14 TRUTHS ABOUT THE ALLIANCE-TORY MERGER
1. The Canadian Alliance is finished. The merger
talks have destroyed whatever confidence
remained, among party members and members of the media, in
its survival.
2. The merger will happen. Whether it happens before
the next general election or after is immaterial. By
investing his personal authority in the merger, Stephen
Harper, leader of the second-most powerful party, has
declared that the Alliance is insufficient without the
approval of the Tories, the fifth-most powerful party.
3. Even if the merger occurs before the next election,
it will not greatly affect the outcome. It’s too late.
The Alliance never had any institutional strength, while
the Tories’s has dissipated to nothing over the last
decade.
4. Stephen Harper’s intelligence has been grossly
overrated. Right now he looks about as smart as Kim
Campbell. While his decision to betray the Alliance
members that voted him leader on a non-merger platform is
a moral failing, his decision to wait until well over a
year after becoming leader before actively seeing a merger
is a political disaster. Harper has obviously learned
nothing from the Alliance’s electoral debacle of 2000.
5. But Harper’s betrayal comes at no cost to his
leadership. He is not taking a "risk." As I wrote
back in January, "The Alliance has already had three
leaders in three years. One more leadership change, and it
will be as dead as L. Ron Hubbard." Faithful readers
will remember that I predicted Harper’s "graceful
exit" at that time.
6. There never was any "vote-splitting" on
the Canadian "right-wing." If vote-splitting was
real, the Tories could not have won the Perth-Middlesex
by-election in May. The Tories are not a
"right-wing" party and haven’t been for
decades. The overwhelming second choice of Tory voters is
the Liberal Party. For the past two elections, the Tories
have served to siphon off Liberal voters. Party
polarization will serve only to guarantee Paul Martin up
to 50% or more of the popular vote in 2004.
7. The Tories have absolutely nothing to lose by
playing hard to get. The more they demur, the more they
will be offered.
8. There is no chance the leader of the new party will
be chosen by one-member, one vote. This would defeat the
purpose of the merger, which is to give the Eastern elite
what is has always demanded: Reform/Alliance’s head on a
silver platter. If Alliance members were allowed to vote
their strength, this would permit them to make the
"wrong" choice, just as they did in 2000 with
Stockwell Day. The "right" choice was
"fiscally conservative, socially liberal" Tom
Long.
9. For this reason, there is no chance that
"fiscally conservative, socially liberal" Tory
MPs such as Scott Brison will be allowed to slip the net.
10. For this reason, the first leader of the
Conservative Party will not be Stephen Harper, will not be
from Alberta and will not be an evangelical Protestant.
The ideal leader would be an "ethnic
hermaphrodite" (e.g., Pierre Trudeau, Brian
Mulroney) from Quebec.
11. Contrary to the claim made by my esteemed colleague
Lorne Gunter, Reform/Alliance has not
"transformed politics in this country." The end
of deficit financing in Canada had nothing to do with
Reform/Alliance and everything to do with Roy Romanow’s
NDP government in Saskatchewan, which proved that a
left-wing party could cut spending without alienating its
base. Such federal tax relief as Canadians have been
granted had nothing to do with Reform/Alliance and
everything to do with the "Third Way." Jean Chrétien,
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were all shrewd enough to
realize that the "tax and spend" label was a
millstone around their parties’s necks. The
Reform/Alliance succeeded only in a) ensuring three
consecutive majority governments for the thug Chrétien b)
destroying "social conservatism" as a political
force and c) demonstrating just how far a party would go
to demonstrate it was "inclusive" and not
"intolerant." From Ringma and Chatters to Betty
Granger (twice) to Stephen Harper’s apology to Svend
Robinson, on every occasion Reform/Alliance had the
opportunity to stand up for itself, it decided to grovel
instead.
12. The Conservative Party will not be a right-wing
party. It will be a brokerage party and back to business
as usual. This means not only that Westerners will
continue to be robbed to pay Quebec and the Atlantic
Provinces but also that their leaders will again counsel
them to revel in this robbery—being Canadian is all
about "sharing," you know.
