We have been thinking of the coming trouble to our dear Canadian Parliament, and so, in our cups, lisping, for we lisp when in our cups and when in our cups we do not care who knows it, though when sober and reminded that we lisp when we are in our cups (that’s how those bastards say it: “Hey, you know you were lisping last night?“ Us: “When? When!?“ Them: “Last night. You know. When you were in your cups”) we are shamed and mutter things under our breath but otherwise cause no trouble for we are not troublesome when hangovery but contrite and sad in our way. Anyway, we must, as preamble, declare that we are sensitive men, we are generally men of moderation, if anything at all we are moderate men of great sensitivity, and we had got to talking and to reasoning, for we do our best reasoning and talking when greased by good crisp cold clean Canadian lager, and we began recalling what it is really to be Canadian. As we ordered more to drink, for in our moderation we could not quench our thirst, we began to wonder at the late date of this Canadian awakening.
The alcohol we drank made us sharp, it cleared our minds, and we would have none of that pap that told us it would be better if we didn’t reach for another, and then another after that. The beer made us wiser, for that is what good clear cold beer does to moderate men of sensitivity. Beer freed us from the quotidian details of life that serve to generally clutter our minds. Quotidian details such as whether or not we should get some rest and get to bed before 3 AM so as to better do our various jobs for which we receive financial remuneration. Not to mention that the deep sense of fulfillment our various employments offer us, the rich emotional lives that we have built around our work that we do for cash, the sense that we are working not only for a business, in our various jobs, but for families, extended families, horrible little bitchy extended families that demean us and force us to wake early when we know, as sensitive and moderate men, we should only awaken late, that sense of camaraderie and a palpable bitterness might be affected were we to drink further into the night. Beer can make heroes out of ordinary people. Are we not heroes? Are we not the sons of the hewers of wood and drawers of water? Or in my case the son of a cleaner of offices, in my comrade a son of old bootleggers. Are we not sons of immigrant entrepreneurs? Yes! We are! Were they not drunk a lot too? They were |(except for in my case my father was mostly a teetotaller)! And were our even more ancient ancestors drunk just as often as we are? You know, in pioneer times? Certainly as far as we know! We agreed that it was probably so that pioneers got drunk. And we agreed that, though we had little enough evidence to support it, that the pioneers were drunk often.
So it is in these latter days of our so-called well governed Canadian democracy that we find ourselves, and perhaps you too feel this way, in a sense of desultory apathy towards our democratic politics.
We have entered a time of the long yawn. We are too well fed, and we mean this personally, the amount of food we consume is absurd and something should be done. We have needlessly expensive coffee, and we are constantly checking our face book accounts, we recently friend-ed Kanye but he never comes to our parties and we are duly upset. We can’t remember what happened during the last referendum and we are unclear what the word means anyway. We think multiculturalism is when we eat at those restaurants that claim to be Chinese/Canadian food purveyors and while dining we make uncivil joke references to international crisis (for instance when something mildly disappointing happens, like a sub par lunch in an average kind of restaurant that we should have known better than to eat in we like to say loudly so that other tables may hear that our dining experience was worse than being in Libya) which both supports a certain status as somewhat knowledgeable intellects fully aware of the world at large while being disdainfully far enough away not to really care (and really, can you be a Canadian/Chinese food fusion restaurant without maple syrup and back bacon? Damnit we think not!). In other words, it is so often the case that we are full of shit.
We firmly believe that you also are full of shit.
