The Silly Season

Politics is Show Business For Ugly People – Solomon Short

It’s the silly season here in the Tropics. Actually it’s the silly season across much of the nation, it’s just that here it really is silly. This is my third year in the Tropics. On my first visit the entire country was trying to figure out which color they wanted to wear, red or blue? I commented then that Andy Griffith was running for School Board and that someone was running for a seat on the Mosquito Control Board. Just about every office here that serves the public is an elected position. Which, as a lifelong student of human folly, makes it interesting for me. I’m also glad that the election advertising knocks the annoying lifestyle ads of Big Pharma to the kerb for the duration.

When I was here last year there was a fellow running for local council office though I forget his name and what he was really running for. What I do remember is that his radio ads promised he wasn’t a “backroom” boy. As a savvy and veteran consumer of political speak I think he was inferring that he wasn’t beholden to a network of “old boys”. After he had made these assertions of good character, the background music would come up full. It was the same music used for the theme of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and ended just at the point where the big foot would come down and crush whatever was under it. I swear it’s true.

But I digress. The big story here is about the two guys running for the job of State Big Kahuna. The incumbent Kahuna is coming to the end of his first term, and he wants to keep the job. His competition used to be the Big Kahuna here. After one term he wanted to swim in a bigger pond so he ran for federal office as a Senator, lost handily, then emerged once again seeking the Big Kahuna job as an Independent candidate, only to decide he had a better chance running for the party that had previously been the competition. As a surprise he won the nomination! That’s the kind of thing that narrowly defines political desire, not caring about obtaining the right to represent but rather obtaining power for power’s sake.

But it gets sillier. Both Kahuna candidates are being dogged by controversy. An attack ad, which for a while ran in nearly every commercial break on TV (one figure said it aired over 7000 times), targets the current Kahuna as having been involved in a scheme to defraud the Federal Medical system for over $600 million, and while testifying under oath invoked his right to not incriminate himself 75 times. It must be pointed out that he was never charged personally only the company he worked for as an executive, though when asked he wouldn’t identify his own signature on paperwork. The challenger is being attacked over his party hopping, previous record as Big Kahuna (his term started just before the economic collapse of 2008), that he supports same-sex marriage, and lifting a 52 year old economic embargo on a neighbouring Caribbean country. He faces just a tad of opposition from some conservative and minority groups.

The latest poll I saw had a 2 point spread between the two of them. Which is pretty much neck and neck when you consider the “margin of error” was 4 points. And that was after the last debate between the two of them, which degenerated into a serious form of political silly before it even began. There was a dispute over a small fan at the base of the challenger’s podium. The incumbent complained the fan broke the jointly accepted “rules” of the debate which contained a hand written addendum prohibiting the fan. The incumbent Kahuna refused to come out to start the debate.

A fan. It’s the Tropics. Why didn’t the incumbent Kahuna have one? Seriously! What sort of childlike foolishness is this? It’s beyond sad, it’s silly to the maxx. But that’s the point isn’t it?

In the mind of the voter there is no longer the expectation of electing a statesman and not a salesman. That we find ourselves offered up a choice between two bad choices means all we will ever have is bad choices. Jerry Garcia once said that “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil”. Back when I was meaningfully employed I met and conversed with a lot of rational and intelligent people. Then they put on their political hats and all bets were off, the darndest things came out of their mouths.

There is a word that’s rarely mentioned outright in political advertising and media coverage, yet it’s the one thing that it’s really all about. Hypocrisy. It’s the emotional and intellectual measuring pole, even though it’s practically subconscious as we read, watch, listen, and evaluate. And yet it’s the one point that all the attack ads seek to succeed at proving. It’s how we respond to every story and commentary. We are looking for, and expecting signs of half-truths and deceptions. Every attack ad puts forth a “gotcha” accusation and they’re apparently quite useful. We swallow it whole, or in my case spit it up. Can’t stand the things, or those that use them.

The hypocrisy is in pointing out that something is gospel truth, when it can be an out of context fact. But don’t ever talk about issues, heaven forbid you say you actually want to accomplish something! Back home there is a major party who uses them to create a great deal of fear around other political parties. They don’t just run them during our own silly season, but year round, trying to keep the electorate in a constant state of concern. Or so they think. You see they’ve run them so often everyone tunes them out. Just like those ads for “Big Pharma”, walk-in bathtubs, and the Trivago guy.

Here in the Tropics I find the hypocrisy is part of the process. There are so many candidates who have been formally accused or convicted of fraud, corruption, and influence peddling that one night after watching so many of these ads, I asked myself if having been accused or convicted was actually a prerequisite to being a candidate? As if the question was on the official form, along with the questions on citizenship and where you live? Except maybe for the current guy that’s running for Mosquito Control Board. He’s trying to convince voters that he’s uniquely qualified because of his profession as an accountant. I think he’s pretty clean, though I would have thought trumpeting some knowledge of mosquitos might be a better approach.