13. Joe Clark is a strategic genius. Yes, that’s
right. Clark understood that it was never necessary for
the Tories to prevail over Reform/Alliance; it was
necessary only for the Tories to survive. Clark reasoned
that given enough time Reform/Alliance would commit
suicide—and it has.
14. Preston Manning, look to your laurels. Stephen
Harper is the most cynical man in the history of modern
Canadian politics.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.59 p.m., September 30,
2003►
UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
Tyler Cowen, apostle of "creative
destruction," is clearly not a real person. The first
hint was his name; a pseudonym if ever I heard one. The
second was his guide
to DC ethnic restaurants. His review of the "Ghana
Café" is one leg-pull after the other:
Ghanian places are never bad,
but this one is better than you think. The Red Red (beans
and plantains) is excellent, so is the peanut soap.
Can’t go wrong here, highly recommended, don’t be put
off by the total lack of enthusiasm among the staff.
"Peanut soap" is sailing awfully close to the
wind, but, still, nobody got the joke. "Tyler
Cowen’s" imposture has become increasingly
reckless, as if he begs to be exposed. Which leads us to
the third hint, from a September 26 blog
entry:
$10.5 billion in small change
sits around people's homes.
The average U.S. transaction produces 4.7 coins in change.
Eliminating the penny would lower this figure to 2.7
coins.
The average Canadian transaction produces 5.9 coins in
change (Canada has a dollar coin), this would be 3.9 coins
in a pennyless world.
A mathematical technique known as Diophantine equations
can be used to calculate the coin denominations that would
produce the least amount of expected change per
transaction. If we replaced the dime with an 18-cent coin,
the average number of coins per transaction would fall
from 4.7 to 3.89. If we must keep the dime, adding a
32-cent coin would give us a figure of 3.46. The best
solution of all would be to combine an 18-cent piece, and
actually use the half-dollar coin, for a figure of 3.18
coins per transaction.
"Diophantine" equations, indeed! But wait;
there’s more:
These calculations do not
consider the limited ability of Americans to do math in
their heads…Using pennies may make an average cash
transaction three seconds longer.
Stop it; you’re killing me! I was disappointed that
"Tyler Cowen" did not add that the aggregate
cost of repairs to the pockets of American jackets and
pants due to the increased weight incurred by the
continued existence of the penny was $37.2 million in
2001, but even Homer nods.
Who is "Tyler Cowen"? Is he an
"editorial collective," as I am informed is the
case with "Robert Locke"? Is he a double act,
like "Anthony Daniels" and "Theodore
Dalrymple"—and if so, who’s the other half?
The more I think about it, the more likely it seems
that the greater part of the Internet punditocracy
consists of artificial constructions. "Eve Tushnet"?
"Mark Wickens"? "Damian Penny"?
"Barton Wong"?! Dickens or even "Ayn
Rand" would have rejected these monikers as too
outlandish.
Which leads us to "Colby Cosh." He claims
Cosh is Scottish, but then so was "Cocktoasten."
Colby Cosh: the anapest is just too good to be true,
especially if you know that Cosh is British slang for
blunt weapon or use of same. I’ve worked with the man,
shared two houses with him, and there’s always been
something not quite 16 annas to the rupee there. What sort
of man goes a year between haircuts? Absolutely refuses to
pay parking tickets? Keeps every single penny he has ever
received in change?
Penny? This could link him to the Newfie warblogger—but
the more likely twin is our old friend "Tyler
Cowen." Besides the similarity in names, there is
also the shared utilitarianism and love of Southeast Asian
food—"peanut soap" for Cowen, "peanut
sauce" for Cosh. Further evidence that something
sinister is afoot: Cosh claims to have relatives in
"Saskatchewan," the "There Be
Monsters" of Canada, the mythical province with no
natural boundaries. Obviously a great deal more detective
work is needed; but now that "Colby Cosh" has
become a twice-weekly feature of the National Post,
this task is all the more urgent.
