Author Archives: Michael Happy

Irving Layton

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZlaFcjLX_4

Yes, there are better clips available, but who could resist this?  Leonard Cohen sings the Chiquita Banana song to Irving Layton.  Cohen said of Layton: “I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.”

Today is Irving Layton‘s birthday (1912-2006).

From “Poetry,” written in 1958:

It is difficult to do justice in a sentence or two to the variety and exuberance of Layton’s best work. The sensuality which seems its most obvious characteristic is rather an intense awareness of physical and bodily reality, which imposes its own laws on the intellect even when the intellect is trying to snub and despise it. The mind continually feels betrayed by the body, and its resulting embarrassments are a rich source of ribald humour. Yet the body in the long run is closer to spirit than the intellect is: it suffers where the intellect is cruel; it experiences where the intellect excludes. Hence a poetry which at first glance looks anti-intellectual is actually trying to express a gentler and subtler kind of cultivation than the intellect alone can reach.  Thus Layton is, in the expanded sense in which the term is used in the article, an academic rather than a Romantic poet, though one of his own highly individual kind.  (CW 12, 290-1)

TGIF: “They’re not even a real country anyway”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAYMJnO9LBQ

Our reference yesterday to Canada being the world’s laughing stock for our annoyingly dull niceness invites at least a couple of examples, which the Americans in particular always seem glad to produce; although Scarberia-born Mike Myers provides a sweetly self-deprecatory characterization that perhaps describes us best, observing that we’re the country that loves its silver medals: “Yay, second place!”

Above is the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” from the South Park movie.  This being South Park, the issue here is Canadian liberalism, which distresses the aggressively conservative side of the American mindset (just listen to any Republican member of Congress angrily grind out lies about Canadian health care). For me the funniest thing about the ongoing satire involving Canada on South Park is that the Canadian antagonists, Terence and Phillip, speak with English accents. The point seems to be that American ignorance about Canada is so profound that even the stereotyping is wrong.

A couple of gratuitous jabs from Family Guy after the jump.

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Getting It Right

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I want to thank again well-wishers as I continue to recover from surgery. I’ve tried to maintain the daily presence of the blog during the past week because we have a readership that seems to engage it every day.

Yesterday, however, I posted a piece that, when I read it back later, betrayed my true state: lingering discomfort exacerbated by the judgment-impairing presence of analgesics. The result was a post so badly written that it is a humbling reminder that a sincere commitment to a topic is never enough.

I’ve gone back and, I hope, made it worthy of your time, but without any expectation that anyone would want to take it on again. However, I did so on the principle that it is necessary to get it right when introducing a new discussion thread, in this instance addressing the current political situation in Canada from a Frygian perspective.

The “Harper government,” as it styles itself, has ambitions that are not consistent with our long tradition of the pursuit of good government. According to the old British North America Act, good government, along with peace and order, is not just desirable, it is a matter of constitutional concern. Frye regularly observed that we have a genius for political compromise that is unique to us.  It seems to be foreign, for example, to an American political process that regards government with a suspicion that occasionally devolves into gun-toting hostility. For Canadians, government has never been something that gets in the way of national purpose, it is an instrument of it.

The importation of “American style politics” by the Harperites is therefore not just a nose-tweaking provocation of our Red Tory sensibilities, it is an affront to our deeply ingrained sense of civility that has made us the world’s laughing stock as a pleasant enough but boring people. In other words, it undermines the best we have to offer. It’s hard to argue that Frye would have regarded it as anything but a quality worth preserving.

Yesterday the Speaker of the House found the Harper government in contempt of parliament. That’s a welcome development but not much of a surprise at this point. Harper’s contempt for everything in the Canadian political tradition that does not deliver him to power has been apparent for a long time. What Frye has to say about the national character which shapes that tradition will increasingly become the focus of our attention here as the country moves toward an election.

Frye on Canada’s “separation of the head of state from the head of government” [Reposted]

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

Further to our earlier posts (here and here) about Stephen Harper rebranding the government of Canada as the “Harper government.”