So, it is, for us anyway, in our weaker moments, when the cooling and healing powers of alcohol do not relieve us but we are caught between the sigh and shrugging off of what it sometimes can come to feel being a Canadian, a sort of “why the fuck not” nationalism and a vague concern for our fellow citizens. We feel that there are only two requirements in democracy, and that is to pay taxes and to vote. Of course the implication to voting is being informed about politics. So let’s be honest with you, newspapers, while important, can be absurdly boring. We freely admit this. As well, while we do enjoy the CBC, sometimes we want to punch it in it’s polite little well turned mouth, and after that we want to have sex with its girlfriend, and pee on its lawn and do other juvenile bully-ish things. Here’s the thing. We are the ugly Canadians. In our better moments, when we are quietly reading these quickly becoming obsolete things called books, we read about the early Canadians. We won’t say it was a better time, but it was certainly a more uncouth time. We are the ugly uncouth Canadians. There was a time, and it really wasn’t so long ago, when America was thirsty for liquor we secretly made it for them. Why? Mostly for cold hard cash. There was a time when our ministers of Parliament thought it would be great fun to get trashed and then make fun of each other in the actual Parliament itself. There was a time when our political parties thought that it’d be fine to actually have a party by giving away free beer and then get hammered Canadians to vote! One beer, one vote. And there was no reason you couldn’t get a second beer. For a second vote of course. We’re not saying that our political parties should offer us good strong cold pints, but we are saying that we really want to drink beer. Perhaps we’re losing the thread here. Anyway, we think our point might have been that there are a group of ugly uncouth impolite foul mouthed Canadians who are at times genuinely moved by what happens politically in this country, allowing us to politely wait out the current dry heave that constitutes the governing party in our parliament.
We believe that we live in an immoderate age, and we are being uniquely Canadian by being immoderately moderate. The slow drift of our politics is at times admirable, there is nothing at all wrong with the sober judgment, and calm reflection. Though we often find ourselves a little out of fashion, our skinny jeans took too long to take hold in the downtown zeitgeist, and it is just when other liberal democracies are returning to social democracy that we quietly and calmly picked our first genuinely committed neoliberal government. Never one to move quickly, Canadians have again and again asked of our current government to be just weak enough to barely act on their agenda. For, just as we are people who drink in moderation., this country is a country of moderate political values. We aren’t necessarily upset by this.
Our government is a silent minority and it is to our growing horror that we do not wish to rid ourselves of the tyrannous flannel grey that covers our dear Parliament. Beneath the crushing cold gaze of Harper’s Government our plain dealing Canadian ways have been subverted into the hard glare of an economist. Not even a good economist, our minority party leader was incapable of figuring out that an enormous recession was at hand, and still we elected him and his party. Our silent minority does not want our northern ways, but looks to our flatulent southern neighbours for answers.
Our cabinet ministers have been trussed, our Ministers of Parliament have been in the depths of a long cruel verbal constipation. HarperGov does not trust his own people to speak, and We Know Why! Or at least we think we know why. No, we totally know why! It is because of what they’ll say. Our current government has no big ideas. A smaller tax base is the best they can come up with, and it is with an elongated yawn that Canada is passing off its social security system in favour of what has always best characterised us, our collective effort to live a better life not at the whim of the invisible hand, but we the many hands of our actual neighbours.
We want a government that has big ideas, innovative ideas, that will propel Canada into the future, stronger, with a system that will provide better lives for Canadians, healthier, smarter, and yes, of course, far richer.
We think that our newspapers do a damn fine job of reporting, except for The Sun, that’s just a piece of trash, really, you can ask anyone about that. Other newspapers, actual newspapers, they’re just fine for the most part. We would like to offer our humble services in providing that one thing that a newspaper is not able to: Historical Context mixed with the lightest touch, the barest zest, of a belligerent sense of humour.
You see, we believe that the current zeitgeist in Canada, the hand ringing, the je ne sais quoi that comes to mind when you ask the average Canadian what being a Canadian is all about is the product of a certain lack of vision on behalf of our elected officials. Our current government looks to our absurdly petulant south and thinks the answers spring from the Chicago School, while previous governments have called to our colonial roots asking an outdated British cultural imperialism to tell us where we are going.
The thing is, we aren’t British subjects anymore, and we certainly aren’t American. We are the marvelously shaped hat of the America’s, we are Le Belle Chapeau, and we should damned well act like it.