Who, or why, or bosh, or gosh, Is the Colby of Cosh?
I think we should be told.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.50 a.m., September 29,
2003►
HINT, HINT
Here’s an old column on the late Steve Allen. No
particular reason for reprinting it, except to point out
how much I enjoy writing about TV and that Galaxy 500
was the best name for a column ever.
Dumb and Dumber
TV is to literacy as crack cocaine is to sobriety
BC Report
November 2, 1998
Steve Allen says television makes you stupid.
Commercial television, anyway. So who’s Steve Allen?
According to Tim C. Leedom, writing
in Truth Seeker magazine: "When we think of
Steve Allen we think of past great thinkers such as Thomas
Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire." Oh, and he
also invented the TV chat show.
Allen
is the author of 44 books (and counting), a composer of
hit songs (including "This Could Be the Start of
Something Big"), a jazz musician, playwright, movie
star and Broadway actor. Yet this "true Renaissance
man by every definition of the word," according to
Leedom, is remembered today, if remembered at all, as the
first host of The Tonight Show.
This is no small accomplishment, even if necessity was
the mother of invention. The chat show was, before the
advent of multimillionaire hosts and writing casts of
thousands, cheap to produce. A desk, a couch, one camera
and a couple of microphones. The guests, paid union scale,
were as good as free. From this humble beginning, the chat
show has come to dominate television. Its only rival is
the other new form TV created, the situation comedy.
The creation of a new medium always inspires attempts
to duplicate older mediums in a different manner, as
McLuhan reminds us. Television was live when it began and
producers filled the airwaves with small-screen versions
of live theatre and music. The Ed Sullivan Show,
one of the longest running shows ever, was really just
vaudeville in a box. Theatrical drama and music concerts
vanished from TV around 1970; although every couple of
years someone makes a doomed attempt to revive the variety
show format.
Chat shows have prospered because they are perfectly
suited to television’s limitations. They are personal
and intimate. They are also intensely democratic—and
television is the greatest democratizing force in history.
A movie star, a politician and some guy who makes
mashed-potato sculptures all have equal status on Jay or
Dave or Conan’s couch.
It was on Chris Matthews’s CNBC chat show, Hardball,
that I saw Allen plugging his new book: Dumbth:
The Lost Art of Thinking. The irony of
this self-consciously literate man lamenting the closing
of the American mind on a show that routinely reduces
serious issues to the level of a cockfight was lost on
both guest and host. It certainly made a change from the
"Clinton’s a scumbag—No, it’s Ken Starr who’s
the scumbag" slanging matches that Matthews usually
referees.
If Allen realized that the only reason he’d been
given 12 minutes that night was because there were no new
Monica revelations that day, he didn’t show it. Game as
ever, he indulged, aided by Matthews, in sentimental
maundering about the Golden Age of Television. Remember
those days when serious writers—you know, like Norman
Mailer—used to trade witticisms with Jack Paar? Matthews
kindly neglected to explain that the only way he’d have
a novelist on his show is if he had some comment to
make on sex addiction.
For all my cavils, Chris Matthews is intelligent, a
decent interviewer and a good guy. And Hardball is
about as highbrow as commercial television gets in 1998.
Matthews knows that culture is death on TV, and I suspect
he also knows this is not because of philistine
businessmen but because that’s what the viewers want.
You can catch all the intellectuals you want on Charlie
Rose’s show, which is banished to that ratings Siberia
called PBS.
Allen, like many innovators, has little comprehension
of the monster he helped create. Television, more than any
other medium, is the voice of the people. And the people
no longer have any patience for their so-called superiors
telling them they should better themselves.
So we watch Jerry Springer instead of listening to
Schubert. So what if some has-been like Steve Allen tells
us it makes us dumb? That’s a small price to pay, as The
Simpsons Dr. Hibbert reminds us, for countless hours
of top-notch entertainment.
