491 years ago today, the French navigator Jacques Cartier — on the appetitive colonial business of the King of France — arrived at the mouth of a river which had been known from time immemorial by several names, among them Kaniatarowanenneh and Micta Sipi. Because Cartier arrived on August 10th, and because the rhythms of the Catholic Church would have been his most sacred and significant means of measuring and marking time, the river’s European name comes from that of the saint whose Feast Day it happened to be when he got there: Saint Lawrence of Rome, a deacon martyred in the year 258.

The great majority of francophones in this country live in the valley of the Saint Lawrence river, including nearly all of my paternal ancestors — including the post-exile Acadians. I have wonderful memories of visiting my grandfather, Grandpapa David, at his home in the Laurentian mountains — mountains that take their French name from the river. Even our national political vocabulary bears the river’s influence, as we often speak of the Canadian Eastern ruling class as a “Laurentian Elite.”

If you know Saint Lawrence’s story, you know that the idea of a “Laurentian elite” is actually a contradiction in terms. Lawrence was a member and minister of the church in the time of its persecution by the Roman Empire in its pagan era. After the brutal execution of his bishop, Sextus, Lawrence was ordered by the Romans to gather “the treasures of the church,” and to surrender them to the imperial authorities. Lawrence told them that this would take three days. (With Christians, everything always takes three days — doesn’t matter if you’re Joseph and Mary looking for your kid in Jerusalem at Passover, or you’re Jonah in the belly of the whale, or if we’re talking about the Main Event: three days, every time).

Over the course of his three days, Lawrence busied himself by divvying up the then-modest goods and material possessions of the church amongst the poor of Rome. When the time came for his rendezvous with the Empire, rather than gold or silver or coins, Lawrence brought with him a large crowd of orphans and widows, the sick and infirm and the poor. And he said, “Here are the treasures of the Church.”

The Romans didn’t appreciate the cleverness.

They ordered Lawrence burned alive on an enormous metal grill. And today, amongst many other patronages (to wit: cooks, firefighters, Rotterdam, poor people), Lawrence is the patron saint of comedians, because in the midst of his torture, enveloped in flames, he raised his voice to say, “I’m done on this side, you can turn me over.”

Subscribe now

Lawrence had confronted the Romans with values that were completely upending and counterintuitive for the ancient Mediterranean. They were monotheistic values based on the worship of a God who was found, as the Jewish people had written in their sacred Book of Kings, not in the loud violent wind, nor in the shattering earthquake, nor in the fire, but rather a God whom we hear in that “still, small voice.”

In director Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey, every time that thunder strikes, the characters remark that Zeus has taken an interest in whatever’s going on.

The enormously popular movie presents us with a religious life which is strange and exotic to us today, whether faithfully practising or atheist. Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, fires an arrow into the eye of the cyclops and his troops are angry with him, because they believe that now, Poseidon, god of the sea — and, I should say, earthquakes; though not the god of still, small voices — will be enraged against them and, consequently, their ship will be imperilled.

In ancient cosmologies, divinities associated with ocean water, like Poseidon or the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat, personified chaos.

That’s the symbolic load borne by the Gospel of Saint Matthew when it presents the world with an image of the Son of God, of God incarnate, as, instead, the one who approaches us walking across the water, a lake big and wild enough to be known as the Sea of Galilee. God as the one who says to us, “Come, take my hand — do not be afraid.”

That’s why the real miracle of this passage isn’t about a trick with the laws of physics. The real miracle, as it is for most of us, most days, is the possibility of courage.

Because that’s what’s so novel at the heart of the Abrahamic revolution in the belly of the empires of antiquity. Not the idea that there will never again be any chaos, but the idea that the chaos itself is not the divine power — that instead, divine power is what takes us by the hand in the face of chaos. The idea that God arrives not in the storm, or the earthquake, or the inferno, but in the still, small voice.

It’s the revelation of courage that changes the disciples onboard the ship, on the lake, surrounded by the waters of the Sea of Galilee. It’s courage that gave Saint Lawrence the inspiration to mock his torturers while surrounded by the flames. Put simply, courage just is human awareness of the state of being taken in hand by one’s Creator.

And maybe something like that awareness, articulated in the many languages and traditions of our varied faith and philosophical traditions, is how we here in this country — a place where people have always lived using different names for the same life-giving currents; where we are surrounded by water, surrounded by flames — can find our courage, too.

Share

Maybe the worst thing about book-burning is that sometimes, it works. This was certainly the case in 1933 when the newly ascendant Nazis snuffed out the most important largely-unread socialist text of the 20th century, The Socialist Decision, by the Christian existentialist Paul Tillich, who then entered his American exile. Conventional wisdom is that Tillich’s American period was less political than his German work. Those who criticize him for this tend to ignore not only the continued favourable references in his writings to both socialism and, although more critically, to Marxism, all through the years of the early Cold War till his death in 1965 — they also tend to ignore the very human aspect of a person’s political exhaustion after first experiencing total moral, psychological, and religious collapse in the trenches of his country’s defeat in the first World War, and then, after having spent the interwar years working closely with Jewish socialists and strongly emphasizing the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and the pernicious dangers of antisemitism, as well as writing a searing diagnosis of the appeals and perils of fascism and the indispensability but ultimate inadequacy of liberalism to confront it, seeing his country defeated again, this time totally, and only after first descending into the murderous barbarism of the Shoah. The Socialist Decision remained the book of which Tillich was most proud.

This week, the progressive American Christian podcaster and educator Tripp Fuller has written and published a substantial and for the most part excellent audio summary of The Socialist Decision, and its relevance to the contemporary American situation, on his Substack. I would strongly encourage you to check it out. Fuller’s applications of Tillich’s analysis to Trump’s USA are apt, and his theological elaborations on Tillich, including a very beautiful framing of the Incarnation, are deeply moving. But quite naturally, his essay is aimed towards an American, religious (and specifically Christian) audience. So from my perch as a Canadian Anglo-Catholic social democrat in a multi-faith and secular political orbit, I wanted to respond with a supplementary piece offering some relevant insights from Tillich for those operating outside of the United States or the Church.

Perhaps the most American aspect of Fuller’s essay is that it doesn’t fully disentangle liberalism and socialism in Tillich’s political schema — which, in fairness, has in recent years become more than just an American problem. In fact, the relationship — or lack of one — between liberalism and the populist blue collar constituencies who are supposedly meant to make up the ranks of the world’s socialists has in some ways become one of the greatest political anxieties of our times.

As Fuller notes, Tillich basically identifies the root of all political thought and action in the existential categories of origin and demand (there are shades here of what will emerge as the polarity of destiny and freedom in his later Systematic Theology). Basically, origin is where we come from (family, language, nation, authority etc.), demand is what we’re going to (justice, creativity, plenitude, etc.). Roughly speaking, conservative instincts flow from the powers of origin, and liberal democratic and socialist movements draw power from demand. But the latter do so in a contradictory way.

Demand presents as a criticism of origin: the family is patriarchal and authoritarian; the nation is exclusive and imperialist; the language codifies relationships of power. This is why the bourgeoisie, in the early days of capitalism, was a revolutionary force albeit a funny sort of one; why Marx and Engels wrote, in the Communist Manifesto, that “[t]he bourgeoisie wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” To put it crudely: purple does not remain a colour that only royalty can wear in a society where textile manufacturers and producers of synthetic dyes can make any money selling purple t-shirts. According to Tillich, this liberal instinct, what he calls the bourgeois principle, drains the world of its sacred qualities and reduces everything to a commodity.

For the capitalist, this is liberating. For the worker (or the colonized, or the otherwise oppressed) it is a liberation of a different sort — like being cut free from the ropes binding you to a chair that was being tipped over a canyon. Tillich’s words in 1933 are chillingly prescient in their description of our post-neoliberal world: “Liberalism prevails, in bourgeois society, among the groups that require the free play of forces in their development, and for whom the idea of harmony provides justification for their unlimited economic aspirations […] the Enlightenment’s paradoxical concept of harmony is being more and more transformed into the feudal, stratified concept of organism espoused by political romanticism [i.e. fascism]. This is the way from liberalism to the new feudalism.” The emphasis was Tillich’s.

Since 2016 at least, but perhaps as far back as Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas? (2004), observers have been declaiming — with an air of either incredulity, triumph, or resignation — that working-class voters are ‘economically left-wing, socially right-wing,’ or ‘economically progressive, socially conservative.’ But in 1933, Tillich not only anticipated this analysis, but sought a way out from it. For Tillich, socialism’s participation in the critique of conservative origin offered by liberalism was not optional — this is what made it part of the democratic tendency in human life, part of the existential movement towards the demand. But its role within or over against liberalism was contradictory. Why? “Socialism is prophetism on the soil of an autonomous, self-sufficient world.” What does this mean?

In the process during which capitalism replaces human awe and wonder towards the world with what Tillich calls “technical reason” — a process with huge upsides (hooray penicillin!) but which also robs all sacred meaning out of reality in order to objectify commodities for exploitation and sale — the market inevitably turns to the labour of human beings themselves. When the bourgeois principle attempts to commodify labour, whether in enslaved or exploited waged work, it tries to objectify that which most profoundly resists objectification: the subjective par excellence, the human person. “There remains an element of proletarian being which has not been reduced to the status of a thing, and from this element there emerges the struggle against the bourgeois principle,” he writes. I should say here that Tillich employs a more expansive use of the term “proletarian” than, for instance, Marx does — as I read it, his analysis would absolutely apply, for instance, in the case of Coastal First Nations whose sacred waters and ancient food sources have been rendered reducible to actuarial considerations of pipeline construction. But there’s the added benefit that his analysis also helps us understand why the roughneck oil patch worker rooting for that pipeline to go through spends a vast chunk of his day scrolling right-wing nostalgia pages on social media: “That which reacts in the the proletarian is the same as that which political romanticism [fascism] makes the sole principle of human nature and of society — the origin. Here is the point where they stand together in opposition to the bourgeois principle.” 93 years ago, Paul Tillich explained clinically why working class people, denied a meaningful socialist choice, would be drawn instead not to a centrist liberal half-measure but to socialism’s seeming antipode of right-wing barbarism. And nobody’s read it because it was one of the first books the barbarians threw on the fire.

“Socialism is grounded in the interaction of three elements,” Tillich wrote. [T]he power of the origin, the shattering of the belief in harmony, and an emphasis on the demand […] Socialism lifts up the symbol of expectation against the myth of origin and against the belief in harmony. It has elements of both, but it transcends both.” As the prophetic (sacred) voice on the soil of bourgeois rationalism, socialism is the revenge of the actually holy after the critique of the institution or tradition or authority that presented itself as holy, and as such, it redeems what was there, but only ambiguously, in the beginning. What does this mean at the level of politics? Actual, everyday politics? What does it mean in your life?

