Globe & Mail Watch

Nothing to see here

2009-02-10T08:22:00.000-08:00

You will have noticed ... shall we say 'light' posting here lately, as a gang of armed deadlines took me out back in the alley, roughed me up and threw me in the dumpster. This process expected to be repeated for the next week or so, after which I shall have a lovely holiday and recuperate my shattered nerves. In the meantime:

The loonies at the BBC have devised a series on the afterlives of Enid Blyton characters: George speaks! (And I cannot recommend Radio 7 too highly - they have the Goon Show too!)

Michael Phelps has only been dumped by Kellogg's, and you can join the Kellogg's boycott in return. Smarmy gits.

And just for the heck of it, those links you know you want but are ashamed to bookmark:

for all your US political needs

and to calm your shattered nerves after.

Expect a triumphant return at the end of February, with fresh new snark, tall tales of this 'California' they speak of, and long-awaited deep thoughts on Michael Ignatieff. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves...

Slow News Day

2009-02-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

And if there's anything duller than the annual round of 'Many People Do Christmas Shopping' articles it's 'City That Rarely Gets Snow Confounded By Snow'.

So instead, why not take time to enjoy Virgil on Facebook, courtesy of our New Brunswick Correspondent?

Post Blago Blog Post

2009-02-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

Not that I didn't enjoy the Rod Blagojevich Untergang media circus, but I've yet to find a piece addressing the really interesting question here, namely: how did this guy manage to function as Governor of a major state?

I mean, I understand that Illinois expects corruption from her politicians, no problem there. But this guy is nutty -- delusional, narcissistic, histrionic, incapable of normal self-presentation. So what are the expectations of a United States Governor, such that Rod Blagojevich was able to (more or less) meet them for almost five years? And what's next? Are we going to find out that Arnie Schwarzenegger never bothered learning to read or write? That David Paterson is exactly like that Peter Sellers character? That Janet Napolitano is just some kind of Internet hoax? How did the quality controls manage to totally vanish all at once?

Wall St. welfare

2009-02-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

What Paul Krugman said.

Some of Krugman's commentators are pretty good too. Most resonant with me, I fear, was the one who began (roughly): 'This is why I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries...'. Obama is a transformative figure symbolically and stylistically, and his being good rather than evil is a pretty radical change in context. But none of that entails that he's even going to attempt to change the culture of kleptocracy which has now sunk the American economy. My hope is that his current deference to the right and the rich (hiring Summers et al., not really trying to fix TARP) is an elaborate Plan A which he will be able to ditch in a year or so when everyone's been given enough rope and things have only gotten much worse. My fear is that he's a hardcore Rubinomics man himself, and just doesn't grasp how broken the system is or see what's fundamentally wrong with taxpayer-funded robber baronry.

And actually, I have an even deeper fear. This is that Obama does understand the problem, but seriously believes he can change the self-interested behaviour of bad agents through the magical power of his personal moral authority, whether that means being generous and responsive to House Republicans or speaking mighty Words of Chastisement to bonus-taking bankers. In which case he's delusional, and there may be no Plan B at all.

UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.

Front page follies

2009-02-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

That's one slow news day out there, but I still have to say that the Globe's front page story (with sub-Facebook photo) about Michael Phelps and a bong represents everything I hate about journalism today. The only honest headline would be: "Trivial Act of Uninteresting Person Prompts Cynical Corporate Pseudo-Scandal", and that doesn't really describe a story that belongs on the front page, does it? If Phelps' sponsors do dump him, there's a case to be made for a story in the Business section, and certainly for an editorial pointing out how silly and corrupt the whole sponsorship racket is. But they haven't done it yet. No doubt the Globe is proud of itself for being ahead of the story here, but what it amounts to is that they're egging on the mindless festival of hypocrisy they're predicting. Ugh.

Once again, the on-line edition turns out to be a bit more grown-up: there the story is last on the list under Sports.

Darwin Day!

2009-01-31T09:10:00.000-08:00

Today's papers are quite dull and predictable, except for the double page F6 spread on Charles Darwin. It's really a mashup of three articles, one on Darwin himself (in which, as always, he comes across as a lovely chap); one on the ongoing pushback against evolutionary theory; and the third on an eccentric Ottawan couple who hold an annual 'Phylum Feast' featuring burdock, sea cucumbers and god knows what -- the idea is to represent as many different taxa as possible -- in honour of the great man every Feb. 12.

The pushback stuff is spooky if unsurprising, and raises anew the question of why Canada is so different from the United States on issues like creationism, given that we in fact have just as high a proportion of mouthbreathing truth-haters in the population. But the part that really struck me was the Phylum Feast. It all sounds horribly inedible but still, these guys have the right idea. The great (and somewhat surprising) defect of secularism has always been its failure to create a calendar of emotionally satisfying, socially bonding rituals and seasonal narratives to compete with those of the church. Of course there should be a Darwin Day, with appropriate rites and feasts. Other obvious candidates for secular sainthood (in this functional and festive sense)? I would nominate Nietzsche (patron saint of the mad, and classicists), Emma Goldman, Gandhi, Mozart (the poor, child prodigies) and/or Beethoven (the deaf), for starters. Each would have to be someone you could build an interesting party around, one way or another, and collectively they would represent the diversity of human biography and all the traits you want to celebrate. (It's no barrier if they also have gigantic character flaws, as any reading of Lives of the Saints will help to make clear.) It wouldn't be hard to come up with a very appealing Secular Calendar, and as for designing the rituals we have millennia of evidence as to what works. A friend of mine was baptised by his atheist parents at home in single-malt scotch: that works for me. I vote for the annual fast period to culminate in Colette Day, on which you're obliged to prepare the most sensual self-indulgent French meal you can contrive, and for the pilgrimage to be tied to Mozart -- who wouldn't prefer a Hajj that ended up in Vienna?

So what should we do on Darwin Day? Something to do with nature, obviously -- mass country rambles, perhaps. And he was by all accounts an underachieving youth and a wonderful father, so perhaps after the walk everyone would have to take a young person out for tea and listen sympathetically.

Your finance minister, Sandy McTire

2009-01-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

There's something pretty funny -- and very Canadian -- about the way that, judging by the emphases in the Globe and on the CBC yesterday, the Harper 'stimulus package' is all about that central pillar of our economy: home renovations. In other countries, infrastructure stimulus means les grands travaux, nation-building, fixing the railways and establishing epic monuments. Here, we're more about putting a new deck in. In fact, given the avidity with which Canadians collect Canadian Tire money, I suspect the Conservatives are on to a vote-winner here. (Come to think of it, why not just make Canadian Tire money legal tender?)

I don't really understand why construction should be privileged over other sectors as a focus of stimulus, unless there's stuff we particularly want constructed. The do-it-yourself kind is presumably anti-stimulus, since the labour is unpaid. And so far as I can tell, the average GTA renovation/construction firm (a) has had more demand than it could keep up with for the past five years, and could surely coast a while; (b) prefers not to collect GST; (c) has coped with high demand by hiring illegal immigrants, who presumably are sending remittances home and also not paying taxes; and (d) has (reasonably enough) 0 intention of ever hiring and training a laid-off auto worker (see (c)). I don't see how it can be a particularly high-value sector to stimulate once you've factored in all that real-life stuff, which I'm willing to bet they didn't. Instead, why not a stimulus package centred, say, on restaurants and farmers markets? Tax breaks for anyone who eats out twice a week, and/or gets the fancy mushrooms from that guy at the Riverdale market? That's all local spending, it's instant job creation and it's not one-time-only the way construction is. But you just know that Prentice and Harper think spending money at Home Depot is morally superior, and I fear they are true Canadians in that.

UPDATE: Inkless Wells has handily provided a photo of Stephen Harper demonstrating the correct use of a nail gun on Michael Ignatieff. (No no, just on some wall.) It's rather less scary than the photos of him smiling and holding cookies, sharing a laugh with a cute kid, and so on. But personally, I think the only apt photo would be one of Harper trying to lure first Quebeckers and now Ontarians into his gingerbread house.

Mystery of the day

2009-01-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

Overheard on campus, one student dogmatically insisting to another: "It should be the law, like in Quebec. There you *have* to have --" and at that moment they disappeared into inaudibility.

So, what the heck do you have to have in Quebec, by law, that you don't in Ontario? I can tell you my stereotypes are tottering.

Keep it clean, eh.

Same as the old boss

2009-01-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

At last, we have a budget (covered pretty comprehensively in print, but fragmented on-line: can it really be old news already?), and it's much as one would have expected: tax cuts, goodies for the construction industry, regional development stuff... 'stimulus', as they say. I'm skeptical as to how stimulated anyone will be, but what really baffles me is the assumption repeated ad nauseam that this is some massive departure from Conservative principles. I've been following North American politics for over thirty years, and I've never had an actual sighting of those fabled conservative principles. Mulroney ran deficits, Reagan ran deficits, both Bushes ran deficits. Harper hasn't been doing so, but then until the recent meltdown it would have been politically impossible for any leader to do so after the anti-deficit campaigns of the preceding Liberal governments. During my lifetime, a conservative has consistently been someone who hates paying taxes, hates the poor and hates the environment; but government spending and deficits have been neither here nor there ideologically (as opposed to rhetorically, of course). And if in a few years all this spending makes it easier to cut social programs and blow off environmental regulation, in the name of fiscal responsibility -- and you just know that's how they're going to play it -- the Conservative base will be tickled pink.

Who gurs? Uighurs!

2009-01-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

As you will have noticed, I can't be bothered to post anything really serious about Guantanamo: the moral 'issues' are not hard enough to be intellectually interesting, and you can always go read Glenn Greenwald to get good and fired up. But I would like to offer up a brief prayer to the fickle gods of immigration that (instead of/in addition to Omar Khadr) Canada gets sent some of the Guantanamo Uighurs. They've been treated atrociously, to put it mildly; the probability of there being an Al-Qaeda mastermind among them is close to zero; it would deeply, deeply piss off the tyrannical and racist Chinese regime they made the mistake of standing up to, which is an intrinsically good thing to do; and the Uighurs make noodles.

A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.

Updates from all over

2009-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

(1) Our Man on the Allegheny notes that a different version of the Obama-Astaire meme has reached the semi-hallowed halls of the NYT:

On Tuesday, our new president did offer one subtle whiff of the Great Depression. His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote that lyric for “Swing Time” (1936), arguably the best of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.

But it's admittedly a different kettle of fish and (b), I'm not taking responsibility for anything Frank Rich writes. And having finally bothered to importune Mister Google about it, I see that of course I wasn't really the first to note the Obama-Astaire resemblances: so far as I can tell this guy was, and with better pictures too.

(2) A well-connected source, we'll just call him Gerald the Mole, points out that my snark at the Sunday Times' rather introverted circulation policy is misplaced. For their Canadian circulation efforts are entirely outsourced to... take a guess... the Globe and Mail! Which simply buys up some quota of papers and uses them to sweeten its own circulation efforts. Such as they are.

Gerald also confirms my worst fears, much less elegantly stated in Sunday's other post:

On another more urgent matter, you should know that a guiding principle of journalism is that "news" is something that editors have heard over and over and over.

Yes, that would be the problem in a nutshell.