We are in our Avro Arrow moment. Each generation in Canada has had unique challenges that had to be faced collectively: Champlain’s early settlement and the Iroquois war; the war of 1812; we helped reinvent an empire and called ourselves Dominion and then Confederation; we had our prophet Riel hung and built a railway; we were called in as a subjects to a king in world war and left that war as a sovereign state; we gave thirsty Americans booze (amen to that!); we actually had the third largest army of the Allies after the second really big war; then we decolonized and it didn’t actually require a revolution, all we had to do was file the proper paper work; FLQ and the Quiet Revolution didn’t divide us, but defined us as the kind of democracy that can have a separatist party in its legislature, that’s just the kind of incredibly flexible remarkably tolerant calm good looking reasonably well dressed assholes that we are; we wrote a Charter that gave us an official constitution, and while it’s not necessarily prettily written, it’s damnably well written and ends up pissing off any kind of autocratic federal government (as long as we stand for the document of course); Multiculturalism, a testament to the enduring strength of our heritage, for it is certain, our actual heritage is not French, or British, or even native, but all three at once, we are a Metis nation it has been said and it is true, and we are the mixed races of the world. Forget a pot, a salad is healthier.
We are in the midst of a hesitating misstep. We do not think our government's big ideas should be about smaller taxes, bigger police forces, larger penitentiaries, less culture, more air force, and a withering of our ability to act collectively through the apparatus of our state government. It takes a nation to solve continental size problems. It took a federal government to settle this country, it took a federal government to build our trains, our highways, to set national standards on education and sharing the wealth of rich provinces with provinces that happened to be poorer. It is not simply because it is right that our federal governments in the past created national programs that enabled all of Canada to share in the largesse that we have been fortunate enough to have, it is because that is what Canadians do.
From the time we settled the St. Lawrence valley, up to the creation of our national healthcare system, Canadians have struggled together for a better world. Our small bore government has an altogether different view as to what the federal mission should be.
So, we here at barpolitics, aim to dissect all of the missed opportunities of the majestic government of Harper, in all its neoliberal glory. In the tradition of John A. Macdonald all the way to Ralph Klein, we promise to never write to you unless directly under the influence of a good clean lager. We embark on this possibly worthy endeavour, creating our beloved blog, and drinking all the while because we do in fact care, we do it because it’s actually the only way we can take away our existential pain (we mean drinking), and we do it because, let’s be honest, we’re better when we’re drunk, and politics do matter and matter in a way that is a little bit more pissed than perhaps our polite nation would be ready to acknowledge. The thing is, we believe that there are more of you out there. We believe that there are many ugly Canadians of great sensitivity and unusually soft hands who are as contemptuous of our Conservative government as we are. This, our beloved blog, is for you.
The alcohol we drank made us sharp, it cleared our minds, and we would have none of that pap that told us it would be better if we didn’t reach for another, and then another after that. The beer made us wiser, for that is what good clear cold beer does to moderate men of sensitivity. Beer freed us from the quotidian details of life that serve to generally clutter our minds. Quotidian details such as whether or not we should get some rest and get to bed before 3 AM so as to better do our various jobs for which we receive financial remuneration. Not to mention that the deep sense of fulfillment our various employments offer us, the rich emotional lives that we have built around our work that we do for cash, the sense that we are working not only for a business, in our various jobs, but for families, extended families, horrible little bitchy extended families that demean us and force us to wake early when we know, as sensitive and moderate men, we should only awaken late, that sense of camaraderie and a palpable bitterness might be affected were we to drink further into the night. Beer can make heroes out of ordinary people. Are we not heroes? Are we not the sons of the hewers of wood and drawers of water? Or in my case the son of a cleaner of offices, in my comrade a son of old bootleggers. Are we not sons of immigrant entrepreneurs? Yes! We are! Were they not drunk a lot too? They were |(except for in my case my father was mostly a teetotaller)! And were our even more ancient ancestors drunk just as often as we are? You know, in pioneer times? Certainly as far as we know! We agreed that it was probably so that pioneers got drunk. And we agreed that, though we had little enough evidence to support it, that the pioneers were drunk often.
So it is in these latter days of our so-called well governed Canadian democracy that we find ourselves, and perhaps you too feel this way, in a sense of desultory apathy towards our democratic politics.
