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It’s election time in Alberta

On By Christopher Leapock
It’s election time in Alberta – the premier heard the call on this blog, or maybe one of the four million other blogs in Alberta that are more widely read, and deigned to ask voters for a mandate. Much to his surprise, the voters counteroffered with a trip to the glue factory. Yes, it looks like we’re going to have a change of government. I know that for people in most democratic countries this is a regular occurrence, but around here it literally happens once every ten blue moons.

People in the fast-paced modern world are too busy to pay attention to boring things like elections, and so here is an objective and completely nonpartisan summary of the Albertan political landscape.

The Progressive Conservatives

OK, I admit it, the fish was only this big.
Leader: Jim Prentice
Motto: “Guys, C’mon – We Only Held This Vote So We Could Be Re-Elected”
The PCs have been the reigning champions for 44 years, and they’ve gotten as fat and ill-tempered as Robert DeNiro at the end of Raging Bull. They’re in third place in the polls, since at this point re-electing them would be like peasants re-electing their feudal lord. But the PCs don’t give up easy, and they’ve got the money to flood the province with attack ads in the hopes of luring us back to the devil we know. Their desperation is palpable: if things don’t turn around fast, they might have to go and get jobs.

The Wildrose

We’re not lost! We just have to keep making right turns until we find civilization.
Leader: Brian Jean
Motto: “The World Was Better Before Gay Was Invented”
The Wildrose are the party of grumpy old white guys, angry about the decline of traditional social values, angry about taxes, angry about the kids spending all their time on the Face Book, angry about the tornader that done ripped up the fields when the taters was fixin to come in. They’re led by Grumpy-White-Guy-in-Chief Brian Jean, who became leader after Danielle Smith’s defection – which she must really regret now. The Wildrose are a close second in the latest polls and stand a good chance of winning. They have an advantage, because in Alberta electoral districts are based not just on population but on geographic area, meaning that rural areas with more canola fields than people have a hell of a lot of seats.

Their campaign centres on a promise to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes or cutting services, purely by reducing the size of the government that provides those services. They’re like a fitness instructor who says that when you lift weights, you have to lift your own muscle mass too, so clearly the way to lift more weight is to have smaller muscles, right?
The Wildrose are working hard to shed their image as bigoted and old-fashioned. They rejected the candidate who railed about “gay activists”, and fired the one who wanted “brown people” in the front of the crowd where the cameras could see them, and reprimanded the one who asked supporters to “bring your wife’s pie” to a fundraiser. Their problem, of course, is that they even had to.

The Liberals

Think of all the poor children who don’t even have pens!

Interim Leader: Dr. David Swann
Motto: “TBA”
The Liberals were apparently in the shower when the election was called. They hadn’t gotten around to choosing a new leader after the obnoxious Raj Sherman resigned, so they went into the campaign with interim head David Swann. Then they could only wrangle up enough candidates for about half the ridings. Swann insisted that this was because they emphasized quality of candidates over quantity, which I think makes the Alberta Liberals the world’s first boutique political party.

I have an urge to vote for them because I feel they stand for people like me – serial procrastinators who never get anything done.

The Alberta Party

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.
Leader: Greg Clark
Motto: “Not at all like the Liberals. For Instance, Our Signs Are a Different Colour”
A few years back, the Alberta Party had the idea that the reason the centre-left was doing so badly in this province was because the Liberals have a tarnished brand. So the route to government, they thought, was a party exactly like the Liberals, but with a different name. Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work. Though the tarnished brand couldn’t even get ten percent of the vote in 2012, that was still eight times as much as the party no one had heard of before.

The Alberta Party represents the radical centre. They believe in pragmatism and good sense on every issue except supporting someone who might win more than one seat.

The Greens

We’re doing the picture here because my backyard is party headquarters.
Leader: Janet Keeping
Motto: “Power Corrupts, So We’d Rather Not Have Any”
With their candour, clear moral stance, and button-down appearance, the Greens have a lock on several key constituencies in this election: organic grocery store owners, ethics professors, and university students who will get stoned Tuesday afternoon and forget to vote. But, you know, it’s not about winning, it’s about doing right by your conscience and bringing attention to your cause. Even if when the media report the results, they list you as “Other”.

The New Democrats

Who’s the third party now, Jim?
Leader: Rachel Notley
Motto: “If Elected, We Will Probably Go on Strike”
With its roots in organized labour, the NDP has developed into the most effective of Alberta’s many left-wing parties. They have a centrist platform focused on reducing government dependence on unpredictable resource revenues and shoring up public services, which they plan to pay for with some newfangled socialist thing called a progressive income tax. According to the latest polls they are in the lead, due to a stellar debate performance by the intelligent and capable Rachel Notley.

I’m not pulling off the nonpartisan act anymore, am I? Fine. You should all go out and vote NDP. I am too impressed with Notley and the party’s policies to make fun of them.

Besides, imagine the look on Stephen Harper’s face if they win.

Perspectives on genocide

On By Christopher Leapock
Today is the centenary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman government. Using the word “genocide” here is a bit controversial, and by “controversial” I mean that it pisses offTurkish nationalists.

