Michael Ignatieff and the Lessons of Literature

Michael Ignatgieff and the Lessons of Literature

Politics for Joe 16

By: Hubert O'Hearn

For: Lake Superior News

I'd been planning on writing something for you about the Conservative style-attack on the Liberals and Michael Ignatieff when by sheer fortune I happened to be reading a little book that adds an interesting resonance to my already prepared remarks on the attempt to re-shape Stephen Harper as 'un autre petit homme'.

For that is what it is. We are witness to a fascinating Frankenstein-like clod hopping march by Harper and Ignatieff towards the target of becoming Canada's Next Top Jean Chretien. Mister Jay will be advising them on the suits and Fierce Looks. (Actually, I would happily shell out $29.95 to see that on Pay-Per-View.)

Why the fascination? Principally it is because all of Harper, Ignatieff and their pilot fish of yes men, ass kisses and stylists have tried one design and discarded it. Harper was very much coming across as Canada's very own Peter the Great (I shall quell the northern people!) as absolute Tsar of All Doughnut Eaters, until the Conservatives could not consistently break 40% in the opinion polls. The Margaret Thatcher style Harper wasn't playing quite well enough in households where books are used for things other than balancing bridge tables. So it was time to start plonking out John Lennon songs on the piano, stick Mr. Peepers glasses on the nose, and shove the wife and the fam out there. We're as cuddly as that big old doggy snoozing on your feet...

...except we really like ripping Michael Ignatieff's balls off. I've been writing about television and politics both since the days when the presence of Brian Mulroney in a oom wasn't an embarrassment for all other occupants of that space, but I don't think I have ever seen so massive a 'crash the Enterprise into her hull Scotty' attack as the recent Tory camapaign against Ignatgieff.

Massive. And effective.

I hate applauding a negative campaign, particularly one launched without benefit of a Federal election running in the background. Somehow that's not the Canadian way; or hasn't been until the current Harper gang rode into Ottawa. Say what you will about Pierre Trudeau's Rainmaker, Keith Davey who passed away this week, but I'm sure it never crossed the cagey old cage fighter's mind to run a series of ads halfway through a government's term with a scary and sarcastic voice intoning:

Bob Stanfield. He looks kind of weird eating bananas. And he makes weird old man underwear. Do you want him deciding what happens to YOUR kids?

Brrr. I actually creeped myself out with that one. But...and but. This Tory campaign works because it is bang on. The Liberals have not defined themselves at all. Here is how the Liberal Party chooses to define itself: Everything You Like About Harper, We Are! Everything You Don't Like, We Aren't! And that's the show. Don't worry, we'll have a second act for you by the time we open.

The problem with this is that in tennis terms the Conservatives are always on serve. Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi were the best returners of serve I've ever seen, but they definitely didn't count on getting six breaks to win a set. So what are the Liberals putting up in the tie-break?

Well, they have Michael Ignatieff. That was/is the game. We're all-in on Ace-Six off-suit against three opponents. Ballsy bet. The illusion of strength might win you the pot – but what if someone calls? What's the strength of that Ace?

My argument against the coronation of Ignatieff as Liberal leader was always that being forced to run the gauntlet while being bashed about the shoulders by Bob Rae and Gerard Kennedy, he would have to defend and delineate his positions. That is the sort of personal confessioanl that can only happen during a leadership run. For Ignatieff to now say, 'Oh by the way, about this statement I gave to GQ in 2006, well you know...” Now how does that sound to your ears? Exactly.

But … Da Wize Guyz of the Liberals thought they had that one covered. They blackjacked their opponents and got Ignatieff anointed as leader without any messy and germ-infested voting, and shoved him out at the public as – Pierre Trudeau! The Tribute Act! Ignatieff was old/young the way Trudeau had been old/young; neither was ashamed of their university years; Ignatieff's name would not cause blank stares in Washington or Whitehall.

It hasn't worked very well, now has it? Ignatieff is as disconnected to the public as is my cell phone when I drive over the first rise to the west. Here was the blindingly obvious flaw in the plan. While both Trudeau and Ignatieff were first noticed as academics – no matter how far Pierre Trudeau traveled the world, his focus was always on how his accumulated knowledge could improve Canada. He was Henry David Thoreau with an enlarged backyard. Ignatieff is an internationalist.

