FRIDAY MORNING, COMING DOWN

 

Issue Two of my new job as head of production is heading into the home stretch. Everything seems OK, but as this is the first time I have done this by myself, I won’t know for certain until late tomorrow. Quitting time for the old production regime was about 2 a.m. Saturday. That would be nice.

 

I have had several messages from readers urging me to continue this blog, which makes me ashamed of my William B. Williams-like outburst of last week. In my defence, I was exhausted—tired and emotional, one might say. (In the literal sense, not the Private Eye sense.) For those that care about such things—and in furtherance of my policy of pitiless self-revelation—my rolling daily average of visitors is back up to 138—although I suspect that will fall again if I continue to bore my foreign readers with lengthy analyses of Canadian politics.

Kevin Michael Grace, 11.55 p.m., January 15, 2003 [Link]

THE WRONG VENUE, PART 2

 

(Part 1)

 

It is always a mistake to underestimate the importance of boredom in motivating change. Preston Manning euthanized the Reform Party because it came to bore him. The media backed Stockwell Day to replace Manning as leader of the Canadian Alliance party because Manning had come to bore them. (Canadian Alliance members replaced Manning with Day for a different reason; they were angry Manning had euthanized Reform.) And Stephen Harper replaced Day because the media decided Day’s catastrophic incompetence was no longer amusing—it had come to bore them.

 

I was one of the bored. Stockwell Day’s leadership began to unravel on November 9, 2000, when he held up a handmade sign reading "No 2-tier health care" during the leaders debate. This was not merely stupid—it was the sort of thing a child would do. Alliance support in Ontario collapsed, and the party elected only two MPs there, despite the most strenuous effort. After that, it was one disaster after another for Day.

 

It should have been obvious that Day was never suited to be the leader of any party—federal or provincial. He had for years demonstrated a fatal deficiency in both intelligence and judgment. (And in my own interviews with him, he has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of Canadian history.)

 

So how did he rise to such prominence, first in Alberta and then nationally? In Alberta, because Alberta is a one-party state. About one-third of the voters are yellow-dog Tories. This is not exactly conducive to stocking a cabinet pool. I have interviewed many members of Ralph Klein’s cabinet, and more than I care to remember were simply embarrassing. Not by historical standards, you understand, but by latter-day debased standards. Stockwell Day simply stuck around long enough to become Treasurer (i.e., finance minister). He distinguished himself only in his ability to take credit for the (genuine) achievements of his colleagues Jim Dinning (in reforming the budget process) and Mike Cardinal (in reforming welfare). And by being a demagogue and shifty with it.

 

Day came to prominence nationally because many that should have known better boosted him. To my eternal shame, I was one of them, even if my role was relatively minor. Day’s minders positioned him as the tribune of the social conservatives. During a speech early in the Alliance leadership campaign, he spoke of Richard John Neuhaus and the "naked public square." He even invoked my great hero Hilaire Belloc. (It didn’t hurt that this speech demonstrated a close acquaintance with a recent column of mine.) I knew who had written the speech, and it wasn’t Day. No matter, I thought. Day may not be that smart, but he is surrounded by smart people. (This is known as the George W. Bush Syndrome, not that I believe Bush is anywhere near as dim as Stockwell Day.)

 

It’s not all beer and skittles carping from the outside, you know. There is a terrible temptation among the carping class to be positive, to be part of the solution, not part of the problem—even when the solution is not to hand. So it was with Day. Me and many of my colleagues found ourselves backing Day, even though we had experienced him at first hand in Alberta.

 

It is not a pleasant experience to allow oneself to be duped and then to have the evidence repeatedly dangled in front of one’s nose. Day’s election campaign was a fiasco, but it need not have finished him. After all, he had increased Reform/Alliance votes by 7% and seats by six. Instead, Day set about proving he was not fit to be president of the local Rotary Club chapter, let alone a national party leader. (No offence to the Rotary Club intended.)

 

I won’t bore you with a catalog of Day’s subsequent misjudgments and inanities. Suffice to say that by the spring of 2001, it had become obvious that if Day did not leave the year-old Canadian Alliance would die. My professional dilemma was somewhat more acute. I was the chief political correspondent for a magazine that specialized in coverage of the Canadian Alliance. (And is rightfully regarded as the godfather of the Reform Party.) Every issue found me writing a variation on this headline: "Day screws up again but remains in power for now." This was not good for me but was especially not good for my readers.

 

Which brings us to Stephen Harper. (At last!) It was clear that for the Alliance to survive it needed not merely a new leader but a leader with certain qualities. He had to be a man with a proven track record in federal politics. He had to be intelligent and thoughtful. He had to be amenable to the social conservatives. He had to be from Alberta or British Columbia (the Reform/Alliance heartland). Above all, he had to be free of buffoonery.

 

Stephen Harper fit the bill in every respect. I probably did not initiate the "Harper for Alliance leader" media campaign, but no one boosted it more avidly or often. My magazine is influential among Alliance members, and I don’t think it is idle boasting to claim that our pro-Harper and anti-Day tilt during the 2002 campaign was a significant factor in the final result. I know that Day’s campaign team certainly thought so. I was in the hall in Calgary when Harper’s first-ballot victory was announced and it would not be an exaggeration to say that many of them looked at me with murder in their eyes.