The Hürriyet Daily News ran a columnarguing that the Turkish nationalist perspective on the “Armenian issue” should not be ignored, and so I’m only going to talk about that. The Council of Turkish Canadians ran a chilling ad in this morning’s Globe and Mail. Here is an excerpt of a news release from their website that has almost the same text:

Reconciliation – Not Hatred, Fairness – Not Insult

This year, once again we remember and respect the memory of victims of the Ottoman-Armenian conflict during the First World War. The conflict started with  well-documented armed revolt of Armenian nationalist groups (Dashnaks and Hunchaks) against the empire. They committed high treason by collaborating and joining the invading Russian forces. This resulted in their relocation from the war zone. The relocation was a military measure in self-defense, and also to protect all civilians of eastern Anatolia from commencing inter-communal retaliations. Most of the deaths during the relocation resulted from famine of war era, spread of diseases, attacks by bandits, and breakdown of authority in poor war conditions. Both sides committed massacres, both sides suffered tremendously, Armenians and non-Armenians alike. It was a tragic war that has engulfed every corner of the world, including Anatolia!

Now, even if this version of events were true – it ain’t – a monstrous crime would have been committed. The claim here is that because certain Armenian nationalist groups revolted, the civilian population was forced from their homes. This is the mass deportation of civilians as collective punishment – a war crime. And it’s acknowledged that the result was huge numbers of deaths – even the Turkish government says half a million – from famine, disease, banditry, and whatever “breakdown of authority” is supposed to mean.

If this was really all that happened, it would be unconscionable.

I guess what’s supposed to make this a defense of the Ottomans, not a condemnation, is the claim that this atrocity was committed out of “self-defense” and to “protect all citizens”. But you cannot claim that driving civilians out of their homes to die is self-defense. If someone tried to mug me at gunpoint and I shot him, I could claim it was self-defense. If someone mugged me, then ran off and I couldn’t catch him because no one in the neighbourhood would tell me where he was hiding so I drove the entire neighbourhood out of their homes – not self-defense.

As for forcibly relocating civilians to protect them – well, in hindsight, the strategy didn’t work too well, what with the bandit attacks and the starvation. And in foresight, it’d have been obvious the strategy would not work too well. The kind of obvious that makes someone legally and morally culpable for going through with it anyway.

And finally, there is the claim that both sides suffered terribly. I think this is supposed to be the centrepiece of the argument – mistakes were made, nobody’s perfect, lots of horrible things happened in World War I. It’s also specious. Even if Armenian groups had revolted and were committing massacres, massacring different members of the same ethnic group could not be justified.

So if the genocide deniers are right, the Ottoman Empire was guilty of horrible atrocities against the Armenian population. And that’s the best story the deniers can come up with. The truth, as we know, was worse. 

An Open Letter to Forty-Seven Members of the United States Senate

On By Christopher Leapock
Mar. 12, 2015

An Open Letter to Forty-Seven Members of the United States Senate:

I have noticed from the way you have been acting lately that you may not fully understand what diplomacy is. I am writing to tell you all about it. Diplomacy is very important. While you are in the United States Senate, you should seriously consider trying it.

A dictionary is a book that explains what words mean. There is a good one on the Internet at www.learnersdictionary.com. It says “diplomacy” is a word that means:

1. the work of maintaining good relations between the governments of different countries
2. skill in dealing with others without causing bad feelings

When you write a letter to the leaders of another country and you give them a basic lesson on the constitution as if they were children and you were a civics teacher, it is not good diplomacy. Let me explain why.

Eyes over here, everybody

A letter that makes someone think, “Who the [bad word] do these [bad worders] think they are?” is not good diplomacy. In diplomacy, it is important to be polite and nice to people, even if you don’t like them or you think they are bad. This is called “tact”.

When you do diplomacy, you try to convince people to do what you want. But if you talk to people like you think they are stupid, or they do not know how to google the U.S. Constitution, you are being “patronizing”. It makes people think you do not respect them. They might feel insulted. They might not want to do what you ask them to do. They might even think, “I should get some nuclear weapons just to prove you’re not the boss of me.”

I am sorry if you feel left out because President Obama is talking to Iran but you are not. That is because it is not your job. There are special people called “diplomats”, and their job is talking to leaders of other countries. You should not try to sabotage your own diplomats’ work. Doing that hurts the country’s “interests abroad”, which are things in the rest of the world that Americans want or maybe even need.

Also, if you are angry at President Obama, you should tell President Obama about your feelings, not the leaders of Iran. This is a lot like that time when Daddy was angry with Mommy but instead of having a discussion with Mommy he yelled at you for forgetting to put the milk back in the fridge. Remember how unfair you thought that was?

I hope that this letter teaches you some things that will help you be better senators.

Sincerely,

Christopher Leapock

Called it

On By Christopher Leapock

For anyone who thought that my portrayal of jihadis as thugs with no knowledge of Islam was maybe too harsh, we have the following corroboration from the Economist: 

For recruits to an ostensibly religious militia, many of those joining IS seem to display a notable ignorance of Islam. Before leaving for Syria, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, two young men from Birmingham who pleaded guilty to terrorism offenses in July, ordered copies of “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies” from Amazon.