That should not be a pejorative – Internationalist? Damn You! - nor should it be in my opinion. After all, Lester Pearson was an internationalist, Nobel Peace Prize and all. Then again, Lester Pearson never won a majority either. So possibly not a winning formula. But the true crunch is that there is so little in Ignatieff's writings and lectures that specifically speaks to a vision, a pattern, a road map for Canada that it becomes easy pickings for the Harper mind control unit to toss out bombs like, 'Michal Ignatieff: He didn't come back for you' and watch them explode.http://astore.amazon.com/bythe-20/search?node=30&keywords=50+literature+ideas&x=16&y=9&preview=

Strangely enough, this leads me to a little book of literary criticism I've been reading for review. It is called '50 literature ideas you really need to know'. Written by Professor John Sutherland, this charming nook published by Quercus in the UK describes and explains all the facets that go into what we know as literature and literary criticism. Put very simply – why do we like the stories we like? I suggest to you that this book needs to be on the desk and/or night table of everyone in paid political employment today.

Why? Because people vote for the best story. They don't vote for the man. They don't vote for the party. They certainly don't vote for the policies. They vote for the man who says that his party and policies will supply a Happy Ending full stop. And that is that.

This has been the Liberals' great failing since the time of Chretien. Policies spun out from the party during the Paul Martin years like water drops off a shaking dog, but there was no discernible path. The effect was a traveler being given a box of maps of everry inch of the world and then told to go find his way? 'But where am I? Where am I going and why do I want to go there anyway?'

Harper, with his little glasses and piano tinkles is trying to present himself as The Man Who Shares Your Concerns. If that image is ever firmly established he will be allowed by the public to tell them whatever the heck he wants. Why? Because Harper knows me. He wants what I want.

In response, Ignatieff flips burgers and pancakes. There's nothing wrong with flipping burgers and pancakes and humping about the country on a big bus. Just once I'd like to see a political leader entertaining picnickers by trimming out dainty little radish rosettes. At least that would be original.

It is not my place as a columnist or a pundit to tell the Liberals how to craft the story that will appeal to the public. At least, it's not my place this week. For we have written long already and after all …

...suspense is a key element in an arresting story.

Be seeing you.

A Look Back at 'Today'

Inside Television 537

Publication Date: 1-21-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

I was quite torn this week whether to comment on the 'was Ricky Gervais pistol-whipped backstage at the Golden Globes?' controversy; or the body-blow based advertising campaign launched by the Conservatives in Canada against Michael Ignatieff. The former I decided was just a sneaky way of slipping nasty jokes into this column – and I considered it heavily as it saves me from thinking of my own nasty jokes; while the latter I'll be covering In Another Place, as they say. Website. Search and ye shall find.

Then of course there's the revamped 'American Idol'. Honestly now, would you have thought that Randy Jackson would have been the last of the original – or even last year's - judges to remain? It's like everyone leaving The Andy Griffith Show and just leaving Floyd the Barber; or Hans Moleman is the last resident of 'The Simpsons' Springfield. I'm expecting cookie cutter audition shows, so I'll save that review for a week or two.

On Wednesday morning, I did something I haven't done in years, decades even. I had breakfast and watched the 'Today Show.' That was a habit I'd had from Grade Three through high school, starting with the glory days of Hugh Downs, a ground-breaking Barbara Walters, Gene Shalit on the Movies and Joe Garagiola on Sports. Frank Blair did the news headlines at the top and the bottom of the hour. I don't remember who the weatherman was, and I consider this to be a good thing.

Truly, why did weather become the tee hee tickle show in a newscast? My 'Today' habit was broken, I realize in retrospect, around 1980 when Willard Scott waddled onto the scene with his lawn turf toupees and all those little old ladies sending him cakes, cookies and hacksaws. All I want to know from the weather is what form of clothing is appropriate for the day's possible activities. Now get the hell off the stage.

In looking at today's 'Today' (said Major Major to Yossarian) one is reminded that the show began as part of NBC's Entertainment Division, not News. Its first co-host, to Dave Garroway, was J. Fred Muggs. J. Fred Muggs was a chimp. I swear I am not making that up. And although 'Today' has certainly done its share of fine news pieces over the years, it always had this crazy silly side to it.

NOT Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters

I do find the tilt to be more towards the silly side these days, balanced by the excellent Meredith Viera, who lounges like some highly intelligent Siamese cat, purring out intelligent questions to intelligent people. Matt Lauer was saddled with the thankless, horrible, 'who did I piss off in the front office?' task of interviewing Kourtney and Kim Kardashian. I have never seen more plasticized women in my life.

Lauer actually had the moment of the show when he asked the celebzonians, in the politest possible way, if they ever considered that the public was some day going to be very bored with them and their lives. Their replies were predictably robotic – 'We're having a great time. Have you admired my enormous bum?' That was a paraphrase, by the way.

One has to admire a show that has won over 700 straight weeks in the ratings, still dusting the competition after all these years. Will I keep watching? To check what is coming up, probably. As a regular? Well, it's a bit like a high school reunion. Lovely to see all the familiar facelifts, but those years are things that were, not are. Be seeing you.

