I read this, which reminds me of this, so I post this, and I get this comment, which makes me think this: “Every time I think I’ve had some brilliant insight and I try to share it, I run into the brick walls of compartmentalized, literal thinking.” And then I get this other comment which makes me write this.
On the weekend I downloaded the results available at Elections Canada and did some number crunching. Thanks to the miracle of the spreadsheet, this was something that only took about a half-hour to do. The numbers remind us that the Conservatives only got 10.4 million votes, while the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc combined got 15 million. Thus Stephen Harper is full of shit, which is pretty much nothing new, as far as many are concerned.
As for talk of an alliance with Separatists, I too think this is bullshit. Since when as the Bloc been a threat? Since 1995, thirteen years ago. Now they are a Quebec chauvinist party who represent Quebec self-interest in the federal government. Given that a lack of representation and fair dealing throughout the 20th Century is what led Quebec to believe they needed to separate, perhaps the Bloc’s place in the House over the past fifteen years has been sufficient to defuse that threat. Yes, on paper, they’re Separatists. Also, on paper, the Pope believes in Jesus. But the Bloc is not a threat, and like the Pope, probably enjoy their political power and influence more than they do their ideology.
Which is exactly where Harper as gone so wrong – trying to mix his power with his noxious ideology. Seventeen million people did not vote for the Conservatives. Seventeen million Canadians rejected their ideals. Yet, with ten million votes, we found them in power. And what a Chomskyian fall – by that meaning their undoing followed Chomsky’s usual analysis that governments get into trouble when they fuck with powerful interests. All through the pre-election Parliament, the Liberals refused to challenge Harper’s regime. This is what earned my disgust with Stephen Dion, not the Carbon Tax. Now that they’ve finally stood up for themselves and for their representatives, I look forward to Dion as a Prime Minister. And yet, it was the threat to remove their public funding which became the straw that broke this camel’s back. Well, whatever. Lets bygones be bygones – the Separatists are not a threat, nor are they treasonous etc. Dion is no longer being pusillanimous. Harper is no longer appearing reasonable and respectable. Bring on the future.
One constitutional lawyer (also a University of Toronto professor), was on Don Newman’s Politics last evening (Mon Dec 1; begins at 11:19). The talk was a lack of historical precedence, in terms of giving this legitimacy. So what? Why does that even need to be a concern? Can’t this Parliament set a precedent? Indeed, this whole scenario is a heartwarming reminder that there are stop-gaps in place to prevent dictatorships and tyrannies. Mind you, that take on it might not be valid if the governing party was in the Majority. Nevertheless, what I saw when watching Layton, Dion and Duceppe’s news conference last evening was history, an historic handshake like similar foundational handshakes in national histories. John Ralston Saul likes to talk about the agreement between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, and how this arrangement laid the foundations for Confederation. A coalition government at this time could be the foundation of collaborative government which would be appropriate to the networked 21st Century. For all we know, this type of thing could lead to a revised Constitution in fifty years.
Repeated accusations of the parties playing partisan politics, and using the Bloc as a denigration, is entirely missing this point. Big picture, long term, we should have a government where the parties work together, where they represent a multitude of voices and different ideas, and this could free us from rule by one-party ideologues the likes of Harper, or for that matter, the likes of Chretien. Further, the Reform party (from which Harper sprang) found its first members among those who were angry with the Trudeau-era Liberals (who, granted, worked with the NDP during one of their terms). The point here being that breaking one-party majority rules who just piss off a lot of people off is probably a good thing for all. Historians may look at this as an evolution of politics which began with the return to Minority Parliaments after the Chretien years. Minorities which lead to Coalitions which lead to fairer representation at the Federal level. If anything, (and if they can get this right), this may enable future under-represented voices to be heard. And one can hope that amidst the economic stimuli, they find the time to bring in Proportional Representation, since it’s now to their mutual advantage.
In my excitement last night, I posted on as my Facebook status: ‘I am so proud of my parliament right now. This is Canada’s Obama moment. Wow.’ What I meant was that a bold, change-oriented, imaginative thing was underway, which put into contrast the status-quo we are used to. The election of Barack Obama was a result of a majority of Americans consciously choosing a different path, one that lead them into the 21st Century. Obama promises a government of transparency and of networked sophistication.
As Canadians, we aren’t there yet. But a majority of Canadians consciously chose to vote for parties other than the Conservatives, who would never lead us there to begin with. The five million more who voted past the Conservatives ten million will now feel like they’ve gotten the government they were asking for. They (and we, as I was one of them) deserve to be represented, and for our common desire to see a better country given a chance to be implemented.
