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?

R.I.P. Sir Harry Flashman, V.C,, K.C.B., K.C.I.E., etc.

As usual, I have a large stack of books that have been piling up over the term to read over Christmas, but none so eagerly anticipated as Flashman on the March by George McDonald Fraser. Alas, this was also a very bittersweet read for me, because as I blogged last February, George McDonald Fraser died on January 2, 2008 at the age of 82. This of course means that Flashman on the March, the twelfth novel in the Flashman series, would also be the last.

While in P.E.I. this summer, I devoured a stack of books comparable to the one I now have with me, with Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, Flashman and the Dragon, and Flashman and the Tiger among them. I had also purchased Flashman on the March, but decided to wait until Christmas to read it -- delaying the final gratification of an unread Flashman novel until an appropriate time.

And now I'm done. Sigh. For those unfamiliar with the series, Fraser published the first novel, Flashman, in 1969. Harry Flashman was a character in Thomas Hughes' best-selling Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, who was a bully and a coward, ultimately expelled for drunkeness. Fraser picks up on the seventeen-year-old Flashman's story at the moment of expulsion, when he returns home to announce his shame to his father. Flashman pere, a drunkard of failing fortunes carrying on with a much younger mistress, announces that there is nothing else for it but for young Harry to enter the army on a purchased commission. And so he does, but not before taking a romp in the sack with his father's mistress. Upon being posted to a unit in Scotland, Flashman then seduces an empty-headed beauty named Elspeth, and being found out, is forced to marry her by her wealthy industrialist father.

So sets the tone for the novels to come: Harry is the ultimate bully, womanizer, cad, bounder, and coward. He is posted to Afghanistan and is present for the retreat through the Khyber Pass and the Siege of Jalalabad, and comports himself with cowardly elan throughout -- always the first to run, always behaving reprehensively whenever his own skin is at stake, and never passing up an opportunity to seduce a startling array of beautiful women. Managing to take refuge in a small fort outside Jalalabad during the siege, he spends it prostrate with fear on his bunk will the enlisted men curse him for a coward. When the Afghans breach the fort, in a moment of delirious terror he scoops up the Union Jack and regimental colours in the hopes that if he presents them to the attackers, he might be spared. As it happens, he doesn't have time to hand them over, as he gets knocked unconscious and buried by a falling wall. He is the only survivor in the fort, and when he is found by the counterattacking British, they see him cradling the flag and colours as if defending them with his very person. All of which makes him a national hero, feted by the Duke of Wellington himself and awarded the Victoria Cross by the Queen. Not a word of his cowardice comes to light.

And so it goes for twelve novels, with Flashman a remarkably clear-eyed observer of history and candid commentator on his own vices. He falls entirely reluctantly into historical crisis-points like Afghanistan, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Harper's Ferry incident, and the Indian Mutiny. The series' conceit is that the novels are the secret memoirs of Harry Flashman, written in his 90s, found by George McDonald Fraser "wrapped in oilskin" at an estate auction in the late 1960s. McDonald presents himself as "editor" of the memoirs, offering footnotes commenting on the historical context Flashman describes.

The fact of the matter is -- and this is something attested to by numerous historians of the mid-late Victorian period -- Fraser's novels are extremely accurate in their history. They are in their way the ultimate intersection for a literary scholar and historical dilletante like myself: historical education wrapped up in a great story.

Flashman on the March has Flashy co-opted into the 1867 British mission to rescue prisoners held by the mad King Theodore in Abyssinia. As usual, Flashman finds himself where he is largely through his own vices: returning from Mexico to Europe, he dallies with the daughter of a German nobleman during the cruise, and is found out in his behaviour upon making port in Trieste. To escape the retribution of the noble, he takes on a mission to deliver funds for the upcoming mission in Abyssinia -- and once there, is suborned to the mission as a secret emissary to rival tribes in order to buy support for the British project.