Michael Moore Can be Your friend Too!

Michael Moore Can be Your Friend Too!

Inside Television 536

Publication date: 1-14-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Generally speaking, as one ages one is supposed to become more conservative, in dress as well as politics. But I think that my rising ardor for more a more radical liberalism (please note lack of capitalization) has been given the stamp of approval by one of its leaders. I have been re-Tweeted by Michael Moore.

I point this out not so much as a fresh notch on the doorframe of coolness, although admittedly that is part of it. Rather, I was involved in the thick of things as witness and participant in the news cycle whirlwind that is the arrived tempest threatening to blow away every other form of journalism, television included. News by Tweet.

It was of course the Saturday, January 8^th slaughter of six innocents and the wounding of twelve others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that I write of here. I was laid up at the house with your standard mid-winter stomach thingy, so I first heard of the shooting on Twitter while I was flogging the latest book review or some such.

Normally, or until that day when normally changed, I would have leapt for the remote control for CNN. And I did, eventually, with CNN or the BBC on the TV. But it was very much background noise.

What I rapidly realized was that the debate, the outcome of this horror was being shaped in real time by people wondering and seeking leadership in Appropriate Action.

Instantly of course, the instinct was to seek out whom to blame. Was it Sarah Palin, with her asinine Facebook page showing elected officials framed in gunsights, including Giffords? Do we blame her? Do we blame the Tea Partiers? The shooter was a liberal – a communist! it was said - so do we blame the left? But we can't blame the guns. Why, Representative Giffords was opposed to gun control laws! One suspects she may be revising her opinion if God willing she survives.

My side of it was that there were two possible positive outcomes. One, that the sheer fear and hatred infecting politics needed to be curtailed; and two, to take the opportunity for there to be the first wholehearted debate on gun control laws since the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

To simply attack Sarah Palin or one group or the other is to chop down one tree and pretend that the forest has been cleared. Besides which, Palin was already finished as a serious Presidential candidate, perhaps never even really begun. When people are amused by you, they'll let you appear on their TV sets, but they'll rarely vote for you.

As I write this on Monday night, the whole shaping of the framework by which this incident should be discussed is still taking place. Led by the quite wonderful Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Tucson who lambasted his network, Fox News President Roger Ailes (an old Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan hand, by the way) ordered his correspondents to ease back on the rhetoric. If that lasts longer than a month, I'm my Aunt Nancy's cat, but any break will be welcome.

That said, Fox News host valet Megyn Kelly had on Dupnik and essentially stated that Dupnik felt that ranting rhetoric had led to the shooting because he was...a Democrat. Yes I'm quite sure that the first thing on the mind of a law enforcement officer leading the investigation on the most gruesome, insane crime to ever take place in his district would be, 'Hey, how can I score political points out of this?' To make such an implication on the air provides a moment of irony that would have done Harold Pinter proud in his prime. She made Dupnik's point for him.

Megyn Kelly...Surely the heir to Murrow

There was a fairly idiotic media panel on CBC News Sunday night, including Frank Sesno, retired from CNN. They shied from the rhetoric begats violence argument, hiding behind the rubric of 'it remains to be seen'. The concentration will then be on the insanity of the shooter – and no I will not write the name of his poor sick bugger here – with the rhetorical flip that of what use is the experience of a madman? Television news panels will never blame political advertising and television. They're employed by the network; they gain celebrity and income opportunities from the network. And the network lives by the advertising. I'll take Twitter, thanks.

I'm equally hesitantly optimistic about the chance of a gun control debate. That is creeping up on the radar and the moment needs to be seized. Which leads me to the Michael Moore re-Tweet. It was: 'Can't there at least be a DEBATE about gun laws? How can a nation with so many guns have so few balls?' Be seeing you.

Save the U.S. - Ban Guns

(This began as an email to my father-in-law after the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords. I repeat it here, unedited.)


The poor U.S. You know, there is really no need for anyone to have handguns or rapid fire rifles in their possession. I remember after Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King were gunned down there was a serious movement to ban handguns in the U.S. (granted King and JFK were done in by rifles, but let's not quibble - it would have been a start) much as the UK did years later after those Scottish schoolchildren were murdered. That, as I recall it. was the start of this stupid 7th Amendment bull$hit. the 2nd Amendment was to protect local militias against a British takeover of the government - not a likely event in 2011, I'll guess.

But it made me think. I can't name one U.S. politician who has raised a peep about a ban in at least 20 years. George McGovern might have, but he's been retired forever & Teddy Kennedy, who back-burnered his support after seeing itw as a waste of energy, is dead. 

