These were bright lights in a year of darkness
Rose McGowan. I struggle to find enough gleaming words to praise the magnificent McGowan. The actor came forward with her story of the sexual malignancy of U.S. entertainment tyrant Harvey Weinstein and the floodgates opened. But of course I also pay tribute to hundreds of other women who dared to come forward: Canadian journalist Natasha Stoynoff, actor Annabella Sciorra, Roy Moore’s Alabama accusers, women in the British — and the Canadian — House of Commons. I also thank Gabriel Sherman, Ronan Farrow, Robyn Doolittle, Rebecca Traister, Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and many other journalists who faced the beasts. And I think of wait staff, hotel housekeepers, factory and hospital workers, police officers, firefighters, journalists and so many women in other lesser-seen jobs who endure horrors because they need food and rent money, as all humans do. I know good men and women will work together to support all those who are sexually harassed, terrified and brutalized. Thank you, Rose, thank you.
Justin McElroy. By day, he appears to be a city politics reporter for CBC Vancouver. By night, I take it, he was bored and for some reason began a national Twitter contest polling Canadians about the greatest TV shows we ever made. From Degrassi to Da Vinci’s Inquest to SCTV and The Kids in the Hall, he tracked everything while providing witty, anguished guidance and summarized our soul at each round of the contest. We laughed, we cried, we cried some more and it turns out, the best TV show Canada ever made was Mr. Dressup. I can’t argue with that. I mean, I can. But I won’t. The CBC is hiding one of its greatest minds in McElroy. As he recently tweeted tiredly, covering a local election, “Let’s take a look at those sweet, sweet Vancouver-area federal electoral boundaries of 1949 and 1953 to finish off the night.” CBC, give this man his own show.
Marina Hyde. The great Guardian columnist may be the last fully functioning thinker in a once-great nation breaking like a biscuit. She is the jam on my toast, the icing on my keyboard. (Literally. I’m eating almond croissants as I type.) With Donald Trump and Brexit, she was on double duty this year. Crisp, clever and knifelike, Hyde writes three times a week on sport, celebrity, politics, but her subject in all three is human hankering for that which cannot be had.
Recall white-saviour-complexsufferer Louise Linton, Worst Lady and wife of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who posed with that fresh sheet of dollar bills. Yes, her. She survived her daft Zambian memoir and that Instagram feed. She did not, however, survive Hyde who called her the new Bunny Lebowski.
Hyde wins for the second year in a row, but she is a joy forever. Kristen Roupenian. The author of “Cat Person,” a short story in the Dec. 11 New Yorker, has stirred up people in ways they don’t themselves understand, just as Shirley Jackson’s murderous New Yorker story “The Lottery” did in June 1948. Roupenian, an American, writes about Margot, 20, going on a bad date. My favourite line is: “Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing.” Misogynists say “Cat Person” is anti-male, feminists say it’s about coerced sex, others the class struggle or the way women look at themselves at a remove (thank you, male gaze). It could be about age, money, decor or physical fear. The truth about great fiction is that it touches on all these things. But every woman knows what Roupenian is explaining: why women sleep with men they’re not attracted to. Good men have reacted with alarm. The photo illustrating the story may destroy beards as we know them. “Cat Person” is a classic.
David Davis. He’s British Prime Minister Theresa May’s man of all things Brexit. I have to include him because he’s just so awful. I can’t help myself. Who could deplore a man this shameless? Aside from his being a sexist brute and an ideologue glued to a single ruinous track — he hates the EU — the Brexit secretary was about to be held in contempt of Parliament for delaying economic forecasts about the effect of Brexit on various sectors of the British economy. He appeared before a committee to explain that he was not holding back. There were no studies, reports or data on what Brexit would do to sectors of the economy. Automotive? No. Aerospace? No. Financial services? In these anti-intellectual times, he’s a type. The U.S. tax code bills were basically written on a cocktail napkin. It’s a mess. Men like Davis did this. Jacinda Ardern. She’s the prime minister of New Zealand. That happened. It was a happy surprise for all of us and a shock to U.S. President Donald Trump. He’s fast purging women from government, gradually making it too horrible for women to work anywhere, and suddenly he’s confronted with Ardern? She is one of only 12 women who are heads of government. They make up less than 7 per cent of all world leaders. “As an optimist, I have always believed politics is a place where you can do good and where you can make change, and I plan on doing that in our small corner of the world.” Ardern said that. That happened. Golly.
Ahmed Hussen. I salute Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship who took on one of Canada’s toughest jobs in February, before Trump had reached the full heights of whatever he is growing in the Oval Office, possibly triffids. Does he yearn for his golden life back in January? Hussen’s life was already astounding. Born and raised in Somalia, he came to Canada in 1993, grew up in Regent Park and eventually earned a law degree, understanding that education could help him help this country. Now in an era of flight from poverty, war and climate stress, migrants are moving across borders, including ours with the U.S., and only calm and diplomacy can keep things stable. The U.S. is on fire and Hussen’s job is to stamp out sparks at the border. He’s doing good work. I wish him well.
And just like that, 2017 is almost over, a dozen months of grotesquerie. Be more like the people in this list, and 2018 will be a stellar year of courage and recovery. Let’s try harder. I promise I will. hmallick@thestar.ca