of obviates the need for faith. Hence, unless the fundamental principles underwriting scientific inquiry are overturned, Intelligent Design is perfect for religion or theology classes but is antithetical to science. Which is why all the ostensibly reasonable arguments for introducing ID into science curricula is rather transparently a sort of back-door Creationism.

Anyway, in lieu of ever getting to make this argument with a bona fide Creationist, there’s my tribute to Papa Darwin.

The pothole season, she come early this year

I always get asked about the Newfoundland winter, and whether it’s as difficult to endure as people assume. To which I always respond that yes, the winters can be arduous—but not really substantially more than any other Canadian city that isn’t Vancouver. We have a bit of a trade-off: we certainly get massive dumps of snow, and it is with something approaching abject despair that I look outside and see three feet of the white stuff covering my car. On the other hand, we don’t often get the lung-freezing -20 degree stretches of cold that occur in Ontario and are pretty much de rigueur on the Prairies. Our winter temperatures tend to keep close to zero, migrating above and below it with almost daily frequency.

The downside to this constant freeze/thaw, combined with regular dumps of snow, is that come spring our roads have proportionally more potholes than asphalt. Water gets into the cracks in the road, expands when it freezes, and over several of these cycles, ruptures chunks of the street. Add to that the snow ploughs that scoop out these ruptures along with the snow, and you’ve got quite the potent combination.

Hence, driving in St. John’s starting around the end of March and through April is kind of like a random slalom. I’m particularly keen to avoid the potholes since blowing out a tire hitting one two years ago; and while the worst ones get flagged with traffic warning signs, you’re otherwise reliant on the sharpness of your eyes and reflexes to avoid them.

I’m not a particularly observant person—I can stare at my bookcase for ten minutes looking for a volume, only to suddenly realize it’s immediately before my eyes—but I’ve developed a pretty acute pothole-avoidance instinct. It’s as if I can sense them, and my normally sluggish reflexes acquire an almost ninja-like speed. This is not, I have been told, uncommon in this city. While I was giving my friend and colleague Danine a lift home from work last year, she laughed at the blasé way I was sharply avoiding the potholes while carrying on an animated conversation.

While this amused Danine, I know it freaked the hell out of my mother a few times during her visit last spring. My mom’s a nervous driver to begin with, so to be jerked around seemingly randomly as I navigated the streets of my adopted city left her rather pale; fortunately in St. John’s there are few times you have to drive for any longer than a few minutes. A good thing, too—an extended slalom might have induced a massive coronary.

This year, I don’t know if it’s been the particularly violent temperature swings we’ve been having (we’ve had a few atypically cold days, down to -14 on at least one occasion, followed by extremely mild days nearly reaching double digit temperature), but pothole season seems to have arrived early, and in force. This does not bode well for the spring—then, the weather is good enough for a pretty regular filling of the holes, but you don’t see it much in the winter. Which makes me concerned that come April, the proportion of asphalt to pothole is going to be rather skewed.

Stephen Harper, political judo master

Well, you’ve got to hand it to Stephen Harper. He may be petty and vindictive, but no one plays the game of political chess in this country like him. He blundered in December, but was back in true form with the Federal Budget that didn’t give anyone anything to complain about … except for conservatives and Newfoundland.

So you’re Stephen Harper, having just squeaked out of the confrontation with the coalition, and looking at the shiny new Liberal leader who seems set to rejuvenate his party and build momentum that could seriously hurt you in a year or two. What is the best way to sabotage this prospect? Why, to make Ignatieff look weak, of course. And what better way to do that than to stick some of his MPs with an impossible choice of loyalties? And while we’re at it, why not stick it to Danny Williams?

Talk about two birds with one stone.

