Trudeaumania: Part Deux?

It is approaching twenty minutes to midnight as I write this and if the news coverage and projections and preliminary mumbo jumbo is correct, Justin Trudeau is going to replace Steven Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. The craziest thing, thus far, is how it's a Liberal majority - in an election where fools like me were certain it would be a minority government outcome. In the best scenario I could envision: if there was no real change of government, at least the Conservatives would lose their majority, and all the parties would have to learn how to govern – not squabble and waste taxpayer monies – together.

The skeptical pessimist part of me just sees today's results as the pendulum of public favor swinging between two largely similar though ideologically distinct dominant political parties. And I am not convinced it isn't, but another part of me tempers my disbelief and wants to believe that Justin Trudeau will mark a new era in Canadian politics and therefore the country as a whole. Perhaps in ten years the country will be unrecognizable: the slowing economy revivified, the police state moderated or mutated into something more constructive, the puzzle of protecting one of the world's largest countries with what amounts to a tiny population solved, the political climate more respectful and positive, the tenuous possibility of Arctic sovereignty stabilized, the environment protected... and any other of dozens of serious issues put to rest or at least constructively engaged.

This is an election, mind, which has been strangely muted but rather intense, with very high stakes such that an American weekly news show covered it (though John Oliver is British and therefore would know at least two things about each commonwealth member, and perhaps even care about Canada on a personal level). It got heated in the final days, with perhaps one of the most boneheaded, bald attempts at recovery and public control yet to be seen in this election, a full page front cover advertisement... let me post a copy here below for you, in full color!

You know what they say about courting voters: aim for the wallet and the heart will follow... I don't actually know what they say about courting voters, but this to my eyes is an example of what they talk about. What I like is that apart from being kind of a tone-deaf and stupid and reactionary move, it's very shrewd to target the Liberals specifically, as if nobody in politics actually took the NDP seriously as a contender. I guess a real lesson is never to trust polls, I guess they just exist to measure the response of a sample size of the public so the data can be sold to political parties so they can invent good stories and manage their media appearance and tone instead of engaging a public by discussing governance concepts and ideas for bettering the country as opposed to making it a cheap place to live (if you want that, you go to America), and being honest about challenges instead of using them to spread fear and disgust.

Ah mais oui – the Sun line of newspapers. If you want to see what they're like, look them up online and see what they consider front page material. Celebrity gossip, fashion tips, crime stories, automotive news, hockey golf and football... all the stuff Gord MacRegular Canuck III would care about with a blend of partisan politically charged agenda-stories that are definitely surely not endorsing any specific party or being biased. But then, the ecosystem of the Canadian media is not the healthiest in the world and this isn't the time to discuss that.

There was a lot of strategic voting, I think, with motivated activist voting in order to not allow the Conservatives another majority or anything like it. Hence the NDP getting dumped... I feel for Mulcair, it must have been heartbreaking knowing the blow was coming and being completely unable to avert it. Not so Steve Harper (my sources tell me he is eyeing a job in hockey commentary or advising the CAPP), who is expected to step down as leader of the Conservatives, after being in power for a long time and being pretty successful in what he wanted to do, which any Canadian will tell you about if you ask them.

I'm sure Harper won't be heartbroken, but surely disappointed if not a bit sour about losing when none of his victories were particularly hard-fought (or, allegedly, fairly fought). Them's the breaks in Canada, though. You run a tight ship that goes where it wants, all the while rust grows, and one stormy day the thing implodes and sinks. But you get your insurance money and walk down the street feeling pure relief, once the sullenness has subsided, and thinking maybe to go into a different business after all...

One amusing anecdote is that on Twitter (a popular text-broadcasting social media app established in 2006 that is popular with media people and older millenials) the story seems to be STEPHEN HARPER with some mixed messages about who did what. But I guess 'Ridding Canada of Harper' for good or bad, became the theme of this election. That means no minorities and no coalitions, and the world will see what that means.

Isn't it crazy, though? I mean just look at that. Stephen Harper's shadow is so long, and mighty, that Justin Trudeau (soon to be sworn in as the Right Honourable Mr. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, etc) even in victory stands in it. As in: he's overshadowed by Harper as if he were a supernatural figure of some sort, a kind of human rights/environmental grim reaper.

Trudeau's victory speech was inspiring (it had Political Maverick Jack Layton overtones) and polite to other contenders, Mulcair's was resigned but determined, and Harper's omitted the fact that he was stepping down as leader, but NO REGRETS BITCHES. All the speeches have a fair bit of politicalese in both languages and if you want to hear what Duceppe or May said you'll have to look them up. In this writer's respectful opinion, they were never really in the race (except in their respective strongholds).

