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Oct. 31st, 2009 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusYesterday I ran into Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada. I recognized him immediately - not just his face but that distinctive baritone of his.
Not that that's surprising. Mulroney calls Montreal home, and the business district where I work is the water that fish swims in. He was getting his shoes shined in the Place Ville-Marie, which is a very Mulroney thing to have been doing.
But it's a strange thing to see a man you've hated since you were twelve, but never met up close.
For those outside the country or very young, let me explain.
Canada left the Sixties and Seventies on the right track. We'd put out universal health are program in place, liberalized our Victorian laws, and were promoting peace and diplomacy abroad. We'd revamped our constitution for the 20th century so that it promoted sexual, racial, and religious equality.
We'd elected the inventor of peacekeeping to the highest office in the land, wrote the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and Greenpeace. We'd put in place programs to support our arts so we could tell our own story, and built structures to protect our industries from simply becoming American branch plants.
And then came Mulroney.
He dug deep into the nasty parts of he Canadian psyche. He stirred up old hatreds and resentments that most of our leaders had wisely left untouched. He played up old loathings between the West and central Canada, between English and French, resurrected ancient regionalist resentments. For that he was elected.
He was a genius at it. But he'd played with powers he didn't really understand, and in the end those resentments turned on him. He couldn't control the darkness he'd called up, and it destroyed the Progressive Conservative party. The party shattered, and finally died. In the rubble were the Bloc Québécois and the future new Conservative party of Harper. Mulroney was their midwife.
Mulroney had run a government by and for the corporations - and specifically the American branch plants franchises that came to dominate the nation. His people made war on health care, on social programs, and the arts, and on the concept that Canada could be a just society and more than a satellite of the US.
By the time he's run with the money - and he turned quite a nice profit on public office - the whole political landscape had changed. The Liberals under Chrétien had decided to repackage themselves not as a true alternative, but as another Conservative Party. since then, the Conservatives and Liberals have been a race for the right.
Meanwhile, the progressive majority in this country have largely stopped voting, have come to see their own government as a foreign occupying power, and they've put their faith in NGOs and private charitable organizations because they don't feel there's any use in going through the government. Only a small number still go through the system, supporting the NDP or Greens.
And the Harper Conservatives? Still using Mulroney's strategy -- exacerbating the divisions in the country to maintain power. Any online debate with a Conservative will eventually turn into a rant against Ontario and Ottawa now.
The record shows that since Mulroney, we've had four prime ministers - Campbell, Chrétien, Martin, and Harper. But the truth is, we're really in our 28th year now of Mulroney. And memories of another way of doing things have already begun to fade.
So in short, he's the man who broke the country we don't know how to fix. He took us off the right path, and we're still trying to find our way back.
So, yeah. Yesterday I saw the monster, sitting up on a shoe-shine chair like a throne in the Place Ville-Marie.
And the funny thing was the expression on his face. See, he looked worried. Or scared.
And the thing you have to understand about Mulroney is that he's never had that emotion on his face in any public photo. Not when his awful policies had driven his party's popularity into the single digits. Not when he was explaining to an inquiry how he didn't see anything wrong with a prime minister of Canada taking a suitcase full of cash from an arms dealer in a hotel room.
No, Mulroney is smugness incarnate. He's chutzpah. He's ego. He's Tom Sawyer in a grey suit. His autobiography is 1152 pages, and he's never given so much of a hint that he's ever genuinely second-guessed himself in anything.
But now he looked afraid. And I had I wonder what did that...? Maybe it was just his stocks post-crash. Maybe it was his precious reputation?
But it was still odd to see a human emotion on that face.
Anyway, the whole reason I was at the Place Ville-Marie was to mail off my short story in poetry. I feel a lot more confident about the poetry than the short story.
I had no time this month, thanks to all the overtime - the third October in a row where the universe conspired against my preparing anything for the awards.
But now I can go back to preparing my novel to send out.
Not that that's surprising. Mulroney calls Montreal home, and the business district where I work is the water that fish swims in. He was getting his shoes shined in the Place Ville-Marie, which is a very Mulroney thing to have been doing.
But it's a strange thing to see a man you've hated since you were twelve, but never met up close.
For those outside the country or very young, let me explain.
Canada left the Sixties and Seventies on the right track. We'd put out universal health are program in place, liberalized our Victorian laws, and were promoting peace and diplomacy abroad. We'd revamped our constitution for the 20th century so that it promoted sexual, racial, and religious equality.
We'd elected the inventor of peacekeeping to the highest office in the land, wrote the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and Greenpeace. We'd put in place programs to support our arts so we could tell our own story, and built structures to protect our industries from simply becoming American branch plants.
And then came Mulroney.
He dug deep into the nasty parts of he Canadian psyche. He stirred up old hatreds and resentments that most of our leaders had wisely left untouched. He played up old loathings between the West and central Canada, between English and French, resurrected ancient regionalist resentments. For that he was elected.
He was a genius at it. But he'd played with powers he didn't really understand, and in the end those resentments turned on him. He couldn't control the darkness he'd called up, and it destroyed the Progressive Conservative party. The party shattered, and finally died. In the rubble were the Bloc Québécois and the future new Conservative party of Harper. Mulroney was their midwife.
Mulroney had run a government by and for the corporations - and specifically the American branch plants franchises that came to dominate the nation. His people made war on health care, on social programs, and the arts, and on the concept that Canada could be a just society and more than a satellite of the US.
By the time he's run with the money - and he turned quite a nice profit on public office - the whole political landscape had changed. The Liberals under Chrétien had decided to repackage themselves not as a true alternative, but as another Conservative Party. since then, the Conservatives and Liberals have been a race for the right.
Meanwhile, the progressive majority in this country have largely stopped voting, have come to see their own government as a foreign occupying power, and they've put their faith in NGOs and private charitable organizations because they don't feel there's any use in going through the government. Only a small number still go through the system, supporting the NDP or Greens.
And the Harper Conservatives? Still using Mulroney's strategy -- exacerbating the divisions in the country to maintain power. Any online debate with a Conservative will eventually turn into a rant against Ontario and Ottawa now.
The record shows that since Mulroney, we've had four prime ministers - Campbell, Chrétien, Martin, and Harper. But the truth is, we're really in our 28th year now of Mulroney. And memories of another way of doing things have already begun to fade.
So in short, he's the man who broke the country we don't know how to fix. He took us off the right path, and we're still trying to find our way back.
So, yeah. Yesterday I saw the monster, sitting up on a shoe-shine chair like a throne in the Place Ville-Marie.
And the funny thing was the expression on his face. See, he looked worried. Or scared.
And the thing you have to understand about Mulroney is that he's never had that emotion on his face in any public photo. Not when his awful policies had driven his party's popularity into the single digits. Not when he was explaining to an inquiry how he didn't see anything wrong with a prime minister of Canada taking a suitcase full of cash from an arms dealer in a hotel room.
No, Mulroney is smugness incarnate. He's chutzpah. He's ego. He's Tom Sawyer in a grey suit. His autobiography is 1152 pages, and he's never given so much of a hint that he's ever genuinely second-guessed himself in anything.
But now he looked afraid. And I had I wonder what did that...? Maybe it was just his stocks post-crash. Maybe it was his precious reputation?
But it was still odd to see a human emotion on that face.
Anyway, the whole reason I was at the Place Ville-Marie was to mail off my short story in poetry. I feel a lot more confident about the poetry than the short story.
I had no time this month, thanks to all the overtime - the third October in a row where the universe conspired against my preparing anything for the awards.
But now I can go back to preparing my novel to send out.