Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part III

Several of the past month’s news stories force us to derive a number of painful yet unsurprising conclusions about Stephen Harper’s caucus, party, and supporters. I present below a list that is, sadly, not exhaustive. To wit, our Harperoids

...are not averse to watching the Museum of Civilization be bizarrely repurposed into a museum for folks who hate museums (by the people who’ve been perfecting a government for folks who hate government and a Canada for folks who hate Canada), which, if past performance has any predictive relevance, will undoubtedly feature as its centrepiece exhibit a gargantuan bronze statue of Christ in a “USA Kicks Ass” t-shirt riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on the back of a triceratops flanked by an honour guard of Navy SEALs;      

...are unmoved when their “populist” prime minister abridges the rights and privileges of his MPs merely because his party’s base is composed of people who expect their representatives to bring onto the floor of the House precisely the kind of obnoxious-to-the-vast-majority-of-Canadians motion Harper knows makes his caucus look like the cast of Porky’s II and is thus desperate to suppress;

...are content to see the protracted domestic detention of a Crown subject whose “confession”, gleaned by American torturers conducting an illegal, unanimously discredited sondergericht in a Cuban gulag, was extorted partly through the threat of being repeatedly rectally raped, by “big black guys,” naturally (the carriers of what the collective American imagination conceives as the most virulent genus of social contamination). Moreover, they agree with Stephen Harper that the Canadian people, though now paying the full cost of Khadr’s room and board, are too fragile to withstand the apocalyptic impact of whatever he would wish to say from behind bars;

...were proud to see their prime minister ornament the sombre dignity of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral by pimping the event for the sake of a cheap, guttersnipe attack on Justin Trudeau, insolently launched atop the still-warm corpses of the Boston Marathon victims. Nor do they overmuch mind that their tax dollars are currently funding a campaign of wretched defamation, the thrust of which is Trudeau’s alleged faggotry, that is so odious that even hardened Harper-fellating hacks like Stephen Woodworth and Brent Rathgeber—who’ve spent the last half-decade proving that they would queue up naked before the front door of 24 Sussex in a February hailstorm to receive the honour of drinking overflowing bowls of the foetid, maggot-speckled swill compounded of venality, illegality, sophistry, and moral cowardice that perpetually sluices forth from the dank cloaca of CPC HQ—find unacceptably repellent. It’s as if they’ve finally realised that, after seven years of forcing his ward-heeling invertebrates to prostitute every single principle they claim to hold, Harper has managed to become the only maquereau in the history of the West too stupid to know how to run a whorehouse at a profit.     

   

The primary, and perhaps only, utility Harper’s conservative lemmings can offer real conservatives is their service as a stark daily reminder that humankind is irremediably unregenerate: the immutable fact of human fallibility is a core conservative belief, and our justified awe before the myriad glories of human compassion, magnanimity, and virtue must sometimes be tempered by an acknowledgment that we have not crawled as far beyond the primeval slime as we think we have, a fact that Canada’s branch of the global confederacy of idiocy argues with irresistible eloquence.

     

Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part I

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

And there shall no torment touch them.

In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die,

And their departure is taken for misery,

And their going from us to be utter destruction,

But they are in peace.

For though they be punished in the sight of men,

Yet is their hope full of immortality.

And having been a little chastened, they shall be greatly rewarded,

For God proved them and found them worthy for Himself.

As gold in the furnace hath He tried them

And received them as a burnt offering.

And in the time of their visitation they shall shine…

(Wisdom 3:1-7) 

 

My theme tonight is of the soul of a nation staggering through its banishment of Astraea, where the righteous are punished and seem to die at the hands of the unwise. 

Of many thorns is made the crown of mundane injustice that spikes the head of the world. Chief among those is humankind’s ceaseless re-crucifixion of Christ; nevertheless, the fruits of the originary catastrophe were joyful. Last Sunday, a far lesser thorn, but one void of healing transcendence, embittered my Paschal meditations. I thought of how Canada has been led for six years by the political equivalent of the impenitent thief—an insolent rabble who daily abuse the nation they consider a trivial non-entity with the mocking demand that she remove herself from the cross fashioned and erected by the very corruption of which they are the most avid practitioners and who have, moreover—in a sick parody of Calvary—proclaimed themselves the authoritative canon by which we may measure our fitness to enter into their transvestite kingdom.  

