by Rex Murphy
We hear, God how often do we hear, that “young people get their news from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show.” This is most often said as if it were a good thing. But, of course, what Jon Stewart, or his twin Stephen Colbert, delivers isn’t news at all. It is merely a thin comedic overlay on the “hottest” tidbits of the day. Stewart and Colbert offer comedy as a masquerade for commentary; they are in fact the master practitioners of that “truthiness” they claim to be so expert in exploding. They illustrate what is, to my mind, the other great turn in our understanding of news. People go to certain television shows, read certain newspapers, have favourite web sites because these shows, newspapers, web sites offer them confirmation—not of what they know about the news, but of how they already feel. People seek out confirmation more than information. News, in this new, loose understanding of the term, is that which authenticates feelings or attitudes already held.
Environmental news is, by far, the best illustration of this. Environmental “reporting”—the scare quotes are most necessary here—is so wretchedly somnolent on the major controversies of environmentalism, global warming itself being the principal one, as to constitute a form of evangelism. Environmental reporting is, in the main, a mix of conscious or unconscious advocacy. If business journalists reported on business, if political journalists reported on politics, in the manner that most environmental reporters report on environmentalism it would be a scandal.
In such a context, however fruitless the effort—the windmills are so many, the lances so few—it is a rightful task to bark occasionally at the consensus, to highlight the absurdities, mock the vain celebrities, and puncture the politicians. Which is I hope the point—if I may be permitted to hope, and if I have a point—of much of the writing in my columns for The Globe and Mail, or the “Point of View” for The National that I do.
I make no pretense of being earnest in any final sense of that term, and have long since parted with the delusion that my opinions, because they are mine, are less hostage to fallibility or walk nearer with truth than those of many others. I subscribe to the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s dictum, which should be something of a motto for opinion-mongers: “On … occasion[s] of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.” The pleasure part is real. It is a pleasure to comment on, rail against, parse, or idly just note in passing the various “occasions” in our national life, or in the broader life of the times, twice a week. To comment on—to coin a title—Canada and other matters of opinion. The occasions are so many, as I’ve noted above, that for every column or “Point of View” written, ten others have flown by before the fingers reach the laptop.
An Obama win over (we thought then) the indomitable Hillary in one of the early primaries coincides with Stéphane Dion’s launch of the leaden lifeboat he called The Green Shift; Mark Steyn, the indefatigable, boldy goes (where no journalist should ever have to go) to plead his case before the Commissars of B.C.’s human rights commission in the same week, say, as Maxime Bernier’s fling with the busty Julie Couillard makes the headlines: which boobs to choose? That is always the question. It is always answered, in my case, by whichever of the multiple topics on offer provokes a real itch to respond. If the itch is genuine the chances of the response being fun are greater. It’s a simple rule, but about the only real one I have. I hope some of the fun survives in the pieces gathered here. They are, if I may revert to an earlier image, a few pages from my personal diary of a world gone mad.
P.S. I have in many pieces done what time, or absence of industry, did not allow me to do when they were written. I have cleaned up some sentences, unravelled some obscurities. Here and there throughout the book I have appended postscripts in order to underline or add to a point with the benefit of hindsight. What murkiness remains was too thick to be lifted.
Rex Murphy
EMINENT CANADIANS
DON CHERRY, THE PEOPLE’S GG | May 8, 2004
I had not realized how fervently Toronto is a hockey city. The air here was electric with hope for the beloved, hapless Leafs. The dismay following their elimination from the playoffs was palpable. Lord Stanley’s cup will grace another city’s parade.
But time is a great (actually, the only) grief counsellor. So I guess it’s both safe and tactful, from my perch in this city of cruelly procrastinated dreams, to speak of Don Cherry, arbiter elegantiarum of Hockey Night in Canada, sage of Coach’s Corner and straight man for Ron MacLean. He is much in the news; there is talk that his days as the iconic resident of Coach’s Corner may be coming to an end. He is also, I gather, by some weird extension of the Canadian bilingualism statutes, under some sort of review. The Commissioner of Official Languages is offering her scrutiny to some of Mr. Cherry’s obiter dicta.