I've often put together two things or opinions. I love 98% of what America is about. I love its energy and childlike enthusiasm - it imagines itself as a Sitcom Dad to children played by other nations; Bill Cosby say and Canada is one of the middle daughters. And that is somewhat endearing. The U.S. always means well.

But it does ignore Churchill's often-forgotten opinion that 'Jaw jaw is always better than war war.' Always better, he said. 

As a nation, it was founded on the device of superior firepower to Natives, Mexicans and the occasional French. It wasn't firepower that won Independence - it was superiority of numbers and the home field advantage of short supple lines. But, guns worked to grab close to half a continent, so that seemed to be the way to go.

Hence, there were the six-shooters and ammo belts fixed as part of the American mindset. That's the 2% of the U.S. geist I don't love.

Now, I mentioned that were two equations When I lived in two notoriously crime-ridden neighbourhoods in Toronto - and it is amazing how one can learn to get a good night's sleep by imagining gunfire and screams as simple white noise - I came out with the rough number that 1 out of every 1,000 people you see on the street, living in a city are whacked in the head. And I'm probably guessing low.

Not that it's their fault. In North America, if you break your arm you can get it fixed without much fuss. If you break your sanity, well good luck Charlie you're on your own. 

So if we combine that 1 in 1,000 with easy access to weaponry that could probably still overwhelm the armies of several island nations, you're just storing greasy rags and gasoline cans next to the furnace. I've always felt that God gives us a perfect right to do stupid things. If you have free will, you're going to use it, but hopefully learn from the initial error(s). But allowing crazy people access to weaponry - well, that is tempting the diseased and that in my mind is a mortal sin. 

And that may well be the only way that a gun ban will ever be sold in the U.S. That side of the debate will have to be framed in gilt engraved crosses around an illuminated manuscript on aged parchment reading: "Jesus says guns are a sin." 

That might do it. Still not hopeful. The poor U.S.

Mark Twain Comes to Compton

Mark Twain Comes to Compton

by Hubert O'Hearn

Anyone who is surprised that I'm moved to write about this clearly hasn't been paying much attention to my fourteen year career in journalism, criticism and live theatre. The announcement that the Alabama-based New South Books is publishing a version of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'* with the word “nigger” replaced in all its 219 occurrences by the word “slave”, and that “injun” is replaced with “Indian” was reason enough for me to rise in indignity, but a CBC News report on January 6^th has absolutely set me to boil.

This is more than silly people doing stupid things. This is absolutely the prime Exhibit of why liberalism is in decay and retreat. Please read on. We are talking about much deeper issues than the sanctity of classic works.

The CBC News report, as gravely voiced by Peter Mansbridge, mentioned that the three books most under attack in terms of exiling them from school curriculum were the aforementioned 'Huckleberry Finn' along with F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' and Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. These three books are cited as being full of sex, violence and racism.

Well, I certainly missed the paragraph or two in 'Gatsby' where Jay removes Daisy's panties with his teeth before gratefully devouring  the soft flowers of her Southern beauty …

And so did you.

Because it's not there.

But let us look at the what these three books just happen to have in common. If I was any good at drawing, I'd construct a Venn diagram. (Call that your homework, or après reading craft activity.) But at bottom line, the overlaps create a fairly grim picture.

Both 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' have central characters who are black men treated unjustly by a white justice system. In the case of Jim, he is both an heroic figure in the story, but is also recaptured into slavery. To slave owners, he is just a nigger. 'Mockingbird's' Tom Robinson equally tries to escape injustice and is killed. He too was just a nigger.

'Gatsby' shows the shallowness of elite society by having Jay Gatsby instantly accepted by them so long as he was wealthycand played his part well. It didn't matter how he made his money, the point was that he had made it at all. But once Gatsby is dead, he too metaphorically is just a nigger. Or possibly a Jew or possibly a German, but in the U.S. of 1925 when the book was published, one might as well say 'same thing'.

1 out of every 8 American black men between the ages of 18 and 30 are currently incarcerated. I think they used to call those pogroms when other countries locked up similar percentages of racial or cultural groups.

And let us not assume this to be an American problem and shake our heads and go 'tut tut poor Yanks' from where I am in Canada or you are wherever you are in the world. How's the weather, by the way? (Canadians have to begin conversations with strangers in an urgent discussion of weather.)

No, in the city where I live I see every day the result of a permanent underclass of Native peoples. Don't talk to me about opportunities, or government support or any of it. I see generation after generation of babies born to young and unwed mothers who will be raised in an atmosphere of corruption, alcoholism and living off what the government of the day chooses or doesn't choose to dispense.

