A Really Nasty Alternate Universe

Who Are These People? And where did they come from?

I've been reading comment boards at the Globe and the Star again. I know I shouldn't do it. But I can't help myself. They depress me. They unsettle me. They destroy my carefully constructed view of my rational, pleasant world. But still I read them. Why?

For the same reason people watch horror movies or slow down to stare at car wrecks, I suppose. It's as if someone has torn a hole in the reality curtain to give me a peek at a really nasty alternate universe. Ninth circle of Hell stuff where people gnash their bloody teeth, shriek, scream and burn with fevered passions.

These are people who can toss off the most sullen, hateful sentiments with the nonchalence of a store clerk remarking on the weather. As if it's normal. And yet I have never heard anyone, anywhere, at any time, express such raw hatred out loud in real life. Like this poster, from today's Globe, "commenting" on U.S. President Obama:

Enough with the experiments.
Anyone heard of the other American icon?
Where is the Tiger?
When the going gets tough they all hide.
ObaMao played golf when the attack happened.
Pathetic Barry took 3 days to read a release to the press like he didn't give a sh!t.
The fraud is over.
The world laughs at Barry born in Kenya.
Dick Cheney for President.
The USA needs a real home born American today and not Barry from Kenya.

YES WE CAN'T.

Hello, Mr. Yes We Can't. This is your drycleaner calling. We have your nice white sheets ready for you, if you'd like to come pick them up. Sorry about sewing the eyeholes shut.

All right, the selection is a bit extreme, but it's not totally out of sync with a good portion of the commentary. And this is a reputable Canadian newspaper in a modern urban centre -- not some rabid little rag in the 18th century Deep South. Does Mr. Yes We Can't talk like this to his mother, his co-workers, his pals at the pub after a game of pick-up softball? Does he have a real life somewhere with a home, a family, a job, hobbies? Does he have children?

So who are these people? Do they disguise themselves as normal Canadian suburbanites by day, mingling with us at the malls and grocery stores? Or do they hide in dark basements, muttering to themselves? Are they the true face of Canada? Or a couple of Limbaugh wanna-be's holed up in a westcoast condo?

And why do I see so much of this stuff in the Globe and the Star, two Toronto-based liberal-ish publications, where the boards are dominated by screed-spewing ideologues? Why don't I find these reptiles slithering all over the New York Times or the Scotsman or the Guardian or the National Post or virtually any other reputable newspaper in the civilized world?

Maybe that's why I keep reading. To learn what, if anything, they are telling me about my world and the people I share it with. Scary thought. Let's hope they only seem to be so numerous.

Okay, My Friends. Wassup?

The climate change extravaganza in Copenhagen was one of the most perplexing shows ever mounted in the Earth's sorry history.

Somehow, amid the screaming and garment-renting, Canada emerged as the arch-villain of the piece. Apparently, we of the peaceable kingdom are the Bad Thing hellbent on destroying this shiny blue orb everyone loves so much. Against us are ranged the angelic forces of Good -- led by a demented Robert Mugabe, that scoflaw from Sudan who slaughters black babies, a bunch of rabblerousers from Latin America and a handful of self-appointed leaders from countries too small to name.

The whole thing is so improbable that even the slowest among us has to stop and ask, Wassup with this?

Are we to believe that in the midst of the world's daily hurly-burly -- the clamour of Calcutta, the thrumb of Hanover, the clatter of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, the whir of innumerable factories in China and the shriek of chainsaws in Indonesia -- modest little Canada is the Evil that will lead the world over the climate change cliff?

Come on! Pull the other one!

With Copenhagen, surely the idiotic campaign against Canada has scraped bottom. Do you people out there really believe that our seal hunters threaten the Earth's equilibrium? That our lumberjacks are pilaging the planet? Clearcutting every last pristine wilderness? That our mining companies are engaged in a conspiracy of genocide against indigenous people everywhere? That our own Aboriginal people are exterminating wild species willynilly with their marginal fur-trapping? Is this what goes on in your fevered European brains?

