by Rex Murphy
Come to think of it, this may be the real appeal of marijuana. As well as the comforts of addiction, a joint offers a bland, smooth, edgeless few moments in a turbulent world. It puts a soft blanket over transient anxieties, suspends the critical judgment and enhances, beyond all measure of their intrinsic worth, the reception of some truly awful songs.
It is impossible to understand the popularity of some ancient bands and singers—the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez (eech), Peter, Paul and Mary—without allowing for considerable numbing of the brain and a benign stupor that buried their dreadful lyrics beneath the radar of any self-regarding consciousness. The entire fame and popularity of Bob Dylan is only explicable on a similar subtraction of critical response.
I suppose the question that remains to be faced is whether the switch from one form of cigarette to another—pot is mainly smoked, and while RJ Reynolds may not be rolling them, joints are cigarettes—is a good thing. Do we have the same alarms about the second-hand waft from a doobie as we do from the less-noxious Export “A”? Are we to worry about the “passive relaxation” effect?
These are deep questions. They require meditation. Wind chimes, an old Cheech and Chong soundtrack, a few doobies and Health Canada beside us in the wilderness—we’ll figure them out.
GREAT NEWS OUT OF VANCOUVER | September 29, 2007
The Cinderella City is about to enact one of the most comprehensive, ferocious, detailed and high-minded antismoking bylaws this side of Alpha Centauri. I am really glad to see this.
It’s been well known for decades now that Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and further that it has resolved every major social and political problem known to man or metropolis. The Downtown Eastside, old-timers will recall, was cleaned up decades ago, and is now a most splendid housing-estate cum park, with a mix of citizens of every income and colour and culture—a true model to the world. Thanks to the forward-looking city governors of previous years, and their generous support of science and research into waste disposal, Vancouver’s garbage now evaporates, harmlessly, into the wide air as soon as it is placed on the streets. Garbage trucks can now only be found in the city’s famous network of museums.
Finally, where every other city in North America is a stifling box of car-packed gridlock and toxic exhaust, there hasn’t been a traffic jam in Vancouver since—let me see—about 1975, I think. The great monorails, the uncluttered bridges, the zillion bike lanes and the brisk, courteous efficiency of the city’s drivers as they zip, unimpeded, in their tidy little hybrids in and out of the downtown are the envy of every other municipal government on the continent. Shangri-La, thy new name is Vancouver.
So I’m glad the city council of that marvellous city by the mountains and the sea has finally gone to the mat, so to speak, on the last social scourge and only outstanding civic problem the city has.
Are the city’s proposed anti-smoking bylaws thorough, you ask? Let me put it this way: It’s just too bad there isn’t a Nobel Prize for Zeal, because, were there one, the civic fathers and mothers of Vancouver would be booking flights to Oslo even as I type their praises. The only failure in the bylaws, as I read the accounts of them, is that smokers are—not yet anyway—required to carry a handbell and sound their approach when they enter municipal boundaries
I especially like the bylaw for transient smokers. If a taxi is passing through Vancouver, neither the passenger nor driver may smoke—even if agreeable to both parties, and even if the taxi is licensed by another civic authority. This could be fine-tuned, though. Both the cab and its passenger could be defumigated at the city’s boundaries—it would be a pity to fustify an impeccable city.
Sidewalks, public buildings, bars, restaurants—well, you know they covered them. No smoking “within six metres of any entryway, window or air intake.” If you want to light up in Vancouver now, by my calculations the only legal spot would probably be on the median line of a major highway, or at the end of a long diving board extended from an apartment window.
But this is Vancouver. So let there be no surprise, as it approaches the sublime apogee of utter civic perfectibility, that it was mindful—that even here, in addressing its last plague—it had to consider its dues to multiculturalism, plurality and tolerance for all.
Vancouver will allow hookah parlours. That’s “hookah,” in case you stumbled. There are, I read, three hookah parlours, which offer their glass bowls and water pipes to some of the city’s newer citizens.
According to the World Health Organization, “a typical one-hour session of hookah smoking exposes the user to 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.” Now, any trivial inconsistency that nitpicking libertarians, or the live-and-let-live extremists, might have with this is more than trumped by the consideration that an hour on the hookah will combat “the depression common for newcomers” to the city. And if toking an hour on the hookah with two hundred times the volume of smoke from a single cigarette chases away the newcomer blues, well, hook up the hookah, toke away, I say.
Another petty glitch I spotted in a Vancouver Sun article suggests that “the one foggy point in the new bylaw was whether it will apply to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking.” Picky, picky, picky. Crack cocaine and crystal meth? Bubblegum addictions. I’m sure the city council will get around to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking when, and only when, they’ve reined in the jelly-bean rings on city playgrounds.
So, it’s a perfect set of bylaws. Accommodation for hookahs, a little ambiguity on the toy drugs of crack and meth, but a steel fence of regulation—even for those just passing through—on the only problem left in the city that is the only unflawed diamond in a zirconian world: damned cigarette smoking.
Three cheers to Vancouver and its Committee for Public Safety. Now, I gottah gettah hookah.