Let the whingeing commence! Let the qualified commentators do their thing. Let the vitriol spill over, as it will despite the calls for clemency and moderation by the leaders. I can't wait for the Trudeau Facts articles which will point out his deceased brother (killed by an avalanche) and all the Father/Son comparisons observers of Canadian politics will be forced to endure. How voter turnout numbers will look is going to most interesting for me, but I haven't seen figures at the time of this post and need to sleep. In conclusion:

Hootings and Ramblings of a Deranged Dead Blogger

Thanks mostly to my own foolishness and sloth, this blog has the buoyancy of a lead brick and the influence of a field shrew. I had hopes for it. I thought it could get me ahead, or help me hone my craft. Instead I alienated myself further, and whatever dozens of readers I might've had have dissipated into the dark aether of the internet. My foolishness, and also my stubbornness. Due to my own stubbornness I view modern culture with basically unbridled contempt, and instead of trying in any way to improve things, I wallow in this dead end era of hype, spin, and mindless arrogance. I despise the way of life I spinelessly inhabit.

There's a funny anecdote from the 19th century, beginning around 1860, wherein Great Lakes fisheries completely destroyed a species of sturgeon. First it was considered a useless bycatch, and was stacked to rot on the shore and fed to pigs and generally misused... then its worth was discovered, which put it in the nearly fatal sights of the greedy optimists who believed there could be no end to natural riches. That fish still survives at some infinitesimal fraction of its pre-19th century population. What's this got to do with anything? Well the fisheries industry learned very little from the destruction of the Great Lakes.

In the ensuing hundred and fifty years many other species of fish have been devastated, the ocean's been filled with garbage, radiation, and the refuse from dipshits on cruise ships. The oceans, allegedly the birthplace of life, have been treated like a merry-go-round of possibility and nobody wants to take responsibility or change how things are done. Now, I don't ever believe that life will just give up because conditions are bad. The oceans won't entirely die anytime soon, but our ability to sustain ourselves with their bounty is diminished by all the bone-headed nonsense unrealistically optimistic businesses perpetrated.

What's that got to do with anything? It's why I'm a pessimist. Why I'm shitty, of a bad temperament unless I've drank enough to escape the downward pull of reality. What happened in the Great Lakes happened in a slightly different sense with every market crash and recession, every extinction prompted by humanity, and and and... so what, right? Things need to be the way they are so they can remain the way they are, so that people big and small, rich and poor, stay calm and comfortable and their entitlements to misery or luxury remain constant. We need to listen to the optimists as we climb out of each increasingly unbelievable crisis, and ignore the realists who warned us all along.

Even thinking about it bothers me because it's all such hackish reasoning. It's been done a million times, the truths are self evident and the truisms are deafening but it doesn't lead to real progress in any meaningful sense, which is either a factor of the naturally tardiness of progress and evolution or the sign that something is deeply wrong with the world and its most powerful and influential humans. Are the people at the top evil? Are they simply ignorant? Are the powerful inflated with such a facile self-worth and arrogance that they cannot be touched by the truth, by self-doubt, by any of the checks and restraints nature set on the human mind? Are they doing the right thing, trying and failing, and it's just 'leftists' who paint them with a broad brush of villainy? What is it? Why is it so hard to find a clear perspective? Is there none or does nobody care enough to attempt it?

Old sociology texts have only made me more cynical about success but as a result I'm a nobody, with no long-term goals, no particularly fun vices, and modest unglamorous hobbies like attempting to learn as much as possible, reading, and traveling, mostly on my own power, to nearby places - in short living in a cage of my own design within the larger cage of socioeconomic convention. Lately it's not been enough, but what I eschewed still seems hateful to me, but I have fewer and fewer certainties. Whatever is righteous and humble opens me to criticism (some legitimate, some merely hateful of divergence) and misery, and the sense that I am doing less harm than others doesn't matter, when others won't ever give a shit or sacrifice anything... I am giving myself a kind of slow martyrdom that lots of people live because they can't escape it, but which I chose out of perverse instinct.

Well whatever. Nobody knows anything. The people who get paid millions to hold the title of CEO are protected by the majority opinion that they have a 'necessary skill-set' and 'important contacts' and while that may be true in some cases, it is most often the product of a privileged upbringing and those 'important contacts' liking them. There may have been sexual favors and silence on sensitive secrets traded for power. There may, for all we know, be a few dozen secret societies that encourage the conspiracy set with half-truths in order to make the very idea of conspiracy (which in its least-fantastical and most realistic sense has been true for thousands of years) laughable to the mainstream. If the search for truth becomes a joke it will frighten away the serious-minded because their reputations may suffer (and have, in the flawed examples of yesteryear) But even so: what of it? If they're that successful and we're still alive, with coffee and a newspaper of a Sunday morning, who gives a fuck?

