By Heather Mallick, The Toronto Star, June 2, 2015
Canadians have grown quiet, afraid to speak up. Let’s change that.
Canada is a less interesting place than it used to be. Or rather it is harder to be interesting in this country. It is harder to speak loudly or off-the-cuff, crack a joke, be wry, wear something other than grey trousers, use an unusual word, express a weird or even slightly fresh viewpoint, or discuss something not mentioned though often thought of.
Imagine a fabric map of Canada laid out over its entire landscape. I see a giant iron descending onto our nation, knocking chunks off the Rockies and planing the foothills. The Prairies are smoother than ever. The tall-poppy lopping machines have already been by. Ontario is being steamed and starched. Anyone who deviates or even pops their head up over the parapet with a bright remark will have it severed (“I’m crushing your head,” as Mr. Tyzik used to say on Kids in the Hall). The country is flatter than an airport runway. We are dull as dust, hiding under a groundsheet and waiting for better times.
Harper has put Canada into Silent Mode. Scientists are muzzled, the Supreme Court chief justice is openly attacked for bold notions that are not even that bold, the House of Commons is now a hallway that MPs shuffle through on their way to early pensions and corporate directorships, MPs and senators follow the party line, and Harper doesn’t take questions, not from the media, not in national debates, not anywhere.
And then there’s us. I’m not blaming all this on Harper. He is one of us; we elected him; he did not deceive us. We got the cunning, mean, anti-intellectual, resentmentchoked, punitive, socially awkward man we knew him to be. Many of us found he had his uses.
I’ll happily take Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau or a combination of the two, if only because they seem like normal, natural people who speak freely about where Canada should be headed, hopefully on highspeed trains. I understand Trudeau saying he’d support Big Brother Bill C-51 because he’ll just turn it into papier mâché once Harper’s gone.
But what if Harper doesn’t go?
With some honourable – and cherished – exceptions, journalists have been semichloroformed, the editorial process known as DullCheck having smothered the industry for years. I was astounded when a few journalists got a bit brave in their prose recently. Then I realized that they had taken a retirement buyout and the truth was rushing out. Where had they been hiding?
The crushing demand for sound bites and perfect behaviour throughout a politician’s life means that when a politician speaks honestly, he is pilloried. “Authenticity comes off as lunacy,” Jon Stewart said this week of the Beltway reaction to Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders’ perfectly reasonable economic proposals. Canada’s young MLAs are suspended for mistakes on social media, many of which are simply a hallmark of being young.
Noam Chomsky describes the state of things: “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everyone is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”
And then there’s shy watered-down Canadian journalism. We are warned never to bore readers and we do. It’s like homeopathy, the now-derided alternative treatment in which sick people are treated with tiny diluted doses of a substance that would in normal doses make a healthy person ill.
Lazy journalism and dull creative writing are homeopathic. If I may semi-quote the critic Julian Barnes, “homeopathic” is the word for “work whose artistic content is so dilute that it cannot have any more esthetic effect than a placebo.”
When you dilute your work in order not to offend the government, friends, editors and co-workers, you put your readers last, and journalism becomes less of a draw. Then it becomes a snore and then it dies.
There are many opinions worth offering simply for an airy sense of possibility. I dream of not dismantling the Gardiner Expressway but bombing the thing from the air or doing a controlled demolition – in which road crumples inward – followed by a fireworks display and a Berlin Wall-type Bacchanalia.
Free morning coffee for toddlers. Take a bulldozer to the RCMP. Close the Royal Military College. Offer free cargo bikes with the box in front (stable, and safer for children). Alter city zoning for architectural taste, for form as well as function.
New rules for media: a ban on cheap sentiment, bonuses for jokes, a mandated fresh angle on every story. We live in end times. Everything is up for grabs. So startle us. Write something unputdownable. Write something we can’t live without.
Our Comment.
Bravo! A wonderful clarion call!
Élan