Touchingly, Allen declares that he could devise a
perfectly adequate curriculum solely from public and cable
television. I wonder which shows he has in mind? Are
You Being Served? perhaps? Maybe he’s thinking of Mr.
Bean or The New Red Green Show, to name only a
few of PBS’s fine offerings. And who needs Schubert when
you have Lawrence Welk?
Then there’s the amusingly named Arts &
Entertainment Network, once known as the "Hitler
Channel" but which now features old crime shows, new
true crime shows and biographies of such cultural
luminaries as Demi Moore and Madonna. Columbo, of
course, was based
on a Dostoyevsky detective. Is that highbrow enough for
you, Mr. Allen?
Brevity is the soul of wit, they say, and Philip
J. Fry explained TV’s limitations in a
mere 13 words as opposed to my 776: "Clever things
make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them
feel scared."
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.06 a.m., September 28,
2003►
ST. ROBERT OF DORSET PREACHES
TO THE FISHES
Friday night is when The Ambler gets squiffy and
listens to old records. The featured presentation tonight
was In the Court of the Crimson King. The first
time I knew of this record was in Grade 9 when I overheard
one of the intellectuals at Argyle High School (alma
mater of Jason Priestly, doncha know) declare,
"The only group doing anything significant today is
King Crimson." Well, I thought, that
certainly sounds authoritative.
When I went to A&B Sound across Burrard Inlet into
scary Vancouver to check it out, there was this hideous
screaming head on the LP cover. All I could think was…Drugs!!!
Eeeee!!! I got over it soon enough, just like everyone
else—what was once freaky became normal. Later I
discovered that "prog rock" was not as
coterminous with drug use as I had thought.
Listening to ITCOTCK today, I’m struck by how
subtle it is. Could this really have been recorded in the
same year as Led Zeppelin I? Crimso Mark I was
"heavy," but not heavy, if you know what
I mean. I can count the number of rock drummers as musicians
on two or three hands, and Mike Giles is one of those
fingers.
It is fashionable today to write off the early 70s as a
musical wasteland, but I can’t agree. There was a
striving then for beauty in new sounds that was quite
commendable. In the event, everyone was prog then.
Listening to Alice Cooper, Killer and Billion
Dollar Babies, I am taken aback to remember that the
chord changes therein would not have been out of place on
Steely Dan records.
I could be mistaken about all of this, however. Crimso
supremo Robert Fripp has been engaged for some time in a
project to "fix" his early recordings; for
instance, getting Adrian Belew to re-record Gordon
Haskell’s vocals. Fripp has released, oh, say, four
dozen recordings of the old days; I wish he’d re-release
The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson. Apart
from jewels such as Judy Dyble’s demo recording of
"I Talk To the Wind," the "gatefold
sleeve" (remember them?) was adorned by the quite
beautiful naïve paintings of an Australian aborigine.
I’ve never met Fripp, but I could have. He certainly
wanted me to; not that there was anything special about
me. He was booked for solo concerts of "Frippertronics"
for three nights in Vancouver at Robson Square Theatre in
1979, and being the fan I was, I was there the first
night. Robson Square is really more appropriate to
corporate presentations that rock concerts, what with it
being buried well underground (thank you, Arthur
Erickson!); so it was shocking after going down the
stairs, and turning left and right, with our feet not
making a sound on the heavy carpets, to find ourselves
face to face with Mr. Fripp himself.
He was sitting on a desk, he was, as I recall, looking
eager to "commune" with his many fans. Except
that me and everyone else had exactly the same reaction:
"Yikes! That’s Robert Fripp! What’s he
doing here…And what are we supposed to do now?"
Fripp sat there, looking kindly, for over a half an hour,
but not a single person dared to go near him. This was the
closest thing I’ve ever seen to religious awe in the
secular world.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.59 p.m., September 26,
2003►
THIS IS WHERE I LIVE
My Air Miles self-debate
is over. I’ve spent them all: 5,900 on a Minolta
digital camera and 128 MB flash memory card
and 2,000 on Christmas gifts. Having taken up photography
again after an interruption of more than 30 years, I’m
afraid I’m going to be subjecting my readers to the
results.
