Several of the
past month’s news stories force us to derive a number of painful yet unsurprising
conclusions about Stephen Harper’s caucus, party, and supporters. I present
below a list that is, sadly, not exhaustive. To wit, our Harperoids
...are not
averse to watching the Museum of Civilization be bizarrely repurposed into a
museum for folks who hate museums (by the people who’ve been perfecting a government
for folks who hate government and a Canada for folks who hate Canada), which,
if past performance has any predictive relevance, will undoubtedly feature as its
centrepiece exhibit a gargantuan bronze statue of Christ in a “USA Kicks Ass”
t-shirt riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on the back of a triceratops flanked
by an honour guard of Navy SEALs;
...are unmoved
when their “populist” prime minister abridges the rights and privileges of his MPs
merely because his party’s base is composed of people who expect their
representatives to bring onto the floor of the House precisely the kind of obnoxious-to-the-vast-majority-of-Canadians
motion Harper knows makes his caucus look like the cast of Porky’s II and is thus
desperate to suppress;
...are content
to see the protracted domestic detention of a Crown subject whose “confession”,
gleaned by American torturers conducting an illegal, unanimously discredited
sondergericht in a Cuban gulag, was extorted partly through the threat of being
repeatedly rectally raped, by “big black guys,” naturally (the carriers of what
the collective American imagination conceives as the most virulent genus of social
contamination). Moreover, they agree with Stephen Harper that the Canadian
people, though now paying the full cost of Khadr’s room and board, are too
fragile to withstand the apocalyptic impact of whatever he would wish to say from
behind bars;
...were proud
to see their prime minister ornament the sombre dignity of Margaret Thatcher’s
funeral by pimping the event for the sake of a cheap, guttersnipe attack on
Justin Trudeau, insolently launched atop the still-warm corpses of the Boston
Marathon victims. Nor do they overmuch mind that their tax dollars are currently
funding a campaign of wretched defamation, the thrust of which is Trudeau’s alleged
faggotry, that is so odious that even hardened Harper-fellating hacks like Stephen Woodworth and Brent Rathgeber—who’ve spent the last half-decade
proving that they would queue up naked before the front door of 24 Sussex in a February
hailstorm to receive the honour of drinking overflowing bowls of the foetid,
maggot-speckled swill compounded of venality,
illegality, sophistry, and moral cowardice that perpetually sluices forth from
the dank cloaca of CPC HQ—find unacceptably repellent. It’s as if they’ve
finally realised that, after seven years of forcing his ward-heeling invertebrates
to prostitute every single principle they claim to hold, Harper has managed to
become the only maquereau in the history of the West too stupid to know how to
run a whorehouse at a profit.
The
primary, and perhaps only, utility Harper’s conservative lemmings can offer real conservatives is their service as a stark daily reminder that humankind is
irremediably unregenerate: the immutable fact of human fallibility is a
core conservative belief, and our justified awe before the myriad glories of
human compassion, magnanimity, and virtue must sometimes be tempered by an
acknowledgment that we have not crawled as far beyond the primeval slime as we think
we have, a fact that Canada’s branch of the global confederacy of idiocy argues
with irresistible eloquence.