Ridiculous.

So what is up with this?

What's with the Canada-bashing by all these murky and unelected NGOs? And why are all those supposedly responsible European governments lending support to this drivel? Not to mention all that U.S. money flooding in to support those murky and unelected NGOs.

Interesting, eh what?

If anyone has any answers, please let Rupert know.

Searching for a Post-Left Left

Oh, how I hate to admit this. But the Left -- soul of my soul, heart of my heart -- has become the enemy of everything I value.

How did I misplace the good, old, unassuming Left that worked to get working people into their own modest homes and helped them send their kids to school? Whatever happened to the people who valued the working-class life and the decent, down-to-earth folks who wanted fair wages for a honest day's work? Norma Jean - where did hell did you go?

Now it's all fight climate change and save the caribou and preserve the Boreal and shutter the shit-belching factories and stop those dirty lumberjacks, miners, steelworkers from soiling my pristine wilderness backyard latte patio garden. And fuck off with your hopes for a stone quarry that could employ your sons and daughters at decent wages because it might spoil the view when I sea kayak on your pretty shores in some distant summer. Workers should renounce their carbon-spewing jobs and their animal-killing ways to take up the noble tasks of retail and hospitality -- so they can more perfectly serve the new-veau Left when it arrives for a week of getting in touch with its excellent wild-child self.

That's what the new Left is all about, isn't it? Auto workers are uppity illiterates who deserve to be put in their place. People who shop at Zeller's and Wal-Mart are white trash. Snowmobilers, ice-fishman, bowlers, moose hunters, bingo players, Legionnaires, union members, high-school graduates and community college drudges, people who get up every day to go to work -- all right-wing red-necks. And god, don't get me started on Oshawa and Hamilton and Sudbury. Arm-pit towns full of tedious, uneducated rubes. No nightlife. No creativity. No class.

Way to go, folks. You have achieved a Left that hates the working class. Is it any wonder that working people vote for Stephen Harper and Sarah Palin?

How do we get beyond this? Because get beyond it we must, if we don't want an endless horizon of Stephen Harpers and green-grocer fascists.

We could lose the pretentious superiority. We could stop channelling the late, lamented Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We could start to like real people again. We could stop kowtowing to fever-brained neo-anarchists with delusional agendas. Above all, the Left could to reconnect with its working-class base to become a viable political force again instead of an elitist echo of 18th century nobless oblige.

If the Left can't become the post-Left, and quickly, it will find itself on the wrong side of an emerging class war. Many exquisitely educated heads will roll.

And all that was, will be dust. And all that might be, will be lost.

Bruce Mau and Sudbury

Sudbury is a really cool place and I am immensely grateful for the time I spent there.

In the exercise of courageous self-examination, no other city in the world -- that I know of -- can hold a candle to Sudbury. And I say that without the slightest hint of sarcasm or wink-wink, nudge-nudge paternalism.

Over the past several decades, Sudbury has, on several occasions, bravely looked into its own heart, plumbed its depths, faced its demons. And it has learned tremendously from the truths it has seen there. It has never flinched. Just to live in Sudbury is to be smarter and braver and more alive to reality than most of the people who live in other cities in other places in the world.

So it surprises me not at all that Sudbury has had the balls to invite native son Bruce Mau, a true outlier in the world of design, to come and give advice about designing a viable future.

Anyone who has read Mau's work, or visited one of his Massive Change exhibits, has to understand that Mau is not your average garden designer. To say he has a big scope is an understatement. He is difficult, if not impossible, for a non-artist to understand. Yet it is impossible to view his work and not realize that he is on to something. Much as one might read Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose and understand that there is something important there, even if one cannot grasp it.

Bruce Mau is not accessible in the way that Jane Jacobs or Richard Florida might be. He is difficult, tantalizing, suggestive and visionary in a way that may be beyond the ken of most of us. One may dismiss his vision, but one cannot deny he has one.

