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".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
* 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.   

Constitutional Pedantry Justified*

* Now with "What He Said" and "Support Our Troops" updates!

Anyone who wondered how badly we need to restore dignity, authority and competence to the office of Governor General and beg of it to take ultimate executive authority away from the giggling psych-ward outpatients who now pretend to national leadership needs to understand that our current prime minister thinks democracy is dangerous. No, really.

Just when you were starting to bow under the apparently persuasive weight of the endlessly reiterated insistence that Stephen Harper has changed—that he is not the state-hating, anarcho-libertarian, free-market fundamentalist he used to be—the man himself proclaims that, since the "games" (he means "debates") that go on in Parliament are so frightening to international finance, the House is better off kept empty.

Disappointingly, Harper failed to pursue his train of thought to its logical conclusion and announce the indefinite suspension of Parliament and the immediate proscription of all political parties (except his own) in order to ensure that Canada remains attractive to the sharks that ply the world's capital markets. Perhaps he’s just waiting for his blue sweater to come back from the dry cleaner’s, as he would wish, of course, to sport his “harmless eunuch” look when promulgating that particular edict.



What He Said:

I just came across this week-old editorial by noted constitutional scholar Errol Mendes (of my dear old University of Ottawa) and thought I would share it with you. It’s so close to the spirit of my last post that it might have served as its contextual preface. I was quite surprised to read Mendes explicitly argue that Harper’s prorogation was undeniably unconstitutional (as in illegal).


"Support Our Troops":

On a lighter (though, also, darker) note, I thought I would pass along a clip of Noam Chomsky deploying his rarely used stand-up skills. Here, he talks about what asinine, bumper-sticker-ready slogans like “Support Our Troops” are designed to accomplish on behalf of élite objectives.

Given that the latest Parliamentary suspension might go down in history as the “Support-Our-Troops” Interlude (as it barred the evil Opposition from doing the Taliban’s work in their subversive House committees) and given that Chomsky’s guild syndicalism is the closest thing to Romantic-Jacobean Toryism of which modern Americans appear capable, I believe the clip to be more than glancingly apropos.

Noam Chomsky, ladies and gentlemen. Well into his eighties, and still really, really angry. Now that’s my kind of guy.

The Fat, Smug, Arrogant Face Of "Accountability"

"Jeepers. Don't you just hate it when some ball-busting bitch demands that you tell Canadians what you plan to do with three billion dollars of their hard-earned cash? Just who the fuck does she think she is? The duly elected representative of her constituents, or some other such highfalutin', lah-di-dah, fancy-ass nonsense? God, it's bad enough I have to pretend to believe that Liberals deserve to live; here I am answering their insolent questions, like they're my equals or something. Ewwww, gross! How degrading".

"Listen, Miss Thing--we'll let you know what we've done with the money after we've spent it. Now go away, and let me get back to my box of Timbits".

[h/t Chrystal Ocean]


------------------------------------

Business As Usual in the Imperium Americanum

How to Apply the "Harris Formula":

Famed Irish actor and raconteur Richard Harris loved to tell a story that illustrates how (as he put it) "the British take the best" out of those who hail from their imperial fringes and "throw the rest away".

Harris had appeared on the British stage and screen for over a decade when he won an award at the 1964 Cannes festival for his role in This Sporting Life. The British press announced the good news with the headline, "British Actor Wins Cannes Award". When, a few days later, Harris got into a bar fight, the same press announced, "Irish Actor Involved in Brawl". He tells the story here, from 2:12 to 3:15 (watch the rest of the clip if you want to hear Harris tell one of his famous tales involving Peter O'Toole, yet another Irish actor whom the British claimed as one of their own when it suited them).

I was reminded of Harris' wry observation when I read the Yahoo headline about this year's Razzie Awards on Sunday. The Razzies, a parodic anti-Oscars designed to "celebrate" the worst cinematic performances of the year, awarded Worst Picture to The Love Guru, ill-starring Mike Myers. By all accounts, the award was richly deserved. I was struck, though, by the Yahoo headline: bizarrely, it stated, "Canadian Movie Voted The Worst". A day later, Yahoo removed the story, leaving an "error" page in its wake.

