Here’s a new word courtesy of Sarah Palin, “squirmish,” which appears intended to mean “a brief battle between small groups, usually part of a longer or larger battle or war.”
Palin’s use of it in a sentence: “The people have a right to know: Are we at war? Or is this an intervention? Or a squirmish?”
Video here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0
“Friday”
Angry Birds. Rebecca Black. It’s hard to keep up. But for pure wtf-ery, it’s Rebecca. There are no “lyrics,” but there are words consistent with the vocabulary of a 7th grade book report, and they are “sung.” It’s as if Mark Mothersbaugh and Morrissey had both suffered strokes and got together to write this song as the first step to a long recovery.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ugSKW4-QQ
All of our posts today will be in the spirit of the day, starting with this April Fool classic from the BBC in 1957, perhaps the granddaddy of large-scale April Fool pranks.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNmPYmrsNk
Pre-Confederation footage from the Salmonier River, along with a traditional Newfoundland reel
The Dominion of Newfoundland joined the Dominion of Canada on this date in 1949 to become the country’s tenth province:
Frye in an essay about E.J. Pratt, “Silence in the Sea”:
The attitude I have trying to trace in Pratt and associate with his Newfoundland origin is most clearly expressed, naturally, in the poem called Newfoundland which stands first in his collected poems. As the poet watched the sea beating on the Newfoundand shores, a possible ironic or fatalistic vision is dismissed and the vision of the unquenchable energy and the limitless endurance which unite the real man with real nature takes its place:
Here the tides flow, And here they ebb; Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters Held under bonds to move Around unpeopled shores— Moon-driven through a timeless circuit Of invasion and retreat; But with a lusty stroke of life Pounding at stubborn gates, That they might run Within the sluices of men’s hearts, Leap under throb of pulse and nerve, And teach the sea’s strong voice To learn the harmonies of new floods, The peal of cataract, And the soft wash of currents Against resilient banks, Or the broken rhythms from old chords Along dark passages That once were pathways of authentic fires.And just as the closed door separates the world of consciousness and feeling from the blind fury, so the open door unites man and his world in a common vision. (CW 12, 396-7)
I was lucky enough to live in Newfoundland for a year, and I can guarantee that Newfoundland did not join Canada, Canada joined Newfoundland.
I can also confirm that the bite of Newfoundland humor is keen. After the jump, a sketch from CODCO, now twenty years defunct and still missed.
An earlier post in which Frye cites a poignant fragment of Newfoundland verse here.
The Yonge-University-Spadina line opened on this date in 1954, the first subway in Canada.
Toronto, of course, was Frye’s hometown from 1929 on, and he regularly referred to the changes he saw there across six decades. Here he is in “Canada: New World without Revolution”:
Some time ago Eric Arthur produced a book on Toronto called No Mean City, full of photographs of its older architecture. If we count the number of buildings that have been destroyed, many of them before the book appeared, we can see that there is something else in the city which is, if not mean, at least reckless and out of control, something that needs strong organizing to resist it. According to John Stuart Mill, there is a liberal and conservative question to be asked about everything: what good is it? and why is it there? If these questions are asked about public, cultural, or historical monuments, the prevailing answer in our day to the question, what good is it? is, no good unless to the present owner of the property it stands on; and the answer to the question, why is it there? is, because it is not yet worth anyone’s while to remove it. Clearly we need more intelligible answers to both questions. (CW 12, 441)
Here’s a nice addition on the anniversary our nation was signed into law: Frye in “Trends in Modern Culture” describes liberalism as “the true faith in democracy”:
This is liberalism, the doctrine that society cannot attain freedom except by individualizing its culture. It is only when the individual is enabled to form an individual synthesis of ideas, beliefs, and tastes that a principle of freedom is established in society, and this alone distinguishes a people from a mob. A mob always has a leader, but a people is a larger human body in which there are no leaders or followers, but only individuals acting as functions of the group. Tolerance of disagreement and criticism among such individuals is necessary, not because uniform truth is nonexistent or unattainable, but because the mind is finite and passionate. (CW , 237)
Edward Greenspon in The Toronto Star today illustrates why the Harper government does not meet this standard:
For all its neglect, Liberalism actually stands for something important. It is, in the words of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, not a neutral concept but “a fighting creed.” It says: “That is not the way we do things” in the face of illiberal behaviours, whether these be misleading MPs about signatures on documents, failing to disclose the costs of fighter jets or prisons, proroguing Parliament rather than abide by rulings, attacking the legitimacy of independent watchdogs from Elections Canada to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, jamming the judiciary or weakening the channels of knowledge by which decisions can be taken on the basis of evidence rather than belief.
Queen Victoria gave royal assent to the British North America Act on this date in 1867, to take effect on July 1st.
Frye in “Criticism and Environment”:
The second stage of cultural development in Canada revolves around the Confederation of 1867, the union of the two Canadas, now Ontario and Quebec, with two Maritime Provinces, and eventually British Columbia. This stage is characterized by a search for a distinctively “Canadian identity,” more particularly in English Canada, and attached to this search are a number of critical fallacies that are important to diagnose. The first and most elementary of these is the fallacy of the exclusive characteristic, or nonexistent essence, the attempt to distinguish something that is, in this case, “truly Canadian,” and is not to be found in other literatures. There are no exclusive or even defining characteristics anywhere in literature: there are only degrees of emphasis, and anyone looking for such characteristics soon gets as confused as a racist looking for pure Aryans. (CW 12, 573-4)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDTmpXj9vyM
When he benefits, he’s for it.
(Thanks to Clayton for the tip.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgjjWaUykKI
Gilles Duceppe of Stephen Harper: “I don’t like people lying”
Stephen Harper is pretending out of the gate that the issue in this election is the possibility of a coalition government involving the opposition parties — as though this outcome were some form of treason, when it is in fact a threat only to the prolonged life of the Harper government, sometimes confused by the Harper government as the institution of Canadian government itself.
Above, Gilles Duceppe reminds us that Harper wasn’t always so resistant to the idea of coalition government when the coalition might have been the Harper government. Today, Duceppe produced a 2004 letter to the Governor-General signed by the leaders of the opposition parties — including Stephen Harper — advising her that the opposition might be able to form a government if the then Liberal minority fell. At that time, such a maneuver would have been regarded as parliamentary procedure. Now the idea that opposition parties might co-operatively command the confidence of the House is an affront to Canadian democracy — despite the fact that maintaining the confidence of the House is how parliamentary democracy works, and that such an arrangement would, unlike the Harper government, represent the majority of Canadians.
More in The Gazette.