I won't retell more of the story than that, other than to share a very typical Flashman moment. His guide (of course) is a beautiful young woman of noble blood, with whom he has torrid sex all the way along. She has saved his life on a few occasions, and Flashy finds himself quite affectionate with her -- all of which matters for naught when Flashy's skin is at stake. They find themselves, fleeing pursuers, headed directly over the massive Tisiat Falls, and Flashman manages to snag some low-hanging branches, with his beautiful guide clinging to his leg:

There was only one thing to be done, so I did it, drawing up my free leg and driving my foot down with all my force at Uliba's face staring at me open-mouthed, half-submerged as she clung to my other knee. I missed, but caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled away downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone. Damnable altogether, cruel waste of good womanhood, but what would you? Better one should go than two, and greater love hath no man then this, that he lay down someone else's life for his own.

Of course, nothing is too easy for Flashman, and his erstwhile lover and guide survives to wreak vengeance later ...

So no more Flashman novels. I guess there is nothing else for it but to start with the first one again ...

Who throws a shoe? Honestly!

This just in: in the midst of George W. Bush's valedictory press conference in Iraq, a reporter threw his shoes at him.




That is all. Return to your normal activities.


Thirty-six more days.

Christmas traditions, new and old

It doesn’t really feel much like Christmas for me yet … given that I don’t bother with decorating my own place, as I don’t spend Christmas there, and I don’t start shopping until I’m back in Ontario, my run-ins with Christmas spirit tend to be incidental: stuff on TV (such as the Iron Chef chocolate battle last night), the decorations in the English office, occasional Christmas songs on the radio waking me up in the morning … And tonight I go to see a friend play Bob Cratchit in a musical version of A Christmas Carol. So there’s that.

Even so, the rhythm of my life now brings with it a new set of associations that inevitably start simmering Christmas anticipation, and perversely enough, one of the big ones is grading final essays in December. The latter stages of grading provoke a shift at the molecular level as the end of the semester comes into sight and I feel increasingly inclined to watch and listen to Christmas-themed things. One of the big ones for me is listening to Dylan Thomas read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” something I have blogged about in previous Decembers.

And there’s also Christmas carols … but only some of them. Come Christmastime, my decidedly un-religious nature experiences a fundamental contradiction, as I tend to lean more toward traditional Christmas music: I love the more overtly religious carols, especially when performed chorally or orchestrally. I also have a weakness for the mid-century crooners, Bing Crosby in particular. I do tend to cringe when contemporary pop stars record Christmas albums … I hear enough Mariah Carey and Celine Dion in shopping malls through the year without needing to hear their deformations of “Santa Baby” or “Silent Night.”

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan doing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” is now one of my favourite versions of my favourite carol, as is Loreena McKennit’s “Good King Wenceslas.” There’s also the new-old classics, by which I mean the things I grew up with—such as Bing Crosby and David Bowie doing “The Little Drummer Boy,” and pretty much all of Boney M’s Christmas album (was that laughter I heard in the cheap seats??). And of course the twin pinnacles of my childhood Christmas: John Denver with the Muppets and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, both of which are in my iTunes library.

(And to digress from music for a moment, I should add two more recent additions to my annual Christmas viewing: Love, Actually and the Christmas episode from season one of The West Wing, the latter of which takes first place in the list Television Guaranteed To Make Chris Cry No Matter How Many Times He Watches It. Dear god, I’m getting a lump in my throat just writing this).

And then there are the new-new classics, songs you hear and immediately know they’re there to stay. Which this year happens to be my boys doing “I Believe in Father Christmas”:

New branded politics

There’s a great moment in the first season of Mad Men when the men of Sterling Cooper—who have effectively hitched themselves to Richard Nixon’s would-be presidential star—view a JFK television ad, and suddenly realize what they’re up against. The ad is peppy, happy, cartoonish—a montage of image’s of the handsome Kennedy and his wife alongside a series of random Americans of various ages and stations (though not races or ethnicities)—and is utterly substanceless. Don Draper and company are taken aback by the breathtaking shallowness of the ad, but as ad men recognize the ad’s persuasive power ... especially when compared to Nixon’s ponderous and stern catalogue of his qualifications for the presidency.



