Not What I Expected But Welcome

Something exciting has actually started to take place here, it seems the entire country is terrified of ending up with the current PM as a leader of a majority government (even in a minority position he managed to do a lot of damage, in just two years–no one wants to see him act out full bully tendencies without stops) so one of the latest trends is for groups to create an actual political party out of their membership and “campaign”…but their platform is “Anyone But The Conservatives”. There are two of them at the moment (I’m thinking specifically of the Sinclair Stevens’ Progressive Canadians Party, as well as the Animal Rights party, who’d like to see more attention paid to Green Issues but really want to tell the world how Harper betrayed them on a promise in the past). More seem to pop up and enter the election every day. They’re just out there to be heard, since media will only report what other candidates are campaigning on, not opinions on issues, or the way the campaigns are being received or debated. The “first past the post” voting system we have in Canada is outdated and it makes us all vulnerable to a majority Conservative government even if the vast majority of Canadians vote for anyone else, so the second largest message in the Canadian election at the moment is “vote strategically” to eliminate the possibility that the Conservatives will win in any particular riding. If you’re curious about the extent of this message in Canada, just google up Anyone But Harper, there are numerous websites with maps and postal-code tools to help anyone in need of figuring out who’s most likely to win against the Con in their riding, sites put up by individuals and groups who just want to make a majority Conservative government an impossibility. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone run in an election solely to tell others not to vote for the incumbent–in each case, this is what these parties are all saying. Not a single one among them is actually running a candidate or raising money to accomplish that, and that’s telling in itself. This is the first time I’ve ever seen that particular drawback (you cannot run for office without a lot of money behind you) being used to an advantage.

Another interesting thing is people in the arts who’ve had their funding cut drastically in the past two years have also just decided to speak up in the media they create, cross country–so for the first time I can recall, well known film makers, actors and actresses, musicians, painters, people who write and produce literature, plays, and television have all decided to use the media by organizing public speaking engagements along the campaign trail, and by buying advertisement spots as well–to make the whole issue of restored Arts funding very, very big. Suddenly it’s on the agenda, nation wide (when Harper simply wanted to ignore it and continue cutting funding). And since they’re all involved in media, these artists have an access that can match the one held by the candidates. They’re really undoing a lot of the “spin” put on the issue by the Conservatives–that the arts are frivolous and not important, for example, that artists aren’t entitled to “hand outs” and we need the money for more important things (such as sending lots of young Canadian kids from the economically depressed provinces over to Afghanistan so that American soldiers can keep blowing them up). One television and theatre performer, Rick Mercer, has a satirical television show (the Mercer Report) on which he often challenges political leaders on their positions and tactics–I’m quite sure Harper hates him–however, in his “ad” Mercer simply says (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close) “You may hate my show, but the bottom line is all about jobs. I employ more builders and technicians and electricians every week than everyone in parliament has employed or will employ in their entire lives”. It’s easy for people to forget that so many people in the trades alone are dependent on the arts for work, aside from writers and actors and directors and producers. And that pitch seems to be putting the importance of arts funding in terms everyday people can “get”; a clear and simple retort to Harper’s costly ads, and his contempt for things like the arts, child care, health care, and women’s shelters funding as a kind of ‘extra welfare’ given to the undeserving.

I’m fascinated by the way the actual media is reporting events in these elections, as opposed to the way the new media (bloggers and online news sources which are more interactive and immediate) are reporting events. And there does seem to be a “struggle” in the conventional media to break away from a very restrictive means of operating, of “reporting” (with a script) what is happening cross country. Some of the most revealing footage of President Bush over the last 8 years has only been seen on a late night talk show–the most satirical and subversive daily media source in the United States over that time. David Letterman’s daily 5 and 10 second shorts of Bush flubbing speeches or reacting to a pertinent question in his characteristically incapable way has been the real news update for so many….and that kind of behaviour–the actual president in action–is never shown on mainstream news. Letterman has been so successful at indirectly creating and furthering debate and knowledge that other satirical comedians have since joined him to do the same thing–John Stewart and Stephen Colbert being two of the best known on American television. By now, everyone must have heard about David Letterman’s coup last week regarding the scheduled guest appearance of John McCain–McCain canceled on the show at the very last minute saying he had to go to Washington to deal with the economic crisis, which left Letterman both insulted and determined to show up McCain on that statement (McCain has no history of any involvement on economics during his time in the administration. so there’s no way the excuse could be taken seriously). McCain actually turned Letterman down to do an interview with a news broadcaster, in a studio not far away from his own. So during the show, Letterman ran a live feed into the other studio where Katie Couric was interviewing McCain–and the entire live audience and extended television audience witnessed McCain being caught out in a big lie, first hand. Letterman roared, “The road to the white house goes right through me, Senator McCain!”, a statement funny enough to be ridiculous, and (as Letterman well knows) ridiculous enough to be absolutely true. McCain will have to work extremely hard to undo the damage done there.

