Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part III

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.

     

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.

All Hail Stevie, Our Chief of Mice!*: Part One

* With apologies to Lady Antonia and John Milton.



Well, chaps, we’ve learned so much about our beloved country over the past week. This sublimely teachable moment--brought to you by a government driven solely by the pusillanimous and imbecilic venality of a rodentine leader suffering from a Cromwell complex and an Opposition whose level of tactical ineptitude would shame the debating team of a Bronx reformatory—may be particularly valuable for those of us still desperately clinging to the illusion that our civic institutions are not disintegrating into dust through the cultural vandalism of our swinish élites and the widespread apathy of our bread-and-circuses besotted populace.

Here are just a few items of note, which I present to you the way our politicians have lately been managing the nation’s affairs--in no particular order:


1) Whatever stimulus package “Prime Minister For Life” Harper eventually presents for the House’s approval had better include enough cash for Stevie to fetch his testicles out of hock from whatever pawnshop he sold them to. The man idolised (delusionally) by his carbuncular acolytes as a fearless and savvy political “chess player” last week committed the most risibly craven act of parliamentary cowardice in Commonwealth history, and he did so under the pressure of a man once dismissed by CPC slackjaws as an ineffectual milquetoast “professor” , unworthy of even the attention required to ridicule him.


2) The question, burning for years, of whether Stephen Harper in fact does have more integrity than can be scraped off the sperm-spattered walls of a gay-bar john has been answered, in the most utterly predictable way imaginable.

What else should we have expected from the man who became our first explicitly anti-Canadian prime minister? Why would such a man apply himself to the task of uniting the nation in solidarity against the gravest economic threat we’ve faced since the Great Depression when there yet remain Opposition politicians whose parties need to be crushed, when there’s an entire civil service that must be humiliated, scapegoated and shorn of fundamental bargaining rights, when there are regions and provinces to be pitted against one another so as to make lording over the broken pieces so much the easier, when there’s a Prairie version of the Southern Strategy to be enacted as a way of demoralising the country into a meaner, smaller place--when there are, in short, so many odious Nixonian games to be played with people’s lives, so many modes of civic discourse to be degraded?

I think most of us finally get it: what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of electing a man to state office who has spent his entire adult life explaining, at length and in detail, why he hates the state. Frankly, we can’t blame the man: is it not natural to destroy what one hates?


3) The Reform/Alliance “populist” tradition which Stephen Harper represents has just lost its political virginity—not on the soft, silk-sheeted, canopied bed of a lavish bridal suite, but in the Wild-Turkey soaked backseat of a ’78 Oldsmobile idling in the parking lot of an abandoned factory.

By murdering the last Parliament in its cradle in order to evade the just chastisement of the people’s representatives, Stephen Harper has had gutless recourse to methods unknown and unattempted in the English-speaking world since the Seventeenth Century. Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, two of history’s most notorious tyrants, are Harper’s new inspirations (along with some lesser scum).

And the “jus' folks” in Alberta are just loving it, darlings! We hear no supercilious lecturing from the schoolmarms of the Manning Centre for Democracy about this outrageous abuse of power, no blithering redneck rantings from Ted and Link Byfield’s torch-and-pickfork gong show about unaccountable élites shutting down democracy whenever it becomes inconvenient to them. We hear none of that once-stentorian yelping against the “Stalinism” of the federal executive, delivered with the swaggering, cocksure arrogance of a messianic clique fully convinced of their monopoly of political virtue. Gee. I guess the brutal serial rape of democracy is just fine as long as, at the end of the day, the nation is made to eat its breakfast out of your own narrow, partisan, ideological ass crack.

If there’s one good thing to come out of this fiasco, it’s that we no longer need accord the Calgary School and the purveyors of its demagogic bromides the slightest shred of respect (I, of course, never did). They’ve shown themselves as concupiscently avid for power as the Liberals have ever been at their most hack-ridden and unprincipled. We’ve let ourselves be schooled and browbeaten by the Flanagans, the Coopers, the Mannings and all that tribe for far too long. We’re done. It’s over. Finished. Prairie populism and its primary partisan vehicle have been exposed as contemptible frauds boasting all the inherent moral authenticity of a buck-a-blow crackwhore servicing drunken longshoreman for packs of black-market smokes.