UPDATE: Apparently 'outsourced' is an overstatement: it's just that these Sunday-only Canadian subscriptions to the NYT are part of a Globe campaign and my snark is more properly directed at them. (Though I suppose for them it may make business sense to use the Times as short-term bait.)

Your morning aargh

2009-01-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

Mostly not a bad paper today, but I must say it makes me angry that the Globe gives op-ed space to the drivelings of Margaret Somerville. God knows how she got to be "founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University"* but her reasoning is never less than excruciatingly embarrassing, and probably quite a few readers draw the natural inference about academic ethics as a whole. There really should be some kind of consumer warning tag-line: "plays an ethicist on teevee" or similar.

Today's column, so you don't have to torment yourself as I did: religion is kinda useful, Richard Dawkins is a meanie, and if you don't have a religion then that's your religion so there! So let's all be nice to religion.

Four hundred years of rather sophisticated and detailed argument about the genuinely difficult issues raised by the relations of church and state, modern liberalism pluralism and secularism ... all bypassed in blithe ignorance for maunderings so contentless as to be unfiskable. There's just no way they'd print something of comparable murk and incompetence about sports or business -- you know, stuff that matters -- but hey, you're an expert in ethics if you think you are.

* OK, she's a lawyer. And a licensed pharmacist in Australia! I have a feeling that Wikipedia is not giving me the full story here, but her lack of relevant credentials is certainly confirmed.

Digging their own graves

2009-01-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

So Bill Kristol won't be writing a column for the New York Times any more. Instead, he'll be writing a column for the Washington Post! And the betting seems to be that the NYT will get some other ignorant right-wing doofus (that being the kind that's always in stock) to fill his slot. So there we are.

I think this will go down as the moment, or one of the pivotal moments, at which mainsteam American print journalism really jumped the shark. There is just no way that the editors of either the NYT or the WP are stupid enough not to realise that Bill Kristol is, in fact, stupid. They just don't care, because they have a cynical contempt for their readers. The thinking is that those readers are either themselves right-wing dickheads who don't care about that whole true/false distinction; or, that if they're reality-based, they're masochists who will be enthralled by a paper that makes them mad. But banking on the masochism of your customers is really not a great long-term business strategy.*

I used to have a subscription to the Sunday Times, but I can't say I was sorry when it lapsed. (Which it did because when my credit card rolled over they couldn't be bothered to contact me for the new expiry date -- I know an anecdote is not data, but that still seems to me to cast a lurid light on the NYT's circulation promotion efforts.) They have plenty of good 'content', but I just scan it whenever it suits me on line. I do not miss having it in the house. What do I subscribe to (besides the Globe)? The New Yorker, which they'd have to pry out of my cold dead hands. I also pay rather a lot to get the London Review of Books delivered. I read both when I dine alone; they're welcome in my house as good company. I trust them. I'm fond of them.

Now nothing stops a newspaper from being a beloved brand like that. I'm sure there are crazy-ass rightwing businessmen who are genuinely fond of the Wall Street Journal. I've heard people speak with affection of the Financial Times. And time was when the most treasured luxury in a lefty North American household was the copy of Manchester Guardian, airmailed worldwide every week at fantastic expense. (Imagine caring that much about a newspaper!) But then the Guardian decided to become just like every other paper, and sure enough now it sucks. And every time the NYT or WP hires a right-wing moron just for 'controversy' or a 'balance' nobody believes in, it's a sign that they just don't think it matters whether anybody actually likes their brand. As revenues plummet, in an era of almost infinite free content... yeah, good luck with that.

*Or maybe, dumbest of all, they maybe think it doesn't matter if you have a few nutbars and liars on staff so long as you also have columnists who cater to the reader who happens to prefer truth. So long as you have Paul Krugman, why mind about Bill Kristol? Think of it as balance! An even bigger tent! It's like a restaurant deciding to enhance its weekend brunch buffet with a poisoned rat dish -- I mean hey, what's the problem, we've still got the omelets for folks who like them, and now we'll be getting the poisoned rat market too! It just doesn't work that way.

Your morning aargh

2009-01-25T08:56:00.000-08:00

I understand the pressures to fill those column inches, but is it really, really necessary for both my Saturday papers this week to have utterly identical, utterly tedious articles on Robbie Burns Day, Chinese New Year, and the Academy Award nominations? The first two I swear are just recycled from year to year; and there seems to be more and more bilge about the Oscars every year, even as normal people lose interest and the ratings drop. But then journalists are terrified of the responsibility of deciding for themselves what might be an important story. So if they covered Robbie Burns Day last year, and the Tourism Scotland p.r. office sends the same press release this year, they'll happily run the same damn story all over again, probably with a feeling of relief and satisfaction. And if the Oscars become boring, irrelevant, and uninteresting, if the televised show becomes unwatchable and people in fact stop watching, well, they'll just take it as fodder for a further genre of article moaning and whining about the Oscars. Whereas a rational person would respond by, you know, paying less attention to them.

I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.

Onwards to Pulau Weh & Nuremberg

2009-01-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

The one article I'll keep from this weekend's papers is apparently not available on line: an article in the Globe travel section on the fabulous scuba-diving off the remote Indonesian island of Pulau Weh. Of course, all these fabulous-diving/remote-island pieces are exactly the same, so just take this as an invitation to construct your own tropical reverie instead.... Still, did you know that there's something called the megamouth shark, a prehistoric looking deepwater monster discovered only in 1976 and sighted only 42 times since? Pulau Weh's got 'em. (Now and then.)

While we're on the subject of stuff you and I didn't know, follow the links to the golden hats. (is that cool or what? don't you want one??) This is why it's worth reading even right-wing blogs now and then, if the right-winger is sufficiently idiosyncratic.

Saturday front page smackdown

2009-01-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

Not a bad pair of A1's this weekend. The Star does what the Star does well, a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-our-institutions investigative piece on the high cost and total uselessness of (some) workers' comp-funded retraining programs. The Globe does what the Globe does well, sending someone to Niger to look into the mysterious abduction of a top Canadian diplomat.

The Globe wins this one on points, I think. Everyone already knows that our workers' comp system is a black hole of waste and mismanagement: it has ever been thus. And the focus of the piece is rather narrow, even lazy: just a few case studies of people who were sent by expensive consultants [!] to expensive private training centres, and still can't speak English. Time was when any workers comp piece worth its salt included the phrase 'billions unaccounted for', or 'skyrocketing deficit' or 'nightmare of red tape as benefits delayed for maimed thousands'. Kafka worked in workers comp, ya know.

The real story here is the general lack of adequate ESL services in this province, which has been causing massive inefficiencies and suffering for decades. It's a real mystery why -- and a scandal that -- no government has ever bothered to do anything about it: that's the story the Star really needs to write, and didn't here. (There's also a certain amount of bad faith in the writing of the story: they keep harping on the fact that these centres cost more than tuition at our universities, as if a university education were a live alternative for these guys; and they don't acknowledge that a manual labourer who can't do manual labour any more is never going to get a highly paid job again even if he does learn English.)

As for the Globe, well, Top diplomat kidnapped by Tuareg isn't a story you come across very often these days, and their writer covers the possible explanations of the mystery thoroughly and evocatively. Despite the wonderfully John Buchan sound, I fear this is really the sadder story of the two: somehow I don't think they're just fattening him up with turkish delight for the Marrakesh slave market. I don't buy the rumour-mongering in the article about the local rebels having Al-Qaeda connections -- how can you, when people can make careers out of inventing stuff about Al-Qaeda? But it can't be a good sign that they left his car and his cellphone behind. Surely ordinary bandits take everything.

Obamaflections

2009-01-22T10:53:00.001-08:00

I'm the least qualified person to try to speak to this, but I wish someone would do it, so here goes.

Amid all the joy over Obama's inauguration, I've seen no mention of how remarkable it is that black America fully embraces Obama as theirs, sees his cause as theirs, fully owns this moment of triumph. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Obama is not descended from any slaves, or people who suffered under Jim Crow, or civil rights marchers. He's really African-American, whereas the phrase is normally used as a weird euphemism for practically the most longstanding indigenous group in the country (except for aboriginal groups, I guess). And in many well-known ways Obama's story is more like that of an immigrants' kid than of the average black American (to the admittedly minimal extent that there is such a thing). At the start of the primaries, when Hillary was still leading among black voters in South Carolina, there were some muffled rumblings and grumblings about whether Obama was 'black enough', and it took a while for those to die away. He could easily have come to be identified as mixed-race first and foremost, and not really representative of anything but his urban elitist self.

So why didn't it play out that way? This is where it gets interesting, because there are two diametrically opposed answers:

1. It's all about race. Obama might not share the family history of most American blacks, but he shares the pigmentation, and that's what matters to them because it's still what matters for your life chances. It's what gets you excluded and stereotyped and stopped by the cops. Obama could have grown up Brazilian and his triumph would still be black America's triumph, because what it's a triumph over is just the centuries-long history of white racism in the U.S.

2. It's all about culture. Obama counts as fully American-black because black America is his adopted cultural home: he married into it, he goes to church in it, he lives in Kenwood, he listens to hip hop. (He even likes sweet potato pie, which I fear would be the dealbreaker for me.) He lives as an African-American, in short, and if that's what matters then the phrase isn't so stupid after all: all these cultural markers are just like the markers that we casually use to place some family as Italian-American or whatever.

Now I try to imagine a white man who had made all of Obama's choices, and assimilated as fully as possible to the black South Side. (I wonder if there are any....) How would black voters respond to that guy as a political candidate? I think there would be some feeling of solidarity, but obviously nothing like the reaction to Obama. So (1) can't be dismissed; and maybe it's really the heart of the matter. But I'm pretty sure (2) counted for a lot too. And that points to a future where pigmentation means less for identity than culture and culture is understood to be something freely adopted, as a mode of personal expression and self-development, open to all and none the less authentic for it. Bring it on, I say.

"Mr. Khadr should come home, and he should be reintegrated into Canadian society”

2009-01-22T09:37:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd find myself more reactionary than Michael Ignatieff, but this really rubbed me the wrong way. 'Home?' 'Reintegrated?' Khadr's family was never integrated into Canadian society in the first place -- they lived in Pakistan precisely because that possibility horrified them. Now Guantanamo is a moral abomination, and we should do whatever we can to help Obama out in closing it. But Omar Khadr shouldn't be our problem in any special way. That is, if we took citizenship seriously and had sane requirements for it*, the Khadrs would never have been eligible, or at least would have had it revoked decades ago. You'd especially think that a Conservative government, if it took government seriously (but apparently conservatism now precludes that), would care about that having Canadian citizenship mean something. But no. Presumably the imposition of any new standards would be perceived as picking fights with the hyphenated voters they're desperate to woo, so instead they just let citizenship itself come to be devalued to the point of worthlessness -- we didn't even get our citizens out of the Gaza Strip! Which is disgusting and clearly racist at bottom -- the assumption can only have been that Palestinian-Canadians aren't the real thing. (Same thing with Lebanon not so long ago.) But so long as you make citizenship easy to get and impossible to lose, there are going to be lots of cases in which going to bat for your citizens isn't unquestionably the right thing to do, as it always should be.

