Monday 26 December 2011

Season's Creepings

In describing the pagan desecration of holy places, early medieval accounts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle observe a euphemistic fastidiousness that, while acknowledging the Viking zeal to denude shrines of their relics and tabernacles of their gold and silver, leave implicit or entirely unuttered the grosser heathen habits of profanation, such as lustily evacuating or performing bloody sacrifices upon the altars of monasteries and abbeys.

I was reminded of the old monks’ proto-Canadian pudeur when imagining Canadians’ likely response to Stephen Harper’s Christmas message. My guess is that the few Canadians aware of the existence of the soporifically banal, annually hissed testaments to Stephen Harper’s utter inability to rise above vacuity even when inspired by one of the holiest days of the faith he pretends to profess will, generously, merely note that his vaporous flaccidities are bereft of the silver and gold with which his words might have been imbued were he capable of anything even touching the hem of a competently simulated sincerity, candor, or authentic commitment.

For myself, growing ever more impatient of polite euphemisms as I age, whenever I hear crypto-religious pieties from reptilian frauds such as Harper or any among the cowed, invertebrate caucus of castrati over whom he presides, my mind runs immediately to visions of Norseman emptying mead-filled bladders onto ciboria and squatting over the scattered bones of saints, for, though I am willing to assume that history’s vomitorium of rhetorical hypocrisy contains far viler blitherings than Harper’s, there is little in Canada’s history of prime ministerial conceit and pretension that offers impudence equal to that with which Harper consistently preens himself as a credit, rather than a disgrace, to the Christianity the key beliefs of which his core political and economic principles (and his executive proclivities) daily violate.

Ecco homo, this avid disciple of Pilate, boasting of how his government promotes “the things that unite us as Canadians” mere months after providing Jack Layton with state obsequies in order to pour bleach over his party's despicable “Taliban Jack” vilification program (inspired by Layton’s espousal of a common-sense view shared by the vast majority of Canadians and that has since become official NATO policy), not long after accusing the Liberals of being Taliban sympathizers, not long after sponsoring the gravest truncheon-wielding violation of civil liberties in post-war Canadian history in order to make Toronto safe for the scumbag emissaries of corrupt totalitarian regimes, and a mere handful of years after accusing a Canadian prime minister of enjoying the sight of children being raped.

Behold the verminous pork-barreling hack, luxuriating in his prime ministership after having spent decades dancing attendance upon corporate elites whilst managing to keep his threadbare CV untainted by the slightest evidence of volunteer (or even avocatory) service to his community, lecturing Canadians on the importance of “remember[ing] those who are less fortunate” not long after conspicuously failing to see any reason to get off his ass and personally assess the ongoing humanitarian disaster on a Native reserve and only a few years after unrepentantly cheerleading one of the half-century’s most disastrous, civilian-butchering military interventions, one whose Christmastide is a perpetual Massacre of the Innocents.

Note that Harper’s message is a smarmy exhortation to remember the less fortunate; it is not directed at the less fortunate. Harper does not deign to address the less fortunate: he prefers to speak over their heads. They are to be spoken about; they are not to be spoken to. The prime minister, as Harper conceives the office, must not stoop to a direct communication with the poor and marginalized, though he may sometimes, when decorum demands, acknowledge their existence when chatting to those who actually matter (he is a populist, after all). Prime ministers don’t talk to losers, and they confine all collateral reference to their humanity to a few smug, oblique shibboleths exchanged with their smug constituencies at this time of year, designed to reinforce each other’s high self-regard.

Christ stood with the poor, the outcast, the victimized. Harper stands with the hateful, the criminal, the cretinous. Harper’s is not really a Christmas message; it is an Easter message, graven with a nail, and delivered in much the same spirit as that which wrote and hoist atop a cross a sign reading “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.

15 comments:

theo said...

Amen.

H7N9 Watch said...

It's good to see you writing again.

aardvark said...

About bloody time!
Good to see you back.

Sir Francis said...

Theo & Analemma:

Thanks. It feels good to be back.


Sixth Estate:

It's gratifying to be appreciated by someone writing one of the handful of what I consider to be the indispensable blogs--one of those I almost feel guilty when reading, as I can't help but think that I really should be paying for the privilege.

ron wilton said...

Why don't you just come right out and tell us how you really feel about Harpo?

Alison said...

Utterly brilliant. Harpie's Christmas message was indeed smarmy and creepy; pap spoken in the reptilian delivery he has so well mastered. At least no kitten was terrified in this attempt to make him seem human.

thwap said...

I'm having a shitty enough holiday without having to subject myself to harper's drivel.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious in such an original way.

Sir Francis said...

Thwap:

My link to the actual message was merely pro forma. I didn't expect Dr. Dawg to invite people to watch it. You're quite right: given the over-indulgence to which we're all prone at this time of year, we're hardly in need of an additional emetic.

Dr.Dawg said...

My dear friend, one cannot be satisfied with one half of the dialectic. One must grit one's teeth to discover precisely what it was that made your spleen explode. :)

Sir Francis said...

True. But do the words "Stephen Harper's Christmas message" not, alone, convey an adequate spleen-destroying semantic payload? :)

Thanks for the kind sponsorship over at your place, by the way--"your place" being another of the indispensable, guilt-inspiring blogs...

Walk a Kb or Two in my cassins said...

Dear Dred,

Thanks for the "Conrad Couldn't Have Said it more Densely" commentary on Ol' Firewall.

Query:
Perhaps you might be the one to see that the PM & his PMO is NOT part of "the Executive" in 1867's BNA Act ... but that the Privy Council (s.11) IS part of it.

Understanding that fact is key to appreciating why the reversal of Order in Council PC 1940-1121 is so important to restoring "good governance" to Canada.

This Order in Council was "officially presented" as an emergency measure to maximize wartime efficiency.

The timing (3 weeks after the death of the GG and retirement of former Clerk Lemaire)tells the real tale.

It was Wm L M King's 'revenge served cold' for the BYNG-KING thing of 1926.

see
http://robertede.blogspot.com/2011/12/order-in-council-pc-1940-1121-allowed.html

Sir Francis said...

Robert:

I've said a number of times that Harper is King re-incarnated (with a touch of Nixon), though King's gambits, cynical as they were, had somewhat more constitutional legitimacy than Harper's. The Harper regime is, by far, the least legally and morally legitimate ministry we've ever had.

Purple library guy said...

I'd be ecstatic if Harper were merely blunting us.

Aeneas the Younger said...

The fact that Harper perpetuates the abuse of the Constitution via the King-Trudeau eradication of the Rights of the Privy Council demonstrates just how liberal he really is...

Unknown said...

Religion is a waste of time, effort and trouble.