Cenotaph

Toronto Old City Hall cenotaph (click to enlarge)

THIS IS THE CENOTAPH AT TORONTO'S OLD CITY HALL. I'm not sure precisely when the bookend inscriptions commemorating Canada's peacekeeping missions were added to the dates of World War One, World War Two and the Korean War, but they've been there a long time now.

I understand that we have a lot invested in the "myth of Peacekeeping." Canadians like to imagine ourselves as the nice guy, the good friend, the designated driver, the burly but amiable dude who wades in to break up the fight. Like so many national myths, it says more about how we imagine ourselves than the reality.

Never mind that those carved brackets of Peacekeeping, pleasingly symmetrical as they might be, are redundant. There's the simple fact that at least 159 Canadian soldiers have died since we first sent troops into Afghanistan. That's more than the total 122 Canadian fatalities on various UN peacekeeping missions.

Afghanistan might not be anyone's idea of an unmitigated military or political success, but not all of our peacekeeping missions have ended well.

They deserve to be remembered. Perhaps it's time to replace one of those stone slabs and get out the chisel.

 

Why I Vote (and Why I Spoiled My Ballot)

I arrived at the polling station this afternoon to see this, and it pretty much summed up my feelings about the whole election.

The first big mistake Stephen Harper made was to double the length of this election cycle - 78 days, over twice the minimum allowed in the 1996 Elections Act. It's not as harrowing as the American election cycle, which lasts four years and starts before inauguration, but it's a step closer, and makes democracy seem like a punishment. I can't speak for anyone else up here, but the effect it had on me was to give me more than enough time to realize how much I hate politicians - all politicians.

I certainly didn't have a lot to choose from in my riding, which elected its last Tory before I was born, and only sent an NDP MP to Ottawa in the last election, which hindsight seems to be painting as a freak.

I knew I wasn't going into this election a partisan voter, and based on what I'm seeing now as the results come in, I wasn't alone, at least on the conservative side. I wasn't the last time around, four years ago, but at least then my ballot gave me an outlet for my frustration - not one, but two libertarian parties quixotically contesting the riding. After a bit of Googling, I determined which one was the less sophomoric and off-putting and made what was, ethically if not technically, a protest vote.

If nothing else, that ballot provided me with a punch line to any future jokes about the self-sabotaging tendencies of fringe politics in general, and libertarians in particular.

I can't remember why I didn't vote Tory the last time around, but I know that this time it was impatience with Stephen Harper and distaste for at least three of his platforms.

Bribing me with my own money was one of them. As much as I'm shocked at having mysteriously arrived in the middle class, it's never comforting when politicians try to tell me they're my friend. And when they try to grease the unwelcome intimacy with what amount to bribes they insist on calling tax cuts, my gag reflex kicks in.

Sure I like having more money to spend on my kids and a bit more budget for home renos would be nice - that brown '70s kitchen isn't going to replace itself - but I'd like to get that from actual tax cuts that everyone can enjoy and not targeted goodie bags.

I didn't like Bill C-51, either. Not that I'm against fighting terrorism or giving law enforcement the tools to do it, but badly-written legislation is a time bomb. I'm suspicious of any new law, but when they potentially target free speech and legitimate protest thanks to imprecise language like "terrorist propaganda" I can see the overreach waiting to happen. Just look at the Department of Homeland Security to see how expanded powers, well, expand - in all directions.

Most of the people who protested C-51 liked to paint it as Harper creating a police state; I saw it turning really toxic under some future administration with a different definition of an "internal enemy." The "Stop Harper" crowd have always looked like they were fighting a nemesis created in their own imagination and fitted with Harper's face; I didn't see an evil leader but an evil law, with the potential for real trouble when political opportunism and cynicism (inevitably) finds the other side of the blade.

Which brings me to the niqab, which will probably be called the iceberg that holed Harper's Titanic. Maybe it was; it was certainly the issue that energized opposition to Harper when election fatigue was setting in. Now I'm as against masks and covering women with sacks as any putative Islamophobe with daughters, whose understanding of liberal principles bridles at such things.

I would have liked, however, if Harper could have framed his late-in-the-game attack on the niqab more rationally - like how covering your face in ID photos or while giving testimony (or voting) makes a joke of the essential functions of bureaucracy or law or democracy. Instead it was the image of a niqab at a citizenship ceremony that became Harper's boogeyman - a wholly ceremonial ritual where it's intent and not identity that's recognized.