* Like what? Well, maybe you should have to swear an oath to the effect that you don't hate and mean to actively work to destroy everything Canada stands for, with citizenship revoked if you turn out to have lied about that (as I believe is already the case for lying about war crimes). That doesn't seem too much to ask, does it? (And yes, I realize that oath would be a tricky thing to write.)

Your e-z post-inauguration round-up:

2009-01-22T08:50:00.001-08:00

1. Bush getting booed and jeered, as the commentariat falls into awkward silence. That's change I can believe in! (If it needs defending, see here.)

2. A nice first-person account of the big day (and another one here)... which was actually an organizational fiasco in some respects. Here's hoping a head or two rolls.

3. The Obama family defined: very cool.

4. And of course Pete Seeger.

Heh, so someone at the Globe does read this blog

2009-01-20T12:44:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Spirit of the West for pointing out our first unacknowledged contribution to the host organism, from one of the endless rather dull articles today on Obama:

But Mr. Obama is a man as well as a symbol. His personal qualities appeal at least as powerfully as his race to all sorts of Americans.

His Ivy League law background excites educated voters. His stance of "ironic cool" in interviews wows the young. His gentlemanly manners and lithe elegance - he is closer in style to Fred Astaire than to any U.S. politician - charm suburban whites generally and white women in particular.

You're welcome, Mister O'Sullivan! (Truly.)

Now ship them to the Hague

2009-01-20T10:58:00.001-08:00

I may yet get cathartically verklempt later on, but this morning I didn't really hear the big cartoon sun singing Beatles songs as angels frolicked, though I would have liked to. (Did you?) Perhaps it's because I was multitasking and as usual it ended in a botch-up all round: ended up with an unwritten lecture, an ominously hockey-puck-like pie, and having missed all the fun bits of the inaugural ceremony, if indeed there were any. (I gather that at any rate Cheney's transformation into Dr. Strangelove is now complete; that there was a groovily weird benediction; and that Barry O's speech was basically depressing.) For whatever reason I'm more in a mood for retrospective bile today, and in that spirit will link to the most telling comment I've found on the interwebs today: a summary of the Bush years according to America's Finest News Source, at Making Light. Lest we forget, eh.

UPDATE: For anyone else still working the schadenfraude, nothing (as you might expect) can touch Wonkette and commentators on the Old Testament satisfactions of seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. Setting aside the now-standard Dracula and Hannibal Lecter riffs, opinion is evidently divided on the important question of whether the right cultural touchstone is now (a) Mister Potter in It's a Wonderful Life; (b) Doctor Strangelove (seemed like the obvious call to me); (c) Burgess Meredith as a Batman villain (this I don't get); and (d) a Dalek in Doctor Who. But who or what is a Dalek, and just how sordidly evil is it?

Your Weekly Book Review Snark

2009-01-17T14:44:00.001-08:00

Nothing much to see here this week, but I do think someone should have stopped Jane Urquhart from inaugurating "a weekly series about books that have been unjustly overlooked, under-praised or just ignored" with a piece on The Blue Flower, which is a pretty damn famous novel. In fact I seem to remember there was a bit of a scandale when it failed to win the Booker.

I think The Blue Flower is one of Penelope Fitzgerald's weaker books anyway. Her great strength is that trademark elliptical style -- very simple, cool, immensely respectful of her characters -- which seems to at once tell you nothing and everything about them. They remain mysterious just as real people are, so you feel as though you're observing them directly -- or perhaps hearing stories about them from a slightly dotty, very generous, but underneath it all rather sharp English aunt. (Aunt Sadie, in fact.) The method works wonderfully with more or less familiar English characters, especially of a sad and loser-ish stripe; but applied to strange 18th century German aristocrats, as in The Blue Flower, it just results in impenetrability.

You want unjustly overlooked? How about Beer in the Snooker Club, a wonderful novel by one Waguih Ghali who (a) never wrote another one, (b) committed suicide, and (c) has no Wikipedia article to link to? Or how about the whole freakin' oeuvre of Colette, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, whose stuff was only ever (partially) available in terrible fifties translations and is now mostly out of print? I could go on...

For your pre-inaugural pleasure

2009-01-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

As a public performer and icon, Barack Obama has always reminded me very powerfully of somebody, and I've finally figured out who it is. And America, you could do a LOT worse:

(Both photos from Creative Commons.)

Exactly the same shape of head, ears, etc.:

Exactly the same smile. Exactly the same build. Exactly the same physical grace, the same air of relaxation combined with precise control, the same debonaire way with a prop.

The birth-certificate conspiracy theory folks just haven't been asking the right questions....

Rubinomics strikes again

2009-01-14T16:12:00.000-08:00

The bad news is that the new soon-to-be-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury didn't pay his taxes until he was audited and forced to do so.

But hey, the good news is that it was all just an honest mistake! That IMF payroll system was just too darn tricky and complicated for him.

Umm, wait a minute....

Geithner's only claim to fame is being a protege of Rubin and Summers, the soi-disant geniuses and Wall St. apologists whose ideological opposition to all regulation of financial industries brought us the whole fucking securities-industry meltdown and with it the total crash of the American economy. It would be really, really nice if Obama started throwing these boys overboard. But I don't see it happening. Because not paying your taxes and having an illegal housekeeper can only make Geithner seem all the more reassuringly One of Us to Wall St. and the Republican Party. And of course appeasing those two groups is universally understood to be the sole legitimate aim of Democratic administration economic policy.

Even more than Her Hillaryship, this is the nomination that made me decide I just don't believe in all that hoohah about 'Change'. Or rather, I'll believe it when I see it, and with this shower I'd be crazy to expect to.

But seriously now

2009-01-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

on the all-important question facing the new administration, Portuguese water dog vs. labradoodle: I don't see how that can be a close call. They're both absurdly energetic, so either way there'll have to be an extra Secret Service man for walkies duty. And let's face it, neither is actually going to be at the D.C. animal shelter. (Which I'm willing to bet is pit bulls all the way.) But PWD's, judging by the ones I've seen, are indeed obsessed with water, and only happy when splashing in and out of it all day. And the White House doesn't have any.

Correction: The White House does have an outdoor swimming pool, which I guess counts. Click on the link and you can compare Ford's nice looking retrievers to those goofy Bush things.

Tiny afterthought

2009-01-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

It must be longstanding policy, but I only just noticed that the Globe refers to Her Hillaryship as 'Ms. Clinton'. Does that strike anyone else as odd? Wouldn't using the husband's last name automatically make you a 'Mrs.'?

Same as the old boss

2009-01-14T08:16:00.000-08:00

I realize half the point of the front page is to toady to the powerful, with photos, but really: trying to pass off Hillary Clinton sounding sternly anti-Hamas as either 'smart power' or 'tough diplomacy' -- for that matter, trying to pass it off as news -- is pretty pathetic.

Meanwhile doomed U.N. attempts to stop the fighting make page A15, as do the completely disgusting efforts by the Israeli right to ban Arab political parties. So far the Globe has had 0 coverage of Olmert's claim to dictate American voting at the UN, which has been a pretty big scandal in the US. And today's editorial -- after nothing on Gaza or Israel for at least the previous four days -- is condemning, of all things, the UN Human Rights Council, which is indeed a wacky chronically anti-Israeli group -- but who cares? It's hard to imagine a more pusillanimous choice of focus: it enables the Globe to insinuate that the Harper government is being rational and even-handed and standing up for the little guy, when in terms of the realities on the ground they're aggressively cheerleading for the bullies. Ugh -- it's really hard to know which is being more cynical, cowardly and self-discrediting here, our government or our press.

You heard it here first: 'tough diplomacy' is going to be the 'compassionate conservatism' of the new regime. A have-it-both-ways oxymoron whose two sides, somewhat miraculously, both manage to be lies. Unless you can tell me how refusing to talk or engage with the powerless, under orders from another country's government, is either tough or diplomatic. 'Soft power' -- same thing.

It's now official

2009-01-12T15:25:00.001-08:00

I have directed my computer -- with pangs of regret and in a tone of chagrin that it probably didn't fully register -- to regard everything from the Obama family as spam.

Why is this morning's paper all about the Golden Globes?

2009-01-12T07:20:00.000-08:00

For some aggregation and sorting of information on Gaza, to which I have nothing very original to add, see the Galloping Beaver and Dr. Dawg. They make the point en passant that the Ignatieff Liberals are now following the Conservatives as they follow the Americans into mindless cheerleading for the very worst aspects of Israeli policy. And though our mainstream media isn't quite as indoctrinated as the US one (for just how bad it is down there, see Glenn Greenwald passim), it's still pretty reluctant to use the phrase 'war crimes' however well the shoe may fit. The Globe's coverage of Canadian foreign policy in all this has been dire bordering on invisible, thus neatly matching the policy itself. Demonstrations by Arab-Canadians don't even make the print edition.

What I'm still waiting to read is some analysis of how and why the Canadian spectrum got twisted in this way. Everybody knows what the Americans' problem is: AIPAC, and a political system so beholden to big money that a handful of rich fanatics can fix the Overton window wherever they want, wherever the rights and wrongs and the national interest may stand. (Again, that's AIPAC: it's a mistake to speak in more general terms of the Jewish lobby or Jewish voters, not only because of the unpleasant conspiracy-theory sound but because the ordinary Jewish voter is a sane person who has very little to do with all this -- just as ordinary Israelis know perfectly well that it is not actually in their interest to have the Sharons and Netanyahus constantly egged on by the most powerful nation on earth.)

But Canada doesn't have an AIPAC equivalent, so far as I know. (If we do, it's really time for someone to do an article on it.) So what's going on here? Why are Harper and Ignatieff trying to outdo each other in mealymouthed support for the insupportable? There's no way it's a vote-winner in the long run. Admittedly Harper's base includes the creepy kind of evangelical who 'supports' Israel in the sense of hoping it will do something awful enough to bring about the End Times, but is he really that far off his rocker himself? Or is it just that if the US decides to jump off a tall building, we always feel compelled to follow sooner or later? But the closest parallel to America's crazy Israel policy is their crazy Cuba policy, also dictated by a handful of unpleasant rich extremists; and Canadians have always rather enjoyed thumbing their noses at that one.

Ah, a closer communion with Mister Google has corrected me: we do indeed have our very own AIPAC. (I knew about Gerry Schwartz, which is how I knew what to ask Mister G.; but I thought he was a one-off.) Interesting that I had to go to this somewhat marginal lefty venue to find out about it -- and I wouldn't necessarily vouch for the impeccable fairness and insight of all the reporting there. Still, res ipsa loquitur. Alas.

All the cool kids are doing it

2009-01-10T14:20:00.000-08:00

... so naturally I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I have been been 'tagged with a meme' by Miss Lucy. I'm supposed to take the book nearest to me, and post the 5th sentence on p. 56.

Oh no, I am sitting nearest the retro pulp shelf. And what's that sitting at the near end of the shelf? Oh dear. Ahem:

"If I had had a son I should have liked him to be snub-nosed and bullet-headed, for ugliness in the male is a security for virtue and a passport to popularity."

