Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's Warren Kinsella*

*In homage to one of Canada's most spectacularly, narcissistically, and tunelessly pretentious descents into abject mid-life crisis.

And, speaking of decadence, allow me a short intermission...

I wonder, to those few Canadians who have become accidentally aware of Warren Kinsella's modest and unearned celebrity within a small, dull circle of elite political trainspotters, which of Kinsella's achievements among his trove of gumball-machine trophies gathered during a dismal career of representing everything Canadians loathe about their vapid, cynical, focus-grouped, spin-doctored politics shine the brightest. Would it be

1) Kinsella's use of a Barney doll to ridicule the Leader of the Opposition's Pentecostalism in what became the first overtly sectarian attack ever launched in the course of a Canadian federal election?

2) Kinsella's key role in a legendarily arrogant Liberal administration that laid waste to the progressive Pearson/Trudeau social welfare legacy and superintended corruption so vast and flagrant that its exposure destroyed the party and guaranteed an indefinite, perhaps generations-long, even more deeply corrupt "Conservative" overlordship?

3) Kinsella's 1997 electoral loss, amid a crushing Liberal national victory, against a half-mad Western separatist incumbent languishing on Reform's farthest fringes?

4) Kinsella's bathetically unctuous attack of the vapours over an offhand remark that allegedly places a blogger he considers good enough to poach from in the ideological company of the "Far Right", broadcast in blithe disregard of his own protracted collaboration with the odious Sun Media Corp. (among whose vile notorieties is the 2010 Ottawa Sun editorial that advocated the mass murder of civilians, an outrage that went unprotested by Kinsella) and of the fact that a strict application of his logic would force him to declare Noam Chomsky an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier?

My guess is that most would choose number 4—chiefly because that event's diffusion has not had to rely on Kinsella's own negligible powers but has been driven by Dr. Dawg's superb systematic demolition of the pious fool's presumptuousness. I'll warrant you that, since last week, thousands of people have stumbled onto Warren Kinsella's existence for precisely the reason English Literature undergrads discover Thomas Shadwell. Enjoy your 15 minutes, Warren, to terminate when our laughter subsides and we return you to the scribbling, had-been* obscurity where, at no one's request, you regularly dole to a tiny, indifferent readership a clutch of limp, pedestrian lines, each one an ingenious rearrangement of the disarmingly candid sentence, "Yeah. I used to be a spin doctor; tough racket".

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* Instead of the conventional "has-been", we use the past perfect here to indicate that Kinsella was a has-been before he lowered himself below the dignity of has-been by joining the execrable Sun chain of over-priced bog roll.   

Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part I

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

And there shall no torment touch them.

In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die,

And their departure is taken for misery,

And their going from us to be utter destruction,

But they are in peace.

For though they be punished in the sight of men,

Yet is their hope full of immortality.

And having been a little chastened, they shall be greatly rewarded,

For God proved them and found them worthy for Himself.

As gold in the furnace hath He tried them

And received them as a burnt offering.

And in the time of their visitation they shall shine…

(Wisdom 3:1-7) 

 

My theme tonight is of the soul of a nation staggering through its banishment of Astraea, where the righteous are punished and seem to die at the hands of the unwise. 

Of many thorns is made the crown of mundane injustice that spikes the head of the world. Chief among those is humankind’s ceaseless re-crucifixion of Christ; nevertheless, the fruits of the originary catastrophe were joyful. Last Sunday, a far lesser thorn, but one void of healing transcendence, embittered my Paschal meditations. I thought of how Canada has been led for six years by the political equivalent of the impenitent thief—an insolent rabble who daily abuse the nation they consider a trivial non-entity with the mocking demand that she remove herself from the cross fashioned and erected by the very corruption of which they are the most avid practitioners and who have, moreover—in a sick parody of Calvary—proclaimed themselves the authoritative canon by which we may measure our fitness to enter into their transvestite kingdom.  

For “parody” is the most accurate characterisation of Canada’s current civilisational stage: we are become the burlesque—the satiric antithesis—of everything the Fathers of Confederation envisioned and of every article of the heritage of freedom and order we inherited from our founding Anglo-European tradition.

Perhaps we are wandering through a cultural winter made inevitable by our long and dismal thirst for every last dram of intoxicating gibberish distilled by the neighbouring southern tribe who, in elevating their rebarbative hybrid of irreverence and vulgarity to the dignity of a national ethos and in establishing irony as both the engine of their cultural discourse and the presiding genius of their every collective myth (where a vicious civil war, an event internally divisive enough to spark one of history’s largest mass emigrations, becomes a universally approved “revolution” against foreign domination, where legitimate defensive action against an unruly and violent mob far more provoking and dangerous than that which faced the National Guard at Kent State is called a “massacre”, and where naked expansionist aggression, the success of which would have re-imposed slavery on the first colonial jurisdiction to ban it, is called a “war of liberation”).

What else but the perverting influence of a nation that recently crowned two centuries of feverishly prosecuted domestic and foreign moral squalor by twice electorally self-inflicting the kind of Caligulan cretin that other peoples have had to suffer as a brute force imposition can explain Canada’s sudden decision to place the tin wreaths of federal office upon some of the most existentially worthless vessels of intellectual bankruptcy and moral debility to ever ooze out of the free exercise of a Western franchise?

Quite apart from the very real possibility that the last election was stolen, the fact that more than a handful of Canadians were willing to vote for what must be considered Canada’s first objectively degenerate national political organization is an index of the degree to which “decadence” is the only appropriate descriptor of our current cultural character. All that now remains is to enumerate the salient consequences of Canadians’ grant of the legislative keys to a canting racaille that hates common decency, hates the truth, hates the constitution, hates democracy, hates the rule of law, hates Canadian sovereignty and national security—hates Canada, in effect. The fundamental meaning of the election and continued dominance of our first ideologically anti-Canadian (or at least anti-Confederation) national government shall be outlined over the course of the next few posts.