For “parody” is the most accurate characterisation of Canada’s current civilisational stage: we are become the burlesque—the satiric antithesis—of everything the Fathers of Confederation envisioned and of every article of the heritage of freedom and order we inherited from our founding Anglo-European tradition.

Perhaps we are wandering through a cultural winter made inevitable by our long and dismal thirst for every last dram of intoxicating gibberish distilled by the neighbouring southern tribe who, in elevating their rebarbative hybrid of irreverence and vulgarity to the dignity of a national ethos and in establishing irony as both the engine of their cultural discourse and the presiding genius of their every collective myth (where a vicious civil war, an event internally divisive enough to spark one of history’s largest mass emigrations, becomes a universally approved “revolution” against foreign domination, where legitimate defensive action against an unruly and violent mob far more provoking and dangerous than that which faced the National Guard at Kent State is called a “massacre”, and where naked expansionist aggression, the success of which would have re-imposed slavery on the first colonial jurisdiction to ban it, is called a “war of liberation”).

What else but the perverting influence of a nation that recently crowned two centuries of feverishly prosecuted domestic and foreign moral squalor by twice electorally self-inflicting the kind of Caligulan cretin that other peoples have had to suffer as a brute force imposition can explain Canada’s sudden decision to place the tin wreaths of federal office upon some of the most existentially worthless vessels of intellectual bankruptcy and moral debility to ever ooze out of the free exercise of a Western franchise?

Quite apart from the very real possibility that the last election was stolen, the fact that more than a handful of Canadians were willing to vote for what must be considered Canada’s first objectively degenerate national political organization is an index of the degree to which “decadence” is the only appropriate descriptor of our current cultural character. All that now remains is to enumerate the salient consequences of Canadians’ grant of the legislative keys to a canting racaille that hates common decency, hates the truth, hates the constitution, hates democracy, hates the rule of law, hates Canadian sovereignty and national security—hates Canada, in effect. The fundamental meaning of the election and continued dominance of our first ideologically anti-Canadian (or at least anti-Confederation) national government shall be outlined over the course of the next few posts.

Waterboardin' U.S.A.!*

* Thanks, guys.


If anybody had a notion,
Across the USA,
To tie scum like Dick Cheney,
Down to a board and say:
"We're going to pour some water
Down your throat 'till you die";
I think I'd laugh 'till I cried;
Waterboardin' USA.



Let's review, shall we? So far, the "Change You Can Believe In" dude has re-imposed duties on our softwood lumber, after we committed the unpardonable sin of offering it to American consumers more cheaply than their spoiled, candy-assed domestic industry cares to.

He has refused to remove Maher Arar from the U.S. no-fly list, presumably because Arar's exoneration by way of the conclusive findings of Canada's security services and a comprehensive House inquiry was the unholy work of Al-Qaeda front organisations.

Now, he's decided to offer a blanket amnesty to any and all U.S. national security personnel who tortured detainees during the Bush II phase of the "Global War On Terror" (or "GWOT", as it was called until Obama officially scrapped that preposterous catch-phrase; actually, I prefer George Grant's term, "orgasm at home and napalm abroad,"* as a ready-made phrase for America's current cultural disposition--not GWOT, but OAHANA).

So, are Canadians done with the degrading infatuation with this man that was so humiliating for those of us in the sane community to witness, or will Obama have to turn into a werewolf on live television before we get the message? Is this act of glibly pardoning torturers and killers proof enough of the man's moral vacancy? I say "killers", for we need to recall that, as of 2005 (when the Americans were still counting), one hundred and eight "terrorist" detainees had died violently in U.S. custody. Given that the former commander of Abu Ghraib once estimated that, shockingly, 90% of her inmates were innocent, one needs to assume that most of those dead were guilty of absolutely nothing--they were murdered, in effect.

