Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  John the Baptist is renamed The Dipper, a.k.a. The Voice; Mary Magdalene is a comfy-cute Maggie. Even the Biblical execrations are defanged. For example, the perfectly good imprecation “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is Simonized into some 1950s-style pseudo-slang: “Take a running jump, Holy Joes, humbugs!”

  Ah, Tyndale. Burning anew with a hotter flame, I suspect, martyred by zealots of bad English.

  The Archbishop of Canterbury has given his seal to this gibberish. He regards it as “fully earthed.” So is compost. And he expects it to spread in “epidemic profusion.” I can’t quarrel with his metaphor: It won’t be the first time a plague of bad taste, backed up by the two Horsepersons of Witlessness and Condescension, caught the ear of a trendy time.

  I’m with Peter, er, Rocky on this one: I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

  SILLY BITCHING | August 11, 2007

  Samuel Johnson’s preface to his landmark Dictionary of the English Language is the best essay in English on English. Its great, rolling sentences, superbly chosen diction, stately rhythms, and the ever-affecting cadences of its concluding paragraphs embody the Johnsonian manner at its most powerful and most penetrating.

  Who has read those last paragraphs wherein Johnson surveys his mighty labour and not been startled by the sudden, sad and beguiling personalization of the preface? First, in summing up his efforts, he writes: “It may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed.”

  And then comes the turn: “I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

  What a great style—of person and prose both—there is in that melancholy observation that “most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds,” and how much it earns from the courtesy and dignity of its saying.

  I owe it to the fussbudget and increasingly ridiculous city government of New York that Johnson’s words ornament this column. The Michael Bloomberg city council is the very Mary Poppins of nanny government, with hardly a week going by without its trying to introduce new curbs on what people do, say, eat or inhale as they go about their daily lives.

  The most recent was a motion by Brooklyn council-woman Darlene Mealy to place a citywide ban on the word “bitch.” I think she’s concerned about one usage of that versatile and venerable term, the one the Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines rather daintily as “a woman whom one considers to be malicious or unpleasant.”

  This is a good thing because there are other meanings to its noun form that should surely escape the proscribing scythe of even the most prudish puritan of political correctness—its neutral designation of a female dog being the most obvious. And then there is the unlimited semantic largesse of its adjectival and verbal variants.

  Bitching, meaning to complain, is surely a term without which life in New York would be impossible, New Yorkers being universally regarded as some of the most virtuosic bitchers the world has even seen, their bitching of such energy and invention that it constitutes an unheralded art form.

  In fact, what the mealy-mouthed Ms. Mealy is actually doing with her vacuous motion is bitching about a word she doesn’t like. That there are opprobrious and rude terms in the lexicon is something no one will deny. That there are opprobrious and rude terms that are sometimes directed, justly and unjustly, at women is an equally obvious axiom.

  But are there any of us, who crawl here between earth and sky and then disappear into dust, who do not at some time, justly or unjustly, fall under a hail of harsh insults, crude epithets, blasphemous injunctions, obscene recommendations, vile descriptors and, in epic moments, whole anathemas of inspired and filthy objurgation? Bosses, friends and enemies, sons, daughters, parents and in-laws, strangers and intimates—at some time or other, any or all of these let loose upon our careless heads a string of mean and vicious words, compared to which poor feeble “bitch” is a lollipop next to a vat of acid.

  But we cannot pass laws to limit the expressive range of human speech. The freedom to be harsh is the cruel side of the liberty to be graceful. We can, should and do deplore demeaning and degrading language. But its restriction belongs in the territory of manners and upbringing, not in the niggardly nannyism of city hall legislation. Besides which, it is the deepest folly even to imagine that language can be suffocated by diktat.

  This is what those who have read Samuel Johnson find affirmed in words as glorious as the subject has yet to find: “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.”

  THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

  SAUDI HOSPITALITY | August 23, 2003

  He was a torturer and a sadist (the terms do not necessarily exhaust one another). He was a mass killer. Some 300,000 people died under his barbarous rule. This is the most frequently cited tabulation, but when killing reaches into the hundreds of thousands, we must remember some amount of “rounding off” is almost always inevitable.

  He was sexually lawless, very likely cannibalistic, ever suspicious and vengeful, devoid of personal grace. He despoiled Uganda, and his rule was a slander on all the promise of postcolonial government in Africa. Yet, when chased out of power, he became the recipient for the rest of his miserable life of the perplexing hospitality of the Saudi government.

  Idi Amin died in a hospital in Jeddah of multiple organ failure. We can hope, I suppose, that the organs that failed were his own. He was buried in Jeddah—the current administration in Uganda having correctly decided that the country he polluted while alive should not have to bear the stain of his posthumous presence as well.

