Canadians, who like to think of themselves as a largely amiable people devoted to humility, apologies, and occasional hockey riots, now and then get a bit smug because they're not Americans. We have universal health care. We tend to believe that dinosaurs existed and were not the pets of prehistoric man, that children can be taught evolution in school without becoming god-hating, socialist homosexuals, and that god-hating, socialist homosexuals are often quite decent and deserve to be treated just like everyone else.That's a self-serving generalization, obviously, and it springs from the complacency that can flourish up north when the north looks down below the forty-ninth parallel and sees everyone pepper-spaying everyone else in the face.But then you hear about something like Attawapiskat and you're forced to acknowledge that Canadians can suck as much as anyone else. Attawapiskat is a remote native community in northern Ontario where people are living in uninsulated shacks (or lucky enough to live in poorly-insulated houses crawling with black mould), enjoying a range of exciting experiences made available to them by a lack of indoor sanitation and potable water, and where children learn not to take education for granted because they have no actual school due to the fact that their old school building was condemned.Of course, the most important lesson one should learn from this story, according to the people who spend their time being unfettered by the demands of basic human decency and then commenting on websites, is that the natives in charge of such communities are rich and corrupt, and the natives not in charge of such communities are drunk and lazy, so, really, the children with those rashes on their faces brought about by unsanitary living conditions had it coming to them and have only themselves to blame.The federal government draws strength from and then reinforces such opinions by pointing out that it's sent Attawapiskat a whole lot of money - more money, even, then was spent on inexplicable Huntsville gazebos during the G8 summit - and implying that if the people there have squandered the money on trying to make up for a massive housing shortfall and didn't succeed, can't we all rest easy in the knowledge that those big-eyed, rash-faced children had it coming to them and had only themselves to blame?The feds are absolutely right. I have no sympathy for fat-cats who use tax-payers' money to feather their own fat-cat nests and don't even bother creating a credible paper-trail to convince those same tax-payers they haven't been paying a great deal of misappropriated money for superfluous gazebos.And is it really reasonable to expect the federal government to start putting time and effort into caring about sick, poor, disadvantaged native children? I mean, there are a lot of them, and not just in Attawapiskat. If the feds took that on, there'd be very little time left over for the construction of gazebos, and I don't want any child of mine growing up in that kind of world. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
The other day, Rob Ford, who people have tried to convince me is the democratically-elected mayor of Toronto, was confronted outside his house by Mary Walsh, who people have tried to convince me is an actual professional comedian. Rob Ford, concerned that an aggressive, plastic bustier-wearing lady was lurching toward him with a microphone, rushed back into his house and called the police.When I first heard about this, I felt a certain sympathy for Ford and so endured an uncomfortable few hours. It's probably unpleasant to have someone ambush you when you're in your driveway. It's not his fault that so many Canadian comedians could so easy pass for totally unfunny crazy people. There's no reason that Rob Ford, or anyone else for that matter, should be expected to recognize a Canadian comedian from a television show I was convinced had been cancelled in the late '90s.Thankfully, Rob Ford proceeded to behave in a way that allowed me to whole-heartedly dislike him again. He called the police not once, but three times, demanding to know why a patrol car had not arrived. While speaking to the 911 operator, he said either:a) “You … bitches! Don’t you f---ing know? I’m Rob f---ing Ford, the mayor of this city!”; or,
b) "This is f---ing ridiculous.:Obviously, everyone's hoping it was "a", because that's way more exciting and offensive and in line with the kind of person I suspect he is. Even if he didn't say it, I say we continue to believe he did, because it's so much more plausible. And if he didn't say it, and someone leaks the tape and he's found to have used an expletive in a less exciting manner (option "b"), it shouldn't be all that difficult to put him in a cussing mood again in the future. I'm sure the CBC is preparing to deploy Luba Goy as we speak.