I spoke to a Native man the other day. He would have been 54 or so, not much older than me, and he was sat at the bottom of a stairwell because a combination of drink and a prosthetic leg had rendered him unable to stand up, let alone walk up the stairs. He had been abandoned there by his nephew in the hotel where this happened. I spoke with him at length while waiting for an ambulance to come to his aid.

He had been a graduate of a government program, a B.Sc. granted in 1978 by a completely reputable university. That would have been early days for those sort of post-secondary support programs and at that time, Canada was only supporting the truly intellectually qualified Natives. The Trudeau government wanted success stories. So this man must have been quite right.

And this is where he had come to. Abandoned at the bottom of a stairwell: poor, drunk, unemployed and alone.

Or not alone. No, he is one thousands. Whatever is being done has not worked. And changing the word 'Injun' to 'Indian' isn't going to particularly help. Not when people are being treated like niggers.

But that's the nut of it. This is what liberalism has turned into. Never get to the nut of the problem. Never truly attack – not 'discuss in reasoned terms' – but attack the elite levels that are the proof of Edmund Burke's great and oft-quoted phrase: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

When the men aren't particularly good and don't intend on doing much of anything, the situation is even worse.

For this where 'Gatsby' comes in. Not only must the elite snuff out things that might get black folks riled, but any work that might display the shallow ethics of an Eastern wealthy class that sucked billions of dollars from the wallets of American taxpayers. Very few have served prison time. There are no meaningful new regulations to stop another 2008 type man-made financial collapse. And those self-same elite executives still go off to their summer homes on Long Island...where Jay Gatsby's house used to be.

Really though, this is a skirmish in a larger war, that of the bottom of society against the top. I doubt (I hope) that this new version of 'Huckleberry Finn' will go crashing up the best-seller lists. The irony may well be that school boards, pressured by yahoos to buy the 'clean version' will come to a non-resolution and just won't teach the book at all. “There, we'll show resistance to pressure by dropping Mark Twain. So there. Now who's on Charlie Rose tonight?”

The final exhibit is in the newscasts of the Mark Twain story. I didn't watch every networks' coverage but I saw enough to remark on the strange absence of the word “nigger”. Instead we had the fug-alicious construct of “the N-word”. On these self-same newscasts I know I have heard every one of George Carlin's ancient 7 Words list used with un-bleeped relish.

I had to wonder: if one was reporting a crime story wherein a black man was accused of beating up a white man because the latter had called the former a nigger, would the network use the word then?

And I guess that all the recorded comedy routines of the late Richard Pryor – who was scorchingly brilliant as a social commentator at his peak from the mid-60s through the mid-70s – must not be broadcast again. Pryor used the word nigger as frequently as the modern comic says fuck. The difference being that Pryor's word actually shocked, jolted, and made an audience take notice.

And I guess it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to say that the primal rap group N.W.A. Had initials that stood for Niggers With Attitude. N.W.A. Itself stood for much more than that; again anger that threatened to cause urban revolt.

Which is why I titled this essay as I did. Because Mark Twain, you're just another nigger living in Compton. But you'll probably get along fine with the people there.

And that's the point.

As Number 6 used to say in 'The Prisoner': Be seeing you.

*I generally link book titles to my Amazon on-line store. Your buying things makes me money. But if you think I'm going to profit off that book; well, I may not have much but I do have ethics. 

Paula Abdul & Live To Dance: Worst-show-ever

Inside Television 535

Publication Date: 1-7-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Robbie sez - shhh! this show is crap (actually no he didn't - Inside TV lawyers)

I've been a fan of the UK singer-songwriter Robbie Williams for about 10 years now. Robbie has never made the kind of impact in North America that he has in Europe; my theory being that he can actually sing and that's just not a qualification for success on this side of the Atlantic. Anyway, a few years back he had a hit singing a duet with Kylie Minogue called 'Kids'. I quote from the chorus:

And we'll paint by numbers
'Til something sticks
Don't mind doing it for the kids

I bring this up because I spent an hour Tuesday evening watching an hour of the Paula Abdul produced new show, 'Live to Dance'. It was a two hour show. I watched an hour. Does that tell you something?

Generally speaking, I don't write negative reviews. I'd much rather encourage you to read or watch something than discourage you. But sometimes there comes along a show that is just so ridiculously manufactured that it just begs to be commented upon. Which is still better than being pissed upon, unless you're into that sort of thing.

What is truly, spectacularly, boldly fascinating about the show is that it is the least original thing to appear on a TV screen since the days of the old Indian head test pattern. It is as though the elements of the show were chosen from a Chinese menu from a Chinese restaurant whose only features are chicken balls, chop suey, packaged fortune cookies and some green thing stuffed in a brownish pastry sock and loosely associated with an egg roll. The whole effect was akin to attending a high school reunion where only the boring kids bothered to show up.

