Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part II

Any attempt at a socio-political diagnosis of North America’s current condition that hopes to claim the slightest dram of explanatory validity must convincingly account for the undeniable fact that the “New World” is afflicted with at least one collective distemper utterly unprecedented in the cultural history of the West.

North Americans have fallen into a state of crushing torpor untold in the chronicles of Western civilisation. For proof, we need only acknowledge that we find nowhere described in any of the histories of the West a popular reaction to brazen elite criminality as mutely bovine as that which greeted Wall Street’s wanton years-long poaching of the global economy. Our cowardice in the face of this perpetually unpunished disgrace has no known ancestor. It is the Mitochondrial Eve of societal moral squalor.
 
Until 2008, the West had produced no society so thoroughly drained of its ethical haemoglobin as to be prepared to accept with a lobotomised half-smile that the already-obscenely rich perpetrators of the systemic rape of trillions of dollars of global assets shall not only waltz away from their felonies uncharged, unconvicted, and unjailed but shall also be pensioned off with bonuses hundreds of thousands of times larger than the yearly wages of most of those they robbed. Never in the course of human history, not even during the Viking sacks of Ireland’s gold- and silver-larded monasteries, had an act of such rapacious barbarity been committed with such lucrative impunity.

In a society healthier than ours, that of Caligula’s Rome or of France’s late ancien regime, for instance, such a laughing display of unconscionable rapine would have landed an emperor, festooned with innumerable gladius slashes, floating open-eyed amid the currents of the Tiber, or would have destined the powdered limbs of aristocrats to adorn pikes held aloft by garlanded girls dancing down wide, sunlit avenues bordered by their joyously weeping fathers and mothers. Mark that these executors of the natural law would not have been, as they are today, ragtag scratch militias of the marginal and the disenfranchised: it was the powerful Praetorian Guard, quintessential insiders, who obligingly delivered to the Palatine crowds the emperors they wished deposed; it was the most talented, ambitious, and bright-futured among the comfortable French bourgeoisie who led the toppling of the Bourbons.

Meanwhile, we Canadians, clearly aping Americans’ acquiescence before robbery, as we seem to insist on aping every species of American moral idiocy, watch the slow-motion shipwreck of the robocall fiasco unfold with the sullen, heavy-lidded indifference with which a fifteen-year-old Crip, returning to class after a spliff-puffing session enjoyed behind the school dumpster, settles in for a lecture on quadratic equations. Too many commentators have attempted to explain Canadians’ apparent unconcern before the troubling Roboscam facts as a symptom of the alleged “complexity” of the case. Those less afraid to wield Occam’s razor will simply add this supine unconcern to the mounting evidence of Canadians’ quadrennially shrinking inclination to vote for their choice of faceless party automaton and come to the necessary conclusion that a growing number of Canadians do not care whether their government is elected fairly and constitutionally, whether it slithers and slimes its way into the House of Commons via an I-Ching or Tarot reading superintended by one of the Trailer Park Boys, or whether a government is elected at all. Among the most glorious fruit of the harvest of freedom seeded by Stephen Harper’s overturning of the Chretien/Martin tyranny is the undeniable fact that most Canadians, in the year 2013, have as little thought of meaningfully interfering in their own political lives as had Yorkshire ploughmen under the Plantagenets.

Asking whether or not there is hope is not the right question to ask at the tail end of one of the two (formerly liturgical) seasons the most marked effect of which on me is the sad recollection that our culture has managed to degrade two narratives that had at least an iota of morally redeeming value into mere Pavlovian retail reflexes whose only function and practical effect are to goad children into abducting their parents’ superegos and forcing them to enrich China’s Politburo through gratuitous purchases the flamboyant uselessness of which would have caused the buyers to be thrust outside the moral borders of the society that founded this Dominion.

The right question to ask is whether there is a way to hope that does not have at its foundation the very urges that turn our hopes to ashes.

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.   

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]


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