One of the things I love about Mad Men is the way in which it so frequently subverts our accustomed understanding of certain cultural and historical moments and artefacts. The mythos of John F. Kennedy for us today (the version other than the unremitting lothario) is the eloquent and earnest, brilliant and dedicated leader who surrounded himself with the greatest minds of his generation. Nixon resides in the imagination as the self-obsessed, pathologically dishonest Machiavelli willing to do anything to attain and consolidate power. The first we like to imagine would have been a force for good had he not been cut down; the latter inaugurated a politics of skulduggery and character assassination that has been the norm until the recent election of Barack Obama.

Of course, neither of these portraits is entirely true or fair: Kennedy and his “best and brightest” have to bear much of the blame for Vietnam, and Nixon was (for all his faults) an accomplished administrator and diplomat. But their respective mythologies persist, which is why seeing the JFK ad was somewhat jarring—it has frequently been said that Kennedy was the first television president, that his victory was a product of this new medium that allowed his image of youthfulness, combined with his accomplished oratory, to sway the electorate. But those looking back on Kennedy with rose-coloured glasses tend to associate his televisual appeal not with the vapid TV ad seen above, but with such historic moments as the Berlin speech. It is, hence, a bit of a shock to the system to see said vapid ad and realize that Kennedy’s campaign not only exploited the shallowness of televisual sensibilities, but blazed a trail we’ve been walking since.

I’ve been musing on these questions this morning because of two things. One, I’ve been reading The Assault on Reason by Al Gore (speaking of candidates partially hamstrung by ponderous earnestness); two, there’s a particular turn of phrase that has been increasingly irritating me in the aftermath of our recent parliamentary silliness: the frequent recourse of liberal MPs and political commentators to the discussion of how to recuperate “the Liberal brand.”

I’ve always been a fan of Al Gore, and have a deep respect for him as a politician, statesman and just generally as a human being. The frequent assaults on him since 2000 by both the conservative and mainstream press have exemplified a particularly pernicious form of American anti-intellectualism that irritates the hell out of me, as well and scaring me a great deal too (plus, I have a certain sympathy for stodgy and pompous know-it-alls, having been justifiably tarred with that brush myself many, many times). The Assault on Reason is an extraordinary book, and one I’m now wishing I’d read when it was first published—though had I done that, it would have filled me with despair at the nadir of the Bush Administration and the uncertain prospect of what was to succeed them. It’s worth reading still however (Obama hasn’t been sworn in yet—forty-one days!), because it offers a trenchant critique of what happens when we allow mendacity and misdirection to rule political discourse in the place of reasoned and measured debate.

While we wait with bated breath to see whether Obama’s election will usher in a new era of pragmatic and transparent leadership based on rational debate, our own political situation in Canada makes me recommend The Assault on Reason as a fine book to be put in your loved ones’ stockings. Or perhaps, in this political climate, the stockings of your unloved-ones. Even as the Bush/Cheney/Rove style of politics is being shown the door by the American electorate, our own PM continues to play zero-sum partisan hardball and consolidate his party’s power by any means necessary. To quote Rick Mercer: “We've seen unheard of cooperation between political rivals all over the industrialized world. But not in Canada. Not with Stephen Harper ... No my friends, he has one goal and one goal only and it has nothing to do with governing: how can he use this crisis to destroy the opposition?”

What is perhaps most galling is the degree to which he continues to succeed. He made a drastic misstep that led to him almost being ousted by the coalition, but somehow convinced our GG to prorogue Parliament. He’ll return in January unrepentant but with a budget with enough gifts for the electorate that the coalition—which already looks dead in the water—won’t have a leg to stand on. And he’ll have managed, through some bizarre bit of political misdirection, to have transformed his blunder into political capital. And to those who say you can’t argue with success, I cry bullshit.