Harper C Party: I’m not ideological enough to be scared by Harper. More or less I find him uninspiring and disappointing. I think the Conservative strength is in their fiscal policy: I for one am looking forward to opening one of their registered savings accounts in January. But money matters are not inspiring matters, and when their cuts about arts created an uproar, the question shifted to not whether they were justified or not, but to the perception that the Conservatives don’t care about culture. Mr. Harper positively beamed when talking about the talents of his kids. He’s a proud father. It is striking that the question was even asked – when was the last time arts-n-culture were part of an electoral campaign?
I’ve admitted in the past that I respect Mr. Harper. I like the no-nonsense attitude, yes. But I’ll never vote conservative for as long as I live, and that has everything to do with their hard-hardheartedness. Maybe I respect Harper because he comes across as the only intelligent one of the bunch. He’s not a windbag like Jason Kenney, nor as much of an unprofessional jerk like Jim ‘don’t invest in Ontario’ Flaherty – a stinky old fish from the Harris regime (which John Ralston Saul described as ‘intentionally evil’ in his new book, writing about their attacks on the school system). At my riding’s All Candidates Meeting, Gerrard Kennedy tried to scare-monger by describing Harper as Harris. Puhlease. Harris was a typical stupid bully, whereas Harper is just the self-righteous smart kid who gets great grades and makes everyone feel bad. There’s a big difference. It is notable that they gravitated to the same political spectrum however.
Underlying conservative arguments is a not only past-oriented romanticism, but also an ignorance which feeds bigotry. They are ultimately the party of stupid patriarchs, and we’ve had quite enough of that.
The Conservatives display financial expertise. But it seems to be the only thing they can speak about with authority. Since life is about more than money, I’d appreciate more well-rounded fuck-saying people in my government.
Day – G-Party: Ms. Day was fantastic, bringing up obscure facts to educate the public on. I’m increasingly thinking I may vote Green. That’s all I need to say I think. I hope she impressed many people to do the same.
Dion L-Party: Mr. Dion spoke with authority, but what an uphill battle. He cowered for the past 18 months since becoming leader, and when the election was called brought up the fact that Harper was violating his own fixed-election date law. WTF? I mean seriously, what … the … fuck !??? You mean to tell me the reason we haven’t had his election sooner was because Dion seriously respected that silly law, which is obviously of no consequence? Does he really want to be PM? You mean, he would have contently waited out his role as leader of the Opp with the calendar marked with Harper’s fixed-election date? God I wish they’d made Ignatieff leader when they had the chance.
Besides that, Green Shift … whatever. I don’t care what it’s called or what it costs, I want to be able to breath outside when I’m 90. All parties seem to agree on this except for the stupid Conservatives.
Layton – N Party: Layton did a good job of agreeing with Day. That wasn’t a bad thing, since it reflected sensibility. Jack Layton isn’t someone I have any big problems with, and he’d make an excellent Prime Minister. The NDP tend to seem shifty because they come across as impractical (vs. the Conservative practicality). He made a good point in suggesting that if citizens want a better government, they should try electing one which doesn’t start with an L or a C (not his words, my interpretation). I would like to see the NDP appear more well-rounded and stop catering to relatively minor issues like fucking bank fees. I mean, banks suck of course, but I don’t need the leader of the minority opposition treating it like a mission more important than child care and health care and all the rest. The NDP have done a great job in keeping the Conservative budgets from being overly-crazy, and I commend them on that.
Duceppe – Q Party: Duceppe was irrelevant to English Canada.
I saw the image in the blog posting, positing the fate of one of the characters. Because we know that the story takes place at a post-apocalyptic time, and thinking this was a leaked shot from an upcoming episode, I imagined the wildflowers were those of British Columbia spring, depicting some time in the far-off post-catastrophe future. The camera would rotate about it, there’d be some slow motion fluttering of cloth, angelics and whatever.
Then I Google the file name and find this. Still, on yesterday’s walk, I thought about the wild flowers, the future, and the simplicity of the character’s supposed fate. And made the image my Desktop wallpaper.
Because of the context in which I first encountered it, the image has poetic resonance. But had I found it’s Photoshoped goodness in its original context, I wouldn’t have reason to think differently of wildflowers.
I recently decided that my current website is actually version 5.2, not 4.4. This needs some explaining.
