Rod McQueen's Blog, page 29

Charisma and catharsis

In 1871 when France lost the Franco-Prussian war, the country needed a patriotic boost to get citizens feeling good again. The state reached back into the fifteenth century for a heroine and erected statues to Joan of Arc who drove the English off the throne of France. I’ve seen some of those statues in small French towns as well as in New Orleans where her birthday is celebrated at the start of Mardi Gras.

Back in the day, the church and the establishment were both against her. Just as the country came around, so did the church, by canonizing her in 1920. George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. All this to say that the current production at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake comes freighted with history.

The play succeeds … and then some. The sets are simple and geometric in design. The costumes are equally straightforward; no breastplate for Sara Topham who not only captures the vibrancy of the teenaged Joan but also the gravitas necessary for others to follow her into battle. After all, the young Joan did hear voices. Some thought she was deluded; others were convinced she was a witch. Female leadership remains equally problematic today.

We were in New York recently and saw Come From Away as well as Present Laughter with Kevin Kline who won a Tony for leading actor. Both plays were excellent but Saint Joan is better. In fact, it is the best play I have seen in a long time. At the end of the epilogue, I had tears in my eyes and literally felt the whoosh of catharsis through my body just like is supposed to happen in Greek tragedy. I was, and remain, thunderstruck.

 

 

Touch me not

Why is it that directors and choreographers feel they need to take perfectly good material and add their own ham-handed touches? James Kudelka, then of the National Ballet, to my mind ruined several productions, including Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Except for taking my grandchildren to The Nutcracker a few times, I have refused to attend anything by the National Ballet since.

Lezlie Wade, who directs H.M.S. Pinafore at Stratford this summer, has been equally busy with equally predictable results. For reasons unknown, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pinafore opens in an estate where the war wounded are being cared for, then switches to the more usual ship. The “play-within-a-play” framing device is totally unnecessary.

Wade has also introduced far too much slap-stick for my liking: sailors getting a foot stuck in a pail, one of the “sisters, cousins and aunts” throwing up for no apparent reason, people getting knocked over too many times by an oar, you get the idea.

Ah, but the music is perfectly delightful and escapes unscathed. “When I was a lad I served a term” sounds just like the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company version that I heard playing on my father’s Victrola when I was a lad. So, will I complain? No, never. Well, hardly ever.

Aucun progrès

The Official Languages Act, passed in 1969, gave equal status to French and English when dealing with the federal government. The legislation has, over the years, propelled many parents to send their children to be educated in French immersion. Such classes were seen as good for social standing and useful for the student’s future.

Others, like me, worked hard on their own to learn French. There was a point in time when I could understand political speeches in French, and my vocabulary remains extensive, but I would never have called myself bilingual. One-on-one was OK, but conversation with a group was always difficult.

Few other Canadians are bilingual, either. After all the effort expended, nationally and in neighbourhoods, only 17.5 percent of Canadians are bilingual. In 1981, the number was 15.3 percent, so progress has been minimal.

A recent full-page newspaper ad showed fifty-eight graduates from Toronto French School and a list of the seventy-five universities around the world from which they received offers. The graduates, all of whom are fluent in English and French, don’t seem to want to continue learning in French. Among all the schools listed, there are only two – University of Ottawa and HEC Montreal – where they are likely to be taught in French. Was studying in French so awful that so few want to do it? Was the Official Languages Act a waste of time and effort? Quel dommage!

Party on!

The process was as foolish as it was flawed from the get-go. I’m talking about the multiple choice ballots used by the Conservative Party of Canada for its leadership contest. Apparently the methodology was insisted upon by the Reform Party during one of the many amalgams that created today’s Conservatives. It was like a crazy uncle leaving you a fetid swamp along with a demand that you plant crops and make it productive.

Even such a brain as Kevin O’Leary couldn’t understand how the ranked balloting worked when other analysts on the CBC panel scoffed at his advice to supporters – just vote once, don’t pick other names for second, third, fourth etc. How does anyone get any growth, he was told, but the lightbulb never came on. And we all sat at home, watching for three hours, even though the outcome had already been decided backstage.