Why? Because it’s not about who wins and loses in Parliament, it’s about who wins and loses in Canada, and at the moment we’re all losing big time: because we have a locked and shuttered House of Commons at a time when we need leadership, because we have a prime minister more interested in holding onto power than genuinely working with the opposition for the greater good, because we have an inept and factious opposition, and because we’re pretty much a laughing stock. When Jon Stewart said the other night on The Daily Show that Canada’s biggest export is jokes about Canadians, I really couldn't do much more than sigh and silently agree.

All of which is why the incessant argument about “the Liberal brand” makes me want to knock people’s heads together. A political party is not a pair of sneakers or a celebrity fragrance, but we’ve arrived at a point where that’s exactly how we treat it. Harper &Co., according to a news report I heard yesterday, already have a series of Michael Ignatieff attack ads ready to roll out. Presumably they also had a series of Bob Rae attack ads in the can, and undoubtedly they’re assembling anti-coalition attack ads in the unlikely eventuality that the coalition is still drawing breath in January. The Conservatives have become masters of branding: they know that this is the strategy by which one comes to value or devalue something based on a set of associations detached from the innate value of a given object. They have been waging a very successful war against the Liberal brand since the waning days of Chretien, and have indeed succeeded in devaluing it dramatically.

Which is why we should remember that we're not talking about a consumer product here but a complex of elected officials, staffers, ideas, policies, and voters that cannot and should not be reduced to a set of simplistic catch-phrases, talking-points, and visual cues.

Which begs the question of why the Liberals allow Harper to control the debate. Every time an MP expresses their confidence in the “Liberal brand,” they’re playing a game they’ve been losing consistently. I can’t say I’m without ambivalence about Michael Ignatieff, but I take comfort in the fact that the Liberals seem to be getting their act together and ending, or at least suspending, their crippling internecine squabbles (the operative phrase here being “seem to be”). But Mr. Ignatieff: please don’t talk about the Liberal brand. Please don’t play Harper’s game. Granted, I’m not entirely sure what the alternative is, but then I’m not the newly appointed party leader presumably surrounded by a lot of smart political operatives. There is one glimmer of hope, however, which happens to lie to our south. Promise me you’ll think about how to change things.

Friday miscellany

1. My friend Jason’s Facebook status update sums it all up for me: “Jason is boggled that even as our laissez-faire partisan neighbours to the south managed a recovery package in days, all our morons managed was a time-out. With pay.” At a moment like this, it strikes me that doing nothing is about the worst thing a government can do. Even an election would be preferable. Not very, but still.
   
   
2. Everything I have predicted about the course of events since the coalition became a gleam in the Opposition’s eye has been wrong. I was thinking I should just stop prognosticating, but when the G-G gave Harper permission to dissolve Parliament, I came to the conclusion that I simply don’t possess an irrational enough mind to see into the crystal ball of our federal politics.
   
   
3. In happier news, the semester is over and I will be winging home to Ontario in slightly less than two weeks. This was a good semester, and after the perfect storm that was my fall term last year, it felt like a walk in the park. I actually managed to get some of my own writing done, which felt so decadent that I had to remind myself that that’s technically 40% of my job description—40% research, 40% teaching, 20% administration. The problem was that this time last year the math was more like 40% research, 40% teaching, 60% administration. Which is what happens when you leave the math to English professors.
   
   
4. Forty-six days of Bush's presidency left.
   
   
5. It occurred to me recently that I came roaring back to my blog after a two-month absence largely on my obsession with the American election. And now I’ve been going on about Canadian politics. Not wanting to turn this into an exclusively political blog, I shall do my best to reinsert more literary and personal stuff (i.e. things I actually know something about). That being said, this essay is one of the smartest things I’ve read since Obama’s election, and articulates some of the things I’ve thought way better than I ever could.
   