REPUTATIONS
THE BUSH PARADOX | January 31, 2004
There’s a paradox at the centre of the terrific animus toward George W. Bush. For his detractors, and they are legion and intense, the man is a cipher, a mere stand-in, for the real powers in the White House. A puppet of the functioning minds and stronger personalities of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and the outer ring of advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
He is simultaneously thought of as a bumbling preppy, an arrested-development delinquent, the prototypical frat-boy party animal, the kind of middle-aged man who thinks John Belushi’s Animal House is the only real film made in the last thirty years and whose idea of reading is a Tom Clancy novel—or, on less challenging days, the latest issue of Guns & Ammo magazine.
The indictment is scathing and thorough. George W. is an automaton of Pooh-sized mentality (“a bear of very little brain”) with the attention span of a slow-witted gnat, the introspective capacity of a starlet and the mental agility of a stale Fig Newton.
His enemies scarcely credit him with doing his own breathing, and would comment that, if he is breathing on his own, he is surely not conscious of his doing so. He lucked into the presidency on the strength of his father’s name, a private fortune that was made for him by his friends, and the sheer, eerie incompetence of the Al Gore campaign. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that George W. Bush, on his own merits or as a consequence of his own actions, contributed to the effort that landed him in the White House and placed in his late-adolescent hands the exercise of the greatest power that this Earth has ever known.
That is the short and polite version—but such is the character of George W. Bush in the minds of millions and millions of people who actively detest him, among them some millions of his fellow-citizens.
Mr. Bush, in the account of his despisers, is a nullity, a nothing, a creature so limited in the resources of his person, his competence, his presence, that he is almost a non-being. Why, how does such a nothing stimulate so commanding an intensity and range of visceral loathing? The distaste for Mr. Bush is not a casual dismissal; it is passionate.
He inspires a sharpness of revulsion that people usually reserve for more personal antipathies: the bitterness of hostility following the reversal or despoliation of a cherished intimacy. If this Texan is such a perfect nobody, why does anyone care?
It is not because he is president, though that is usually the rationalization put forward: that, because he is president, and therefore has such power to do so many evil, stupid things, it is not only right to detest him, it is an obligation.
No, this line of reasoning is a kind of after-scaffolding for an emotion that has little to do with reason at all. Mr. Bush is loathed, first, in his own right—as a pickup-driving, nicknaming, inarticulate and haughty George Dubya. That he should be president just adds rocket boosters to the initial hate.
If he is, as a person, so innocuous, so unfinished and essentially trivial, what drives the anger and contempt of so many people? Part of an answer might be that, for those outside America, for whom anti-Americanism is professional or ideological, the projection of the person inhabiting the White House as little less than a fool and a stooge adds an extra fillip of insult and contempt to their career animosity.
For those within America who are fervidly anti-Bush, the same characterization offers them a proportionately larger and higher image of themselves. They are bigger because “Bush” is so small. Michael Moore, ludicrous, pompous and banal all at once, stands so much taller, morally and intellectually, when set against that dim caricature occupying the White House. The people who hate George Bush have a great deal of their own self-esteem invested in maintaining the idea of that upstart, vacuous, Texan dummy in the Oval Office.
By the reading of his enemies, George Bush does not have the personal force, the sustenance of character, to generate the enormous field of contempt and enmity with which he is surrounded. A vacuum doesn’t inspire hate.
By contrast, Bill Clinton—quicksilver Bill, the man of a thousand reflexes, intellectual, at home equally at the most highbrow symposium or riffing on a Hollywood stage—has a personality as large and volatile as some weather systems. But it’s Mr. Bush, the nullity, the man empty of personality, who charges millions with the most profound and negative emotions. The response is all out of proportion to its stimulus. It is irrational.
The Bush paradox is the central fact in world politics today. It has one equally curious rider. The world’s real villain, Osama bin Laden, very largely gets, by contrast, an emotional bye.
FROM BRIAN’S LIPS TO PETER’S MICROPHONE | September 17, 2005
Some are indifferent to high office, and some few seek it merely on a whim.
There are others for whom ambition has all the force of a carnal mania.
The drive for power is manifold. It can exist purely for its own sake—to be the one person who’s in charge, to be at the top of the heap—for the delicious thrill of outstripping everyone else. For others, power exists but as an instrument for doing things, to work great change for a common good. This set, alas, is a small one, but politics earns whatever good name it may claim because these few exist.
And then there are those who burn their life’s energy, marshal all their cunning and intelligence to achieve acclaim, because they need to. They need the office. It fulfills them. And there is no set of whom we should be more wary. The politician who seeks to erase a sense of personal inadequacy by a scuttle up the ladders of power is undergoing a kind of therapy by means of the ballot box.
People sense this dynamic. Was there ever, in modern times, a more needful politician than Richard Nixon? There were many things that were enigmatic about Nixon, but his need for the office of the presidency, his compulsion to achieve that rare summit and, from its eminence, look back and down in scorn and triumph at what he called his “enemies,” is not among them.
