Author Archives: Michael Happy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Today is Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s birthday (1712-1778).

Frye on Rousseau:

It was largely Rousseau, who had brought into European consciousness the discovery that the continuity of subject life, which is dependent on memory and conscious thought, is very largely an illusion, and that a violent alternation of irrational moods keeps exalting and dethroning one consciousness after another.  The result was the growth of a literature of self-revelation, which is a very different thing from self-consciousness.  In self-revelation, a writer takes takes himself for his theme, but, with insight and control granted, can treat himself as objectively as any other subject. (“Recontre: The General Editor’s Introduction,” CW 10, 64)

This is the conception of “natural society,” which, largely through the influence of Rousseau, became central to the development of revolutionary thought in France.  Central to it is the identity of the natural and the reasonable: whatever in society seems logically absurd will sooner or later be found to be unnatural as well.  In England a similar issue was raised by Lord Bolingbroke, a friend of Pope and an influence on his Essay on Man.  The conservative views of Swift and Johnson, to be understood in depth, have to be seen as vigorous repudiations of the conception of natural society and defences of the opposed and more traditional view, that civilization, including law, class ascendancy, and the restraints of society, is what is really natural to man.  (ibid., 87)

Quote of the Day

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Matt Taibbi on David Brooks on Michael Hastings on General Stanley McChrystal:

” . . . . Brooks drags us all to the same dreary place that every conservative columnist eventually goes to in these discussions of sourcing and secrecy and attribution. He regurgitates the tired idea that the press lost its sense of patriotism after Vietnam and Watergate and began reflexively searching for political scalps with gotcha headlines – instead of working collegially with power to sift through the “kvetching” to sit on embarrassing but irrelevant stuff while revealing to the public the few truths it needed to know. Here’s how Brooks put it:

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.

This is a load of crap. It’s bad even by Brooks standards.

Yeah, we have a press corps that goes after “impurities” these days, but you know what kind of impurities they’re after? They’re after Monica Lewinsky’s dress, they’re after gay blowjobs in train stations, they’re after governors who like high-priced escorts and televangelists who like to do meth with male escorts. And yes, they go after that stuff with an Inquisition-like intensity nowadays, but that has nothing to do with Watergate and Vietnam and everything to do with the media business turning into a nihilistic for-profit industry every bit as amoral and bloodless as oil or banking or big tobacco.”

James Wolfe

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Benjamin West’s “Death of General Wolfe”

On this date in 1759 General James Wolfe began the siege of Quebec which ended with his victory — and death — in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

Frye on Canada and Quebec:

Canadians, as I have implied, have a highly developed sense of irony, but even so, de Gaulle’s monumental gaffe of 1967, “vive le Quebec libre,” is one of the great ironic remarks in Canadian history, because it was hailing from the emergence of precisely the force that Quebec had really got free from.  For the Quiet Revolution was as impressive an achievement of imaginative freedom as the contemporary world can show: freedom not so much from the clerical domination or corrupt politics as from the burden of tradition.  The whole je me souviens complex in French-Canada, the anxiety of resiting change, the strong emotionalism which was, as emotion by itself always is, geared to the past: this was what Quebec had shaken off to such an astonishing degree.  It was accompanied, naturally enough, by intense anti-English and separatist feelings, which among the more confused took the form that de Gaulle was interested in, a French neo-colonialism.  This last is dead already: separatism is still a strong force, and will doubtless remain one for some time, but one gets the feeling that it is being inexorably being bypassed by history, and that even if it achieves its aims it will do so in a historical vacuum.  I begin with French Canada because it seems to me that the decisive cultural event in English Canada during the past fifteen years has been the impact of French Canada and its new sense of identity.  After so long and so obsessive preoccupation with the same subject, it took the Quiet Revolution to create a feeling of identity in English Canada, and to make cultural nationalism, if that is the best phrase, a genuine force in the country even a bigger and more significant one than economic nationalism, which is, as Mr. Mayo notes, mainly a Central Canada movement.  (“Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada, CW 12, 450-1)

Saturday Night at the Movies: “The Children’s Hour”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK85OYo8HXg

A look back at the days when homosexuality was still criminal and socially stigmatized, but Hollywood was at least trying to open the closet door with mainstream films like The Children’s Hour (1961), based upon Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play.  However, it’s hard not to notice that the limited consideration here is watered down by ambiguity about the lesbian love involved.  Still, it had to start somewhere.

The rest of the movie after the jump.