You of course have the standard three-judge panel. The ever-wiggling and gushing Abdul, Kimberly Wyatt from celebrity-slut singing act The Pussycat Dolls, and someone named Travis Payne who did choreography for Michael Jackson. I guess he needs the work.

Wyatt, who has the personality of a napkin, isn't worth commentary. Payne at least has a certain gusty laugh when he likes something: MAH-Ha!-Ha! He would make a great pirate king in a melodrama.

The judges vote with the same sort of light-up buzzer system as used by 'America's Got Talent' and the auditioners were presented in exactly, exactly, the same manner as 'American Idol'. See the crowds! See the limos! See the judges! See the crowd cheer the limos and judges! Yay judges! Yay limos! Yay us! We're on TV! Yay! U!S!A! U!S!A!

Well, the crowds didn't exactly chant U!S!A!. But the show did. Small children...will ris from the ghetto because they have Arrived on television! Old people are now hip and nimble of his because they have Arrived on television! Young lovers will now go to romantic success because their relationship has been Blessed by television! Praise the Lord and pass the chips at commercial break!

The only original bit, so to speak, is that the judges occasionally change their mind, spurred on by the audience chanting 'Change your mind.' But even this was about a s spontaneous as the results of Wrestlemania as the background music was the soft sound of soft singers singing 'Change your mind.' Yuh huh.

Can anybody dance? Oh I guess so, but dance without story or context is just a series of moderately interesting quasi-gymnastic moves. Big fat hairy deal. No, this one is all about how appearing on Reality TV and being blessed by Paula Abdul will makle your life better. Amen.

Be seeing you, but I won't be seeing 'Live to Dance' again.

The Media vs. John Lennon

Politics for Joe 14

by Hubert O'Hearn

for Lake Superior News

December 30, 2010

Preamble:

It was on a late night streetcar ride this past March from Toronto Western Hospital where my beloved Kimberly rested in ICU following emergency brain surgery, to my sister's flat off the Danforth. Twenty years had passed since I lived in Toronto, with a girlfriend at the time with whom we used to describe ourselves as Toronto's Dashing Young Sophisticates. All the dancing and daring martinis in the then fresh nightclubs around John Street aside, one of the thousand things about Toronto I had enjoyed back then was the Streetcar Crazies.

You know who I mean. The lost souls one missed prescription dosage away from a stint in the mental hospital, or worse a frozen corpse shroud in newspaper under a Q.E.W. overpass. Come listen to us, for we are the dead and we know of many things.

And I enjoyed and enjoy listening to them. I used to comment in light sarcasm to other Dashing Young Sophisticates that, 'If the Apocalypse is really coming I want to know about it.' Ha hah. Ho hoh.

So with my eyes fixed on whatever book I was reading for review on that March night, I kept my ears alerted from the ravings coming from the man across the aisle, two seats ahead. His age is immaterial, his description obvious, so I leave those details to your mind.

But he carried on, to the woman sat next to him – I couldn't tell if she was sympathetic friend or unfortunate bystander who had lost the seat lottery – shouting in a measured calm voice.

This city is doomed. You'll see. You'll see. The newspapers and the TV and the radio, they're all behind Tom Ford. Oh Yeah. You'll see. You'll see. There's going to be the army on every street and nobody's going to be allowed downtown. Oh yeah. You'll see. You'll see. We're going to be driven out or locked up. Oh yeah. You'll see. You'll see.

Ha hah. Ho hoh.

One G8 summit and a municipal election later (he got the order wrong), who's the Streetcar Crazy: him or me?

This picture of a beautiful woman probably led you to this column. That's my point.

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be:

I've been considering this column for weeks now, which is why there has not been a new Politics for Joe column for weeks now. For much of what I am going to discuss and damn at length is based on what I will call the casual punditry that infests news media. I utterly reject the tossing out of explosive opinions (e.g. Tucker Carlson: “Michael Vick should have been executed”) just for their own sake; deadline met, audience aroused, cheque cashed.

Such opinions are the IED of journalism. The Improvised Explosive Device, assembled by uncaring fools, and lobbed or embedded in places where they will cause the most damage. The only difference is in the audience reaction – an IED is feared; an IED pundit is idolized. Why?

As soon as you're born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,

Those are the opening lines to John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero”. You'll be seeing more of them here, but for now I just want to say that on December 8, the thirtieth anniversary of Lennon's murder, I read and heard lots of references to Beatle John, Father John, Husband John, and Victim John but darn few about Revolutionary John.