 

Harper moved quickly and efficiently to save the Alliance. He lured back the caucus members that had fled the caucus and cleverly abandoned the two no-hopers among the dissidents. He crushed Ezra Levant, the Alliance tumler who stood between Harper and a seat in his hometown of Calgary. He cleaned out the Manningites backstabbers from the party apparatus. He introduced stability. With the result that the Alliance is no longer sinking—it is merely dead in the water.

 

I am hardly the only journalist to have got the impression that Stephen Harper doesn’t like his new job very much. After campaigning against a merger with the federal Conservatives, Harper on several occasions proposed a merger with that same party. He seemed strangely eager that former Ontario premier Mike Harris run for the federal Conservative leadership. And Harris has demanded a merger as a precondition for any leadership bid. As we have seen, most politicians regard power as a terrier regards a bone. Harper, on the other hand, has seemed strangely indifferent. Could it be that only a sense of duty led to Harper’s re-entry into federal politics? (There was also the Jack Kemp Syndrome. Harper had earlier resisted entreaties to run for the federal Conservative and Alliance leaderships. If he had resisted again in 2002, he might have been pegged as a coward.)

 

The rise of the Reform Party in the late 1980s was a response to the failure of Alberta separatism. Several of its early MPs had been outright separatists but had been persuaded by Preston Manning to give federal politics another chance. After Manning’s betrayal of Reform and the failure of the Alliance in the 2000 election—a failure to some extent precipitated by a savage Liberal campaign against the West in general and Alberta in particular—many Reformers again abandoned federal politics and turned their gazes homeward.

 

Stephen Harper abandoned federal politics in 1997. He declined to run for re-election as an MP after falling out with Preston Manning. With his writing partner, University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan (now Harper’s chief of staff)—another early Reformer who had fallen out with Manning—he examined various options of political reform. Harper then became president of the National Citizens Coalition, a right-wing lobby group.

 

The open hatred of Alberta manifested by the Liberals in the 2000 election had a profound effect on Harper. I know because he told me so. When I interviewed him shortly after the election, I asked him why he thought Prime Minister Chretien would risk alienating half the country for short-term political advantage. His response was revealing:

 

I think that Chretien just doesn’t care. You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society.

 

This sounded a lot like quasi-separatism—or Alberta nationalism. Harper had a surprise in store for us. On January 24, 2001, he (and Flanagan and four others) sent an open letter to Premier Ralph Klein. It advocated an aggressive program to protect Alberta from Ottawa:

 

It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.

 

In rereading my cover story on the "Alberta Agenda" letter, I am struck by Harper’s remarkable prescience:

 

We believe it is not enough to respond only with protests. If the government in Ottawa concludes that Alberta is a soft target, we will be subjected to much worse than dishonest television ads. The prime minister has already signalled as much by announcing his so-called "tough love'' campaign for the West…

 

As economic slowdown, and perhaps even recession, threatens North America, the government in Ottawa will be tempted to take advantage of Alberta's prosperity, to redistribute income from Alberta to residents of other provinces in order to keep itself in power.

 

Harper and Flanagan had decided federal politics was a mug’s game. Harper:

 

Confederation is not about sharing with this part of the country; Confederation is about taking. If it was necessary for the flow to go the other way, the system would break down.

 

Flanagan:

 

I've increasingly become aware that the structure of Confederation has become a kleptocracy.

 

Flanagan was candid in his assessment of the Canadian Alliance:

 

The [open letter] represents a realistic appraisal of the Alliance's chances of coming to power. I don't think it represents loss of support for the Alliance; I certainly continue to support it. But you'd have to be a moron not to see that the chances of the Alliance winning soon are not very great. But this isn't really abandoning federal politics; it's opening another front.

 

At the time, I suggested that Ottawa was considering "a new National Energy Program" for Alberta. (The first NEP in the 1980s broke Alberta financially and spiritually.) This was considered outlandish. Not two years later, of course, Chretien ratified NEP2; it is called the Kyoto Protocol.

 

Among Western separatists and nationalists, the Reform/Alliance experiment is often spoken of as "a lost decade." Looking back at what Harper and the Gang of Six knew on January 24, 2001, it becomes obvious why Harper does not seem so happy in his new job. He is in the wrong venue; he knows it; and his diversion into federal politics has meant two lost years for Alberta. Indications were that Harper and his allies were planning a new Alberta political organization, one that could easily have become a new political party to threaten provincial Tory hegemony.

 

Harper thought then that Ralph Klein was not the man to protect Alberta against Ottawa. He has been proved right but can do nothing about it now. As leader of an ostensibly federal party, he cannot be seen to unduly favour Alberta, even as his homeland faces a catastrophe. Indeed, if Harper is still Alliance leader come the next federal election, the "Alberta Agenda" letter will be used against him and his party like a truncheon. Meanwhile, Albertan rage against Ottawa is so great that an "Alberta First" party with a respectable leader would likely sweep the Tories from power in the next provincial election.