Now Mike Myers, though Canadian-born, has lived and worked in America for over fifteen years and is about as Canadian as Peter Jennings. That is why the American press fastidiously avoided describing Myers' huge box-office hits like Wayne's World, Austin Powers or Shrek as "Canadian movies", just as it has never mistaken James Cameron's movies for "Canadian" products, just as it would never describe massively popular TV phenomena like 24 or Battlestar Galactica as "Canadian", even though both feature largely Canadian casts and though the latter show is filmed almost entirely in Canada.

Apparently, Hollywood productions featuring Canadian ex-pats are "American" when they are excellent and gross millions of dollars and are "Canadian" when they suck and lose millions of dollars. The Harris Formula, then, still applies: the empire takes the best out of us, and throws the rest away. It's a formula that has endless applications. To wit:

1) Canadian-made General Motors vehicles shall be considered "American" if they provide years of safe, reliable service and "Canadian" if they need frequent, significant or expensive repairs;

2) Joint U.S.-Canada NATO operations in Afghanistan shall be considered "American" if they succeed and "Canadian" if they fail;

3) American-made firearms smuggled into Canada shall be considered "Canadian" when used in the commission of criminal offences and "American" when used by little old ladies to fend off burglars and purse-snatchers;

4) North American weather patterns shall be considered "American" when they provide clement conditions and "Canadian" when they cause storms, tidal waves, hurricanes and other climatic nuisances.

Mind you, the Harris Formula can operate in reverse, as America seems all too ready to take our worst. Unbelievably, in an act either of selfless courage or of suicidal recklessness, they were willing to take custody even of Rachel Marsden. The application of that particular cultural laxative may be worth, alone, every bit of imperial insolence we take from them.


"Benz? Shmenz!":

Why do the media insist on reporting Barack Obama's stated belief that Americans invented the automobile as a "gaffe"? Sure, Benz and Daimler patented and produced German cars decades before an American equivalent appeared, but pointing that meaningless factoid out is precisely the kind of petty, pedantic, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that emboldens the terrorists and puts the West in serious jeopardy.

Clearly, too many over-educated, élitist journalists still don't get it: "reality" does not mean "stuff that actually happened, is happening or will happen"; it means "stuff that Americans make up in order to feel messianic, omnipotent and omniscient". If Americans had rooted their culture in a respect for facts and reason, they'd still be a Sabbath-honouring populist republic with a small citizen militia, an ethic of Puritan moderation and a loathing for unearned wealth, privilege and military interventionism--in other words, semi-socialist losers.

Obama's delusional grandstanding is moved by precisely the kind of Nietzschean self-glorification and ass-in, knees-up, balls-out fanaticism that has made America great. Facts are needed only by people who don't have the guts to believe in lies, which is why Obama's countrymen feel that Canadians and their history deserve each other.


Bonus American Superhumanity!:

On Tuesday, Bobby Jindal, thirty-seven-year-old governor of Louisiana, delivered the Republican response to Obama's address to the nation. This opportunity to rehabilitate the battle-scarred GOP with a young face and fresh voice turned into a poisoned chalice for Jindal, as he disgorged what even friendly critics have described as one of the worst speeches ever delivered by a major American political figure. Jindal's self-authored fiasco appears to have dealt blunt-force trauma to what were realistic chances of competing in the GOP's 2012 primaries and then strangled them with a length of piano wire for good measure.

That's a shame, because the speech is comic gold. The son of immigrants, Jindal relates how his parents were filled with the "immigrant's wonder at the greatness of America". He told his audience how his Indian father had seen "extreme poverty" and how the old man was awe-struck when he saw the "endless variety on [grocery store] shelves" without mentioning that his parents came to America as graduate students enrolled at Louisiana State University--rather than as illiterate peasants with but two dollars in their pockets between them--and that Baton Rouge could have shown his father plenty of poverty and hordes of people unable to afford the grocery-store cornucopia he so admired if he had dared to ever wander far enough beyond the safe, middle-class enclave he settled in.

Throughout his speech, Jindal's refrain was, literally, "Americans can do anything". Yes, perhaps the man is just a Jim Morrison enthusiast. More likely, though, he was carried away by that peculiarly American fashion of being a Christian--namely, by refusing to rely on faith in the (allegedly) All-Mighty and, cutting out the middle-man, acting as their own miracle-maker--their own God.