And to undo the damage Sarah Palin’s done in the same arena–failing egregiously under Couric’s obvious questions. Tina Fey’s uncanny resemblance to the Alaskan Republican, coupled with her easy comedic grace, result in the best documentation of the Karl Rove-selected candidate’s fall. Both McCain and Palin are really out of their element in the media, but that’s where seasoned and talented artists are willing and able to show them in their true light, to an audience more than ready to hear the truth from somewhere.

Perhaps that’s why arts funding is being so completely shut down, everywhere: the artists are the only ones talking about what’s really taking place, politically. I suppose that will never change, but it’s awfully nice to see how all the money and effort placed on controlling how we understand what’s going on is being countered simply with observation and thought and debate, on the ground level and now on an equally widespread level of media. Gives me some hope.

Our Lady of Sorrows

14 January 1922 — 15 September 2008

This was my mother.

When she died, she was in severe distress. This was after a number of days in growing pain, after a few years of daily discomfort and a growing frustration with being capable of less and less.

I knew it was coming, I could tell. There were events that I knew would bring it about–my aunt dying last month, and years before that her sisters moving completely out of her reach, where each of them would suffer from the separation with their own personal sickness of loss. Alzheimer’s for one, cancer for the other. Leukemia was my mother’s last diagnosis, post-mortem. It was, apparently, in its nascent, turbulent acute stage–white blood cells all cytoblasts; red blood cells almost extinct. Like a rousing, futile, furious last ditch effort against an insurmountable invading virus. Death.

I always thought I’d be completely prepared, as she was 86 and she was in pain–I also knew, as she went along, that her very mild heart condition would turn into full blown heart failure. I even knew, about a week ago, when it had started to happen. There was a moment when the paramedics were taking her to the ambulance, our eyes locked and I realized in my bones that she would not be coming home, she was telling me goodbye, telling me she loved me, telling me that that was it. But even then I followed her to the hospital, feeling like I had time, hoping against all hope I’d meet her best doctor doing his rounds. I did meet him while walking in, then I heard him being paged to her room in emergency. And I knew.

She could not be stabilized, she went wildly down, then wildly up as one organ after another failed. Morphine calmed her and the monitor over her bed slowed till her blood pressure disappeared, the alarms sounding at first, and then silenced while every one of the displays turned into flat lines and question marks. Morphine masquerades as a legitimate painkiller but it’s the only euthanasia we can get away with, too much and everything causing the pain is crushed in its beneficent paralysis. And that was it. No more distress and no more pain but Holy Fuck, she was just gone.

Olivia Chow wants me to what?

Nobody is surprised, except me I guess (what kind of a Governor General would give assent? That’s what I want to know), but yes, we’re having an election here in Canada.

The timing is disturbing. After all, we’ve got a Prime Minister no one can relate to: he’s no orator, he won’t– and can’t, I suspect–negotiate, and he’s coming under quite a lot of scrutiny for yet another misappropriation of public funds scandal. When he speaks English, he doesn’t make eye contact, when he speaks French he speaks the Franglaise of a million testy, mushmouthed schoolchildren, huddling and giggling with puerile contempt over the bilingual labels of their breakfast cereals. When it comes to women, he’s cut funding nationwide for daycare, women’s shelters, and even the Status of Women offices. When it comes to growing poverty, he simply doesn’t see it; when it comes to everyone’s concerns about jobs disappearing from the Canadian economy in the millions since he took office, he squeaks out an annoyed “let them eat cake” and makes a big show of handing out long-ago earmarked auto industry bail-out money, months after it was alloted, yet seconds before calling the election, to a Ford plant that will build cars with wasteful, unwanted V-8 engines. When it comes to the environment, it’s an enforced “business as usual, and climate change be damned, no one can prove Sour Gas is deadly, Green Ideas cost Jobs” nonsense. Those tar sands are the reason he’s in office, after all.

Mr. Harper is no Kennedy.

