MR. HARPER'S ANGST

The great philosophical question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

…and as he looked and saw her well known pleasant smile, he felt death come again. This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall…So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.
Ernest Hemmingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Look. Listen. Many things have gone wrong these days passed and many deserve their fate, while others are still suckling the optimism of bewilderment, not yet sure that the raw and intemperate days of doom are indeed theirs. Perhaps I fall into both categories, first for betting that the Dallas Cowboys would cover a 5.5 point spread in Sunday’s game against the Arizona Cardinals, and second for putting good money on the 4-1 Carolina Panthers to cover the 1.5 point spread against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Carolina left me shaking my head, but I will admit that putting my money on a team with a career low life corner back (Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones) and a mentally ill wide receiver (Terrell Owens) who, in last week’s post-game press conference, very nearly simultaneously broke into tears and hallelujahs as he declared himself God’s instrument of football, was a terminally dumb maneuver that cost me an otherwise flawless bet. In either case, my losses are cheap and insignificant in the face of the other losers out on the heath, howling in the winter winds. But for others, recent days have been days of a greater nothingness, and while I am playing for fun, they are in it for keeps, and one suspects that there will be much less cracking of bones and much more licking of wounds and gnashing of teeth around some fires in the long days to come.

Yes. Stephen Harper has watched his ‘brilliant tactics’ fail as the economy slides and Canadians peel off in the polls like blisters in the sun. He and he alone—for this is a man who prides himself on his iron grasp and penultimate control of his party and (as he once imagined) this country—bears the blame. What must have seemed like such a clever opportunity to finally grasp the ring of majority power that he so cravenly desired has turned into a nightmare of existential proportion. Yes indeed Mr. Harper, after tomorrow, you may have so much less of something that it can and will only seem like nothing to you, as you chew on the cinders of another minority government and the secret knowledge that you are your ilk are not really wanted around here. Let’s be clear. Since the day he called this doomed election, Harper has lost credibility by bending his own fixed election rules; cutting off his feet in Quebec; pissing off artists; presiding over cautious estimates for the cost of the war in Afghanistan that have ballooned to somewhere at or above $18 billion; watching the economy falter while telling people to buy stocks and not to worry; and even losing much of the senior citizen vote. And it gets worse: the numbers in the polls have fallen substantially to as little as a 5 point lead over the Liberals, and if any of the citizens backing the Jackal or Elizabeth May get nervous come voting time, this could shrink considerably more.

How did what seemed like something, so catastrophically become so much nothing? Well, Mr. Harper, though claiming to be a historian of hockey (which I doubt, but more of that later), also admits to not being interested in studying history or philosophy, which explains a lot. See. An interest in history and the leaders of the past, along with the fundamental curiosity and the desire to understand that is rooted in philosophy would have been of great help to Mr. Harper, for he would have the ability to step down from his economist’s, moralizing throne and understand that he is attempting to govern people, not numbers or sheep, and these people have interests beyond the scope of what he has determined to be important. And this is his undoing. Undoubtedly he has crafted a plan, but it is inflexible and resolutely determined: there can be no change with Mr. Harper, because, as any conservative at heart, he does not believe in change. Now, putting aside history and philosophy for a moment, even if he were simply a student of Canada’s game, possibly he would see the folly of his ways through basic, analogous thought: to wit, hockey, like politics, is a game of fluidity. When played at its most beautiful and highest levels, it is one of the most unpredictable, fast changing, and artistic of sports. For the set pieces of football, soccer, and basketball, and the rigidity of the baseball diamond are largely absent from hockey. Positional play and strategy are second to the speed and creativity of the 12 players on the ice—and this demands the ability to change, just as real, breathing constituents at the heart of any election demand change.

But I suspect that Mr. Harper has other things on his mind beside hockey. He is the emperor in a dying campaign—one which, on those heady late summer days, seemed so promising—perhaps still unable to hear the winds of death or the majority of people in Canada whispering his fate. And oh! how the idea of anything less than a majority government must freeze and gall his thin blood as he broods over what must be a gnawing and bitter, deeply personal question: Why is there nothing, rather than something?

GOD SUFFER THE CHILDREN

I am a child. I last a while. You can’t conceive of the pleasure in my smile. You hold my hand, rough up my hair, it’s lots of fun to have you there. I gave to you now you give to me. I’d like to know what you’ve learned. The sky is blue and so is the sea. What is the colour when black is burned? What is the colour… You are a man, you understand. You pick me up and you lay me down again. You make the rules, you say what’s fair. It’s lots of fun to have you there…
Neil Young, I Am a Child