You see, just because you made something up on the spot doesn’t mean it’s not true. Metaphysical journalism wins again! Though for some reason the Globe and Mail still returned my resume with the note, “Send this again and we’ll get a restraining order.”

Charlie Hebdo

On By Christopher Leapock
Today I conducted a metaphysical interview with one of the men who allegedly carried out the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, killing Stéphane Charbonnier and eleven others. As you may know from earlier posts, a metaphysical interview is like a real interview except instead of talking to people you speculate about what they might say. It’s basically like Fox News without the pretence of factuality.

The killers are in hiding, of course. I met them in what looked like an abandoned warehouse. Before me was a thin, thuggish man, his head not quite shaved recently enough to hide his widow’s peak. He fixed me with a menacing stare. “Allahu akbar,” he said slowly. “I am Cherif.”
“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.” Then I froze up, not sure what to say to someone who had allegedly just gunned down twelve people in cold blood. “Um – so you are one of the alleged attackers.”

“Yes,” said Cherif. “I was one of those who allegedly executed the infidels. We allegedly cut those bastards down where they stood. We allegedly went in there, found that beast Charbonnier, that foul cartoonist, and put an alleged cap in his alleged ass. And then we allegedly shot everybody else, mostly because they were there.”

 “And – why? I guess that’s the question, right? Why did you allegedly do this?”

“To defend Islam. They blasphemed the Prophet.”

“And so you killed them all? Don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?”

“Allah is harsh,” said Cherif. He leant towards me, scowling. “You don’t fuck with Allah, see? You try fucking with Allah, and you’ll hear from us.” He tapped his chest with his fist.

“Isn’t there some kind of rule against using all those words in the same sentence?”

“This,” he went on, “was divine motherfucking wrath. The Koran says that blasphemy must be punished with death.”

“Where does it say that?”

Cherif took a yellow-striped paperback out of his pocket. The cover read Ql’iffs Notes: The Qu’ran, and below that Your imam will never know you didn’t read it! “Right here,” he said. “‘It is forbidden to make the Prophet look silly.’ And when you insult Muhammad, we are gonna fuck you up.”

“If Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were offensive and broke Allah’s law,” I said, “God would punish the cartoonists in the afterlife, wouldn’t He? Why do you need to kill them?”

“You stupid or something?” Cherif snarled. “You want Allah should go around breaking kneecaps himself? Is Muhammad gonna have to cut a bitch?”

“I’m a little confused here, but I think – ”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Think.”

“What?”

“Thinking is forbidden. Islam prohibits it. Everybody knows that.”

I smiled nervously. “For a second there I thought I was talking to Geert Wilders.”

“Islam means submission to God. It does not mean ‘think about shit’. Ever heard of a Muslim who – ”

“Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina – ”

Cherif waved his Ql’iffs Notes in the air. “The Koran says – ”

“That’s not actually the Koran, though.”

He tucked in his chin and glared. “Let me tell you a story. There was once a great Islamic scholar. And when he came across people in the marketplace blaspheming and apostating and philosophering, he said to them, ‘You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend.’”

My jaw dropped so fast I pulled a muscle. “That’s from Scarface.”

“Yes. That scholar was the great al-Pacino.”

“It’s a movie about a psychopathic drug dealer.”

He shrugged. “It’s allegorical.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Is this really what you believe in?”

“Hey!” said Cherif. “I’m a devout Muslim. I check Muhammad’s Twitter feed five times a day, sometimes more.”

“Muhammad died in the seventh century. He does not have a Twitter feed.”

“Well, the angel set it up for him. I don’t know. Allah is all-powerful.” Cherif narrowed his eyes. “You’re thinking again, aren’t you?”

I sighed. There was no point arguing with him. But maybe something else would work. I leant forward and said in an Oprahish kind of voice, “Was this really about Islam?”

“Everything is about Islam,” Cherif snapped. He began counting on his fingers. “Scarface, Taxi Driver, that one where they cut the guy’s eyeball open – ”

“Or is this about your own pain?” I continued. “Did you feel that Charlie Hebdo was insulting you?”

Cherif’s eyes suddenly misted over. His voice wavered. “Maybe – maybe I was jealous, since that blasphemous magazine was so popular and my rap career never took off and the networks won’t broadcast my show.”

“Your show?”

“The Super Salafist Funtime-mentalist Variety Hour. Good, wholesome, pious entertainment, but the liberal media refuse to air it.” He leapt from his chair. “We’re taping a new episode right now, in fact.”

“I thought you said the networks refused it.”

“We put them on YouTube. We get dozens of views – sometimes. Come on! You can watch!”

He dragged me through another door, where to my shock I found a soundstage. Men, and women in niqabs, were milling about. There was a live studio audience, with all the men seated on one side and all the women on the other, and a portable chain-link fence set up between them. Cherif and I sat down in the back row.

“Can you sit in the audience like this?” I asked. “You said it was your show.”

“I’m an executive producer,” Cherif said. “Now hush, it’s about to start.”