Stevie, you saved your tatty political skin, and committed ethical suicide in the process. I hope it was worth it, cowpoke.

Canada's Little-Known War on Behalf of Terror

How nice of the White House to offer us six of its Boeing Co CH-47D heavy-lift transport helicopters at such a reasonable price--a measly 375 million dollars. A Pentagon spokesman explained that the deal is motivated by the kind of selfless, humanitarian vision that has come to define American strategic thinking:

"Canada needs these helicopters to enhance its capabilities in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) [yes, the thing has officially been given its own acronym]...Having the same configuration as the U.S. would greatly contribute to Canada's military capability by making it a more sustainable coalition force to support GWOT," the Pentagon said.

In other words, the more American stuff we have, the more efficiently our Forces can be absorbed into the American imperial system and be deployed as colonial levies in U.S.-led conflicts. Statements like these can leave no doubt but that the American military leadership sees our Forces as a servant of American geo-political ambitions rather than our own. In fact, the Pentagon--doubtless very aware that our current government is happily willing (and even eager) to swallow any species of American insolence--hardly bothers to hide its arrogance. It proclaims that:

...Canadian deployments in support of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations have made a "significant impact to global political and economic stability and have served U.S. national security interests."

The Pentagon obviously assumes that most Canadians will be delighted to hear that their tax dollars and the precious lives of so many of their countrymen have "served U.S. national security interests" rather than been wasted on Canadian security interests.

The Pentagon is probably right: in this dark hour of national demoralisation, the product of two-decades' worth of Canada-hating rhetorical flagellation by our self-loathing media and political élites, Canadians are apt to think that handing our Forces, our resources, and even our very lives over to the pleasure of the United States is but a barely sufficient atonement for our inherent worthlessness, for the abject pusillanimity of our very being, for having so scandalously presumed to deserve an autonomous existence beside a neighbour who embodies the perfection of all the virtues. Before 9/11, Canadian self-hating had been the fairly disreputable fetish of a marginal, mainly Albertan, gaggle of cranks; it now seems to have replaced fluoride as the main additive in our drinking water. One can hardly blame the Pentagon, then, for its plain speaking: they know that few Canadians will care.

Indeed, "interoperability"--for that is what our military's absorption into the U.S. war machine is euphemistically called--will continue apace and go unchecked as long as Canadians can be fooled into thinking that becoming ancillary sepoys in the service of American geo-political ambitions is an ideal way of redeeming our tradition of degenerate parochialism through global "humanitarian" interventions.

Our mission in Afghanistan is the opium which helps keep the masses hallucinating along those lines. News of Haiti's most recent agony should have removed the pipes from Canadian lips, but--as we've been convinced that Afghans are the only suffering people who deserve our development assistance--we've been allowed to keep sucking away at our opiate and, in the process, have forgotten our own shameful role in Haiti's tragedy.

Starving Haitians have lately been reduced to eating dirt and have thus reached depths rarely before seen even in that tormented nation. The collapse of their so-called government may herald the disintegration of what little remains of a functioning Haitian civil society. This is all happening despite the dilatory Brazilian-led "peace-keeping" effort to which Canada has contributed a token force since 2004. It is fitting that we are doing so little to help Haiti, since we have done so much to trigger its current chaos.

In 2004, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, one of the only two elected presidents Haiti has ever had, faced a rebellion fomented by criminal gangs and disgruntled ex-soldiers enraged by Aristide's wise decision to disarm the army (traditionally one of Haiti's most destabilising elements). Aristide had long been out of favour with the White House, which withdrew all humanitarian aid to the impoverished country in 2000 (with Canada and Europe shamefully following suit soon after), presumably in retaliation for the alleged irregularities that marred the 2000 election that returned Aristide to power and the allegedly "authoritarian" nature of his rule (America apparently having discovered some democratic scruples after having supported the homicidal Duvaliers for decades).