We have entered a time of the long yawn. We are too well fed, and we mean this personally, the amount of food we consume is absurd and something should be done. We have needlessly expensive coffee, and we are constantly checking our face book accounts, we recently friend-ed Kanye but he never comes to our parties and we are duly upset. We can’t remember what happened during the last referendum and we are unclear what the word means anyway. We think multiculturalism is when we eat at those restaurants that claim to be Chinese/Canadian food purveyors and while dining we make uncivil joke references to international crisis (for instance when something mildly disappointing happens, like a sub par lunch in an average kind of restaurant that we should have known better than to eat in we like to say loudly so that other tables may hear that our dining experience was worse than being in Libya) which both supports a certain status as somewhat knowledgeable intellects fully aware of the world at large while being disdainfully far enough away not to really care (and really, can you be a Canadian/Chinese food fusion restaurant without maple syrup and back bacon? Damnit we think not!). In other words, it is so often the case that we are full of shit.
We firmly believe that you also are full of shit.
So, it is, for us anyway, in our weaker moments, when the cooling and healing powers of alcohol do not relieve us but we are caught between the sigh and shrugging off of what it sometimes can come to feel being a Canadian, a sort of “why the fuck not” nationalism and a vague concern for our fellow citizens. We feel that there are only two requirements in democracy, and that is to pay taxes and to vote. Of course the implication to voting is being informed about politics. So let’s be honest with you, newspapers, while important, can be absurdly boring. We freely admit this. As well, while we do enjoy the CBC, sometimes we want to punch it in it’s polite little well turned mouth, and after that we want to have sex with its girlfriend, and pee on its lawn and do other juvenile bully-ish things. Here’s the thing. We are the ugly Canadians. In our better moments, when we are quietly reading these quickly becoming obsolete things called books, we read about the early Canadians. We won’t say it was a better time, but it was certainly a more uncouth time. We are the ugly uncouth Canadians. There was a time, and it really wasn’t so long ago, when America was thirsty for liquor we secretly made it for them. Why? Mostly for cold hard cash. There was a time when our ministers of Parliament thought it would be great fun to get trashed and then make fun of each other in the actual Parliament itself. There was a time when our political parties thought that it’d be fine to actually have a party by giving away free beer and then get hammered Canadians to vote! One beer, one vote. And there was no reason you couldn’t get a second beer. For a second vote of course. We’re not saying that our political parties should offer us good strong cold pints, but we are saying that we really want to drink beer. Perhaps we’re losing the thread here. Anyway, we think our point might have been that there are a group of ugly uncouth impolite foul mouthed Canadians who are at times genuinely moved by what happens politically in this country, allowing us to politely wait out the current dry heave that constitutes the governing party in our parliament.
We believe that we live in an immoderate age, and we are being uniquely Canadian by being immoderately moderate. The slow drift of our politics is at times admirable, there is nothing at all wrong with the sober judgment, and calm reflection. Though we often find ourselves a little out of fashion, our skinny jeans took too long to take hold in the downtown zeitgeist, and it is just when other liberal democracies are returning to social democracy that we quietly and calmly picked our first genuinely committed neoliberal government. Never one to move quickly, Canadians have again and again asked of our current government to be just weak enough to barely act on their agenda. For, just as we are people who drink in moderation., this country is a country of moderate political values. We aren’t necessarily upset by this.
Our government is a silent minority and it is to our growing horror that we do not wish to rid ourselves of the tyrannous flannel grey that covers our dear Parliament. Beneath the crushing cold gaze of Harper’s Government our plain dealing Canadian ways have been subverted into the hard glare of an economist. Not even a good economist, our minority party leader was incapable of figuring out that an enormous recession was at hand, and still we elected him and his party. Our silent minority does not want our northern ways, but looks to our flatulent southern neighbours for answers.
Our cabinet ministers have been trussed, our Ministers of Parliament have been in the depths of a long cruel verbal constipation. HarperGov does not trust his own people to speak, and We Know Why! Or at least we think we know why. No, we totally know why! It is because of what they’ll say. Our current government has no big ideas. A smaller tax base is the best they can come up with, and it is with an elongated yawn that Canada is passing off its social security system in favour of what has always best characterised us, our collective effort to live a better life not at the whim of the invisible hand, but we the many hands of our actual neighbours.