Heh, you could have done a lot worse. This is an aged clubman reminiscing to our narrator about the evil yet charismatically beautiful Arabin family, who are the mainspring of The Dancing Floor by John Buchan, which is really one of the oddest books I've ever read. It has Buchan's trademark combination of totally ludicrous, coincidence-driven plot with such effective scene-writing as to be at once gripping and unreadable. All aspiring pulp writers should have to read all of Buchan and Daphne du Maurier to learn their trade (and Agatha Christie for the converse virtues and vices). What makes The Dancing Floor specially weird even for Buchan is that there's a lot of very vivid archaic Greek religion mixed in with the adventure story -- it's as if he'd hallucinated the whole plot while stricken with a high fever in the middle of reading The Golden Bough. In other words, it's really rather good....

I believe I'm also supposed to put the fifth sentence of p. 56 from 'the book I'm currently working on'. Unfortunately that description currently picks out a pile of unassembled rubbish with no such page numbers. But I'm sorry to say that several of my current papers-in-progress run to that (if you double space which I therefore usually don't), so here goes from 'Plato on Desire for the Good':

For it is criterial for agency that not everything can count for the agent as success: I must aim at some determinate outcome which my performance may or may not bring about.

This is by way of explaining an argument in Plato, but also in my sly historian's way insinuating that he is right. An insinuation I stand by.

Ah, but is it any truer or better than the Buchan? It certainly isn't any better written.

The city that does not work*

2009-01-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, this story on Toronto's half-hearted venture into legalizing street food sums up everything that's wrong with this city. (Accurate headline: "So you want to cook bhajias or fajitas? Do we have a slate of rules for you".) Well, maybe not everything, but enough: red tape, indifference to the point of the policies under consideration, and, basically, stupid stupid people (both elected and administrative) in charge of city policy. That for decades we had a system designed to legally prevent the sale of anything other than semi-toxic hot dogs is a total embarrassment; that now, instead of just adopting whatever New York or Singapore or Bangkok does -- you know, doing what works -- we are slowly custom-designing a regime so snarled up in red tape that no one you would want in the street-food business would be willing to go into it -- that's beyond embarrassing and into infuriating. And it's really hard not to see it as a sign of general indifference and dysfunction -- remind me again why everyone was so excited about David Miller?

* I wonder how many of you even remember when Toronto used to be called 'the city that works'. A phrase that has gone the way of 'Harvard of the North', and for much the same reasons.

The book club for men

2009-01-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

As for the content of the new Books subsection, there's an interesting piece about an all-male book club: I didn't know there were such things. They read books about wars, Genghis Khan, Conrad Black, and hardly any fiction. (Just a Ken Follett [!] and a hit literary novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.) The group has been around for 30 years, which is pretty impressive, and includes a wide range of vaguely upper-middle class anglo Montrealers. What struck me was this bit:

...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.

Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:

The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.

The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."

See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.

I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.

The end of an underwhelming era

2009-01-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

But enough of the belles-lettres, you say: bring on the snark! Well, today's paper [ed. note -- and for once I really do mean 'today', Saturday] confirms what I've long inferred from the Globe combination of generally good reporting with dodgy editorial judgement. Namely that the No. 1 problem with the paper is the No. 1 editor, one Edward Greenspon. Today he has an ex cathedra piece in the front section which includes the following near-gibberish:

Authoritative coverage of authors and their renderings has always been a hallmark of The Globe and Mail. Today, we rededicate ourselves to the subject with a new package that traverses the print-digital divide and opens up a world of new possibilities while securing the old world order.

Coverage of their renderings? Traversing the divide with a package to secure the old world order? Is he Doctor Who? To me this reads like a stoned intern's spoof, which nobody caught because the preceding paras. were already so pompous and opaque. If this is what Slow Eddie's own prose is like, it's astounding the paper is as strong as it is.

But wait, you say, what is this divide-traveling package? What does it all mean? It means that the Globe, which used to boast endlessly about having Canada's only free-standing Books section, no longer has a free-standing Books section. Books are now a subsection at the back of the Focus section. A pretty big subsection, this week at least; but the point is surely to cut back coverage significantly in the long run (the sad trajectory of the once-great National Post book section, where by 'once-great' I mean that in its heyday it used to commission, and pay handsomely for, free-form stuff from me.) Meanwhile they are bumping up coverage of books on the website: they are also adding this amazing new thing called a 'comments' feature to the reviews there, and including some web-only content, in the hope that poor Slow Eddie can spin the killing of the Books section (vivi-section?) as a fabulous new-media breakthrough. Well, good luck to them. Personally I think I'm a lot more likely to read about books in print, over my breakfast coffee, rather than during a bout of web-surfing later in the day: but my guess would be that they don't have much choice here. (Dr. B's grasp of these matters is hazy, but it seems that newspapers expect their on-line ventures to lose money, though how long that can last is anybody's guess).

Of course, given my usual whingeing about the quality of the Books section, any complaints about the quantity are going to sound like that joke about the two old ladies in the Catskills.*

Oh, and in totally unrelated and coincidental news, the Globe is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce.

*Who moan about the resort food, endlessly and in great detail, with the punch line: 'And the portions are so small!'

The rutabagas of politics

2009-01-08T15:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know posting has been light lately, it's that tricky 'work' business slowing me down. You are always on my mind, dear readers, but by the time I've snatched a moment to compose my thoughts about some news item -- and I do have views, for instance, about those entitled gits who insisted on going out of bounds at the ski resort in BC and had to be rescued by the ski patrol (ah but was that, on the other hand, perhaps unnecessary nanny-stateism?) -- the world has moved on.

So, clearly, I should be working on a post about Gaza, since it seems perfectly likely that Israel will still be pounding the crap out of it as I enter my retirement years. Any other suggestions for stories that, like turnips or rutabagas, will keep reliably in storage throughout the winter months, even if the thought of them turns the stomach?

Yuppie scum

2009-01-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

Am I still allowed to be annoyed at the gentrification of my supermarket if my shopping bags say Leslieville Cheese Shop, Riverdale Farmer's Market, Le Boulanger Francais [Ottawa] and London Review of Books?

I do buy a lot of the old-lady stuff -- innards and passata and nasty Portuguese snacks -- but I fear that's not enough for street cred nowadays.

A thankful new year

2009-01-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

For academics, the real New Year comes in September, and by January all good resolutions have been scattered to the four winds. So this time of year, with the cheeriness of Christmas on one side and the really-not-so-horrible horrors of the term to come on the other, always puts me in more of a Thanksgiving mood. The past few days I've been utterly absorbed in a book of letters among members of quite an affluent family of a few generations ago (more on this later, no doubt), and I'm feeling thankful for a few things which have really substantially improved our lot just in the short time since -- say, since 1950. So -- without retracting any of my usual grumbling about our wretched and potentially apocalyptic era -- here are some things I'm feeling thankful for:

1. Central heating. Almost everybody used to be cold and uncomfortable all the time until really quite recently. Thank god we don't have to be. (Now how did you guess this book is about English people?)

2. Respectful and sometimes even effective treatments for cancer. Better pain treatment too. There's still a ton of unnecessary suffering, but my god it used to be worse. And as late as the 1970s patients were being systematically kept in the dark. (When exactly did all that change, I wonder, and how?)

3. Effective cheap instant communications: cheap long-distance, cell phones, e-mail. This one is trickier. I do think that the death of the letter is a terrible loss: not just our lives, but our actual selves are less interesting than those of the people who used to sit down and pour out their thoughts and experiences, with some reflection and in detail, on a regular basis to their far-flung friends. Serious letter-writing is like the Mediterranean diet (I mean the real one, that used to make Cretan peasants live to one hundred): incredibly good for you, but not quite attractive enough for people to stick with when there are cushier alternatives. And that's really too bad. Still: think of the enormous amount of anguish and heartbreak, the terrible mistakes and misunderstandings and missed opportunities caused by letters delayed or gone astray, or garbled telegrams, back in the day. Thank god that's basically over.

4. Parenting taken seriously. Yes, I know it's gone too far, we're creating a monster race of overentitled overprotected zombies, but do admit. The level of parental neglect, selfishness, unfairness and outright cruelty that was socially acceptable just a few generations ago is quite something.

What else should go on the list? And for bonus points, what family have I been reading about? All the clues are there...

UPDATE: Two more indisputable recent contributions to human happiness:

1. Quick no-fault divorce. Surely the main cause of long-term declines in murder rates?
2. The photocopier. Remember the Gestetner? I literally cannot imagine trying to function as a teacher without the ability to create and revise handouts almost instantly.

On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia

2009-01-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

The tree is down and the ornaments packed away. The leftovers have been eaten and the hangovers hung. The cats have almost stopped pooping tinsel. It's really over.

Time to put our Bob Cratchit mittens back on and get back up on the stool, rubbing our hands in anticipation as we open the first newspaper of 2009 we can bother to read. Incidentally, does anyone else think that the very lowest ebb of journalism is all those endless lists of Best of/Worst of Whatever that the papers use as vapid filler at the fag-end of every year? It was worth spending part of the holidays at a work-related convention in Philadelphia to avoid all that.

So, what have we in the paper today? [ed. note -- meaning as so often the day before yesterday] Just this from David Eddie:

I come from a family of nerdy number-crunchers; I also went to an egghead high school where about half the population were calculator-toting dorks who spoke in robotic voices and had weird little peach-fuzz mustaches, high-waisted flood pants and tinted glasses.

Hem hem now -- surely no more than one-third or so?

Uncle Dave's advice also seems off in this column: if the writer of the letter can't or won't explain why the in-laws 'deeply dislike' her, isn't that the first thing to get clear about, even if they are physicists? We dorks are usually pacific, even genial folk.

Rolling down the shutters

2008-12-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

Dear patrons: GMW will be closed for the Great Winter Hoohah as of tomorrow. We intend to keep busy and come back better than ever in the New Year: while you loll about in your tryptophan coma, GMW staff will be taking inventory, sweeping out any dusty corners, installing a new zinc bar, renovating the men's loo, and laying down warfarin. We may even do a little research on how to put up photographs. We will be open for business sporadically as of Dec. 27, and resume regular opening hours at the start of the New Year. No reservations will be taken until that time, but feel free to leave a message after the tone. Happy holidays and a merry everything!

Your morning aaargh

2008-12-17T09:07:00.000-08:00

Another weird-ass front page today, as the photo and no. 2 headline go to an agitated and disoriented Business columnist, under the mysterious headline "Will Danny's resource power grab pay off?" You see, Premier Williams of Newfoundland (as we bloggers with our olde-world courtesy prefer to call him) has expropriated hydro assets and timber cutting rights belonging to AbitibiBowater, in response to their plans to close their main mill in central Newfoundland and throw huge numbers of people out of work. But it takes a hell of a lot of work to find that out, what with having to wade through endless unfunny Hugo Chavez jokes and wipe off all the spittle. I don't know how much Abitibi stock Konrad Yakabuski owns, but he is a very very angry little man. (Actually, if he owns stock he should be grateful by the sound of it.)

If you read the other, background article on p. 4, you get much more information, including the somehow amusing fact that the government informed Abitibi of its plans by e-mail. Also that Williams claims Abitibi has reneged on its side of the 1905 (!) contract it had with the government.

The Premier quoted century-old documents to the legislature. He cited a 1903 letter from the president of the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company Limited, a predecessor to AbitibiBowater, and a 1905 lease agreement to argue that the company's rights were dependent on operating a mill in the province.

