Saturday, April 02, 2011

Punish Canada

The title of this post represents the best way I can come up with of understanding the Harper Conservative approach to governance. 

Harper and his minions and base are people living in a country, a state, an imagined community of people that consistently reject their worldview in enough numbers to deny them a majority government. Even if our archaic poll distribution elects them to a majority, this does not mean that the popular vote will reflect that sentiment. There will be no sweeping majority for this crowd.

This mixed population of rights embracing; social and economic justice supporting; queer-loving; race, religion and gender tolerant; environmentally concerned citizens largely do not subscribe to the Conservative agenda of anti-society.

This must further enrage the Harper-ites. If there was ever a self-loathing group of Canadians, it is these people. The sense of them that speaks loudest through their campaigning now and activities in office is the sense of punitive subversion. The cannot win by playing fairly and honestly and deep down they know this. They view the Canadian society that embraces these virtues with contempt. To Harper and his friends and supporters these might appear as 'liberal' or 'feminist'. To be fair and just is to allow for tolerance, and accept that things might not work out your way. Because they cannot abide the latter, they must reject the former.

This is logically consistent and explains how they can be so infuriatingly duplicitous and conniving without flinching when it comes to their lack of causal consistency. Hint: you need the latter for effective governance and sandwich making.

The aim as far as I can deduce, of these sophisticated incarnations of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris is not to govern, but to shoot-up the Canadian high school so all those fair-minded Canadians suffer and suffer badly. And no, I will not apologise for that comparison; it is the same frustrated and self-indulgent victimhood rage that I think drives our Conservatives. They've got a finance minister who can't add, and immigration minister intolerant of immigrants, and a prime minister whose contempt for everything about this country, even the media following him around, is etched into the public record and recorded in Hansard and Speaker's rulings.

The other parties have platforms that describe solutions to pressing concerns for Canadians: education, environment, rights and justice, economy, health care. The Conservatives have a platform that seeks to defund parties proposing remedies to these issues. In power, they spent most of their time subverting and thwarting the coherent function of their Opposition.

In Toronto last summer I suspect they saw an opportunity to kick the snot out those Canadians they most loathe. Perhaps they couldn't resist the opportunity impose a massively disproportionate security apparatus on the protesting public and anyone other members of the effete urban elite who got caught up in the fray. Peeling away the technical motivations or justifications for it, the PCO's involvement in security planning makes me think that there was a very emotional motive behind the events that we saw. It fits well with the narrative coming from this crowd.

I had started to ask myself why they do it? Why does Harper feel he had to become prime minister just he could beat-up Canada? Why didn't he find a nice job in the private sector, or stay in academia after his masters? Rule Alberta? Move to the US and work for the GOP? Why'd he have to take his pathetic rage issues out on the rest of us?

I think the answer would be the same one you got if you asked a gang of adolescent skinheads running about looking for scapegoats to thump why they do it. Or the Columbine murderers why they shot up the school. Anger, frustration, inadequacy for some, and an authoritarian tendency in others. Put them together and we find ourselves with a Stephen Harper. I mean, just behold the man. He's got a whole nation to scapegoat.

4 comments:

Alison said...

I'm not much one for conspiracy theories, but I have wondered about the need for all those new prisons. Looking at the G20 horror, it does give one pause.

double nickel said...

I thought the prisons were for all those unreported crimes. I could be wrong though ;)

Beijing York said...

Bravo Boris! He's fueled by rage. His professional ambitions amount to nothing more than revenge.

I don't think anyone else would have ever offered him a job - private sector, academia, military or even the GOP down South. He's not a team player, a thinker or a charismatic personality. He's just an overgrown, arrogant kid with a huge chip on his shoulder.

Scotian said...

Harsh, very harsh, and I really wish I could find a way to disagree with you. I can't though, and the fact we are being governed by such a man is one of thew greatest horrors of my life, and I mean that quite literally, no exaggeration, but then I was one of those warning about just how anti-Canadian and dangerous he was to our way of life since before he ever became PM and started to prove just how scary he truly is to those of us that both pay attention to politics AND understand the basic civics structure of how our government is actually designed to work (something I find an appalling lack of in many Canadians these days).

Harper has always held the majority view of this nation as a tolerant progressive place to live by its citizens in contempt, as you so correctly noted in your post. This image is not as he and other CPCers would have us believe a recent change caused by the 60s, this goes back many decades prior to that, and that the work and legacy of generations of Canadians is held in such contempt by our PM is one of the greatest stains of dishonour our nation has IMHO.