The Classroom Conservative

Billy Bragg, Mr. Love and Justice

Billy Bragg gave the best concert I ever attended.  It was in the early 1990s in a school gymnasium in St. John’s.  Mr. Bragg was, so the story goes, on vacation in Newfoundland, and he took some time from his whale-watching adventure to play a charity gig.  He appeared onstage with a guitar and a small amplifier, and he ran through a thoroughly-entertaining, stripped-down set of many of his already-stripped-down favorites.  This, you see, was the success of Mr. Bragg’s early career.  An angry young man with a keen sense of humor and a knack for connecting with his fans, he could draw you in with his take on relationships in “The Saturday Boy” and “Must I Paint You A Picture,” and you would follow him to darker spots in the human heart on “Levi Stubb’s Tears.”  His clever songwriting on “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and “A New England” carried the day.  An unapologetic Labour Party advocate, he was never shrill in his openly partisan politics, on songs like “Between the Wars,” “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” and even “Help Save The Youth of America.”

 

But when he was in St. John’s, he was basking in the relative commercial success of Don’t Try This At Home (1991) whose lush musical accompaniments were hard to replicate alone.  Perhaps this was a sign of trouble, a sign of things to come.  Marriage, fatherhood, and the eventual revelation that Tony Blair’s government advocated things that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush had to be reflected in Bragg’s music.  How could he be that clever young man anymore?  I was less pleased with efforts that tried to build on the triumphs of the early 1990s: William Bloke (1996) and England, Half English (2002) left me cold, for the most part, where musical proficiency and lyrical variety stood in for early magic.  An exception must be made for his two albums of newly-discovered Woody Guthrie songs, prepared in collaboration with Wilco in the late nineties, which freed Bragg to connect with his material.

 

So what to expect from Mr. Love and Justice, a brand new album from one of my favorite voices, a voice muted for so long that NPR recently listed him in a program naming people we’ve “grown out of”?  Well, I took a flier, and I couldn’t be happier.  I bought the deluxe version of the album: two discs, one solo and one with the band.  I listed to the solo album first, and I listened to it repeatedly.  I found tracks, like “I Keep Faith,” “M For Me,” and “Something Happened,” that stand up amongst his best relationship songs.  There are even rough gems, musically, like “I Almost Killed You” and, lyrically, like “The Johnny Carcinogenic Show.”  The complex politics of contemporary Britain emerge in “The Beach is Free” and “Sing Their Souls Back Home.”  There are a dozen songs here with which to fall in love, and in this form they would not have been out of place in a set in 1988 or 1991.

 

But this need not be an exercise in nostalgia; the fully-arranged versions on the other disc have their own warmth, I must acknowledge, and these may be of greatest appeal to new fans, people for whom “How can you lie there and think of England / When you don’t even know who’s in the team” has no resonance, people who are too young to know about “Red Wedge.”  I would even admit that “I Almost Killed You,” “Something Happened,” “O Freedom,” and the title track may be better with the band.  That’s what happens when you fall in love with the songs: they transcend the arrangements.  And two versions of each track lets old fans and new do just that.

Defending Hillary Clinton

I enjoy a great deal the work of liberal commentator Keith Olbermann, but his scathing rebuke of Senator Hillary Clinton on Friday underlines how tense the political rhetoric has grown south of the border.  Most people understand that Americans must have an opportunity to weigh properly the policies of the Republican and Democratic candidates for President, and ongoing debates between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama skew the issue: necessary while the Democratic nomination is in play, harmful as an aftershock.  Mrs. Clinton is desperately trying to convince people, in spite of the mathematics involved, that she can be the Democratic candidate; she wanted to point out last week that primary contests have, in the past, gone well into June.  That she did so by reminding people that Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning in June 1968 was offensive to some – and offensive to no one more, apparently, than Mr. Olbermann.

   

There has been, for some time, a simmering fear about Mr. Obama’s safety that references to Mr. Kennedy seem to inflame.  Dan Savage has written about it in Seattle on a number of occasions, and he talked about it on Bill Maher’s television program.  Mr. Olbermann’s response too reflects this unspoken concern.  The MSNBC broadcaster charts in Mrs. Clinton’s thinking over the past few months oblique references to calamities and scandals between now and the general election for which the Democratic Party needs to be prepared.  But does this mitigate the point Mrs. Clinton was, or should have been, making?

    

If Mrs. Clinton was, as she suggests, claiming only that the American primary season is a long one, no one would disagree.  But this is not a point worth making – certainly not when balanced against the possibility of offending voters.  When Mr. Kennedy ran for President in the late 1960s, the primaries did not start immediately after the previous general election, as seems now to be the case.  The American public has had enough time to vet Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, and if there are other votes necessary the American public should get to them already.  When Mrs. Clinton’s husband found himself running in the month of June, as she also pointed out, the contest was still to be sewn up, mathematically.