A strange thing, for a language commissioner to be analyzing the analyzer of Coach’s Corner. I’m not sure what business the nation’s bilingualism monitor has with the Plato of the playoffs. Whatever Don Cherry—or his faithful dog Blue, for that matter—may be doing, they are not unravelling the two-languages concept.
Parliament, even in its most liberated or unhinged deliberations, did not contemplate the commissioner’s office evolving into a freelance inquisition for the furious beadles of political correctness. If this nation is in jeopardy of fracturing, look not to Coach’s Corner. Try the sponsorship program.
But it is neither of these matters that has brought the familiar image of the natty, high-collared Homer of hockey onto the front pages and television screens of the country. It is, rather, an active courtship from the newly minted Conservative Party to enroll Mr. Cherry as one of its candidates. I would like to see him in Ottawa in a three-way faceoff against Richard Mahoney and the resuscitated Ed Broadbent. The inevitable candidates’ debate would earn higher ratings than the Olympics, and certainly more drama.
But it cannot be. First, because Mr. Cherry has been reported as saying that he has been too long with hockey—I’m paraphrasing here—to dwindle into politics. I agree with him. From Coach’s Corner to Question Period would be a subtraction of the great man’s zest and energy, and a brutal contraction of his public influence.
Nor, should the Conservatives win, does the thought of Don Cherry at the cabinet table, trying to refashion Stephen Harper into a reasonable facsimile of Ron MacLean, offer the mind any peace. In any case, politics is a tepid stew of compromise and euphemism, a nest of affectation and posturing—all genetic antimatter to His Outspokenness.
No, I applaud the Conservatives for their nerve and originality, and Stephen Harper for being man enough to contemplate his own eclipse, which would have been inevitable should Mr. Cherry have yielded to the party’s entreaty.
I think the time is ripe for a different thought, not original with me, though I have brought it up before.
The co-governor generalship of Their Excellencies Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul is moving to its flashy close. An eager and anxious nation awaits a worthy successor. These are large, well-heeled and splendidly itinerant shoes to fill.
Well, Don Cherry is the obvious, the blatant, choice. It was said of Diana, that most melancholy of Cinderella-celebrities, that she was the people’s princess. I do not think of Mr. Cherry as a princess, but he is the people’s governor general.
The Clarkson-Ralston Saul era has left its high-toned and circumpolar imprint. We have had a governor general ship of lofty (and, let us whisper it, bloodless) pretension, a harvest time for the canapé-and-string-quartet set. It has been a Chardonnay era at Rideau Hall. It’s time for some beer.
Being as he already is the impresario and master of ceremonies of the national ritual—hockey—Mr. Cherry already carries on his shoulders the mass fealty of this hockey-cherishing country. In every living room and den, in every pool hall and bar, at every checkout counter, in Tim Hortons and at Canadian Tire, Grapes—such is the affectionate diminutive of this man—is the toast of every Canadian heart.
I think he would bring to the office of go
vernor general a kind of profile that has hitherto been only dreamed of, and a popularity not contingent on luring the country’s better novelists and musicians to high tea or the annual garden party. Governor General Don Cherry. It has quite a ring to it. The Conservatives’ loss will be the country’s gain.
Should this come to pass, I have only one wish: to be present when the Swedish ambassador presents his or her credentials.
I see now, more than four years after writing this homage (as the French foppishly put it—to borrow from an old comedy album), that my hopes of seeing Grapes as our GG are dim indeed. How dim? They have yet to so much as give Mr. Cherry an Order of Merit pin. A country that does not include Don Cherry on its roll of honour doesn’t have a roll of honour.
A BOSWELL’S LIFE | November 13, 2004
You are a very rich and powerful business person, a bit of a recluse, or with a severe distaste for publicity and an allergy to journalists. You hear Peter C. Newman wants to interview you, and the very notion is repellent. What’s the best course of action?