The house lights went down. A loud recording of a man singing played for a moment, and then a sign reading APPLAUSE IS FORBIDDEN in red letters lit up over the stage. Two lines of veiled women walked out and formed a sort of phalanx.

“These are the Funtime-mentalist Showgirls,” Cherif whispered excitedly.

“They’re, um, not moving.”

“Dancing is forbidden,” Cherif replied.

“Shouldn’t there at least be music or something?”

“Can’t have women and music together. Things could get out of hand.”

Several minutes went by. “How do you even know they’re women?” I whispered. “You can’t see anything but their eyes.”

Cherif pouted. “It would be improper for me to see their faces, but I talked a bunch of times with one of them, while chaperoned. There, the tall one in the back row. Her name is Richard.”

I coughed.

“She has the loveliest knuckles,” Cherif went on. “And this husky voice. Once we even talked about getting married. Richard wanted to have our wedding in Canada or Oregon, but I said, no, we should go to Saudi Arabia. And she said we couldn’t get married there for some reason she never really explained.” He sighed. “Well, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

The dancers filed away, and a portly man with a long beard walked onstage. “Good afternoon and welcome to the Super Salafist Funtime-mentalist Variety Hour!” he said. “I’m your host, Abdul al-Unser.” He took a book out of his pocket. “We’ll begin tonight’s show by reading some of Muhammad’s sayings.”

“You see,” said Cherif, “unlike that degenerate, corrupting mockery Charlie Hebdo offered, we both entertain and teach.”

Al-Unser began to read from the book, in what appeared to be Classical Arabic spoken with a thick French accent. I looked around the audience, then nudged Cherif. “It doesn’t seem to me like anyone here understands what he’s saying.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” said Cherif. “He’ll explain it for us afterward.”

Sure enough, after several minutes al-Unser closed the book and said, “And those are the passages where Muhammad said that we must kill all the infidels, women are not allowed to use phones, and Mountain Dew is liquified sin. And now,” he continued, “it is time for entertaining jokes. Please welcome Abdul al-Jolson!”

Another stout bearded man came on. He must have been the designated comedian, as his robe was made of different clashing plaids. “Good afternoon, al-Unser,” he said. “Tell me, how many Jews does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Why, I don’t know,” al-Unser replied. “How many Jews does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know either,” said al-Jolson. “I don’t speak to Jews.”

No one laughed. Cherif nudged me with his elbow and whispered, “He’s a comic genius, isn’t he?”

I was too flabbergasted to answer.

“Knock knock,” said al-Jolson.

“Who’s there?” said al-Unser.

“Allah.”

“Allah who?”

“Allahu akbar!”

I couldn’t help snickering. Cherif jabbed me hard with his elbow. “Laughing isforbidden.”

Al-Jolson bowed to the silent audience and left the stage, and al-Unser said, “And now everybody’s favourite part of the show: the Funtime-mentalist Puppets, featuring the severed heads of executed infidels!”

The curtain of a Punch-and-Judy-like booth behind him opened up to reveal two decomposing heads with arms shoved up the necks. One began moving its mouth, and a second or two later a voice said, “Good afternoon, fellow infidel. How many Jews does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“All right, that’s it.” I stood up. “This has gone way, way too far.”

“You can’t leave now!” Cherif hissed. “I co-wrote the next sketch! It’s called ‘Jihad to Avonlea’. Some hair is sticking out from under Anne’s hijab and so al-Unser – well, I won’t ruin it for you, it’s too hilarious!”

“It’s horrible,” I said. “This is all horrible. You’re so stupid and cruel it’s almost pathetic.”

Which I should not have said out loud, because I was immediately surrounded by men waving guns and shouting “Blasphemy!” and “Kill him!”

I had to think fast. “There!” I cried. “Look over there!”

No one looked. I had to come up with a better plan.

“In the…backstage dressing room! There’s a piece of toast with Muhammad’s face on it!”

The men stared at me in horror. “Kill the toast!” somebody bellowed. “Kill that blasphemous toast!” The mob charged toward the stage. There were screams as they trampled one of the alleged showgirls. And I got out of the building as fast as I could.

12 People You’ll Never Believe You Actually Elected

On By Christopher Leapock

Today, instead of a fictional farce, we look at the actual farce that is Alberta politics. The Progressive Conservative party has been in power in Alberta for 43 years. I’m just going to repeat that number in case you missed it the first time: 43 years. They have literally been around longer than disco.

They can be called a centre-right party, inasmuch as a party whose name is an oxymoron can have a coherent position. But it’s not very accurate to call the PCs a party. A party is a faction, a group of like-minded individuals who band together to better compete against other groups of like-minded individuals. The PCs are an institution. They are the Blob, inexorably absorbing every sentient being within reach.

For starters, they haven’t just governed this province for 43 years, they’ve done it with overwhelming majorities. In the last election, the PCs won 61 seats, and all three other parties combined won 26. That’s less than three-quarters of the total, which is well below average for the PCs. Every twenty years or so, another party actually tries to winan election in Alberta. The rest of the time, they try not to lose every one of their seats.
But that by itself kind of understates how dominant the PCs are. The second-biggest party was the Wildrose, a sort of right-wing protest group. Rather than progressively conservative, they were straight-up 160-proof conservative. (You’ll see in a moment why I’m using the past tense here.) Several Wildrose members were former PCs who’d grown disaffected with the government’s unaccountability and ideological incoherence. Another party, the Liberals, are led by another disaffected former PC. So our legislature consists of the governing party, the governing party’s castoffs, and a smattering of other politicians who spend nearly all their time complaining about how nobody ever pays attention to them.