You almost have to admire the elegance of it. In choking off $1.5B over three years to Newfoundland and Labrador, Harper gets his revenge for Williams’ ABC campaign and presents Ignatieff with a handful of Liberal MPs who really have no choice but to vote against the budget. It’s lose-lose for Ignatieff: if he lets them vote their conscience, he’s a weak leader; if he punishes them for dissenting, he’s petty, and still weak in the bargain for not having brought his party into line to begin with. Either way, in the first major political drama of 2009, Ignatieff loses much of that shiny newness. And Harper comes out of it with nary a scratch: his ruthlessness is now such a commonplace that it doesn’t bear remarking; what’s more, political retribution for Newfoundland and Labrador’s rejection of the Conservatives was more or less to be expected. And Danny Williams’ rants about Harper’s petty vindictiveness tend to elicit more eye-rolls here in Newfoundland than emphatic nods of agreement (for those unfamiliar with Danny Williams’ political style, he is the king of petty vindictiveness when it comes to those who cross him here on the Rock—his accusations of the same against Harper are seen very much as throwing black kettles in a glass house).

It’s a political judo hold, and deftly done. That doesn’t change the fact however that it was petty and vindictive, politically cynical, and an act of partisan maneuvering at a time when the country really needs a leader who can, if not rise above this sort of adolescent squabbling, then at least put it aside in a time of crisis. Even as the country looks to the Prime Minister for solutions to intractable problems, Stephen Harper is using the very Budget designed to help Canadians to give his political opponents the shaft.

Does this put Ignatieff in a difficult position? Yes. But I think the best response at this point is to call it what it is: to call out Stephen Harper for his political scheming and outline explicitly the way in which he’s playing Liberals against each other, province against province for his own cynical ends; and if I were Michael Ignatieff, after saying all that, I would continue: “I will be voting for this budget, because I need to think federally. This country does not want another election now; it has made it clear it is at best ambivalent about a coalition government, and so for the time being those options are off the table. I need to consider the good of Canadians as a whole. That is the job of a party leader. But the job of MPs is to speak for their ridings, and for that reason I will not be either forcing the Liberal members of Newfoundland and Labrador to vote my way, nor will I punish them when they don’t. In fact, on this issue, I will be freeing all Liberals to vote their conscience, to vote the way their constituents wish for them to vote. Stephen Harper has included this measure in the budget to punish Newfoundland and Labrador for rejecting his party and to weaken the Opposition. It is a cynical and petty move at a time when this country needs leadership. And I think the Canadian people are not nearly as stupid as Mr. Harper believes them to be. I think the Canadian people recognize a con job when they see it. And I think the Canadian people are going to remember that, at a time when they looked to their Prime Minister to rise above political expediency, he failed spectacularly.”

Apostrophalypse Now

Apparently, Birmingham has decided to remove all apostrophes from its street signs.

Yes. You read that correctly: Birmingham—Birmingham, England that is, in case you were wondering if this was a non-English Birmingham with therefore a more casual relationship to the English language—is banishing the apostrophe. From its street signs. So “King’s Heath” becomes “Kings Heath” … which is a pretty significant semantic shift, when you think about it, changing it from a heath owned by the king to a heath where kings congregate to do … I don’t know, whatever kings do when they gather in large numbers.

Why have they done this? Principally, because this has apparently been a bone of contention for years. “We keep debating apostrophes in meetings,” a city councilor declared, “and we have other things to do.” Well, speaking as a veteran of English department meetings, I can understand the frustration of debating grammatical minutiae, but … seriously? You spend your council meetings debating apostrophes?

The anti-apostrophe advocates claim that apostrophes are “confusing and old-fashioned.” The same city councilor said “They confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”

Again … seriously? Just how easily confused do you have to be in order to get turned around by an apostrophe?

Actually, I think navigation will be a lot more difficult without the apostrophe. Just think of all the people looking for a building on King’s Heath, who wind up going to the wrong end of the city and wandering confusedly among the kings gathered at Kings Heath. It will be chaos.

Free advice to email scams: invest in a proofreader

About every other week I get an email purporting to be from RBC, telling me that something has gone wrong with my account. Aside from the obvious fact that, in the event of a serious problem, a bank isn't about to email you (along with the fact that I also get comparable email notices from Scotiabank, the Bank of Montreal and TD, none of which I have accounts with), there are often little clues in the messages themselves. I received this one this morning:

Your access to Online Services has been suspended. Due to a miss-match access code between your Security information. To enable you continue accessing your online account it will only take you few minutes to re-activate your account. Click on the link below and you will taken straight to where you can activate your account.