   
6. Teaching this term was a joy. I had two classes, my standard 20th-century U.S. fiction, and a fourth-year seminar on American Lit after 1945. In both cases, I decided to mix things up a bit by giving each course a specific theme rather than just doing a typical survey. In the case of the former, I decided to take advantage of Obama’s candidacy and focus on novels dealing with issues of race and identity; in the latter, we looked at post-9/11 fiction. The 9/11 course, while interesting, was a bit tougher—because, as it turns out, most novels written about September 11th really suck. At the same time however, we did Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is an utterly fantastic read and helped balance out stinkers like John Updike’s Terrorist. In both classes, though, I had some amazing students … which really is the rule rather than the exception here. I am consistently impressed and often blown away by the students I have; it’s quite the privilege.
   
   
7. Speaking of, my student Emily introduced me to the genius that is the comedy of Dylan Moran, who you may remember as the irritating David in Shaun of the Dead. His stand-up is brilliant: the following clip in which he expounds on the nature of Irish vs. English sensibilities, and Protestant vs. Catholic had me laughing so hard I was close to asphyxiating myself:
   
   

What I imagined our leaders saying as I watched them debate the coalition on the muted TVs at the gym while I ran on the treadmill yesterday

"OK, so remember all that stuff I said last week? You guys know I was joking, right? I mean, come ON … all that stuff about cutting off your funding? We were just hazing you. New government and all, having some fun with the Opposition. It’s a tradition! OK, well, it’s a new tradition, one that myself and my fellow Conservative MPs were hoping to get started. But NOOOOOO … you spoilsports have to go ahead and ruin the joke by taking it all totally seriously. I thought Canadian politicians were supposed to have a sense of humour. I mean, don’t you guys watch This Hour Has 22 Minutes? I mean, we’re hilarious. I was just punkin’ y’all! So let’s just forget this Coalition silliness, and go back to where we were before I said all that stuff. Which, like I said, I toooootally didn’t mean ….

"OK. OK. OK. Please don’t take the PMO away from me. Please!! You guys don’t understand what it’s like … I NEED to be Prime Minister! It’s like a drug. I can’t give it up. PLEASE! Look, it’s my campaign guys’ fault … after we did all those ads, they took the sweater vest away, and happy fun cuddly Stephen went away too, and hardass wants-to-be-President Stephen came roaring back. Let me put the sweater vest on again! I can do this, I swear! Don’t you understand? THEY TOOK AWAY THE SWEATER VEST!!"

(For some reason sounding an awful lot like Ian McShane) "Listen, you oil-sands worshipping shitheel cocksucker. You, my friend, just bought your cocksucker Conservative fucking party one long-term ass-fucking. You call this a fucking power grab, you with your wanna-be fucking executive branch? You fucking George W. fucking Bush clone? What you see before you, my monumentally arrogant friend, is a parlifuckingmentary solution to your pale imitation of those American Karl Rove cocksuckers. You want to be president, emigrate to the United fucking States of America. You want to be Canadian, you just bend over there and take our Westminster procedure like a polite little fucknut."


"I would like to correct Mr. Flaherty’s characterization of our agreement as the “New Socialist, New Separatist Coalition” and remind the honourable member that four years ago his party’s leader sought an identical agreement with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois. And I would like to further chastise the honourable member for speaking not only hypocritically, but for employing such incendiary and divisive language. We are not the “New Socialist, New Separatist Coalition,” Mr. Speaker. We are the Communist-Centrist Coalition of Partitionists, or CCCP. HA! That’s right, you bourgeois pigs, you running dogs! WE GOT YOU! At long last, the glorious revolution may commence! Добро пожаловать к соединению канадских советских социалистических республик!!"

Coalition concerns

I read this funny comment today by Matthew Yglesias, who writes one of my favourite political blogs:

“One happy result of recent election outcomes is that now liberal Americans get to tease our liberal Canadian friends about the role reversal — they’re the ones saddled with government by rightwingers, and they’re the ones who’ll need to flee ‘cross the border to enter the bountiful Land of Obama.”