Subscribe now

I think the easiest illustration of what it would look like to apply Tillich’s politics lies in the transformation of the institution of marriage in the contemporary world, from an exclusively heterosexual institution based on male authority and property rights, in which divorce was expensive and difficult if not impossible, and marital rape was often legally enshrined to one in which two consenting adults of any gender may enter together, may leave at will, and during which they retain all the rights of their person. (I would suggest that anyone who considers this to be a ‘merely cultural’ change rather than a profoundly material and economic one is… um… not very smart.) Gay marriage rights, in particular, have been a rare thorough-going, unequivocal left-wing win over the past several decades, and though often associated with middle-class and liberal values, observers such as the legal scholar Joan C. Williams — a severe critic of the Left’s abandonment of the working class and its priorities — have pointed to the gay marriage fight as exemplary of the way progressives ought to engage.

Why has the fight for more safe, equal, inclusive, and democratic marriages been so powerful? I would argue that they embody the Tillichian dynamics with an almost textbook clarity: marriage is an institution of unarguable creative power in human origin, the fount of the family, the main logic of our reproductive lives. The conservative case for it is well-rehearsed — but so, too, is the liberal critique against it. Historically, marriage suffocates women; enshrines the tyrannical authority of parents over children, husbands over wives; keeps generational wealth in place; banishes queer sexualities. All of these criticisms are true. And yet to simply do away with marriage would be felt — by all but the tiniest economic and cultural minority of empowered individuals — as an abysmal loss; literally, a loss leaving one in an abyss of meaninglessness. An abyss so terrifying, it might be better just to hold onto marriage.

Or, better, to move through critique — to fulfill demand in expectation. In this case, to give women access to unilateral, no-fault divorce; to grant children and spouses legal freedom from physical and emotional abuse; to grant same-sex couples equal matrimonial rights. The critique is honoured; the institution is redeemed.

This, I would argue, is the most practical takeaway from Tillich’s analysis for the world of retail electoral politics. Retreat, Critique, Redeem — these are the three main movements of political life. Fuller outlines Tillich’s concept of “belief-full realism,” an absolutely vital idea for which I wish he’d come up with a catchier name. This is essentially, as I read it, a political version of Jesus’s instruction to “Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” (Matt. 10:16) We have to be knowing (‘Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is a dangerous violation of norms, though takes place in a longer context of US imperialism in Latin American’) but not cynical (‘International law is a joke and you’re a dupe for believing in it; might makes right’) — because whether liberal critique or cynical resignation, we can’t sit in acid forever. We need the corrective. But the corrective needs substance. Those of us in Canada know full well many of the institutions in this country’s history that have never lived their promises. Having participated in the important work of critique, can we imagine what redemption might look like?

Share

The following remarks were commissioned by and, tonight, delivered to the opening session of, the Fraser Valley Writers Festival at the University of the Fraser Valley. I offered these words in the context of addressing of a literary festival three days after publishing a new book about language and Canadian identity, which you may purchase here or wherever books are sold.

Thank you so much. It’s an honour to be with you all here this evening and it’s a privilege to be in beautiful Stó:lō territory.

I have a couple of opening jokes here to break the ice. They were written for me by Premier David Eby.

He and I have moved to a barter system.

Thanks to Rob Taylor and to all of the volunteers and organizers at the festival for inviting me to be a part of this. And thanks to the “Stellar Jays” at CIVL radio, Julia and Jocelyn, for having me on their show to talk about the festival and about my new book earlier this week. I recorded that interview from my place over the computer, just as I was coming home from a yoga class, and right before we did I panicked because I remembered all the construction noise that would be coming from my end, because they are tearing down the old United Church building next to our townhouse. And I thought, “This is just what everybody in the Fraser Valley already thinks of Vancouver, everybody’s in yoga pants and you can’t even hear people talking over the sounds of all the church demolitions.”

I wanted to make a good impression because I have a strong affection for UFV. One of my best friends in the world, my daughter’s godfather, someone who’s been in my life for forty years now, is a man named Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith. But Ian’s PhD was in American history, so I had always resigned myself to the idea that I was going to lose him to the States. Some of you will know that instead, he teaches history right here at UFV, and though I know that wasn’t for me, I appreciate it.

And the last thing I want to say before I get to the specific substance of my keynote here is how humbling it is to be sharing the stage with Evelyn Lau tonight. As a Vancouver writer who works in multiple forms and genres, I consider myself to be very happily surfing in Evelyn Lau’s wake. I wish I could remember exactly what piece I was reading, but years and years ago, I read a line of Evelyn’s describing the “pearly” waters under the Burrard Bridge. It was one of those miraculous moments in a reader’s life when something you’ve seen since the day you were born is described for you in totally new language that captures perfectly what you’ve always recognized.

I’ll strive to be halfway as edifying tonight myself, but I want you to set the bar relatively low. Because I’m going to focus on mood swings and underpants.

One of the most critically-acclaimed English-language films of this past year has been P.T. Anderson’s One Battle After Another, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Benecio Del Toro, among a whole host of others, play a slough of twenty-teens direct action radicals now faced with the tightening vice of counterrevolutionary conservative terror. There are, throughout the film, many blood-chilling close-ups of sunburned white men with crewcuts, wielding all the power of the state with wild abandon. In this present moment, it all cuts very, very close to the bone.

I saw the film, though I haven’t had a chance to read its source material, Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The book is centred instead around 1960s radicals in 1984 — a year with obvious political-literary import but also of the year of Ronald Reagan’s landslide right-wing electoral reaffirmation.

Reagan, of course, was first elected in 1980 — which was also the year of the first recorded appearance, in popular culture, of the boxer brief, worn by Richard Gere in the film American Gigolo. But we’ll get to that.

Reagan was elected on November 4th, 1980, 3 days after Dr. Rocksborough-Smith was born, and 4 months after I was born. We were born and spent our childhoods in the era of what the author Susan Faludi called “backlash”; what the kids on the internet today more euphemistically refer to as a “vibe shift.” It was backlash against feminism, backlash against the Black Civil Rights movement that Dr. Rocksborough-Smith teaches students about here at this university, backlash against the idea of a state oriented primarily towards meeting the material needs of its working- and middle-class citizens.

Growing up in the 1980s was uncanny, and here’s an image that, I think, gets a long way towards capturing what it was like to be a kid back then. Years ago, I went down a bit of a nostalgia rabbit hole on YouTube one night, and found myself watching videos about the history of Chuck E. Cheese.

(Chuck E. Cheese really could get its own keynote address. Not long ago, when I informed some younger comedians that when I was a kid, on your birthday, Chuck E., the eponymous rat mascot for the restaurant, would spank you with his tail, to whatever number equivalent to the age you were turning, they looked at me like I was an 80 year old man from a completely alien time, just unearthing some totally unexplored trauma.)

But in the course of this YouTube excursion, I found myself watching some old, local news footage from an American station covering the opening of a new Chuck E. Cheese location. And high on the walls of the dining area of this Chuck E. Cheese, there hung a collection flags — maybe they were flags of the world, maybe they were U.S. state flags — and among these flags, in the children’s birthday-arcade pizzeria, hung the Confederate flag. I genuinely think that particular image — a Confederate flag hanging in a Chuck E. Cheese — captures what it was like to be a kid in the 1980s more perfectly than anything else I’ve ever seen.

For grown-ups, I think the mood was ably captured in the words of Tim Robbins’s fictional right-wing folk-singer-turned-Reaganite-politician, Bob Roberts, in the 1992 film of the same name, whose rebuttal of Bob Dylan’s immortal “The Times They Are A-Changin’” ran, “Times Are Changin’ Back.”

The same year Bob Roberts was released, 1992, the rapper and aspiring actor Mark Wahlburg, then more popularly known as Marky Mark, appeared in a widely celebrated and very popular fashion spread in which he wore nothing but a pair of Calvin Klein boxer briefs. But we’ll get to that.

Times change, they change back. This past week, Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the country its first peek at his budget. Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, was first celebrated, then largely mocked, for having once answered a reporter’s question by giving the rationale, “Because it’s 2015,” as opposed to saying anything more substantial. This rhetorical move has become known derisively, on the internet, as “The Argument From the Current Year.”

But the rationale for huge chunks of Carney’s budget may as well be, “Because it’s 2025.” Why isn’t there adequate funding for getting clean water to every reserve in Canada? Well, for roughly the same reason the same party pretended it was going to end all boil-water advisories ten years ago: Liberals can read polls. There’s been a vibe shift.

Lost in the back-slapping around the floor-crossing of MP Chris D’Entremont this past week has been the vertiginous fact that just before Remembrance Day, a guy who felt comfortable running with Pierre Poilièvre at St. Patrick’s Day, now feels comfortable joining a party that, last Christmas, most Canadians considered twinned with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP.

7 Conservatives crossed the floor to join the Liberals while Jean Chrétien was leader. 3 under Paul Martin. 1 under Justin Trudeau.

Times change. What does it mean?

As Dr. Rocksborough-Smith and I were moving into our tweens and teens, after the heat of the 80s and into the 1990s cool of the Clinton-Chrétien-Boris Yeltsin years, and Francis Fukuyama’s abortive “End of History,” the pendulum was maybe the go-to metaphor, not to say cliché, for expressing overconfidence in Western liberal democracy. “The pendulum will swing back in the other direction…” someone’s self-assured dad would say, or, if he were worked up into a lather, he might opt for the critical-declarative “The pendulum’s swung too far!”

In those days of easy confidence in free market solutions, this was just another expression of the broader faith in self-regulation: left to its own devices, society would never get stuck in a particular ideological or political or even economic corner, or rut. All extreme conditions were by definition temporary, as humanity possessed a collective, or, better, an aggregate wisdom that would always send the blessed pendulum swinging back in the opposite direction whenever it went too far.

That this belief came from such a place of confidence seems odd now in retrospect, since the pendulum metaphor suggests nothing so much as a society lurching more or less automatically between the outside rails like a ball rolled by a child at bumper bowling. Do human beings learn anything on these swings of the pendulum? Or do we go from, say, way too racist (bounce) through moderately racist to moderately not racist to not racist at all to somehow not racist enough before (bounce) swinging back through moderately not racist on the way back to the opposite again?

There is obviously some logic to this insane schema (besides of course the nauseating idea of a society’s being too not-racist). The “vibe shift” we’re in right now, the backlash, is real. Every day, more of the profit-seeking private companies which stampeded to signal their newly-acquired progressive virtues in the social justice gold rush of 2020 announce the cancellation or reversal of DEI initiatives for exactly the same reasons they were started in the first place: the winds changed.

There are, no doubt, moments of counter-vibe shift, or back-backlash, such as Jimmy Kimmel’s being restored to his late-night throne, or, much more significantly and substantively, the election of Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty of New York City. But despite victories in these battles, there’s no serious question of which side of the political spectrum is, to mix metaphors unforgivably, sitting in the catbird seat when it comes to the war.

For those of us who’ve spent lifetimes on the political left, the seeds of this vibe shift/backlash were glaringly obvious from the start, right there to be seen in the sudden, superficial, and seemingly universal adoption of our politics, including some of our previously very least popular positions, from the very beginning. To take an example everybody already knows: an intra-left debate which had historically ranged all the way from the social democratic idea that the militarization of urban police forces and the related decay of cities should be addressed by dramatic budget reallocations, at one end of the spectrum to, at the other, the anarchist idea that police forces as such were irremediable instruments of class and race repression, somehow wandered out into the stupefying world of social media and became a vaguely incoherent demand to defund the police (partially? absolutely? Nobody knew for sure). Today, no one takes credit for this now-toxic slogan in the midst of a big billy-club swing in the other direction.