The reason? To discuss Revolutionary John would mean that followers might emerge: questioners, dissenters, those who look at the way things are and say No.

I've been reading Chris Hedges' 'Death of the Liberal Class' for a review which will be appearing in the next few days. Hedges' essential point is that popular opinion has been so narrowed and homogenized by state and corporate control that there truly is no contrary argument available for the way things are. We argue about the tailoring of the Emperor's clothes while ignoring the pink and naked man beneath.

Think I'm wrong? I'm going to play an off the cuff game. Here are the top news (sic) stories on several major news sites, chosen as the first four off the top of my head, as I write this column:

Yahoo!: 'Spring Olympics' top news story' (actual headline)

Google News: 'Graphic cigarette warnings ignore contraband problem'

The Globe & Mail: 'UAE denied new visa fees discriminate against Canadians'

The New York Times: 'Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains'

Well let's see: if you're a cigarette smoking Canadian serviceman hoping for a spot of skiing in Dubai while on furlough, you're going to be piss mad. Otherwise, it's not your problem.

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

What is disturbing about these headlines is how they skirt around the real issue at their heart. Let's take them in order.

1. Spring Olympics – The cause is global climate change, but let's not talk about that. Instead, let's talk about the inconvenience, the 'unusual' nature of a warm February in British Columbia that nonetheless – yay for us! - did not stop the Olympics from being an extended Canadian end zone dance worthy of Billy 'White Shoes' Johnson.
2. Cigarette labels – Again, let's approach a major issue from the point of view of a shy teenaged boy at the high school dance – we shall observe the action from the perimeter. Instead, why is the question never asked that: Cigarettes do nothing for the soul except put off the pangs of addiction while causing cancer, yet are legal. Marijuana at least makes people giggly happy while causing cancer, yet are illegal. Cigarettes are profitable and taxable. Marijuana can be grown by any fool with a heat lamp, seeds and a pot to plant in.
3. UAE visa fees – A story about the Middle East that does not add to the discussion of the distrust and cultural cleavage between the Arab world and the West. Instead, luxury travelers are inconvenienced. Slightly.
4. Troop deployment – Deployment is hard on families. Therefore, let's support the troops! For the troops are good! Families are good! Our war is good! It just needs to be managed better.

'Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV'

Of all the things I can teach or describe to you about Politics today, what I am about to say is the most important of them all: There is no debate. None. Not in the 'major media', barely any in the minor media.

Let us take the Afghanistan War as an example – there are others, but Afghanistan is well enough known to the reader that there is no need to waste time in describing the situation. What one comes down to is a dialogue straight out of Samuel Beckett:

A: How will we know when the war is over?

B: When it is won.

A: How will we know when it is won?

B: When the war is over.

A: When the other side surrenders?

B: Yes.

A: And if they surrender?

B: Then the war is not over.

A: Why?

B: Because if they surrender, then they are still alive and not to be trusted. So the war continues.

A: And if they do not surrender?

B: So the war continues.

A: So therefore the war continues?

B: But only until it is won.

Lather, rinse, repeat. In the meantime, private contractors will rake in billions in profit, young people who want to have a career and simultaneously serve what they perceive to be their country's needs will die, and we face a situation of perpetual war that never addresses the root issues of ethnic hatred, poverty and minimal education. But all that will come, we are told, when the war is over. Except we shall never know when the war is over.

And Joseph Heller thought 'Catch-22' was a novel.

But yet, the danger exists for the controlling interests of business and their political lackeys (for the word is not too strong) that someone might sit up and take notice, that the absurdist dialogue just described might have a public life. Can't be having that.

So instead we have a false debate, a magician's distraction as it were. We instead are told to exercise our opinions on Lindsay Lohan's latest rehab, Heidi Montag's new tits, or whether or not New York Jets' football coach Rex Ryan has really, really nice feet.

Equally, we are faced with a false debate between a Right and a Left – neither of which exist. I say that debate does not exist because there are no extremes that might invigorate the left or the right. No one – no one – is advocating complete disarmament. No one - no one – is advocating a complete prohibition on cigarettes. No one – no one – is saying that perhaps Al-Qaeda has a point when in its murderous, suicidal way it says that the West is the enemy for it hates the Islamic world and supports the Israeli apartheid state.

There is no Right and Left. Such argument is no more extreme than a golfer and his caddy arguing whether to take a sand wedge or a lob wedge for the approach shot. Should we be playing golf, or militarizing the Gulf, at all? That question is not asked.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still f@(king peasents as far as I can see, 

The saddest set-piece of modern journalism is when it decides to anoint someone ass Radical of the Month in order to proclaim, 'See? We are intense and trustworthy!' the latest is Wikileaks' Julian Assange. All appropriately wind-swept blonde, a Liam Neeson character in training, Assange is our current Danger Man. And by re-publishing Wikileaks' stolen material, the media get to claim that they are fighting against The Man! Working for openness! Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Madness.