    

The only valid argument left to Mrs. Clinton actually comes from Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, a parallel from which she is now frantically backtracking.  When the candidate was murdered in California, he was trailing in his primary contest.  But there was then, if you trust the perception that has persisted, a real feeling that he could have come from behind, against great odds, in order to restore American Camelot in the midst of the Vietnam quagmire.

    

I would like to believe that this was the point Mrs. Clinton was hoping to make; I would like to believe that a potential President, in spite of the deadening repetition and sleep deprivation, can think this well on her feet.  But in that it has proven impossible to raise the image of Mr. Kennedy and his tragic assassination in any practical way during this election cycle, it is a point she now cannot pursue.  That she cannot, in any effective way, should tell those of us outside the United States just how stale this primary race has become.  Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton find themselves in a quagmire that has little to do with the Middle East.

Tim Hortons and Its Bad Press

How would you like to be an executive with Tim Hortons these days?  Sure, I’d like a lifetime supply of steeped tea and raisin biscuits (those are “scones” to most people), but I wouldn’t wish to deal with all that bad press.  As we all know, Canada’s favorite coffee chain recently had icing sugar all over its collective face after a server was, temporarily, dismissed for giving away a free timbit to the cranky child of a harried regular customer in London, Ontario.  Now, it is reeling from the story of a customer chastised by an employee for bringing into a Toronto store a homeless person and buying her a meal.  It appears that the homeless woman had, in the past, been disruptive.

 

On the surface, we might conclude that Tim Hortons, along with the people who make up the organization, has no compassion.  But I think the issue actually has to do with the hiring and training of service employees in a tight job market.  I recently wrote in this space of the problems I had with the airlines when it appeared that its employees were prevented from (or perhaps unwilling to) use common sense to problem solve in the workplace.  Would this not explain the actions at Tim Hortons, as well?

 

In the first case, an overzealous manager did not differentiate between giving a sweet to a child and a rule against giving away free food.  Now, I hope most sensible people would see that the provision is intended to keep the chain from providing free meals, unknowingly, to the friends and relatives of its employees.  Most sensible people would be able to interpret the intention of the policy, but are we sure that corporations are genuinely interested in having their employees use such discretion?  Would it not be easier to enforce uniformity and put out a few public relations fires along the way?  I still believe, as I did in discussing Air Canada and WestJet, that employers are encouraging fleets of automatons in the workplace.  And, as a result, employees no longer have the polished ability to solve problems.  In this latest case, the employee may well have been doing the right thing in securing the restaurant against a disruptive presence.  But who is to blame when the employee demonstrates no ability to implement the correct policy in a fashion that is appropriate to an idiosyncratic circumstance?  Did Tim’s hire this person with an eye to how she might handle a customer in good standing when that customer unwittingly introduced a disruptive presence?  Or was Tim’s concerned, again, only with the employee’s ability to read and implement policy to the letter?

 

I have been across the table from prospective hires who, when asked how they would deal with a particular situation, commented only that they would be sure to follow the organization’s policy on the matter.  In our desire for uniformity and corporate efficiency, we are now surely reaping what we have sown.

Reconsidering The Politics Of Juno

Diablo Cody has her Academy Award for original screenplay, and the media has moved on to obsess over Ellen Page’s personal life.  Juno is out on video; as a matter of fact, it is now available on pay-per-view.  With the dust settled, it seems like a good time to look again at the politics of the film, the most interesting of its many interesting topics of discussion.

   

In the weeks leading up to the Oscar ceremony, much was made of the film’s treatment of teen pregnancy.  What did progressives make of Juno eschewing abortion?  Was Ms Cody demonstrating the “choice” in “pro-choice,” or was she simply ridiculing the nonchalance of the receptionist in the women’s health clinic?  Was she lampooning the tone of Su-Chin’s public, “pro-life” demonstration to contrast the personal, yet ultimately similar, conclusion Juno draws about her abortion?  Some people to the further right of center were ultimately uncomfortable with what they saw as a normalization of teenaged pregnancy.  While it might be common, it is fraught with problems only suggested in a ninety-six minute romantic comedy.  I can say that these issues were discussed on the Charles Adler radio program weeks before they hit the print media, and the conclusion was that Juno was a surprisingly complex film, politically.