Or to take another example: yes, a broad acknowledgment of Canada’s colonial genesis and the ongoing ways in which those origins are reproduced daily was long overdue among our country’s non-Indigenous populations. But was it ever a tenable, sustainable shift to have middle-class professionals in putatively apolitical settings using the phrase “so-called Canada” to refer to the country of their citizenship? It’s a moot point, because within the space of a few very short months, the mercurial trade war lurching of US president Donald Trump has single-handedly reversed the fortunes of Canadian patriotism in polite society. In the early days of this year, as I watched the Molson “I Am Canadian” ad re-emerge in my Instagram algorithm, I wondered how many Indigenous people were winning bets they didn’t want to win about how long the phenomenon of self-conscious settler colonial Canada was going to last.

But both this moment (of Canada resisting Trump’s Anschluss slobbering) and the one that came before it (of the country’s first tentative steps towards a non-fringe engagement with its colonial history) are too important to be just passing fancies in the history of Canadian moods. Why does it have to be this way?

In the pendulum way of thinking, the times (or vibes) that crested in 2020 in the USA, and perhaps a year later here in Canada, offer nothing permanent to be learned on taken on board, but are simply an out-there extreme to be repelled from; a fever to break.

Meanwhile, those of us who are old enough to remember the other end of the pendulum swing — the second, shorter backlash era I’ve lived through, the Iraq-invading, Entourage-watching, shock jock obnoxiousness of the 9/11-to-Lehman Brothers years — can only brace ourselves for everything we know is coming. On a pendulum, other people don’t learn anything. But if you don’t like the weather, you only have to wait 5 minutes. Unless of course you’re one of the people we’re coming for in that time.

Does it have to be this way? Can we do things differently? Is there a better way of doing social change, describable by a more hopeful metaphor than the pendulum? Yes. I would submit that the proper Marxist, or at least dialectical, alternative metaphor is the humble and beloved boxer brief.

The simplest version of the dialectic advanced by Karl Marx’s famously impenetrable philosophical precursor, G.W.F. Hegel, is, I think, pretty broadly familiar: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. In other words, a proposition is put forward; the first response is its opposite; the next step is a marriage of the best aspects of the proposition and its negation.

Or, even more simply: boxer briefs.

Thesis: bikini brief underpants are too tight, are uncomfortable, and find their ways too easily into the various crevices of a masculine lower body.

Antithesis: boxer shorts are bunchy and unsupportive, putting the humble human testicle in grave danger of reinvigorating the pendulum metaphor.

Synthesis: boxer-briefs are very clearly the best of both words, providing comfort as well as support, housing without imprisoning their precious contents.

The boxer-brief is the clearest, most intimate dialectical synthesis that you are either sitting close to, or inside of, as you hear these words. But more than that, the boxer-brief — and the dialectical thinking behind it — are indicative of the human capacity to learn from conflict, rather than to simply retrench.

I want to make a distinction here between synthesis and centrism. Synthesis doesn’t just split the difference between two alternatives in the name of a lazy or easy compromise. It isn’t just about saying, ‘If I just stand here in the middle, I’ll catch the pendulum twice as often.’

I have some personal experience with this. I’m an Anglican — a Christian denomination known as the Via Media, the middle way, which has sometimes been accused of striking a lazy centrist pose splitting the difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. ‘You want non-celibate ministers, but also… candles? We’re your guys.’

But the late 19th-century Anglican luminary and Christian socialist Charles Gore said that rather than lukewarm compromise, the Anglican Via Media should be understood as a fulsome commitment to both catholicism and evangelicalism, at the same time; the principles of the ancient episcopal creedal church and the scriptural discipline of the Reformation simultaneously. For most of my adult political life, I’ve considered myself to be a social democrat for roughly analogous reasons: not because I was halfway dedicated to both socialism and liberalism, but because I was fully dedicated to both, at once.

Subscribe now

The mark of the thinker truly liberated by synthesis is a freedom from getting stuck in the same mire and morass that everyone else keeps falling back into.

I would argue that you could hear the dialectical synthesis in the words of mayor-elect Mamdani’s victory speech in New York a few nights ago, when he refused to pick a trench in the sterile class-first or race-first wars of the past decade and a half. Instead, he spoke with singular focus about affordability and workers’ rights, and did so in a language that unmistakably reflected the multiracial working class of the city he’s now been elected to lead.

And here in Canada, rather than wild pendulum swings between wondering whether this country is something to be celebrated or something to be condemned, whether Canada Day should be canceled or whether we should all pile on anybody who plays fast and loose with the lyrics to our national anthem — we can instead insist that what the country has learned about itself over the past decade and a half, the years of Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and the ground-penetrating radar confirmations of memory and oral history at the sites of Residential Schools, can never be ignored or forgotten; that really to love a place requires both knowledge and honesty, and that precisely because Canada is worth redeeming, it has to atone and make amends. As we’re threatened by the American giant, we need to remember that it’s been when we most try to be like that American giant — to be a singular, monolithic nation state rather than a commonwealth of peoples, based on treaty and plurality — that we’ve committed our darkest crimes.

One of my favourite aphorisms is the old, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” But with each passing year, that metaphor is less and less evocative, as fewer and fewer people look at any analogue timepieces anywhere in their lives.

That goes double for the pendulum — but in that case, the loss of the simile will actually liberate our thinking. It will allow us to move beyond the tit-for-tat, back-and-forth that isn’t good for anyone who doesn’t own a proprietary conflict-driven social media algorithm or frothing radio call-in show.

If I really had the courage of my convictions, and owned a pair of tearaway track pants, at this point in my remarks I would dramatically snap them off to reveal the boxer briefs I’ve been wearing the whole time. I’m not going to do that. But for the record, they’re Manmade Boxer Briefs — a Canadian company.

Share

Ever since Guy Fawkes tried to bring the bang for the Vatican 420 years ago, November 5th has been an explosive evening in the English-speaking world. This week is no exception!

This week marks the official publication of my new book, The Eh Team (still pre-orderable here), and I’m super excited. But, being a stand-up comedian, I’ve grown accustomed to the luxury of an art form where you get to be in a room with your audience. That’s why in-person literary events, like book launches, are so important to me.

The Vancouver launch for The Eh Team is this Wednesday evening, November 5th, 7pm — at one of my favourite comedy venues in the city, ChillX studios at 2270 Manitoba Street in Mount Pleasant.

In keeping with the theme of Canadiana, the event will be co-hosted by my outstanding Super Team Canada co-star Veena Sood, and will feature everybody’s favourite Permanent Resident, international comedy sensation Yumi Nagashima.

The other co-host is my friend Richard Side, who, among other accomplishments, created The Debaters. I wanted Richard to be involved because the writing for this book so often felt so much like writing for the show, in all my favourite ways: short, funny writing that has to get across jokes and ideas inside of tightly-limited word counts.

There is even a rumour that my daughter Joséphine will be introducing me.

I’ll be signing books sold by local indies Book Warehouse. I really hope to see you there!

Share

Good news for fans of Demersian prose & post-modern, non-nationalist, self-conscious patriotism: I have a new book coming out on November 4th, just in time for your Guy Fawkes Eve party! (That said, I think the publisher, Greystone Books, had the Christmas/Chanukah/Winter holiday season more in mind.)

The Eh Team is a lexicon — a collection of very short, short, and shortish essays explaining key Canadian words and phrases from A to Z (I don’t even have to tell you how I’m pronouncing “Z” there, do I?). It was a ton of fun to write, and reminded me in almost equal parts of writing my first book of essays, Vancouver Special; my abecedarian collection The Horrors; and writing for CBC Radio One’s The Debaters.

But not everything went to plan during the writing process. This is a short little book, and at the end of the first few drafts, we had an excess of entries — a few too many for the final manuscript. So I’ve decided to give my beloved Substack readers a peek at the deleted scenes from The Eh Team; these are the entries that were cut in order to make room for their brother and sister essays. If you like what you see, perhaps you’ll consider pre-ordering a copy today!

ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS

WHEN AMERICAN R&B group TLC urged us to stick to the rivers and lakes that we were used to, one assumed these rivers would be at ground level. Rivers above ground level still tended to be following hilly or mountainous terrain, and in the event that such waters broke completely free at these heights, they inevitably became the very waterfalls that TLC were warning us against chasing. Imagine the surprise, then, when towards the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we were informed that there were now rivers in the sky; sodden ribbons of climate change floating over us from warmer climes, and as they hit Canadian turf like the Fraser River basin, they were turning to massive dumps of precipitation; huge floods of rain and even the occasional snow. The only silver lining: your top floor is now riverfront property.

DEGRASSI

WHEN YOU BECOME a parent, and start for the first time in your life to consume children’s media whilst in possession of essentially all your faculties—as opposed to being in the process of forming them—you realize something very quickly. Only two kinds of art or media are made for children and teenagers: absolutely irremediable cynical shit, or the most lovingly wrought, mission-driven creative works you’ve ever seen. The only two attitudes at work are “Who cares, it’s just kids” or “Drive like your children live here, but for media.” Linda Schuyler and Kit Hood’s various Degrassi series (The Kids of Degrassi Street; Degrassi Junior High; Degrassi High) are among the outstanding exemplars of the latter, having given us kids everything we wanted from the teenage comedy and soap opera stories of Saved by the Bell or Beverly Hills, 90210, but with the cinema verité heft of post-war British kitchen sink drama. The students of Degrassi High looked real and sometimes awkward, even the good-looking ones; sometimes puberty made cute little ones big and lumbering and maladroit; sometimes the friends on the show grew apart, and they looked like they were growing apart. When kids were in a band on Degrassi, it wasn’t like Zack Attack, where the Bayside students could suddenly play instruments you’d never heard them mention before like professionals, as they lip-synched unconvincingly over tracks laid down by anonymous adult studio musicians. The band on Degrassi was The Zit Remedy, and they had one song, and it sucked shit. Like actual kids. The stakes of the show were often small enough to seem real, and that made them big. And then, when the stakes weren’t small—when they were about intimate violence, or racism, or teen pregnancy—they felt earned. Now, I realize that I am talking around a significant portion of the Degrassi canon, which is to say, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which I have not mentioned at all. I want to be clear: this is not to be interpreted as in any way related to the Drake-Kendrick beef. But I have to admit, the new show always seemed too polished to me; it lacked the scruffy, fuzzy quality that made the original Degrassi shows so vivid and relatable. That said, I’d still be in favour of Drake for the Grey Cup halftime show. Or failing that, The Zit Remedy.

EXCHANGE RATE

STRICTLY SPEAKING, the exchange rate refers very simply to the daily value of the Canadian dollar expressed in terms of a particular number of American cents (well, admittedly, technically as an expression of American dollars; however, practically speaking, the highest we’ve ever soared in relation to the eagle is $1.04—and that was just one time, in the swingin’ seventies.) But since things bearing on the Canada-U.S. relationship are rarely merely literal without any symbolic dimension whatsoever, the exchange rate is also an expression of the fact that all Canadian things shall always and forever be held up and evaluated with reference to their closest American analogue, and almost never in a way that favours our thing. Nobody has ever failed his CFL tryout and fallen back on the NFL; no one has ever referred to Reba McEntire as “America’s Anne Murray.” I was once nominated for a Juno award, and whenever I have to explain this to people from the United States, invariably, I have to say that it’s basically the Canadian Grammy, which I guess makes it easier that I lost.