What is the outcome of Assange? It is this. He has done more to advance the cause of government secrecy than any man in history. They'll just be more careful about it all next time. Any further tightening of sunshine laws will be justified by pointing at Wikileaks and saying, 'We need to protect the privacy of our citizens and our state.' Assange is like God to the corporate state: if he didn't exist, he'd have to be invented.

A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,

No, dear friends, you're being deluded. It's ironic really that the journalists of a foregone age when the media (nee press) was actually confrontational to power that they were popularly known as a gang of brutish drunks. (My father was a columnist and my uncle Walter the editor of the Montreal Star- the description was fairly accurate.) The irony comes in that whereas the present journalistas are largely healthy eaters – they are a pretty trim bunch – they have more reason to wallow in the whisky bath of shame.

I've written about this In Another Place as they say of the Senate or House of Lords in the Commons, but I do feel the need to expand on the theme of the pap bath that modern 'news' has become. Because it should, it must, affect everything you think about politics today.

Political speech more than ever has become a language of raw slogans designed to stimulate raw responses. I'm not going to pretend that I remember an age when it was much more. I am a great admirer of the late Pierre Trudeau, but put absolutely bluntly, the average voter who swept him to power saw him as a guy with a nifty haircut, a hot car and said whatever you wanted to get up to in the wee small hours was fine by him so long as everyone involved was down with that.

But that at least, again in bluntest terms, was more than Obama. Obama was America saying to the world the Archie Bunker line of, 'Some of my best friends are Negroes', a reluctance to return to the Clinton years, a nifty poster and he had nothing to do with George W. Bush.

Except, what precisely, beyond a watery Health Care Bill and the revocation of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has Obama done that is much different from what Bush would have done in the same time and place?

Exactly.

But yet, one is led to believe that there chasms of difference between an Obama Democrat and a Bush Republican. The Tea Party is not all that different. They used to be called America Firsters and John Birchers. They're the crazy uncle that's always been part of the Republican family but they liked to leave out of the Christmas card photo.

And yet, they are alone on the fringe. The Tea Partiers – or the John Baird brand of Harper Conservatives in Canada – are truly a fringe whose message is More of the Same! More war, more secrecy, more intrusion into the lives of private citizens, and the environment can go to hell because that's going to be the next guy's problem.

So where exactly is the equivalent on the left? There is no true contrarian voice. One may not agree with arguments such as:

• pull all troops out of the Middle East and Afghanistan
• cease development of the Tar Sands immediately until there is scientific consensus
• take the starvation or abuse of any child in the world as seriously as one would take the fate of that child were he or she to be a child of your home country

But such a debate, which would in turn strengthen the more moderate members with the dialectic of ideas, is not heard. There are two reasons.

One, it is infinitely easier for the media to illuminate and re-write the positions of the current 'left' and 'right' wings (which are as different as Tweedledee is to Tweedledum) than to seek out opinions that frame the debate as a bottom versus top proposition. That, by the way, is the genius of Michael Moore. He literally shoves the powerless in the face of the powerful.

But two – it's bad for business. The 'news' so to speak approaches its audience the way Harry Lime looked at the people below the Ferris Wheel in 'The Third Man'. “The dead are happier dead.” People don't want to be disturbed. Outside of scary movies and comic books they've spent their entire lives being told they don't have to be disturbed – not for long anyway. The next Saviour will be along shortly. We'll package him up nicely: Obama shooting hoops, Ignatieff flipping sausage, Harper singing Beatles' hits. You'll like us! You'll really like us!

Ideas will only re-enter the arena when the media decides it will be so, when it re-assumes its mantle as the challenger of authority. Media must be brave, else it is just advertising with weather maps.

Media must not pacify the audience with pseudo-news of who Scarlett Johansson may or may not be married to this week. If there truly needs to be celebrity news at all within a newscast, let it be celebrity news that illuminates rather than overshadows a true issue, a real issue.

For instance, the most read posting on my website was about actress Alyssa Milano sponsoring wells being dug in arid areas of Africa. That is real celebrity news because it is about environmental victims. Bottom versus an uncaring top. (For it is an uncaring top. One week of war could bring fresh water to all of the Saharan fringe.)

So Joe, that is your politics today. Demand the truth and support it where you find it. And don't be afraid to hear a shocking opinion. Happy New Year and -

Be seeing you.