I learned web design through books on the advice of a friend. My first book (Elizabeth Castro’s HTML 4) along with View Source cut-n-paste got me writing my first rudimentary website in 2000. It wasn’t until early 2002 (through Geocities) that I learned how to FTP. It was a proud moment when I was able for the first time to see one of my jpegs on someone else’s computer via the net.
During the summer of 2002, I built my first website. It was hosted on Geocities and later moved to Instant Coffee‘s server.
This went through a number of body-colour variations (and upper-right hand graphics) before it ended up as it remains today.
The Way-Back Machine shows me a site on the Instant Coffee server from February 2003 which I called then Version 4, meaning it was the 4th design revision I’d gone through since the above # 1, before I scrapped all this alpha-draft code later that summer.
My site, Feb 2003
When, in August 2003, I tried to apply what I’d learned in the previous year by building my first complicated site, using Youngpup.net‘s ypSlideOutMenus code. This page (as was proper for the time) even had a splash page.
In August 2004, I again worked on redesigning my site, to incorporate what I’d learned in the previous year. This site used CSS and my then basic understanding of PHP Switches and MySql.
I left this site for two years, until August 2006, when I began working on another redesign. However, while I began the basic layout during August, I backburnered it until December, and made it public in January 2007, when I acquired my timothycomeau.com domain name and new server space (until this time, the previous websites had been sub-directories of my host. The 2002-2003 sites had been found at tim.instantcoffee.org or instantcoffee.org/timothy and then the 2004-2006 site had been at goodreads.ca/timothy). For this reason, I sometimes refer to this design as ‘the 2006 one’ or ‘the 2007 one’. I’ve pretty much decided from here on to think of it as ‘the 2006 one’ since that’s how I’ve come to consistently remember it.
Last December I began to redesign the site, to once again update it according to my expanded know-how. Because I felt I’d simply redesigned the menu and updated the logo, I felt that it was a version of #4 (most recently 4.4) and hence, until recently, I’d considered it such. But, I’ve come to think of the present site as a different ’2008 version’ and figured I should just consider it a #5. Since the .dot numbers come somewhat arbitrarily via whatever small improvements I make here in there, I figured it’s present state is about two modifications away from where it was at in January (when I considered 4.2) hence, version 5.2.
Sometime within the next thirty years, the area of Yonge St incorporating Sam the Record Man, Dundas Square, up to Bloor, will be preserved in all its classless glory as a heritage district of late 20th Century.
I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not so sure the sentiments herein expressed would resonate with early 20-somethings who hate old art as being too much Church-stuff. I’m also not sure how many 20-something artists are dealing with legacy-Marxists on a regular basis, as I have over the past decade.
***
One of the lessons of the 20th Century was that the world changes every ten years. Each decade compressed the changes of a mediaeval century, and yet the arts don’t seem to have clued into this. My reason for pursuing the arts came from it’s humanism, as expressed especially in the 1960s, which I now recognize as being part of the Western World’s healing process following World War II. As a teenager, the Time-Life series on artists produced at that time were an introduction to a cultural world that I was not being taught in my rural Nova Scotia school.
The humanistic aspect of the arts is still what politicians and journalists are likely to throw at us – the arts encourage ‘life’ with mystical overtones. I now understand why that was propagated in the years following the Second World War, but by the time I went to art-school (following the idea that a cultured life was the one the most worth living) I ran into bitter and disagreeable adults who hated the word `beauty`, hated the word `humanism`, and instead taught me to be angry with capitalism, patriarchy, corporations and the other suspects. Thus enraged, I was then encouraged to express my thoughts on the matter through obfuscation, conceptual trickery, (and those other usual techniques) not in writing – since I was expected to be only barely literate – but my making something to be exhibited in a plain white room.
Once out of art school, I thought of myself as a young professional trained in my field and yet found that income-via-arts-employment was rare, the already-expensive credentialing inadequate, and the grant system to be more of a nepotistic lottery, and no one was as smart as they thought they were; more or less they were merely quoters, not thinkers. Old ideas, not new. As long as they could throw a quote at you from one of those bitter French men (they who hated capitalism, humanism and the usual) then they considered themselves not only smart, but superior, and it didn’t matter if their day jobs did not coincide with their training. We were all channeled into a bohemian life of obscurity and intellectual self-deception.