   

But it now occurs to me that Mark Loring, the would-be adoptive father played with skill by Jason Bateman, might be in fact the film’s most “political” character, his experience providing the most interesting point of discussion.  Loring’s utter boredom with a life that is little more than an extended adolescence, his fear of adult responsibility, is entirely consistent with a central critique pursued by Mark Steyn in his America Alone.  Steyn is concerned with demography, primarily, with the ways in which we have chosen to live our lives that imperil our way of life, entirely.  But the point is that a delayed coming of age is a negative thing, not something to celebrate and pursue, and this is something that young Juno recognizes herself, in a scene in which she tells her father that she has been out dealing with things “beyond her maturity level.”

   

Initially, I had a lot of sympathy for Bateman’s character: I believe you are supposed to have it.  His wife, played by Jennifer Garner, relegates his hobbies to the basement.  But, through the course of the film, you discover that Mark Loring does not see music and films and comic books as hobbies, they are his main passions, and when he reveals himself as being less emotionally mature than Juno, herself, the audience has its bombshell.  Well, it is not like the pregnancy could be so: it is revealed in the first five minutes!

   

I am not sure that Mr. Steyn would see Juno as a conservative classic, but I am certain that Ms Cody did not set out to write one.  What she obviously did set out to do was write a deceptively simple story with hidden complexities.  And, as its meaning continues to evolve over time, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is her profound achievement.

Aluminum Wheels And The Funding Of Science Research

The funding of science research is inherently worthwhile, and the funding of research in the social sciences and humanities is a waste of money.  This is the general perception in the media, and so many readers of the National Post choked on their corn flakes when they read on Monday morning of an NSERC grant holder who, apparently, used his small slice of the funding agency’s billion-dollar budget to pimp his ride and equip his home with a state-of-the-art entertainment system.

   

This fellow spent more money in his living room than I used to write my book.

   

There is no war between scientists and humanists: we in the latter group understand where our national priorities lie, and we also acknowledge the great costs associated with doing science.  But the story of the unidentified scientist at the unidentified university with the plasma television should remind us that all research funding, both extensive and modest, must be monitored closely.  If the researcher in question was able to undertake his work while still preserving the necessary flexibility to misappropriate at least twenty thousand dollars from the government, his proposal would have had to have been as barmy as the wackiest SSHRC project to ever capture Robert Fulford’s attention.

   

The flaws in our funding system are obvious.  As I have written previously, because we need to allow researchers the discretion to spend their money effectively over a number of years, it is impossible to get exhaustively itemized budgets before the work begins.  The bureaucracy that oversees expenditure is split between accountants in Ottawa with one set of rules and accountants in our universities with their own, derived from council guidelines.  As a result, you might find yourself dealing, as I did, with a dilemma.  In the first year of my SSHRC grant, I paid $600 to repair my laptop monitor.  It was a perfectly good machine, and I saw no reason to blow one-seventh of my money on a new one.  But by the last year of my grant, my laptop was a paperweight.  Still, when I requested funds to replace it, I was told that I had already made my one allowable computer expenditure!  People helping me manage my money pointed out, however, that if I claimed full food and incidentals per diems for the eight weeks I spent researching at an archive, even if I was lunching on peanut butter and jam and carrying my own bags, I could indent for enough money to offset the costs of my technology.  Is there any wonder that a system this pennywise and pound foolish is vulnerable to nefarious characters?

   

We do not know if this scientist is still employed at his university.  If, as his university concluded, he altered receipts in making these claims, I cannot imagine that he kept his job.  But if he lost his job because of fraud, is it likely that the public would not know?  I have a feeling that if this had been, say, a humanist wasting money that had already been earmarked for an unconventional project, we would have, somehow, heard a little more a little sooner.

Americans Must Be Getting Tired Of The Undercard

CNN.com has an excellent "delegate calculator" on its site:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/29/delegate.counter/index.html

Basically, these functions allow you to compare the progress of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as they stumble towards the Democratic nominating convention in Denver.  You can, as I did, enter the assumption that Mrs. Clinton will win 60% of the popular vote in all the remaining primary elections; you can, as I did, even enter the assumption that Mrs. Clinton will win 60% of the superdelegates.  Even should this happen, Mr. Obama would win the nomination in August.

I have a lot of respect for Mrs. Clinton and the contest she has run.  I have a lot of respect for people who want this to be decided on the convention floor.  This is, after all, how it happens in the movies.  But, in practical terms, I think a lot of Americans want to get to the main event: democrat versus republican.  They want to compare how the two parties plan to steer the United States forward.

After a team wins four games in the World Series, they stop playing the games.  I am sure that a lot of Americans, and perhaps even a lot of vocal supporters of Mrs. Clinton, must be feeling that they have watched the final out.  But, as a CNBC pundit put it last night, who is going to go and take the baseball away from her?