And knowing something about the job never seems to be an issue, just your personal character and credibility. Back home I have this problem in spades. My own federal rep, a Member of Parliament, has his face and party affiliation platered on the sides of two mid-size SUV’s that he and his family drive around. He was driving these things before he was even chosen as a candidate! They show up at events, drive them in parades, and around town. To me this speaks more to his desire to be a recognized salesman and not a quality statesman. As if behaving like a real estate agent uniquely qualifies him to represent me and my family in an honourable and effective way, the way his predecessor did. Without the clown cars. To me as a voter and a thinking human being, such things matter.

As a much younger man, in an age when the sun was steam powered, we had a political group at home called the Rhinoceros Party. They dressed in outrageous costumes, made outrageous promises, and generally held that if you were going to send a clown to Parliament you should send someone who actually says they’re a clown. They disbanded when one of them reportedly received enough votes it actually seemed feasible they might win an elected seat. I think they got frightened at the prospect that voters were devolving intellectually, and they were seeking any option other than what they were getting. Even if it meant having a self-professed clown holding office.

What does all this have to do with travelling? It doesn’t matter where I’ve gone in the world the same issues, choices, and personalities have all essentially been the same, just speaking a different language. So are the voices and misrepresented facts in the advertising. I also discovered a growing vocal call that “None Of The Above” be considered a valid ballot choice.

From my deck chair here in the Tropics it’s all the silliness that’s growing worrisome, both for the people here and at home. Which brings me back to the guy with the Monty Python music…

This is not the blog I had intended for this week

This is not the blog I had intended for this week. It’s a world away from the tongue-in-cheek look at Tropical politics during the silly season. Instead recent events at home weigh on me.

Some parts of the media proclaim “Canada has lost its innocence”. Over a 33 year career in media I have heard that more than once. Usually it involved nutbars with guns. When it comes to the events of Monday and Wednesday all it did was result in the loss of a generation’s self delusion. That delusion being one built around pious righteousness that nobody would attack Canada, we’re too nice.

Canada is nice, and peaceful, and civilized. And guess what? People who are none of those things violently hate us for it. That’s right, violently hate. Ugly word isn’t it? It takes a lot of energy to hate one person, never mind an entire country who would rather sit down over a cup of tea and amiably chat about everything under the sun (especially a kids game played on ice), rather than plot how to destroy an entire race of people and their inclusive nature.

When it comes to assertions that Canada has lost its innocence I’m pretty sure they don’t know a great deal of our history. The murder of Louis Riel and the NorthWest Rebellion, the Vancouver Post Office riot of 1935, the country’s experience in the First and Second World Wars, or the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970 after homegrown terrorist kidnappings and bombings. A search of Canadian history shows many instances of our having lost our “innocence” long before the events of the past few days.

That it was a huge wakeup for the country is without doubt. That it wiped the slightly smug arrogance of untouchability off our faces is a sure thing. So is the loss of a collective delusion that a generation of relative internal peace could last forever. And to me it’s not a bad thing because it opens up the discussion of what it’s going to mean to us in the coming months.

The people who hate us aren’t going to win our conversion. They aren’t going be able to frighten us. They might occasionally take a shot at us and some people will get hurt. But they can’t defeat who we are as a collective nation of people who spend a lot of time loving and caring for each other. It would never occur to us to spend our lives cowering in caves and desert tents using only ignorant hatred to sustain our reason to live. In Canada we use our lives to forward the purposes of civility, reason, and knowledge.

Let’s keep some published figures in mind. The authorities have revoked and cancelled the passports of 90 people. I suspect there will be more, but that’s an aside. Conservatively estimate that at least three times that number are high on the watch list, and round it off to around 400 people. In a nation of 33 million people the reality is that an overwhelmingly larger number of us love and respect each other than wish harm on strangers. It’s why I’ll not be frightened or cower indoors. If I was at home, I would be out at the pub around the corner, enjoying the company of my neighbours and friends over a burger and a beer.

However, we must also be aware that there are people out there who wish us harm, large scale and small. We must be vigilant to the quiet and withdrawn and we must learn to talk with them, and engage them in a conversation. The individuals who committed the soldier murders this past week were “radicalized”. Perhaps, but somewhere along the way they passed through many hands in officialdom that might have taken a moment to listen to the underlying issues, the real personal ones of alienation and isolation. It wasn’t until they started acting out that anyone paid attention with police visits and revocation of passports. They became tools of extremism because it was the only way they had a voice to be heard.

We must also be cautious of the loud and grandiose, whose particular firebrand rhetoric speaks of hate and exclusion. That one thing is better, and the other lesser. In Canada we’re pretty attuned to these folks, but rarely do we engage in shutting them up by declaring them offensive to our educated intelligence.

Personally I am against any form of extremism, be it practiced in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, or any political stripe. The methods of extremism are familiar and somewhat frightening to anyone who has experienced them before, in childhood. By the common nature of the world they are just a common street corner bully! And for most of us, we outgrow our fear of them.

Canada didn’t lose its innocence this week. We are far too mature a country for that. We just awoke from a slumber to realize yet another barbarous bully needs to be stared down and educated, perhaps by force that we like to be left in peace.