My sense then is that the arts professionals of Canada have totally lost track of the game. They are very quick to adopt the thinking of foreigners while denigrating their home culture. Their greatest ambition is to leave the country. Trained to be hateful of contemporary society, they are too disagreeable to be employable by the corporations who could use them. And here it comes back to the humanistic heritage – your average person who respects the arts does so because of that humanistic heritage, and yet the too-cool-for-school artist today will quickly mock this superficial understanding.
Why then, is there little art is schools? Perhaps because ’sensible’ adults don’t want their kids around the bad influence of either hippy-dippy mystics or disgruntled communists. Those of us who understand why that is an oversimplification and an unfair stereotype are the ones who probably already have their kids involved in the arts. They’re not as rare as we may think, and highlights the political thinking against universalizing art education – politicians think parents-who-want-it find a way outside of the public system. It’s a lifestyle option, and an ethnically specific one at that.
My own, disillusioned sense, is that the arts do not have the value invested into them by 19th Century European snobs. I never use the word `disinterested` for example, except when talking Kantian aesthetics. The writings of John Ruskin I find to be mostly unreadable due to being obsolete. Clement Greenberg, nor Andy Warhol, ever heard the word ‘email’ in their lifetime, let alone ‘world-wide-web’. For that matter, Warhol never got the chance to use Photoshop.
Industrial manufacturing has given us a world of aesthetically pleasing products, and talent for image making is now found in the worlds of design and illustration. (Jutxapoz magazine). Installation art tends to amount to bad set design, and performance art to bad acting. I see better art videos on YouTube than I do in galleries, and on YouTube they don’t try to be art. If you consider the Mona Lisa to be the first viral image, it’s easy to extend the consideration to how much a viral video has passed the test of the audience, making it legitimate art.
These are examples of how our world has changed, and I feel like ‘the visual arts’ are a fossilized cultural product from at most, the 1980s. Future historians will look to illustration, design, and films to gauge our culture, and especially the YouTube archives. Like the photography of a century ago, it’s the stuff taken with Kodaks that are of interest, not the stuff trying to imitate romantic paintings.
If we want to have galleries in our towns and cities, it is important that we all understand why they are important. I still value art for it’s humanism. But our culture is so creative outside of galleries, and it is this creativity that is accessible to people who haven’t studied art. The argument shouldn’t then be to have an art for those professionals – it should be accessible to all. A life in the arts should broaden one’s possibilities, not narrow them to the life of a clique.
When people talk about `art` these days, I no longer know what they’re talking about. I suspect they are talking about some hipster club they don’t want a corporate dork to join. But that exclusion denies someone who needs art is their life from having it – and the result is Canadian culture in 2008.
There are two types of artist I know: those who love the council-system and those who dislike it for encouraging ‘safe’ work.
I’m of the latter sort. My feelings are that the council system is made up of juries who are into one particular type of art. So, the assumption being that if you’re a painter specializing in the type of portraits and landscapes appreciated by grandmothers, you don’t have a chance of getting a grant. The so-called ‘safe’ work is whatever’s hip, and that’s impossible to pin down from year to year: it’s a fashion, it moves through communities as people imitate one another, it’s original source unknown and unimportant. In today’s globalized culture, the determination of what’s hip is dominated by bigger players, and is probably documented and originated in magazines like Artforum rather than C Magazine. (That’s a specifically visual-arts reference. There was a blurb I saw on a TV news channel scrawl saying that hip-hop is the least well funded of the all the art genres by the Canada Council, and yet hip-hop is obviously the most relevant music genre to most young people. The evident bias there is an example of my point).
I got a couple of grants in my time, and I appreciated them. They allowed me to execute projects without having to invest my own money, of which I had none. Looking back, I’m not sure if these projects meant much to society as a whole, which is why I no longer take the ‘art is important to society’ argument too seriously. I’ve come to think of art as something more private and personal. And I feel I make more money working than I would by relying on the hand-outs of grants and prizes. I dislike the current-system of cultural funding as it exists, but I wouldn’t support scrapping it altogether.
What I don’t like about this type of ‘taxpayer bitching’ is how the ‘angry conservative’ stereotype falls into ‘I don’t want them spending my money…’. I’ve always found this reason to be nonsense. I don’t understand why we don’t teach people to think of taxes as that salary we citizens pay toward the functioning of the state. Imagine if employers started saying, ‘I don’t want you spending my money on drugs, or drunken weekends, or McDonald’s hamburgers, or home stereo systems, or …’ etc. Employers know where to draw that line in minding their own business. We in turn should trust our governments to spend their funding responsibly, and when, as often happens, it is exposed that they haven’t been doing so, there should be scandal, there should be apologies and firings, and we appreciate the reforms that follow. Corruption should never be the norm, but it should never be unexpected either. ‘Show me a completely smooth operation,’ Frank Herbet wrote in one of his Dune novels, ‘and I’ll show you a cover up. Real boats rock.’ 1 In other words, human beings are never perfect, and we shouldn’t expect that.