In a way all too depressingly typical of our urge to privilege tactics over ethics, Obama is being congratulated for expertly negotiating the fine line between his new administration's need to exorcise the past and America's need to retain its messianic morale: he's releasing the notorious "torture memos" in order to provide transparency (so the narrative goes), yet he's ensuring that the operatives who executed what the memos mandated (in "good faith", of course) remain legally protected. Meanwhile, although Obama claims to be open to the possibility of prosecuting the men who actually wrote the memos, he knows very well that a Bush-era act of Congress ties his hands: his predecessors have already pardoned themselves. They self-Forded.

Unbelievably, Obama's latest mendacities are being hailed as a healthy "reckoning". If I were an American national security official, I would simply reckon that I need not fear being held accountable for anything I may do, as Obama considers me absolutely beyond prosecution: I'm safe as long as I'm taking orders. If the orders are vile, that's not my problem. We found this argument odious at Nuremberg; it's coming in bloody handy for our "best friends" now.

The facts are clear: through these memos, the responsible arm of the U.S. Department of Justice (the Office of Legal Counsel) allowed Americans to behave according to a definition of "torture" totally outside international norms and in violation of the Geneva and Hague protocols. The Nietzschean Superman allowed itself to effectively re-define those international norms. When a Western nation's high judiciary removes itself from the spiritual legal college of the international community, we need to worry; it bodes ill. When the chief executive of such a nation finds the removal pardonable, it bodes very ill.

Those who wish to peer into the moral worlds of the men who authored those repugnant memos may wish to consider the case of John Yoo, the brilliant former U.S. Attorney General official and advisor to G.W. Bush who acted as the éminence grise behind most of the key torture memos. Yoo once debated Notre Dame law professor Doug Cassel on human rights issues. They had a notorious exchange:

Cassel: "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

Yoo: "No treaty".

Cassel: "Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...".

Yoo: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that".


Thus, on the question of whether it is legitimate to crush the testicles of a child in order to get information, Yoo says "it depends": sometimes, one needs to be an unconscionable savage. After all, we're protecting civilisation here--protecting it from violent, unscrupulous people.

Rest assured that hundreds of Yoo's underlings took his advice and that hundreds of innocents paid the price in dignity, sanity and in life itself for his ivory tower sadism. Nevertheless, John Yoo shall teach law at the best Ivy League schools; he shall become wealthy from lecture tours and books; he shall spend his middle years laved by the amniotic warmth of Establishment affirmation. He shall die, an old man, in his sleep.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Here's where the term comes from:

The space programme, necessary imperial wars, and the struggle for recognition in the interlocking corporations can provide purpose only for a small minority. Purpose for the majority will be found in the subsidiary ethos of the "fun" culture. It will meet the demands of those who live in affluence but are removed from any directing of the society.

One is tempted to state that the North American ethos is "the orgasm at home and napalm abroad," but in the nervous mobile society, people have only so much capacity for orgasm, and the flickering messages of the performing arts will fill the interstices.

They provide the entertainment and release which technological society requires. The public purpose of art will not be to lead men to the meaning of things, but to titivate, cajole, and shock them into fitting into a world in which the question of meaning is not relevant. The humanities in the universities will become handmaidens in this task.

George Grant, "The University Curriculum"

Stumbling Towards Veronica on the Via Dolorosa: A Paschalogue

"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and 'Hallelujah' is our song". (Pope John Paul II)

"This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw these things". (Ezekiel 16:46-50)

"For the sake of ten just men, I will not destroy [Sodom]". (Genesis 18:32)



During the early days of my evolution into one of the worst Catholics in the Western Hemisphere, as a child crawling through Quebec's post-Quiet Revolution Catholic school system, I felt fatally attracted to the angry, militant Christ--the one who whips the money-changers out of the Temple with a length of knotted hemp after busting up their tills into splinters, the Christ who snarls "Get thee behind me, Satan!" when his most loyal apostle tries to divert him from his mission. To a fundamentally angry, alienated kid with a taste for extreme states and a longing to see the exterminating power of divine wrath visited upon his enemies, that was totally cool.