So when Bruce Mau comes to Sudbury to give advice, a wise person will listen and try to understand that advice as best he or she can.

It will be very exciting to watch this interaction between the genius designer and the intrepid city.

My hope is that Mau can be convinced to expand his range even further, and to begin to think about the design of the entire region of Northern Ontario. That would really be something to see, wouldn't it?

Poor, old CBC

As is normal in our country, the poor, old CBC is being castigated right, left and centre for its new National news format. All the usual naysayers are out in force. With all the usual naysayer arguments. Why do I have to pay for...? Leftwing bias....Liberal mouthpiece....blah, blah, blah.

Sadly, the problems of the CBC have nothing to do with any of this. Or set graphics. Or colours. Or people sitting or standing. Or even demographics.

No. They are fundamentally to do with the poor, old CBC's mandate. And that has to do with Canada itself.

Unfortunately for the poor, old CBC, there is no Canada left to interpret. No Canadians to explain to each other. It's all an empty illusion. All of it. Whatever was Canada has disappeared. Evaporated. Long gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. The CBC is not even a voice in the wilderness. It is an echo in a vacuum in a bathroom in a bus station.

There ain't no there there.

Folks, there is no longer any Canada for the CBC to interpret. And therein lies the problem. That is why the CBC seems so irrelevent. It is out there on a shaky limb, all by itself in the world, trying to explain one lot of Americans to another; struggling to mediate between the expatriot leftwing Americans, who love the idea of the CBC and work there in great numbers, and resident would-be Americans, who hate the CBC and all it stands for. Blue State vs Red State stuff. Impenetrable American inside baseball stuff. Leaving the rest of us wandering around in the washroom, wondering where the voices are coming from.

Much of our public discours has become this -- various brands of Americans feuding with each other at the cottage that is Canada. Like upstate N.Y. Mohawks warring with United Empire Loyalists in Desoronto. Wannabe Republican Harper tilting at New England Liberal Ignatieff. Simpson versus Wente. C.D. Howe versus Jane Jacobs versus Richard Florida versus Tom Flanagan.

The CBC is trying valliantly to interpret Canadians to Canadians, but it can only fail. There are no Canadians left. Only ex-pat and would-be Americans grinding their tired, old axes in the safety of this vacuous piece of real estate.

Poor, old CBC.

Power Shift

Rex Murphy plumbs an interesting subject in his column this weekend. Harking back to the National Energy Program, he postulates that if the eco-folk manage to derail the development of the Alberta oil sands, the resulting backlash could tear Canada apart.

He is, of course, absolutely correct.

Albertans will be justifiably outraged if central Canada's intelligensia manages to kibosh the province's last, best chance at securing a piece of economic, political and social power. This is, after all, Alberta's hour. Albertans have waited a long time for it, with many false starts on the way. At last, the political and social centre is subtly shifting west and, as a result, the country is finally balancing out. It could be seen as a sign of maturity and growth, a step toward the future and a welcome development for everyone but the long-entrenched elite.

It really is time for new blood. And it is well passed time for a counterweight to the sterile, derivitive thinking that dominates much of what comes out of the minds of central Canadian political commentators.

Rex misses the mark, however, by suggesting that this is a battle of provinces. It is not. Rather it is a fight, perhaps to the death, between working Canada -- the Canada of farms and mines and sawmills and factories -- and the old Family Compact, their children, their friends and the hangers-on.

The hangers-on are in the driver's seat now, but that won't last. Lament it as we might, the olde Empire is dead, and we must move on. If we don't, we are, of course, toast. Which we have been for most of the last century and a half anyway, so no harm done, eh?

Things that are hard to say

It is so hard to say this.

Because I may be wrong. I could be misinterpreting history. Maybe others are right, and I am wrong. And if I am wrong, I will be doing a great disservice to good people, for whom I nothing but good will.

However. That said.