Hey, as long as that bloody "Buy American" clause doesn't prevent Canadian firms from bidding on the inevitable Tower of Babel and Golden Calf construction procurements, it's all good!

Quotations of Chairman Harper

Stephen Harper's reputedly sharp intellect is like the mist that wafts up from a tray of melting ice cubes: it's an evanescence--an insubstantial product of specific environmental conditions. Thus, amid the backdrop of the dreary stupidity of our current political discourse, Harper--though blessed with all the charisma of rancid mayonnaise--often seems quite adequate, like a predatory, libertarian, slightly overweight but competent golf caddy.

One needs to pay close attention to what Harper actually says in order fully to appreciate the profound mediocrity of the man. Canada has, sadly, produced very few politicians whose words deserve a life beyond the immediate needs of the moment. Age upon age (as for ages to come), our Parliaments brim with two-bit lawyers, carbuncular sales reps, and middle-management technocrats who wouldn't know how to inspire incontinence in an over-fed infant. Harper is not the worst of these; he is merely one of them, as demonstrated by this collection of Harper quotations, compiled before the 2004 election.

Each quotation has its own special inanity, but some of them deserve special mention for the flamboyance of their incoherence. All of them make sense only in Harperland, that imaginary workers' paradise promised to us by the Great Helmsman and for which he has tirelessly striven since the Great Leap Backward two years ago. Let us arise, then, and go to Harperland--a vast stretch of fog-bound fenland where the laws of logic languish in perpetual suspension.


1)

"Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society…It is in fact totalitarianism".

In Harperland, the key tactic of dictatorial hegemony has always been to provide citizens full access to mechanisms of human rights remediation. This differs from our boring real world, where totalitarian regimes take away citizen access to human rights remediation.


2)

"Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion… And whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or ten governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be".

In Harperland, a nation can have many "national" governments. There, people are not bound by the reactionary need to see a "nation" as a unitary organism, bound by collectively experienced values and ambitions. There, all physical, biological and political laws obey the Chairman, so that nations comprised of politically autonomous, culturally disconnected entities are perfectly viable--even ideal. Similarly, Harperlanders do not consider the human body to be in optimum physical condition until it has had its limbs and head lopped off and become a "body" of six sovereign, decentralised bodies.


3)

"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status…".

In Harperland, when a nation the Chairman despises proclaims pride in its authentic, internationally-recognised strengths, it is deemed to be "boasting", for only those nations with a faltering economy, a massive underclass, disgracefully few social services and an obscenely expensive military establishment have a legitimate right to feel proud.


4)

"...west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

In the Chairman's world, those who dare to challenge Harperthought can be dismissed as "unassimilated" ghetto-dwellers who don't quite belong. They are allowed to stay and live in Harperland, of course; they are people, after all. They're just ignorant, which is not a crime. Besides, they make good nannies and janitors.


5)

"I don't know all the facts on Iraq, but I think we should work closely with the Americans".

Unlike normal men, the Chairman does not require facts before declaring war and putting men and women in harm's way. His intuition and strong connection to the stars and planets provide more guidance than a mere grounding in reality ever could.


6)

"Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took."

In Harperland, avoiding Canadian casualties in a useless war is not considered an "upside". This is because, whenever Harperthought triumphs, the people are liberated from the bourgeois, mundane habit of valuing life and seeing its loss as a tragedy. Why, in Harperland, needless killing is hardly even seen as an awkwardness.


7)

"I am more comfortable with a more populist tradition of conservatism. "Toryism" has the historical context of hierarchy and elitism and is a different kind of political philosophy..."

The Chairman has redefined "populism" as the process of spending two decades wallowing in the lap of Big Oil or in the deep end of the public trough while labouring under the delusion that one has not become part of the "élite". The Chairman's own life has been faithful to this vision, and all who wish to follow him must do likewise.

What we've just seen is the way to wring the latent absurdity out of any piece of Harperspeak. It is not difficult. Merely take a sentence, and express, in your own words, what Harper is actually saying.

Feel free to try it at home.