Daily Archives: April 19, 2011

This election sucks

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Well, I guess I should write something about this god damned fucking election.

For my American friends : this upcoming Monday, May 2, we Canadians will be going to the polls for a national election. Steven Harper’s Conservative minority government has fallen, and so it is once again time for us Canadians to do our patriotic duty and go to our riding’s polling station on Monday, and vote.

I am a little less than completely enthused.

It’s not that we’re having to vote that has me feeling down in the dumps. It’s the state of Canadian politics in general. I have never felt more like there was no good choices out there. You just have to hold your nose pick the poison you hate the least.

This malaise is, I suspect, common to all modern democracies (or at least, ones dominated by two major parties) at this point in history. It’s not just that the inherent weaknesses of representational democracy becoming increasingly grating on the population as our social reality evolves and our democracy remains the same as it was in the era of the horse and buggy. That’s a major factor, undoubtedly, and I could go on and on about that (trust me), but there’s something more specific afoot here.

It has to two with the two party system. In the USA you have that more or less explicitly. In Canada, we have fewer barriers to third parties than the USA, and indeed we have what might be considered an Official Third Party in the NDP, but due to historical inertia and (in my opinion) a general lack of courage and imagination in the population, our politics are still dominated by the two massive historical juggernauts, the Liberals and the Conservatives.

And to be blunt, that’s just not fucking good enough any more.

Democracy works a lot like capitalism, and hence, it thrives on competition. The more competition, the better the outcome for the consumer, or in this case, the voter. And any economist or business theorist will tell you that having only two players on the field does not a robust and consumer-friendly contest make.

And it shows. To me, it’s abundantly clear that all the Liberals and Conservatives care about is screwing the other party and getting elected. Neither has a clear moral focus or vision of the future of Canada any more. In terms of policy, they drift closer to one another every day in their all-consuming attempts to be That One Party Anyone Can Vote for. The names are meaningless, the Conservatives are anything but and the Liberals have obviously stopped feeling like they need to be any more liberal than it takes to be slightly better than the Conservatives, and of course, the Conservatives are only too happy to make that as low a bar to jump as they can possibly get away with.

So the party names are mere labels now. Gone are the days of truly ideological politics, where there was a feeling that the political parties represented clearly defined points of view and you could choose the one that matched your own. Now, it increasingly feels as meaningless as choosing any other mass produced and fundamentally identical consumer product. Gee, do I want the toothpaste with Whitening Action or the one with Stain Fighting Power? I just want clean teeth, god damn it.

Partly, I blame the consultants. Politics is dominated by image experts, message specialists, groomers, trainers, coaches, and all other forms of professional bullshit peddlers who have completely eroded all traces of genuine ideology and sincerity out from under the party’s platforms in their never-ending quest to justify their enormous consulting fees. As a result, politicians don’t even seem like human beings any more. They have no chance of genuinely connecting with the people and inspiring them. They are nothing but the sum of their various handlers, and hence, about as human as an airbrushed supermodel on a billboard.

But the problem goes deeper than that. There is a reason why nearly every voter decries all the negative advertising you see on TV and negative campaigning you hear from the mouths of of the candidates and yet it continues unabated, and indeed, seems to get much worse with every election.

It’s because the hegemony of the two party system relies on one overpowering message, one on which both parties wholeheartedly agree : there are only two choices. They have to convince you that the other party is the worst kind of evil because then you will feel like to vote for anyone but them is essentially to vote for The Other Guy, who is Satan, more or less. This squeezes out third parties without having to lift a finger directly against them. Combined with media collusion in the form of not treating third parties with any respect at all, and indeed often completely ignoring them and thus reinforcing the message that there are only two parties worth noticing, it keeps the competition low and the elections easy.

And they don’t care that they are destroying democracy by discouraging voters in the process. As far as they and their corporate masters are concerned, the fewer voters, the better. Makes elections easier to manipulate. And as long as the two big parties are entirely dependent on enormous amounts of election bucks to pay for all that negative advertising and soul-crushing consulting, they will continue to be panting at the end of the big corporations’ very short leash.

And that’s why, no matter who you vote for, nothing really changes.

This election, I am voting NDP. I don’t know who their person in my riding is, and I don’t really care. I just cannot stand either of the two big parties, and Jack Layton actually has some good ideas.