I can’t claim my early efforts as particularly good,
but they do serve to illustrate my hometown. West Saanich,
where I live, remains primarily agricultural; my residence
was built as a farmhouse as recently as 1968. East Saanich,
on the other side of the Pat Bay Highway (which bisects
the Saanich Peninsula), was urbanized decades ago, yet
still contains several working farms.
Crisscrossed with numerous trails,
Saanich is a great place for ambling. During my walks,
looking in every direction for as far the eye can see, it
is often difficult to believe I am actually in a city. One
of Saanich’s glories is the 94-acre Rithet’s
Bog, a wildlife refuge. Yesterday, I took
several shots from one
of the routes leading to the Bog from the
north. Here are two.
Unmistakably the rainforest
Rather like an English country path
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.19 a.m., September 26,
2003►
THIS IS JUST A TRIBUTE
Everything I have written on the devolution of the
classical record industry is just a gloss on the work of
Norman Lebrecht. I may have said this before in this
space, but I’ll say it again—everyone who cares about
serious music and its future should rush out and buy his
book When
The Music Stops.
Or, if you’re poor or a cheapskate, you can read
Lebrecht’s latest column
in the London Evening
Standard, which says what I was trying
to say in my American Prowler piece—only better:
The music business during the
early 1990s surrendered its individuality. By 1995, six
giants controlled the market. Then Matsushita pulled out,
leaving five. Universal is presently being broken up for sale
by its French owners, Vivendi. Warner-AOL and
Bertelsmann's BMG are pursuing a merger,
either with each other or with EMI. The future of Sony
Music is enigmatic. By the end of this year, four
groups—perhaps three—will control more than 80 percent
of the world's recorded music. A monopoly by any other
name.
The forces behind these
mergers trot out all the usual arguments—economies of
scale, consumer advantage, shareholder benefit, that sort
of thing. The larger the group, the greater the pressure
it can apply on distributors to keep prices down and small
fry out. As a result prices are static but choice has been
brutally restricted…
The one factor unconfigured
by the corporate monopolists is the cost of the trust they
have so recklessly squandered…The only brand loyalty
left is to the handful of owner-operators—to book
Publishers like Thames
and Hudson or Canongate
and record labels like Chandos,
Hyperion
and Sweden's Bis,
which this week jubilates its 30th anniversary under the
same single-minded owner, Robert von Bahr. Naxos,
Klaus Heymann's £5 impulse-buy label, claims more
customer fidelity than all the corps combined.
Loss of trust, politicians
will tell you, is the prelude to losing power.
Corporations come and corporations go. When the present
monoliths crumble to dust, they will leave behind a
brandless morass in which seekers of truth and beauty will
stumble empty-handed through homogenized shops, past
shelves that are stacked with characterless products
towards an unedifying future. Believe what you like about
big business, but do not for one moment believe that it is
good for civilization.
Of course Tyler
Cowen and his acolytes
will tell you exactly the opposite—it’s all good! But
they are dead wrong. Capitalism untempered by morality
produces a heaven fit only for accountants.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.02 a.m., September 26,
2003►
RICHARD THEN AND NOW
Richard Brookhiser wrote his first cover story for National
Review when only 14 years old. As I recall, he (or a
model made up to resemble a 14-year-old National Review
cover story writer) posed for the magazine wearing a host
of political buttons, one of which declared, Don’t let them
immanentize the eschaton.
The them referred to in the slogan was liberals,
and to immanentize the eschaton means, roughly, to bring
down to earth that which properly belongs to heaven. The
phrase comes from Eric Voegelin’s The
New Science of Politics.
If memory serves, Brookhiser’s Cameron Crowe moment
was in 1969. Back then, it was taken for granted that
"conservatives" were indeed conservative. That
is, they acknowledged original sin and the limits it
imposes on human aspirations. Today, National Review
has joined the Jacobins.