But neither article bothers to investigate the content of Williams' claims and work out whether they're true or not. So, though it certainly warms the heart to see a corporate hack that angry, there's absolutely no way for the reader to figure out the rights and wrongs here. (It does seem suggestive that they can't find a single Newfoundlander to quote as opposed to Williams' plan, not even the heads of the other major local employers.) The Globe knows what it wants you to think -- so much so that they're prepared to pass off the editorial as the news story and cut the news story down to a useless add-on.

UPDATE: Heh heh, about half the letters to the editor today are complaints about that dumb story. Well, you heard it here first.

Apples 12, Oranges 0

2008-12-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell's articles are always loaded with fascinating information, but then it's a toss-up whether the inferences he draws are clever or ridiculous. Last week's article in the New Yorker was definitely on the asinine side, so I was disturbed to see it being pushed further by Yglesias.

Gladwell's starting point is the fun fact that apparently it's almost impossible to predict who will be a successful NFL quarterback. The NFL defensive teams are so much faster than in college that the whole strategic picture changes, and it's impossible to tell who will be able to adapt. Ok, fine. (Though actually it doesn't sound like an unsolvable problem to me: instead of watching games, just run some lab tests to find out exactly how fast the guy's vision and reflexes are.)

Then we get a analogy with (elementary and high school) teaching. Apparently there is such a thing as teaching skill: year after year some teachers get demonstrably better results than others on an objectively measurable and consistent basis. (Colour me somewhat more sceptical here.) But as with the quarterbacks, no one can predict who those good teachers are going to be. Somewhat spoiling his point, Gladwell then describes an experience of watching videos of teachers and instantly detecting which ones are successful (videos of beginning teachers at that, so there's no way these judgements could be backed up by the kind of long-term comparative evidence he's just been insisting is probative). Apparently it's a breeze to tell good teachers from bad once they're in the classroom, and it's just as you'd expect: the good teachers are the interactive, confident, responsive, high-feedback ones. Hence my scepticism: the profile of 'good teaching' here sounds suspiciously like what the education industry already assumed it was. But perhaps it is so.

The ridiculous part is the moral Gladwell draws: we need a lot more turnover in teaching. Abolish all entry barriers, and then fire everyone who doesn't perform! Because as with the quarterbacks, you can't predict, you can only sort after the fact. But this doesn't make sense for either industry -- and that's about all they have in common. The problem with selecting NFL quarterbacks is that they need physical gifts so extraordinary that they're freaks of nature even among skilled football players, and the costs of a wrong choice are extremely high. (So it's no surprise that the NFL doesn't in fact use the massive-turnover strategy.) In the case of schools as well, the costs of bad teaching are pretty high. But if good teaching is what Gladwell thinks it is, it's a bag of tricks that any reasonably quick-witted person could learn to master. So why not just teach actual teachers to do it? He's written an article about how to improve teaching which depends on the assumption that teaching can't work.

A lot of writing about education, even by smart guys like Gladwell and Yglesias, has this not-too-well-concealed Fire everybody! agenda. And it's not hard to guess why. Everybody had to suffer under The Teacher From Hell at some point in their lives, and it's an extremely traumatic experience. It's as if every single person writing about health care policy had had a close call with a botched surgery -- of course you get obsessed with the problem of bad apples. And I don't deny that there is such a problem. But if these guys kept in better touch with their high school friends, they'd know that their Teacher From Hell was somebody else's inspirational teacher of a lifetime. It's not a simple business. And it definitely isn't football.

Toronto Life watch

2008-12-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

I see Toronto Life is still running that stupid poll feature on the back page. Every month I hope it will have been changed to something more interesting, like 'Casserole of the Month' or 'Celebrity Lint', but no. They ask random vox pops a bunch of neither-serious-nor-actually-funny questions and print the meaningless results. I can see the advantages from the editor's point of view: it's free, and the intern can do it in an hour. But you'd think there'd be a voice in the back of his head pointing out that it's totally unamusing, month after month.

The only reason I notice is that the back page used to be the best thing in the magazine. It was a kind of obituary page, only for local institutions as well as heroes and villains -- I remember one for the old CHUM AM. It was often very poignant and well written, with a genuine local feeling. And before that it was a pretty good humour column by Marni Jackson. (Yes, Dr. B. goes way back.) It's the perfect spot for a snappy interview, or to a spotlight a local hero. But I guess advertisers don't care what goes there. And so the editors don't either.

'How to insult George Bush, wherever you are in the world'

2008-12-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

is the irresistible headline of an article in the on-line Guardian's today, complete with action photo of flying shoes. Unfortunately it's just a survey of traditionally obscene and insulting hand gestures from around the world -- which turns out to mean just about every hand gesture you can imagine, including the Churchill victory sign. This is useful information, but does not solve the problem of what to do when George Bush is not standing in front of you.

Nitwit of the Day

2008-12-15T08:52:00.001-08:00

Now this is just embarrassing -- can we please get some kind of ruling that hockey columnists do not get to also write about politics? Maybe from the board of health under workplace sanitation rules, like the way raw poultry has to be handled separately. Having spent the weeks in question covering Sidney Crosbie, Roy MacGregor here shows olde-Canadian grit and resourcefulness in just making stuff up as regards the nameless parliamentary crisis. For the record: we have no reason to think that the G-G was 'uncertain' about anything, whatever exactly he means by that, and it is not true that "one of the polls found that nearly three-quarters of Canadians were "scared" silly by all this." Well, maybe one of the polls did, I don't know what might be out there (and notice how msm columnists never give you links, even in the online version), and I know that for instance the outfit that specializes in climate-change denialist push-polling also did a poll with some predictably absurd results. But the only serious poll I saw about the coalition, and the only one the Globe itself bothered printing, had the following on the relevant point:

Only 37 per cent of respondents supported the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition, while 58 per cent opposed it.

Good luck getting that to equal 'three-quarters scared silly'.

Meanwhile some of the grownup columnists are also peddling this tripe about the coalition having been an unmitigated disaster with the voters, what a terrible blunder it was, good thing Ignatieff is backing away etc. etc. I can't tell whether they've been sincerely gulled by all the hysterical screeching from the right (not that it wasn't sincere screeching, just that the Con base is very good at puffing its chest out to look bigger than it is). Actually my suspicion is that the media insider types were just so horrified by Dion's amateur video that it's the only thing they can remember about the whole business (which happened all of ten days ago). Anyway, the fact that public opinion was divided and equivocal in all the ways you'd expect has been pushed right down the memory hole already.

Wacky Hijinks of the Wealthy

2008-12-14T07:05:00.000-08:00

Shorter Leah McLaren: My rich friends have stopped giving to charity! Funny or what?!

I'm going with 'what', but there is something funny here, which is how desperately the online Globe seems to be hiding the piece -- though I did eventually find it, if you really care. In fact the whole 'Shopping' section, or whatever it's called, practically disappears online; and the only McLaren piece openly listed anywhere is from November 22, and she comes up sixth on a search for 'McLaren'.

Add in that the online version regularly reclassifies the trivial stories that appear on the front page (as Sports or Business or whatever they in fact are); and that it updates pretty rapidly during the day; and that there's some good extra political coverage (including this guy's very interesting blog), and you have a paper that's way more serious than the paper version. I hope they're finding a way to make some money off it.

Canada as Milhouse

2008-12-13T09:21:00.000-08:00

All through this fall, as the financial system of the U.S. imploded, it seemed to be almost impossible to get good information on how, and how far, and why Canada was or wasn't different. Did we do that whole highly leveraged securitization of subprime mortgages thing? Apparently not -- who knows why. Did we have mortgages like that in the first place? I was sure I'd seen ads for such things. Now the Globe finally gets around to looking into it, and the short answer is yes, it did happen here -- but only for two years, spring 2006-2008, at which point the government beat a stumbing retreat back to its senses.

“Quite honestly I was surprised [the 40-year mortgage] was seized upon so eagerly by the Canadian banks and borrowers,” said a U.S. insurance executive who asked not to be named. “You hear all the usual excuses: ‘It's a cash-flow management tool, people will pay off their mortgage ahead of time.' But in reality it just becomes a mechanism for borrowing more than you probably should have.”

Industry officials repeatedly said in interviews that they were shocked at the frenzied escalation of risk. “It was fast and furious,” said one AIG executive. [yes, that AIG: apparently their awe-inspiring stability and prestige played a major role in gulling Canadian regulators at the time]

We have so little transparency in the mortgage system that one can't say with confidence that disaster has been avoided. But if it has been, it's clear that the reasons are what they always are around here: sheer dumb luck, or more precisely Canadian caution and inertia. It's not that anyone actually perceived the risks accurately and spoke out. It's not that Canadians are less greedy. It's certainly not that our politicians and regulators are more aggressive in defending the public good. It's just that when Americans decide to do something incredibly risky and reckless and stupid, it takes Canada ten years to make up its mind to do the same thing.

Nolen to India

2008-12-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

Stephanie Nolen, surely the Globe's best reporter these days, is leaving the Africa beat. The farewell article makes it clear why five years is enough, but it's too bad -- good reporting on Africa is a really scarce commodity. The stories she emphasises are mostly the obvious ones (AIDS in South Africa, Congo civil war), but the ones I remember best were a series on Mugabe this spring and summer, when it looked like the evil old bastard might actually go. God knows why they would have talked to her, but her articles gave you a vivid sense of listening in on debates among the Old Man's cronies -- far more detailed and telling than anything I read anywhere else. Likewise her attempts to explain the awful anti-foreigner riots in South Africa last spring. And, above all, a great article about how the current movement to prosecute former tyrants at the ICJ, and the prosecution of Charles Taylor in particular, was having the unintended consequence of pressing Mugabe and similar to cling to power for as long as possible. It was impeccably reported, fairly written, and unanswerable -- the most disturbing piece I've ever read in that great genre, 'Westerners with good intentions once again pave road to hell for Africans'.

By popular request

2008-12-13T08:10:00.001-08:00

I didn't mention it yesterday, because I'm trying to keep a cap on the number of posts about how awful the front page looks. But yes, it does seem ridiculous to have a front-page story about the fact that Ian Brodie is now a lobbyist. And the headline is ridiculous too:

"PM's former adviser accused of peddling access to corridors of power"

... in other words accused of being a lobbyist. Shock, horror, shock. Of course he's a lobbyist: that's what people like that do, after leaving the PMO and similar, and I've never understood why it's viewed as inherently evil. Our political system depends absolutely on a large cadre of full-time career political hacks -- the guys who run the campaigns, keep the party machinery working, develop policy, talent-spot and hold things together for whichever party is out of power. They don't hold elected office (a good thing) and aren't really employable outside of politics either (also good). Meanwhile given the nature of our system there are bound to be lobbyists of some description. Having the hacks employed as the lobbyists is a very effective way to get big business to massively subsidize the costs of our political system, without it being perceived as a tax. Of course governments that make bad policy because of insider lobbying are bad governments, but that doesn't have to be the outcome and it's a whole nother problem.

Can I just say how much I love saying 'the King-Byng Affair'?

