BIG BOYS DO CRY
Justin Trudeau wasn’t the only man to shed a tear over Gord Downie’s death and that’s OK, Judith Timson writes,
“Justin Trudeau breaks down over Gord Downie death” blazed a headline this week on the gossip site TMZ.
It was followed by a somewhat snarky “Justin Trudeau needs a hug today, and some tissues — the Canadian Prime Minister completely lost it while talking about the death of his friend, the Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie.”
And that of course elicited hundreds of predictable comments — “what a wussy little princess” — and even some barefisted competition over which male leader was worse, Trudeau, a self-professed feminist whose emotions often seem very near the surface, or U.S. President Donald Trump, who probably can’t even spell empathy, let alone feel it. As one of those commenters joked: “When someone dies that Trump liked he just says, ‘You’re fired.’ ”
First of all, Trudeau didn’t “completely lose it.”
The prime minister did choke up and weep when he was paying tribute to “our buddy Gord,” the beloved singer who died late Tuesday of brain cancer.
In fact there was a lot of male weeping after Downie’s death. Montreal-based Stars indie band singer Torquil Campbell’s voice notably wobbled on the CBC radio show q as he said that Downie was the “gold standard of how to be an artist and how to be a person.”
There was even some past footage of Downie himself choking back tears when he was honoured at an Indigenous ceremony.
So whether you were male or female or both or neither, it was a good day to cry.
And grief — the only sadness that hasn’t been medicated or pathologized — is always an acceptable reason to shed private or public tears.
Yet I’ll confess my reaction the first time I saw the footage of Justin Trudeau reacting to Downie’s death: I got nervous.
I worried that our PM, blessed or cursed, depending on your perception, with a notably theatrical delivery even when he’s just talking about the middle-class, might just go over the top this time, reacting to an event that genuinely affected millions of Canadian fans of the Tragically Hip and of Downie, a talented performer who transcended his art to mean something greater to Canada.
But no. Trudeau didn’t lose it — either his dignity or his, if you want to go there, masculinity, crying over the death, however expected, of Downie, who had been diagnosed more than a year ago with terminal brain cancer and had made a well- publicized final tour that Trudeau had attended.
The PM even apologized for his demeanour: “I thought I was going to make it through this but I’m not,” he said. “It hurts.”
The snark notwithstanding, this is a good week to talk about what we want emotionally from our male leaders.
The U.S. media, in a perpetual and justifiable uproar over the tone deaf, often cruel and bullying behaviour of Donald Trump, is now embroiled in a controversy over whether the president was flat-footed and disrespectful in a condolence call to the widow of a slain soldier.
Trump doesn’t do empathy well. Often, as exhibited by his reaction to such diverse tragedies as mass shootings, natural disasters or even the deaths of his own troops, he seems to focus only on his own role and grievances.
Such empathy deficits horrify many people today.
Times have changed sufficiently since 1972, when Democratic frontrunner Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine was drummed out of the race when he cried publicly — “three times in as many minutes” as one journalist put it — over vicious attacks on his wife Jane. He was done.
However, male leaders since — Bill Clinton, feeling everyone’s pain, Barack Obama, crying not only over the death of his grandmother, but also over the 2012 horrific shooting deaths of 20 small children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut — have felt freer to publicly cry and have not been judged for it.
Why should they be? We can’t have it both ways, wanting men to be more in touch with emotions — theirs and everyone else’s — and then slam them when they exhibit them.
In fact the only thing that doesn’t go over well in our “open and vulnerable and leaving it all out there” society, as one Downie fan put it about the singer himself, is a politician crying solely about himself. I give you disgraced American politician Anthony Weiner, crying in court as he was sentenced to 15 months recently for sexting with a 15-year-old girl. Yech.
Besides, where did the judgmental phrase “a grown man cry” come from, other than the Rolling Stones song “Start Me Up?” Boys growing up in every generation have been told it’s not manly to cry out loud.
You don’t hear an uproar over “grown women” who cry, although Chrystia Freeland, then Canada’s international trade minister, was mocked by some when she seemed close to tears a year ago during tough negotiations with Belgium over a stalled trade deal.
Now minister of foreign affairs and dealing with the colossal headache of tricky NAFTA negotiations, Freeland seems poised and tough. And that Belgian deal worked out, by the way.
Back to Trudeau, whose Liberal government has hit some major speed bumps of late, with one stalled or failed policy promise after another.
We want his public tears to be authentic, dignified — and OK, not prolonged. We want them to be very rare.
Few things deserve a public show of tears from our PM. But when it does — and in this case it did — I will hand him a tissue myself. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.