So because of this psychological element, Canadians meet the seemingly objective metric of the exchange rate with very, very subjective vibes. As a result, a high-value Canadian dollar is often treated as though it were something that is a good in and of itself, whereas in reality, a high valuation favours some actors in the Canadian economy (travellers, importers, wholesalers, coin collectors) and tends to make things tougher for others (say, people in manufacturing, and those of us dealing in Canada’s natural resources, like bitumen or Hallmark movies where women discover meaning in their rural hometowns at Christmas). Even though a relatively low Canadian dollar is good news for hewers of wood and drawers of water and other major parts of the Canadian economy, the fear of a low dollar is one that returns again and again in Canadian politics. In a 1970 provincial by-election in Québec, the Liberal party attempted to foment panic against the then-upstart Parti Québécois by printing up propaganda leaflets which compared an American greenback, a Canadian dollar bill, and a hypothetical Québécois currency—which no one was proposing—festooned with the face of René Lévesque. On the handout, the greenback (with its more traditional Washingtonian portrait) had its valuation of one American dollar printed, a little redundantly, right next to it; and the pre-Loonie Canadian bill, bearing the image of Queen Elizabeth II, had its valuation—at that point somewhere in the high 80-cent zone—printed accordingly next to it. In contrast, the imaginary Québécois currency was valued at a terrifyingly pathetic 69 cents. The Liberals, however, must have been worried that a dense electorate might miss their message and so just to be clear they had doubled down, gilding the fleur-de-lily, and marking “69¢” on the bill itself as well. As a then-young future-premier Bernard Landry was keen to point out at the time, this made an incoherent nonsense of the whole exercise: if a Québécois 69-cent bill, however ridiculous the denomination, had a value of $0.69USD, then the made-up René Lévesque money would have had parity with the Yankee dollar. C’est dommage that Monsieur le Premier Ministre missed the crypto age.

Subscribe now

POTATO

I DIDN’T WANT to do this whole thing without any Prince Edward Island. But it’s difficult to get into the complex historical unfolding of Confederation, and I’m not adept enough in the ways of Anne of Green Gables to write an entry that would meet the standards of devotees, whom I respect too much to half-ass in front of. I thought about discussing the iconic, charismatic red soil of the island, which is my most vivid visual memory of my one visit; my father having turned off the road we were supposed to be on and our somehow ending up, in those pre-Google Maps days, staring down a perfectly red dirt road without any idea of where we were supposed to go. I thought I could maybe talk about the Confederation Bridge, as a feat of engineering, or about the travails of Mike Duffy and Canada’s infamously asymmetrical distribution of senatorial power. But if there are two things I know, it’s comedy and carbohydrates. And so instead I’ll just take a moment to say that while, yes, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas’s McKenzie Brothers and their Great White North/Kanadian Korner segment will always be SCTV’s most iconic Canadian joke, having even been referenced multiple times throughout this book, the most underrated Canadian joke ever on SCTV, perhaps in the history of Canadian sketch comedy television, was “Magnum P.E.I.,” in which the late, legendary Johnn Candy fired a large handgun at a furtive potato thief. Rest in Peace.

Share

I am very proud to share with you, just in time for your weekend viewing needs, that my brand new stand-up comedy special Fish From the Jar is up on YouTube from Comedy Here Often! Just click that link to watch for free!

And if you are a looking for that audio-only experience, Fish From the Jar has been simultaneously released as my third album from 604 Records — and you can follow this link to stream or download it from your favourite platform.

I’m so proud of this work, my third collaboration with literal rock star and comedy producer powerhouse Kevvy Maher, and I hope you’ll enjoy it and spread the word.

And watch this space for further developments!

Share

Disclosure: I am about as compromised as I possibly can be in writing a review of Sam Wiebe’s work. He’s a good friend, sometimes-collaborator, we’re at the same literary agency, & our publishers are owned by the same people. If you read this weirdo religio-philosophical review of his new book & think I’m doing it venally… you at least have to grant that I’m bad at it.

Since especially the days of Philip Marlowe, the literary private investigator has occupied a very particular space in relation to questions of ethics and morality. On a superficial level, the PI is a moral skeptic, the man (or, less frequently, woman) for whom all social, institutional, and official hypocrisies are totally transparent. He doesn’t wear any uniforms, swear any allegiances, confess any creeds, or salute any flags; to him, they’re so many shaky alibis for a cruel or craven humanity.

But more profoundly, and more importantly, the PI is a backstop against nihilism; a post-critical naïf whose own spartan moral code is so distilled it’s almost perfectly pure. It’s precisely in his capacity as someone who’s kicked the tires of society’s collective virtues and found them wobbly that we trust him in the driver’s seat when it comes to values. In other words, the initial, world-weary, seen-it-all shrug inevitably becomes the indignant fire that powers him to tilt at the real depravities and obscene abuses of power that invariably lie within the innermost pathways of the labyrinth of every case.

Sam Wiebe’s Dave Wakeland — the PI at the heart of four novels and one novella, each set in contemporary Vancouver — is no exception to this existential inheritance. But in his latest instalment, Sunset and Jericho (which may or may not be the end of the Wakeland series), Wiebe has raised this thematic subtext up into the letter of the text itself. In doing so, he’s written a secular religious novel; a book about a crisis of faith for a character who didn’t think he had any to begin with.

“A feeling crept over me like persevering in a fight, gaining that elusive second wind, only to expend it fruitlessly. A double exhaustion. Muhammad Ali had called that feeling ‘the closest thing to dying’.” (Page 253)

In Sunset and Jericho, Wakeland finds himself in the existentially absurd position of working for clients he holds in contempt, looking for perpetrators for whom he can’t help but feel a reluctant sympathy. Someone is taking the masters of the Vancouver universe hostage — here the mayor’s insulated goofball brother, there an overlord mega-developer with a mansion in the British Properties and another under construction on the beach in Point Grey — and demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms in the shape of donations to morally unimpeachable causes serving Vancouver’s hungriest and most vulnerable people.

Early on in the novel, we get a crash course in Wakeland’s fatalistic, cosmic minimalism in the shape of a flashback to a date with a substance-dependent ex:

Shay said[:] “I don’t even think I can explain it. What are we living for?”

She made a gesture with both hands encompassing the two of us, our watery bourbons, our uncomfortable aluminum stools. And beyond the bar, the city, the cosmos. The whole shebang.

“How is this enough for you?”

I told her I didn’t realize it was an option.

In case we missed it, Wakeland drives the point home explicitly a few lines later: “I don’t believe there is a purpose to the world. But I like people. They interest me. I find my purpose in them.” (p. 83)

Whenever Wakeland is called upon to explain his seemingly inscrutable behaviour — the enormous risks to life, limb, and reputation which he takes on to no discernible advantage of material comfort or social power — he cites a seemingly simple basic need for the truth:

“Among my many faults and quirks of personality is a stubborn need to know. It’s why I’m single, why I still live in a city that doesn’t want me. It’s why I kill friendships and houseplants with reckless abandon. I’m just that person. The one who’s not leaving without the answer […] The looking is what matters.” (p.134)

For at least about a thousand years, give or take, of Christian philosophy, Wakeland’s apparently inexplicable defining character trait would have been fairly easily identified as an especially robust capax veritatis (capacity for acquiring and understanding knowledge and truth), a subset of the capax dei (capacity for God) given to all human beings. Since God is Truth, and we were created to know God, the pursuit of truth is beatific.

But what happens to the capax veritatis when it’s uncoupled from the capax dei? Is humanism (“I like people [… ] I find my purpose in them”) enough to answer that question? If you’re thinking, ‘Hey, this is not just Dave Wakeland’s conundrum, but sorta the crisis of our entire society,’ then, my friend, you have the capax non cacas — capacity for ‘no shit.’

That’s why the inclusion of the clauses “it’s why I’m single, why I still live in a city that doesn’t want me” is so important here. Readers of the previous instalments of the Wakeland series will be wondering, ‘What happened to VPD officer Sonia Drego?’ The love of Wakeland’s life has left Vancouver for a job in Montréal — a city not only famously less expensive than Vancouver to live in, but for our paradoxical purposes here also Canada’s most assertively secular town despite (or because of) its sleeping beneath the lights of a large hilltop Cross.

Sonia’s departure hangs the possibility of Wakeland’s following suit over the novel’s whole proceedings. It explicitly separates the possibility of staying at home and the possibility of being happy.

Ultimately, this has to be part of any answer to the dilemmas of a search for truth without God. In the theistic worldview, we belong here; we’re part of a providential Creation. In an atheistic one, nobody owes us anything, least of all an explanation as to why things are so goddamn tough and inhospitable.

Faced with the growing violence of the city’s avenging kidnapping cell, Wakeland will have to sort out secular answers to a number of historically religious questions — such as whether there is ultimately a difference between justice and mercy; whether human beings can ever be used as means towards ends; whether violence is always diabolical.

But the biggest question is the perennial human one; a question that takes on new valences in the context of colonial settler land theft, renovictions, and the erasure of civic memory, but is ultimately, in some ways, permanently with us:

Am I even supposed to be here?

Share

One awkward inevitability in the life of a comedian is that at some point — and from both sides of the equation — one will have to sit or stand beside another comedian, with whom one has just finished a show that went asymmetrically well for one of you, but just as poorly for the other, and politely entertain feedback from the departing crowd.

The best (and worst) version of this story I ever heard was shared with me by a well-known comedian whose stars had aligned many years earlier one night on the road to produce a perfect show, without extending the evening’s graceful mojo to his colleague for the gig. On the way out, an audience member stopped to ply the shining comic with plaudits and compliments, before realizing on his own powers the embarrassing unevenness of his praise. Searching for something positive to say to the tough-luck performer, the guy from the crowd quoted back the one line he could think of from the act which had gotten a big laugh. Which would have been fine, except that this particular line had been given to him by the other comedian as a suggestion the night before.

The second time I wrote the script for a local-colour comic children’s play, Cinderella: An East Van Panto, there was one joke in the book that stood head and shoulders above all the others. It was, without exception, the biggest laugh of the night, because it was objectively the funniest thing in the play.

At the very moment when Cinderella stood poor and bereft and definitely not going to the ball without some sort of supernatural intervention, the curtains pulled back to reveal her deliverance in the person of a fabulous sparkling lady in resplendent drag, with a large oceangoing ship growing out of the southern hemisphere of her body:

The BC Ferry Godmother.

Anyone — anyone — who saw the play and offered me any positive feedback on the writing isolated this moment as particularly worthy of praise. As a joke, it was exactly what the show was supposed to be about: hyperlocal, gently subversive, clever but broad. BC Ferry Godmother, they would say slowly to me, shaking their heads, mock reproach in their voices as though I’d been sitting on the line, hiding it from them, waiting to deploy it for maximum explosiveness. I ran into a local television journalist who had defined not only broadcasting excellence but also poise and elegance from the time of my childhood; this was a person I could never in my life have conceived would ever even know my name, and now here she was, fresh from seeing a play I’d written the script for, saying, “BC Ferry Godmother…”

Every polite smile I returned was half wince. It wasn’t just that the moment was not exclusively mine to claim triumphantly, belonging just as much to the performer, costume designer, set designer, lighting engineer.