2008-12-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

Canadians are not much good at naming -- who else would have traded in 'Dominion Day' for 'Canada Day'? Then there's the way every institution has to be named the Canadian X (CBC, CNE, CMHC, NGC, CMC, CFL...). Because we have to insist that Canada too has an X -- not a very big X, of course, not the X, not an X with any distinguishing features, just a little X of our very own. And if we called it the National X most Canadians would think it was American.

So it seems worth pointing out that 'the King-Byng Affair' is a genuinely kick-ass meme. It has that proto-Ludlum, welthistorische-diplomatische resonance -- right up there with Molotov-Ribbentrop, the Balfour Declaration, and the War of Jenkin's Ear, but with a slightly P.G. Wodehouse assonance all its own. And we don't need to call it the Canadian King-Byng Affair, now do we?

So now that we have a bit of a lull in Nameless Crisis, let's all get cracking on a name for it.

Igwatch

2008-12-11T10:56:00.001-08:00

So, everyone is asking, "What do we think of this Ignatieff fellow?" So far opinion in these pages breaks down as follows:

white-hot hatred: 20%
he's ruthless and intelligent, good: 20%
turns too many people off -- he's toast: 20%
ambivalent/undecided: 20%
ambivalent with overtones of Judith Krantz: 20%

Dr. B. herself is still waiting for the full graphological analysis of that wobbly signature on the Coalition petition, but will come up with an opinion in due course. In the mean time, she notes that Ignatieff made exactly the right noises yesterday:

- a coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition ("You don't vote against a budget you haven't read.")

- ...someone asked him at his first press conference how he would cope with attack ads from the Conservatives. With a look of defiance and a rising voice, Mr. Ignatieff warned Mr. Harper that in the middle of a parliamentary crisis, "it would be a very serious mistake" to do so.

- major project will be to win back dingbat vote fixated on 1980 Trudeau energy policy [ed. note -- project phrased somewhat differently by M.I.]

- and the good bit: "I don't take lessons in legitimacy from Stephen Harper."

Stick up, into the boards, a clean hit and off we go. Good. Because if there's one thing everybody knows about Stephen Harper, it's that he's a bully. And if there's one thing Canadian voters hate, judging by the fortunes of Stephane Dion, it's a bully's victim.

Because there are no cool couples cooler than Toronto cool couples

2008-12-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

In the November 24 New Yorker, a profile of Duguid and Alford:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/24/081124fa_fact_kramer

In the December 8 New Yorker, a profile of Naomi and Avi:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar

So which hipsters will be welcoming the New Yorker to their downtown Victorian brick semi in the December 22 issue? Atom and Arsinee? Peggy and Graeme? Those lesbians with the big dog down the street? Please god not Jack and Olivia.

Your Section A recap

2008-12-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

In today's Globe on the front page with photo, a story of interest strictly to those nostalgic for all things 1988: 'Bobsledders make a cool run to B.C.' [ed. note -- I hope this is not their idea of going for that coveted 'younger' demographic]

On page 3: 'Canada ties for last among developed countries in early-childhood care'

page 7: Canada becoming pariah for aggressive indifference to global warming

page 13: those Greek riots explained, sort of

Given how many of them are required, I can understand having a cap on the prominence of articles to the effect 'Canada under Harper increasingly a shithole'. But I can't be the only person who's been wondering for a few days why Athens is in flames.

I note that the Jamaican bobsled story is kind of hard to find on-line, since it's accurately treated as a minor story under Sports. Evidently on-line readers are assumed to be more interested in that whole 'news' thing.

Another milestone in the life of the Dominion

2008-12-10T11:42:00.001-08:00

as, in what I believe is a first, the word 'fuck' appears on the front page of the Globe and Mail.

The story is quoting from who else but the fabulously corrupt Governor Rob Blagojevich, as he imprecates the unhelpful Obama administration. As you recall, dear reader, a story covered here with more consideration for the delicate sensibilities of the Canadian web-surfer.

Distinct Society

2008-12-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Noted in a random juxtaposition this morning, the old Quebec:

[Former PM Jean] Chretien was born on January the 11, 1934 in Shawinigan, Quebec, as the 18th of 19 children (10 of whom did not survive infancy) to Wellie Chrétien and Marie Boisvert...

Not that long ago, really.

And the new, from the results of Monday's election:

"Left-wing party aiming to 'share the wealth' gains a foothold"

In the surprise breakthrough of the election, physician Amir Khadir picked up a first seat for the Québec solidaire party, a fledgling formation whose policies for big government would place it on the fringes of the Canadian political spectrum.

Dr. Khadir, an Iranian-born father of three, ousted a two-term Parti Québécois incumbent to win a riding in the heart of Montreal.

Québec solidaire brands itself as leftist, ecologist, feminist, pacifist, pluralistic, democratic and sovereigntist.

And why can't they just vote Green or NDP like normal people, and try to, you know, actually build something that might spread? Oh right -- because they have to add that souverainiste bit. There's no chance that the comfortable artsies on the Plateau are actually serious about that, but god forbid that they should give up on the reflexive fuck-you to the rest of Canada, it's a sacred moral requirement.

Ah, Quebec -- always inspiring, heartwarming and totally aggravating in equal measure.

Last of the Rae days

2008-12-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

Do you, like Simpson this morning, feel kinda sorry for Bob Rae? I don't really, even though I have have plenty of respect for him. The reason Rae's deficit-raddled 1990-95 premiership hangs around his neck like a leper's bell is that nobody knows what he's been up to since then. And if his reputation is unfair it was up to him to fix it. He's clever enough to have written a bestseller to redefine himself, the way Chretien did with Straight from the Heart, but he didn't. (Wait a minute, he did write a book, and it sounds kinda interesting. But I'd never heard of it.) He could also have outed himself as a Liberal much earlier and put his real skills on display under Chretien, Martin or even McGuinty. But he didn't. Instead he spent ten years -- and it feels like much longer, whole eras have passed in Canadian politics -- doing mildly useful great-and-the-good stuff nobody noticed. Which is fine, but you can't hope to go straight from what's perceived as a fiasco to having the prime ministership fall into your lap. Rae should have been able to see in 2006 that the only way he could ever be PM was after a record of success in somebody else's cabinet. But it was probably too late even then, and it definitely is now.

To me the fascinating thing here continues to be the fact that Ignatieff and Rae were roommates and rivals in college. (There's what I remember as a better, fuller Valpy article behind the wall.) Proof that Canada is even more class-ridden and inbred than the U.S. or U.K? Or just a fun fact?

UPDATE: Our New Brunswick correspondent points me to a much better article in Macleans about the enduring Rae-Ignatieff psychodrama. It brings out clearly how deeply Toronto-establishment both boys are, but also makes the point that both families had worked their way inside in a single generation -- though admittedly the whole Czarist-cabinet-minister thing makes the Ignatieff saga less than the stuff of Horatio Alger. Still, you get the impression that the Canadian establishment is both a somewhat creepy club for insider game-playing and reasonably meritocratic... is that possible?

Count the kinds of wrong

2008-12-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

I only just got to the very yuckiest thing in Monday's paper, an interview with Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA -- arguably the most influential animal rights activist of our time. And it's in the 'Life' section. And it's by one Sarah Hampson, most recently seen writing about starter marriages, what to do when your ex-remarries, and something I couldn't make sense of about Vince Vaughn. Every 'question' Hampson asks is nakedly hostile:

"Some people would say the move is shameless hucksterism," I point out.

Doesn't she worry that people might develop fatigue over PETA's predictable shock tactics and ignore the message?

But doesn't she debase humanity by putting it on the same level as other animals?

There seems to be a distinctly anti-human theme to her comments.

Does she ever wonder if she has felt more love for animals other than humans, I ask by way of concluding the interview.

It isn't even intelligible as a hit job, because it tries to depict Newkirk both as an unabashed nutbar and as a cunning manipulator of her own image ("she keeps the image on a tight leash" -- i.e., strangely, she wasn't keen to share secrets about her private life with an aggressively hostile doofus). It's a compendium of all the ways an article can be wrong without, so far as I know, quite saying anything factually incorrect. Trivializing an important subject; filtering everything through biases that aren't acknowledged or explained; and sneering and snickering because... well, because that's what journalists do when they don't know what to do. And I say this without having a pro-PETA axe to grind: I don't know whether to think of them as a force for good or not, that's why I read this stupid thing.

Sometimes I think environmental issues are finally being taken seriously in the mainstream media. Sometimes I know they're not.

Oh Chicago, I miss you sometimes

2008-12-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Eschaton, some hi-lites from today's indictment of Governor Blagojevich:

A 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps during the last month conspiring to sell or trade Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife. At various times, in exchange for the Senate appointment, Blagojevich discussed obtaining:
< a substantial salary for himself at a either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;
< placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year;
< promises of campaign funds – including cash up front; and
< a cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.
Just last week, on December 4, Blagojevich allegedly told an advisor that he might “get some (money) up front, maybe” from Senate Candidate 5, if he named Senate Candidate 5 to the Senate seat, to insure that Senate Candidate 5 kept a promise about raising money for Blagojevich if he ran for re-election. In a recorded conversation on October 31, Blagojevich claimed he was approached by an associate of Senate Candidate 5 as follows: “We were approached ‘pay to play.’ That, you know, he’d raise 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a Senator.”

The full press release is here, including some almost Nixon-quality bathos:

Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being “stuck” as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife’s employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.

... In a conversation with Harris on November 4, Blagojevich analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to the highest bidder. The day after the election, Harris allegedly suggested to Blagojevich that the President-elect could make him the head of a private foundation.

...Also during that call, Blagojevich agreed it was unlikely that the President-elect would name him Secretary of Health and Human Services or give him an ambassadorship because of all of the negative publicity surrounding him.

Meanwhile the Nixon tapes just keep on giving.

Mock Bloc Shock

2008-12-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

I guess there's nothing really surprising about this op-ed piece by Tom Flanagan -- except perhaps for the measured tone and rational content of the opening paragraphs, given that Flanagan is Stephen Harper's ideologue-in-chief, a denialist moneylaunderer, and an all-purpose creep. But then -- wait for it -- we get this explanation of why the G-G should not consider asking the Coalition to form a government, normal constitutional practice notwithstanding:

The Bloc is not a party comme les autres. It rejects the Canadian constitutional order and is devoted to achieving the separation of Quebec from Canada.
...Because they cast votes in the House of Commons, other parties must at times make common cause with them on particular issues; otherwise, nothing would get done in a minority Parliament.

But it is another thing altogether to ink a long-term agreement that makes such a party a pivotal supporter of a coalition government. Any politician who says he cannot see the difference has just demonstrated why he should not become prime minister.

... it is preposterous to install a Bloc-based coalition in power without giving voters a chance to discuss it.

See, the problem here is that everybody now knows that the Conservatives themselves solicited the formal support of the Bloc in 2004, hoping to oust the Liberals in a similar minority situation -- and that the Alliance (the Alliance!) thought about doing the same thing in 2000:

The separatist Bloc Québécois was part of secret plotting in 2000 to join a formal coalition with the two parties that now make up Stephen Harper's government, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The scheme, designed to propel current Conservative minister Stockwell Day to power, undermines the Harper government's line this week that it would never sign a deal like the current one between the Liberal Party, the NDP and the Bloc.