You see, the PCs are what they call a ‘big-tent’ party, meaning that they have colonized a wide swath of the political spectrum. PCs come from right and left, but they are all united by one belief: they want a share of power, and the way you get power is by joining the party that’s had it all since before I was born.

With that in mind, let’s move to recent events. Three years ago the PCs were facing a major threat from the Wildrose, who had a likeable leader, Danielle Smith, and a clear message.

Danielle Smith dreams of power

The first problem the PCs were having was that people were getting tired of being governed by a dynasty about to enter its fifth decade. The other problem was that the premier at the time was Ed Stelmach, the blandest politician ever to live.
Ed Stelmach’s official portrait

This was a serious threat to a job security that tenured professors envied. So the PCs sent Stelmach back to his farm (I am not making that up) and cast about desperately for anyone who might win them the election. They settled on Alison Redford.
Alison Redford suspects we’re talking about her

Redford came from the left wing of the party; rather than progressively conservative, she was progressive, though conservatively. She cozied up to leftish types in the big cities. Her strategy was to portray the Wildrose as a bunch of grumpy old white men who hated everything invented after 1900 and a great deal of things from before then.

It worked mainly because of an almost unprecedented twist, which was that what she was saying was more or less true. One example among many was Wildrose candidate Allan Hunsperger’s blog, which described in detail what he wanted God to do to gays. (Hint: it’s like what the server does to a baked Alaska, but longer-lasting.) The Wildrose party’s attempt at damage control was just to say that raging homophobia wasn’t official party policy, which is like the cable company saying that, yes, some of our customer service representatives are assholes, but we don’t require them to be that way.

It was an interesting election, with the PCs basically running under the slogan “Corrupt and Out of Ideas, but Not Evil” and the Wildrose riposting with “Honest, Fresh, and We Might Not Hate You Specifically”. The Wildrose swept the grumpy old white man vote, but the PCs won the election through a last-minute surge of liberal urbanites voting for them out of sheer terror at what the Wildrose might wreak.

But things didn’t go swimmingly for the new government. The main problem was that Redford spent most of her time in office circling the province in a taxpayer-funded private jet sending out tweets like “what up, alberta? just cracked a fresh bottle of dom perignon. btw have 2 cut all higher education funding by 20% 🙁 ”

The fun finally ended when her own party went after her with torches and pitchforks. She was replaced by Jim Prentice, a former federal politician, then vice-chairman of a large bank. 
Jim Prentice gets ready to bring the pain

In one of those quirks of the Canadian parliamentary system that is not endearing, Prentice became leader first and was then elected. That is, he was chosen as party leader and then ran for office in a byelection in a safe district, one where a majority of people would vote for a genital wart if it was running for the PCs – not that anybody shows up for byelections anyway, since they’re roughly equivalent to inviting all your friends to the bar on a Tuesday afternoon. Prentice won with 6 898 votes. This was 58% of the people who bothered to show up, 15% of the population of the district, and a resounding 0.189% of the people of Alberta.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Wildrose, Danielle Smith, had been fighting for her party to officially agree to equal rights for everyone regardless of race, religious belief, or sexual orientation – because, as she repeatedly pointed out, it’s hard to win an election when you come across as bigoted against most of the electorate. And the party of course agreed, since no political organization not actually run by Archie Bunker would be so committed to bigotry that it would rather give up the chance of ever governing than compromise on the issue.

No, I’m kidding. They refused. And so what happens? Well, the Wildrose leader and ten other legislators from her party figured out their best route to power was, as always, to join the Blob. So they – and this is the majority of the Wildrose caucus we’re talking about, including the party leader – defected and joined the PCs.

So let’s review. Who governs Alberta now?

  •          A bank vice-chairman who got almost 7000 ordinary citizens to vote for him.
     
  •          A party one-sixth of whose representatives were actually elected as members of a different party.

Is this undemocratic? Well, let’s compare it to, say, Russia. On the one hand, Vladimir Putin won the presidential election in part by jailing all his serious opponents. On the other hand, he actually bothered to hold a fucking vote.

I suppose we did vote, in a way. We voted for the Blob, and they’ll keep us posted on who exactly we elected. Isn’t that so very nice of them.

The young man and the sage

On By Christopher Leapock
Once upon a time a young man who was acclaimed for his wit and the profundity of his thoughts decided to visit an old sage who lived as a hermit on a mountain. The young man climbed up the steep path to the hermit’s hut and found him working in his garden.

 “Great sage,” said the young man, “I have come to you because you are reputed to be very wise, and I wish someday to be as wise as you. So, tell me: what is the secret of your wisdom?”

The old sage sat back on his haunches and looked the young man over. He scratched the side of his nose as he thought. “Wisdom,” he finally said, “is the sea.”