Above is Stephen Harper addressing an invited audience of people he’d likely acknowledge as “real Canadians.” Note that his first declared priority is to win a majority government. Our parliamentary system functions by way of the confidence of the House of Commons, maintained by the majority of House members. Harper makes it clear that he wants a majority government not because he’d be representing the majority of Canadians (he wouldn’t even come close), but because the majority of Canadians represented by four opposition parties would be legislatively neutralized. Like George Bush, Harper behaves as though one vote more than he needs is all that is required to push through an agenda that is not representative of the will of the people.  Like Bush too, that agenda accommodates corporate interests which always have his full attention.

It’s no surprise that Harper’s version of Canada has no reference to Frye’s, which is unfortunate because Frye was an avid student of Canadian culture, history and politics in a way Harper obviously is not. In fact, whatever Harper seems to do or say turns out to be, by Frye’s standards, the opposite of what we as a nation have accomplished, as well as what we demonstrably aspire to be.

From “Canadian Culture Today”:

It has always seemed to me that that this very relaxed absorption of minorities, where there is no concerted effort at a “melting pot,” has something to do with what the Queen symbolizes, the separation of the head of state from the head of government. Because Canada was founded by two peoples, nobody could ever know what a hundred per cent Canadian was, and hence the decentralizing rhythm that is so essential to culture had room to expand.  (CW 12, 528)

Harper, on the other hand, knows with a hundred percent certainty what a “real Canadian” is and believes in, and says as much. A fully unleashed Harper majority government might therefore require not-so-real Canadians to conform to standards that aren’t a good fit for them and have no reason to be. The kind of conservative who wants government out of the way of business often tends to be the kind of conservative who also wants government intruding upon people’s private lives; government not fit to regulate commerce still ought to be free to legislate the morality of those who deviate from some lugubriously maintained norm. Harper appears to fit that mould. His outlook, in any case, is inconsistent with “the decentralizing rhythm” that Frye says is “essential” to our distinctive culture.

We don’t have to look far for evidence of this. Harper is the man who spent almost a billion dollars on security at the G20 summit in Toronto last summer. That security failed pretty spectacularly, but it nevertheless succeeded in executing the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, the vast majority of those detained being peaceful demonstrators. The amount Harper spent on failed security exceeded the combined costs of the two previous G20 summits in Pittsburgh and London by, again, almost a billion dollars. The security for those earlier summits cost only a few million each. So where did Harper’s billion dollars go? Who received payment and for what services? Why aren’t those who abused the constitutional rights of the people they improperly detained answerable for their actions? We still don’t really know and no answers seem forthcoming any time soon.

Consider how much health care, education and other benefits those billion wasted dollars might have provided, and at a time when we are relentlessly assured we cannot afford them at current rates. In order to make such an assertion a self-fulfilling prophecy, Harper intends to decrease corporate taxes funding government programs to 12%, down from 20% in 2000. The strategy on the right everywhere these days seems to be some form of this corporate tax runaround, in which corporations get a never-ending string of tax concessions, resulting in a “revenue shortfall” which leads to cuts in social spending “we can no longer afford.” All of this happens, of course, as the already very rich get considerably richer.

It is therefore also worth recalling that Harper used his office to promote a Fox-style news channel that was intended to have mandated carriage by cable service providers across the country, bringing it into the homes of millions of Canadians whether they wanted it or not. And he did so after meeting with Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch of Fox News. Or, more accurately, he did so after secretly meeting with Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch of Fox News. Harper is allowed to be a narrow ideologue if that’s what he wants to be. But as our prime minister, all of his transactions as a public servant must be transparent. Secret meetings with people like Ailes and Murdoch are not acceptable.

Given that Harper thinks of government as his to rebrand rather than as an inalienable instrument of the people, he may not even be able to conceive of his role as one of “service.” He can therefore try to rebrand the government of Canada all he likes. But it nevertheless remains our government, whatever else he calls it. As our servant, he serves only at our pleasure, and we of course are always free to dismiss him. Thanks to the kind of behavior he has displayed over the last four years, we may be doing that sooner than he expects.

Frye on McCarthyism: “The big lie as a normal political weapon”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anNEJJYLU8M&feature=related

Edward R. Murrow’s closing remarks in his report on McCarthy, which was instrumental in ending the hysteria

CBS broadcast its See It Now piece, “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” on this date in 1954.

