Harper Agonistes

Harper Agonistes




Inside Television 593
Publication Date: 3-2-12
By: Hubert O'Hearn


For me it was the piano. It was the sight of him at the piano, playing old Beatle songs in a clip that was introduced by shiny-toothed smiling news anchors on every newscast in the country. Yes, that started to bring back the memories and made me realize with increasing shock and horror that the memories weren’t just memories. They were warning signs, clues left by history to warn us of a monster that was waiting to be re-born.

Richard Nixon loved to play the piano at parties. The instrument suited him. Even while trying to be warm and happy and good old Dick, he made sure to keep a massive block of furniture between himself and the world. For in his heart he knew that he was hated, or at least less loved than his old Senate colleague Jack Kennedy. So very well. If you will not give me your love, you will at least fear my power. As soon as I saw Stephen Harper start to thunk out the tunes, I knew. Canada was being run by a man who would heartily rip apart every piece of the soft-spoken national identity like a lynx at the throat of a rabbit.

And a one ...

Harsh words and not pleasant to read. I can’t apologize. These are hard times and they’re going to get harsher. I’ll explain in a moment, but first and for those too young to remember Nixon or shocked that I have described a currently sitting Prime Minister in such terms, I’d like you to read a quote. This is from the late Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary of Nixon in Rolling Stone, from 1994:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

There is a strange parallel between Watergate and the Robocall Scandal. Both could only be organized by the truly paranoid and that is its most fearsome aspect. Nixon never needed to have his Plumbers break into the Democratic National Committee offices in order to defeat George McGovern. As good a man as McGovern was, Americans hadn’t voted out a sitting President for forty years and they weren’t about to start. Similarly, Harper was destined for his majority. The rise of the NDP had come a week too late and the demise of the Liberal Party a week too soon. The jig was up. The man who saw that Conservative begins with Con and thought that was a fine idea was going to get his majority. Both Watergate and Robocall were a waste of time. If it wasn’t so terrifying, it would be comic.

and a two...

Watergate was, I think, the greatest television series of my life. Nixon had a fall guy, just as Harper has this poor bastard in Guelph. You could have a good parlour game argument over whose choice was uglier - Harper for blaming it all on some 26 year old office hack; or Nixon for trying to make his former White House Attorney John Dean the patsy. But John Dean sang better than two centuries’ worth of La Scala tenors and the events played out every day and every night until that August day in 1974 when Nixon finally waved goodbye on the steps of a helicopter parked on the White House lawn. All the soap operas were put on hiatus in the summer of 1973 so that all the US broadcast networks could air the complete Senate hearings led by a rolypoly ex-segregationist named Sam Ervin.

That to me is the troubling part. Will Robocall become the on-going television news event its importance deserves? I live in hope, otherwise why hope to live? And yet. We know that employees of Responsive Marketing Group right here in my awkward home city of Thunder Bay saw that what they were doing on Election Day was wrong. They reported it to their Supervisor. Nothing happened. They reported it to the RCMP. Nothing happened. It haunts me that the natural progression is that they reported it ti the media and...nothing happened until now.

Any reporter who was given this story and did not write or broadcast it should immediately retire to a life of scrawling out the lunch menu on the chalkboard at Big Sam’s Grease n’ Eggs. Any editor who spiked the story should be hauled off screaming to the abattoir from where to meet his fate. If Canadian media still has a spine it can stiffen - now’s the time, brother. Now’s the time.