Why the hell does anyone care about celebrity culture? It's corrosive and stupid and the worst kinds of people are made rich by it and it's just a shameful, stupid spectacle that could be replaced or eclipsed by more edifying things that aren't advertised as heavily and let people be themselves. From what are Ellen and her feel-good safety show distracting you? Why is the internet three-quarter owned by celebrities? Why do even people who 'hate that shit' know where Kanye's yacht is parked, give a shit about the Kardashians? It's not celebrities, but rather their passionate followers, who should be flogged and shamed. Celebrities should be ignored, and have some of their riches taken away and donated to charity or used to defray government debt (debt is the new money, since money is just based on imaginary value now)... although the governments are celebrities and don't deserve the money either. I don't hate the entertainment industry... we need distraction so we don't think about killing ourselves or how little any of this means or how foolish our young aspirations were or how fucked the world might be. Maybe we should get rid of the middleman and let the entertainment industry run countries, and the world.

Why aren't soft drinks heavily taxed on the basis of their unhealthiness (it's only fair if tobacco and alcohol are rightly taxed based on their unhealthiness, which is not two orders of magnitude worse than drinking some carbonated sugar water each day)? Why do people get so upset at commonsense agreements that may make life easier for everyone?  Why do we all get off on the idea of hating someone (it is acceptable with targets like criminals, terrorists, people in other countries, and the insensitive)? Why are so many people around the globe so proud of being so ignorant? Why all this conflict? Lots of it was started by Western governments, who 'rule' an anesthetized populace with increasingly nauseating and wasteful habits and thoughts. Convenience and venality have destroyed humanity. If a system this disastrous and uncontrollable could collapse, I would say we are living in the closing years of it, but I don't even know what to think anymore. Avarice looks after itself, but where does it all end?

I wish more people could be happier with less, and with the idea that their not taking something ensured it would get to someone else who needed it. Decades of surplus production and planned obsolescence have made consumerism a nightmare of waste and distraction and its precepts have invaded everything from politics to faith to the 'third world' (outdated term, I know)... but I'm not about to launch a crusade even though I think it's miserable and destroying the best and most promising parts of being human and jeopardizes the whole world. I don't care... I exist within that system anyway and would have to take drastic steps to actually leave it, much less oppose it, which would then further invalidate my position due to 'extremism' and 'ecomania' and other bullshit critiques the comfortable heap on the anxious. If I find a way to stop colluding, I will be branded a traitor. There is no place in the law for people who see an urgent need for progress, who see the Western Lifestyle as a blight that needs to be changed now, painfully, not in 'a generation' while our prospects diminish.

I guess I'm saved by the need to laugh and to seek out the absurd before I even think of countenancing the more prosaic horrors implicit in the contemporary world. Even so, it's not enough... I feel powerless, completely powerless, to stop any of this madness and I always have. I feel so disinherited that I no longer consider myself real or a part of anything... I'm just a detached actor with no lines or stage presence, no beliefs be they foolish, hopeful, angry, or anything. I live in a void and everything that convinces me otherwise is constantly in danger of being swallowed by the deepening void of nonsense that has given rise to our slick, dishonest, empty culture. Those 'backwards' parts of the world don't fear the West – they pity it. 

[Don't worry, I will return to low-risk stuff next week like reviewing products, interviews, and less dire observation tempered by humor. Or I'll be gone, in which case, crawler bots, it's been fun. You won't need to index this site much longer.]

Four Lessons Learned in the 2015 Canadian Election Cycle

With nine days to go and advance polling taking place this weekend, it's a perfect time to look back on a strangely muted, bloated, and distracted election season. Will there be a revival of youth voting? Will the Conservative Party of Canada, despite dozens of instances of bad-faith governance, retake the majority? Will apathy win? Is there any hope for Canada to break out of mediocrity and return to something of prominence and respectability in the global arena? Find out in this loosely researched, kind of lazy blog post!

1. It's Easy to Hijack and Distort Public Debate (Whoa)

If anything, the Niqab Discussion went so far out of bounds that it summoned such specters as Terrorists, Terrorism, Al-Qaeda, ISIL/ISIS/DAESH, and the shooting death of one corporal and vehicular death of a warrant officer in 2014... it brought out the absolute worst in mainstream, main street Canadian thought about international policy and immigration and hasn't stopped. If the operators of political discourse wanted to steer attention away from Conservative misdeeds, they succeeded admirably. Even people I spoke to (in various bars) who 'don't give a shit' and 'couldn't' bring this up as a reason for voting conservative or abstaining completely.