Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  When Mr. Newman is angry, his light touch and wicked pen take on a degree of flame and sharpness that make for wonderful writing. His thumbnail cameos approach a Muggeridgean callousness. Of Lord Black: “Conrad had turned himself into a latter day Citizen Kane. He looked like a young Orson Welles but behaved like an old William Randolph Hearst.”

  Of Barbara Amiel: “Even in repose, she was always posing, playing the femme fatale in her own movie. While she kept insisting it was her mind not her body that merited attention, it was widely suspected she was Mother Nature’s little helper.”

  There are many, a wicked many, more. In the caustic-asides department, Mr. Newman is one with Keats: “Load every rift with ore.”

  Mr. Newman has gulped a lot of life. He has a taste for panorama, but it never overrules detail and individuality, the quirks and quiddities of each personality. This makes him an excellent diarist. He has a zeal for taking in the illuminating anecdote, and a flair for reproducing it in print.

  I have remarked on the frightening industry and variousness of Mr. Newman’s career, but there must be time to remark on the writing. He is, on the evidence of this book, a very cheerful fellow. It might seem undistinguished to call Here Be Dragons a “happy” book, but it is. His observations and obiter dicta are crafted, keen and frequently funny. They save the book from the slightest shadow of tediousness and self-absorption. He is not afraid to boast of his accomplishments, personal or professional, romantic or scribal, but does so with insouciance and charm. He has enjoyed his ride, is bemusedly dazzled by his success, has savoured his talents, clearly loves writing, and values the wiles and stratagems that gave him entry where others (Hic Sunt Dracones) feared to tread.

  He has a style that can work these various effects and responses. It can dispense an anecdote, sketch a character in a mini-essay, turn lyrical at moments of reflection or nostalgia, and is by turns pungent and relaxed, bare for story, barbed for impact. The many, many books, the editorships and articles, have sharpened a considerable talent. He has the instinct of a gossip wedded to the mind of a true chronicler: one who sees the arc of an age through the multitude of its particulars and personalities.

  And, finally, he writes against the profound echo of what, as a child, he glimpsed and his parents felt and fled: the horror of the Second World War, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust. I have said he is cheerful, and my guess is that this is the cheerfulness of someone who has seen all that is the worst of us, felt some of it in his own Jewish legacy from those dark times, and determined there were only two faces with which to stare back at the world: an angry one or a determinedly embracing one.

  He chose the latter, obviously. He is both a student of the world and—in one of his own terms—a jester. The world here is mainly, as I have said, ours, Canada. He has done a fine job of seeing a consequential part of it, has fashioned some of the very tools others in his trade now deploy. He has inflected the public record of this country, and he has lived a mixed, charming, various, replete life. He has known everyone who is anyone and passed on the highlights of that ranging acquaintance to his readers.

  He has earned his cheerfulness. Here Be Dragons is a much more than worthy picture of ourselves, and a work of genuine wit and insight.

  MICHAËLLE SHINES BY DEFAULT | October 1, 2005

  I hope it’s not awkward to bring this up, but the office of the governor general is a ceremonial post.

  It’s useful to remember this, if for no other reason than to scatter the cloud of incense hanging over the installation of Michaëlle Jean this week. The jaded cynics of the national press corps went into full rhapsody mode, with reviews of her speech that whizzed past being merely complimentary and only halted at reverential because, I suppose, there was no higher place to go.

  My Globe and Mail colleague John Ibbitson came as close to producing a swoon in print as, outside the delicate prose of the romance novelists, it is possible to do. Of Ms. Jean he wrote, “She is the becoming Canada,” a tribute made more plangent by being set off against the “old faces [and] old men” of those who hold real office in this country, one of whom—old face notwithstanding—actually appointed her.

  Over at The National Post, the remorseless logician Andrew Coyne, who a few weeks back greeted the appointment of Ms. Jean with as blistering a denunciation as I can recall, started his piece with a surrender notice. “You are my Commander-in-Chief” was the least fervent whisper of his billet-doux.