From The Modern Century:

The collapse of Communist sympathies in American culture was not the result of McCarthyism and other witch-hunts, which were not a cause but an effect of that collapse.  The object of the witch-hunt is the witch, that is, a helpless old woman whose dangerousness is assumed to rationalize quite different interests and pleasures.  Similarly the Communist issue in McCarthyism was a red herring for a democratic development of the big lie as a normal political weapon: if internal Communism had been a genuine danger the struggle against it would have taken a genuine form. (CW 11, 42)

Fulford Reviews Denham’s “Remembering Northrop Frye”

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Robert Fulford’s review of Bob Denham’s Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections By His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s, here.

An excerpt:

By 1946, when he was 34 years old, he stood at the centre of a circle — “We were a coterie,” as one member put it. Doug Fisher, one of many war veterans who came to university on a federal grant, took five Frye courses and edited the college literary magazine with Frye as faculty adviser. Fisher became a socialist politician and made his name in 1957 by unseating C.D. Howe, the most powerful minister in Ottawa; he later moved to journalism and after 40 years retired as dean of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

In the 1940s, Fisher noticed that Frye had more graduate students than any other professor, the largest audiences for his lectures and a claque of followers that no other teacher could equal. Fisher listened carefully to Frye’s words and for the rest of his life cherished them. Even after 50 years he would sometimes feel the need of fresh stimulation and dig out his Frye lecture notes on a subject like the Book of Job or Thomas Carlyle.

I’m quoting from Fisher’s remarks in a new book edited by Robert D. Denham,Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections by His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s, published by a North Carolina firm, McFarland (mcfarlandpub.com). Denham, a professor at Roanoke College in Virginia and an expert on Frye, edited his diaries years ago. While working through Frye’s hasty journal entries, he wrote to many students and friends for help explaining them. Remembering Northrop Frye brings together letters from 89 of the people who responded.

They were all Frye-ites, the term one of them uses in his reply. Others called them Fryedolators. Irving Layton invented the term Frygians, suggesting they were cold and academic, like their leader; later he changed his views. Many of them, of course, knew each other long ago, which gives this book the feeling of a reunion.

Frye: “There can be no general elite in a democratic society”

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Jon Stewart exposes the hypocrisy of those who begrudge teachers their union-negotiated $50,000 a year plus benefits salaries but also fiercely defend the Bush tax cuts for the top percentile of wage earners and defend the kleptocracy and billion dollar bonuses of Wall Street. Watch the video here.

Frye in The Modern Century captures nicely the sinister forces now openly undermining American democracy, especially a “general elite” employing immediately recognizable agents provocateurs — Ailes, Palin, O’Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh, and so on — who are attempting to consolidate political and economic power while simultaneously instilling confusion, fear and resentment in an already assailed general population through the incessant clanging of tin pot patriotism. Replace “John Birch Society” with “Tea Party,” “nostalgic intellectuals” with “neo-conservatives,” and “those who readily identify themselves as belonging to some kind of elite that a closed myth would produce” with mealy-mouthed white bread demagogues like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, and this passage is fully up to date:

In the democracies there are many who would like to see a closed mythology take over.  Some are hysterical, like the John Birch Society, who want a myth of the American way of life, as they understand it, imposed on everything. . . . Some are nostalgic intellectuals, usually with a strong religious bias, who are bemused by the “unity” of medieval culture and would like to see some kind of “return” to it.  Some are people who can readily imagine themselves as belonging to some kind of elite that a closed myth would produce.  Some are sincere believers in democracy who feel that democracy is at a disadvantage in not have a clear and unquestioned program of its beliefs. . . [T]here can be no general elite in a democratic society: in a democracy everybody belongs to some kind of elite, which derives from its social function a particular knowledge or skill that no other group has. (CW 11, 66-7)

Everybody belongs to an elite — like, say, teachers and nurses and police officers and fire fighters, who represent their common interests by way of labor unions; much the same way corporations have their common interests represented by Republican legislators and the “corporations are people too” Supreme Court of Roberts/Scalia/Thomas/Alito.