Islam seems to me to have become a most evil religion. Dark, lustful, bloody and hateful. As if a crack has opened in the Earth and this ugly, dark thing has emerged. Obsessed with stonings, and hackings, and the cutting off of limbs; the control of women; bombings and killings and the slaughter of innocents.

There is no light here. No colour. No playfulness. No creativity. Nothing of the golden age. It has all been sucked into a darkness so profound that it can only be equated with the death itself.

Beheadings. On video. On YouTube. On Al Jerzera TV. Let's all watch, shall we? In the name of religion. Has there has been anything like this since the Kali cult or the Aztec abominations? Glowering clerics in black robes screaming jihad against the Other? Brutal boys blowing up subways and dreaming of dead children? Twisted faces shouting sharia now, don't you know we're going to get you when we get in power?

Would we be out of order to label this satanic? If not that, then what?

How did these people get so far from the wonderful Islam of its golden age?

I guess it can happen to any religion.

Sometimes I Sit Up Late at Night

Thinking about Canada, and where it's going, and what it's doing. And what it is today in these opening chords of the 21st century.

How silly is that?

Knowing that I have to get up early in the morning. Knowing that no one in this country's "thinking class" gives a damn what I think. Knowing that nothing I think makes a damn to what is.

And yet the mind can't help roaming over this jumbled landscape, can it?

It must be an obsession, this urge to scan the geography late at night. When you look at it from one angle, the country seems so full of promise and potential. From another angle, it seems so old. So woolly-headed. So peevish.

I mean, how can you have any hope when the newspaper comment boards are choked with bile and stupidity? Rightest ravings and leftist rants. All of them so annoyingly derivative. Columnists banging on about Republicans, Obama, Putin, Europe, Islam and Israel. Elected officials pilloried by reporters who find their issues in News of the World archives. Bloggers who grind old Andrew Carnegie's axe against immigrants and union bosses.

What a mess of arid thoughts and petty grievances. Does no one have an original idea?

So I wonder, in my doddering way, if all this noise really represents Canada. Is this who and what we are today? Petty, peevish and stale? Or is our so-called intellectual dialogue nothing more than a Laff in the Dark fun house, where reality refracts off a kaleidoscope of Rush Limbaugh, George Galloway, the Daily Kos and those wackos who sputter through the pages of the Star every day? None of them, apparently, having much to do with this time in this country.

Hard to tell. Could go either way.

I guess the real question is, does anyone actually care?

Our Disintegrating Country

In a G&M essay today (click on title to view essay), Michael Valpy writes about signs of the disintegration of social cohesion in Canada. Remarkably - and I say remarkably because the Globe's comment boards are usually dominated by a handful of foaming morons - there are some thoughtful reactions from readers to Valpy's observations.

The piece elicits a mixed Rupert reaction. Some top of mind thoughts:

• Valpy's assumption of a previous state of cohesion is a departure for the national intelligensia. I don't recall seeing any general acceptance of Canada as a social unity before. When did this happen? Did I completely miss a golden age of social cohesion? I thought we were all a-warring in the bosom. Now we're disintegrating from a cohesion we never had the joy of experiencing. Is Valpy a revisionist? Why? What's his angle?
• Trudeau remains a watershed event for Canadians. He has become a symbol that marks the fork in the road between conservative and liberal positions. Maybe PET is our focal point, our source of social cohesion, and we circle his memory like wrestlers, looking for holds in multiculturalism, bilingualism-biculturalism, the Indian Act, Meech Lake, the NEP and immigration. Will we spend the next century arguing about this man? How can we resolve this and move forward?
  
• Discontent over multiculturalism bubbles like raw sewage under the surface of this country. Is it resentment? Did the English and the French have a cozy mix-up going on, and now the Muslims have horned in? Can these "others" assimilate fast enough, or can we find another group to fixate on quickly enough, for them to avoid the fate of becoming our new source of social cohesion? What do they respresent in our national narrative?
  