Never mind that, as a religious person and the world's worst Catholic, I have very good reasons to be afraid of laws that - thanks to the bafflingly imprecise language that ends up framing legal definitions - will be inevitably turned around on anyone's religious customs when some malicious lawyer or Supreme Court justice with a hunger for precedent becomes creative with interpretation.

I understand that "religious freedom" - like "free speech" and "the right to bear arms"  - is a concept regarded with far less reverence here than in the U.S., where there's a written Constitution with more vigorous definitions bolstered by two centuries of inspired debate. Which is why I have every reason to expect that good intentions will become predatory legal rulings and punitive bureaucratic punishment here. It's happened before.

Was it too much to ask my country's leader to get me to vote for his party  by treating me like a rational adult?

Which is why I showed up at the polling station expecting not to vote for my Conservative candidate. This time around, though, I didn't intend to vote for anyone.

Years ago, a high school friend sold me on voting with the simple maxim: "If you don't vote, you can't complain." I love complaining, so I made sure I voted in every election. No exercised franchise, no soapbox. It was that simple.

Sometimes I have regretted my vote. Other times I could defend it happily. Thanks to the parliamentary system and my choice to live in the country's largest city I have always known, since I first marked my ballot as a "conservative," that my vote would be largely meaningless, as every riding I have lived in has had an electoral history like the one I live in now.

As ever, even if I voted for my Conservative candidate they'd end up polling at best a distant second but more probably a resounding third. I suppose I could vote "strategically," but I've always been rather sentimental about my vote; I consider it a gift to be bestowed on a deserving suitor, not dice thrown in a game of odds. In either case I entered the polling station knowing in my gut that Harper's conservatives were in for a mauling, and I know they knew it, too. No vote, strategic or not, would change that, and I frankly didn't much care.

So with no stomach for the Conservative party and no Libertarian to gift with my protest vote - the only independent running revealed himself as a maniac and a slumlord after a few minutes of Googling - I spoiled my ballot.

I'd never done it before. I looked online to see if there was a "proper" way, but ballot-spoiling is apparently like modern jazz: you can do it with as much style as you want, but most people still won't approve.

My friend and editor Paul Tuns was the first person who ever told me that it spoiling my ballot wasn't just an option, but a principled one. He ended up voting Tory this time around, but his rationalization included a thought that made the conspicuous gesture of a spoiled ballot seem almost creative:

So it's illogical that I'm voting, but that, too, is the beauty of freedom: It doesn't have to make sense.

It wasn't fun. I hope I never have to do it again, but that would mean a future with better politicans and superior politics, and I can't see that happening. Staying at home would be a franchise wasted; making the effort to dig up my papers and identification and walk to the polling place to say "none of the above" isn't apathy, but it is an admission that I've slipped away from the apparent majority of the population who can express joy or disappointment at the results of an election. I can still complain, but without much passion or outrage; this time around, I didn't think anyone had a better idea.

Speech

This blog is new, so I'm not sure I can be so presumptuous as to address my "American readers," as I'm not exactly sure if I have any regular readers yet. Similarly, the subject of this post is responsible for much of the traffic to this site, so it's pretty certain that what follows will be familiar to the vast majority of my "readers," American or not.

Sentimental? Yes. Corny? No. Don't you dare call this corny.

Brazening past all that, my American readers might not be aware that the concept of free speech as they know it isn't as common or widespread as they'd presume, growing up in a country that has (at least up until now - more than a bit of diligence is required in these matters) enshrined the principle of freedom of expression explicitly in the founding documents of their country. It's not so simple here in Canada, where we inherited the more circumspect concept of free speech from the British and laid on it further conditions in a poorly-written document pushed by a leader more concerned with his reputation in posterity than with any enlightened, mature concept of liberty or civil polity.

The result is that speaking your mind - or even hosting a forum to let other people speak theirs - is a potentially actionable pursuit here in Canada, and increasingly liable to legal harassment, financial disaster and court-mandated prohibition of your freedom of speech, thought and association. Americans have, so far, been able to defend themselves from this assault on their liberties simply by saying that it's unconstitutional (though there are forces constantly working on attacking the First Amendment - as someone who envies your country's up front defense of liberty, can I warn you to be vigilant?) The rest of the world, sadly, is even further behind the U.S., perhaps even Canada.