Now, I grant you that the last few months have certainly thrown the intelligence of those working at banks in question, but the grammar on display here is quite impressive. And by "impressive" I mean laugh-inducingly appalling.

Then again, the justifications by John Thain for handing out billions of taxpayer dollars in bonuses while the world economy goes to hell in a handcart do sort of boil down to "Me want!"

Answers delivered to an empty kitchen

My habit on Sunday evenings these days is to take my time making dinner and listen to Cross-Country Checkup. I can’t figure Rex Murphy: his columns and opinion pieces tend to irritate me a great deal (even as they sometimes amuse me), more for their style than their substance much of the time … but as an interviewer and discussion moderator he’s top-notch. I really enjoy the conversations on the Checkup, and find myself often answering questions out loud to myself, or arguing with the various callers (this is what living alone does to you).

This week’s topic was, predictably, the inauguration of Barack Obama, and what this will imply for Canada. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my responses to the questions and comments were, um, a lot more spirited than usual—to the point where I was seriously considering calling the show, but didn’t feel like hitting redial umpteen times before getting through, and then probably not making it into the queue. So I thought I might air my thoughts here because, well, that is what blogs are for (i.e. the textual equivalent of speaking animatedly to your empty kitchen).

There were three basic questions that Rex kept returning to:

1. What did you think of the inauguration?
2. President Obama is making his first state visit to us; what kind of relationship do you think he and Stephen Harper will develop? Will they get along, or will there be friction?
3. Obama has made it clear that he wants to exit Iraq, but re-dedicate forces to the mission in Afghanistan—just as the Canadian forces have set a timetable for withdrawal. Does this mean we will be out of sync with the U.S. in coming years?

Given that I answered the first question at length two blog posts ago, I’ll skip it.

On number two, there was a lot of back-and-forth with Rex and his guests and callers about the history of amity and tension between our Prime Ministers and America’s presidents—the general standard being that Conservative PMs got along with Republican presidents, and Liberals with Democrats, while there has tended to be tension when our governments are ideologically out of step. Examples such as Diefenbaker’s loathing of Kennedy, Nixon’s dislike of Trudeau, and the frostiness between Chretien and Bush were cited; conversely, Mulroney and Reagan were peas in a pod and Clinton and Chretien seemed to bear each other no overt aversion. A lot was made, vis a vis Harper and Obama, of the fact that policy-wise, these two leaders are not actually too far apart—that “Democrat” in the U.S. tends to fall into the red tory category here.

This, I felt, was missing the point a bit. Which is not to say I disagree with this assessment: whatever Harper’s more conservative tendencies, especially in terms of social conservatism, they get mitigated by being leader of a country that doesn’t like going to extremes (not all of them, alas, but still). What I’m looking forward to seeing is how Harper deals with Obama’s overwhelming popularity among Canadians, and the popularity of his message of change, of a politics of transparency and bipartisanship, and of moving on from the arrogance and cynicism of the Bush Administration. This might well prove a problem for Harper, who has embraced a politics of attack, reduced the transparency of the PMO, and attempted as best he can to turn it into something with the more autocratic powers of the American executive branch. The American election was a resounding “No! in thunder” to that brand of politics, and Obama still only received 53% of the popular vote, whereas he would have been elected by something on the order of 80% here in Canada. Perhaps now that we the power of that example to look to now, Canadians will be less willing to watch our politicians squabble like spoiled teenagers.


For the third question, Rex insistently kept phrasing it in terms of whether we will find ourselves “out of sync” with the U.S. on Afghanistan. My answer to that would be to say that I hope Stephen Harper, or whoever is PM when that specific push comes to that particular shove, will have the cojones to observe that it is not that we’re out of sync; it’s the U.S. who is now getting into sync with us and everyone else. When our projected withdrawal in 2011 comes around, we will have been in Afghanistan for ten years; and unlike many of the other nations that sent troops, Canadians have been there without caveats about not taking on combat roles—indeed, we’ve been the point of the spear, and have the casualties to show for it. If the Obama Administration puts pressure on us to extend our combat presence, the PM needs to observe that for a decade we’ve been helping hold a rapidly deteriorating line while the most powerful military in the world fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and reduced their strength in Afghanistan to do it. I hope that the PM says at that point that, as far as the “war on terror” goes, we’ve done more than our share and don’t owe anyone anything.


