The Ballot of Protagitron

Dateline: Ontario. Election Day 2014.

First: Get a shovel.

Yes, I voted. No, I was not enthused with any of the parties. Not to the point of spoiling my ballot to make a statement, but to the point where I kept on letting out long wistful sighs while waiting for the polling station to open. 

Then an older man ahead of me turned around, and said to his wife:

"Look at how long the line is! So many good people out here."

Without any irony at all. 

Yeah, I expect my medal in the mail, good sir. In fact, I was such a "good" citizen that the line I was in WASN'T EVEN FOR MY POLLING STATION. I hadn't bothered to read my registration card closely enough, wandered into the first place I saw on St. Clair with orange arrows, and tried to vote there. The man in charge sent me to the correct place, probably thinking I was another silly person about to vote for the cutest candidate. 

Ha! Wrong. I was actually going to vote for the person with the best-sounding name. 

Well, really, I had forced myself to sit down with my laptop last week and research who the best MPP would be for my riding. But getting back to the voting thing - I do think it's important to vote. But it dominates the discourse of political action (and newsfeeds on social media), when it's only a fraction of what it means to be truly engaged. Compared to the constant, daily work of effecting change, taking a few minutes to mark up a ballot isn't a huge accomplishment. There are many other days of work to do. The next day you have to hold the people with the most ballots accountable, and sometimes you're forced to accomplish what your representatives are too cowardly, too hamstrung, or just too tired to do yourself. 

So let's tone down the self-congratulation. Put the back patting on pause. It's also worth looking at who's not with you in that line, and why. That's a good place to start the rest of your work. And maybe next time, more "good" people might be able to join you.

Can't Stop Physics: Bobbie Robbie 2014

Sadly, I was unable to score a signed Rob Ford bobblehead doll this morning.

Now, the important thing here isn't that our scandal-scabbed mayor, who's lied about smoking crack, written reference letters for drug dealers, spewed racist, homophobic garbage, and regularly lost battles with inanimate objects, is selling bobbleheads to raise money for the United Way, or that he's doing so on the eve of the first council meeting since he admitted he smoked crack, or that these bobbleheads have lead to long lines outside of City Hall.

Who cares about that anymore? The Rob Ford Experience, I have decided, isn't a municipal political disaster. It's a piece of performance art, forcing viewers to confront the constructs of power and privilege within the fraught sphere of the "public"... OR SOMETHING. Like any good art experience, there is a gift shop with souvenirs. There are these bobble heads.

And so, the really important thing about the Rob Ford bobbleheads is, that I didn't get one.

This is the greatest miscarriage of wobbly-headed justice since I missed out on a "Marty the Marmot" bobblehad giveaway in Victoria, BC. Now I'll never have a physical memento of the Ford Years, just a bunch of incoherent rantings about NFL TIE REALLY and BIKE LANES GIVE THEM BACK.

But what if I never need a physical memento? What if these years never end, and I'm surrounded by Fordliness forever, in a miasma of Russian Prince? Because I think he might win. By coming out about the crack, then stubbornly moving on, he might just pull it off. It doesn't matter that his critics are justified. The less he engages, the more shrill they'll sound. And then he can talk and talk about how much money he's saved as our mayor. The fuzzy truth of that strong claim doesn't really matter. He's said it enough times, that people have started to believe him. "If he smokes and saves me money, I'll vote for him — " one of my fellow citizens recently said, "even if he's a bum."

It's that kind of high quality reasoning that makes me think Rob Ford's bobbleheaded persona could take on the man himself in 2014. Not only will it "save" at least as much money, but voters will love its positive, can-do attitude! That Bobbie Robbie just never stops nodding.

Sex and the Megacity: Trudeau and Tru-Don't

Isn't your favourite cultural product from the late 90s/early 00's Sex and the City? No? Well shut up, hater. You're probably a Miranda. I, however, am a Fast Walking Background Extra #3. Fortunately, Justin Trudeau's recent  Toronto event - where, for $250, I could meet the man glowingly described as "Dreamier than Mulchair" and "Not Michael Ignatieff" by Canadians everywhere - meant I could finally live out my SATC fantasies. Get ready for...

Sex and the Megacity: Trudeau and Tru-Don't

by Carrie Bloorshaw

When you live in a cracked-out amalgamated metropolis like Toronto, you get your kicks where you can. Maybe you lick the pole on the Spadina streetcar.

Maybe you smoke some actual crack.

Or maybe you try and get on the first wagon headed out of town, to a new city where everything closes at five, dignity matters, and nobody remembers the time you tried to climb the outside of Sneaky Dee's, naked.