 

Harper could still be that leader. Late last year, a new political party was formed in Alberta. It is called the Alberta Alliance and led by Randy Thorsteinson, former leader of the Social Credit Party. Thorsteinson is a decent enough fellow, but he is not a Tory-killer. But Thorsteinson is not what is interesting here. What is interesting is that the federal Alliance has made it known it has no objection to the provincial use of the word "Alliance." This is direct contradiction to all Reform/Alliance history.

 

The old Reform/Alliance did not allow provincial parties. It turned a cold shoulder (to put it mildly) to B.C. Reform (which secured the name before Preston Manning could do anything about it), a party that once had a serious, respected leader and a decent shot at taking power. The old Reform/Alliance would have moved heaven and earth to prevent the existence of an Alberta party with the name "Alliance" in it.

 

Stephen Harper has done none of this. He has even allowed Thorsteinson to state publicly that the Alberta Alliance enjoys a friendly relationship with the Canadian Alliance and that federal members are active in it. Could this be merely a new latitudinarianism? Perhaps. But is also possible that Thorsteinson is keeping a seat warm for Harper. 

 

As I have demonstrated, the Canadian Alliance has little hope of coming to power and, in any event, Stephen Harper lacks the skills and issues to be a successful federal party leader. Stephen Harper as leader of the Alberta Alliance would be something else entirely. I’ve had my differences with Harper, but I’m sure of this—he would fight like a terrier to prevent Ottawa from raping Alberta again. And, if necessary, he would take Alberta out of Canada.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 1.06 a.m., January 15, 2003 [Link]

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

 

Kathy Shaidle writes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: "Nobody really understands this ponderous mess." There are two criticisms here: that the film is ponderous and that it cannot be understood. The first criticism is a matter of taste, I suppose. As for the second, does anyone understand Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony?

 

One of the legends of 2001’s disastrous premiere is of a bemused Rock Hudson demanding, "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'" How about this, then: 2001 is a non-linear contemplation of the mystery of human existence. It is about the terror of the silence of infinite space. It is about the tragic insufficiency of the bureaucratic response to the cosmos. It is about the limits of human understanding. 2001 is about many things.

 

As I have written elsewhere:

 

Kubrick was a fabulous technician and a technician of the fabulous, but he was foremost an artist. Like Richard Wagner, he aspired to the conception of what the composer called Gesamtkunstwerk, the unity of all the arts in subservience to a greater whole.

 

The greater whole Kubrick sought was transcendence. In his own words:

 

Movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension.

 

2001 is best appreciated as a tone poem. It has a program, certainly, but it would be pointless to attempt to reduce it to the program. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony is about Napoleon, but everyone understands that it is about more than "the memory of a great man." Otherwise, why would we need the music?

 

The message of Kubrick’s films could be reduced to three words: Life is cruel. A banal sentiment. It also happens to be true, however, and Kubrick’s greatness resides in his ability to communicate this banality in ways that are shocking, comic, wondrous and dreadful.

2001 is so well known that most of its images have entered the collective unconscious. But I remember the first time I saw the lip-reading scene: shocking, comic, wondrous and dreadful all at once. Like a single entity, the audience gasped. This was the second time the audience had gasped; the first was when the ape’s bone was hurled into the sky…tumbled, tumbled, tumbled for an almost agonizing length of time…and was transformed into a space station. From prehistory to the future; evolution expressed in a single cut; no words, just transcendence.

 

Old Catholic joke: an eminent theologian gives a lecture on the Trinity. He gets up from his chair, walks to the podium and declares, "It is a mystery." He leaves the podium and returns to his chair.

 

The defence rests.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.35 a.m., January 13, 2003 [Link]

THE WRONG VENUE, PART 1

 

Did Stephen Harper make a mistake in running for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party? Not in the most obvious sense: he won and is now the leader of the Official Opposition. But what did he hope to achieve? Saving the Alliance from extinction? He has accomplished this. Becoming Prime Minister? That does not seem likely.

 

Let’s look at the map. There are 301 seats in the House of Commons in five federal political regions--four major, one minor:

 

The West (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba): 88 seats.
Ontario: 103 seats.
Quebec: 75 seats.
The Atlantic Provinces: 32 seats.
The North: 3 seats.

 

There is only one Canadian party that has significant support in all five regions. The Liberal Party. The Alliance is not a national party. It elected 66 MPs in the 2000 election, and took 64 of the 88 seats from the West. It elected two MPs in Ontario and none in Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

 

Alliance support in Quebec and Atlantic Canada is abysmal (the same was true of the Canadian Alliance’s predecessor, the Reform Party). It cannot reasonably hope to win a single seat in either region in the next election.

 

Stephen Harper is explicitly anti-nationalist and was the godfather of the Clarity Act. This kills any hope of winning Francophone votes, 80% of the Quebec population. The remaining 20%, Anglophones (English-speaking) and Allophones (non-English-speaking immigrants), are liberal and multiculturalist. The Alliance has even less hope among these voters.