  All that was missing from some of the commentary was a burst of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Lawrence Martin, in The Globe on Thursday, essentially positioned Ms. Jean, so late of two citizenships, as a new Joan of Arc of federalism.

  Her arrival on the scene would topple the separatist dream, “turning the André Boisclairs of the world into ghosts.” (At the time of this writing, in October 2005, Mr. Boisclair was considered the rising star of separatism. He became leader of the Parti Québécois in 2005, but resigned in 2007 when the PQ came third in the provincial election.) Her speech, according to Mr. Martin, buried all the controversies that attended her appointment, even the one with her dressmaker. It’s a rare speech that quiets the Haberdashery Wars.

  This is the kind of unleashed adulation that is normally on display only in the backyard of MuchMusic when Jessica Simpson or Shania Twain pay a visit to the teenagers, and recalls nothing in the political world so much as the ancient transports of Trudeaumania.

  And, lest it be forgotten in the sunrise glow of Michaëlle Jean’s installation, every major speech she gives from now on, she will give as a figurehead. The voice will be hers. The words will be those of the prime minister who has dictated them. It is called the Speech from the Throne only in deference to the chair she occupies. Neither the chair nor its occupant bears blame for the prose.

  Some of the response to our new governor general is easy to account for. She has immense and genuine charm. She is attractive and intelligent. As a good friend of mine from Newfoundland once said of another impressive woman—and this is a high compliment—“There are no flies on her, and if there are, they’re paying rent.”

  Another reason is simple contrast. The real, as opposed to ceremonial, leadership of this country is woebegone and mediocre. There is something very saddening in the recollection, during the leaders’ debate in the last election, of just how many in the press and the public thought that the separatist leader Gilles Duceppe was the best performer.

  Mr. Duceppe is no Cicero; that he could be thought to have outshone Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton speaks more to the dreariness of their presentations than to the sparkle of his.

  The citizens of this country have a very lively and enduring suspicion that it is one of the most favoured and fortunate nations on the Earth. But they will have to stagger their brains to remember an occasion within the past twenty years or so when any of our national leaders gave some memorable and convincing articulation of why it should be considered so.

  The new governor general’s speech was astonishing not in its content. In fact, in terms of one of its major themes—that the time of the “two solitudes” is past—it was seriously off-key and anachronistic. To dismiss the concept of two solitudes would have been a great line in a speech by a governor general thirty years ago. But the concept, like the phrase, is a pure museum piece.

  So it wasn’t the speech itself. It was the spectacle of someone at the level of national leadership at least attempting, finally, to give voice to the worth of the country, and doing so with some confidence and conviction, that dazzled spectators and commentators alike.

  In the week of David Dingwall, the year of Gomery and sponsorship, the decade of no real opposition politics, even one note of something that spoke to themes larger that “gotcha” politics, partisan frenzy and the daily horrors of Question Period took on an aura of substance and nobility by default.

  Make no mistake: Her Excellency gave a good speech. But it was made so much better by all the other speeches that our real
leaders have not given.

  THE COMPLETE SOLDIER | April 14, 2008

  Rick Hillier is more popular than Avril Lavigne. But let’s forget popularity, General Hillier owns a far less vaporous distinction. He is probably the most respected public figure in all the country.

  It’s easy to be liked when nothing’s going on, and no big deal to be respected when things are calm and easy. General Hillier’s standing with the Canadian public comes, however, from his service as the head of Canada’s military, at a time when it is actively engaged in a still unresolved conflict, suffering the inevitable losses of real combat, in a war that claims far from universal support here in Canada. He has had what is arguably the most difficult and painful job—though for a true military man being a soldier is more of a vocation—of anyone in Canada, but from one coast to the other, from the north to the south, General Rick Hillier has earned almost universal respect and admiration.

  The accomplishments of his tenure have a lot to do with this. He hauled the Canadian military out of the cellar of public opinion and from the bottom of every government’s list of real priorities. Within the military and without, he refurbished its morale, bolstered its prestige. Other professions in this country are well esteemed. Soldiers are honoured.