I am reminded of a counter-example from our country: Robert Stanfield, the best friend modern Canadian politics has ever had. Mainly for the example, both of character and actions, of the public man who is not compelled to seek office, who is not the silent slave of his own ambition. Stanfield once had a chance to topple the Trudeau government, and declined to do so—an act of grace in an arena largely unmarked by graciousness, and a moment of great personal discipline and self-denial.
Stanfield and Nixon probably represent the extremes of the range. Most of those who seek office operate from a medley of motives on a line stretched between utter compulsion and total disinterest. Brian Mulroney is up there, shivering closer to Nixon than to Stanfield. This is not said to abuse him. Mr. Mulroney was a Grand Canyon of openness compared to the Watergate exile, and infinitely less cloistered—genuinely cheerful and sociable, where Nixon was saturnine and solitary. Where they meet is in the need to excel, to find in the occupancy of high office overwhelming approval and distinction. From the hail of observations made by Mr. Mulroney, now tumbling onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers from Peter Newman’s taped tell-all, it appears that, for Mr. Mulroney, distinction is not just a matter of having been prime minister—it’s being better and smarter and shrewder than everyone else who was on the scene with him or just before him.
Vegematics have fewer blades than a telephone call from Brian Mulroney. Pierre Trudeau, Lucien Bouchard, Kim Campbell, Clyde Wells—they are all diced and sliced with an energy and thoroughness that, in some cases, is actually painful to read—and, in some cases, is inaccurate and malicious as well. Clyde Wells, for example, may have many flaws of character, but to select as his damning deficiency that he is unprincipled turns the man completely upside down. Principle is Clyde Wells’s oxygen.
Kim Campbell did mess up her campaign, but the great tsunami that washed over the Tory party, and left poor Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne alone on the beach after the vote, had been set roiling by the anger Mr. Mulroney stirred before he left office. Mr. Mulroney prefers not to see that some of his setbacks, and some of the abiding dislike some Canadians still carry toward him, were stimulated in part by his own actions and his own character.
But the desire to be the tallest tree in the forest is not an excuse or a reason for taking a chainsaw to every other tree. He is not content with having been elected prime minister—twice. Others must be diminished, so that he stands taller. At least that’s the message of the tapes.
But the tapes, raw and unedited, are at the very best problematic. They are in the idiom of private conversation—hence their unfettered flow and pungency. Mr. Mulroney may have signed off on them, but they retain the flavour of a person talking to a confidant. They are true in the sense that he says what he says, but taking the private manner and loosing it raw between two book covers adds a force and an impact that doesn’t properly belong to them. They have been transposed from one medium to another. They have been translated from a sphere of assumed intimacy to the public record. And this amplifies the negatives for Mr. Mulroney in a way that is not fair to him.
The Secret Tapes was the first blow to Brian Mulroney’s attempt to resuscitate his post–prime ministerial reputation. On the principle that time heals all wounds, Mr. Mulroney had, as much as a former prime minister can, stayed away from the front pages and headlines following the near-total immolation of the Tories after (and largely the consequence of) his two terms as leader. He may also have been investing in the dubious wisdom of that other folk axiom that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Publication of The Secret Tapes stripped both those ancient Kleenex of whatever truth they had. Mr. Mulroney’s “rehabilitation” was stayed ere it could begin. Then came the cash-in-paper-bags story, and the return of Airbus and the Ancient Mariner: Karlheinz Schreiber. Poor Brian. He is the Rodney Dangerfield of Canadian politics.
ADRIENNE CLARKSON PRESENTS | September 23, 2006
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?
The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe, and the word “regiment,” on which it turns, here carries a meaning of “authority,” “sway,” “rule” and, quite
possibly, something close to our modern terms “status” and “prestige.” Regiment in this context is a constellation of all of these meanings. The authority of a real king was always a fasces of tangible power—command over life and death, the control of armies, unquestioned rule—and the invisible but equally mighty influences of dread and reverence.
It’s no news that kings (or queens) aren’t what they used to be. Their regiment has decayed and vanished. Modern-day royals, most emphatically the set at Buckingham Palace with which Canada has historical and constitutional associations, exist in a twilight of anachronistic significance, tabloid-feeding celebrity and lower-rank pop-star acclaim.
All of which may be disappointing to those who struggle to hold the monarchy in esteem, and may be poignant, too, but none of it is news to the least-engaged consciousness. It raises the question now, more forcefully than at any other period, about our “ties” to the monarchy, of the value of those ties, particularly the utility and prestige of the one office in our country still bearing the imprimatur of its royal origins: the governor general.
The case for the governor general is what I take to be the burden of Adrienne Clarkson’s Heart Matters. It is a memoir of Clarkson’s interesting and distinguished life. It is a divided book. Its earlier pages are, at times, an affecting recounting of her family’s progress from difficult beginnings and wartime peril, their arrival in Canada, her growing up, the complex, painful, yet always affectionate relationship with her mother, her pride in her father, and his pride in her.
But from the moment the book takes up her adult career, from the days of CBC’s Take 30 all the way through to Adrienne Clarkson Presents (to my mind, a real foreshadowing of how she saw herself in the governor general’s office), the book takes on a drier, brisker tone. We depart from subdued recollection and memoir to more bristling justification and defence.