So there’s my two cents. Perhaps next Sunday I’ll actually call in.

Seas between us braid hae roar’d, sin auld lang syne.

A happy Robbie Burns day to all! I was thinking of posting a picture of a haggis to mark the occasion, but wished to spare my more squeamish readers gentler sensibilities. Instead, here is Alton Brown showing how to make haggis on Good Eats, sporting a bad William Wallace costume and an accent that runs the gamut between cartoon Scot and Arnold Schwartzenegger.



Also, I have in the past posted "Address to a Haggis" to mark the day, so I'll offer a Burns' verse dedicated to a less revolting victual:

Chorus:
O gude ale comes and gude ale goes;
Gude ale gars me sell my hose,
Sell my hose, and pawn my shoon-
Gude ale keeps my heart aboon!

I had sax owsen in a pleugh,
And they drew a' weel eneugh:
I sell'd them a' just ane by ane-
Gude ale keeps the heart aboon!

Chorus

Gude ale hauds me bare and busy,
Gars me moop wi' the servant hizzie,
Stand i' the stool when I hae done-
Gude ale keeps the heart aboon!

Chorus

(A fine companion piece, I must say, to A.E. Housman's "Terrence, this is stupid stuff.")

The Force is strong in this one ...

My friend Mandy posted on Facebook the other day a link to images of a Barack Obama action figure, produced by a Japanese company. The pictures showed the figure in a variety of presidential poses: behind a lectern answering questions, delivering a speech, standing in a determined and heroic stance, and so on. And then, brandishing a machine gun. And then, standing ninja-like with a pair of samurai swords. And finally, as you see above, doing battle with Dick Cheney. I mean, Darth Vader. (No, I actually mean Dick Cheney).

Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to be made into an action figure, but he’s certainly the first that children in countries other than the U.S. would be eager to own, or be delighted to be given as a gift. His international appeal is genuinely unprecedented; he’s the first president to be a bigger celebrity than the musicians playing at his inauguration. (This, it occurred to me when I watched U2 perform, will be a monkey wrench in Bono’s usual strategy of lending his celebrity to politicians in exchange for action on Africa. Obama stock won’t go up just because he’s staged a photo op with Bono. On the other hand, people might take Bono more seriously if they think Obama likes him).

The new president’s celebrity has been a sticking-point for many people, but I tend to think that this uneasiness says more about the connotations “celebrity” has for us these days than anything else. The overexposure of such wastes of skin as Paris Hilton unfortunately tars all celebrity with the same brush. And the general contempt in which politicians as a group are held makes the popularity of Barack Obama at the very least unsettling and leads in some cases to egregious comparisons with the cult of personality surrounding such figures as Hitler or Mao.

For all of Obama’s personal appeal, however, I tend to see this overwhelming adulation not as adulation per se. Rather, I think what we’re seeing when Obama is greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering people when he visits France or Germany or elsewhere is the sudden and unexpected return of love for America. There are two Americas, one loathed and feared outside the U.S., and one that inspires fascination and hope, best summed up in Bill Clinton’s great line in his speech endorsing Obama: “People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” I tend to see each version of America antithetical manifestations of American Exceptionalism. The first, "example of our power," is the insular, nativist my-country-right-or-wrong, “America is great because it’s America” tautology (most recently exemplified by Sarah Palin’s characterization of “real America”); the second, "the power of our example," is the America defined as a unique set of possibilities, as potential for hope and growth and life undreamed-of elsewhere in the world. Barack Obama’s remarkable personal story exemplifies the latter, and people around the world see in him the idea of the United States that has captivated the world since 1776.