What's fascinating is Flanagan's response to this embarrassment, because -- because there isn't one. At all. No explanation of how those cases were different; no casuistry; no flimflam about extenuating circumstances, no distancing, no embarrassed softpedaling, nope nada nothing. Because for these guys, even when they're writing an op-ed for a wide circulation daily, the point isn't really to persuade anyone or argue or prove anything. It's to tell partisans what to think; and to see how many of the ignorant can be gulled. And trust that all the contrary evidence falls down the memory hole.

I always wonder how the reporters at the Globe -- or the NYT, or the WSJ -- feel about the editorial board preference for columns by people in whose alternate universe their work has been suppressed.

Igwatch

2008-12-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

The fun continues.

This is well-reported, comprehensive insider stuff -- assuming it's true, that is, and we'll know within a few days [ed. update -- or minutes]. What's questionable is the framing: it's all about Ignatieff, complete with a bigass front-page photo of him looking like Brutus on his way to the Senate. As you read the article it becomes clear that everyone in the Liberal Party thinks Dion must go now, and there's a real debate about how: Ignatieff and supporters want a vote of caucus to install him as interim leader followed by the convention as planned, Bob Rae a speeded-up party vote by phone or some such. Why not just present it in those terms?

So far what's described is all perfectly rational. Dion can't go on; a flesh-and-blood convention can't be magically moved forward; and there's no upside to installing an interim figurehead. And god knows where the whole freakin' governing party of the Chretien and Martin years vanished to, but Ignatieff really does look like their most electable option now. But as we've just seen with the coalition hoohah, choosing the best of a lot of bad options can still bite you in the ass politically -- and in this case it's actually Rae's proposal that sounds the best (ie most democratic, transparent and thus legitimizing).

I wonder if Ignatieff really grasps how many people, including nice born-Liberal Ontariarians, find him viscerally distasteful. If asked why, they can always cite his little Iraq war booboo. The Ignatieff supporter can respond that that was an isolated mistake of which he's repented (sort of), and keep the conversation going. But if Ignatieff takes control by anything that looks like an undemocratic power-grab, I suspect that many, many voters will take it as probative of his character and will be gone forever.

Meanwhile, shorter Blatchford: Politics, hockey, same difference. You got a problem with that?

UPDATE: Like I say, "everyone in the Liberal Party thinks Dion must go now": that turns out to include Dion. Interesting thoughts on the tricky questions of method now facing the Liberals here and here.

J'ai l'oeil Americain et je dirai tout

2008-12-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

One of the less-noted benefits of living in Toronto is the whole French TV thing. Due to an obscure regulation from the Trudeau era, cable companies are required to provide French-language channels equal to the number of Francophones currently resident in Toronto. Which means we're now up to four: CBLFT, TFO, TV5, and RDI. (Wait, where did RDI go? Did somebody leave town?) Freed from the unreasonable demands of actual viewers, every one of them offers better programming than the anglo channels; TFO in particular runs great movies, often with surprise value as the TV guide coverage is sketchy. Late Friday night I was hooked by something grainy and enigmatic which eventually resolved itself into a classic of the cinema francais: Le Corbeau, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a safe bet for the best French film of 1943. A tense, queasy-making tale of poison pen letters in a country village, Le Corbeau was banned at the Liberation for giving an, erm, unsympathetic portrait of French provincial life, and blacklisted by the Catholic Church to boot (films à proscrire absolument parce qu'ils sont essentiellement pernicieux au point de vue social, moral ou religieux). Apparently it was made by a German company of collaborationist stripe, but the movie itself is misanthropic in a subversive and implicitly lefty way, much like the creeptastic Bunuel Diary of a Chambermaid. So check it out, and don't say bilingualism never did nothin' for ya.

The post title should be a link: for proof that the interwebs can explain anything, see here.

Your book review recap

2008-12-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

Number of full-length book reviews in the weekend Globe: seven

Number of positive reviews: six (poor Josef Skvorecky)

Number of positive reviews that manage to make the book sound awful: five (exception: Paul Quarrington on hockey books)

You-lost-me-at-hello openings:

Margaret Thatcher was the greatest reformer in Argentinean history [ed. note - that's actually a pretty good line]; and it could hardly have escaped the notice of anyone who met her that she was, or had made herself, a most formidable figure. Indeed, she seems almost the last politician on the world stage to have had any object in view other than the achievement of personal power. [wha with the what now?]

This is Wally Lamb's first novel in nine years and, even if you suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome and have a hard time holding it, I guarantee you won't be able to put it down. Lamb's first two novels, I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone, were Oprah picks, and this one doesn't disappoint. [Why do you keep threatening me?]

It's easy to distrust a book whose first chapter is mainly press clippings. Fortunately .... [Fortunately it's about a really interesting parrot, so who cares about the writing!]

James Bond never was a man of many words, and nor is this book. With a text limited to a foreword, captions and an interview of actor Craig Daniels by the author-photographer, the rest is a visual treat of hundreds of pictures.

Ah yes -- Daniels, Craig Daniels.

Today's Rex Murphy prize for almost literally unreadable tripe

2008-12-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

Goes -- dear reader, how could it not -- to Rex Murphy:

"And what of the other crowd? What of partisan architecture's wildest students, the Frank Lloyd Blights of Parliament Hill [ed. note: meme FAIL], Stephane Dion, Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton, engineers of the coalition? If you'd asked these three to design an elevator, they'd deliver Stonehenge.
Was ever such a cobbled construction seriously proposed to be the government of a serious country?"

"Separatist and federalist, NDP activists and retired bank managers. A deposed leader on the way out who is a prime minister on the way in. Green shifters and auto-industry saviours. Matter, meet anti-matter. Wet, meet dry. Sense, meet non. Welcome to the coalition -- we're a government!"

I have to go take some Gravol now.

One cobbled construction will be sent to Mister Murphy, in honour of his own.

What makes this really embarrassing is that Margaret Wente has written exactly the same column next door, only in English.

Shorter Wente: Stephen Harper is a bad man. But Stephane Dion looks silly on teevee! Oh noes, what to do??

Not in the weekend Globe

2008-12-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

is the one piece I was looking forward to, as advertised in Friday's paper:

"Farewell Africa: Globe correspondent Stephanie Nolen departs her Johannesburg post with a bittersweet look at the continent's progress in her five years reporting there."

Presumably Nolen got bumped by the three pages on Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, on the occasion of no. 100 having been reached. I have mixed feelings about articles like this:

1. Yes: quite right to remind people that there is a huge human cost to this Afghanistan mission. Our soldiers are doing something noble and tremendously difficult, and when they make the supreme sacrifice of course they deserve three pages. Attention should be paid. [moment of silence, head bowed]

2. But... I'm not actually going to read it. Did you? A quick skim strongly suggests there's nothing new here, factually or so to speak emotionally. And articles about the troops never have useful policy implications, since the take-away message is always on the one hand that the soldiers believe strongly in what they are doing (which is indeed a point worth bringing out) and on the other hand that it doesn't actually seem to be working. I've yet to see an article that pushes beyond that stalemate to something I didn't already know.

3. If you have Christie Blatchford covering the military, The Point Will Get Made.

All we aspired to was 'snarky'

2008-12-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

A friend of these pages points out that we have already managed to offend... Facebook?

Look what happened when I tried to switch over... while on Facebook:

The following website has been identified as malicious:
http://globeandmailwatch.blogspot.com/
The link you have clicked has been identified by Facebook as a malicious web site. For the safety and privacy of your Facebook account, we strongly suggest you avoid visiting this address.

As she notes:

Sorry for exercising free speech, Facebook.

And pithily comments:

Holy crap. Where do we even begin?

I have to admit I'm somewhat charmed by the idea of an emergency session of the Facebook Security Council convening for a detailed analysis of all three days of posts here, and after a frenzied discussion caving to unimaginable pressures from the fiendish international Rogers lobby. But frankly it seems to me more likely that a something-bot misfired. Now for a no doubt hilarious Brazil-like exercise in attempting to wrest an admission of error from the implacable Authorities. In the mean time you can join an exciting new Facebook group at http://utoronto.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52246940983&ref=nf. Let the crossfire begin!

It's hard to be sure without knowing what actually happened (thanks for the transparency, Facebook); but if this really is the result of thin human skin I will have to further label this post 'Canadian lameness'. Because frankly the level of snark here is nothing compared to the hijinks American political blogs get up to. There are good (meaning among other things tough) Canadian blogs as well; but not nearly so many and they don't seem to be as big a part of the culture yet, so Mister Delicate-Flower Journalist might not have found out about them. (That would explain a lot, come to think of it... 'You mean they have politics on the intertubes now?' ) Anyway a political blogroll with tons 'o' fun suggestions will be coming soon, so you will be able to see for yourselves just how very constructive, peacable, and dare I say it Canadian we are here.

Your morning aaargh

2008-12-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Wonderfully depressing poll this morning. 63% have noticed that Harper is responsible for "the current situation", but 45% would vote for him and outside of Quebec a full 64% are opposed to the Coalition.

The problem is that like all polls it isn't explanatory, so for insight you're still stuck with vox pops and guesswork by pundits. What's wanted is a follow-up question to those 64% asking why, with a suitable range of options:

(1) Because President Harper won that majority fair and square
(2) Because Stephane Dion is a geek
(3) Because as an Albertan who personally invented oil, my vote should count for triple
(4) Because them thar Frenchies!

Still, another day of pretty good coverage, balanced and thorough. Given how well (1) and (4) are represented on the letters page, a lot of Globe 'readers' must not read anything in the paper at all.

But do they have a special Airbus pull-out section, and news about the Leafs?

2008-12-04T15:04:00.000-08:00

For the most part, not a bad paper today, it seemed to me -- clearly starting a critical blog has the same kind of effect as vowing to carry an umbrella at all times.

On the other hand, our Senior Mitteleuropa Correspondent [Code Name: Edelweiss] has some truly disturbing observations on the Globe coverage of international news. Or to be accurate the lack of it:

Why does Canadian journalism in general assume that "news" is actually crime reporting, and "foreign news" is bizarre crime reporting from other countries?

I've just done, for comparative purposes, a quick scan of foreign news in today's (or yesterday's) online Globe, NYT and Die Presse (centre-right Austrian daily, serving a market one-quarter the size of Canada). I've not gone into content - a qualitative comparison would be too depressing - but just to see what's covered and what isn't. The Globe's view of the world includes a confused piece about how everyone is being mean to one another in Gaza, the governor of Kandahar, the Ressam sentence and Somali pirates. Its US news consists of lead in toys, a Nixon memo on Vietnam, Polanski pleading clemency and a nifty arrangement of stars in the sky, as well as the Obama transition. In Europe, apparently the only thing that is happening is that Venice is sinking. Asia is all about Mumbai and Thailand (fair enough), and unfortunate Chinese schoolgirls. In Africa they mention Zimbabwe and Somali pirates, though if you click on the Africa sub-heading you actually go through to sports.