The young man waited a moment in case the sage added anything, but he didn’t, so he replied, “Ah, yes! Of course! Why couldn’t I see that before! Thank you, thank you!” He went back to his town and relayed the old sage’s account, expounding and expanding it, and soon he had built up quite a reputation as a teacher himself.

All the time, however, something was nagging at him, which was the feeling that he didn’t completely understand what it was for wisdom to be the sea. In fact, when he was really being honest with himself, he felt like he didn’t understand it at all. So after ten years had passed, he decided to go back to the sage. He climbed the mountain much more slowly this time, his impending confession weighing heavily on his mind.

The sage was resting under a tree. “Wise sage,” said the young man, “I am grateful for what you revealed to me, but I must admit that I do not fully understand yet what wisdom is.”

The sage looked him up and down, scratched the side of his nose, and thought. After several minutes he said, “What I said before was true, and yet – wisdom is not the sea.”

“Why, of course!” said the young man. “I understand now. It’s much clearer.” And it did seem that way for a while. But then the doubts returned, and he found himself lying awake at night wondering: how is wisdom the sea and also not the sea? He decided the meaning was ineffable. That satisfied him for a number of years, but then the nagging worries began to grow, that maybe his understanding was not so much ineffable as nonexistent.

And so, ten years after his last visit, he returned to the sage. The path up the mountain seemed much steeper than it had been before, and the man had to stop several times to rest. The sage had grown very thin. He was slumped in a chair watching a girl, a granddaughter or even great-granddaughter, tending his garden.

“Oh great sage,” said the man, “I have considered what you said for all these years, but I regret that I still lack your insight. So please tell a poor suffering soul: what is wisdom?”

The old sage looked him over. He thought for so long that the man started to wonder if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. And then the sage said, “Wisdom is the slightest blade of grass and the mightiest mountain.”

“I see,” said the man. “Yes! It explains so much!” And it did seem for a bit like it did. He felt like he was right on the cusp of understanding, but every time he tried to take that last step and grasp the meaning, it would slip away like a ghost. He took to meditating on the sage’s words for several hours a day, but it did him no good. He drank gingko biloba tea every morning, and ate fish for dinner. When he was sick of those, he tried fasting, but he still could not understand.

After ten more years, he could no longer stand his hollow life, where he was wealthy and respected as a learned man but was unable to grasp the simplest truth. So he gave away all his worldly possessions and set out on foot across the countryside seeking enlightenment – until his sciatica got so bad he had to have his brother send him money for a carriage home.

When he returned, he heard that the sage had taken ill. The man realized this might be his last chance to learn what wisdom was. He struggled up the path until he reached the little hut. The sage was bedridden, but the girl – who was now a grown woman, and quite pretty – propped him up on some pillows so he could receive his visitor.

 “Oh great sage,” said the man, “I have thought and considered and fasted and meditated for so many years. But I still cannot grasp the secret of your wisdom. You said that wisdom is the sea, and you said it is not the sea, and you said it is the slightest blade of grass and the mightiest mountain. But sometimes I cannot imagine how such things could mean anything at all.”

“Neither can I,” the sage replied, “but it didn’t take me thirty years to figure that out.”

Return to blogging

On By Christopher Leapock
I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while, but it’s been a busy few months:

  • I finished my book, now titled The Myrtle Child. It is the funniest thing since sliced bread. It is so epic it makes Game of Thrones look like People magazine. Next step is to find an agent, and then I’m on my way to world domination. (Except that with the comic novel instead of the death ray I was hoping for, I may have to revise my plans a bit.)
  • I did some philosophy, writing a piece called “Intellectual Virtue Now and Again” for a volume called Epistemic Situationism, to be published by Cambridge University Press. If you know what all those words mean you should check it out. If you don’t, what you need to know is that philosophical debates are basically like this.
  • Pavel and the Ivans, the patriotic Ukrainians you might remember from previousposts, were finally noticed by the media (and by ‘the media’, I mean ‘the media who aren’t just making the news up’). Vladimir Putin explained that they and the other Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine were not invading the country; they were just on vacation. I was a little suspicious of this story at first, but I checked TripAdvisor and it turns out he was telling the truth. Just look at this review of the Donetsk Best Western, posted by a ‘Sgt. Pavel’:

    This hotel is terrible. The air conditioning didn’t work half the time, and neither did the running water. We specifically asked for a quiet room, but the sound of artillery fire kept us awake until three in the morning! The service was rude and totally unreliable. The concierge never showed up once. When we ordered room service, it took almost an hour for them to bring it, and there was blood all over the cart. The bellhop said he’d been shot by a sniper, of all the ridiculous excuses! I think he was actually drunk – he was slurring his words and could barely stand up straight. We sent the food back but then when we checked out, the meal was STILL on our bill. We should have known better than to book a hotel advertising it was a short walk from the Historic Front Lines.

A metaphysical interview with Toronto city councillor Doug Ford

On By Christopher Leapock
This afternoon I had the opportunity for a metaphysical interview with Doug Ford, Toronto city councillor and brother to the mayor, Rob Ford. You’ve probably heard of Rob Ford: his pro-taxpayer, anti-downtown-fatcat policies have been featured in news media all over the world, and Youtube is full of amateur videos of his impromptu political speeches.

