Are Canadians too nice to defeat Harper?
Most governments run countries according to what they favour, what they like to see in citizens, events and projects. Canada used to be that way, like an affable dad.
Ottawa giddily approved bridges and highways, urged criminals to mend their ways, listened to wildeyed scientists warning about bugs eating our forests and summers getting mysteriously swampy. They offered us tax credits to fix the furnace and weatherproof our walls.
Face it, governments used to like us. Sure, we drove too fast, we were basically stationary and got fat — well, portly — and then there was the gonorrhea problem. But federal and provincial governments were parents. They were stuck with us, but they had faith.
The Harper years have flipped that on its head. Stephen Harper does not like us.
He runs Canada according to what he detests in citizens, events and projects. Pet hates: hijabs, niqabs, probably berets, careerist women, women, scientists, census-takers, city folk, immigrants, Canadianborn children of immigrants, citizens, citizenship, dairy farmers, farmers, the auto industry, artists, writers, whistleblowers, regulation, taxes, the Supreme Court of Canada, Parliament, pensions, organics, demonstrators, students, libraries, public servants, foreign aid, clean water, modernity, Aboriginal Peoples, peacekeepers, oversight, snappy dressers, sippers of wine, elites, Leaside, Trinity College, the University of Toronto, all universities, gun registries, gun control, #PeopleLikeNenshi, Blue Rodeo, foreigners and their funny little ways, anyone outside the base, etc.
The man exhausts me. But perhaps it is not his fault. Rather it is the temper of our times, to dislike rather than not. Our nerves are shredded by news fragments blasting at us online, so much so that I could write a daily column fuelled by cortisol alone. You would not wish to read it, but I could emit the thing.
The minute I start hating, I check myself (for moth holes, moral taint) because truly, when you hate someone, you’re hating something that lives in yourself, secretly, maybe perched in the pancreas (Islets of Langerhans?). On feminist grounds, I don’t like the niqab either and glare at the men accompanying niqab-wearing women, although I’m always in the car and wearing sunglasses so it’s a passive-aggressive thing, almost imperceptible. Plus I feel guilty later.
But I resent with abandon. My pet hates: guns, a hideously cruel new bullying app called Peeple, Republicans who toady to the Tea Party, the Tea Party, the male American Roth/Bellow canon, female genital mutilation, nepiophiles, pedophiles, incuriosity, Jason Kenney, people who yell, the refusal to pay for books, music and journalism, Lululemon, Canada stripping criminals of citizenship (they’re less exportable than asbestos, surely), Harper singing Jumpin’ Jack Flash and abusing a Yamaha, Conservative MPs twisting and shouting on a big night in Ottawa, enraged men with thick necks (steroid use), raccoons, modernist houses that look like one coffin crushing another coffin, people who smoke while walking even though there is nothing better than smoking while walking (I now do neither), people who get sour and crisp as they age (I call them “olives” because they need soaking in oil to get the bitterness out), Tom Mulcair smiling when he doesn’t feel like smiling, Justin Trudeau hiring a ghostwriter with catastrophic mom- my issues, etc.
You see the difference. Harper’s resentments are the conceptual boiled down to the personal. They are vast and contain multitudes, they have been nursed for decades on bile.
Mine are largely esthetic and petulant; I thought them up just now. I can skip most of them by just staying home or in some kind of office space. It’s Harper indoors, scheming as the night turned to dawn, who built the hate edifice that is the new Conservative party. How I miss Red Tories.
How many careers have been ruined, opportunities missed, children untaught, veterans abandoned, libraries closed, citizens gone uncounted because of Harper’s vengefulness toward a country that pro- vided him with health, wealth, education, a free house and a happy family?
I fail to understand it. It is not my world. But then I don’t design vast Napoleonic campaigns in my head. I just ponder vengeance against my raccoons.
You see? What worries me is that people like us are not up to defeating our grey-blooded prime minister. Would we really slip into a saloon and buy a Taser from a ravaged man who smelled like gun oil? Would we make that raccoon squeal and fall off the shed to his hairy little death?
No, that would be cruel. We take the raccoon’s point: We are his plaything. And that is why I fear we will not win. hmallick@thestar.ca