It should not be the case however that the citizen comes to think of culture as an irresponsible expenditure, and yet that has been allowed to happen within my lifetime. We, as a first world nation, can afford to encourage the imagination. God knows we need to in this country.
We pay taxes and we expect a functioning public service and stable infrastructure in return. We aren’t the United States with a military industrial complex, wherein the government subsidizes global violence. We could instead have a cultural-industrial complex and the most we’d have to suffer is visual pollution and bad music, but it would be preferable to a painful and ugly death. Of course, this isn’t on the table because the money is currently in War, and so when we hear talk of Canadian governments trying to attract investment in science, we should ask, science for what? The fact that the Cdn Gov blocked the sale of MDA to land-mine-manufacturing ATK this past week shows that we aren’t immune to such questions and considerations.
When we are told triumphantly that the provincial and/or federal government is running a budget surplus, it is evident that they could be doing much more for the citizens. Unfortunately, a penny-pinching mentality has taken hold, which may be useful as private citizens (I’m currently in a penny-pinching mode myself) but I’m not sure it serves the public interest. If anything, governments should be more forthcoming about their plans for a surplus. Paying off some debt – fine. But holding on to it indefinitely? Not so fine. Are you trying to accumulate interest on the monies so that it grows further? Ok, sure. But when are we going to get a day-care system, and a guaranteed income, and bigger minimum wages, and fatter old-age pension cheques, and investment in affordable housing, better and more frequent public transit, lower tuition rates, cancellation of student-loan debt, and on and on…?
The government still seems to think that its constituents are ignorant people with personal attachments to numbers on pay-stubs who can somehow magically trace those exact numbers into the pockets of the so-called welfare mom all pissy because they’ve been legislated into civilized compassion. Soupcoff echoes this argument when she says ‘Canadians are accustomed to having their money transferred from their own bank accounts to those of the nation’s broadcasters, sculptors and poets.’ Soupcoff then plays a class-card, by writing, ‘Government funding ensures that every time these affluent aesthetes sit down to hear a live piano concerto, they enjoy a nice subsidy from lower-class taxpayers, who are sitting at home reading their Harry Potter books and listening to their Nine Inch Nails CDs. It just doesn’t seem fair.’
I for one have been to a live piano concerto, and that was when I could afford it under the TSO’s program of selling $12 tickets to those under 30. Since I’m now over 30, I haven’t been to the TSO in four years. I did however buy the latest Nine Inch Nails CD this past week, to listen to when I want a change from the classical music I used to stream from CBC 2 and which I now get from alternative outlets like Classical 96.3 or icebergradio.com. My personal example here to say that there’s room in life for both Harry Potter and Tolstoy, and that Nine Inch Nails is actually pretty good.
Class-based access to culture is the result of both education and pricing. But it’s also a question of interest. So what if some people just aren’t interested? I’m not interested in Harry Potter (I haven’t read any of the books or seen any of the movies) and in this binary I’m lucky: this makes me look like I made ‘the right choice’ to people like Harold Bloom, who would be happy to see me reading Macbeth if I was interested in magic. But if millions are loving Harry Potter, clearly I’m missing out on something. It’s just a question of taste. (And while Bloom has a point in questioning it’s literary value, life needs the occasional piece of candy).
Greater funding should translate in greater accessibility. The reward of the arts should be available to all. This argument justifies libraries: publicly funded knowledge made accessible. Would Soupcoff suggest we shut down all libraries because people can buy whatever books they want at Indigo/Chapters? My understanding is that type of argument would have been made in the 19th Century, when publicly funded childhood schooling was considered controversial. But we’ve come to take democratized education and accessible knowledge for granted. We are in the process of achieving a future society where the arts will also be taken for granted and be thus ensured against this type of financial short-sightedness. But we are not there yet.
Perhaps it needs to be said that the argument for ceasing funding was allowed to take hold because the arts were allowed to become incomprehensible. (It did not have to be that way, but that is past. The mistake is allowing it to continue).