Now, it turns out, maybe there were some shenanigans. There’s a 7,500-vote discrepancy between the final ballot count and the list of voters. According to my morning paper, party officials are saying 3,000 people who voted at certain polling stations weren’t on the list. Worse, said the same source, there was “inconsistent data entry on about 4,000 ballots.” Sounds like election day in an emerging nation. Oh, and sorry, the ballots have all been destroyed so we can’t do a recount.

I have an answer. Call another leadership contest. Run it like they were in the past. Six delegates are elected by every constituency. They gather and vote at an arena in Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa. Somewhere around the fourth ballot, a candidate drops out and marches across the floor, taking their delegates along, to endorse another candidate. There’s a queen (or a king) and a queen- or king-maker. A secret ballot that’s all out in the open. What a concept!

Physician, heal thyself

Just when you thought the news about OxyContin couldn’t get worse, it did. We just don’t know how bad. Last year, almost 1,000 people died in British Columbia from an overdose or improper opioid use. In the rest of the country, statistics seem less scary only because they’re scarcer.

Yet doctors and hospitals are still prescribing OxyContin, even though staff must know that some people will become addicted. Of the two people I know who recently had surgery, both were offered OxyContin for post-operative pain. Both refused. Wisely.

Physicians are a big part of the problem. Many are paid by pharmaceutical companies to give speeches or endorse products. Apparently it’s normal for a doctor to accept freebies like trips or concert tickets from pharmaceutical reps. According to the Globe and Mail, one-third of the people who wrote the guidelines about publicly disclosing such links with Big Pharma have such links themselves.

There was a time when doctors were looked up to like gods. Surgeons all but demanded such reverence from those who drew near. Now, it turns out they don’t even abide by the old saw, “First, do no harm.” Until the medical community quits its own addiction to the wiles and wares of Big Pharma, and joins in with the efforts of police and border security, the opioid plague will continue to spread.

Help is at hand

I’m not much for self-help books. It’s not that I don’t need help, I need all the help I can get, but they pretty much all share the same message as lyrics from any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical: You have the power within. Some people can’t seem to help themselves and they write multiple self-help tomes. Hard on the heels of Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s book about how women could make faster progress in business, she has a sequel called Option B.

Lean In seemed to be about having a supportive husband who could help with the work-life balance. But suddenly, he died. Two years later, Sandberg has a new book about grief. The main takeaway? Every night, write down three moments of joy. I’ve done some grieving in my time. I look at my daybook for the rest of the year following my wife’s death in May 2011 and I see events I attended of which I have no recollection. Three moments of joy? Each day? Right.

But everybody deals with grief in different ways. Some people survive; others never surface. More relevant than Sandberg’s books, or the ubiquitous books on finding happiness, of which there are far too many, may I point to The Power of Meaning by Emily Esfahani Smith. Smith’s thesis is that happiness is not the issue, it’s the meaning in your life that matters. And that comes from four places: belonging, purpose, transcendence, and story-telling.

Belonging is about family, community, friends. Purpose is doing something significant like volunteer work or, in my case, writing books, which covers story-telling too. As for transcendence, maybe that’s a bit more mystical. I’ve had some transcendent moments this spring, such as spending ten minutes admiring a neighbour’s magnolia in bloom or picking a nosegay of lily-of-the-valley for someone special. But am I capable of longer-lasting transcendent spells? I’m working on it.

Bearing witness

I, for one, am bewildered by all the banter about cultural appropriation. What started as an editorial about indigenous writing has ballooned into a full-throated debate. So far, the collateral damage has claimed the jobs or caused demotions of three journalists. I will try to be sufficiently assiduous so I don’t have to tender my resignation as the head of my one-person household.

Lost in all of this talk is the only issue that should matter in today’s society: how are we doing at improving the lot of indigenous people? I think we would all agree that we’ve made little progress. I was about six years old when I was travelling in a car with my parents near Lake Couchiching, north of Toronto. Somehow, we got lost and found ourselves in the middle of the Rama Reserve. Even at such a young age I was aghast at the poverty of the people and the ramshackle nature of the housing.

I assume that particular reserve is today vastly improved because of the casino revenue. But for all the valiant attempts over the years by governments of all stripes little has been accomplished elsewhere. There are all too many reserves that likely look little better than Rama did that day to me.