Atlantic Canada would die without the massive transfers it receives from Alberta and Ontario. It will never vote Alliance, particularly after Harper went to Halifax last year and condemned the region’s "defeatist attitude."

 

Seventy-five plus 32 equals 107. Take that away from 301 and you have 194. (There will be 305 seats in the next election, but the regional composition will be almost identical. B.C. and Ontario will each gain two seats. Quebec and Atlantic Canada are constitutionally guaranteed seats in considerable excess of their populations.)

 

The Alliance has nearly topped out in the West. Because of Third World immigration, the Liberals are guaranteed a base of about 10 seats here. In addition, the Reform/Alliance in the last two elections spent 50% of their resources in Ontario. Western seats were perforce left on the table. I don’t expect this to change the next time around. So 75 is the maximum seat count the Alliance can expect in the West, and this is generous.

 

Assuming 75 Alliance seats in the West, the Alliance would still need 76 elsewhere to form a majority government. As we have seen, these seats would have to come from Ontario. Actually, they would have to come from 59 Ontario ridings. Metro Toronto is 44 ridings, and Metro Toronto will be majority non-white by 2010. (The City of Toronto is majority non-white already.) The Alliance took 14% of the non-European origin vote in the 2000 election—as against 25.5% nationally—the Liberals took 72%. This despite years of revolting multicultural sucking up by leaders Preston Manning and Stockwell Day.

 

So a majority government is out of the question. What about a minority government? This would still require a breakthrough in Ontario, and all indications are that Ontario has already passed judgment on the Alliance. Recent polls give the Alliance just over 12% there, the Liberals over 50. If these numbers hold steady into the next election, the Liberals will win just about every seat in Ontario—just as they did in 1993, 1997 and 2000.

 

And there is no reason to suspect Liberal support in Ontario will not hold steady. In his already famous December 9 National Post op-ed piece, Michael Bliss, University of Toronto historian, paragon of Middle Canadian respectability, expressed despondency about Canada’s future. I can’t provide a link, as none exists, but his column can be boiled down into six words: "We’re doomed! Doomed, I tells ya!" Unless,

 

If you want to see a real change of government in Canada in your lifetime, you're going to have to screw up your courage, swallow your reservations and vote for the Alliance in the next election. If you're not ready to do that, then you might as well stop gobbling and grumbling as the Liberals carve up you, your family and your country. You are getting and will get the government you deserve.

 

Pre-Jeremiad, Prof. Bliss did not stop to ask himself why Ontarians had given that ass-clown Jean Chretien almost every seat in three consecutive elections. It’s not as if they didn’t have the measure of the man. They knew he was a national embarrassment---a national disgrace, actually—and voted for him anyway. Three times. Why does Prof. Bliss think Ontarians are going to change their minds now? Scandals, gross incompetence, malaise? Don’t matter. The Chretien government is so corrupt comparisons to previous Canadian governments are no longer useful. The "billion-dollar boondoggle" didn’t make any difference. The "Groupe Grope" scandals, in which millions of dollars were wheeled out federal department doors and then deposited in the bank accounts of Liberal supporters, didn’t make any difference. Billion-dollar boondoggle 2, the gun registry scandal, hasn’t made any difference. The Ipsos-Reid poll that gave the Liberals 41% nationally and over 50% in Ontario was taken after Boondoggle 2 came to light.

 

Look, if Jean Chretien pranced around the precincts of the House of Commons with a T-shirt pulled over his head yelling, "I am the great Cornholio! I need t.p. for my bunghole!"—it still wouldn’t make any difference. Liberals voters would say, "That Paul Martin will fix everything." Look, I’m not certain Jean Chretien as Bevis would make any difference even if he somehow contrived to lead the Liberals into the next election. This is the same guy, remember, who marched across a square in Hull, Quebec, to strangle a protestor who had ticked him off. And nothing happened! It didn’t make any difference!

 

What might make a difference, might even win support in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, is if Stephen Harper were to make "Doomed, I tells ya!" the theme of his campaign. If he polarized the electorate, gave Easterners reasons to support the pig in a poke that is the Alliance. Everything I hear, however, tells me that Harper believes that the Alliance can become the government on the Buggin’s turn principle—voters will eventually become so disgusted with Liberal arrogance and sleaze they will turn to us. Hey, it worked for the Conservatives in 1957 and 1984. (And would you want to belong to a political party that counts on being elected every quarter-century or so?)

 

There are two fatal problems with this principle. 1. The Alliance is not the Tories. It is not an institutional alternative to the Liberals. It has never been elected to anything anywhere: not nationally, not provincially. 2. Stephen Harper is not John Diefenbaker and he is not Brian Mulroney. They were both politicians and good at it, for a decade or so anyway. Harper is not a politician; he gives the impression of hating politics. Worse than that, Harper, a saturnine figure, gives the impression of not liking people very much.

