Monday, January 14, 2008

Rambling Ez-Ra

I have to say I really hadn't paid much attention to Ezra Levant until the past few days. In fact, I only had the vaguest idea who he was until recently. I'd never seen him speak, or read his dead magazine, though I think I did see a copy on the shelf in McNally Robinson once.
So I clicked the youtube videos and watched a kindly, bored looking woman with the expression on her face that mothers can get in the face of a ranting child. You know, the look they get after they've given up negotiating with the brat and just let him wail on until he wears himself out. Yeah that was her. Which would make Ezra the... Anyway, panel members at public meetings get the same glaze when dealing the people the mighty Driftglass so aptly describes as,

the Community Activists, for whom every forum is a Nail for their particular Hammer.

...

There's a few moments of frosting where they talk a little -- very little -- about the reason the meeting was called in the first place...then on to the Bitch List.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s often a valid Bitch List – or at least portions are – but every meeting is an occasion for telling whomever is gaveling the session that the neighborhoods are getting screwed. Whatever’s on the flyers – a dog park, a bond issue, bike trails or mosquito abatement – you’re going to hear 30 seconds of symbolic abatement chatter, and the rest is how they’re getting screwed in various ways by the allocation of government money, or gentrification, or The Man generally.

Except this particular "community activist" was arguing for what amounted to his right to be a bigot and an asshole, and well, let the whole world know. Arguing for his right to publish materials that, given his professed intent and interpretion, were published in the same context that caricatures of people of African or Asian decent, or Jewish or Catholic faith, that were common and acceptable in another era.

I might have understood his point (not saying I would agree) if he intelligently and maturely tried to make a point about free speech. But he didn't. Instead, he turned it into a misinformed narcissitic piece of very bad acting to, I suspect, get his name in the paper again and give some fodder to the sycophantic howler monkeys that dote on his every word like he's some reincarnated version of one long [mostly] dead white orator or another. Why, when you visit they're blogs, is there often a "liberal" helping of hero quotes from old dead white dudes with Greek or Anglo names? I guess it does explain their fetish for flowery rhetoric. I wonder if there's a phone sex line for wankers (pun intended) where some man (after last year, I have to assume the males are all in the closet) quotes Thucydides, Churchill, Victor Daisy Hanson (why do I always think "venereal" when I see his name?), and [shudder] now Ez-Ra.

It is clear they do not like the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission and spend no limit telling everyone, like dear Ezra, that the State is unilaterally crushing their freedom all Stalin like. And there is no democracy. And there are Bolsheviks in their bathwater. And and...but wait, I mean, it was their democratically elected MLAs that passed the Act that created the AHRC, was it not? So, um, the MLAs, whom they chose, well, created the Act that created the AHRC. But you can't point this out to them. Well you can, but they won't listen. I've tried on this matter (elsewhere and as not-Boris in these here intertubes) and others, but no, they just sit there and blink. Maybe drool a little. Impervious to facts and reason (these folks might be keen to study the membrane encasing their brains) And start claiming the gulags are coming. Oh, how desperately they want to be oppressed. Somebody please oppress me. Oppress, oppress, oppress. I swear the happiest day of their lives would be if they found themselves suddenly living under a communist, Islamist, fascist (pick one, or better yet, all, make your own!) dicatorship - all their feeeers legitimised. Dark fantasies about liberals and single mothers in jackboots marching about town. And really dark five o'clock shadow. With accents, thick and Slavic. Or Persian. And lots of leather. Maybe spurs. And goose-steps. Marching around. Oppressing. Under dark and stormy skies. In black and white, for sure. Grainy, old footage like and stuff. I mean, considering the untrackable number of times I've seen them invoke Stalin, and Hitler (haven't seen a Mao yet) on this thing, you have to wonder what sort of mental image they conjure when confronted by a woman in a blue sweater and a meeting they didn't have to personally attend, in Edmonton, representing an institution created through a democratic process they participated in.

Hmm...someone out there could have some photoshop fun with Ezra's youtube freezes - what we see vs. what Ezra sees.

But, really, you do have to wonder exactly where they think their government comes from? The stork perhaps? Giant, jackbooted stork, with beady eyes, and talons. Wings so big it the bright noon sun is hidden as if by eclipse. Dropping giant globs of oppression over their "ancient and inalienable right" to insult whomever they damn well please by whatever means they please for whatever racial, religious, sexual, political, or cultural reasons they please. When Ezra started talking about, sorry, lying about radical "Saudi-trained" Imams (dogwhistle terrorist for teh fans, you know), Muslims, and his views on Mohammed, ad nauseum in his hatefilled ignorant little screed, he be the one wearing whitesheets and the jackboots.

Who is this fucking guy?

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