Finally, the CBC has come up with a new way to humiliate itself! I thought it might be content to rest on its crappy scripted non-laurels (e.g. Being Erica) and its crappy unscripted non-laurels (e.g. Don Cherry), but the CBC seems to have decided it would like to be denigrated by more than just people who don't want to look at that guy from Da Vinci's Inquest anymore.
Apparently unaware that its audience is made up of people who focus on how much better the CBC is than some unavoidably inferior American tabloid news station instead of how much worse anything it airs is than even the vaguest ramblings of Jim Lehrer, the CBC has decided to dress up in American right-wing grown-up clothes by allowing some really smug, annoying guy to say outrageous things. I am not going to make a snide comment about Peter Mansbridge at this juncture, as we all know that he is never outrageously anything.
The guy I'm talking about is Kevin O'Leary, a man who looks like a sleek and malevolent seal and has apparently made a career for himself out of making money (fair enough, I guess) and saying abrasive things he clearly think are hard to take because they're so steeped in bitter truth instead of because they're positively drowned in a sea of completely baseless self-regard.
For some reason, the CBC, desperate, perhaps, to employ someone who's not Nicholas Campbell or Eric Peterson, has allowed this man to appear on approximately 85 television shows. He's on Dragon's Den, where he dismissively tells people dismissive things and manages to be neither insightful nor funny, and on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, which, when I thought about it all, I thought was a 1970s movie about hostage-taking.
The other day, he bravely faced off against Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges on the topic of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I say "bravely", because Hedges is obviously smarter, classier, and more celebrated than he is.
O'Leary defends principles of journalistic accuracy and integrity by reminding Hedges that he called him a "nut bar" and not a "nut case". He apparently intends to disparage a largely grass-roots, anti-corporate movement by calling it "low budget." He leaps delightedly on the "you probably drove a car to the demonstration" point because he just KNOWS that charge of hypocrisy will oblige Hedges to give him his Pulitzer.
While watching this on the internet, I thought "Sun TV must have a larger set budget than I thought, and money for more than one camera-person." Then I discovered that my blessed ignorance of Canadian television had protected me from the knowledge that O'Leary was speaking as an employee of CBC. This is a CBC show. This man is employed by Canada's public broadcaster. He's not just biased, and combative, and insulting to his guest; he's also complacent and stupid and paid for with tax dollars.
The CBC seems to be trying desperately to make itself relevant by employing more and more abrasive, shit-talking, smug sons of bitches. I don't see why they don't just replace everyone with Don Cherry. Surely, that would be more cost-effective.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Canadian elections are often discouraging because they generally lack the really exciting and inflammatory fear tactics employed by Americans running for office. We don't tend to hear about anchor babies or toddlers being turned into shameless, sex-crazed atheists after receiving government-mandated vaccinations. At best, we're treated to the phrase "tax-and-spend" used in such a manner as to suggest "vicious killer of especially adorable babies."Thank goodness for Tim Hudak, who not only looks like a bloated and malevolent Steve Yzerman, but is also finally bringing to Ontario provincial politics some of the barely-concealed xenophobia and homophobia we've been forced to admire from afar for so long.