Brookhiser, a longstanding senior editor of the magazine,
has taken to lecturing the liberals on what it means to be
liberal. It takes one to know one. His September 25 column
in the New York Observer begins with mockery of
General Wesley Clark and ends with a warning that liberals
had better continue supporting the "Terror War"
(sic)—lest they be seen as "racists." Or in
Brookhiser’s own words:
Indifference to the fate of
dusky peoples used to be the property of the right,
especially its satirists. The classic expressions of such
sentiments are the African farces of Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
and Black
Mischief, filled with comic savages and
their jabbering intelligentsia. (Waugh’s white people
don’t come off any better, but it is depiction of the
Other that stings.) The Tory view of the world
acknowledged that people and cultures are different, and
that they cannot be homogenized by mere decrees. But in
its extreme form it treated different races as different
species, and consigned some to eternal darkness. Liberals
should not want to be in that role.
Presumably, then, liberals should return to the role
they played during Brookhiser's adolescence:
We are here to help the
Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American
trying to get out.
Evelyn Waugh didn’t write that line,
of course, but I’m sure he would have relished it. It
stings.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.34 a.m., September 25,
2003►
WELCOME PROWLERS!
A big thrill for me today. The American Prowler,
the website of The American Spectator, a magazine I
have read every issue of since 1977, has published an article
by me on classical music. Or rather, how babes are killing
the classical music recording industry. Sadly, TAP
doesn’t publish pictures, so here is one of bond,
just to show I wasn’t exaggerating about their
"lipstick lesbian posturing."
bond: Is that a bow in your pocket, or are you just
happy to see us?
To my new visitors: hope to see you here often. Just so
you know, I’m about much, much more than fogeyish
cultural commentary. I hold fogeyish opinions on many
other subjects as well.
To my old visitors: my hiatus is over. My explanation
for the interruption: Canadian politics—by which I mean
something more than "my team is better than your
team, nyah, nyah"—died last week, and I have been
meditating on this. Expect published conclusions soon.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.57 p.m., September 23,
2003►
MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO
Been seeing a lot of the trailer for Denzel
Washington’s new movie Out of Time. Once again,
Washington plays a cop. And once again, just like in his
old movie Ricochet, Washington is heard to say,
"They set me up." People, and especially cops,
sure get set up a lot in Hollywood movies.
Back when I reported crime stories, I interviewed a lot
of cops, defence lawyers and prosecutors. I often asked
them, "Do you know of a single case where
someone was set up for someone else’s murder?" The
answer was always the same, "Well, I don’t know of
any. But I’m sure it happens." Why were they sure?
Because they had all seen this scenario thousands of time
in movies and on TV.
This is just one example of how popular culture changes
our perception of reality. More to the point, how it
changes the nature of reality itself. You will remember
how the prosecutors in the O.J. Simpson case lied their
heads off on the stand by insisting they hadn’t
considered O.J. the prime suspect right from the
beginning. Let’s see. O.J.’s "estranged"
wife is hacked to pieces. O.J. has a documented history of
violence against said dead wife. O.J. somehow manages to
leak quite a lot of fluid before skipping town that night.
Now why would the cops jump to the conclusion that O.J.
had done it? Especially as we all know that people—often
talented, successful, rich, well-liked folks like O.J.—are
framed for murder all the time.
Race certainly played its part in O.J.’s acquittal. I
was producing talk radio in San Diego during the trial. We
were 600 on the dial, so our signal went as far north as
Santa Barbara. We got callers from L.A., one of the best
was an amusing black woman who said, "There are eight
black women on that jury! O.J. could be on the witness
stand wearing his frogman outfit and holding a dripping
knife—and they still wouldn’t convict
him!" QED.
But the black women on the jury would not have been
able to even consider the preposterous tale spun by
O.J.’s dream team had not the skids been greased by
Hollywood. O.J. killing his wife? Too pat, too perfect.
What’s the real story here? I’ll tell you the
real story. The Man is always bringing down our
African-American heroes. O.J. was set up. Just like
Denzel Washington.
