The Classroom Conservative

Two Cents For A Coalition Not Worth That Much

As a centrist - a fiscal conservative and social progressive - I am horrified at the prospect of a coalition government taking over in Ottawa before Christmas. I have not voted Liberal since Paul Martin's first government, when a prudent finance minister showed me that, as leader, he was willing to lure NDP voters with our money. The lean and responsible approach he developed in bad times disappeared as the Liberals imagined new bureaucracies and financial commitments. The plan was simple: demolish the NDP and hold the Conservatives to a rump. He does not seem to have considered that moderates would go to the Tories out of fear of the Left.

Now, there are neo-conservatives in the Conservative Party whose ideas belong nowhere near the seat of power. But they are reigned in by the simple realization that access to power, and life to the best parts of the Stephen Harper platform, depends on the moderate support that Mr. Martin took for granted.

There will be no such check on radicalism in an unholy coalition. Under Prime Minister Stephane Dion, a man rejected by his own party and the vast majority of Canadian voters, success will be measured by how much money is wasted, how many unreasonably expensive ideas are implemented.

If we must topple the Tories, I think the following two conditions would be demanded by that percentage of Canadians necessary for the government to succeed. First, someone other than Monsieur Dion must lead the coalition. Second, it must be a formal coalition of a plurality of MPs. On this point, I think it reprehensible that 77 Liberals could lead our country, propped up by NDP, Bloc, and Independent support. Bring at least 144 people together, formally, and give all participating parties cabinet seats, making them accountable as the bad times again roll in.

Our last recession was managed by centre-right fiscal policies. Why do we imagine that reckless spending will manage this one?

Thanksgiving Turkeys

The National Football League is the most successful sports operation in the world, and for my money it features the best talent in the best endeavor. It is almost always pitch-perfect in its organization: the length of the games, the length of the season, the number of teams, and the salary cap. What I cannot understand is how it gets wrong its Thanksgiving extravaganza.

I marvel at the big deal Americans make of Thanksgiving. There is no holiday like it in Canada, and there is certainly no other holiday I can imagine with such a solid sporting connection. As big as Thanksgiving might be, it would be diminished if it did not feature NFL football. There are now three games on this most special Thursday each year.

Unfortunately, these are now often meaningless contests, as parity makes it difficult to predict year to year who the competitive teams might be by this point in the season. As I type this, the third lopsided game of the day is churning towards its conclusion. Anyone who follows the NFL could have seen this disaster coming, but perhaps no one could have seen it coming last spring: far enough in advance to influence the schedule. However, it would not take an avid fan to know well in advance that the game involving the Detroit Lions would be a bigger turkey than that sitting on tables across the United States. The Lions are chronic underachievers, and they have been utterly terrible for about a decade. This year, they lost by more than five touchdowns. Their involvement in Thanksgiving football each year is based only on tradition, and I think it is one tradition the National Football League could do without.

Constance Briscoe, Carmen Mitchell, And The Law's Understanding Of Literary Veracity

The weekend National Post carried a story on a lawsuit filed in England over Constance Briscoe's Ugly, her memoir of an abusive childhood. Ms Briscoe's mother, 74-year-old Carmen Mitchell, is seeking damages from her daughter on the grounds that incidents of abuse related in the narrative did not actually occur. The Post was closest to accurate when Katie Rook, its reporter, claimed that "the veracity" of the book "is being tested."

Everything else about the case, and any analysis of it, represents an uncertain path forward.

Ms Rook, quite understandably, relies on the word "truth" in setting out what the court is testing. In fact, in the study of a book such as Ugly, truth is not what you, or Ms Rook, might think it should be. There are, maddeningly, multiple truths in autobiography. Even if Ms Mitchell did not refuse to buy her daughter's school picture, we cannot say that Ms Briscoe is being untruthful in making this claim. If the latter remembers it so, that is her truth; it is entirely reasonable to believe that the former has a truth of her own.

What must interest the court is "fact," of course, and these are not nearly as subjective, though they are almost always as elusive. Can we prove, definitively, whether or not Ms Mitchell ever ridiculed Ms Briscoe's lips, comparing them to a sink plunger? I think the court will have a hard time. We may, as readers, sometimes catch the autobiographer in a demonstrable lie. Not having left Newfoundland until the early 1980s, I could hardly claim to have witnessed the Kennedy Assassination. But, even if I did, I would not be eroding my own truth, which could be rooted in delusion, as much as I would be unsettling my readers into questioning my reliability as a narrator of my own story.