First, he spoke darkly of "foreign workers" being given employment advantages by the Liberals, conjuring up images of sinister hordes of immigrants swarming across Ontario with their advanced degrees, snatching up plum jobs and refusing to sign their kids up for hockey. But what else would the father-daughter pair from the this-should-be-about-a-long-distance-plan-but-it's-really-about-Tim Hortons commercial and the appallingly off-putting young people from the Rogers commercials fear besides job-thieving neurologists from South Asia? That's right: pint-sized perverts.You've probably heard by now about the fantastically entertaining flyer being circulated by some Conservative candidates and adamantly defended by Hudak. It asserts, in both comforting blackboard-y and menacing old-typewriter fonts, that Dalton McGuinty wants to turn the next generation of Canadians into a bunch of transvestite sluts. McGuinty, unsurprisingly, denies that this is his secret and nefarious aim and claims he just wants kids to be informed and not quite so mean to one another. I suggest to the Liberals that in the one day of campaigning they have left, they change their approach ever so slightly. Instead of arguing that the pamphlet is crazy and full of lies, why don't they simply admit that their vision of Ontario relies heavily on cross-dressing primary schoolers? Liberals are working tirelessly to create a future full of and for cross-dressing primary schoolers and job-stealing immigrants. I myself would far rather live in a province populated by boys in skirts and highly-trained professionals from abroad than one peopled with small, medium, and large-sized, and somewhat-hateful, really-hateful, and pamphlet-makingly hateful Tim Hudaks.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 The Self is often misunderstood in Society. It's been an exciting week for disapproving of things. Many of the things offered up by the world for my disapproval were offered up at the CNN Tea Party GOP Presidential debate. When Wolf Blitzer, who always asks my favourite hypothetical-comatose-patient questions, asked the candidates who should pay for the care of an uninsured coma victim, and responded to Ron Paul's response with "Are you saying that society should just let him die?" a number of audience members I would very much like to meet and date cheered and someone yelled "yeah!"Michele Bachmann spoke piercingly about "little girls" (11 and 12 year-olds; still young, sure, but not the pig-tailed, thumb-sucking cuties she piercingly evoked) being given "government injections" (HPV vaccinations) and yesterday managed to up the ante on her own stupidness and lyingness by indicating that the vaccine might cause mental retardation (which it doesn't). When various people, among them quite an unsurprising number of doctors, told her she was wrong, she said, "I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am not a physician. All I was doing was reporting what a woman told me last night at the debate." She's referring to a random member of the public who came up to after the debate and told her the vaccine had harmed her daughter.So one is apparently allowed to report ignorant, unfounded claims about something as long as one has oneself no knowledge or expertise related to the subject. Except when that's not the case. There's an astonishingly discouraging story out of York University this week, for once not related to a faculty strike. Cameron Johnston, a York prof, was teaching a Social Science class ("Self, Culture and Society" - a staggeringly descriptive title) and stated that not everyone was entitled to have and express an opinion. "All Jews should be sterilized", he said, was the kind of opinion that was egregious and inexcusable. At that point, a student stormed out. I assumed it was some kind of free-speech defender, rushing out to fetch Noam Chomsky (who waits out in the car for just such an eventuality), but, no - it was a student convinced that Johnston had just asserted that Jews should be sterilized. Sarah Grunfeld immediately contacted a campus Israel advocacy group, and it immediately sent out news releases calling for his prompt dismissal. The best part of this whole story isn't that some poor man who'd really rather be thinking about your Self and its Culture and Society was plunged into controversy by way of a complete misunderstanding, but Grunfeld's response to being told that it was a complete misunderstanding: "The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”Actually, Bachmann and Grunfeld have at least one thing in common: both failed to consider the larger context surrounding the words they heard (i.e. some stranger at a public event with an unsubstantiated story not supported by science in the first case, and quotation marks and total condemnation in the second). What's so wonderful and inspiring is that it's the listener who decides whether something should be believed in with no cause or denounced for no reason. I'm so inspired, I might just ambush Hudak after a debate and tell him cuts to social services cause Muskoka cottages to spontaneously burn down. After all, there's a good chance he's no smarter than a potential presidential candidate or York university undergraduate. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