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin’s excellent programs to improve aboriginal education and support entrepreneurship don’t receive the accolades they should. Meanwhile, the fuss about cultural appropriation keeps the focus elsewhere. It’s honest action that matters, not high-falutin’ argument.

The seven deadly sins and how they grew

Humorist Will Rogers used to say, “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” That statement was never more accurate than it is today. Why, even the seven deadly sins can be ascribed to politicians as the following list will show. Well, anyway, most of those on the list are politicians.

For sin #1, greed, we need to look no further than Barack Obama who is charging US$400,000 per speech. Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, managed to combine greed with sin #2, lust, when he was paid severance of US$25 million after being fired over allegations of sexual abuse. Sin #3, wrath, is what we feel about Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s misdirected efforts to buy our votes by shifting $25 billion in hydro costs out two generations so our grandchildren get stuck paying for her inanities.

Sin #4, gluttony, is best expressed by the never-ending parade of Quebec councillors, mayors, cabinet ministers and other hangers-on who seem bent and bound on diverting for themselves every possible dollar from public contracts that should be free of such flim-flammery. Sins #5, envy, and #6, sloth, are jointly demonstrated by those journalists who focused on Justin Trudeau’s mismatching Star Wars socks rather than the content of the meeting he’d just held with Enda Kenny, the prime minister of Ireland.

And finally, deadly sin #7, is pride, the kind of exuberant, in-your-face vainglory shown by Donald Trump in his Rose Garden celebration after finally getting something passed by the House of Representatives. And we all know about hubris, the kind of pride that goeth before a fall. Watch out, Mr. President, if the gods have anything to do with life – and we know they do – you will eventually come crashing to earth. And not a moment too soon.

Kevin, we hardly knew ye

In my January predictions for 2017, I said Kevin O’Leary would become leader of the Conservative Party. Got that wrong. I believed with the backers he had – a lot of formers like former Ontario Premier Mike Harris and former Senator Marjory LeBreton – that he was a shoo-in. But it turned out not only could he not campaign, he didn’t even try. Yesterday he pulled out. Call him Kevin O’Leery.

O’Leary didn’t show up for debates, spent too much time out of the country, and demonstrated that he didn’t really know policy from pinochle. His big idea was to cut taxes and grow the economy. Would that governing were that simple.

His main reason for quitting was that he believed he could win the leadership but not the country because he lacked support in Quebec. According to O’Leary’s calculation, he needed to win 30 seats in Quebec. This is nonsense on stilts. Robert Stanfield almost became prime minister in 1972 as a Progressive Conservative with only two seats in Quebec. Conservative Stephen Harper won the country in 2011 with just five seats in Quebec. As a self-anointed stock market guru, O’Leary’s math is sadly lacking.

O’Leary now says he’ll support Maxime Bernier who may be popular in parts of Quebec but his Libertarian views are unlikely to draw votes in the rest of the country in a general election. And, oh yeah, O’Leary says he’ll be raising money and campaigning hard for Bernier. I predict O’Leary will do no such thing. And that’s a prediction that will prove to be correct.

Cicero, thou shouldst be living at this hour

Ten years ago, when last I bought a television, I had the installer hook up my VHS machine just in case I might need it. It’s never been used since. The time is still blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. But I did use the DVD player. At least for a while. Today I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I actually watched a DVD.

In fact, when I bought my most recent iMac, it didn’t even come with the necessary slot for DVDs or CDs. The sales associate kindly told me that if in time I found I needed one, I could buy an external drive, rip all my CDs, and then return the drive for a refund. Her suggestion gave the phrase “planned obsolescence” a whole new meaning. I did not partake of her beneficence.

That the world is changing quickly, and the attitude of people changing along with it, has been the situation for quite some time. It was Cicero, after all, in ancient Rome, who lamented, “O tempora o mores!” meaning, “Oh what times, oh what customs.”

It’s just the speed of change that has altered. I recently read that since last October, 89,000 U.S. jobs have been lost in the ailing department store sector, the same number of jobs as in the entire U.S. coal industry. You may remember that coal was one of the groups Donald Trump promised to protect. These days, even a belligerent president can’t keep up.