  Canada’s regard for its soldiers used to be manifested almost exclusively on Remembrance Day and other ceremonial occasions. General Hillier brought that regard to every day of the living calendar. He re-cemented the connection between the military and the Canadian public. A Canadian soldier today, therefore, man or woman, in army, navy or air force, walks a little prouder, smiles a little wider, because of that strengthened connection.

  General Hillier is smart, straight and knows what he wants. He works like a dog. The modern military man has to know the battlefield and warfare, but he has to be equally skilled in politics, the media, the inside arts of Parliament Hill and the twilight combats of the bureaucracy.

  General Hillier has the whole package. He is distinctly unchoked by political correctness, and he could offer master classes to politicians (and journalists, too) in the almost abandoned art of saying what you mean and meaning what you say. His deepest gift, I think, was knowing what his real job was; as he’s put it often, his first responsibility was to the men and women of Canada’s military. He said he was working for them and their families, and they believed him. It was no pose.

  Which brings me to the central characteristic of our now-departing general. He inspired trust, and people, in and out of the military, genuinely looked up to him. The question his leaving might pose is why, in all the other public fields, and in politics, which is leadership, too, there are not more like him. General Hillier is as large as he is—and this is not said to his detraction—because leadership in other areas of public life is so flat, feeble and mediocre. Some politicians are said to have feared or envied him. They would have feared and envied less had they tried to be bigger themselves. We can leave that for now. This is General Hillier’s moment.

  I think we can all be very pleased that we have had a public servant—for that, finally, is what a general most fundamentally is—who has elevated the service he led, and renewed the spirits and esteem of the Canadian military, and the spirit of esteem in which we hold them.

  General Hillier is a rarity: a person in public service who excites distinct respect and an almost populist regard. It’s interesting that—as one might say, “of all people”—Auditor-General Sheila Fraser is another public-servant hero—not of General Hillier’s proportions, but an outstanding figure nonetheless.

  CELEBRITY

  LET US EXCORI8 LIVE 8 | June 25, 2005

  In the realm of celebrity, Marshall McLuhan’s otherwise rather naked aphorism has some application: The medium is the message. Britney Spears is a celebrity because she is a celebrity. Paris Hilton, Madonna—these are the great vessels of the vacant idea of our times. Famous for being famous. The essence of celebrity is to maintain celebrity. Celebrities “do” things (sing badly, act poorly, dress strangely or not at all, talk rudely, smuggle dead raccoons onto talk shows), not for the sake of these things themselves, but as “hooks” to keep the cameras trained on them, to feed their gluttonous narcissism.

  Fame is not an accomplishment; it is a need. So it is an axiom that what a celebrity does always has a primary reference to his or her celebrity, and is connected only secondarily, and at a distant remove, to the actual thing done. For reference, contemplate, as we did last week, poor Sean Penn putting together his own Coles Notes on the Iranian elections.

  For more current reference, let us turn to the so-called Live 8, the “world” concert taking place in several venues on the day of the G8 summit in Scotland. Behind this sing-along are no lesser eminences than the chicly ubiquitous Bono and the one-time singer from the Boomtown Rats, the now-ennobled Bob Geldof.

  It’s an internationalist soiree, a kind of postmillennial reprise of the Band Aid and Live Aid concerts Sir Bob, when he was just Mr. Bob, put on some twenty years ago for the relief of famine in Ethiopia, and which gave the world the Dickensian treacle of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and accumulated close to $100 million in aid for Africa.

  This time around, Bono and Sir Bob are aiming for something rather different. These two have extended their celebrity by straddling the world of pop music and the high conference altitudes of Davos and the G8 summits.

  Bono, in particular, has become something of a self-appointed, free-floating superstar-as-ambassador. He has long since won Paul Martin as a buddy, and is on a first-name basis with the leadership in dozens of countries.

