Painful, boring, this campaign is like dentistry
How timid is this country, how boring this election campaign. Australian Liberals (Conservatives, really) got sick of the hateful onion-eating Tony Abbott and whoosh, the bad man was gone.
Britain’s Labour Party couldn’t win with centrist Ed Miliband, couldn’t stomach the memory of rightist Tony Blair and suddenly, to the huge surprise of everyone on two legs, Jeremy Corbyn is the new and genuinely leftist leader of the Labour Party.
I don’t hold out a lot of hope for Corbyn. He won’t sing the national anthem, even during a Battle of Britain service? That’s mad.
When asked if she favours public fund- ing of homeopathy, his shadow health secretary didn’t briskly answer, “No, it’s daft.” She said her parents quite liked homeopathy and she wouldn’t rule it out. Call it the return of macramé, but stories like this are going to drip-feed into British veins until Corbyn’s gone.
It’s a shame. We need Corbyns to shift the framing of the political landscape over from the right-hand side of the room to the central place where people understand that “deficit” and “women” are not swear words and can be discussed openly, without shame.
But still, whether bad or not, Australians and Britons made a decision, while Canadians remain a gentle, indecisive people who let things go on too long. Boring.
I am writing in a state of pain caused by extreme boredom with an election campaign that will last 11 weeks, but feels like 26. It’s only 100 days till Christmas and I could scream. Canada’s fate rests on this election — if Harper wins again, we are finished— but the kind of boredom I’m feeling is caused by pain, not tedium. I will illustrate this point. Last week I made a huge mistake and went to see my dentist, a perfect doctor, a gentle genius really. I have white trou- ble-free teeth and should have put it off but I was in that back-to-school life-begins-a-new mood. I was laid horizontal on that chaise longue arrangement for bleach-painting while mouth-spreading frames and tongue control racks were inserted into me. My mouth, that is. Nothing fit, it was going badly wrong, and I didn’t protest.
Trained in stoicism by my Scottish mother — “we were not put on this earth for pleasure,” she once told me — I told myself I could endure extreme pain for an hour if I rewarded myself by never again seeing a dentist. There’s no teeth you can’t clean at home with some floss and a pair of nail scissors. Live through it, woman!
Also, my father was a gynecologist and I’m always disturbed by those long chairs, having once had a terrible experience with an elderly Catholic gynecologist wearing a fishing hat loaded with sharp fish hooks. I’ll remember that awful man on my deathbed.
There was nothing to do but think of time, bloody time. I ran my tongue over my mouth roof, licked the tongue bridle, focused on everything below my personal neck, and planned what I’d tweet on the “little pill with a chicken on it” (Twitter). But it was the boredom that damaged me, the intense awareness of each minute of misery followed by all the minutes to come. It was like solitary confinement with mouth shackles. Poelike, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Time moved like fudge.
In hell, it isn’t the torture, it’s the eternity of it that’s the problem, the slow lane of pain that never ends.
Everything OK, my nice dentist kept asking, we can stop any time, until I snapped. I flapped my arms about until he extracted the soft-tissue manacles and I left, the way you do in extremis, waving a credit card because you’ll pay anything, anything to get out and mop up the blood, as I did in the driveway of a nearby Danforth crematorium.
If I endured dentistry for an hour, surely I can take more of the Trudeau-Mulcair-Harper campaign. I’m voting Liberal unless I have a good strategic-voting reason not to. But I’m flapping my arms about, I am in extremis, I’ll endure anything, anything never to have to suffer through the pain and boredom of this campaign’s slow bleed again.
If I endured dentistry for an hour, surely I can take more of the Trudeau-Mulcair -Harper campaign