Look. Listen. In either a calculation of supreme arrogance or one of spineless incertitude, Stephen Harper has just announced his proposal to overhaul the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). Either way, this is a gutless move, in the ilk of a purse snatcher or perhaps a savage drunk who beats his dog for barking. Yes. The champion of family values is showing the same crooked, sneering cynicism that is smug and dangerous, cowardly and brutal, and deserving of the wholehearted contempt of the nation. Now, I am no stranger to cynicism. I like it. It, I think, is one of the higher pleasures and it is not for the faint of heart. But neither is it for the heartless. Enter Stephen Harper. In a nut, lowering the age at which a youth, no, a child—and let’s not bandy words about here, because the whiskey is running low and I am feeling raw and vicious in this night both late and cold—can be sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14, is a proposal designed to capitalize on all the base and reactionary tendencies of the dumb and brutal, the simple and the resentful, the blind and the fearful. Further, its built-in concession to the people of Quebec, the people who would, and I hope still will, flay the moral skin off the Conservative Party and pummel Harper’s veneered face come election day, is nothing short of a base campaign promise that, beyond allowing the justice system to become two-tiered, threatens the fundamental concepts of a federalist nation. But that is another issue, and the long and the short of it is that I don’t even care about those things right now. No. If Harper and his supporters continue with their worn out agenda and proposed legislative muggings, I will be only too happy to migrate to Quebec, pull up the drawbridge when I get there, and swear fealty to Gilles Duceppe and all that is holy in his party.

But the night grows longer and colder here, and the shadows are just a little darker and who knows how long the bolted door will hold—so I will get straight to it. Harper’s proposal is most deeply cynical because he has once again drawn children into his sights and like any bully, believes that a thrashing of the weak will impress upon us that he is a firm, decisive man who believes in justice and the values of the family.

So first I ask you, since when is anyone justified in drawing a line between the people who have family values and those who don’t? Since when are any of us outside of the family values community? After all, I have parents and even siblings. I have aunts and uncles and cousins. Once upon a time, I had grandparents. I have children. Am I not a man of family values? I suspect if you examine your own lives, you may ask the same. Yet, there is a group of people who have declared some ideological and moral ascendancy, a kind of ‘divine right of the religious family,’ that qualifies them to tell you and me about values and what it is to be moral. And in this case, they are telling you about the value of our children.

And this is what is most depraved about Harper and his acolytes. His proposal does not reveal justice, punishment, or even revenge. No. This is about the degeneracy of a society that has systematically devalued its children and a man that while, in his sweater by his fireplace, with his children whose names one suspects he can’t quite remember, seeks to turn on our nation’s children with a loathing that is nakedly irrational and shallow. Yes. There is a loathing of children at the root of this gambit and it has grown like a death flower, sickly and cruel, and if it is not burned to its very roots, it will poison us all insidiously and eternally.

The problem belongs to us—the adults, the rational, the sane—but see what we have done. We have strung our children between two solitudes; parsed them out between the beautiful and the dark. We have fetishized their innocence and bemoaned their cruelty. We have denigrated their intellects and capitalized on their ignorance. We have infantilized them and sexualized them. They have been idealized, commercialized, marketed, bought, sold and traded—we have made them commodities, every last one. Children have become our hope and our bane, and we have shuffled them like cards, playing each one like we are guilty sharks at the table. We have praised them on the screens and at the dinner tables for their manners and their ability to parrot us, and damned them in the classrooms and in the streets for the pain and bewilderment of puberty and experience. We have cajoled, demanded, and threatened them to be like us and barred them from themselves and their identities. We pick them up and hold them aloft for the slightest of their achievements and plunge them into cold pools of ostracism for the slightest of their flaws. We have longed to be them and we have laughed at them for the transgression of not being more like us. We have cocooned them and fed them medicine and told them that they are unaccountable, and we have beaten them and exposed them and held them accountable for all. Children have become our glory and our shame, and for that we have made them pay. In short, we have worshipped them for everything we wish to be and damned them for all that we are.

And so it is the greatest temptation to thrust from us that which reminds us of our own guilt. And no, I am no idealist nor is this a Pollyannaish dream. I am aware of the depravity and the blackness of some of our young offenders, our child criminals. I know that they have stabbed, cut, shot and beaten and more. I know this like I know the evil depths of any man’s heart. But I also know a little about the biology and physiology of a child and about the statistical probability of a child committing a heinous crime, of a child being rehabilitated, and of a child being destroyed in an adult penal system. More importantly I, and many of you, am well acquainted with the blind stumbling of the adult, of the crippling suffering of the adult intellect, of the bewilderment of the adult mind, of the doubtful and precarious existence of a fully formed adult, and the despair of the long and inevitable adult journey into the night. In this life, I know something about chance and loss and anguish. And I have had the benefit of so much more opportunity, experience and time than any child I know.

So when I hear Stephen Harper so brazenly and coolly target our children and declare that these children, the same people he would deny sex education and so much other adult information, worthy of adult justice and the adult penal system, forgive me: forgive me, if I ask for children a second chance that I suspect most of us would beg and even kill to have.