 

Stephen Harper reminds me of Richard Nixon, another saturnine figure. Nixon, however, had issues. He was a polarizer. Harper, like his mentor Preston Manning, is a unifier. Canada, however, already has a unifying party—even if only a unifier of parasites—the Liberal Party. I have it on excellent authority that Harper has dismissed out of hand the two great polarizing issues that could bring him success: immigration and Native Indians. The only issue that Harper has expressed any passion about is out-warmongering the Bush administration on the invasion of Iraq. There is no evidence the Canadian people are hell-bent on invading Iraq. Rather the opposite, I would say. The Liberal position on Iraq has been pitch-perfect. Or it was until Defence Minister John McCallum’s bizarre intervention of earlier this week. Tony Blair bugs out, and Canada bugs in? Either McCallum has fallen off the wagon, or alcohol was the only thing fuelling whatever acumen he had.

 

Stephen Harper is the wrong man in the wrong job. But there was and is an alternate role for him, one for which he is perfectly suited.

 

(To be continued.)

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 10.41 p.m., January 10, 2003 [Link]

A SHORT, DESPAIRING POST

 

Back in Victoria. Wrote half a long post on the plane, but I'm not posting it today, as I can't really see the monitor. I arrived 90 minutes late in Victoria and arrived back home 10 minutes ago, without my luggage, which has been lost--sorry, "misplaced"-- by WestJet. So I don't have any contact lens solution or my glasses or electric toothbrush or electric razor or any of my toiletries. Oh, and my tape recorder and my only decent suit.

 

I suppose that under the eye of eternity all this is trivial. Yes, of course it is, but it doesn't seem like it now. I am furious, which will give way to despair soon enough. I trust that tomorrow will be a better day. I could use a decent day, considering that the last 50 or so have been utterly miserable. But then I remember King Lear: "The worst is not, so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'" My capacity to endure vexation has been stretched to the breaking point. If my luggage does not arrive tomorrow, my capacity for rational behaviour will be pretty much exhausted.

 

I see that I've managed to lose about 30% of my traffic in the last week. For several reasons, I'm beginning to wonder whether I should continue to bother with this.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 11.42 p.m., January 7, 2003 [Link]

A SHORT, BORING POST

 

In Edmonton for a two-day meeting. Is that the most boring sentence ever written or what? Swank factor on the plane coming in was non-existent, I’m afraid, because it turns out my iBook does not have a DVD player at all. It has the software but not the hardware. I was so looking forward to that. I couldn’t even get the CD player to work. I started a blog entry on the plane and was going to finish it this morning at my hotel, but then I remembered—Apples don’t have disk drives, do they? So unless I could plug the iBook into the Net somewhere, my previous work was useless.

 

I am typing this now in the foyer of the Executive Royal Inn on 178th Street. This used to be (I think) the Royal West Edmonton Inn, and the name change has proved mighty confusing to many, especially cabdrivers. When I say the name, they always act as if I’m putting them on. The foyer has a computer with broadband Internet, but Hotmail won’t let me access my POP mail without paying, and I’ve forgotten my Telus account number. So no email for me until Wednesday night. I’ve never seen anyone using this hotel computer. I once wrote an entire CBC commentary on it on deadline and was terrified that a cranky queue would form behind me. I had nothing to worry about.

 

Are there people out there that like business traveling? I find it wearying. Pack for trip. Forget something important. (Internet account number this time.) Taxi to airport. Three double whiskies to prevent me from screaming with terror when I get on the plane. Routine humiliation at security checkpoint. (Now Transport Canada is demanding our jackets, for heaven’s sake.) Plane to Calgary. Switch planes. Plane to Edmonton. Wait for luggage. Taxi to hotel. Repeat in reverse order. I am wilted when I arrived, and it takes me about a day to recover at the end of a trip. Are there really people that do this for a living?

 

My hotel room is good, but like any other hotel room I can remember offhand, there isn’t enough light. Two end-table lamps. One overhead hanging lamp in a shade. Murky. Is this deliberate, to facilitate adultery? I wonder.

 

Now let’s see if I can get this short, boring post up. I’ll have to email it to my son Patrick along with instructions on using FrontPage. Perhaps you’ll never get to see it. If not, you won’t have missed much. I’ll put something better up tomorrow. Promise.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 9.03 p.m., January 6, 2003 [Link]

TWO COMIC GEMS

 

Just off to the airport in a few minutes, but I should have time for a short post. Just watched the Browns blow leads of 24-7 and 33-21 to the Steelers. Browns quarterback Kelly Holcomb was unstoppable until he took a cheap shot to the head. The Steelers took a 15-yard penalty, but afterward, Holcomb’s timing was just the slightest bit off—despite putting up 429 passing yards. Cheating works, I suppose.

 

During the commercials and halftime, I switched over to the Space Channel, which was showing Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. This is a movie I never tire of, primarily because of the outstanding performance of William Sadler as Death. Totally bald, white pancake makeup, black cloak, scythe and a Swedish accent. The Seventh Seal played for laughs. Bill and Ted challenge Death to a contest to win back their lives. Not chess, but Battleship and Twister. Death loses. Ted compliments him on his play in Twister, notwithstanding his "totally heavy death robes." Death: "Don’t patronize me." Bill to Ted: "Don’t fear the reaper."