O.J.: Hollywood saved his ass
How else has Hollywood changed the nature of reality?
Example Two: Kick-ass chicks. Way back in the 1960s, the
ur-kick-ass chick, Diana
Rigg of The Avengers, was a figure
of high camp. The "sinister" harpsichord in the
theme song gave the game away. It was understood then that
women—especially model-thin "sexpots"—can’t
administer thrashings to men—especially combat-trained
"heavies." Four decades later, whenever you see
said heavy get the drop on a woman who weighs less than I
spit in a day, he’ll be lucky to escape with his life.
And four decades later, real-life women have been
conditioned to believe they can kick any man’s ass. You
can read about the results of this new belief in your
newspaper every morning.
Example Three: Life imitates pornography. Piers
Paul Read once explained how the sexual
mores of the Russian elite changed radically during Soviet
Communism’s dying days. This elite prided itself on how
very au courant and Western it was, and its idea of
Western sexuality came from pirated porno videos. The joke
was that the Russians began to imitate the sexual
positions they saw on the videos, not realizing that these
are conventions devised to get around the problem with
filming the missionary position—there’s nothing to see
there. But the joke is on us now. The various pornographic
conventions are now normative in Hollywood—and on Main
Street. Cameron Crowe satirized this new reality in Jerry
Maguire. Although I don’t
think many got the joke when Jerry and his fiancée
engaged in a bout of coitus so strenuous as to require the
musculature of Olympic wrestlers or when she proved her
devotion by announcing she was up for a three-way, if that
was what Jerry desired. Why are so many ordinary men and
women now addicted to the gymnasium? One reason is that
you can’t bonk like they do in the movies without it.
And why is bisexuality in women now considered the norm?
Because it is de rigeur in porn.
Try as it might, however, there is one aspect of human
nature Hollywood cannot change. The criminal gang
consisting of white and non-white members remains almost
as a rare as the man framed for murder.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.33 p.m., September 23,
2003►
POETRY CORNER
Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich
machte.
Ich bleibe stumm;
und sage nicht, warum.
Und Stille gibt es, da die Erde krachte.
Kein Wort, das traf;
man spricht nur aus dem Schlaf.
Und träumt von einer Sonne, welche lachte.
Es geht vorbei;
nachher war’s einerlei.
Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte
Do not ask what I was doing all this
time.
I remain silent,
and will not say why.
And there is silence, as the Earth roared.
There was not a single word that fit;
we talk only in our sleep.
We dream of a Sun that is laughing.
It passes;
and afterwards, we are left alone.
The word went to sleep as that world awoke.
—Karl Kraus, 1874-1936
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.41 p.m., September 19,
2003►
BACK INTO THE FRAY
My old friend Kelly Jane Torrance is now the arts and
culture editor of the online magazine Brainwash.
Her first contribution
to that organ is a meditation on the vexed question of
whether biographies are comfort reads for the
intellectually indolent. She has also resuscitated her
blog, where she weighs in on the subject of filmed
versions of great novels. She notes
that the rumoured remake of Brideshead
Revisited "plans to excise from
the story Charles Ryder’s conversion to
Catholicism." Rather like remaking Frankenstein
without the monster, I should think.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.45 a.m., September 17,
2003►
EXCLUSIVE TO THE AMBLER
The editor-in-waiting of the Ezra
Report is not, as I had jokingly suggested,
my old friend Colby Cosh. Colby has other fish to fry. He
is instead a man called Kevin Libin, a senior writer with Canadian
Business and a close friend of the would-be
proprietor. According to his bio,
he has written for that publication since 2000. In
addition, his "work has also appeared in the pages of
the Toronto Star and the National Post. A
native of Alberta, Libin currently lives in Toronto."
