Author Archives: Michael Happy

On Second Thought

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I have decided to take down Ezra Levant’s column slandering George Soros.  Since posting it this morning with the intent to expose the viciousness of the libel and the ugly way it is expressed in Levant’s September 5th Toronto Sun column, I have realized that it also makes the full text available to those who might wish to reproduce it in order to perpetuate the slander.  I have therefore simply resorted to reporting the libel — the nature of which has long been in the public domain and has been refuted many times — in my own words.  The revised post is here.

That said, I wish to emphasize just how wretched a thing that column is, as well as what it says about Levant and Sun News.  You can read a very thorough account of the evolution of the slander with direct quotes from Levant’s column and what the public record reveals about his libelous claims here.

Out of curiosity, I called a lawyer friend of mine to ask about the legal status of reporting a libel verbatim with the obvious intention to contextualize it and fully expose its fraudulent nature — as well as bear witness to the kind of person who would  perpetrate it in the first place.  (I am especially curious to know because the column still circulates on the internet, which raises the question of being allowed to address the fact of the libel as it was expressed without any implied assertion of truthfulness about its fraudulent content.)  My friend referred me to another lawyer specializing in libel law.  I have put a call in to him and hope to report back on what he has to say about it soon.

In the meantime, I’ve kept a copy of Levant’s column for my files.  Whenever I get complacent about what we’re dealing with here, I’ll pull it out and read it again.

Margaret Atwood in the Toronto Sun

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Atwood’s recent response to accusations by the Sun in the Sun here.

Money quote:

THE ACTUAL PETITION

“As concerned Canadians who deeply oppose American-style hate media on our airwaves, we applaud the CRTC’s refusal to allow a new “Fox News North” channel to be funded from our cable fees. We urge Mr. von Finckenstein to stay in his job and continue to stand up for Canada’s democratic traditions, and call on Prime Minister Harper to immediately stop all pressure on the CRTC on this matter.” THE VERBS ARE “APPLAUD,” “URGE,” AND “CALL ON;” NOT “BAN,” “SUPPRESS,” AND “CENSOR.”

The “Fox News” comparison is from the Sun’s own CRTC Application # 1. Is it “American-style hate media?” You judge.

The CRTC refused Sun TV News’ request for a special licence that forces all cable and satellite distributors to offer the station, thus generating almost automatic income. Application #2 — almost the same deal as #1, but for three years — will be considered. The Sun says it needs this special deal for its “business plan.” Should it get one? Should anyone? Can I have one too?

This last point goes to the heart of the matter.  Why, just because Sun News has applied for the license, must it be granted one?  Hell, I’d love one of those myself — like Sun News I could have a “business plan” which includes making millions of dollars.  Why should I be refused?  If I’m not owed it, why is Sun News?  Particularly as they employ libel-spouting nincompoops like Ezra Levant.

Mohammed

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Mohammed’s Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation; leaf from a copy of the Majmac al-tawarikhTimurid. From Herat, Afghanistan. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 1425

On this date in 622 Mohammed completed his hijra from Mecca to Medina.

Frye in notebook 11f:

Still with the Koran: it’s a perfect example of my concern and imagination thesis.  Mohammed was a very great inspired poet, but he found that this quality was precisely what made him distrusted.  So he insisted that he wasn’t a poet but a prophet, & started brainwashing his followers with interminable repetitions of the just-you-wait type.  Islamic culture, Sufi mysticism, geometrical art, mathematics & the like, descend from the suppressed poet; Islamic fanaticism descends from the paranoid prophet.  Yet, human nature being what it is, there would never have been any Islamic culture without the brainwashing paranoia.  Ugh.  But I think we’re finding the moral equivalent of war [para. 78, p. 87] and the next thing to find is the moral equivalent of concerned paranoia.  One element of this is counter-prophecy, of the sort Blake describes in his Watson-Paine notes.  A prophecy that, without being facile or “optimistic,” points out the positive opportunities in each situation. (CW 13, 88)

Ezra Levant’s Vile Slander [Updated]

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Sun News, under threat of a lawsuit, has apologized to George Soros for the scabrous column by Ezra Levant published in the Toronto Sun on September 5th, alleging, among other things, that Soros, as a thirteen year old Jewish boy in occupied Hungary, collaborated with the Nazis.  This is a slander that has been circulated by the likes of Lyndon LaRouche and Levant associate Ann Coulter.

All traces of the libelous column have been scrubbed from the Sun News site and from Levant’s own website.  However, I have seen it and it is horrific reading for anyone who still has a sense of common decency.

The charges of collaboration are demonstrably manufactured lies and have been publicly debunked many times, right down to the maliciously misleading re-edit of the 60 Minutes piece about Soros for which Levant provides a bogus “transcript.”  It is as wretched a hatchet job as you could ever expect to see in any journalistic medium.  It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how Levant and his editors could have proceeded without knowing that what they were publishing was slander.  Besides the revolting mean-spiritedness of the piece, therefore, there is the sheer recklessness with which it was produced and circulated.  And these are the people who want a broadcast license for a “news” channel with “mandatory access” status.