And thankfully, he’s not considered important enough to be worth compromising. Yet.

I guess that makes me officially a grumpy old cynic. And I’m only 37. Well, I was always ahead of my age group in school.

The goat says what?

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No really. It does.

Takes around 15 seconds to get going but it is SO worth it. That’s freaking hilarious.

Obviously, this goat is a big fan of the WWE and Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The Battle Of The Baby Mamas, Part 2

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When last we left out intrepid band of heroes (namely, me and my friends) we were caught in a dilemma : stuck there in Denny’s with a band of mamasitas and their banging, shrieking brood, and denied the option of switching to the front of the restaurant by a loud crowd of playoff watching Canucks fans.

What were we to do? We didn’t really want to get up and leave and go find another restaurant. So Felicity did a perfectly natural and reasonable thing : she shushed the loud little ones.

Then we hear a voice from that table saying “Excuse me, did you just shush my baby?”

Aw shit. Now it’s on.

I had heard of this happening before. People angrily defending their right to be terrible parents by letting their children be extremely loud in public. And I had been dreading the day it would happen to me. Before last Friday night, it had come close to happening to me, but it had never quite landed right on me like that. Now there I was, in the middle of it.

Like I said in part 1, my main worry is (and was) my ability to keep my temper under control under stressful situations. I am mostly a fairly mellow and easygoing fellow, someone who believes in going with the flow to get along and letting people be themselves. It’s how I am and how I like to be. Mostly.

But one thing that really brings out that fraction remaining from that “mostly” is rudeness. I have my own sense of what is proper behaviour and what is insensitivity and rudeness, and when someone really violates that sense, that is when you are mostly likely to see my more fiery and confrontational side come out.

It often comes as quite a surprise even to those who know me, because like I said I am mostly friendly and mellow and harmless and relaxed, so to see me suddenly be All Up In That with someone is rather a shock.

So now the word war is engaged between our two tables, with me and my friends exchanging verbal volleys between tables. Our numbers were roughly even. Of course, we’re smart intellectual types. Which helps a lot less than you would think.

I don’t recall exactly all that was said. I have this weird thing : when I shift into Action Mode, I often have trouble remembering much of what occurs later. It’s very freaky, honestly, and kind of scares me. All I can think of is that I spend so much time in a more contemplative frame of mind that those rare moments when I switch into the Be Here Now mode leave the little note-taking elements of my mind all in a tither at the sudden change and they don’t know how to index the memories properly.

It’s not something I like to think about.

Anyhow, so I don’t remember all that was said, but I remembering yelling something like “I can’t believe that it somehow missed you how wrong this is. This is not normal. This is not how babies are supposed to act. ” and “Just because you don’t hear it any more doesn’t mean that nobody else does. ”

Anyhow, the skirmish was fairly brief, and concluding with us just getting up and walking out of the back up to the front, where Felicity stopped to get information from the manager of that Denny’s on how we could complain to the Denny’s head office about this whole incident. At this point, it was up in the air whether we would ever come back to that Denny’s, but we certainly weren’t planning on staying or paying for the drinks and appies Joe and I had already consumed.

The manager was very understanding, and told us that it was Denny’s policy to never ask someone to quiet down their child, and we understood that and were not blaming the Denny’s people for the whole thing at all. They have always been really great to us, but there was just no way we could put up with this insanity. I honestly feel bad that they got caught up in this at all. They’re great people.

But as we are talking with the manager, a funny thing happens. The Baby Mamas get up and leave on their own. And a few minutes later, the ringleader comes in, contrite as can be, and apologizes to us, and shakes my hand and everything. Turns out she’d had a very bad day (to say more would be indiscreet) and she was very sorry for what she had said.

Well. Hell. On the brink of defeat, we won. Instead of us leaving and never coming back, we ended up staying and having our usual Denny’s meal without incident. The manager even gave us half off the cost of our meals as an apology for the whole thing.

And, what was most important to me personally, my friends congratulated me on my articulate defense of our cause. That really meant a lot to me, because I often don’t know whether I am doing well or not, and I need all the affirmation I can get.

I did good.

So thus endeth our tale of battle, loss, and victory. Our faith in Denny’s and humanity is restored, and we retain our Friday night meeting spot.

Feel weird to win. I’m not used to it!