REX MURPHY ON PM’S $50M TWEET.
DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE ONLY WORLD LEADER WITH AN AFFINITY FOR TWITTER
‘I’d like to send the world a tweet, to keep it company …” — with slim apologies to Michael Jackson and Coke. Follow the Tweet.
It used to be the money. But in our brave new Snapchatting Kardashian world, it’s the tweet. A celebrity tweet is a verbal selfie: high virtue-signalling value, ace selfpromotion, cloyingly charming. Aims for Harvey Levin (TMZ) but will settle for Samantha Bee (whatever).
It turns out Donald Trump is not the only world leader with a fancy way with Twitter.
In olden times, people used to learn about “foreign aid” (that’s what it was called in the Middle Ages) through something called the Estimates Committee (defunct or buried in Omnibus swaddling). Sometimes foreign policy was even announced in Parliament (a building in Ottawa currently under severe renovation intellectually and externally).
Modern prime ministers — well, one modern prime minister — don’t do it that way anymore. I don’t know if the PM has a Hashtags and Hipster Committee but it sure looks like that lately. For out of that Buenos Aires (sweet airs meets sunny days) assembly, launched on the taut wires of Twitter, came the following:
Hey @Trevornoah — thanks for everything you’re doing to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s legacy at the @GlblCtzn festival. Sorry I can’t be with you — but how about Canada pledges $50M to @ EduCannotWait to support education for women & girls around the world? Work for you? Let’s do it.
Before getting to the novelty of using Twitter as a high-stakes cash dispensary, we should explain what GlblCtzn — apart from being vowel allergic — is. Essentially, it’s a latter-day version of the ’80s rock-star-infested Save the World/End World Hunger exhibitions. It is a gathering of the celebrity-elect (Beyoncé was there) in one of their “giving something back” spasms. A lot of show, and lot of tell.
The other unknown (to most) — Trevor Noah — is one of the many unfunny late-night non-comedians. The tweet was Justin doing a texted high-five for bro-Noah’s hosting the GlblCtzn gig — a very celebrity kind of thing to do. The admiration of celebrities for each other’s caring ways is the Proust tale of our times.
The tweet itself is pure gold (pure gold, Jerry*). It had everything: Nelson Mandela, a charity festival, education for girls and women, and a $50-million flip over of Canadian public money from a rock star PM. All that was missing was a mention of Gandhi and a Lena Dunham “like” to hit diamond status.
One under-remarked aspect of the bro-gram is that it partly reads as if the PM is asking Noah if he’s “cool” with the idea (how about Canada pledges $50M?), as if it wasn’t settled already — when as John Ivison has pointed out, this “spontaneous” tweet was “planned for three weeks.” Three weeks to “plan” a tweet — someone must have called in the NEB for assessment.
And then the beautiful Mickey Rooney “let’s-put-on-a-show” moment: Work for you? Let’s do it.
However, back home in the land of disappearing auto plants and unbuilt pipelines, $40 price differentials and high-stakes Grewal mischiefs, it wasn’t quite the perfect hit I’m sure it was supposed to be. Some thought the idea of a prime minister tagging a third-tier late-night clone of Jon Stewart a tad “casual.” Others went for “flippant.” I don’t know if showboating was called up, but it was certainly ready and available. Aforesaid Ivison in the National Post had a full fleet of ready adjectives — all wellchosen. My own queue, among many others, contained unserious, flighty, inexplicable, embarrassing, odd, and WIG’sN, which I “acronymize” here to spare religious sensibilities.
Fifty million dollars is an expensive twitter tag, even in the best of times, and these are not (see above: auto plants, pipelines). And does the obligatory worthy-cause umbrella — it’s for “women and girls,” Beyoncé supports it — shield it from being plainly undignified? Do we know of any other world leaders who route their foreign-aid choices via tweets to talk-show chat monks?
And not so incidentally, why is it, with the world’s most famous male-feminist, always girls and women? Is this a uni-gender government? Are there no distressed, underage, education-deprived males anywhere on this troubled planet? The question is impolitic, but the gender lens obsession manifest in Trudeau’s government is more feminist interest-group politics than national governance.
If 90 per cent of oil workers were female, Canada would be Kuwait by now; there’d be pipelines running across university campuses, and oil would be described in government press releases as “milk for cars, carrot juice for jets.”
Follow the tweets. Twitterhigh-fiving Trevor Noah isn’t by any measure another Mr. Dressup Goes to India moment, but it surely reawakens the durable question of whether Canada has prime minister who happens to be a celebrity, or a celebrity who happens to be a prime minister.
*Unhip, dated Seinfeld reference.
I DON’T KNOW IF THE PM HAS A HASHTAGS AND HIPSTER COMMITTEE.