 

Sadler’s whiny exasperation is pitch-perfect. When Bill and Ted compliment the Martian Station for his totally excellent construction of the "good robots usses," Death needs to be complimented too: "What about me? I made the wigs; I helped with the shopping." And after Ted makes a joke about Station’s "enormous Martian butt," Death has to be complimented about his too: "Don’t overlook my butt. I work out all the time, and reaping burns a lot of calories." Totally deadpan and with that Swedish accent. A masterful performance. Sadler normally portrays some variation on either Action Man or Marlboro Man, but I’d like to see him in more comedies.

 

This reminds me of another overlooked comic portrayal, John Glover as Daniel Clamp in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Clamp portrays a Donald Trump figure. He’s monomaniacal, of course, but also manages to make him loveable, which is quite a feat. The childlike wonder and joy he brings to his role makes this movie one of my most-watched as well, but then I never need an excuse to watch anything by Joe Dante.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 4.13 p.m., January 5, 2003 [Link]

BACK IN FLESH

 

Hola, amigos. (And amigas! I do love the ladies.) Sorry for going AWOL on you. Circumstances beyond my control. Did you know that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as their word for "working until you can’t stay awake any longer and then working for hours more and then feeling like your head is going to implode but you’re still not finished"? Welcome to my world.

 

In other words, I finished my first week as head of production for my magazine. And I still haven’t gone to sleep. And now I’ve missed today’s NFL playoff games. Bugger. So I said goodbye to Jeremy Lott at midnight last night and then worked for another 12-plus hours. I like doing production, but it’s a job whose quitting time is not self-determined. For instance, when your Internet connection goes out for three hours you just have to lump it. Or try for an hour to get online and then have a nap. And then dream repeatedly about having got out of bed and back to work only to discover I’m still in bed. I’d thought I’d left that behind 20 years ago. The production crisis is only fortnightly; radio deadlines were five times a week. After you’ve been a slave to a daily deadline, anything else is easy. This week was difficult, but it all ended happily. It’s one of those jobs--and radio production is another one like it—where it must end happily, otherwise it’s all over.

 

There’s a real sense of satisfaction in producing a magazine. Any staff writer is only a small part of the finished product, but when the printed magazine is in my hands I can say: "I made this." Actually, Dave Stevens is far more important to the process than I am, but the pride remains. At least until the errors starts leaping off the page and accusing me.

 

Working with Quark XPress after five years, I found to my delight that some of the commands were coming back to me. Quark is an exceedingly powerful program, but I only ever really scratched the surface with it. Now that I’ve got it at home, I intend to become much more competent.

 

I get to write captions again, and I love writing captions. My favourite this time around: a picture of a Canada goose with the cutline, "A demon defecator." Oh, how I laughed. Of course, I would have laughed at anything at that point, but I take my amusement when I can get it.

 

Poor Master Lott was in the throes of food poisoning or something like it when he packed it in. I hope he’s recovered. I fear I may have given a misleading impression of the Wunderkind. I had to go to the bank yesterday to deposit my cheque, and he gave me a ride. I then went to Shopper’s Drug Mart to buy some contact lens solution and saw Jeremy buying some CDs. He showed them to me on the journey home: Our Lady Peace and…Shakira. Any hope I had maintained kept that the Peruvian Pistolero (or wherever the hell she’s from) was purchased for some benighted niece or some such was dashed when he put the thing on my office stereo. Later, at dinner, Jeremy recounted how he had begun university at the age of 15, but I’m afraid the damage was done.

 

I’m leaving Victoria tomorrow for Edmonton: a two-day editorial meeting awaits. Young Master Lott will be there, Dave Stevens, Kevin Steel and Colby Cosh. A regular blogger convention. I’m off to have dinner with my friend Dave Cunningham now. I used to be his boss at BC Report, now he’s communications director for the Premier of British Columbia. Not that I’m jealous or anything; I’d be no good at that. No tact. Then I’m back home to collapse, but will post tomorrow. Just in case anyone was worried. I’ll be posting when I’m in Edmonton too. Just in case anyone was worried. Don’t worry about me. I’m a survivor. There was that one time when I was in country, when I thought that Charlie had my number, but scraped with the help of a phantom Marine. Oh dear, I see I’ve internalized Stan Ridgway’s "Camouflage" as memoir. I really do need some shuteye.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.05 p.m., January 4, 2003 [Link]

LOTT CHRONICLES, DAY Ω

 

There shall be no further Lott Chronicles in this space. My apologies.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.02 a.m., January 3, 2003 [Link]

LOTT CHRONICLES, DAYS 2-3

 

Day 2

 

Young Master Jeremy Lott, who is teaching me my new-old job, arrives at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. I struggle some more with the layout of the magazine. There are some difficulties. Not only have I a laid out the 6-column Kyoto story twice, the 6-column story Kyoto story does not exist. It had been replaced with a 7-column package of three Kyoto-related stories, but I had not known this. But I have some other stories to fill in the space: two that were going to be overset and a 5-column story on the Surrey School Board decision that had been assigned late.