  A trivial question occurs at the very beginning of any thought of the life and crimes of Idi Amin: What had this grotesque monster left undone that would have made him persona non grata in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Post-Uganda, he was reported to live in style, accompanied by his many wives and children and supported by a state pension from his hosts.

  What virtue was the Saudi government answering when it gave harbour and support to a non-citizen who had wrecked a country, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and defiled every universal canon of civilized behaviour? Merely parroting that he was a “guest” won’t do.

  But let us leave what it takes to be tossed out of the Hotel Saudi Arabia and visit an even more substantial question. General Amin left the Uganda he brought to tears and tatters in 1979—so, for something close to twenty-four years since then, this blot upon the human race passed his days in untroubled serenity, supplied with the all the requisites of the good life, to the apparent disinterest of those we have fashionably come to call the world community.

  Why was Idi Amin given the bye?

  More recent tyrants of comparably splendid depravity absorb the world’s liveliest attention, call forth the alert jurists of the International Criminal Court and stir lonely judges in Spain to extraordinary reaches of indictment.

  Slobodan Milosevic, once the ethnic cleanser du jour, was hauled before the UN International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague while some of his victims were yet warm. The name of Augusto Pinochet could stir the streets of any number of capitals years after his rule and torture were history. Killers who keep their count low—the Carlos the Jackal type—remain newsworthy till the mom
ent of their death or capture.

  But here was Amin, truly a Caligula of our day, whose name and practices were a perfect synonym for all that is gruesome, wanton and cruel, wandering the rich streets of Jeddah and browsing the meat departments of its better supermarkets (perhaps nostalgic for the days when the selection was more mobile), not so much forgotten as disregarded.

  How did he earn this right of disregard? Was it, I wonder, because there was a cast of ridiculousness in his public demeanour? Does a brute cease to horrify because he contains an admixture of the clown? One report tells the story that when he came to New York in 1975 to address the United Nations, he showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria with his own personal dancers, as well as live chickens. (These categories were possibly discrete.)

  It is true that a taint of the ludicrous, or the simply lunatic, can put judgment at bay? But surely the fact, which I think is incontestable, that Mr. Amin was a buffoon does not erase his grander, more malign character as a butcher. Was it that he was one of a chain of reckless tyrants who have played on the stage of Africa since its emergence from colonialism, the kleptocrats and dictators who have sown misery so wide and deep in that sad land, that he “merged” with a too-common phenomenon? That in a continent that housed so many tyrants, even one so outré and brutal didn’t stand out?

  I don’t think so—yet the very recent careers of Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor are evidence that atrocious stewardship, if out of Africa, doesn’t summon the moral revulsion that attaches to like behaviour almost anywhere else in the world.

  What we can say is that some filter is at work, something that separates some tyrants from others and exempts them from the zeal to see them face some kind of justice that attaches to others.

  That Mr. Amin should have gone quietly and unmolested to his grave, after the nightmare he visited upon Uganda, should be a scar upon the conscience of the world.

  BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWS | April 6, 2004

  Commenting on the bombing of a Jewish school library in Montreal yesterday, the prime minister said, “The assault was not directed against the Jewish community of Montreal, but against all Canadians.”

  I know what the prime minister meant by saying that. It’s a noble thought, that we’re all diminished by violence and hate, that an attack on any group of Canadians for whatever reason is an attack on the civil and moral code that makes us Canadians. In the abstract, the prime minister was right, but what was the name of the school that was actually bombed? Well, it’s the United Talmud Torah School in Montreal.

  The Talmud Torah. I cannot see how it is possible to get more Jewish, more quintessentially expressive of Jewishness, than in the combination of those two words that refer to the absolute foundational text and commentaries of the Jewish faith. So let’s be very clear: the bombing—not a word we’re used to hearing in Canada, I note in passing—was directed very particularly at the Jewish community in Montreal, at its Jewishness, and to walk away from its immense particularity is to diminish its very concrete outrageousness.

  It wasn’t a school. It was a Jewish school, and it wasn’t any Jewish school, but the United Talmud Torah School. It was bombed because of its intimate identification with being Jewish. The second part of the crime was the note that accompanied it, which read that the bombing was prompted by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and that more attacks were being planned.

  Now, I know that there are very strong opinions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and with opinions as opinions, neither I nor any other Canadian can have any real problem. But there really does seem to be a tilt, that some of those who most see themselves as critics of the Israeli side of this conflict (and please note I said some of those) seem to think they have some extra warrant or righteousness in how far they can go to express their detestation of Israel’s policies, its government and, by extension, of Jews.

  And as is the case in the bombing of the Talmud Torah library in Montreal, they also feel that tormenting and intimidating Jews anywhere is an earned licence because of where they stand on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. So we have swastikas on Jewish homes in placid Toronto, we have the upsurge in assaults on Jews in Europe, and we have all too frequently, in demonstrations almost everywhere in the world, the placards and chants equating Israel and its government with its own demonic anti-type, the Nazism of Adolf Hitler.