It was that “BC Ferry Godmother” was something an actor had said, seemingly by accident, at a read-through of the play’s first draft. It wasn’t mine to claim triumphantly even a little bit.

Specifically, the actor was performer-playwright Jonathon Young — who wasn’t even in the show. Filling in for an actor who couldn’t be there, Jonathon miraculously “flubbed” (I still think it was most likely a camouflaged act of inspired generosity) the Fairy Godmother’s introductory line, and director Ami Gladstone quietly leaned over to me and whispered the inevitable: “Well, that’s going in.”

All of this was about seven years ago give or take, and so what brings it to mind now? Because I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I didn’t write the best bit of writing in my script.

How? This past weekend, I learned that Fat Clemenza’s infamously homey post-execution sangfroid, delivered in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in the first instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather — “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” — was half an ad-lib.

The magnitude of this discovery is perhaps best conveyed by the fact that I learned it in a magisterial newish book about the film, considered the last word on the production, and titled Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather.

I was a teenager when I read Mario Puzo’s original novel, and I’ve never read he and Coppola’s screenplay — but I’d just assumed that Clemenza’s perfect line, a metonym for practically everything important in the story, had to be in the source material; the idea that it isn’t is a vertiginous one. Mark Seal, the author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli — whom as you can probably guess, feels a certain attachment to the line — is quick to point out the thematic heavy-lifting done by the six little words. They speak volumes on violence, patriarchy, immigration, family, and more.

Beyond that, the line has shaped the texts that built on The Godfather as ur-source. On The Sopranos, Freudian subtext became text itself, as “cannoli” was used alternately to refer to Tony’s money and his penis. In one episode, a to-do list including the pressing need for moving around large sums of illegal cash reads “Transfer Cannolis.” But the real transference comes when Tony has a sex dream during which he receives fellatio from an unseen woman under black silk sheets; he wakes in terror when his psychiatrist’s face emerges, and says (in the voice of his mistress), “Tony, I love your cannoli.”

Subscribe now

According to Seal, actor Richard Castellano’s scripted line for Clemenza’s Godfather scene was simply, “Leave the gun.” which is a bit like finding out that the Mona Lisa was originally supposed to be eating a meatball sandwich, before the guy who was framing it playfully sketched out a smile.

If the best line in one of the greatest films ever made was improvised, I can live with BC Ferry Godmother.

By the close of his long career, the American theologian Gordon D. Kaufman had landed about as close to atheism as one could while still laying claim to a nominal religious identity. Many believers, of whatever faith, might have had a difficult time distinguishing between Kaufman’s brand of religious naturalism and simple, straightforward secular disbelief.

But for Kaufman, the hard kernel of divinity in the cosmos was the reliable presence throughout the universe of “serendipitous creativity.” We are not bound to mere mechanical repetition but instead open to and drawn by novelty, complexification, and fecundity.

I figure that, by this logic, to labour painstakingly over the product of your own brow is human; but to let someone else blow it wide open for you, half by accident, is Divine.

Share

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s shocking 2016 loss to presidential rival Donald Trump, two explanations were routinely put forward by her supporters despite the fact that they contradicted each other. On the one hand, the results of the vote were inevitable, because the United States of America was a hellhole of misogyny and racism. On the other, they could only be explained by appeal to an interfering foreign agent, in this case Russia and its invincible army of internet assets, because Trump could never have won over the real America without international meddling.

Former Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart is not Hillary Clinton; for starters, no one was surprised when he lost.

Lest there be any confusion: I (somewhat begrudgingly) voted for the guy. But anyone who’d spent even half as much time in Vancouver as the English Bay barge knew that he was going to lose last fall’s municipal contest. After almost twenty years in the wilderness Vancouver’s powerful civic supra-partisan West Side right-wing had finally coalesced again around a single candidate and a single electoral vehicle, Ken Sim and A Better City (ABC). Once one of the country’s most successful political machines, the paradoxically-named Non-Partisan Association (NPA — so named that it might house Liberals and Tories with equal comfort in order to block any East Side socialists) had only won the mayoralty once this century, by seemingly less-than-fair-play (in a race against Vision Vancouver’s Jim Green, a surprise candidate named James Green had appeared to sop up votes at polls where Jim performed well).

But all that was behind them now, and the NPA had been shed like a snakeskin to make way for an even stupider set of initials along with a law-and-order campaign that went down easy with a public who could see, feel, and had possibly even experienced the post-pandemic shift on the city’s streets.

It didn’t help that Stewart was not an especially strategic candidate. He up-ended attempts to build a coalition of left and progressive civic parties by unilaterally deciding to run a slate of his own candidates — and when I say “his own” candidates, I mean a slate literally consisting in part of persons on his staff as well as of one candidate to whom he is betrothed in holy matrimony.

Nor was Kennedy an especially galvanizing candidate, with much of a popular touch. There was a time when I thought that, after three Big Personality mayors — Larry Campbell, Sam Sullivan, Gregor Robertson — Stewart’s slightly rumpled, understated style would be a good thing for the city. But it doesn’t help on the campaign trail. A few weeks before the election I saw Stewart address an audience of nearly two-thousand people at a Vancouver International Film Festival gala. Brimming with enthusiasm, the then-mayor told the crowd that when asked to describe Vancouver to outsiders or visitors, he explains that it’s “Egypt without the pyramids.” The moment was indeed Sphinxian, as I’d never heard the sound of 1,836 people all trying to process a riddle before. The takeaway from this almost wholly inscrutable description is still at least partially lost on me. The nearest I can tell, he was making the salutary point that civilization is just as ancient and established here as it is in the Nile Delta? In any event, #EgyptWithoutThePyramids is unlikely to trend as part of any viral Vancouver tourism or film & television promo campaigns on the horizon.

All of which to say, there’s no need to call in Vancouver private investigator Dave Wakeland to unravel the mystery of how Kennedy Stewart lost the election last fall. Newly reunited right + disarray on left + charismatic intangibles favouring the other guys = what happened. Which is why it was so cynical, a few weeks ago, when Stewart jumped whole hog on the Chinese Interference theory for recent Canadian electoral outcomes.

The Globe and Mail noted, in their reporting, that “Mr. Stewart would not go so far as to say he lost the election because of Beijing interference efforts” — a fact that the reader would never have made it two-thirds of the way through the story having guessed on their own. Instead, Stewart stinks up the election of the first Chinese-Canadian mayor in a city with a long and sometimes violent history of anti-Chinese racism with credulous parroting of CSIS briefings and vague suspicions about how invitations and donations started drying up in the final weeks of his campaign (i.e. when it was obvious to everyone besides, apparently, him that he was no longer going to be mayor).

Subscribe now

So does Kennedy Stewart think that Vancouver voted the wrong way because of the dastardly Chinese? Not necessarily. Because when he isn’t citing CSIS as a snow white source of value-neutral information, he is denouncing the genocidal reach of Canadian law enforcement.

Last week, the former mayor sent a recriminating tweet to the voters who cost him the election that made “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” look like a dignified exit by comparison. In reference to the generally heartbreaking decampment carried out by police in the Downtown Eastside, Stewart tweeted:

On October 12, 2022, 85,732 of you voted to elect a new mayor and council who today abandoned our attempts to reconcile with Indigenous people and resume traditional genocidal practices. Welcome to Cruel Vancouver. #Vanpoli #UNDRIP

The tweet is practically a capsule clinic in the ways social media is stupefying our civil discourse. Stewart’s unhinged and obscene deflation of the term ‘genocidal’ is beneath comment. And as at least one other person has observed, the reduction without remainder of a homelessness and street camp issue into an Indigenous one is at the very least bizarre, and otherwise problematic from a number of angles.

But most striking of all is that, barely three weeks after alleging that one of the most powerful governments in the world was at work throwing off the results of the Vancouver civic election, here’s Stewart holding Sim voters responsible down to the very last one — 85,732 of you — for having explicitly chosen this barbarous path.

Vladimir Putin tricked you into voting against a woman, you sexist cretins!

Xi Jinping blocked Vancouver’s hateful settler-colonialists from voting for Reconciliation!

There were many ugly things about the gentlemanly non-partisan bourgeois political decorum of the years from the end of WWI to 9/11. It was used to cover up all manner of ugly collusion. And as we’re seeing right now in Tennessee, its spirit can be invoked as alibi for the most grotesque racism on offer.

But maybe one of the norms of that era which was worth holding onto was the one that frowned upon sore losers lashing out at the results of democratic contests using whatever tool handy, with whatever degree of cynicism convenient.

Share

Dear Paid Subscriber,

When I began this Substack in the depths of pandemic, it was not only an outlet for expression and creativity — a chance to connect from the abyss of isolation — but it was also, very practically, a chance to make a few desperately needed and appreciated dollars at a time when nearly …

Read more

In the past weeks, my already-sporadic posting schedule has attained hibernation-like dimensions owing largely to the fact of reproduction. Just 20 days ago, my wife, our daughter, and I welcomed into the world a baby son born on January 28th (an auspicious number) and weighing eight pounds (not bad either). Named Pascal, he was born at the outset of the Year of the Rabbit, making him an Easter bunny. He is a Water Rabbit, as his big sister is a Water Snake, providing another sweet cross-cultural serendipity from both sides of the family tree (de mers). He and his mother are both healthy, and the whole family is very happy and very tired, with the possible exception of a deeply jealous schnauzer.

When Joséphine, my daughter, was born, I was youngish (33) and naive(ish) and so pre-committed to writing an epistolary book of non-fiction about fatherhood with a much older friend, Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering. I would write George a letter every week (this schedule was aspirational; the spaces between my reports soon grew nearly as quickly as my beautiful child) of the first year of fatherhood, and he would write back, working both from memory as well as from the journals of his own early days as a papa. The book we ended up with was called The Dad Dialogues.

I’ve had cause over the years to be very grateful for that book, mostly because it helped force me to sit down and record some of the details of feeling and experience from a time that would otherwise smear too easily into an undifferentiated exhaustion and confusion, punctuated only by the funniest or hardest moments — “Remember when she was six weeks old and gurgled what sounded exactly like the phrase ‘Oh good God’ from her bassinet?” or “Remember when she was six months old and got chicken pox at the same time the townhouse flooded?”

But I was a maternal orphan experiencing fatherhood for the first time and so it was perhaps more or less inevitable that I was going to pore over the elements of every experience of parenthood in agonizing psychological, if not also political and comedic detail. In the end, the meditations on fatherhood ultimately produced not only the book co-written with George, but to a large extent the one-person show Leftovers co-created with Marcus Youssef, and the Juno-nominated comedy album Fatherland, which was half about fatherhood, half about the rise of fascism (get it? Fatherland? No one else did).

Subscribe now

By having our children nine years apart, my wife and I may have taken the James Cameron/Avatar approach to things (wait about a decade between instalments; spend a couple hundred million dollars each time), but it seems unlikely that I will produce any sequels to these works — and not just because people hate anyone’s writing about new fatherhood.