I wanted to post sooner after the inauguration, but it’s taken me this long for my thoughts to settle into something cohesive. I watched the ceremony at Bitters, Memorial’s grad pub. I had been planning to go home to watch, but decided that this was something better experienced in the company of others. And as I looked around the standing-room-only pub, everyone raptly listening to Obama’s speech, the thought that leapt to mind was that we looked like nothing other than people gathered around, not a television set, but a radio. True, most had their eyes on the screen; but the overall impression was not of watching, but listening.

This for me is emblematic of Obama’s promise: since Tuesday, I have read more columns, op-ed pieces, and blog posts parsing the speech—more attention paid to its substance and significance of a his words—than I have ever seen devoted to a political speech before. Granted, a large part of the attention paid the inaugural speech derives from the high expectations Obama’s past oratory has raised; but never in my lifetime have I seen so many people pay attention to a politician’s words. Rather, the cynical default—which, generally speaking, has been richly earned—has been that it is a waste of time listening to politicians, because at best they’re merely saying what people want to hear, and at worst are lying through their teeth.

The sea-change with Obama is that it’s not so much that he’s saying things people want to hear (although he is and people do); the difference is that he’s not saying what he does because people want to hear it, and we’ve arrived at a point where a plurality of people want to hear the things he says.

It is a subtle but seismic distinction, and one the places a premium on listening. Listening is something that has been absent from political discourse, and not just for the last eight years. The Bush Administration possessed the ideological equivalence of tone-deafness, but they can’t shoulder all the blame, or even most of it. Political discourse at some point became an exercise in people talking past each other—evinced most glaringly in the world of punditry, where volume trumps content and bullying trumps argument.

The image of people gathered around the radio put me in mind of FDR’s “Fireside Chats,” the radio addresses he delivered to reassure the American people during the dark days of the Depression and the Second World War. You can read them here. And I do recommend reading them: besides being interesting in their own right, they are remarkable for what they did. Roosevelt paid his audience the tribute of assuming them to be intelligent and thoughtful, and he did not condescend or talk down. The “chats” effectively kept the American people in the loop in difficult times, informed them of what the government was doing and why, and engendered a sense of collective purpose. And what’s more, people wanted to listen to them.

Perhaps I’m still a bit starry-eyed, and looking at this past election too idealistically. Perhaps—though I certainly do not expect the Obama administration to accomplish all (or even most) of what it is expected to do, and we can already see the inertia of Washington exerting its gravitational pull. But as someone whose entire career is all about language, and the written and spoken word, there is no down side to the prospect of listening becoming again a central aspect of our political and social discourse.

Now, if we can just get our Canadian politicians to get that memo.

Seriously, Blago? Tennyson? Seriously.

I'm starting to come around to the opinion that we should pull a Truman Show on Rod Blagojevich -- build a massive television sound stage in perfect imitation of his home and offices, transfer him there while he's asleep, and then let him continue to be the (fictional) governor of (fictional) Illinois. And film it all: the backroom deals, the self-aggrandizing riffs and speeches, the arrogant indeed delusional denial of reality. Which, if we put him unwittingly into the middle of a reality TV show, would be the most poetic justice that could be enacted. Let him believe he's getting away with everything and start a viewer's contest to predict just how egregious his behaviour gets.

I make this modest proposal both for the poetical nature of its justice, but also because I would otherwise miss his Nero-like performances in front of the press when the inevitable finally happens. The most recent incident had me both cringing and laughing: to add a rhetorical flourish to his words of defiance, he quoted the end of "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I cringed because this happens to be my favourite poem by Tennyson; I laughed because of the absurdity of it -- it reminded me rather vividly of the scene in The Wire when the massively corrupt state senator Clay Davis, standing on the courthouse steps before his trial, holds up a copy of Prometheus Bound and claims to be taking strength from this place by Aeschylus (which he pronounces "Ascilius"). Life imitates art.

And then I laughed harder when it occurred to me that, more appropriate to the governor's saga would be the closing lines of another Ulysses: "yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." Seems a little more appropriate to the breathless spirit of opportunism and transgression fostered by the good governor, don't you think?