Well, if you’ve had the chance to read Here Be Dragons, Mr. Newman’s crowded and compelling memoir, the correct, least painful, way out of this quandary is simple. Surrender. Phone him up, right away, and get it over with.
Because if Mr. Newman really wants to interview you, you may be as secretive as a hermit, as elusive as a second-storey man, as disdainful of the press as, well, Conrad Black, but you are going to be interviewed.
He is best known in this country as the Boswell of the A-list corporate overachievers. The four volumes of The Canadian Establishment constitute the Debrett’s of Canada’s entrepreneurs. They constitute, as well, the first, and only, account of the sometimes shadowy, sometimes flamboyant people who own the big companies, live in the big mansions and exercise—by right of the power that large piles of money bestows, and the ego that usually attends the possession of both the piles and power—substantial dominion over the rest of us.
When Mr. Newman set his mind to sketching this set, his first problem was the most basic one: access. The majority of the wealthy and mighty in this country—especially at the time of Mr. Newman’s self-assignment—were not (thank God) in the Donald Trump mould. Not, in other words, walking publicity sponges, puerile show-offs and addicts of the dim and dubious pleasure of seeing their names in print or their haughty, smug faces on TV. Most were (the term is seen less frequently of late) WASPs. Reticence and hauteur characterized the majority.
It is one of the delights of Here Be Dragons to watch Mr. Newman stalk, seduce, extort, trick and beguile those who had set their teeth against having anything to do with him. The greatest journalistic skill is not the interview; it is getting the interview. I’ve known a few journalists who were more than normally resourceful in coaxing the reluctant to the studio couch or the probing microphone, but Mr. Newman’s artfulness and determination are all his own. He is a hedgehog with the cunning of a fox.
Here Be Dragons is the large book of a full life. The chronicler of others comes to the tale of himself. Ever since his flight from Europe at the age of eleven with his parents, from a beach at Biarritz in the early days of the Second World War, Mr. Newman, as he writes in a prologue, “was charged with a sense of purpose. I would search for security and stability, try to find safe haven in causes to follow and heroes to worship. By enlisting myself in the services of worthy men (and later women) who I could believe in, I would never feel so vulnerable or threatened again.”
This book is the grand narrative of that search, and in one dimension of the country, ours, in which it was mainly undertaken, and in another the story of himself, the busy, sometimes turbulent professional, of the personal transit of a driven, talented, eager and alert human being. There’s not a headline personality in Canada that Mr. Newman’s near-half-century career in journalism hasn’t encountered and mapped. Here Be Dragons is a very lively piece of social and political history. Mr. Newman is a one-man journalistic Niagara (twenty-two books, two million sold—and counting). He has learned this country through the people he has studied; studying himself studying them, he has drawn a thorough portrait of us both.
His signature—apart from the trademark headgear—is the monumental X-ray of our rich and mighty, the early Canadian Establishment. They are the Dragons of the current title, the remote unknown eminences behind or beyond the landscape of Canadian journalism—unknown, that is, until Newman appointed himself their naturalist.
The powerful can be shy. They must be courted to reveal themselves. The story of how he came to lure the reticent rich of the Canadian elite to his journalistic laboratory is not the smallest of this book’s many pleasures. For example, he won the keystone interview for The Canadian Establishment, with John Angus (Bud) McDougald, by haunting the company of everyone who knew him, and floating to them wild and wilful misapprehensions of Mr. McDougald’s financial worth and business dealings. Everywhere Mr. McDougald went, he was hearing of this “journalist” with the crazy estimations of his worth and practice. It took Mr. Newman the best part of a year to win it, but an invitation to Mr. McDougald’s Green Pines estate was finally forthcoming. Mr. McDougald had figured out “the trick,” but admired the guts behind it.