They tell you that you’re usually less anxious when it comes to your second kid, and while I find so far that that’s been true to an extent, the far greater change this time around is that I’m seem to be less self-conscious. This time feels less about deliberately entering a new phase of life, or about setting right the pains and privations and losses of the past. This time there’s a new baby at the centre of everything again, but there’s also a nine-year-old who needs just as much love, a dog who still needs walks, and two that-much-more-jaded parents, now in their forties, at least one of whom has been humbled, if not cowed, by the pandemic-era technological and economic transformations of his various fields of professional endeavour.

But a humbling cuts both ways, and so if I don’t foresee any major, immediately baby-propelled creative output on the horizon just at the moment, I know too much now about life to dismiss the possibility out of hand. In both the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) as well as the New Testament, stories about older parents birthing new babies are recurring symbols of faith, or the lack of it. Zechariah, a priest, loses the power of speech when he doubts that his wife Elizabeth can become pregnant with John the Baptist; when God promises a child to Abraham and Sarah, she laughs at the very idea. A new baby, at a time when you thought it was too late in the day to have one, is powerfully symbolic (in that, per Paul Tillich and Sandra M. Schneiders, it not only represents but also embodies or participates in the reality) of the transcendent power of renewal — the eternal conquering of ‘non-being’ by the ‘power of being’ (Tillich).

My first child was born at a time that felt like the beginning of something (a time in life, career, in political history), and making sense of those facts came with a burst of creative energy. But my second child has come at a time — in the wake of pandemic, and of nightmares and failures both public and historical as well as private and personal — when I had thought that the best days, all the days of newness, were behind us. By just by his being here with us, I know now that’s not the case. Maybe that realization, too, will lead to a rush of writing — or maybe the opposite; maybe it will lead to a quiet, the exact inverse of Zechariah’s. One that comes precisely from trusting that there’s still great hope ahead.

Share

Of all the various kitschy things that Disneyland’s Tomorrowland guessed wrong about the future, by far the most disorienting for an actual park visitor is that they thought there would still be water fountains. Even the most celebrated imaginations of the mid-twentieth century, straining to picture the world unfolding in front of us, couldn’t conceive of bottled water.

Similarly, of all the outdated themes and metanarratives to be found consistently in their classic animated features, the most difficult one to square with the Disney of today is the one that says: as difficult and bittersweet as it feels, every child must one day become an adult.

It’s counterintuitive and contrary to a business model based on selling theme park tickets and streaming services from cradle to grave, but it’s true. Paradoxically — but like the popular fairy tales upon which they often drew — Disney movies created some of the most iconic images and memories of childhood while gently nudging their audience towards its sunset. Long before the primary Disney narrative became ‘transform your family/social group through self-discovery and self-realization’ (Ratatouille, Zootopia, Encanto), it was ‘here are the ways you will need to grow to become what your family/social group needs’ (Bambi, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio).

When the Shrek extended universe had its genesis in 2001, the picture was little more than a feature-length anti-Disney parody. The unsubtly-named Lord Farquaad was infamously modelled to look like longtime on-again, off-again Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and the story world’s remit was all of European nursery rhyme and fairy tale.

So maybe it’s appropriate that the latest instalment in the franchise — Puss In Boots: The Last Wish — should take a format, the animated feature, that has been reduced entirely to self-affirmation, and made it instead about the fact that death is coming for us all.

Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) begins his story from the place where most animated protagonists end theirs: absolute self-realization. As his song goes, he is not only a “fearless hero,” but your “favourite” one. He travels from town to town basking (and by the look of some of these towns, possibly Basque-ing) in the adulation of anonymous, adoring strangers, on whose behalf he occasionally effects a stirring and stupendous act of bravery.

Puss is brave because he “laughs at Death.” But we soon discovery that his is a counterfeit bravery, born of thoughtlessness: he has 9 lives, so Death is forever forestalled. Or at least it was, until he carelessly loses life #8 by indulging in an encore of his theme song. Through flashback, we learn that he was similarly profligate with all of his lives, each of which was lost in some stupid act of hubris or bravado.

In the face of this mortal nonchalance, Death — in the guise of a sickle-wielding Wolf (Wagner Moura, who brings all the chilling terror of his Pablo Escobar to this cartoon anthropomorphism) — has decided not to wait for Puss to toss his ninth life away, but instead to take it himself.

And now, Puss in Boots feels terror.

This is what the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich called “the shock of non-being.” Tillich’s longtime student, Langdon Gilkey, would go on to write that the polarity between being and non-being was even more central to Tillich’s system, and his conception of God, than maybe he even realized. This is something of Heidegger’s existentialism in Tillich’s worldview (despite the former’s capitulation to and collaboration with Nazism, and the latter’s early, vocal, and ongoing anti-Nazism): that without finitude, our being would have no meaning. There would be no anxiety, because there would be no choice.

Subscribe now

Tillich’s most famous and well-read work was The Courage to Be, in which he brought before a wider audience the concept of “the God above the God of theism” — this was, famously, God not as a being, but as the divine Ground of Being. As ultimate reality, God grounds both being and non-being, containing (and therefore overpowering) his own negation. This was also Tillich’s sense of the meaning of the Cross and Resurrection. Therefore, we finite creatures who have been shocked, and terrified, by the threat of non-being find the courage to be in the fact of our being rooted in a divine ultimacy that is big enough to be the ground of its own cancelling-out:

[T]he self-creativity of life, when it fully realizes itself, becomes as well the self-giving of life. The reason is that only the symbol that is willing to negate itself is able to remain in unbroken unity with its ground and so able to point beyond itself. Through death, or at least only through the willingness to die, is there life. [Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, page 112]

With his friends Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) and an unnamed orphan dog (Harvey Guillén), Puss sets out in search of a wishing star, in the hopes of retrieving his lost lives — with the overriding aim of outrunning Death.

But faced repeatedly with the consequences of his own selfishness and frailty, of his own (to borrow a Tillichian term) estrangement, Puss’s initial shock of non-being begins instead to offer the possibility of the courage to be.

Oh, and it’s also very funny.

Puss In Boots: The Last Wish is rated PG, which is just as well — for once, here’s a cartoon that really does deserve to be seen by kids of all ages.

Share

It’s almost impossible to write anything about Fleishman Is In Trouble without unleashing virtually all relevant spoilers (you’ve now been warned), and this fact is down to the relationship between the miniseries’ narrative and its plot, and the way that both are meticulously unspooled. We live in an era whose most ambitious artists are encouraged to develop intellectual properties that can migrate with the liquidity of capital from format to format, platform to platform, and in this context the novel as such is often nothing more than a way station en route to film, television, or some streaming combination of the two. But Fleishman is a literary adaptation helmed by the original author herself, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who clearly didn’t just think of the book as the larval stage of a work that was ultimately supposed to be something with movie stars in it that people could watch. The TV version now streaming on Disney+ is stubbornly novelistic; an adjective very often promised during the putative Golden Age of television but very seldom delivered on.

There are two shots during the series’ eight episodes in which a bright, yellow hardcover copy of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint can be seen, first bedside, then shelved, and both in flashbacks centred on the titular character, Toby Fleishman, played by Jesse Eisenberg. Brodesser-Akner’s story is an heir, rebuttal, conversation partner, refutation, tribute, and corrective to Roth’s infamous work on middle-class masculinity, masturbation, intellectual machismo, cultural Judaism, Zionism, and sex in the American northeast. Rather than ejaculating into catcher’s mitts or deli liver, though, Toby Fleishman mostly comes into the virtual and actual fleshy vistas of the previously unimaginable bacchanal opened up by the apps on his cellphone (and, a step in the right direction: his encounters are, to borrow an image from Slavoj Zizek, mutually masturbatory; it would be too much to say that they offer real connection or reciprocity, but at least the sensual satisfaction mostly runs both ways).

Toby, 41, is a recently divorced hepatologist (not only does he not masturbate into liver; he saves them!) whose nearly $300k annual salary was, seemingly, not enough to match the ambitions of his talent agent wife, Rachel, played magnificently by Claire Danes. Rachel has left their two children at Toby’s apartment in the middle of a hot summer night and disappeared without explanation. This crisis comes just as Toby is being evaluated for a promotion to management at his hospital, and as he guides a bereft and baffled husband and father of two through the trauma of his wife’s medical coma and liver transplant.

Part of what retains the novelistic quality of Fleishman Is In Trouble are regular stretches of prose narration; the monologue which overlays the opening scene of the first episode is virtually identical to the paragraphs that open the book the itself. The narrator is Libby Epstein (Lizzy Caplan), a former men’s magazine staffer who once lionized a misogynist essayist whose work still affects her, and who quit her job when she realized that it held no future for a woman. Libby and Toby are friends from their early twenties, having spent a year in Israel together, along with a third pal, the dashing Seth Morris (Adam Brody). Rachel didn’t get along with Libby and Seth, and so only after his divorce has Toby reconnected with his friends, for the first time in 15 years. Toby’s post-marital traumas throw both of his friends’ lives into sharp relief from their own perspectives, pointing up the shallowness of Seth’s low-responsibility party lifestyle and the aching existential ambivalence of Libby’s petit bourgeois marriage and motherhood.

Libby is a narratological Trojan horse; by telling the story through the words of a smart, funny female friend of the male character who seems to be our protagonist, Fleishman Is In Trouble puts the viewer off our guard. Not only do we spend the first few episodes getting to know Toby asymmetrically well in relation to his ex-wife, but the sympathy of his cool, woman friend (and her antipathy for Rachel) validate the loyalties which begin accruing almost automatically for the good doctor. But as not only the details of the story become clearer but also Libby’s reasons for telling it, she, Rachel, and Toby each become more human.

Golden Age TV was supposed to be more like the novel because of the narrative space it offered to creators — to stay just in the mafia picture genre as an example, the sheer scale of the 86 hours of The Sopranos made the two and a half hours of Goodfellas, the three hours of Casino, or even the nine hours of the Godfather trilogy seem paltry time by comparison in which to explore characters or themes. And the eight hours of Fleishman do indeed serve the story and its telling in this way, giving real heft to relationships whose defining characteristics here are the ways in which they either fail or succeed to sustain across time. But if it were all just about screen time and the relative abundance of it, then All My Children would have reproduced the quality of the novel on television decades ago. The misdirected idea that prestige projects with enough budget, former big movie actors, and melodramatic scoring can produce an automatic alchemy of highbrow culture with lowbrow-sized audiences is partly responsible for the tidal wave of middlebrow shit making all the platforms creak. At a superficial glance, Fleishman Is In Trouble bears a passing resemblance to the members of that beige parade of shows about affluent people with deeply hurt feelings. It would be a shame if it got lost in that crowd.

Subscribe now

What keeps the literary energies crackling is Brodesser-Akner’s interest in addressing issues of, to use Paul Tillich’s phrase, ultimate concern, and to do so not only through the content but the form of the work. Much the way Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal (1978) told the story of an infidelity in scenes of reversed, receding chronology so that the audience’s understanding of what they were watching — and so their certainties and sympathies — were made slippery, Fleishman Is In Trouble first places and then dislocates its viewers by flashback, perspectival shift, and the ever-widening of the narrative scope. Several episodes begin and end with a New York cityscape turned upside down; towards the end of the series, the title card crawls from the bottom of the screen up, so that Trouble Is In Fleishman.