I was thinking a move to Ottawa was in order, and I didn't want to do it on the back of a backbencher. I was shooting for Mr. Big Deal - Justin Trudeau himself.

With my eyes on the parliamentary prize, I accepted Justin Trudeau's invitation for a ladies' night. I would get to know him - really know him - in a few hours. Plus there would be booze. A chance to be intimate in all the right ways with our next prime minister, and knock back a few glasses of cab sauv before throwing it all back up in a cab cab's back seat? Madam Speaker, I move to adjourn... to the venue!

I had  maxed out my credit card to buy the right shade of Liberal Red dress. I wanted the Mr. Big of Canadian politics - big name, big hair, big ideas - to notice yours truly. And notice he did.

It was about the time of my sixth Lib-tini of the night. They tasted suspiciously like regular cosmopolitans with little paper Liberal flags stuck in them, but I didn't even want to know what a Paul Martin-i was. It looked old, and sad, and people kept on ordering other drinks after they had one.

And then - there he was. He cut across the room like Stephen Harper cutting through democratic process in order to prorogue parliament. I held myself up with the back of a chair.

"Hello there," Mr. Big Deal said. "What's your favourite virtue?"

Looking into his earnest, desperate eyes, I couldn't help but wonder - What are the dating procedures when the House of Commons Procedure and Practice just won't do?

"Why, Justin" I purred, falling off of the chair and on to the Liberal party leader, "shouldn't you be asking me what my favourite VICE is??"

I shoved another mini-quiche into my mouth.

"Because it's gluttony. Gluttony, and SEX!"

However, Mr. Big Deal was more acrobatic than he looked. Like Jean Chrétien proving a proof, he wriggled out of my grasp.

As I stood up, the Lib-tini caucus in my stomach started to behave in a very unparliamentary manner. Where had it all gone wrong? Why wasn't I one of Justin Trudeau's real life heroes? Was it because he was married, or did he know I had secretly voted NDP last time because Jack Layton's mustache reminded me of my daddy issues?

Only one thing could save this night, and it didn't come from a bottle. I pulled out my cellphone and dialed the number I kept under "300 Pounds of Fun."

"Hello, Rob," I said, "are you up for meeting one of your constituents tonight?"

Well, Ottawa might have been nice for a term. But I can never resign from you, Toronto. And the best part is, you can't make me, either!

Cage Fight of Awful: Rob Ford v. Ezra Levant

The worst person in Canada right now, ignoring the usual criminal element, might be either Rob Ford or Ezra Levant. I know that sounds ideological, but hold up. It's a battle between a quivering mass of privileged resentment and an oily mound of an attention hound, so I think this crosses party lines. Rob Ford has an international profile, earning "Worst Person in the World" laurels from Keith Olbermann last week. But a Ford scandal only breaks every fortnight or so, while Ezra Levant appears on SunTV every single weekday.

Although Levant has the (dis)advantage when it comes to exposure, Ford has all the real political clout. Levant might have more if SunTV's production values ever surpass those of a local cable access channel, and he finds a legion of followers. But right now, with that lighting, viewers could be forgiven for turning on The Source and thinking they've caught My View with Peter Etril Snyder on channel 20 instead. Ford carries the chain of mayor and he's using it to batter Toronto. He's set its urban planning back thirty years, abandoned useful transit plans and removed bike lanes instead of adding more. He almost succeeded in saddling Toronto with a monorail/megamall development, and believes his football coaching is more important than his actual mayoral obligations. He doesn't just make people nostalgic for David Miller. He makes them mourn for the days of Mel Lastman.

And yet, even while so genuinely awful, Rob Ford is also more genuine than Ezra Levant. As much as I disagree with his politics and personal conduct, at least it seems like he believes in them. Levant is just what the SunTV's website describes him as, in its little blurb on The Source: a "provocateur." Publishing those Danish Muhammad cartoons in the Western Standard, the dubious achievement that's been front and center on his CV for a while, wasn't a great gesture for free speech. It wasn't even the expected act of an Islamophobe. Levant probably doesn't hate Muslims, as long as they don't raise his taxes, don't ask for arts grants, and keep off his damn lawn, please. But it wasn't free speech. It was just the keening sound of one huckster squawking for attention. And that makes Ezra Levant the worst- or at least the most annoying- person in Canada.

Why I Quit on this Kai Nagata Article, Or: Honey, Press Delete Sometimes

Hey, remember Kai Nagata? He wrote that article about why he quit his CTV gig, which got sent around to most of Canada, pissing off a few, being shared by many more, and likely read in its entirety by none. This is because Kai, who I am sure is an articulate, well-dressed young man in person, gets a bit windy when place in front of the keyboard.