  Sir Bob seems a more moody, brittle sort than Bono, as evidenced this week by a lecture he gave to Bono’s buddy, Paul: that if Canada wasn’t going to live up to its commitment of 0.7 per cent of GNP to foreign aid, then he, Mr. Martin, shouldn’t come to the G8 summit at all.

  I don’t know, precisely, when the alumnus of the Boomtown Rats (and composer of “The Chains of Pain” and “My Birthday Suit”) was put in charge of the guest list at the G8, and, I suspect surprisingly, neither does the hectoring (“Too Late God”) Sir Bob. It strikes me as impertinence swaddled in righteousness. It’s probably a punk thing.

  What do they think this scattered concert is supposed, really, to do? What link do a bunch of celebrities singing passé songs—in Barrie or Paris—have to do with the politics or the development of Africa? Inevitably, the feeble and hoary answer will come back that the concerts “raise awareness.” Awareness of what? Awareness of Bob Geldof and Bono, mainly.

  For that matter, how exactly does one sing “for” a country? And what possible connection does this live singing, or Céline Dion offering her anorexic nimbus via satellite from Las Vegas to a giant screen in Barrie, have with the meeting of the leaders of the G8 nations in Scotland?

  Tens of thousands of people jam Highway 401 to head up to Barrie to attend a summer concert that has “8” in its title, co-hosted by the roadkill comic Tom Green. What happens after the last chord is sounded? Does Zimbabwe cease its infernal turmoils? Does the protracted slaughter in Darfur shut down for the night? Does the World Bank dismantle itself, the UN find a purpose, and the myriad aid agencies of the planet suddenly find a moral force that, pre-singalong, was out of their grasp?

  Of course not. Entertainment Tonight and its grisly clones go mad with coverage and “exclusives”; the glossy magazines, The View and assorted megaphones of the celebrity set tell us who was wearing what, who stayed where and who did what with whom.

  But, in the end, it will be just one more self-absorbed, pretentious, hollow celebrity shtick, another moment for ex-punk stars and rock maestros in decline to strut before the world’s lights and cameras for a moment more.

  Celebrity will seek more celebrity, and when the hits start to fade, celebrity will discover a cause. That’s all Live 8 is, and that is all it and its successors will ever be. The pop-star missionary is a contradiction in terms. As well as a furious irony.

 
And Paul, you go to that summit, regardless of what the rude Mr. Geldof has to say.

  Well, that really worked. All the yodelling and speechifying up in Barrie, Ontario put an end to the world’s woes, and as the slogan of the day promised, poverty is now history. Thank God for Bono and Dan Aykroyd. I hope people kept the colourful wristbands. A relic of the Live 8 concert is an Entertainment Tonight’s version of a splinter of the true cross.

  Were poverty ever to return, and I can’t really see that, I’m sure someone somewhere has a CD of the concert and can haul it out to exorcise world misery all over again. I think what we really need now, however, is another, all-new concert to save us from global warming and peanut allergies. And we’ll need different wristbands too. Each new apocalypse averted by rock stars should have its own wristband. Hand-me-downs are for losers.

  A SAINT SORELY TAXED | October 17, 2006

  It’s nice to see that Madonna has come down from her neon cross—a Las Vegas-looking crucifixion of the emphatically Material Girl was part of the safe shock of her recent tour. After all, if you can’t blaspheme Christianity these days, what can you blaspheme?

  Now she’s descended on Africa, following the trendy, spangled footsteps of Brad and Angelina and other monstrously rich celebrities who have turned Africa and its misery into their own publicity-fat conscience theme park. They should start a foundation: good deeds that make it to Entertainment Tonight, adoptions that land you the cover of People magazine.

  Madonna, her entourage, her private jet and Guy Ritchie have plucked one African baby from an orphanage, and the world is all a-twitter at another celebrity good deed. The story is almost big enough to drown out the news that U2, the rock band, has moved some of its assets from its native Ireland to the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a very favourable tax rate, even better than Ireland, which for artists is already a tax haven of unimaginable indulgence.