What occurred to me much later was the clear thematic unity underlying the only outbursts of outrage the scriptures attribute to Christ. In both cases, sacrifice--our highest duty to God--is being thwarted by the venal and the weak. Peter cannot stand the idea of being without his charismatic leader; he sees the disciples as a gang, and he's terrified of the profound vulnerability Christ is demanding of himself and of his followers. He cannot yet accept that Christ's mission requires total surrender, a ruthless and reckless giving away of self, without hope of any return on investment.

In the Temple, unscrupulous brokers are charging the poorest of the poor extortionate rates for something without which they cannot offer sacrifices to their God, without which they cannot properly worship and, thus, cannot be fully human. The money-changers are essentially robbing their victims of their humanity and turning their lost dignity and violated souls into equity.

It appears that, for Christ, the most odious sin--the one sin vile enough to move even the Prince of Peace to acts of violence--is the sin of forcibly removing from the already wretched their means of being fully human. This was the sin of Sodom--not the orgiastic homosexuality that haunts the lurid fantasies of barking fundamentalist preachers, but that the city, in its "excess of food and prosperous ease...did not aid the poor and needy". From this it follows that those who pursue prosperous ease whilst failing to aid the poor and needy have earned a most notorious soubriquet by dint of prophetic proto-canonical fiat: they are "Sodomites".

To us, they may be "capitalists", or "classical liberals", or "laissez-faire", or "Chicago School", or "neoconservatives", or "libertarians", but, to God (and, incidentally, to the many Evangelical/Pentecostal Biblical literalists who sit in Stephen Harper's caucus), they are Sodomites. And it appears that the ten just men (if so many yet remain) who've managed to stave off divine annihilation on behalf of an ingrate nation have scriptural sanction to bludgeon Canada's money-changers out of our temples--literally.

Thus ask yourself "What would Jesus do?" when formulating an appropriate response to Stephen Harper's government only if you're prepared to wield a baseball bat in illegal ways; it's becoming increasingly difficult to be authentically Christian without risking arrest, and perhaps that's how it should be.

In Stephen Harper's Canada, every day is an anti-Easter--a paschal parody. Instead of an empty tomb and a risen Christ, we get a cultural sepulchre redolent of the stench of Canada's rotting heritage and a national morale plummeting to heretofore unplumbed depths. The latest stage in the descent is the Abousfian Abdelrazik fiasco, a revolting injustice ably documented by dauntless blogger Dr. Dawg and journalist Thomas Walkom (among a very few others).

Basically, Abdelrazik is being refused re-entry into Canada as a "security threat" even though every responsible agency (including the RCMP) says he is not a threat. Harper is keeping the man in a wretched Sudanese exile, where he's spent the last six years--away from his children. There are no charges against him; there's not a shred of evidence to suggest he's done or will do anything remotely harmful to Canadian security. There is only the implacable hatred, corrosive indifference and Stalinist, technocratic arrogance of Harper's External Affairs apparatchiks and Public Safety commissars. To them, Abdelrazik's just another brown-skinned loser of whom there are plenty more where he came from (unfortunately) and who never really belonged here anyway. Good riddance, and the law be damned.

If every injustice re-crucifies Christ (as the Sisters of Notre Dame taught me it did), then this Easter is not just the ritual, abstract memorialising of an event far distant from me in time and space. It is also the hour when faceless government cowards, paid by my wages, sit beneath the suspended bodies of the weak and the poor, not to weep nor offer a draught of vinegar, but to parcel out the sad pieces of their lacerated humanity and to throw dice for whatever about them cannot be ripped into shreds.

Have a chocolate bunny on me, Mr. Harper--you worthless, contemptible pile of ordure.

"Justice", Alberta Style: The Inevitable Bush-Bashing Post

* With apologies to Ryan and Joël, proud Albertans, proud progressives, and braver men than I.


I guess being lucky enough to sit on an ocean's worth of the planet's second most expensive natural resource doesn't make Albertans different enough from the rest of us, for it seems they always feel the need to deepen, to sharpen and, finally, to revel in their difference.

Sure, this is often entertaining. Sometimes, though, it’s just embarrassing--for everyone involved. Like an aged uncle who ruins a wedding reception by stripping down to his briefs and attempting the macarena after too many rum and cokes, our Albertan brothers and sisters just don't seem to know when to stop.