 

The other difficulty is in working with a 12-inch notebook screen. (I had worked with a 20-inch monitor when I did production in Edmonton.) I can view the complete layout only when it is displayed so small it is difficult to actually discern what has been placed where. And every change to the layout involves the use of Photoshop, which is time consuming and wearisome. I’ve never used Photoshop before, so there is much cursing under my breath after I forget to "flatten" the document or forget to return to the default fill-in colour. I suspect it would be much easier to return to the use of pencil, paper and eraser and make changes to the Photoshop document only after the layout is set.

 

There is an interruption around noon. As you will recall, the house cats have been banished from upstairs because of Master Lott’s allergy. One cat in particular is not prepared to tolerate banishment. I hear a piteous wailing from outside. I look out my office window and see, perched precariously in a spindly tree 10 feet off the ground, the cat Traitor. (I won’t tell you why I named the cat thus because the story is too disgusting.) She can’t go any higher because the tree won’t support her weight, and she can’t go back down because she can’t get purchase on the branches.

 

This is not the first time this has happened, and I know the drill. I go to a closet and get a laundry basket. I open the window as far as it will go, and, holding the basket with my left hand, extend it as far as it will go. It once took considerable persuasion to entice Traitor into the basket, but now she knows the drill as well. Once Traitor is in the basket, I lean out the window as far as possible, extend my right arm as far as it will go, grab the cat by the scruff of its neck and pull it toward me, taking care not to drop the basket, drop the cat or yank its claws from its paws as it grips the basket. I then pull the now empty basket into the room, drop it on the floor of my office, get my now free left arm under the cat’s body and remove it to safety. I turn around, and Jeremy has fled the room.

 

I then deposit Traitor downstairs and close the door. Jeremy and I go to the Broadmead Mall. He has some banking to do and then we have lunch. Jeremy recounts how he had started an Internet magazine, the American Partisan, when he was a 20-year-old student at Trinity Western University. It all went pear shaped soon enough, and Jeremy was left with nothing, but it was a considerable achievement nonetheless.

 

I find Jeremy fascinating because his character is so alien to mine. Jeremy got into the media as a mere pup, while I got into it only at the age of 30, after a series of fortuitous (or otherwise) coincidences. Jeremy has always been secure in the foreknowledge of his success, while I am consumed by the foreknowledge of failure. Jeremy is secure in his self-worth, while I am consumed by self-loathing. I suppose I should hate Jeremy, as he is half my age and has already accomplished more than I could ever hope to. But I find myself liking him, as he is completely without side. According to Gore Vidal, "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail"; but there is no sense of this with Jeremy. Life is not a zero-sum game to him; he seems to want others to be as successful as he has been himself. For the moment, he is a child of felicity.

 

We return to my office and work until 5.30. It is New Year’s Eve, and Jeremy is alone in a strange city, so I ask him if he wants to go out. He does. We drive downtown and make a brief stop at his hotel, one of Victoria’s ubiquitous Traveller’s Inns. We set off on foot toward the tourist quarter, and I act as guide: down Douglas Street past City Hall, down Yates to Wharf Street, along the Inner Harbour as far as the Legislature, across the street and through the grounds of the Empress Hotel and then along Government Street to the Garrick’s Head Pub on Bastion Square. He drinks Seagram Ice; I drink Victoria Lager. He has nachos; I have onion rings. After half a dozen drinks for me and four for him, I decide it’s time to go elsewhere.

 

I lead him toward Hugo’s on Courtney Street. I’m fond of this place, as it regularly hosts more beautiful women than I’ve ever seen together in one room. But at 9.00 the queue is already fearsome, so we depart. We walk to Steamers on Yates, but there is some sort of New Year’s bash at $15 a head, so we head off. Jeremy says he wants to see a movie, so we walk to the theatres. It is now 9.35, and I tell him the likelihood of finding anything that hasn’t begun is unlikely. We’re in luck, however; there’s a showing of Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can at 10.15. We have half an hour to kill, so I take him to the bar on the roof of the Strathcona Hotel. We’ve barely sat down before it’s time to leave.

 

The movie is a diverting enough piece of 60s nostalgia, beautifully shot (as always) by Janusz Kaminski. Leonardo DiCaprio is engaging; Christopher Walken is touching; but Tom Hanks seems hidden beneath his cheap suit and Boston accent. Spielberg gets his happy ending, of course, ties up all the loose edges and explains everything and nothing. I suspect that if he filmed Les Misérables, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert would become friends.

 

We leave the theatre at 12.45. We walk towards his hotel, and I keep a lookout for buses. There are none to be seen. Douglas Street is thronged with drunks: some jovial, some insensible, others belligerent. We get to within a block of Jeremy’s hotel when there is a confrontation with three adolescents: two male, one female. They are belligerent. As we pass by, one shouts out that we are "bitches." Other sexual insults follow us down the street. I then hear the chief belligerent shouting, "You bitches are fingering me?!" I say to Jeremy, "You didn’t finger them, did you?" He confesses he did.

 

I am somewhat disappointed with young Jeremy. Earlier, as we had walked the other direction down Douglas, I had recounted to him the horrifying tale of Courtney Walls, the 33-year-old civil servant who had unwisely got into a confrontation with a 21-year-old punk outside a KFC in 1997. Walls had dispatched the punk and kept on toward his office. The punk got a carving knife from one of his minions and caught up with Walls in front of the Blenz coffee shop. He stabbed him in chest, and Walls bled to death.