The interesting part about this case is that Ms Briscoe has accused Ms Mitchell of criminal activity: physically beating her until abandoning her as a teenager. This might raise the stakes, but it will make it no easier to prove the facts of the case. Moreover, what is the standard of proof that must be satisfied before an author can write non-fiction? We expect footnotes to link us to authority when we read an author write about others. But can we really reign in the latitude we give people in writing their own stories, even when those stories inevitably involve other people?

Anyone who has been maligned in one-sided, published accounts can understand the frustration. It is just difficult to imagine a one-size-fits-all remedy for it.

SI's Peter King In The Mouth Of The Echo Chamber

It is fortunate that Sports Illustrated has Peter King and Paul Zimmerman, the two best football writers now working. Their writing is enriched by the personality they bring to their columns. In reading the former, I have learned about the highs and lows of raising two daughters while regularly travelling from New Jersey to cover the National Football League; in reading the latter, I have learned how a shared love of good wines can keep together a gridiron curmugeon and his long-suffering, red-headed artist/wife. I have also learned a tremedous amount about football. These two gentlemen never let their personal lives, and personal opinions, overshadow their knowledge of the game, but it has been great to get to know the men behind the words over, say, the past decade or so.

It seems to me that Mr. King has suffered, however, during this interminable presidential election campaign in the United States. It is none of my business whether he is a registered Democrat, but I could draw a reasonable conclusion that he was not terribly disappointed that Barack Obama won the recent election, and if the United States is able to negotiate an orderly, honorable withdrawal from Iraq that allows us all to maintain some of the principles that took them there in the first place, I am pretty certain that Mr. King would raise a cheer. These positions, whether he holds them or not, are not unreasonable. What I find unreasonable, however, is that on the few occasions he has suggested that some change to the status quo might enrich the lives of all Americans, he has received for his trouble a deluge of correspondence from readers who want him to stick to football.

What rubbish.

These readers have profited from Mr. King's catholic interests, as well as his pragmatic judgment of everything from coffee to television programs. (I am dismayed only that he does not appear to be the rabid fan of Mad Men that I am!) Mr. King's columns are not political, nor should they be. But people who object to a sportswriter discussing how black NFL athletes responded to Mr. Obama's election are the kinds of people who enjoy the internet only because it allows them to restrict their reading to people who think exactly as they do.

Insofar as today's media has become a small series of echo chambers where our own thoughts can be communicated back to us, we are an impoverished people. So long as Peter King fills my Monday mornings with pages and pages of football information stuck together with the other stuff of American life, I will consider myself lucky.

Cobamady On David Letterman

Eighty-two-year-old Don Rickles must have heard the deafening silence a million times before. He had gone a little too far, said something that offended the sensibility of his audience. But this time he was on Late Night With David Letterman, and the joke he made was about Barack Obama. He suggested that when faced with a crisis, the President-Elect would find it hard to turn his attention away from shooting three-pointers on the half-court at the White House. The gasps drew all the oxygen from the room.

It would not rank among Mr. Rickles' best jokes, certainly, but it has probably been a long time since he told one as important.

A lot of comedians have been fretting over how difficult it will be to needle Mr. Obama. Forget, for the moment, that he is immensely popular and has earned the respect of even some of his political enemies: that will pass. But, as an African American, he appears immune to the attention of late night comedians who are afraid of being labelled racist.

Now that we have crossed a line, life should be a little easier for everyone.

I have no doubt that Mr. Rickles, a lifelong Democrat whose Jewish background has exposed him to prejudice, was referring primarily to Mr. Obama's basketball proclivities; we know he is better with the roundball than with the bowling ball. But the stereotype, of course, is that African Americans are obsessed with the sport. At its most coarse, Mr. Rickles' steroetype is less offensive than, say, golfer Fuzzy Zoeller's famous suggestion that Tiger Woods stuffed himself on fried chicken and collard greens! Mr. Rickles knew what he was doing by drawing on a dodgy generalization that might offend some people, but it was no more offensive to me than invoking southern stereotypes to discuss Bill Clinton or drawing George W. Bush as a Texan who is a little slow on the draw.  It was certainly nothing like Ralph Nader invoking the "Uncle Tom" phrase when discussing the President-Elect.

Mr. Obama will soon be the leader of the free world. I think he can withstand the suggestion that hitting treys is, somehow, in his DNA. Much worse has been said about him in anger, after all. But if an offhand remark leads to legitimately funnier things in these dark times, no harm has been done.