I've finally decided what I want to be when I grow up: I am going to be a courageous, truth-telling cynic who isn't afraid to say profoundly unpopular things as long as I'm being paid for them. I would just have to consistently be able to find unpleasant things to say about topics people feel strongly about. Thankfully, that's not all that challenging, because of the tireless work of trailblazers such as Limbaugh and men and women on talk radio all across the continent. Just argue that the people most people think are unfortunate and sympathetic are, in fact, extremely lucky or entitled or selfish or corrupt. There will be genuinely entitled, selfish, or corrupt listeners/readers who think you're just saying what everyone else is too afraid to say, and there will be gentle, sensitive, thoughtful people who will become very angry with you and question why you're employed. The existence of both groups will ensure your continued employment.And don't think Canadians lack such a media personality just because we don't have some Limbaugh clone crouching full of hate in a basement next to a ham radio. We have Christie Blatchford, and she has the National Post.It's all so tedious. Jack Layton, who most people appear to think was a really nice guy, died this week and Blatchford proceeded to write a strange, unpleasant, ranting piece about how he thought too much about politics to be a really reputable politician, how he shouldn't have taken the time close to the time of his death to write a letter to Canadians, and how the outpouring of public emotion after his death was really the result of celebrity death hysteria promoted by the media/internet and therefore cheap and insincere. I have already not followed the suggestion I'm about to give, but I'm going to give it nevertheless: let's ignore her. Let's not comment on the webpage, or send her angry letters, or talk about her on the radio. Let's give her the one thing she deserves and is not accustomed to: the cold shoulder. If people stop signing her pay-check with their outrage, maybe she'll just have to give up and go where journalists go to die: Sun TV. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 "I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty the Press, her editors and reporters, regardless of the law. So help me God." Canada is not very good at scandals. Not very good at all. There was the time Brian Mulroney went for a helicopter ride with a German (or something like that), and the time the Liberals gave a lot of other Liberals money, and the time that Stephen Harper became prime minister, but other than that, we've got nothing. Politicians don't tend to get caught doing anything interesting with prostitutes and the worst thing the Canadian media has done is to repeatedly employ Peter Mansbridge. The U.S. gets a lot of credit for its explosive and tawdry goings-on. They've had adulterous presidential fellatio, and all kinds of secret wars, and congressional boxer shorts running amok on the internet. But now the Brits, always a dark horse in the race as they sporadically come through with rich gentlemen getting caught in Nazi fetish scenarios, are really pulling ahead and putting the Yanks to shame with their near-unprecedented levels of shamefulness.The News of the World violated the privacy rights of royals and celebrities, and hacked into the voice mail of a murder victim. Staffers seem to have made a habit of paying off the police and alternately terrorizing and attending the weddings of politicians. The relationship between the media and the political elite appears to have been exceptionally incestuous, corrupt, and mutually rewarding. Indeed, David Cameron's former communications chief, Andy Coulson, was once editor of the News of the World, and he is now the subject of a police investigation. So what could add a touch of the surreal to this stunningly repulsive situation? Why, an axe murder, of course. One of the private investigators who rustled up material for the paper was recently acquitted of the murder of another P.I. who was found in a pub parking lot back in 1987 with an axe through his head. He was acquitted, it seems, only through of a murky mixture of police corruption and incompetence. He did spend time in prison for trying to plant cocaine on someone, although Andy Coulson happily rehired him after he was released.
Greed, graft, moral bankruptcy, and now a good, old-fashioned axe murder. Britain's currently leaving the rest of us in the dust. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Of course she didn't. You didn't really think she would do anything crazy like that, did you? She's not (as far as I know) dishonest in a sexual way, which means anything else she happens to be dishonest about just doesn't matter.Bev Oda, the Minister of International Cooperation for Canada's Stephen Harper Government (TM), was recently reelected, despite having been embroiled in a regrettably un-sexual political scandal. Oda, according to one reputable source (Wikipedia, obviously) "admitted to directing one of her staff to add a hand-written annotation to an already signed Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) memo in 2009 that resulted in a funding recommendation for KAIROS being ignored. The memo was altered by the addition of 'not' into the recommendation line of the document. When asked about the matter, Oda had at first told Parliament that she did not know who had made the change." Before she could be punished or anything, there was an election. Today, Prime Minister Stephen Harper bravely decided not to value honest or integrity in politics and announced she would be staying at the Canadian International Development Agency. Apparently, neither the leader of nor the people of Canada care whether Bev Oda lies a whole lot.Everyone knows that in France, politicians are always having extramarital sex and that everyone there thinks that's wonderful. Everyone also knows that in puritanical North America, politicians can accept bribes, tell lies, and start random wars, and so long as they don't accept bribes from a mistress, tell lies to a mistress, or start random wars against a mistress, nobody really cares. It's the sex stuff that really loses elections, not the political stuff.I, because I buck the trend towards apathetic unprincipledness and am brimming with integrity and self-righteousness, am distinctly annoyed that Oda has been reelected and allowed to remain at her post. There's only one way Harper will be moved to remove her: she has to have a sex scandal.PLEASE, Bev Oda, do one of the following things:1) start hosting wild "bunga bunga" parties at your Ottawa home, and interfere with a police investigation to protect a young "friend" from Hull (who you claim you thought was the son of the Prime Minister of Belgium).2) disappear from Ottawa (telling everyone you're going hiking on the Cabot Trail) and visit your lover in New Jersey.3) send a topless photo of yourself to a man you found on Craigslist.OR, why not make a real name for yourself, and do all three? Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident. Totally by accident.