We want a government that has big ideas, innovative ideas, that will propel Canada into the future, stronger, with a system that will provide better lives for Canadians, healthier, smarter, and yes, of course, far richer.
We think that our newspapers do a damn fine job of reporting, except for The Sun, that’s just a piece of trash, really, you can ask anyone about that. Other newspapers, actual newspapers, they’re just fine for the most part. We would like to offer our humble services in providing that one thing that a newspaper is not able to: Historical Context mixed with the lightest touch, the barest zest, of a belligerent sense of humour.
You see, we believe that the current zeitgeist in Canada, the hand ringing, the je ne sais quoi that comes to mind when you ask the average Canadian what being a Canadian is all about is the product of a certain lack of vision on behalf of our elected officials. Our current government looks to our absurdly petulant south and thinks the answers spring from the Chicago School, while previous governments have called to our colonial roots asking an outdated British cultural imperialism to tell us where we are going.
The thing is, we aren’t British subjects anymore, and we certainly aren’t American. We are the marvelously shaped hat of the America’s, we are Le Belle Chapeau, and we should damned well act like it.
We are in our Avro Arrow moment. Each generation in Canada has had unique challenges that had to be faced collectively: Champlain’s early settlement and the Iroquois war; the war of 1812; we helped reinvent an empire and called ourselves Dominion and then Confederation; we had our prophet Riel hung and built a railway; we were called in as a subjects to a king in world war and left that war as a sovereign state; we gave thirsty Americans booze (amen to that!); we actually had the third largest army of the Allies after the second really big war; then we decolonized and it didn’t actually require a revolution, all we had to do was file the proper paper work; FLQ and the Quiet Revolution didn’t divide us, but defined us as the kind of democracy that can have a separatist party in its legislature, that’s just the kind of incredibly flexible remarkably tolerant calm good looking reasonably well dressed assholes that we are; we wrote a Charter that gave us an official constitution, and while it’s not necessarily prettily written, it’s damnably well written and ends up pissing off any kind of autocratic federal government (as long as we stand for the document of course); Multiculturalism, a testament to the enduring strength of our heritage, for it is certain, our actual heritage is not French, or British, or even native, but all three at once, we are a Metis nation it has been said and it is true, and we are the mixed races of the world. Forget a pot, a salad is healthier.
We are in the midst of a hesitating misstep. We do not think our government's big ideas should be about smaller taxes, bigger police forces, larger penitentiaries, less culture, more air force, and a withering of our ability to act collectively through the apparatus of our state government. It takes a nation to solve continental size problems. It took a federal government to settle this country, it took a federal government to build our trains, our highways, to set national standards on education and sharing the wealth of rich provinces with provinces that happened to be poorer. It is not simply because it is right that our federal governments in the past created national programs that enabled all of Canada to share in the largesse that we have been fortunate enough to have, it is because that is what Canadians do.
From the time we settled the St. Lawrence valley, up to the creation of our national healthcare system, Canadians have struggled together for a better world. Our small bore government has an altogether different view as to what the federal mission should be.
So, we here at barpolitics, aim to dissect all of the missed opportunities of the majestic government of Harper, in all its neoliberal glory. In the tradition of John A. Macdonald all the way to Ralph Klein, we promise to never write to you unless directly under the influence of a good clean lager. We embark on this possibly worthy endeavour, creating our beloved blog, and drinking all the while because we do in fact care, we do it because it’s actually the only way we can take away our existential pain (we mean drinking), and we do it because, let’s be honest, we’re better when we’re drunk, and politics do matter and matter in a way that is a little bit more pissed than perhaps our polite nation would be ready to acknowledge. The thing is, we believe that there are more of you out there. We believe that there are many ugly Canadians of great sensitivity and unusually soft hands who are as contemptuous of our Conservative government as we are. This, our beloved blog, is for you.
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