The Scene and Herd

I really appreciate Iggy’s tendency to… go back on things. Seriously, I think it’s a valuable characteristic and I’d not apply the charming “flip-flop” term to it because it always strikes me as genuine. Okay, yeah,most of us were troubled with his stance on Iraq, but listening to him re-think it and admit he was wrong was refreshing. MI is so forward thinking. The past is in the past.

That said, the story of Beryl Wajsman pleases me for very different reasons. 

I really like that Iggy is “wooing” back into the party someone Paul Martin “banned for life” because it fits nicely with his forward thinking persona, but it’s more extreme. Ha. Because he’s sort of retracting on behalf of the whole Liberal party, past and present. And that’s just funny.

Furthermore:

Lapierre himself was at Montreal’s city hall in January while Wajsman was accepting the Martin Luther King Legacy Award for community service work. Wajsman saw him, cursed and proceeded with his acceptance speech. Lapierre sat and listened, clapped politely and quickly left the room before the applause was over.

That is funny. I could not be more serious when I declare that I want this man – the one that curses and proceeds with his speech – to be back, and active, in the Liberal party. So way to go Iggy. God bless.

Also, I was reading around wiki about Lapierre and came across this anecdote from 1990 (when I was eight and therefore have no memory of, but oh man would’ve had a field day with):

Lapierre’s group led a stir at the 1990 Liberal Leadership Convention in Calgary when Jean Chrétien embraced Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Clyde Wells hours after the latter had helped kill the Meech Lake Accord. Lapierre’s followers wore black armbands and yelled “Vendu!” (sell out!) at Jean Chrétien.

Kind of a troublemaker and I don’t really like him but damn, maybe we can woo him back too, just for a minute?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXMNpYMGyck]

K’naan is so wildly optimistic and joyful that it’s almost confusing.

Last year at Romero House I found one of his songs on a mix cd in the communal van and I was like ,”What in the hell is this? It’s so hopeful.”

Anyways, ’bout two weeks into my yearlong stint at RH, the cd player in the communal van jammed with K’naan stuck inside. And that was that.

K is kind of like the US election live on CNN and the comedy network, personified. Because watching Obama win was a pure joy, and I wanted to let all pessimism and criticism seep out of me. But the… hope (if you will) of that moment was greeted with just enough suspicion in the room to really take things down a notch. We were happy! But not too happy.

Optimism really makes my demographic tense. We discuss Obama in calm voices. I listen to K’naan in secret.

But I pulled this off the blogto site this morning because it improved my mood (tensely). Give it a watch and good lord, hopefully you’re from a different demographic than I am. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMwpVF58c2c]

I seriously thought for a second that Michael Ignatieff was the Prime Minister of Canada. I went onto cbc.ca this morning and Iggy is headline news on the Obama visit. Apparently, Barack “will listen to us” on Afghanistan. I’ve also read that Ignatieff will “speak frankly” with Obama… 

Shouldn’t Stephen Harper be saying crap like this? Where’s he at? Canada seems way more excited about Obama’s meeting with the leader of the opposition than the PM.

I feel like we’re in old tyme days and Stephen Harper is our embarrassing older son and we have to let him stick around for the visit because he’s the oldest but we really want Obama to hang out with Ignatieff because, well, we like him better.

“Hello, Barack! This is ouroldestsonStephenbut THIS! This is Michael.” And then we push Iggy over to greet Obama while whispering to Harper to keep quiet or go make a fire or something.

I’m kind of jealous of Richard Dawkins. He was born at the right time, just as the atheists were getting all antsy and vocal. You know, the harvest is ripe kind of thing. He’s kind of like their messiah. 

I was referred to a recent article of his from Arts & Letters Daily. It was a (favourable) review of the book Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne found in The Times Literary Supplement. 

Now, I couldn’t be happier about this article. I’m relieved to finally see some sense knocked into the fanatic-creationist-whack jobs that frequent Arts & Letters Daily and The Times Literary Supplement. 

But then I read this:

Theories about the moon god devouring the sun god may be poetic, and they may cohere with other aspects of a tribe’s world view, but they won’t predict the date, time and place of an eclipse. 

I don’t know anyone who believes in sun and/or moon god involvement in eclipses. So I can’t be sure that those people frequent the same website that I do. Tell me where they are so I can enlighten them in person. You know, “to the ends of the earth” kind of thing, evangelism styles.

Conservative strategies from across the board.

How could any opponent let the aristocratic ancestry, Upper Canada College, Harvard, and home in Provence mother lode go untapped?

Ignatieff is in his element in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, giving lengthy introspective interviews to elite journalists, winning the daily debating society event called Question Period, holding forth in front of adoring university students, supplying pithy comments in both languages for the cameras and hosting wine and cheese gatherings with fellow MPs.

Perhaps arising out of his years abroad, Ignatieff’s highly developed self image and lack of self doubt are very un-Canadian. It’s possible that the Conservatives need do nothing. At some point Canadians will resent his sense of destiny and want to prick his bubble.

Guilty as charged!