Subsidizing Boomtown

I have a lot of sympathy for people who live in jurisdictions with ample natural resources and would like to feel more directly the benefits of development.  The oilsands of northern Alberta, indirectly, make it almost impossible to secure a roofer or a plumber in southern Alberta, and the housing boom across the province makes it difficult for first-time buyers to get a toe-hold on the property ladder.  Can you blame everyday people for wanting salaries that at least compare to rig workers?  Can you blame them for wanting lower taxes and lower user fees?  Can you blame them when so many are too young to remember the ravages of rampant inflation?

   

The problem with lowering taxes, of course, is that a government – especially one in perpetual power like the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta – has to revoke the goodies when the boom goes bust.  They do not want to go into deficit by relying on windfalls, and so they prefer the rebate check, a ridiculous bureaucratic hassle akin to trading gift cards for family birthdays.  In the same way that I buy a Future Shop card for my folks, who buy an Amazon card for my brother, who buys a Chapters card for me, I pay my money to the government, and they write me a check right back.  The so-called “Ralph Bucks” of Ralph Klein’s administration have not translated into “Ed Bucks” for Mr. Stelmach’s administration, the latter group spending to catch up on public works neglected by the former.  But Rick Bell questioned this morning in the Calgary Sun what the government will do with natural gas rebates, a subsidy that protects average Albertans from the wild swings of an unregulated commodity on a volatile market.

   

The demand for energy to make energy threatens the homeowner from Grande Prairie to Raymond with severe price spikes, and the subsidy is applied directly to the bill to blunt those sharp edges.  Mr. Bell suggests that, as the $325-million rebate program expires at the end of March 2009, some people will call for a revised plan that gives the rebate only to low-income earners or only to people who retrofit their homes for efficiency.  On the latter point, Mr. Bell is right to say that the program offers only an incentive to consume.

   

If we are going to subsidize, an older idea seems to me to be the most responsible way forward.  We could easily structure a program that makes efficient use of energy quite affordable.  This should cover folks in small homes – and even people in bigger homes who have decided that turning down the thermostat a few degrees is sound conservation.  People who use much more, for whatever reason, still have the opportunity to do so, but they would pay a premium for it.

   

Imagine if it was practical to allow people who drive small cars to work or people who carpool to get their gasoline at reasonable prices, but people who choose to drive large vehicles or whose recreational demands are immodest had to pay more.  While that sound public policy might be possible, and might be something we will have to consider in the future, it would take a massive shift in the way we sell gasoline.  We need no massive shift to achieve these aims in natural gas consumption.  Everyone, seemingly, young and old, left and right, believes some manner of energy subsidy is here to stay in the heating of our homes.  Why not use this mechanism to achieve aims we should all agree to be prudent: whether you think you are saving the planet, or think simply that you are preserving natural resources for the use of your children and grandchildren.

Last Call For The Campus Pub?

I will not wax nostalgic for the old “Breezeway,” the student pub at Memorial University when the heart of its campus was the Thomson Student Centre.  I did not spend much time there as a student.  But it was without doubt a vibrant establishment, and by many accounts there are few of these on campuses across our country today.  Canadian newspaper stories have been heralding the end of university pubs, but a recent article in University Affairs finds a rosier future, one in which dingy, malodorous drinking holes are replaced by popular campus restaurants that succeed by diversifying their business plans.

   

In principle, this is a great idea.  But, in practice, the idea comes up against a hard reality: a good restaurant is hard to manage.  That is why so many fail.  At the height of its popularity, the campus pub at the University of Lethbridge succeeded in selling cheap beer to students on Thursday nights.  From fisticuffs at dusk to class hangovers on Friday mornings, there were many reasons why this situation was unsustainable.  But the afterlife of our “Zoo” has been rocky: a bistro was a miserable failure, and its current incarnation as a hybrid establishment does not seem to satisfy anyone.  You can walk ten minutes to the west and find the most popular student bar in our city; while there are legitimate complaints about institutional food service on campus, few people can afford the time and money necessary for a sit down meal on a basis regular enough to support the enterprise.  And this is the key: because few businesses can thrive on a university campus without subsidies or other anti-market concessions, a campus pub that tries to be all things to all people often ends up appealing to too few students to justify student government dollars.  Will heavy drinkers want part of their levy to go to a place that is a coffee bar in the daytime?  Will fans of live music support a place that specializes in a ten dollar cheeseburger?

   

The answers are not simple, and if you happen to have the right ambience, the right location, the right menu, and the right staff to make your pub a sought-after destination, you have something that can help you achieve a vibrant campus environment.  But so few people do, in my opinion, in spite of what optimists might lead you to believe.