You probably haven’t heard of a metaphysical interview. This is like a regular interview, but instead of talking to the person you speculate about what they might say. It made my office hours today a bit awkward:

Student: Can I talk to you about my essay?

Me: I’m not here. I’m in Toronto conducting an interview.

Student: If I drop your class now, can I still get my money back?

Anyway, I met with Councillor Ford on the driveway of his lovely Rexdale home. “I wanted to ask you,” I began, “about your comments on the Griffin Centre group home near here. You were quoted as saying that it ‘ruined the neighbourhood’.”

“It did,” the councillor replied. “We have autistic people – not children, but teenagers and adults – who are disturbing the peace, screaming at night and wandering around. We have police and ambulances showing up. It’s hurting property values.”

“But, Mr. Ford,” I said, “isn’t that insensitive? I mean, we don’t want to exclude people from the community just because they have developmental challenges.”

“I feel just as much for autistic kids as the next guy,” he said, and put his hand on his heart to prove it. “But this used to be a quiet, well-kept neighbourhood – neat and tidy, filled with respectable, hardworking people. Having people here with these problems ruins all that. Would you want to live next door to someone who’s wandering around, screaming incoherently, and – ”
What he said next was drowned out by the sound of retching. At the end of a neighbouring house’s driveway, a enormously fat man vomited into a recycling bin. He stood up, wiped his mouth, and took a swig from a half-empty forty of Smirnoff. Then he staggered towards us. Doug Ford was still talking, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the spectacle. The bulbous man wore an untucked dress shirt and tie, both spattered with bile. One of his shoes was missing. He glared at me with bloodshot eyes and growled, “What are you staring at?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied.

The fat man waved his bottle in the air and shouted, “I’m the mayor! Who the fuck are you?”

Before I could answer, he launched into a rambling speech in a fake accent. I certainly couldn’t understand enough to relate what he said, but I think I can summarize it thus:

Rob Ford’s Jamaican-style Jerk Sauce

Ingredients
1 anecdote
½ dozen swear words
3 cups of mock humility, badly faked
1 painfully embarrassing ethnic stereotype
Combine all ingredients and bring to a low boil. Slur until thoroughly mixed up. Serve while waving arms around as if fighting invisible ninjas.

The mayor then bellowed “WHAT’S UP?” and tried to slap his brother on the shoulder, but missed and nearly toppled over.

“Having a good time?” said Doug.

“Fuck yeah!” shouted the mayor, and took another drink, missing his lips and dribbling enough vodka down his shirt to make him a fire hazard.

“So, Rob,” said Doug very calmly, “I’m giving an interview here.”

The mayor jabbed me in the chest with his finger. “Bill Blair is a fucking asshole. And if you quote me on that I’ll ram my knee up your ass. No, fuck that. My knee is wider than your ass. How do you even sit down on that bony thing? You look like you’re fucking made of paper clips.” He wiggled the bottle. “Want a drink, bro?”

“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m driving.”

“So was I until that tree cut me off.” He looked over his shoulder and yelled, “GET OFF THE ROAD, YOU LEAFY BITCH!”

I worried for a minute about offending someone that large and intoxicated, but even a metaphysical interviewer has to take some risks. “Mr. Ford, I thought you were in rehab.”

“Fuck rehab!” he shouted, and launched into an Amy Winehouse rendition. He aimed for the tune the way a fleet of B-52s would, destroying every note in a two-mile radius of the ones in the song. As he caterwauled he began to wander towards the house.

“My brother’s getting help for his substance abuse problems,” said Doug.

“I don’t have a drinking problem!” the mayor shouted. “I have a liberal media cocksuckers problem. I have a Bill Blair is a dickhead problem.”

“He’s making great progress,” said Doug. “He should be back to work in a couple weeks.”

“Taking care of business!” the mayor sang, so off-key that Randy Bachman could have sued him for slander. Lurching back and forth like a buoy in a hurricane, he managed to extricate a pipe from his pants pocket.

My eyes widened. “Is that a crack pipe?”

“No,” said Doug. “It’s a, um, kazoo.”

The mayor teetered back and forth, trying to get his lighter lit, the flame over the end of the pipe, and inhale, all at the same time. It was clearly a bit complicated for him.

“He’s smoking crack.” I turned to Doug. “He’s smoking crack on your driveway.”

“Technically, no,” Doug replied. “He’s got the pipe upside down.”

“He’s trying to smoke crack and failing. That’s even worse.”

“This stuff is shit!” the mayor yelled. “I want my five bucks back!” He threw the pipe in a hedge, then drained the bottle of vodka and tossed it too, laughing when it shattered against the neighbours’ car. “I’m gonna get another drunk,” said the mayor, and staggered up to his brother’s front door, where he stood swearing profusely and trying to figure out how to work the doorknob.

 “So,” I said to Councillor Ford, “where were we?”

“We were talking about respectable neighbourhoods,” he said. “About how people need to live in quiet, well-kept places, with good, hardworking people, and how group homes for autistic people ruin the property values.”