To that end, Marni Soupcoff and I agree that, “The decision about what to watch — American Idol or A Beachcombers Christmas — should be one people make for themselves,’ but we do not agree that, ‘[it is]not one the government makes for them (or at least tries to: Despite its best efforts, the government still hasn’t succeeded in getting more than a handful of us to watch CBC television, even if we do pay for it).’ The Government doesn’t make us to anything. As for the CBC, our ‘failure to watch’ is indicative of the corporation’s mismanagement and cultural stupidity. They thought we wanted to watch ‘The One‘.
The traditionally called Higher Arts are more often than not rendered distasteful by being poorly taught, and those like myself who pursue them do so either because they weren’t taught at all (as in my case; no opportunity was taken to ruin them for me) or because the person has a inexplicable passion for them (which also used to be true in my case). Soupcoff: ‘But let’s be honest — who makes up the majority of the audiences of symphonies, art galleries and ballets? It’s middle-class and rich people who can afford to pay for their own entertainment.’
I hate ballet and I don’t understand why Karen Cain is a house-hold name and Jeff Wall is not. Nor, for that matter, why Rex Harrington’s retirement made it onto the CTV news in 2003. But it doesn’t bother me that it’s funded. I went to art school because I wanted to study the arts. For that I was seen by my conventional friends as being weird. I think it’s weird that Toronto has a ballet school, but that’s just to say I sympathize with its potential students, and I’m glad I live in a society where young girls who want to destroy their feet and starve themselves for the pleasure of jumping into the arms of a gay man have a place where they can go and feel welcome. In other words, it’s nice that people have options when it comes to doing something with their lives. And whatever encourages the broadening of those options is a good thing, even if it does to some seem weird.
To that end, we have the arts: it is the realm of imagination where alternative ways to think and live one’s life are fostered. For example, we have been progressively moving toward a more peaceful and ‘civilized’ (in the mannered since of the term) soceity2, inspired by the examples offered to us in movies and novels. Consider how Star Trek‘s universally acknowledged attraction is it’s vision of a future of inclusion and peace-on-Earth. But Star Trek is an American show and offers an American vision of an American future. If the CBC were living up to its mandate, it would support a Canadian future-based program, to give us some sense of what our future might be like. History is necessary, the present is obvious, but what kind of world are we moving toward? A valid question. We have too many future scenarios that offer dystopias, and we need more utopian ones to inspire us. This is not a job that funding ‘math and science’ will do for us. If the math-n-science is to take us to the Moon and Mars, ask where the idea of going off-world came in the first place.
On the April 7th 2008 episode of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Paikin asked former Ontario Finance minister Greg Sorbara how high the arts rated in the government’s priorities:
Steve Paikin: Honestly, honestly, how high up the ladder are cultural institutions in the Minster of Finance’s play-book?’ Greg Sorbara: During my time they were really high up. SP: They’re not education, and they’re not health care. GB: You know what, they are what creates a healthy city and they are the way in which we educate ourselves. But the fact is, the future of this city and of this region is in arts and creativity and the production of those arts and the dissemination of that creativity. (Mp3 at 14:50)
Sobera’s answer was wonderful, but I think it could have also been answered this way: ‘what’s the point of having health care and education if you’re going to spend your life bored?’
Daniel Richler once described Mike Harris and Ralph Klein as examples of educational failure, and since hearing him say that 3 I’ve always kept that in mind. The people who Marni Soupcoff is pandering to are educational failures. I don’t care what kind of credentials an MBA or the like amounts to if your indifference to the arts has become openly hostile, and if you’re prone to use words like ‘loser’ when thinking of them. If that’s the case, your education has been no such thing. If you managed to go to university, you paid for your job training and partially subsidized your voluntary lobotomization. An educated person can be indifferent to the arts, but they should at least recognize their value.
As I’ve written, I’m not that much of a fan of the arts-councils. But I support public funding of culture. I just think the process could use reformation. If the Canadian Council was able to fund Soupcoff to go on a self-education sabbatical during which she expose herself to what the best of human beings have been able to achieve, perhaps she might be grateful. However, you can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Or, as I’ve heard recently, ‘you can cure ignorance but you can’t cure stupid’.
I’d like to see politicians and journalists start pandering to this societies’ educated rather than to its stupid.
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1. Chapterhouse Dune, 1985, p. 119
2. My position is that the democratic deficit is to blame for increasing violence: governance is disconnected from the citizens who want more social services and less military spending.
3. On the defunct CBC Friday night program out of Vancouver; name of which I don’t remember, circa 2002