His "Why I Quit My Job" post comes in at just over 3,000 words, about twice the length of the average New York Times news article. My brain has interpreted this as a sign to give Nagata's words as much weight as anything I've read lately about the Euro zone crisis or Occupy Wall Street. Although, full disclosure: both Nagata's quarterlife crisis and world events take up a fraction of my mental real estate when compared to pictures and/or videos of corgis. Arf.
Since that went viral, Kai got himself hired by The Tyee, an independent lefty-ish online magazine based out of B.C. And, as The Tyee likely mandates from all of its columnists, he grew out the contractual beard. But, long in facial hair as Kai may now be, he is even longer in print. And "Why Harper Wants You to Know that He Loves Hockey", his most recent article, is a few hundred words longer than his most famous post.

But maybe Kai Nagata is just stretching out his rhetorical muscles online, in preparation for lecturing us all through the medium of CPAC. In short: he wants to be the prime minister. The first third of the article is Kai comparing himself to Harper on the three things Harper is supposed to love most- hockey, the military, and Tim Horton's- and then detailing how he wins each contest. Harper says he loves hockey? Well, Kai Nagata played hockey with a ragtag band of scrappy Vancouver kids so ethnically diverse CBC is probably casting for a commercial right now. Harper loves the military? Well, Kai was actually in the army... reserves. Harper loves himself some Timmy's? Well, Kai HAS A TIM HORTON'S TRAVEL MUG. Suck it, creepy lips Steve!! Something's riding shotgun in the cup holder of Kai's car, and it's a little something called AUTHENTICITY.
It was a competition that Harper was bound to fail, because Stephen Harper... is a robot*. And robots cannot truly be said to understand the human emotion we call "love", even when we're talking about a sweet, sweet double-double. But still, I don't think winning these games makes Nagata a better Prime Minister, or even a better Canadian. Nagata is not writing about how a politician fails to live up to the standards of being a useful public servant, but instead on how they're failing to be the author, and by the end it starts reading like so much literature for a campaign that's only happening inside the writer's mind.

And it's also, sadly, a way of letting the other side win, by letting them set the terms of the debate. You might eat more Timbits than Harper (or care more for immigrants than Jason Kenney, or like Dan Mangan more genuinely than James Moore, etc. etc.), you might have won that battle, but it's a pretty hollow victory when you're still yelling their talking points than talking about what really matters.

But my irritation at the structure of Kai Nagata's piece has obscured, for me and for this post, the important observations he makes about the message Harper is selling, and the techniques he's using in the process. However, it's hard to find them under the heaps of Naga-trivia. So, some suggestions to The Tyee: hire an editor, put Kai on a 1,500 word limit and tell him to talk about himself less and listen more. And maybe shaving that beard would be a good idea too.

*Note: I do not think that Stephen Harper is a robot, just a truly regrettable prime minister.

Music, Movies and Zombies

I've been obsessed with this song, Mes Bottes De Sept Lieues by Le Husky for the past week, so I'm linking to it here as a soundtrack for the following links. Have fun and learn something.

1. Ugh, Canada: The saplings around the site of the G20 conference might be torn up. Why? Because "The trees could be ripped out of the ground by demonstrators 'and then you’ve got a huge bar,' said Constable Wendy Drummond, a spokeswoman for the Integrated Security Unit." Yes, a scrawny, vegan anti-globalization protestor will tear one up from the ground and start flinging it around like a bo staff, roots and all. Because such protesters fucking hate tress. And have the strength of the Hulk.

2. Remember how, a week ago, I wrote about The Small Back Room and its wacky alky scene? Well, it seems that The Onion's AV Club is more positively inclined. You can watch the whole thing there and judge for yourself.

3. Should we kill the label of America's Sweetheart? Alyssa Rosenberg thinks so. I'm not totally convinced, except by her argument that Ms Congeniality 2 sucks. Seems like this is almost a case of hating the player and not the game to me.

4. From Tiger Beatdown: Is splicing horror elements into classic literature remixing or just a ripoff? And what are the gender politics of all this? I think Garland Grey comes on a little strong, but at first I thought at least the fact that all the works getting injected with zombies, sea monsters, vampires and the like are written by women was a point worth investigating. Then I found this: Android Karenina. Well then.

Greed vs. Need

My foray into church-going was brief and forced, and I can remember little but the fact that powdered peach drink is one of the most repulsive substances yet recorded. Morally, it left me a little unfinished. Now I've got a guilt complex, but none of the convenient religiously-related means of expiating it, from prayer to confession.