Ralph Nader And The Currency Of Racism

I am very libertarian about words: I do not believe any of them are off limits. Taboo words - the very currency of intolerance - can be used effectively to convey the perfect idea. When John Lennon sang, shockingly, that "woman is the nigger of the world," he was drawing a comparison between racism and sexism that was so multifaceted, so comprehensive, that the metaphor could only scratch the surface suggested by the ugly history of that word itself.

On election day, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader asked whether Barack Obama was "going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations." Mr. Nader was beating a familiar drum: he believes that politicians are todies for big business. But his comparison profited nothing by invoking words that echoed America's racist past; racism had nothing to do with his point. The use of "Uncle Tom" was nothing but lazy, nothing but ugly.

Shepard Smith grilled Mr. Nader about this on Fox News, and he gave Mr. Nader a chance to retract his statement. Calling Mr. Smith "a bully," he refused to do so.

Mr. Nader should be ashamed of himself.

Bob Dylan In Lethbridge, Alberta

I saw Bob Dylan in Warsaw, Poland on July 19, 1994. He was promoting a third volume of hits at the time, and the set had a retrospective feel about it. He sang "Jokerman," "Tangled Up In Blue," and "Maggie's Farm," and he finished with "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Blowin' In The Wind." I felt as if seeing him live, half way around the world, was a cumulative tribute to someone who had so influenced me. Over the subsequent years, when an opportunity to see Dylan again presented itself, I would shrug.

Of course, Bob Dylan has recorded three fabulous studio albums over the past decade, including the utterly brilliant Time Out Of Mind (1997), and so when it was announced that he would be visiting Lethbridge, Alberta, it occurred to me that to fail to see him again, in yet another offbeat venue, would be stupid. It has been fifteen years, after all. I am so glad I had a chance to share this great experience with all the folks who live here - as well as many visitors from Montana and British Columbia, from what I hear.

The tickets were expensive: about four times what used to count as "normal," and twice what I now usually pay. Luckily, we had wonderful seats about a row or two above stage left. Dylan was set up behind his keyboard on the right side, and we had a good view all night from just feet away. Unfortunately, we were also in line with a speaker, and so the volume was much louder here than at other points throughout the Enmax Centre. (The hearing has just returned to both my ears.) Coveted floor seats I bequeath to anyone who wants to stand and jostle for two hours. Enmax security did an excellent job of clearing our row of people who wanted to creep close enough to take a picture.

The set was heavy with material from Modern Times (2006), swaggering rockabilly that shifted Dylan just slightly from his bluesy turn. Happily, and luckily, the heavy backing band brought those songs alive for me, from "Rollin And Tumblin" to the climatic "Thunder On The Mountain." The back catalogue was represented by "Highway 61 Revisited" and, to my surprise, "Girl From The North Country." Similarly, on the verge of a generation-defining American election, Dylan returned, without comment, of course, to "The Times They Are A-Changin" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." On this tour, Dylan has been using "Like A Rolling Stone" and "All Along The Watchtower" as encores, and he employed them here in that order. While the latter pales in comparison to the former, placing his two guitarists under considerable strain, it was enjoyed by the crowd, who were finally revealed in their pulsing enthusiasm by the house lights. The highlights for me were the blues numbers, however: "Lonesome Day Blues" from Love and Theft (2001) and especially "Love Sick" from Time Out Of Mind, the best song Dylan has recorded in twenty-five years. The live version, anchored by the bass and sharp, throbbing drumming, was worth the price of admission itself.

But what about that voice, much discussed? I have long ago thought of it as the sound of waves beating against a cliff, receding over the rocks and back to the sea. There is a beauty, a poetry that transcends even the words, though if you know not what to expect, I am sure it can be jarring. On this night, there was nothing of which one could legitimately grouse. My complaints are with my fellow concert goers. How many times did the people around me get up to go and get another drink, to go and get another pizza or hot dog? We are so used to socializing in our homes, we do not remember how to sit (or stand) and enjoy even a legitimate spectacle. I was sickened as the inhabitants of a luxury box across from us flashed the lights on and off, on and off, as they filled and refilled their glasses, oblivious to what was happening on the stage.

I have heard further complaining, in particular from those in attendance at his subsequent Regina show, that Dylan chose not to do an intimate, acoustic set of oldies. One of the problems with some Dylan fans is a persistent desire that he be what they think he should be, that he reinforce their nostalgia for a time they now view to be simpler and somehow idealized. What they fail to remember is that his artistry was forged in a troubled time of transition: that he has persevered and reinvented himself as this Dylan for now should be enough for everyone.