I have just discovered I am claustrophobic. No - I'm not afraid of elevators, or of being trapped in some small space underground. I don't have to steer clear of closets or crawl-spaces. You see, I'm not actually suffering from the traditional form of the condition. I've been trying to come up with a name for what ails me, but I can't find anything either appropriate or catchy. "Psychological claustrophobia"? "Political claustrophobia"? I couldn't even scare up a pun.
What I'm trying to describe is this oppressive sense I have of being surrounded by people whose beliefs I do not share. The symptoms first popped up after Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto. They have became noticeably worse since Stephen Harper won a majority government.
So if claustrophobia is (according to Merriam-Webster) the "abnormal dread of being in closed or narrow spaces", what I'm stricken by is the "abnormal dread of being in the company of closed or narrow people". I know that being a warm-hearted, diversity-loving left-leaner means that I should respect other people, that I should try to understand other points of view and mentally embrace my adversaries. That kind of thing. But for the past few days, whenever I see people, I think: "Are you one of them? One of the stupid people I don't agree with and who voted for a Prime Minister who is going to put women who want to have abortions in mega-prisons?"
At some point, I'm sure I'll feel a renewed sense of the beautiful contradictions inherent in the Human Condition, and a renewed sense of smugness about how I'm able to sense all those beautiful contradictions. But right now, I just wish I could live in a place where everyone shared my beliefs. Why do they have to do all that hating of immigrants in Sweden? If it wasn't for all the racism in Sweden, I could totally live there.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 Perfect. They'll never know. For the first time, The Toronto Sun has broken a story that does not involve Rob Ford respecting tax-payers or the Liberals refusing to respect tax-payers. Apparently,former Harper deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart sent The Sun a report from a mysterious U.S. source that claimed Ignatieff advised the Americans on military strategy before its 2003 invasion of Iraq. And not from any cushy, east-coast armchair, either, but from a base in Kuwait. Muttart also helpfully sent along an image that ostensibly shows Ignatieff hunkered down in front of a helicopter cradling a giant gun. The photo, unfortunately, was low-resolution, and lacked the metadata that would have proven when it was taken. The Sun asked for a high-resolution version of the photo, and when it was finally provided, the paper discovered that while the image had been taken in 2002, the man in question was not Ignatieff. Not one bit.
I find this all extremely depressing. Not because it seems like this was a dishonest and underhanded attempt to throw crap on an opponent, but because the Conservatives can't even seem to pull off a good, old-fashioned unfounded smear. They aren't without know-how and resources. If they were themselves duped, do they have no photo-analyzers of their own? If they were actively and knowingly attempting to dupe, did they not realize a sophisticated analysis would reveal the high-resolution image to be a clumsy forgery? Did they not have access to a photo-forger who could have produced something a little more convincing? Couldn't they have located and employed whoever was responsible for making Obama's long-form birth certificate?
I bet the Conservatives are also wishing they'd just waited a couple of weeks. Then they would have realized the doctored photo featured the wrong man. I'm going to offer them this one, free of charge:
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