As a recent example, the devastating earthquake in Haiti has sent me probing, because it coincided with my need for new running shoes. How much should I give, when there's a crisis of such a magnitude? I felt like I couldn't give less than the cost of the pair of shoes. If I did, I would be conceiving of people's lives in fractions of shoes, which seemed heartless, especially when those could have been stitched together at one of the free trade zones in Haiti*. Those allowed companies to profit from the availability of cheap labour, without doing anything to strengthen the country's infrastructure or government. The weakness of both has only worsened the effect of the earthquake.

On the other hand, I couldn't afford both, at least not without having a dull, rather frugal month. And I did need new running shoes, although I could have lived with the many other shoes I own, many of which cost the equivalent of several pairs of the shoes under consideration. Although I am now an atheist, I briefly considered the possibility of an afterlife. What would be my defense if I was brought before some kind of court, and told to account for how I decided the piles of fashionable impracticality on the one side balanced out the abject human suffering on the other? I had to admit that, on many levels, I was not a righteous woman.

Once I established that, I bought the shoes. Then I did what many people have done when they felt they could no longer trust some deity to be perfectly objective. I decided to have faith in chance, so I flipped a coin. Heads, I would donate all of the money I had spent on shoes and tails, half of it. I'll let you guess where it landed.

If you would like to donate money to Haiti Earthquake Relief without this kind of stress, please check out one of the organizations on this list. You can take a measure of the devastation here, or listen to our Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean's, heartbreaking response here.

*Turns out it was a likely bet that my shoes were manufactured in China. Also, garments are usually produced in those free trade zones, but still.

Go, Go Sonia

Oy. Those Sotomayor hearings. Sometimes I forget how prevalent racism still is, and then I see a Latina woman being questioned on whether her identity will influence her decisions on the bench. I don't remember anyone asking John G. Roberts how his blinding whiteness would affect his rulings, y'know.

When I haven't been reading snippets of that coverage (translation: making myself livid with rage) I've been working on a special writing project and checking out Dead Snow at FantAsia with friends. And feeling oddly tired. I hope I'm not coming down with something, because I have to volunteer at a music festival this weekend and camp outside. God knows I don't need to add illness-induced crabbiness to my usual post-sleeping bag bitching. Time to start chain drinking the Neo Citran just as a prevantative measure.

Bonne St.Jean/ Hooray for Baptist Day!: A Quasi Rant.

One of the many, many benefits about living in Quebec is the existence of the St. Jean Baptiste holiday, aka today. Maybe I just like it so much because, as an ex-Ontarian, I tend to forget about it until it's actually upon me, and an unexpected holiday in the middle of the week feels like manna from heaven. Or maybe because it inevitably leads to some kind of franco vs. anglo dramz that entertains.

This year was the English band controversy. If you're not reading this in Quebec, you've probably missed the whole dumb ting, so here's the rundown. A couple of bands slated to play at one of the many SJB shows were English, which meant they sang in English (gasp!) and so were summarily disinvited. This, of course, led to a minor media kerfuffle which led to them being reinstated.

Now, I did see Lake of Stew when they opened for the Sadies and John Doe, and I liked them fine. For the first song. And then I realized that I was in for a whole set of bluegrass songs about NDG, which I really thought only had enough material for half a bottle of Jack Daniel's and maybe a quarter of a bluegrass song, but no matter. So I wasn't particularly invested in seeing their performance as a victory for anglo rights or anything.

But I did think this whole controversy was frigging stupid. Nations like Canada or Quebec are made up piecemeal of a bunch of different cultures and grafted onto the boneyard of colonialism. Trying to govern them so they're monolithic and legislate them so they're monolingual (or at best, bilingual), is a dangerous mix of ignorance and reactionary tribalism. And kind of a losing bid anyway.

So my solution for this bullshit next year is to have a St. Jean Baptiste's day concert where everyone sings in any language but French or English. Portuguese, Yiddish, Swahili, Arabic, Italian, Ukrainian, whatever. Go nuts. It's not going to save the world, or even accomplish much in the way of moving past identity politics. But hopefully it will scramble the brains of folks like the Association Culturel Louis-Hébert so much they won't be able to mount an effective response, and Quebec news can get back to getting worked up over road conditions.

Obscure File #132x: Troo Canadian Confessions

I really can't muster up enthusiasm for Canadian politics. I mean, God knows I've tried. And I think I've identified my problem. I was chatting with a friend the other day, when the conversation went from Francophone zombie movies we would make, to Canadian politics (as is the logical progression for shiftless university graduates) and I made this point:
"Harper is a douche, Ignatieff is smug, and Layton has a mustache."
So, how do I fix this, ladies and gentlemen and others? Other then sending Layton a razor and some shaving cream?