 

Walls had been murdered in the middle of the afternoon. It was now after 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The belligerent adolescent was now moving sharpish in our direction, abusing us obscenely. He is on top of us just before we reach the hotel. He screams directly into Jeremy’s face, and I ball my hands into fists. Fight or flight. Jeremy stands fast. The adolescent’s girlfriend stares at me. She grins, delighted with this turn of events. Her boyfriend kicks Jeremy in the leg a few times and then leaves off. The couple return from whence they came, laughing uproariously and getting in some last insults.

 

Jeremy says to me, "When I was growing up in Tacoma, fights ended with one person unable to get up off the ground." I am more than a little irritated. I reply, "Is that how you wanted this to end?"

 

"This really pisses me off," Jeremy explains, "because I am the least homophobic person at The Report." "Homophobic" is not one of my favourite words. My irritation increases. "Is that what you think this was about? Because it wasn’t. This was about a drunk looking to provoke. He reached into his toolbox and pulled out the worst insult he could find. That’s all. His insults were irrelevant to the circumstances of their object."

 

We say goodbye. Jeremy enters his hotel, and I continue walking down Douglas. There are no buses to be seen, and every taxi is engaged. I don’t feel like paying for one anyway. A mile later, I find myself in front of Mayfair Mall. There is a bus schedule posted there, so I can assess my situation. But the schedule has been torn from its moorings. I continue walking west. A face appears from out of the gloom, and I flinch. He is harmless and bedraggled and wants only to buy a cigarette from me. I give him one for free; he is grateful to have it. The night air fills with incomprehensible cries.

 

Another mile later, I reach Saanich Road. I turn north. I reach the bus shelter on Blanchard. It is about 1.30. A genial teenager asks me whether he can expect a bus. The schedule has not been vandalized, so I consult it. The last bus had been at 12.30. I am now halfway home, so I keep walking.

 

As I travel up and down hilly and winding Saanich Road, a memory plays and replays itself in my mind. Three years earlier, I had been attacked as I sat on a bench waiting for a bus at midnight at the corner of Broadway and Arbutus Streets in Vancouver. It was a pleasant neighbourhood, and I had let my guard down. My assailant was unknown to me. He knocked me on to my back and set at me with fists and shoes. He pummelled me for what seemed an eternity but was probably only a couple of minutes. As I attempted feebly to ward off his repeated blows to my head and chest, a thought managed to surface from out of my dull panic. If this keeps up, he is going to cripple or kill me.

 

I was dimly aware of someone shouting in the distance. A woman had raised the alarm, and my attacker fled. He was chased down and apprehended a block away by persons unknown. I never discovered the name of my saviour. I returned to the bench and awaited the police. I smoked. I was wounded in two dozen or so places, but when the police asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room, I said I didn’t think it necessary. I asked the policemen for a ride home. They didn’t want to, but gave me one anyway. I took two days off work. Speech was difficult for a few days, and for a month I experienced dizzy spells--the result of a blow to the temple.

 

I heard some weeks later from the police that there was some question as to whether my assailant would be criminally charged. He was, eventually, with simple assault. I was informed that he was 26 years old and had at least one previous criminal conviction. A trial date was set for 10 months after the incident. The day before the trial was to begin, my assailant pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. This was a "conditional" sentence, however, so he served his time doing whatever he had done before the day he decided to kick the shit out of a perfect stranger. Apart from the night in the cells after he was arrested, he did not spend a single day in jail for his crime.

 

All of this is to explain that I know more about Canada’s criminal justice system than Jeremy Lott. I know that if our assailant had decided to seriously wound either or both of us, the chances of him suffering serious consequences for his action would have been remote. For that reason, it is best to avoid even the possibility of confrontation on Canadian streets. Only a fool risks trouble with another party who has nothing to lose.

 

With these gloomy reflections to comfort me, I continue walking. I reach Quadra Street and turn west again. I pass by an insensible young woman sitting on the sidewalk weeping. Some Good Samaritan attempts to call her mother on his cell phone. I walk on. About a mile further down the road, I pass by a swaying drunken man. "Happy New Year!" he bellows. A half-block later, he remembers that he’d like a cigarette too. I am not about to turn back and am subjected to more drunken abuse. I ball my hands into fists again, but he doesn’t come after me. I amble the final mile home. It is 2.20 a.m. A brisk, seven-mile jaunt to begin 2003. Happy New Year, indeed.

 

Day 3

 

Wednesday finds me tired and morose. Jeremy arrives at 11.00 a.m., rather subdued. It is a light day. Jeremy leaves at about 4.30. Nothing else to report.

 

I see that Mark Steyn has mentioned my Joe Strummer piece on his website. He calls me "one of the most reactionary and Neanderthal of conservatives." High praise from him. Thanks for the traffic, Mark. Awfully decent of you.

 

Kevin Michael Grace, 2.44 a.m., January 2, 2003 [Link]

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