  We have, in effect, the Holocaust thrown in the face of the people who were its targets. I salute the prime minister for the civic nobility of what he had to say, but by attempting to generalize what happened in Montreal yesterday, he has in effect diffused its horror. It was a piece of hatred for the Jews of Montreal. It was an expression on Canadian soil of that simmering anti-Semitism that takes some camouflage, some protective colouring from asserting a solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

  Anti-Semitism, springing from whatever source, is the most toxic political virus in the world. That’s something we’ve already learned in that other school—the school where six million went to their death.

  CASTRO’S USEFUL IDIOTS | August 5, 2006

  Fidel Castro’s parlous condition this week brought me to an online review of a film biography of him. Fidel was released in 2002, and it is clear early on that the reviewer, A.O. Scott, was not too impressed by filmmaker Estela Bravo’s enthusiasm for her subject.

  I detected a skeptical gleam, for example, in this line: “This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship.”

  Nonetheless, hero worship of Fidel Castro, however perplexing, is despairingly common. Over the forty-seven years of Castro’s dictatorship, whole contingents of Hollywood types have given themselves over to Castro idolatry, which—considering his regime is a one-party state solidly in the mould of every one-party state that has ever been—is odd even for the moralists of Bel Air.

  But then, Castro, much like his early colleague in revolution and arms, Che Guevara, has always—bizarrely, in my view—possessed an unfathomable fashionability among the sophisticated and “right-thinking” classes. No less than our own Pierre Trudeau seemed to have harboured an affection for the Communist tyrant. It is possible, in Mr. Trudeau’s case, his dalliances with the dictator answered to some private amusement, that he (Mr. Trudeau) knew how much breaking bread with Fidel annoyed the mandarins of the U.S. State Department and the Nixon White House.

  However, it was always a QED too far for me to understand how the mature Mr. Trudeau’s visceral and intellectual commitments to civil liberties and the primacy of the individual ever comported with, in logic or morality, toasting an island despot, a leader who had embraced the demonstrably evil creed of communism.

  It is, of course, their status as icons of anti-Americanism that mainly accounts for Fidel and Che’s (harsh and harsher) durability in the fashionable mind. Anti-Americanism is the plenary indulgence of all progressive thought. But let us return to the Scott review.

  From it, I quote: “At one point, the American novelist Alice Walker, with sublime soft-headedness, marvels that Mr. Castro cannot dance or sing. ‘It’s a good thing he’s got all those other good qualities,’ she says.”

  Mr. Scott doesn’t let that go entirely without remark: “This is about the harshest criticism Ms. Bravo permits, and one wonders just which good qualities Ms. Walker had in mind. The persecution of homosexuals? The silencing of political opposition? The jailing of dissidents?”

  All justifiable queries, we will agree. But the line that stopped me cold was one A.O. Scott, wickedly, buried in parentheses just before these questions, and in all its glory is as follows: “(Later, she compares him to a redwood tree.)”

  I think we have here a landmark moment in ecology as revelation. Novelists are the artists of our time, so we’re told. They penetrate the surface, they unravel the hidden connections or speak the unheard messages of our age. Alice Walker is a novelist, and Fidel Castro reminds her of a tree. It would be interesting to hear her take on Tito. A dogwood, perhaps? So much for the art of the novel.

  As
I write this, the redwood, er, the Supreme One, is recovering from an operation, and his condition is a “state secret.” (Maybe they’re counting the rings.)

  No surprise there. Dictatorships and health bulletins on the dictator are not compatible entities. (Let us not even explore the topic of dictatorships and death certificates.) In shrouding his decay or passing, Mr. Castro is merely maintaining one item of a desiccated liturgy.

  But when he shuffles off this mortal coil, we should all be prepared for a full flood of kindly reminiscence and adulatory appraisal. There will be much talk of the wonderful Cuban health care system. And there will be much talk of the wonderful Cuban health care system.

  Because embracing the second-most malevolent political system of the last century, and maintaining that embrace for close on four decades after its hideous innards were exposed for all the world to see—after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after Andrei Sakharov, after the labours of Robert Conquest—must be counterbalanced by something, anything, that may be said to tend toward the humane and benign. The Cuban health care system has performed that dubious service for as long as Castro has held supreme rule in Cuba. It is a toy of an excuse.

  Dictatorship is as much an insult as a horror. It is a fundamental insult to the people it rules, an insult to their dignity, to their honour and to their souls. Wrap it any way you wish—compare him to a redwood—but Mr. Castro was a dictator.

  Hospitals can be named after him from here to eternity, it will never change the fact he never trusted the people he ruled to make a single real choice over who led them.

  EICHMANN IN TEHRAN | December 16, 2006