Except, as he points out, possibly not for much longer. I obviously have had my head in the sand for the last few days, because it wasn’t until last night, listening to Cross-Country Checkup on CBC as I made dinner, that I first heard of the Conservatives’ massively controversial budget and the response of the opposition parties. I’m still a little hazy on the details of what made this budget such a “F*ck You!,” but the consensus I heard last night, from both sides of the political spectrum, was that Harper’s arrogance finally got the better of him—promising a conciliatory approach after the election, and then explicitly poking the opposition in the eye with a stick.

Which brings us to the two possible routes from here (or three, if we take into account the oh-so-Canadian strategy of doing nothing) being the opposition getting together to bring about another election, or the opposition literally getting together and forming a coalition government. The former prospect makes me want to jab the aforementioned stick in my own eye, but the latter is kind of exciting. Not necessarily because I think a coalition government would be the answer to our prayers or the solution to our problems, but because it would have the effect of driving federal Canadian politics out of its rut, and make three of our four major parties actually work together.

Also, it makes federal Canadian politics more interesting. The last election was such a dour affair because its outcomes, and indeed the process of the campaigns, were so predictable as to be practically foregone conclusions. I can’t remember the last time Canadian politics ever actually inspired me … actually, it’s entirely possible that my country’s politics have never inspired me, which is extremely sad. In fact, one of the last times I heard any of our leaders say something that moved me was when Rick Mercer interviewed Paul Martin on the October 28 episode of his show; Martin said “My father understood that government has a really positive role to play in the lives of people. You start with individual freedom, and then the question becomes, ‘Well, how the heck do make sure that people have that individual freedom?’ Well, if you’re not born to privilege, then you don’t have the same freedoms as people who are, and government has a responsibility to put you in that position with the best education, the best health care. That was my father’s belief, and it’s certainly mine.”

It says something about our current state of affairs that I really miss Paul Martin.

So I’m profoundly interested to see what happens should the opposition give this coalition idea the old college try. I suspect if it goes forward we’ll see Bob Rae as its nominal leader, because Stephane Dion would be a non-starter with the Bloc, and Ignatieff a non-starter with the NDP; Bob Rae, given his history with the New Democrats and massive amount of experience to boot, will likely rise to the top. The big question is the composition of the cabinet: the Bloc can’t possibly expect that a separatist would be an acceptable prime minister to the rest of the country, but they’ll have to be given something. Some key portfolios, at the very least, would be dropped in their laps.

I must admit, I am slightly gleeful at the fact that this prospective coalition will necessarily give the party of separatism a hand in government, largely because it’s exactly the kind of surreal logic that surfaces in Canadian political life from time to time that makes me love my country that much more. The very first comment on Matthew Yglesias’s post read “A separatist party joining a coalition government? Man, Canada can be weird sometimes.” Yup, we certainly can—and we’re not even mentioning the Trudeau years, or Mackenzie King’s séances, or Sir John A’s drunken whistle-stop campaign speeches.

But it also, I think, speaks to something in the Canadian character, in finding strength and consensus in accommodating difference. And to those calling in to Rex Murphy’s show last night with apocalyptic predictions of Canada’s demise should the Bloc get ANY power, I ask you this: have you not been paying attention to Quebec all this time? Separatism gains steam when Quebec feels disenfranchised, and withers on the vine when Quebec wields genuine political clout in Ottawa. Paradoxically, giving the Bloc a seat at the table in a coalition government would, I honestly believe, do more to marginalize extreme separatists than aid them.

On the other hand, the enfranchisement of Quebec at the expense of the Harper government, while denuding Quebec separatist sentiments, is more than likely to foster them out west, especially in Alberta. One caller last night hit the nail on the head when he observed that such an unlikely coalition would be read by Albertans as representative of the lengths Quebec and Ontario will go to claw back power from the western provinces and deny them a voice in the governance of the country.

So we’ll see. It’s all a great reminder that democracy is an intractably messy thing. I think it’s moments like this that Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government in the world … except for all the others.