Time to cry foul over our leaders’ language
OTTAWA / New Democrat Pat Martin is tough as nails. He’s the kind of guy who strikes wooden matches off the stubble on his granite jaw. We know this because, as his resume indicates, he is a former miner, carpenter and unionist.
Plus, the Winnipeg MP has a foul mouth. We know this because he is an inveterate Twitterer, and he uses this platform to fluidly cuss anyone who makes him mad. Before Christmas Martin dropped an f-bomb about the Harper government’s propensity for imposing limits on parliamentary debate. On Twitter, he told a critic, “f— you.” Last week he blasted Conservative Senator Pierre-hughes Boisvenu, calling him an “a—hole,” after the latter suggested some murderers should be allowed to kill themselves in prison. Boisvenu, whose daughter was raped and murdered in 2002, later withdrew the remarks.
One can’t help but wonder: What would Jack Layton, who was publicly courteous to a fault (to the point of seeming insincere at times) have made of Martin’s behaviour?
For that matter, what would the Conservative paragon John Diefenbaker, whose virtues are extolled almost daily by members of the Harper government, have thought of Tony Clement’s describing a 15-yearold critic, again via Twitter, as a “Jack ass,” as the president of the Treasury Board did last month? Clement later apologized.
And what would Pierre Trudeau have made of the day in the House in mid-december, when his son bellowed to Environment Minister Peter Kent that he was a “piece of sh—?” Pierre Trudeau had his fuddle-duddle moment in 1971, of course. But Trudeau the elder also believed a political leader should try to criticize his opponent’s ideas, while avoiding personally targeting the man. Whatever happened to that notion, which now seems quaint? George Orwell wrote in 1946, in
Politics and the English Language: “An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Orwell was writing about diction, not manners. Yet the principle can apply to both. At what point does the degeneration of modes of address debase the content of public discourse?
Swearing, according to social scientists, is good for us. In team settings, according to a study done in the U.K. in 2007, it can boost social cohesion and esprit de corps. Anyone who has spent time with Canadian soldiers will have observed this, in spades. Swearing also has physiological benefits: According to another British study reported in Scientific
American in 2009, researchers found that a timely expletive can lessen the pain of, say, pounding one’s thumb with a hammer. Vocalization of the curse stimulates the amygdala, the so-called “fight-flight” area of the brain, which in turn releases painkilling endorphins. Wonderful.
But clearly, politicians who pottytalk each other in the House of Commons and in the media have strayed beyond the locker-room and the spur of the moment, into public calculation. Martin in particular appears to revel in his notoriety.
But as he loads up for his next salvo, Martin might consider this: Each time he takes the low road he reveals himself to be, at least in part, a hypocrite. For five years the opposition have accused the Harper Conservatives of being cruel-minded mudslingers, interested only in the negative hit. How, precisely, does calling a clearly still-grieving elderly father an “a— hole” and a “son of a bitch,” as Martin did in interview with the Winnipeg
Free Press, contribute to anything good in politics or society?
These men — for the offenders are all men, coincidentally — should understand that their pay, privileges and positions confer on them a responsibility to behave like leaders, and not like a gaggle of teenage boys, badmouthing each other across a YMCA parking lot on a Saturday night.