The NYT and Die Presse, on the other hand, in addition to the stories that even the Globe couldn't overlook, mention Rwanda and Congo, clashes in the UK parliament, the condemnation of Sudan's Al-Bashir by the UNSC, Kosovo riots, the Politkovskaya trial, Chavez's most recent manoeuvres, an ETA killing yesterday, real analysis of Gaza, Mindanao/Philippines, politics in Poland, Romania, and more. What really sums it all up for me though, is the cluster bomb treaty signed in Oslo - the Globe mentions it in a 2-sentence Reuters piece buried on page 20 of the print edition, while Die Presse devotes to it 10 paragraphs, a backgrounder and links to five related articles and the NYT covers it in 20 paragraphs and two backgrounders. And the Globe has ENTIRELY overlooked this week's NATO Council Meeting, which was shaping up to be the latest event in the new Cold War what with the US suddenly pushing for Georgian and Ukrainian NATO membership - extensively covered by both other papers (and Austria not even a NATO member...).

So there you have it: right-wing Austrians are presumed to take an educated interest in cluster bombs, the Sudanese government, Russian repression of journalists, and the internal politics of NATO, which Austria unlike Canada does not belong to. Canadians... er, not so much.

(Ed. note: Links are of course to today's 'World' section of the three on-line papers, so you can perform the whole depressing operation all over again.)

The G-G Caves

2008-12-04T09:13:00.000-08:00

An ugly precedent -- decently reported here, with plenty of context.

'Caves' is a tendentious way to put it, obviously, but there seemed to be some pretty good arguments that this was constitutionally speaking the wrong thing to do.

You have to wonder if Jean felt wrong-footed by having been a not-so-secret souverainiste herself. And appointed by teh Librul. And being, not to put to fine a point of it, a woman from Haiti. In short, a perfect candidate for divisive demonization by the asshole-in-chief. It would have been very much in character for him to respond to a rejection by challenging her legitimacy, just as he has challenged the legitimacy of Parliament itself, perhaps demanding her replacement and provoking a full-blown constitutional meltdown. For any G-G, that rather fragile legitimacy is bound to be top priority.

So the rematch starts January 26. I'm betting that at least one of the Liberals or Conservatives will have a new leader by then; and that if only one of the parties does that party will come out on top.

Argle Bargle or Fooforaw?

2008-12-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

Clearly we need a more efficient definite description than 'this weird game of parliamentary chicken which is now evolving into a constitutional crisis'. But every option has its drawbacks:

(1) 'Harper's EPIC FAIL'
-- This leaves out some interesting twists and turns.

(2) 'The Crisis'
-- Wait, wasn't our tanking economy already the crisis?

(3) This... [distraught hand gesture] ... Thing.
-- Depends on distraught hand gesture.

(4) 'Your Daily Shitstorm'
-- Meme unlikely to be adopted by CBC, Governor-General.

(5) 'Canada's Political Crisis'
-- Apparently the Globe's favourite at present, but don't you think it lack snap, zing and pep? Sounds aimed at foreign readers who might, you know, get our crisis confused with one in Cameroon or Comoros or wherever.

If you have a preference, or a better idea, say so in the comments.

Nitwit of the Day

2008-12-03T23:35:00.001-08:00

Dear Adam Radwanski:

Do you really, seriously, hand on your heart believe that the fact that Stephane Dion's televised speech last night had poor video quality tells us something important about his ability to lead a coalition government?

If not, why do you want Canadians to believe it?

I'm aware this sounds trivial. It's not.

Oh good, glad you cleared that up then.

It's probably unfair to blame Radwanski in particular. If you assume that the voting public are complete idiots, and that your job is to give that idiocy voice and direction rather than to encourage more informed reflection, then it follows that raising idiotic criticisms of politicians is an essential part of your job. And it's hard to find a columnist who doesn't seem committed to those assumptions, bizarre though they may be.

Eripitur Cardigan, Manet Res

2008-12-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

There's a certain kind of cold bland repression that can be hard to parse emotionally. Uncle Dick over there, so quiet at all the family gatherings -- is he a sociopath who tortures squirrels in his basement? Or is he just the old-fashioned type, strong and silent? They think well of him at the office, after all. Americans have by now figured out exactly what to think of Uncle Dick Cheney, but only after a wishful media spent years presenting him as just the sort of grown-up we all want to have in charge. Fascism not being much of a dealbreaker, I believe the scales only really tipped when he shot that guy in the face.

Uncle Steve, he of the fuzzy sweater, is having his face-shooting moment right now. Anyone who's been paying attention has known for years that Harper was an obsessional partisan, a relentless liar and hypocrite with a real distaste for the common good. But now word has really got out. The problem is, of course, that this isn't just a personal style: it's a political strategy, imported from the US Republicans, and quite a few Canadians are happy to openly support it. Those who don't need to push back as hard as we can, right now.

Unfortunately, the risks involved in the proposed coalition are complex and enormous. If the Governor-General blinks and prorogues, part of me will be very relieved. But if she does, and if it comes to be spun as a victory for Harper, then it will also be the first clear-cut national victory in Canada for scorched-earth Republican thuggery. For the Karl Rove machinery of open lies (there was no flag!), hypocrisy (dealing with separatists!), fearmongering (it's a coup d'etat!), astroturf campaigning ('Rally for Canada!') and plain old-fashioned bullying in every direction. To simplify just a little: the politics of hatred. If the politics of hatred wins now, the Conservative Party will be wedded to it for the foreseeable future: at this point, they have nothing else. And they will get better and better at it until maybe some day a Canadian Obama comes along. I can't quite figure out what the Western wingnuts fear from the Bloc Quebecois, but I sure as hell know why I think this country is in serious danger.

Because we deserve a national newspaper that doesn't suck

2008-12-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

So, you get the idea. I won't focus obsessively on the Globe: they're far from being the only inspiration for snark out there. Who knows -- in the years to come I may share moments of whimsy, limericks and recipes for pie. But so long as the Globe keeps providing my Morning Annoyance day after day with hammer-like regularity, they will be front and center.

It isn't that I hate the Globe. Not at all. They have great reporters, like Stephanie Nolen and Marina Jimenez. They have Toronto's only reliable restaurant reviews. Christie Blatchford and Margaret Wente do what columnists are supposed to do. Russell Smith... I have a bit of a crush on Russell Smith. And I think David Eddie is a great advice columnist even though I remember what he was like in high school. I don't want to cancel my subscription.

The problem is that the Globe is wildly uneven. To be precise, the political coverage sucks, on Canadian and American topics alike. I remember thinking about a decade ago that Jeffrey Simpson seemed a bit past his sell-by date -- now he looks like Thucydides by comparison. I have no real connections at the Globe, but my impression as a reader is that they are trying to be more right-wing than is compatible with reporting interesting stories accurately and allowing the ablest writers to speak their minds. Alas for today's right-wing-toadying newspapers, reality does have a liberal bias.

The column that gave me the idea for this blog was actually one last week by John Ibbitson. It starts off like a everyday exercise in triteness-maximization: Love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton is back. (Yes, that's actually the title.) Political soap opera... intriguing sideshow ... yadda yadda... but that's still only 100 words, so instead of trying to, you know, say something about Clinton-hatred, Ibbitson goes on to note that some people hate George W. Bush. And some hated Ronald Reagan. And some hated Brian Mulroney! And these things are all exactly alike, in the important respect that Ibbitson can't be bothered to think about any of them.

Excuse me while I bang. My head. Slowly. Against. The wall.

Note just a few of the problems here:

The first is the American-style false-equivalence imperative. Barack Obama is very deeply hated by many right-wing Americans right now, but put that together with Clinton-hatred and a pattern might start to emerge. So instead, we get Bush: isn't it mysterious how many people seem to dislike him? Perhaps sensing the incredulous snickers, Ibbitson flails for cover:

It is perfectly reasonable to be deeply disappointed with George W. Bush's legacy. Yet the contempt that many feel for the 43rd president antedated Katrina or the invasion of Iraq. He was derided as "Dubya" and "Shrub" from the day he entered the White House.

Uhh, yes. Because to anyone who was paying attention it was obvious that he was going to be exactly the kind of president who was going to do stuff like that. If you were too slow to catch on before Katrina, Mister I., you really shouldn't be admitting it. Not in your line of work.

Hence the need for more flailing cover with Reagan and Mulroney... which I can't be bothered to go into. Let's just be clear: Clinton-hatred is a unique phenomenon in modern North American politics. It is remarkable in having almost nothing to do with policy (just try naming Bill's scary lefty accomplishments). What's more, unlike 'hatred' as usually understood, it is not a state of mind but a well-documented, powerful social movement involving millions of dollars of expenditures by wealthy obsessives employing professional spies, 'journalists', lawyers, etc. If you can't see that there are some interesting sociological differences between the Arkansas Project and leftist snark about Bush, you really don't belong in journalism.

Oh, and the best bit: Who do you suppose is Ibbitson's great quoted source and example of Clinton-hatred? Richard Mellon Scaife, perhaps, who funded the Arkansas Project? Grand inquisitor Ken Starr? Obsessional sozzled ranter Maureen Dowd?

Why, no -- it's Dick Morris. Because really, who could be more representative of a powerful social movement than um, ... a disgruntled ex-employee of the other side?

Shorter Ibbitson: apples, oranges, pineapples -- they're all vegetables to me! For proof, have a persimmon.

Nowhere in today's Globe (print edition)

2008-12-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

so far as I can tell: any mention of the fact that the Prime Minister flat-out, demonstrably, just plain lied in Question Period yesterday. (In order to impugn the patriotism of his opponents, it goes without saying.)

It's such an obvious and embarrassing lie that you have to assume he or someone in his office was misled by the camera angle. But it only counts as an honest mistake if you apologize for it -- not if you get your ministers to keep repeating it.

Does that really not count as news any more?

My last letter to the Globe & Mail

2008-12-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

Because doing it this way should be a lot more fun.

Dear Gary Mason,

Contrary to your column today, it is not true that BC voted 'mostly Tory' in the last election. Steven Harper won 61% of the seats with well under half the popular vote, and if Westerners are going to feel alienated about anything that would be a good place to start.

As I'm sure you know, it is also not true that talk radio callers are representative of anything other than their spittle-flecked selves. Is that really the best data you can find?

Over half of BC and Manitoba voters and almost half of Saskatchewan voters did not vote for the Tories; even in Alberta, a third did not, and they managed to elect an NDPer in Edmonton. Are all these people feeling 'betrayed' by the coalition too, or are they thrilled at the prospect that they might now, albeit indirectly, get a little representation? Lazy writing like yours today does absolutely nothing to help a Torontonian like me figure out what is really going on in the West. All it does is confirm my suspicion that Canadian journalists have a habit of saying 'the West' when they mean 'loud rural Albertans'. Thanks for nothing,

yours sincerely,

Dr. B.

Mason's column was actually not the worst in the Globe today. As so often, that honour goes to John Barber, their regular source of hazily wafting fumes vaguely related to Toronto.

Shorter Barber: Michael Ignatieff lives in Yorkville -- Yorkville, I tell you. Also, as an insider, I have long suspected that Jack Layton was a politician.

Mister Smithers rules our world

2008-12-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

Posthumous blowjobs for unpleasant rich man here here here and here in the Globe alone. Fascinating that the sycophancy is almost as intense in the outlets he didn't own as the ones he did. I guess it's just because only a visionary titan of entrepreneurial genius, a man who thought big and never flinched, on whose like we will never look again, and whose very feces are an untrammelled delight -- only such a towering giant could ever have managed to make any money out of a cable monopoly, radio, teevee or cellphones.