“Ah, yes,” I replied. “That’s where we were.”

Return to Ukraine

On By Christopher Leapock
I’d hoped to make it back to Ukraine for another metaphysical interview for a while now, but with my work schedule it just hasn’t been possible. It takes time, you know, speculating about a transatlantic flight. Finally, while doing laundry this afternoon I managed to get back to Kramatorsk, in the self-declared sovereign state that used to be the province of Donetsk.

Looking one way down the street, it seemed like a normal afternoon. People strolled and chatted and shopped. A pair of old men played chess outside a café. A grocer argued with a heavyset woman who was waving around a beet that had apparently offended her. But just twenty yards away, the street was cut off by a barricade of sandbags and cinderblocks. Soldiers lolled in the sun or rested in the shade cast by an armoured personnel carrier parked on the sidewalk. They still wore uniforms that looked oddly like Russian ones, but they had patches freshly sewn on their shoulders that read Donetsk People’s Republic.

“Greetings, Dr. Lipak!” Pavel Aleksandrov strode over to me, a rifle slung over his shoulder, followed by two of his men – who I think were both named Ivan. They stopped a few feet away and saluted me. Pavel’s eyes fell for an instant, and then he said, “Welcome back to Kramatorsk!”

“Pavel,” I sighed, “I can see that you wrote the name of the town on your hand.”

“I had it tattooed there. Because I love my hometown so much.”

“Let’s not go there again.” I pointed to the insigne on his shoulder. “So you’re in the Donetsk army now?”

“Yes,” said Pavel. “In our referendum the people of Donetsk overwhelmingly voted to become a sovereign state. And a sovereign state needs an army, so as a patriot who loves his region, I felt obliged to join up.”

“Right.”

“Of course, we may not remain independent forever. We might, for instance, vote to join Russia someday. But who knows what the future will hold?” He raised his hands and glanced upward as if to say ‘only God,’ though I suspected that He wasn’t the one who would make the decision.

“I wanted to ask you about that referendum,” I said.

“It showed overwhelming support in favour of sovereignty. 89% in favour.”

“That certainly sounds good,” I replied, “though according to pollsters, support for independence is only around ten or fifteen percent. Little odd, that. Anyway, what was the turnout for the referendum?”

“103%.”

There ensued an awkward silence.

“We asked the people of Donetsk to give 110%,” said Pavel, “but they did not. They only gave 103%.”

“Yeah – um.” I took off my glasses, then put them back on. “Okay, you do realize that giving 110% is a sports metaphor and not actually possible?”

“Well, maybe for your apathetic voters.”

“No, I mean it’s literally impossible. You cannot have more than 100% of the voters turn out.”

“It’s not impossible. Only challenging.”

“You can’t have more votes than you have voters.”

Pavel just looked at me, his face impassive except for a polite half-smile; but one of the Ivans said, “Why not?”

“Why not? You’d have people voting more than once.”

“But of course!” said Ivan.

I gave him a second, then said, “You meant, ‘of course they don’t vote more than once,’ right?”

“If someone feels strongly about Donetsk’s sovereignty,” said Pavel, “they should be able to express the depth of their patriotic sentiment. Sometimes one vote just isn’t enough to capture how much a man loves his region.”

“Okay,” I said. “And if they’re strongly against sovereignty?”

“Then they can express their views in the privacy of their own homes.”

I shook my head. “Guys, this is why no one’s going to take this vote seriously. If you want to hold a referendum, you need to do it properly, with international monitors to certify that it was free and fair.”

Pavel sighed. “All that trouble we went to,” he muttered. Then he grinned. “You’re international! We’ll hold the referendum again, and you can monitor it.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Wonderful! Then we vote again.” Pavel took a little spiral notebook and a stubby pencil out of his breast pocket, and turned to the Ivans. “You?”

The two said, “Yes,” at once, and one of them quickly added, “Jinx. You owe me bottle of vodka.”

Pavel mumbled, “Me – yes,” then shouted to the men on the barricade. “Lieutenant!” A young man who was half-asleep jerked to his feet, knocking his elbow on the corner of a cinder block. He saluted, then rubbed his elbow and winced. “We are holding another referendum!” Pavel shouted.

“Yes, sir!” said the Lieutenant. He asked for the votes of the other men, counted their dozy grunts, and shouted back, “Four yeses!”

Pavel waved to the nearest people on the street, the grocer and the heavyset woman. “Are you in favour of the sovereignty of Donetsk!” he called.

“Sure,” said the grocer with a shrug.  

The woman spun around and shook her beet menacingly at Pavel. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times – no!”

Pavel made two tick marks in the notebook. “Well, that’s nine votes, eight yeses, which is…” He chewed on his pencil as he thought.
“That’s not it,” I said. 

“Is that it?”

“89% in favour,” said Pavel. “So, you certify on your blog that our vote was free and fair, and we will be an independent country. Or maybe join Russia. Who knows?”

I shook my head. “Is this seriously how you conducted the referendum? Where did you get the idea that this was how voting works?”

“Joseph Stalin,” said Pavel.

“Ah,” I replied. “I really should have seen that coming.”