Good lord… somebody do something…

Ha. Everyone’s angry at Miller today! Would you believe I saw him this evening? He was outside his house, talking on his cell phone and looking STRESSED out. Poor guy… 

I don’t know David Miller, but I seem to run into him a lot. One early morning last year I was out running by High Park. While going up a hill, I noticed a runner walking toward me, decked out in sweat pants and kind of in cool down mode. As I ran passed him I realized it was Mayor Miller. So I turned around to get a second look and I KID you NOT I saw him picking trash up off of the sidewalk and throwing it into the garbage can.

Best moment of my life! Haha! 

So there ya have it; proof Miller does not hate Toronto. 

Tell your friends.

Allow me, for a moment, to make a metaphor using my favourite TV show at the moment; The Wire. For those of you unawares, The Wire is a wicked awesome show about Baltimore, corruption, cops and drugs.

There is this scene that stays with me: Carver pulls a corner boy (For those of you that are not from Bramps, a “corner boy” is a kid that stands on a corner selling drugs) down to the precinct and is questioning him, playing “good cop.” Carver is trying to get Bodie to spill it. “You remind me of me,” he says.

“Oh yeah,” says Bodie, “you came up hard?”

This is a game you play with delinquents. To gain their trust, you make them believe that you braved the projects, “the low rises,” if you will. 

This is a game that (some of) the Canadian people are trying to play with Ignatieff.

A google news search of Ignatieff turns up a raging plethora of rants and raves (some of them completely embarrassing). Americans like him (ignore the weird graph). It’s patronizing, the way they express it, but they like the guy. 

And yet this persistent trend over here, this bizarre demand for someone “down to earth.”

Okay, can I blame Orillia for a little while?

All this news over the weekend that Orillia really likes Iggy, “standing room only” etc. But what does Orillia have to say?  They like him… because… brace yourselves,

“the former Harvard professor was more like a cross between a folksy preacher and sympathetic high-school guidance counsellor.”

This is what impressed The Orillia Packet.

Shouldn’t The Orillia Packet be saying, “What the hell? I thought you were a Harvard professor. You sound more like a high-school guidance councellor.”

Points to Igntieff for his apt performance, but Orillia (among others) needs to get a grip. Iggy did not come up hard. And he’s not like you, thankfully.

Now stop acting like a bunch of needy delinquents.

Is it just me, or does Bob Rae need to simmer down? It’s weird, like he’s been waiting all these years to prove something. But he’s elected, no?

Every time I’m on facebook these days (deficit days), my feed informs me that Bob Rae’s being self-deprecating again. Or sarcastic. But it’s never really funny, because it’s about job loss and… deficit. 

Bob, I think it’d look way better on you if you toned it down. Can’t you let someone else say “I told you so” on your behalf? Pay and employ someone to say it even? But do not say it yourself. Dude, totally not classy.

The first paragraph is exemplary of all this “weakness” nonsense. Note the phrase in which it’s pointed out that Ignatieff “allowed” a “rebellion.” Is that even possible? You want me to grab a dictionary?

He doesn’t like the budget but he can’t oppose the budget and now he gets to…. have his cake and eat it, so to speak. All this business just confirms that things just… work out for Iggy. That, and Newfoundland Liberals are all troublemakers. I mean, how much noise can you make before the rest of the country gets fed up? (A lot… I don’t think anyone’s really listening.) 

And I don’t think it’s helping anyone’s case, except  Ignatieff’s, to say “this never even happened with Dion and this would never happen with Harper.” Who likes/liked those guys anyways? Isn’t the whole point that Ignatieff is different? 

Furthermore, might we have more fluid parametres to what a “good leader” is than “hard ass who lays down the law?”

I watched No Country For Old Men last night, hadn’t seen it before. And I haven’t thought about it all that much yet.

But I keep thinking of a friend of mine, a man from Colombia named Berleine. One time last year we were talking about politics or racism, something frustrating, and he was trying to illustrate that “people are crazy.” So he told me a story he’d read in the paper that week about a man in Florida that had murdered his wife while they were on vacation so he could cash in the life insurance. People are crazy! I remember that I appreciated that this story affected him. It reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones last night, reading the newspaper story about the maniacs killing the elderly and then running around naked with dog collars on. Tommy Lee Jones had the same look on his face that Berleine had.

The sentiment in the title itself is one that resonates. And I don’t tend to watch movies through a… gender lens (anymore, anyways, since graduation) but when the movie ended last night I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t meant for me.

I want my version of No Country For Old Men.

I heard a version of The Tide is High today in some weirdo hipster cafe. (Incidentally, I think it’s crazy easy to open a cafe in this city and find success. All you have to do is pander to them. You know, play The Velvet Underground a few times a day and spend zero money on furniture. Just pull it in off a curb.) I couldn’t figure out who it was by but it wasn’t the original and it wasn’t Blondie. The lyrics were different than when Blondie does it (ie “every man wants you to be his girl”) and it was jarring and it sounded wrong. 

I’m so glad Debbie Harry’s around. She didn’t just borrow those words, she right out stole them. Who’s going to steal No Country For Old Men? Change a few words around?