Here's my case, in three exhibits.


Exhibit A:

George W. Bush chooses Calgary as the venue for his inaugural exercise in public rehabilitation, signalling to the world his belief that Alberta is the last planetary redoubt of support for an American ex-president loathed in his own country and thus chronically deprived of even the most meagre domestic media platform from which to dribble his preposterous apologetics.

Albertans happily confirm this belief by sending over a thousand of their business élite to the event. The crowd gives Bush a sympathetic hearing--with one of them opining that the plutocrat cum war criminal "came across as a pretty good human being". The anti-Bush protest, a pitifully small affair, is left up to people with names like "Splits the Sky"--moving me to the anguished conclusion that, in Alberta, even the sane people are cracked.


Exhibit B:

Most Canadians know Mayerthorpe as the scene of the most tragic catastrophe in our nation's policing history since the Battle of Duck Lake. Quite a few Albertans, though, seem to view Mayerthorpe as the scene of a terrible miscarriage of justice. According to these amateur clerks-at-the-law, two men who materially aided the cold-blooded slaughter of four young Royal Canadian Mounted Police constables are entirely innocent "scapegoats" whose indictment was an arbitrary act of official vindictiveness and who've had a "huge toll" taken from them since their arrest (more toll, we assume, than was taken from the murdered officers).


Exhibit C:

Most Canadians feel that Omar Khadr has a right to be tried by his peers (i.e. other Canadians). Many Albertans disagree, though: along with the always-interesting folks in British Columbia, Albertans are quite eager for Khadr to stay just where he is, facing a jester's assizes that even his U.S. Navy lawyer considers an absurd affront to international law and American values.

Presumably, Albertans' main objection is that Canada would provide Khadr with a fair trial--one operating according to post-Magna Carta norms--whereas the American process would provide a more gratifying fast-track to the noose, electric chair, gas chamber, firing squad or injection room regardless of pettifogging, pre-9/11 niceties like the distinction between "guilt" and "innocence".

So, let's review, shall we? When it comes to giving the benefit of the doubt to two of their own who committed the slight ethical lapse of shuttling a heavily armed known criminal to the scene of a multiple cop-killing, Albertans are all heart, begging the Crown to give the poor guys a break.

When the man personally responsible for triggering one of the century's worst bloodbaths arrives to prattle on about his ignominiously failed presidency, Albertans roll out the red carpet and wax sentimental about what a "decent" chap he is.

When a fifteen year old is captured, tortured and dragged into a kangaroo court for allegedly committing a murder for which the evidence is threadbare at best, Albertans gleefully watch him rot and cheer on his torment.

Thus, the norms underpinning Albertan "justice" can be divined through the following deeply held beliefs: accessories to a multiple cop killing are victims of a vengeful Crown and must be freed immediately; an American president who orchestrated the massacre of tens of thousands must have his ass kissed, and a Canadian kid (ethnically Arab, provocatively) must be punished, perhaps capitally, for most probably not killing a single soldier.

These are precisely the facts I shall have in mind next time a representative of God-fearin' Albertan righteousness lectures the rest of us about our bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime "decadence". I know decadence when I see it, and, right now, it is home, home on the range.

And Now, A Celebrity Endorsement...

Actor Rupert Everett has undoubtedly burned a few bridges by uttering them, but his views on the last two Masters of the Universe seem pinched from my last post (is reading "Dred Tory" a guilty pleasure among a certain Hollywood clique?).

He complains that "War-On-Terror" era Britons have gotten soft:

The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000 feet above the war zone to avoid getting hit.

He has even harsher words for the United States:

I'm totally off the States now. The reaction to 9/11 and then George Bush - really, they've got very blobby as a nation. Now they are whiny victims whose language is entirely taken from two TV shows - "Friends" and "Sex And The City" - and there's nothing sexy about them any more. And that kind of semi-blindness about the rest of the world, which was attractive when America was exciting, is really unattractive now.

That "Sex And the City" dig was quite apt. Why didn't I think of that...?