• And where will the First Nations land? I sense the approach of a tipping point. How far will the FNs have to push their ill-tempered sovereignty, self-government, pay-us-back arguments before they estrange the rest of the population? With their "wedges are us" standoffishness, do they aspire to become Canada's Roma? At what point do Canadians begin to view them as an economic and existential threat?
• Canadians are fanatically nationalistic. We love this country! We revel in who we are. We may not know how to express it, but we all have a view of what it means to be Canadian. And we love us. Threaten our sense of nationalism at your peril. Many on the left don't understand this. They like to pick up arguments holus-bolus from their colleagues in other countries and trot them out as original thought. As if we don't know shop-worn when we see it. Yeah, I read the Guardian too.
  
• Canadian intellectuals are underachievers. They are mostly derivative of American leftist/rightist intellectuals and dead European philosophers. They carp at us for navel-gazing, but they miss the point. Since Canada is the greatest, most wonderful, most butt-kicking country in the world, at least in our heart of Canadian hearts, it is only right that we should obsess over its meaning and its nuances. Of course, the proper study of Canadians is Canada.
  
• Americans piss us off because they take us for granted and they treat us like rubes. We know they will be sorry one day. Another source of social cohesion.
• Toronto is the centre of the universe. Get over it. It's also full of people from somewhere else. Many of them are from the small towns where people love to hate Toronto. Toronto is a mirage. The real Toronto is made up of 72 families in the east end who are not doing very well. They deserve your sympathy.
• Do our detractors - and we have many more than our share - have any chance of making us curl up like babies in whining balls of guilt, ready to move back to our "homelands" without a fight? I think not. But they keep trying, don't they?

Interesting reaction, eh? Who would have thought?

The Importance of Being a Regular Rupert

It is important, I think, to be post often, in a regular fashion, about topics that are important to you.

This is not to say that regular posting will entice readers. No, it is more to cultivate a habit of frequent and regular self-examination. To constantly inquire: What do I think about that? Why do I think this about that? How is my thinking flawed, or deep, or shallow, or insightful?

And that is the name of this Rupert game. Self-discovery. Self-examination. Self-criticism.

The three pilars of a well-examined life and the foundation of personal growth.

For how do you grow without challenging yourself and your most fundamental beliefs? Your thoughts will get stuck in the cement of certainty and you'll become a curmudgeon, half-sister to the cur with a mudgeon of self-righteousness.

No growth potential there.

Of course, there's always the question of why one would want to grow. Why not rest and snuggle down in the warm seas of stasis? Why not accept what is and go on with it?

Hmmm. Why indeed? Dunno.

Self-improvement can seem so bourgeois and petty, don't you think? So 20th century, narcistic hippie-turned-old-boomer, maybe? A tad self-indulgent and aren't-I-the-centre-of-the-universe type of thing? Is that what the Xs, Ys, Zs and Omegas see when they survey the social landscape? Should I care? Do I care?

Nope. Not a wit. Not my job.

Besides, what have they -- the Xs, the Ys, and the whole roiling alphabet of youth -- done for me lately? Except make ignorant assumptions about my life, insult my being, threaten my future and generally piss me off. (I note some anger there, and I wonder why. Subject of another post perhaps.) But life's cruel, and they really owe me nothing. Which is probably twice as much as I owe them.

So onward and upward, you self-identifying, self-obsessive boomer Rupert.

Let Us Try This Again

I few years ago, I started a blog. I wrote on it faithfully. And nobody read it.

Naturally, I got very discouraged.

Hell, who wants to write your innermost thoughts, put them out there for the world to read and have the world respond with a resounding yawn.

Tough stuff, eh?

So I gave up. And that was cowardly. I should not have done that, and I regret it.

The solution?

Pick it up. Soldier on. Try again.

I will, however, change the name of the blog. Like the NDP, I look for renewal in the mystical renaming of the thing.

Let's try it again. With feeling.

And damn the readers.