Mr. Newman’s writing had its serious intent. It was not, nor was it ever meant to be, just gossip. He was propelled by a thesis: “I would document my theory that most of our destinies were governed by a shadowy group of financial manipulators I called The Canadian Establishment. I would define and detail their origins, interconnections, rivalries, prejudices, values, strengths, mercenary motives and operational codes. This would not be a bloodless audit of their common strains—this would be a journalist’s exposé of who they were, what they did, and how they got away with it.”
Not quite Gibbon recalling the origin of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”), but there is something of a symmetry of intent here, in the sense of scope and mission, however dissimilar the canvas. Our Caligulas are smaller.
Mr. Newman seems to have come upon his distinct terrain early on. After a stint on The Financial Post in Toronto and Montreal, he got work at Maclean’s in its glory days. His colleagues included Peter Gzowski and Christina McCall (his soon-to-be second wife); Pierre Berton was a senior editor, and celebrated editor Ralph Allen guided the whole rich crew. It was then that he produced his first book, a dozen profiles of prominent businessmen, Flames of Power, published on his twenty-ninth birthday.
A handful of zesty reviews, including one in The Wall Street Journal, rocketed sales and confirmed him in what turned out to be his vocation: sketching the personalities, aspirations and connections of this country’s moneyed elite. He found he loved writing. And he learned he loved success in writing even more.
“Success turns a writer into a praise addict… . It becomes a drug, terminally unsettling to mental balance, a price I would willingly pay for the rest of my life.”
A comment from one of the luminaries profiled in Flames of Power, E.P. Taylor, breathed the note of patterned ambivalence with which Mr. Newman’s subjects came to regard him: “Well, we all know Newman is a goddammed Communist, but I’m not taking him off my Christmas card list yet.”
He would rise to the editorship of Maclean’s, and there would be many mighty detours from his dedicated trolling of the guarded waters of Canadian capitalism’s master sharks. Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years, his second book, was the one that made him. It was a pioneering piece of political journalism. It went for the guts and flavour of politics, spoken in a candour and detail that have become so commonplace it is difficult to see how original and daring they then were. It was also, typically, a monster of research and patient assembly. A thousand interviews, frequent meetings with real insiders, seventeen rewrites, ten galley proofs, and the close, creative oversight of Christina McCall went into its making. Mr. Newman doesn’t produce careless book
s.
Renegade in Power was a publishing home run. John Diefenbaker kept six copies, one annotated on every page, while swearing he had never read it. That he resented it profoundly is understatement’s understatement. In the Diefenbaker Centre at the University of Saskatchewan is a note, in the Chief’s own hand, the kindest sentence of which reads, “He [Newman] is the literary scavenger of the trash baskets on Parliament Hill.”
Newman sets a rich board, but for many I predict the crowning soufflé will be the chapter on Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. If the subtitle of Newman’s memoir—Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power—has to earn its keep, the chapter-essay on the Blacks will more than do it.
Mr. Newman has a unique purchase on this great fable of our time. He claims, not without daring, to have “invented” Conrad Black. I suspect the Lord of Crossharbour assiduously asserts that the patent on the great miracle of himself is his and his alone. But Mr. Newman, as Maclean’s editor and as the earliest biographer of Lord Black, was one of the first amplifiers of the Black persona and had singular access at the initial stages of Lord Black’s acceleration into fame, fortune and folly.
Mr. Newman’s account is superior to others because he is neither clinically neutral (a rare stance in accounts of The Conrad) nor dripping with glee (a much more crowded assembly) over Lord Black’s current miseries and mischiefs. In the early stages of the now-familiar rise, Mr. Newman saw much in Lord Black to admire—the potential to shatter the conventionalities of the dull Canadian business world, intellect in tandem with aspiration. This threads his account with something close to anger that Lord Black turned out to be just another acquisitive egomaniac, one with an absurd itch for archaic status, and distinguished only, as it turns out, by a more generous vocabulary than less-fluent compeers in the greed game—the CEO of, say, Enron.