So what's happening is that my friend Arnie, who runs a very good blog called Blazing Cat Fur, is being sued by an onerous individual who's learned to use Canada's pitiful statutes on speech to try and silence his fellow citizens. Arnie is, truly, one of the good guys, and deserves all the support he can get in a legal battle that, regardless of the outcome, is meant to punish him economically and warn other people not to even think about saying what they think in any sort of public forum. This is a skirmish in a battle that, if lost, will make Canada a country very much less free than any of its citizens could imagine.

So I'm asking you to go here, read the details, and consider donating something to help Arnie out and maybe even contribute to a legal precedent that will make the steady diminishment of liberty and free speech slow and - perhaps one day - even retreat in this country. We have a lot of battles to fight right now, but losing this one could make winning any of the others almost impossible.

Wrong

Look, we can probably sit around and make fun of Doug Saunders all day, but the fact remains that he's a respected journalist at the country's most venerable newspaper who not only wrote something patently ridiculous, but he made a whole book out of it and continues wandering our media byways defending the whole damn bucket of stupid.

That said, my friend (and editor) Paul Tuns of The Interim pretty much summed up why Saunders has gotten it so wrong, pretty much from the moment he drew breath to speak:

Doug Saunders, author of The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, writes about why he wrote the book in this week's edition of The Hill Times: "Culture is something that's a product of economic and educational circumstances. It's not a cause. It's an effect ... In many ways, this book is sort of a corrective of that misunderstanding." I think there are three arguments to be made about the interconnection of culture, economics, education, and much more (technology, laws, religion, etc...) and Saunders has accepted as true the one that is almost certainly wrong. The other possibilities are that culture is cause for what happens in economics and education or that these factors continuously play upon each other. I think the constant playing upon each other is the right description.

That's pretty much the whole of Paul's post on the subject, and it needs to be repeated and circulated, to give folks who might be fooled some sort of idea of the resonant, earth-shattering foolishness that underlies Saunders' book.

And no - no Amazon link to the book. You know where to find the thing - I just don't want to make it any easier for you.

New Column: Sanctuary

My latest column is up at The Interim, and instead of talking about books, movies and TV shows, I let myself wonder about the sort of people who want to live in condos carved out of former churches - and why there are so many churches to be carved up accordingly, especially in my hometown. This demographic - a small one, to be sure - seems to be a small group within the larger tribe of the "spiritual but not religious," which is to say those folks who find Richard Dawkins as annoying as everyone else, but who find the thought of church-going and faith-confessing to be not only a whole lot of work, but a likely way of spending altogether too much time with people who would have loved to see those former churches used as, well, churches.

In other words, these are people who are happy to discard organized religions but not their intuition that a higher power exists, that life isn’t finite and corporeal, and that the sacred can have a physical presence, even after you put marble countertops and a rainfall shower in it. The rise of this group has increased among the demographically trending Millennials or Gen Y, known more specifically as the children of the Baby Boomers, and the Post’s Silcoff notes that “once unchurched, people tend not to rechurch. And so what will the spiritual life of the children of these Millenials look like?”

The Interim is a pro-life paper, so I was obliged to wonder aloud for the readers just what this trend might mean to the pro-life movement. Nothing good, really, as it's just another example of the spiritual being chased not only out of public and political life, but from moral discretion in general, as a potential source of friction if you should insist too loudly that something just isn't right.

Bohemian

In a chapter on the middle class in his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg made an assertion that I had to stop and re-read a couple of times to make sure I understood what he was saying. Not because I didn't think it was true, but because it rang so true, and has (I think) escaped serious analysis.

He begins with a quote from Nancy Pelosi, defending Obamacare as a boon to the creative classes:

"We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone: 'If you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You don't have to be job locked.'"

As an appeal to voters, it's curious - the number of people whose creative urges would compel them to throw over their job to pursue their muse is surely tiny, but I suppose Pelosi is casting a wider net, at the sort of people who, Walter Mitty-like, daydream about doing such a thing, and the larger number of liberals who, although they have no intention themselves, think it would be an altogether wonderful world if this were possible. And these are the people who call their politics "reality-based."