Without an army to oppose it, the rebellion gained traction. The White House decided to support the rebellion, thus providing moral and political legitimacy to a glorified street gang led by a violent thug who christened his motley band of killers with the darkly hilarious name, the "National Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti".

Ultimately, in the latest act of a disastrous two-hundred-year tradition of neo-colonial interventionism, the White House decided to send in the Marines and remove Aristide, virtually at gunpoint, rather than protect his government while it completed the last year of its democratically-held mandate. A caretaker administration was installed, and an international force (with a sizable Canadian contingent) was brought in to police the new criminally established status quo. Thus, the U.S., with Canada's sedulous assistance, deposed one of the only legitimate national leaders Haiti has ever produced at the behest of the lowest dregs of Haiti's criminal underworld and of its defunct network of paramilitary death squads.

Canada's role in this catastrophe provides one of the most disgraceful examples of moral cowardice in our history, arguably in all history. While primping ourselves on the "nobility" of our Afghan mission--a project undertaken under the duress of American blackmail, premised on patently unachievable objectives, propping up an Islamist, Sharia-Law-driven, warlord-ridden regime, and now clearly failing on all measurable levels--we threw away a golden opportunity to make an easily achieved, quantifiable step towards the institutionalisation of democracy in the poorest jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere.

Having been shorn of their heavy weapons, Aristide's antagonists were an Interahamwe-like rabble, carrying barely more than antiquated small-arms and big knives. Protecting the president would have required nothing larger than a mechanised infantry brigade without need of artillery or air support-- comfortably fitting within Canada's limited logistical capacity. After two and a half years of ersatz philanthropy in Afghanistan, here was an authentic opportunity to mount an idealistic, stand-alone Canadian operation--to use our small Forces to propagate Canadian values in the defence of a real, functioning democracy.

Instead, we held the Pentagon's hat while it demonstrated to all Haitians that no legitimate president is safe from their mobs, setting back by decades the cause of Haitian democracy and bringing its haunted people to their current horrific reality. You think it worrisome to have a failed state seven thousand miles away in Afghanistan? Consider the risks of having one just off the coast of Cuba, within easy striking distance of North America. If an extremist network ever takes root in Haiti, it will do so on ground made fertile by American venality and Canadian cravenness.

Stephen Harper and his barking acolytes continue to enjoin us to "Support the Troops". I say this: I shall begin to support our troops when they are made to re-connect with what is perhaps the most brilliant thread in the weave of our military history--our voluntary commitment to just wars. The troops I support have yet to be mustered: they are the ones who would have turned back the thuggish canaille converging on Port-au-Prince in 2004, not the ones providing the military life support for Hamid Karzai's failed, madrassa-pocked narco-state.

When Harperoids Attack

One of the most alarming facets of "Conservative" partisanship is the way it deprives its practitioners of the ability to employ even the most rudimentary instruments of logic and analysis.

For a case in point, I direct the reader to an ambush recently inflicted on me by Trusty Tory, usually one of the more sane and respectable of the Blogging Tories. That even such a rare homo sapiens among that wretched agglomeration finds it impossible to rise above dishonesty and moral cowardice is a scathing indictment of the CPC and of its corrosive effects upon the ethical fibre of its adherents.

Briefly, this young man asserts the following:

1) I am actually a Liberal;

2) I have never praised a Tory politician (such as John Diefenbaker, for example) on this blog;

3) I have always defended the Liberal Party on this blog;

4) Tory leaders who did not become Prime Minister (or had only brief ministries) were not real Tories, because they were "losers";

5) Stephen Harper's "success" proves that he is a Tory;

6) Red Tory wants to be seen as a conservative but is really a Liberal in "disguise" (Red Tory is openly Liberal, and his blog is on the Liblogs aggregator, by the way).

Go here to see these laughable canards unfolded in detail, and go here for my response. My comment has yet to be "moderated" by his Serene Harperness, Trusty Tory, but fear not. If it fails to get past his censor board, I shall paste the full text here.