Ultimately, Fleishman, with its focus on the nightmares and opportunities of middle-age, is a philosophical story about potential and change: are we Aristotelian substance, decaying ever further from our true essence with passing time? Or are we actually the change itself, like the process philosophers insist? For Alfred North Whitehead and the philosophical tradition he inspired, concomitant to the fact of a reality made up not by essences or substances but rather by events and processes was the primacy of relationship. The empiricists’ billiard ball universe was replaced by quantum entanglement, and human beings who were defined by the processes of their existences would be not only affected but fundamentally constituted by their relationships to others.

In one of the final episodes, Toby’s troubled young daughter, Hannah (played by the precociously talented Meara Mahoney Gross) announces that she is not proceeding with her bat mitzvah; she wants to figure out her own way in life, and also refuses to take responsibility, at age 11, for fixing a world that she didn’t break. After initially responding in dismayed shock, Toby quickly reconciles himself to pride in his daughter’s vote for “charting your own path.” This is supposed to be a satisfying conclusion to Hannah’s arc, because we’ve seen how destructively the girl has internalized her mother’s desperation for peer group approval and social acceptance.

But later, as we listen to Lizzy lament the hollow inevitabilities and let-downs both petty and profound which come from a life anchored exclusively by self-actualization, we wonder if “charting your own path” isn’t exactly what Hannah, and her mother Rachel, were already doing in the first place. Fleishman, in the end, goes looking for metaphysical ballast in secular Jewish-American culture without wanting to admit how much it inherited from actual Judaism; which is just a particular or culturally specific way of saying it does what’s been done in North America and Europe now for centuries — it tries to squeeze more out of secular liberalism than it was built to hold. It’s a horizon, and so a conceptual limitation, that Brodesser-Akner seems to share with her literary forebear, Roth; though short stories like “Eli, the Fanatic” at least allowed the latter to point up some of the ambiguities and ironies of this curtailment.

But to an extent, Fleishman transcends its philosophical limitations by pointing beyond itself; by the time we’ve witnessed Libby’s subtle shift from passive to agential — maybe even literally creative — narration, we’re made aware that there is an aftermath to this story beyond the possibility of our knowing. The series concludes in a place of genuine human and existential mystery, and it matters to its creator that such mystery exists. Know how to tell? They aren’t trying to make a second season.

Share

(this post originally appeared at TheTyee.ca)

When I was a teenager, my father had a “Do Not Disturb” door-hanger sign which he would occasionally put on the knob of the closed door to his room. It only recently occurred to me that this was not typical of most people’s dads or most people’s houses, and is in fact even, on reflection, a somewhat hilarious idiosyncrasy.

My dad was not at all a chilly or unavailable father, in fact quite the opposite; the sign was not remotely indicative of his general approach, and I think I understand where the need for it came from (as a single parent, still in the closet even to his sons about his homosexuality, that little semi-laminate paper sign was probably his only chance at either solitude or privacy in the home we rented in Burnaby).

But at the time, the only thing my brother and I found funny about the Do Not Disturb sign was that its obverse side, done in red and green, read “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season.” This wasn’t the kind of thing that we had in our house. It wasn’t that we were a particularly atheist or staunchly anti-clerical household, though by the mid- and late-’90s we no longer attended church and my dad, raised Roman Catholic with two sons baptized into the Anglican Communion, had joined the ranks of those known in the ecclesial-statistical literature as “SBNRs” — “Spiritual, but not religious.”

There had been times in our lives when our family had been religiously observant; my Dad a member of the choir, painting a watercolour of the stained-glass window in the chancel and me a loyal altar server, lighting candles, leading the kids upstairs from Sunday School, putting candles out. But even in those churchy days, we weren’t cornballs. We never would have gone in for “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season.” There was still too much High Church dignity and gay Québécois sophistication in our blood to go in for that kind of earnest, rhyming evangelism.

But we never really know what flotsam and detritus from our upbringing will elbow its way to the front of our brain when it comes our turn to be the parent, and wouldn’t you know it, that Christic door-hanger has made a second coming in my life. As my own eight-year-old daughter — who last year pieced together that Santa Claus is not a literally material physical agent within space-time — has expressed ennui and disaffection about her first post-naive Christmases, I find the phrase popping up cloyingly, involuntarily. “I wish I didn’t know,” she mutters, before questioning the purpose of a de-Santafied Christmas, and I have to clap my hand across my mouth to stop from singing:

Jesus Is the Reason for the Season!

As she was sharing her frustration with her uncle over FaceTime, my brother told my daughter a story from the Christmas when he was seven. He had written Mrs. Claus (whom he found more accessible than her husband) and asked for an area rug (an area rug!) for his part of our shared bedroom. Mrs. Claus had written him a letter back, and on Christmas morning our Mom read it to him. Someone in the family took a photo of this precise moment: my overjoyed little brother listening to the message; our mother, holding the letter and gazing up at him with as much love as Mary shows in any image of the Nativity; and me, 10, smiling with indulgent, knowing warmth, aware of who really wrote the letter.

The moment is 76 days before our mother died. She is smiling under cheeks swollen to the lunar angles effected by prednisone. She had been sick since I was five and my brother was two, so we’re used to it and don’t know, as she does, that it is the end.

Like many western Christians, I was raised in a cultural environment that made a much bigger deal about Christmas than it did about Easter, though occasionally paid guilty lip service to the fact that it got things backward.

For various reasons, none of them salutary, we modern and post-modern types preferred Christmas to Holy Week: there are presents to get and buy, rather than eggs; a resplendently candle-lit church will always look more spectacular against the bleak December darkness than any lily-choked altar in April; a baby surrounded by sheep listening to a drum solo is a more winsome picture than a tortured and flagellated sage, healer and peacemaker abandoned by his best friends and killed in broad daylight by imperial power, religious authority, and mob hysteria. In Adam McKay’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the southern-fried NASCAR driver played with brio by Will Ferrell refuses to say grace at dinnertime to anyone but specifically the Baby Jesus, rejecting him in all other forms.

Subscribe now

But Saint Francis of Assisi, the guy on the bird baths and man responsible for laying out the first-ever Nativity scene 799 years ago, also left a theological tradition that has historically advocated for the primary importance of Christmas.

For roughly a thousand years (some years pretty goddamn rough), the church’s dominant explanation for Christ’s mission on Earth has been largely based around sin. God’s son came and died among people in order to remedy the effects of our sinning, which began way back when we ate the wrong fruit in Eden.

But for almost as long, the Franciscan tradition has argued for a minority opinion on the Incarnation: that Jesus Christ, as the perfect union of God and the created world, was the whole point of the universe in the first place.

The popular American friar Richard Rohr puts it this way: “For the Franciscans, Christmas is more significant than Easter. Christmas is already Easter! Since God became a human being, then it’s good to be human, and we’re already ‘saved.’”

In other words, Christmas really is about elaborate, surreptitious gift-givings from Mother and Father. In the Incarnation, the Source of all Being, wanting to be with us, has eternally flipped over the Do Not Disturb sign. And you know what it says on the other side, right?

When my brother tells the story about the Christmas morning photo, he says one thing he loves about the picture is that even though I’m a child, the face I’m making is “older than 10.” It surprised me when he said it, because before he did I’d only seen the opposite; the less complicated innocence of the twilight moments before death came crashing in. I thought it was one of the very last images of me as a real kid. I would be much, much older every Christmas that followed.

But if we’re more fragile than we sometimes think, we’re also more durable — and why shouldn’t that resilience include our innocence?

As it happens, I would feel that kind of naive and unadulterated Christmas morning joy once again the year I became a father myself. And this year, as I put up the tree with my daughter — hanging decorations made by the grandmother she never got to meet, but whose presence shoots effortlessly through every joke she makes and every hug she throws around family or friend — I’m more convinced than ever that Incarnation and Resurrection, Christmas and Easter, really are birds of a feather after all.

Please visit TheTyee.ca where this piece originally appeared.

Share

ife as a peaceable, civilian observer of deer has resumed without great occasion on Galiano Island, though I do feel like they’re looking at me differently. I try to keep the wise words of Sopranos FBI agent Skip Lipari in mind: “Remember Sal, you’re the one that’s different.” The deer here can’t possibly know what I did on Haida Gwaii, what I’ve fed my family and friends. And yet the alacrity with which they bound into the roadside woods, all four cloven hooves leaving the ground at once, seems new. My reputation is spreading.

Not really. The preceding paragraph is purple prose, mostly padding, content production. It’s been two weeks since my last essay and for half that time I’ve grown increasingly self-conscious, more and more anxious, about not having put anything into the world. Or nothing anyone can see. I’m on Galiano with my friend the mystery author Sam Wiebe, for a Barton Fink à deux, a collaborative writers’ retreat during which we’re trying to write a crime-comedy script for a concept we have been batting back and forth to each other for more than five years. In fact, the desire for a collaborator on this particular idea was the occasion for our having met in the first place. Having arrived Monday afternoon with nothing written down, at Thursday midday we stand at 60-something pages and brimming with confidence that the week will produce a first draft. Recreating the experience of living with a roommate is terrific inspiration for getting work done.

Read more

The most famous piece of pop culture for turning children against deer hunting is Walt Disney’s adaptation of Bambi (1942), but I can’t personally claim anything with even that kind of pedigree; my most primordial, formative memory of any image of deer hunters, antagonistic or otherwise, is a 1984 episode of Silver Spoons called “A Hunting We Will Go,” whose imdb synopsis runs so:

Rick is eager to go on his first hunting trip with his grandfather, and Edward reluctantly allows it. But when Rick gets a deer in his sights, he finds himself conflicted over the experience.

In my memory of the episode, Ricky hits the deer with a non-fatal shot, and is then unable to finish the job. His aristocratic grandfather, played with highborn dignity by the actor John Stratton, then steps in to despatch the suffering ungulate with patrician sang-froid. According to the imdb trivia section for the episode, “Before the opening credits, Joel Higgins [the actor who portrayed Ricky’s father] provides a disclaimer that the episode's content may be upsetting for young people and that [the producers] invite families to watch it together.”

As a rule, I’m pretty skeptical of any language that overemphasizes ‘authenticity’ but the fact that this episode of a long-forgotten F-list sitcom is the earliest sense impression I have of the fundamental, transhistorical, transcultural human endeavour of hunting is almost surreally deracinated. The idea that screenwriters in an urban centre of a foreign country, working through the medium of a network TV show about a very wealthy boy living in a mansion with a miniature train running through the living room, shaped my first impressions of what has been, in an overwhelming preponderance of human societies across time both recorded and unrecorded, not only a primary means of survival but also of group cohesion, cultural meaning, and male initiation, is nearly inconceivable. I had a great uncle in rural Québec with guns, bows, and arrows in his basement; I had an uncle on the West Coast who went out in a little dinghy to check his crab trap. But besides our own immediate family’s very occasional crabbing trips to the long pier off the border community of White Rock, these things had nothing in particular to do with how I was raised, or who I was raised to be. The meat that I ate came from grocery stores and restaurants and, on Hot Dog Day, from out of a large styrofoam box at the front of the classroom. In an old issue of the X-Men, when Storm was horrified to see her fellow mutant hero, the Canadian enigma called Wolverine, stalking up on an innocent deer, she was relieved when she discovered that it was all just so that he could pet it — Wolverine (who would routinely slice into human and humanoid enemies with his six metal claws) was still a good guy after all. When I read that comic, I felt the same way as Storm did. Probably because it jibed with the episode of Silver Spoons.