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TGIF: “My Gay Son”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifUQq5p5i2g

Catherine Tate and her gay son

Sure, Toronto looks like the country’s just undergone a military coup d’etat, but soon the jackbooted security, the concrete barriers and the general misery of the good people of Toronto will be wisked aside as Gay Pride gets seriously underway.  Do you think our prime minister and his po-faced cohort might stick around for that?  It’d no doubt do them some good to appreciate that there are men in this country who can dress up like cowboys too but without any intention of getting on a horse.

Gay Pride Week

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Today is the first day of Gay Pride Week.

This past month we’ve posted on Alan Turing who committed suicide in 1954.  Bob Denham put together a post last fall on “Frye and Homosexuality” here.

Frye in his 1952 diary made the following entry; remember that this is at a time when homosexuality was illegal and could definitively end a career — and all too often a life:

I have never myself felt any physical basis to my affectionate feelings for other men, but there must be one, and it seems to me to be as pointless to speak of all male love as buggery as it would be to speak of all marriage as legalized whoring.  When Marlowe said that the beloved disciple was Christ’s Alexis, he wasn’t just being a bad boy: the sense of his remark is that Christ’s love, being human, must have had a substantial quality in it.  (CW 8, 465)

Sun TV News: What We Know (Updated with Further Detail)

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Clockwise from upper left: Mulroney, Peladeau, Teneycke, Harper

What we know is not promising.

Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who lied about his business dealings with convicted influence-peddler Karlheinz Schrieber, who took $300,000 in cash from Schrieber without declaring it, and who then demanded 2.1 million tax-payer dollars in compensation for a slander now known not to be slander, is on the board of directors of the Sun News parent company, Quebecor.  More recently, Mulroney has also improperly lobbied cabinet ministers on behalf of Quebecor.

Pierre Peladeau, CEO of Quebecor, is an “ultra-conservative” whose Sun News division is in the doldrums and hasn’t turned a profit for some time.  He is attempting to have the CRTC convert his money-losing Sun TV of Toronto into a Category 1 — or “must carry” — cable news station, which means that cable service providers across the country must make it available to subscribers and to pay for it even if they don’t want it and their subscribers don’t watch it.  In other words, Peladeau wants to turn his unprofitable news division into a cash cow by way of a right wing news channel for which there is no demonstrable demand and whose income is guaranteed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year from cable subscribers who may want nothing to do with it.

Stephen Harper is apparently in on the scheme.  We know that he secretly met with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in March 2009 and that he subsequently met with Peladeau, who’s also had access to at least three other high ranking cabinet ministers.  This fact alone is staggering in its implications.  A sitting prime minister evidently using his position to facilitate the creation of a right wing news channel to serve as the propaganda arm of his government — and do so, moreover, at public expense.  Are there even words to describe this?  Perhaps one: Cheney-esque.

Kory Teneycke, former communications director for Stephen Harper, is now vice president of development for Quebecor Media. Teneycke was also present at the March 2009 meeting of Harper with Murdoch and Ailes.  This completes the circle.  Teneycke is . . .  Well, just consider these remarks on his Facebook page, as reported by Bruce Cheadle of the Canadian Press:

He lauds Glenn Beck, Fox’s anti-government conspiracy theorist, and makes note of a National Enquirer headline about “Obama Cheating Scandal.”

“The Enquirer has a remarkably strong track record on these stories of late… Tiger Woods and John Edwards. We shall see …” writes Teneycke.

And his edgy, controversial humour shines through: “To the pot heads who keep sending me crazy, profane emails: I hope (imprisoned pot activist) Marc Emery enjoys group showers as much as he enjoys pot. Three cheers for the DEA.”

Wow.  “Lauds Glenn Beck,” promotes an “Obama Cheating Scandal” from the National Enquirer, and — in a particularly crude and mean-spirited comment — says of Canadian Marc Emery, now in U.S. custody, “I hope he enjoys group showers.”  Geez, I wonder what that’s code for?  This is a man with a lot of power and money and influence.  This is how he talks about fellow citizens who have nothing like his advantages?  Disgusting.  (Note that Emery paid both provincial and federal taxes on his marijuana seed business totalling $600,000 before the Harper government turned him over to the DEA in May.)

Finally, Teneycke is now claiming that the association of Sun TV News with Fox News is just “critics throwing stones.”  That’s a bald-faced lie.  Teneycke himself has apparently been saying for years that Canada needs a Fox News, a sentiment that has been echoed up and down the line by other conservatives.  Senior Sun News columnist Peter Worthington recently drew the same analogy between Sun TV News and Fox News.  Sun TV News is to be Canada’s Fox News, and that’s evidently been the plan of all of these players all along.

If you haven’t already done so, take a look these two articles, here and here.