Publication in the left-wing Star is not the
best reference for a right-wing magazine editor, but of
the six pieces Libin has placed in that newspaper, half
were reprints from Canadian Business, and all were
on the subject of Canadian business. Libin has specialized
narrowly in this subject, so his politics are largely
unknown. He is said, however, to have robust views on the
Israel-Palestine question. His prose style tends toward
the rococo, as this lead paragraph from one of his two Post
columns demonstrates:
Canada is in pain—the brain
drain has begun to strain our ability to retain our most
acclaimed. The issue resonates strongly with many of us,
and not only because we love to rhyme. It is familiar to
every Canadian who has felt the allure of our seductress
neighbour to the south, the one in the skin-tight stars
and stripes, beckoning to us with her siren song of
opportunity and riches.
Kevin Libin is a relation of Alvin Libin, LLD, OC,
entrepreneur, philanthropist and part-owner of the Calgary
Flames hockey team. In March, Dr. Libin founded
the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta with an
endowment of $15 million from the Alvin and Mona Libin
Foundation. Perhaps he will toss my old friend Ezra a
bone.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.30 a.m., September 17,
2003►
AN OPEN LETTER TO BARBARA YAFFE
OF THE VANCOUVER SUN
Dear Ms. Yaffe:
In your column
of September 17, "Same-Sex-Marriage Vote
Mirrors the Nation," you summarize the Canadian
Alliance’s opposition to the Chrétien government’s
attempt to legalize homosexual marriage as follows:
The Alliance maintains the
two appeal courts, in B.C. and Ontario, that sanctioned
gay marriage last spring through two judicial rulings,
have no business changing such an important societal
institution. Rather this should be left to elected
representatives of the people—the politicians.
You respond:
But this is a baloney
argument. The Charter
of Rights and Freedoms, and its equality
provision—which the two superior courts used to sanction
gay marriage—was indeed the product of a political
exercise of the government of the day. It was not judges
but politicians who introduced the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.
B.C. and Ontario appeal court
judges merely interpreted constitutional guidelines
politicians gave to Canadian society back in 1982—which
is the a legitimate job of the judiciary.
Do you know, Ms. Yaffe, that, prior to the ratification
of the Charter by Parliament, Svend Robinson, then as now
an NDP MP and homosexual activist, made repeated attempts
to include "sexual orientation" as a protected
class in the Charter? And that these attempts were
defeated by Jean Chrétien, then justice minister, now
prime minister?
You assert:
The Charter guarantees the
equality of all Canadians and that means marriage by the
state must be equally open to straights and gays alike.
Do you know, Ms. Yaffe, that the Charter does not
simply "guarantee the equality of all
Canadians," that Section 15.1 of the Charter
enumerates nine specifically protected classes of people?
Why do you suppose that Robinson was so determined to
include "sexual orientation" in this list, while
Chrétien (the universally acknowledged co-author of the
Charter) was so determined to exclude it?
And do you know, Ms. Yaffe, that the Charter
specifically protects inequality, that Section 15.2 (the
"Affirmative Action programs" clause) guarantees
special rights to the nine protected classes? Have you
read the Charter, Ms. Yaffe? Do you know what
"equality" means?
How can you claim, Ms. Yaffe, that the "B.C. and
Ontario judges merely interpreted constitutional
guidelines" when they adjudicated the rights of a
class of people specifically excluded from the Charter? It
is true enough that "sexual orientation" as a
protected class was "read in" to the Charter by
the Supreme Court of Canada, but do you not realize that
this was an explicit rejection of the
"political exercise" that resulted in the
Charter?
And if, as you claim, Ms. Yaffe, the Chart
"guarantees" homosexual marriage, why did the
Supreme Court of Canada disagree when it ruled on this
issue in 1995 (Egan)
and 1999 (M.
v. H.)?
If you know the answers to these questions, Ms. Yaffe,
why didn’t you include them in your column? If you
didn’t know them, why should we take you seriously as a
commentator on the homosexual-marriage issue or any other
political issue? In other words, Ms. Yaffe, did you choose
to conceal the truth, or are you merely ignorant?
Yours sincerely,
Kevin Michael Grace
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.47 a.m., September 17,
2003►