And yet for years afterwards I was also fascinated to know if, like Wolverine, I might have what it takes to creep up on a deer unnoticed. Obviously, I didn’t want to hunt, because that was barbaric (remember the glassy black eyes on the deer that Ricky’s grandfather had shot? its blank look of terror?). But inexplicably, deeper down, further even than the Silver Spoons memory, there was something in me that wanted to know if I would be good at it. Whether I could be a good hunter.

Read more

The first time readers met Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh detective John Rebus, in 1987’s Knots & Crosses, they were supposed to suspect — until fairly late into the novel — that he might in fact have been the very serial killer that he was investigating. (Strictly speaking, that sentence probably should have come with a spoiler alert, but in fairness, 1) the book is 35 years old and 2) it wouldn’t take a hardscrabble Scottish inspector to figure out that a character who’s so far spawned another few dozen novels and short story collections likely didn’t kill several children in the first book.) In the opening pages of his most recent outing, A Heart Full of Headstones, Rankin has Rebus in court — as a defendant. Rebus’s trial takes place under Scotland’s ongoing COVID protocols, with detail inspired by Rankin’s real life son’s jury duty experience in the time of coronavirus: the jury aren’t in the courtroom but sit off-site in a movie theatre, watching the proceedings on closed circuit television. Rebus is on trial and on camera.

The jury aren’t just a jury, then, but an audience; just as we, the readers, are. And as one audience sits passively consuming Rebus’s story for judgement, the other sits in judgement on itself for passively consuming Rebus’s stories.

When I spoke to Rankin last week in front of a Vancouver Writers’ Festival audience at SFU Woodwards in the Downtown Eastside, he explained the significance of Robert Louis Stevenson in forming his picture of literary, and even physical, Edinburgh. He reiterated that Knots & Crosses had been meant as a 1980s retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (though, to his charming irritation, it hadn’t been read as such by anybody else). But if Knots & Crosses asked if Rebus might be Hyde without knowing it, A Heart Full of Headstones asks if maybe Rebus was Hyde the whole time we thought he was being Jekyll.

The action in Headstones turns on two plotlines rooted in Rebus’s complicated, intimate enmity with crime boss Big Ger Cafferty — who, like Rebus, is now in his relative dotage, the two men both physically reduced from their primes, with Cafferty bound to a wheelchair and Rebus beset with COPD. Cafferty has hired the now-retired Rebus for a bit of private eye work, turning up an old underling once thought dead (at Cafferty’s hands) but recently spotted alive and kicking. In the meantime, Rebus’s friend and former protégé Siobhan Clarke is investigating first a uniformed police officer, Francis Haggard, accused of spousal abuse, and then Haggard’s murder after he threatens to turn whistleblower as a line of defence.

Haggard claims that his abusive temper and outbursts stem from PTSD caused by his service at a rogue police station, Tynecastle, whose culture of bullying, violence, misogyny, brutality, and corruption had essentially left him a monster. The emeritus ringleader at Tynecastle is Rebus’s also-retired friend, Sergeant Alan Fleck — for whom Rebus once facilitated a meeting with Big Ger Cafferty.

Headstones is a post-pandemic novel, full of face-masks and quarantines (Siobhan only gets the Haggard case because a colleague is in isolation after testing positive; he’s the novel’s only well-rested character, the envy of every hale and healthy detective on the force). Nearly each character here is driven by one or both of the overriding fears of 2020: that things will never be the same, and that nothing’s ever going to change. Cafferty and Fleck are reduced to taking in the city by telescope and early morning risings from bladder weakness, respectively, but neither is willing to let go of his power from the Good Old Days. Fast-rising Inspector Malcolm Fox and Cafferty’s looming lickspittle henchman, Andrew, are unambiguous votes in favour of the future, but with their optimism wed more to an unseemly personal ambition rather than actual hope.

The twin moral centres of the story are each more tentative in their partisanship for past or future. As the investigation of Alan Fleck and the Tynecastle cops threatens to take her friend Rebus down with it, Siobhan is initially torn in her loyalties. But her meetings with Haggard’s battered widow, as well as her hearing the harrowing story of a female officer once stationed at Tynecastle, keep her committed to pursuing desperately needed evolution. For his part, Rebus — described by Rankin as “a small-c conservative” — begins the novel’s action in a mode of unreconstructed nostalgia. “Music’s moved on,” Siobhan says to him at one point, over breakfast.

‘Got worse, you mean, like everything else.’ He looked at Clarke’s plate. ‘Apart from bacon rolls. You can trust a bacon roll.’

But the longer he has to consider his history with Alan Fleck and the police at Tynecastle, the more honest and incisive Rebus’s self-examination becomes. And if Rebus has been a dirty cop this whole time, then where does that leave his millions of fans — not at Tynecastle, but under reading lamps around the world?

Subscribe now

In the film, television, and books of the 1970s and, especially, 1980s, the maverick, rule-breaking police officer was more than simply a stock character; he was heroic archetype. In a time when bureaucracy was identified as the great evil stalking North Atlantic industrial societies, the cop who broke the rules was not only played for vicarious thrill and adventure — he was the only fictional cop we knew we could trust, precisely because he broke the rules. This tendency is usually associated with right-wing backlash, and rightly so; but it was not exclusively a conservative phenomenon. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, for instance, offered Al Pacino as a magnetically countercultural cop against an impossibly corrupt police hierarchy.

Conventional wisdom has shifted, though, and the case against rule-breaking cops has found a greater amplification than perhaps it ever has in the mainstream conversations in Western countries. So where does that leave results-oriented rogues like John Rebus? And does his moral culpability extend to the readers who lived through him, thrilling to his exploits?

In the hands of a less interesting or more cynical writer, A Heart Full of Headstones could have been a simple exercise in weathervane following. But Rankin’s characters are too fully human for any panicked 180-degree rebranding. It helps that he’s willing to do what not many writers are anymore: to leave moral judgments in the hands of his readers. It’s never confirmed, for instance, one way or the other, whether Haggard’s invocation of PTSD as a line of defence was cunning ploy or cri de coeur; reasonable readers will differ. And this is where Headstones as pandemic novel works best in service of its theme.

This is a novel about contagion; about the way that disease spreads literally and corruption spreads metaphorically by contact or association. For both kinds of contagion, sometimes quarantine and cordon sanitaire are necessary, life-saving measures. But in the long run, the idea that we can deal with illness or corruption simply by lopping them off or blocking them out is a self-destructive fantasy. The Tynecastle police station is run like a settler fort or military outpost; time and again, throughout the novel, characters in well-defended physical structures learn too late that the real threat to them is already in the building.

Part of Haggard’s bullying initiation at Tynecastle relates to his given name, Francis; the mostly-Protestant officers call him ‘Saint Francis,’ a sectarian dig at his being Roman Catholic. But Saint Francis of Assisi is a useful key for the text. In a novel ridden with warped father figures — Alan Fleck, Big Ger Cafferty, Rebus himself — Saint Francis is a figure who famously renounced his earthly father in favour of his heavenly one. But more importantly, as Saint Francis grew in holiness, his one-time revulsion at leprosy grew into a love and devotion to lepers. His commitment to nurturing and caring for those with the disease was such that it may have been the reason his own life was cut so short. It’s also what brought him either immortality or eternal life, depending on your metaphysical orientation to history.

When I asked Rankin about the religious imagery and themes that had been so prominent in the early Rebus writing, he explained the way that Rebus’s spiritual explorations had mirrored his, Rankin’s, own needs, and then waned accordingly. But A Heart Full of Headstones is about the very possibilities of hope and redemption, and when the cases you’re pursuing are that big, a good investigator knows that nothing’s off the table.

Share

The only thing more imbecilic than sheer imbecility is derivative imbecility. Shortly after young European climate activists doused a Van Gogh in soup, a couple of their Canadian counterparts here in Vancouver splashed an Emily Carr with maple syrup. You say ‘We Are the World,’ we say ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ — this is activism by way of national stereotype Mad Lib. SPANISH climate activists douse PICASSO with GAZPACHO; ITALIAN climate activists douse CARAVAGGIO with MARINARA SAUCE; AMERICAN climate activists douse ROCKWELL with LIVE AMMUNITION.

Is the maple syrup supposed to make the protest more relatably Canadian? Is it a parody of the very idea of anything being Canadian? Have I already put more thought into the semiotics of this protest than did those who carried it out?

I can’t say for sure, of course — but it does seem to me that just a few moments’ reflection would show up the obvious liabilities of this “strategy,” even before the unanimous comments sections underneath reporting of the story rendered their verdicts. First of all, when you’re part of a movement already accused of trying to drain life of its comforts and pleasures and denounced, usually at least somewhat unfairly, as a form of contemporary Puritanism, maybe almost-defacing cherished artwork like an inept vegan ISIS auxiliary isn’t the best foot to put forward.

But secondly — and this is a note relevant for progressive movements on the whole — when your cause has won mainstream acceptance and support, adopting tactics redolent of a lunatic fringe actually sets you back. The vast majority of people not only acknowledge that climate change is really happening and accept the scientific consensus for why that is, but they support bold action to slow, stop, mitigate, and reverse it. Wacko stunts like hurling viscous and patriotically-significant liquids at nationally-treasured works of art create the impression that the opposite is true; that shrill wingnuts are the kinds of people who care about climate change, while the rest of us normal people who don’t huck breakfast condiments at irreplaceable masterpieces (people who work for a living, or drive their kids to soccer, or are CEOs of the predatory death cult corporations smothering our children’s breath with their profit statements) just roll our eyes. These protesters must be marginal, or else why would they be so desperate?

That desperation and its attendant terror are of course the one thing about the protesters that most of us have no problem at all understanding. They are terrified for their future, for their present, and they’re right to be. That panic is overwhelming despite the fact that they’ve “won” the argument — in fact it’s worse because they’ve won it, because they can see that it doesn’t really matter that they have.

Read more

How should Justin Trudeau have answered when journalists asked him why his first federal cabinet would be made up of as many women as men? The answer he gave at the time — “Because it [was] 2015” — brought the house down, but its vapidity has shown through in the years since. Which is iro…

Read more

In Sidney Poitier’s 1972 western Buck and the Preacher — his first directorial feature — one of the most elemental cowboy movie symbols to come up for reevaluation is the White Hat/Black Hat cliché. The first time we see the picture’s putative Black Hat, the titular Preacher (played by Harry Belafonte somehow made not to look handsome, decades before the advent of computer-generated special effects) is sitting naked in a creek of bracing cold water, using his literal black hat to scoop from the stream and cleanse himself.

Read more