Loathe as I usually am to agree with anything written by Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente, I DO agree with her recent analysis of the two political environments on this continent of ours…
“The election next door is a battle of titans. Ours is a battle of the midgets. Instead of a warrior, and a charismatic transformer, we’ve got a mean-eyed guy with the charm of a ball-peen hammer, pitted against a man so clueless that half his own party hopes he’ll lose.”
Have you watched any of the coverage of the Democratic National Convention?
Obama’s soaring acceptance rhetoric, sprinkled with hard, home truths about the choice the United States faces in November. The razor-sharp, glittering knife edge of Hilary Clinton’s call for unity — cutting through all the doubts and grumbling — combined with her own sly, sardonic dismissals of John McCain and the Republican agenda. And then, there was the heart-warming tones of America’s new patriarch, Bill Clinton: inspiring listeners to think back to what seemed to be a simpler, safer, more comfortable time…a time Obama might revisit, should he become President. A time when America led the world by example as a true superpower…and not as an overextended, pariah hyperpower.
But what do we have in Canada? A Prime Minister who is the equivalent of Doctor Who’s barmy arch-enemy The Master: a man so obsessed with a single thought (to destroy the Liberals as a political force), that everything he does is subsumed by this overriding ambition, to the exclusion of all else. His petty cuts to arts funding, his pathetic cuts to the GST (how’s that going for you, by the way…saving a lot of money?), his trust that the free-market will solve problems (because Ronald Reagan proved THAT worked spectacularly), and his desire to appeal to “Tim Horton’s” Canadians and not “Starbucks” Canadians. This is (crude) code for his divisive desire to reduce the dialogue in this country to its lowest common denominator. Harper scrapes the bottom of the bucket…and he’s succeeded in scattering the resulting muck all over Canada.
Unfortunately, the opposition is ineffective and uninspiring. Stephan Dion just can’t seem to get a leg up, Jack Layton sounds tired with his same-old, same-old, Gilles Duceppe is happy to be the devil of chaos in Quebec, and Elizabeth May hasn’t done much to make the Green Party a force to be reckoned with. Five leaders in search of authentic, honest, inspiring leadership…and the result is no leadership at all.
No titans. No giants. No idealistic crusaders or warriors. No Trudeaus, no MacDonalds, no Pearsons, no Lauriers. They’ve been consigned to the mythical past…leaving behind no successors. At this point, I simply want an election to get all this headache-inducing bile out of the way…I’m sick and tired of listening to sniping about nothing but sniping! Just have the vote, dammit…a vote over nothing but who has the bigger balls. No soaring rhetoric, no inspiring ideals…just simple, disgusting pettiness, one-upsmanship, and vindictiveness. Let’s hear from the Globe & Mail’s Rick Salutin:
“Stephen Harper is set to call an election not because he knows where he wants to take us. As Liberal Leader Stephan Dion notes, he offers no clear agenda. He is calling this election, he admits, solely because he knows what the Liberals, who AREN’T in power, WOULD do in order to stop him. This is leadership based on the unbearable thought of others leading.”
“Since he knows most Canadians wont’ support his vision, which would be saleable in the U.S., he’s reduced to undermining what Canadians DO want. It sounds twisted, but it’s a pretty good, even tragic, story. He is risking the power he has but cannot really use in order to forestall others.”
For that reason alone, he deserves to lose. Enough of this egotistical, right wing gobshite. Canada deserves to have a leader that has a clear, single-minded vision that speaks to all Canadians. Someone to give us hope in a time of global tensions and tanking economies. We won’t get any of that from Stephen Harper, but the other leaders of this country aren’t in any position to successfully rebutt him, or offer something more substantial. In short, we’re damned no matter how we vote, it seems.
It’s ironic that Harper invoked Pierre Trudeau’s name to try and smear Stephan Dion as a dangerous, left-wing nutcase. Aside from dirtying Mr. Trudeau’s name by simply SPEAKING it (his audacity makes me sick), Harper could only WISH he had the charisma, the willpower, and the sheer ability to sell his goods the way Trudeau sold the nation on his own vision. Ironically, back then, the Conservatives merely had economic policy differences with the Liberals & NDP — Stanfield, Broadbent (by his own words) and Trudeau were, in all other respects, all but identical on social policy, and the vision of Canada’s place in the world order. Harper’s vision is miles wide, inches thick, and designed to serve his own needs, not the needs of the people. In short, it’s not worth any paper it’s printed upon.
But the men with real vision are all gone…and who knows when such men (or women) will return. They’ve left the country in the hands of small-minded, petty, unremarkable individuals…with no relief in sight. They’ve left me dispirited, angry, and longing take part in a struggle for change on par with the current American campaign.
(SIGH…) It’s enough to make me never want to vote again… :-/