Goldberg isn't convinced that there's any plausible link between socialized medicine and enterpreneurialism  - it's beside the point, of course, when you're trying to sell a fantasy - but goes on to take the Democratic notion behind this to its logical end:

"The larger point is that the liberal vision of an advanced society is one where it is finally rich enough to liberate the middle class from their comfortable bourgeois lifestyles and to subsidize their conversion to bohemian ones. If you want to be a 'musician or whatever' it's okay, because we'll tax the rich enough so that you don't have to worry about life's essentials (like health care or housing or food or your kids' education) anymore. In other words they are going to win their centuries'-old war on the middle class by subsidizing the bohemian lifestyle to the point where it no longer pays to be bourgeois. It probably won't work in the long run. But in the short run, it will bankrupt us all, not only financially, but morally as well."

What resonates for me is how much of this I've already seen transpire up here in Canada, where the arts-supporting government bureaucracy is probably a few years more advanced than in the U.S. I've known plenty of creative people who, before they even finished their degrees, figured out that there were institutions in place to subsidize their creative ambitions, and did their best to tailor their life - and work - to maximize their potential as clients of this bureaucracy.

There were classes of grants, from the municipal to provincial to federal level, that they could apply for, in addition to grants for travel and housing. There are government-subsidized co-op apartments in many major Canadian cities built for the express purpose of housing the creative. (And not-so-creative: The late leader of our socialist federal opposition party lived in one for many years when he and his wife were municipal politicians.) Every now and then I would hear someone I knew express fatigue with their workaday life and a longing to express their creative ambitions, which would inevitably lead to them musing aloud about working on a grant application.

Arts grants exist in the U.S., of course, but many of them - including the most generous - are maintained by private foundations. In Canada, however, private arts funding is far more minimal, as the government has had a virtual monopoly on arts funding for decades. But what Pelosi is talking about here isn't a subsidy structure based on applications and deadlines and juries, but an expansion of current social welfare to include not just those who can't work (for a variety of reasons, some valid, some not,) but those who won't work because of the demands of their muse, or the shortage of truly suitable work for those of creative temperament.

I assumed that this sort of thing making headway in the U.S. would be at least a few years in the future, but a Salon article from over two years ago (h/t SDA) suggests that it's already happening:

Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month. 

“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”

I might be reading too much into Goldberg, but I think his point about the current motivation for the "centuries'-old war on the middle class" is an abiding distaste of progressives for the sumptuary comforts that the bourgeoisie have gained with the success of capitalism, and their pride in being able to afford them. (Not to mention the ill-concealed elite horror at their persistent bad taste.) Diminishing that - or "liberating" the creatively stifled bourgeois - and they'll see the straitened circumstances and love of small creature comforts that come with the bohemian lifestyle as a feature, not a bug. At least for a while, anyway.

So - government-subsidized roast rabbit with sweet potatoes but no savings, delayed plans for a family and little choice in education for kids when you have children, reliance on public transit and renting but not owning: A twentysomething student or recent arts graduate might not regard these as real hardships, but if they can be sold to at least a measurable minority of the citizenry, they'll certainly ease the burdens on a government committed to programs that necessarily hobble a healthy economy. I know that sounds like a conspiracy, but when you've already produced a generation notable for its sense of entitlement, it's never too early to transform them into a voting demographic reliant on its entitlements.

Buy it at amazon.com

Context for Kathy: Lightbulb

My friend Kathy has a post up at Taki's on Sandra Tsing Loh's heartfelt cry from the hot tub, a piece in The Atlantic that paints a picture of women - strong, empowered women, my friend - spelling out just how close men are to getting pink slipped out of history. On her way to tearing Loh and her editors a convenient new one, she drops some cultural references that, for the sake of anyone born after 1980 or raised outside the Greater Toronto Area (that would be billions of people, right?) might need a bit of explaining.

After recapping the scene Loh set in her piece, with a group of mostly divorced middle-aged women sitting around getting snapped while complaining about their husbands, ex- and current, Kathy has a little moment of generational pop culture recall, writing that she "was reminded of SCTV’s 'Bill Needle' and his description of the feminist play 'I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, And No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t.' To wit: It’s about how 'women who don’t have any problems sit around talking about their problems.'”