He’s certainly no Obama, and just to drive the point of inadequacy home, God love ‘em (as the Maritimers say when they despise you beyond civility), he’s not even a Bush, in terms of might and connections. He falls short but manages to scrape up to the status of a Palin: shifty eyes, an offputting demeanor, and a questionable red hand in the middle of a conveniently overshadowed spending scandal. Maybe he didn’t get around to banning books from local libraries, one of Palin’s biggest political thrusts–but I think in enough time, he’d have banned reading all together.

I suppose I’ll have to admit that I watched the candidates give their platform speeches once the election was confirmed, so I’ll admit it. I watched Stephan Dion, I watched Jack Layton, I watched Elizabeth May and our country’s right wing version of the Green Party demand a place in the official debate, and I watched Gilles Duceppe. Here is what everyone knows: Gilles isn’t leaving us anytime soon, Lizzie hasn’t got a hope, Jack is certainly being portrayed as the Rock Star (complete with claque–but you can see they’re paid to support him) and Dion is getting the same kind of bad press we’re seeing against Obama and Biden in the US (so you know he’s the real thing, the bona fide threat). In the States, all the journalists have been given the same script, and variations (or deviations, your choice) are simply never heard. On speaking of Palin, they snort and announce, “This woman shoots Moose!” as though that were impressive and politically vital; or they talk (even the women do this, including the women on Public Television) about “that cute ‘Bewitched’ thing she does with her nose”, then yell out, “Adorable!!” How anyone can watch these performances on television and take them as “real” commentary puzzles me, they’re sexist beyond the pale of anything that’s even been acceptable for decades. The stakes here in Canada, for a journalist, simply can’t compare to the salaries and celebrity available in the States, but I have to wonder what it is that would drive all the broadcasters and commentators to recite the same lines even in Canada, despite what we can see with our own eyes. I don’t know how many more times I’ll be told, in the precise array of words, that Dion “is no communicator, not even in his own language”, while Harper mumbles and works hard to answer a limited and approved set of questions he can address quickly and without much ado.

Last year around this time (well, actually, a little later into the autumn) there was talk of an election too, and for me, that meant offers of work with the NDP party. Oooh, that was seductive, but ultimately the offer was impossible to fit into my life, with its 24/7 demands and its distance. Still, I was screened, and interviewed, and head hunted, and called, and not called, and kept “on file”, and now that the election’s on, a position has come up for me as Olivia Chow’s assistant. For five weeks. The timing is just wrong for me, and the group of interviewers who want me know damn well I’m miles away from her riding, and just minutes away from one of the most steadfast NDP strongholds in the country, I could work here just as well, with Peter Kormos, if the job were created. In my opinion, Layton is their big hope but he’s not a natural, he’s not really comfortable around people and he never seems quick on his feet or lacerating in his critique in parliament (remember parliament?). Olivia, on the other hand, could do it. I wish her the best but they’re certainly blowing an opportunity in my area by having Layton front instead of Kormos. They could make a lot of friends out of voters who are watching their livelihoods disappear out here, who’d only need a little bit of support to start things moving in a far more advanced and profitable direction–but I guess they’re not the kind of people you want to know in politics. Besides, how many votes could you win if you created jobs in the country’s currently most economically depressed region?

On the other hand, I take a little bit of heart from the scattered (but officially “unreported”) evidence of voter awareness, it helps me to know that, contrary to what the media and several Americans I know believe, voters really aren’t stupid. This is an ongoing argument I have with my American friends, who shake their heads in disbelief because they fear that the doddering and proudly ignorant McCain will win this election, they fear Americans are easily fooled and will ignore the cynicism of the Republican party to retain the status quo. I’m not so sure, I think Bush won two times in a row despite being the worst leader in the history of humanity (that we know of) because he had his people rig the elections, we’ve already read about how this was done, who did it, and how much it cost to do…but Americans prefer to believe in that “democracy” nonsense, and they actually think people really want to see the Republicans in office again.

The world’s largest financial institutions are bankrupt, people are losing their homes in the millions, and even real estate is losing its value (when does that happen?). Unless you’re part of that elite group of oil merchants and bankers and warmongers and pharmaceutical corporation owners and media moguls who make up the “Us” in the Bush administration, no one in the US has seen any benefit from the past 8 years of business. That group is far too small to keep “winning” elections, but they’re obviously wealthy enough to buy them despite what anyone wants.

Sarah Palin for Vice President

And cynical enough to present us with this as a candidate for high office.

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