Helpfully, the link to the piece on her blog embeds the original skit:

If you were, say, 17 years old at the time this episode of SCTV aired, you might have found it a bit excruciating to watch. The satire might not have been so obvious, since as far as you can tell a lot of what adults called "theatre" in those days looked about this bad. What you did know was that there had recently been a musical called I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road, and that a local production had a respectable run recently in your hometown of Toronto, playing at the dinner theatre in the same restaurant and banqueting complex where your sister had her wedding reception.

The musical's writer and original star was Gretchen Cryer, who opened the show in the summer of 1978. According to the Wikipedia entry on the show, the plot wasn't wildly different from the satire performed by SCTV's Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara and Joe Flaherty:

Manager Joe Epstein returns from a trip and finds his star Heather Jones on stage at a nightclub, singing her own songs about the emancipation of women, together with the two singers Alice and Cheryl and the band. She told Joe Epstein that this would be her new show. Joe, who had been Heather's friend for a long time, reacted angrily to Heather's change, but he was not able to persuade Heather to go back to her usual role. Almost 40 years old, she feels that the time has come for a change. The songs she is singing now are touching Joe in an unpleasant way, because they remind him of the way he treats his own wife. Heather is determined to support women's liberation; she splits up with her manager and goes on to perform her own show.

I'm Getting My Act Together... was produced by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival, and went on to play Chicago, Los Angeles and London's Drury Lane Theatre. The Toronto production I remember being advertised so relentlessly ran in a swanky licensed venue midway between Rosedale and Forest Hill, the city's most expensive neighbourhoods, so it's not like it was some sort of Living Theatre, avant-garde bourgeouis provocation. Numbers in the show have titles like "Natural High," "Miss America," "Strong Woman Number" and "Lonely Lady." Here's "Natural High," from the cast album:

It's worth remembering that mainstream feminism in the '70s was set to a soundtrack of treacly, earnest, middle-of-the-road hotel lounge act showstoppers, which the SCTV folks pretty much nailed with their parody. For anyone who lived through it, two words should suffice: Helen Reddy.

(If you young folks think I'm being a bit pedantic about all this stuff, you have to understand that you can be a bit stupid sometimes, and we old folks feel we need to talk slow and draw a picture of life as it was lived so very, very long ago.)

The SCTV episode with I'm Taking My Own Head... aired in October of 1981, so Martin and O'Hara had plenty of time to study their subject, and perhaps even take in a performance of Cryer's show at the Ports Dinner Theatre, or perhaps even in Chicago or New York. What anyone growing up in Southern Ontario at the time would know was the inspiration for I'm Taking My Own Head author Libby Wolfson - local daytime TV "women's shows" starring people like Joyce Davidson and Dini Petty, and especially Micki Moore's You're Beautiful, which aired on CityTV, the local channel that SCTV mined relentlessly for material.

Moore's show took its title from the Carole King song that it used as a theme, and oozed an estrogen-thick fog of self-affirmation that could repel men for a block-wide radius. It aired from 1977 to 1989, and mere glimpses of it convinced young boys off sick from school that the girls they knew stood a pretty good chance of turning into the neurotic, needy, resentful creatures who filled Moore's overstuffed couches. There's no helpful archived video of You're Beautiful on YouTube, but here's one of SCTV's Libby Wolfson satires:

The lesson is that you can make fun of things all you want, but it doesn't mean that the object of your humourous scorn will go away, or that it won't actually get stronger, and even thrive under the apparently fertile glare of your derision. Also, a single generation can turn anything from parody to reality.

Canada

Years ago, a crew from ITV came to Toronto to film a documentary about Due South, the Canadian-made "Mountie goes to Chicago" TV series that was - apparently - a huge hit in the UK. I was still writing a daily TV column for the paper-that-can't-be-named, and was asked to join the cast of talking heads eulogizing the show. My recollection was that I did a fairly good job of disguising my complete ambivalence about Due South, and that I made a few cranky comments about my country and our self-image.

I never heard another thing about the show, and assumed that it had disappeared into the UHF ether, but we live in the dawn of the 21st century, which means that everything you ever do in front of a camera will persist. Imagine my surprise to find that someone has put it online (part 1 of 6 above) and that at least a few shards of my unpatriotic bile made it to the small screen. It seems like so long ago. And yes, the camera does add ten pounds...