The Columbia Journalism Review today published an article on the affair here.

The whole awful story of how the noxious combination of Ezra Levant, Kory Teneycke, Sun News, and the vast resources of the right-wing hate machine in the US gave birth to this monstrosity here.

Ben Jonson

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On this date in 1598 Ben Jonson was indicted for manslaughter.  In the same year he also produced his first major success, Every Man in His Humour.

Frye in A Natural Perspective:

With Every Man in His Humour Jonson began a new type of comedy, of which Ibsen and Chekhov (Ibsen at least in his middle or “problem” period) are the inheritors.  The contrast between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is hackneyed, but like many hackneyed subjects, not exhausted.  One seventeenth-century play that we know failed to please was Ben Jonson’s The New Inn: we know this because its failure was highly publicized by Jonson himself.  Jonson wrote on the occasion a poem in which he scolds the public for not appreciating it and for preferring “some mouldy tale like Pericles” instead.  A critical issue is involved here that it might be fruitful to examine.  The New Inn is not first-rate Jonson; but neither is Pericles first-rate Shakespeare.  Yet Pericles was not only popular in its own time, but has been revived with success in ours, and I doubt that any dramatic company in its right mind would attempt to revive The New Inn, though I should hope to be wrong on this point.  Jonson’s critical principle was obviously true to him that he honestly could not understand why his audience preferred Pericles, and in trying to explain why it did we may get some insight into the rationale of Shakespeare’s technique. (14-15)

Kory Teneycke Under Investigation?

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It was very satisfying to watch Harper henchman Kory Teneycke take on Margaret Atwood — and lose about as decisively as it is possible to lose.  He quit as point man for Sun TV News last week (“it becomes increasingly clear my involvement only serves to inflame”), and he may now be under criminal investigation for fraud and identity theft in relation to Avaaz’ “Stop Fox News North” petition, which we (courtesy of Eva Kushner) posted on a couple of weeks ago.

Stephen Maher picks up the story in the Chronicle Herald:

On Sept. 2, Teneycke complained on Twitter that he had been signed up: “So, apparently I have signed the Soros/Atwood petition against Sun TV News as well. What BS.”

Early the next morning, the Sun papers published a column from Teneycke — titled Maggie Atwood: Buzz off! — in which he revealed that the petition contained many false names, including Snuffleupagus, the Sesame Street character who only ever appears to Big Bird.

The activists at Avaaz read the column and checked the list and found out that, sure enough, someone had added Snuffleupagus and Boba Fett and also a number of Ottawa journalists in an apparent attempt to discredit the petition.

The next day, I received an email from Avaaz informing me that I had been signed up. So had Martin and plucky CBC blogger Kady O’Malley, who decided to stick her adorable nose into the story and went hunting for the list of names.

“am i the only one who can’t actually find the list of names online? someone url me, will you?” she wrote on Twitter.

A few minutes later, she tweeted: “maybe he knows. hey, @KoryTeneycke, where’d you see the list of names on the Avaaz petition?”

See, Teneycke had revealed — likely without meaning to — that he knew who had added the names to the petition. Avaaz had not put the names online.

Teneycke, I think, realized the jig was up and replied on Twitter: “@kady Source emailed me to say they registered Boba Fett, D. Shroot, etc. Petition lacks basic controls. Not sure who signed me up.”

Well, how did he know he’d been signed up?

Avaaz squealed about dirty tricks and hired big-shot Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby.

On Tuesday, Ruby sent letters to the RCMP and Ottawa police, giving them the IP address of the Ottawa-area computer used to add the names and asking them to prosecute the guilty party for fraud, identity fraud and theft of a telecommunications service.

The better news is that this may prove to be a fatal blow to the Fox News North application to the CRTC.  This is also yet another ugly development whose provenance is Harper’s office.  Canadians never have much appetite for this sort of thing, and their limited tolerance for it in this case may be exhausted.

Bring on the general election.

Frye and The Critical Path

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In Bob’s announcement yesterday on the posting in the Denham Library of Frye’s previously unpublished letters to his secretary Jane Welch, he includes this tidbit:

[The Critical Path] is the first book since the Anatomy of Criticism that I’ve actually written, i.e., that hasn’t been a series of public lectures.  It’s also a very important book.  I probably won’t live to see it recognized as such, but you may.

I thought I might post on this and explore the reasons why Frye regarded this work as so important — and why its importance might not be immediately recognized.  But then I discovered that Bob Imre Salusinszky had already outlined as much in his introduction to volume 17 of the Collected Works:

In The Critical Path, in 1971, Frye talks about a “myth of concern” as comprising “everything that most concerns its society to know” and as functioning to “hold society together, so far as words are can help to do this” (36). This, then, is the equivalent in Frye’s thinking to the New Historicism focus on ideology.  But, for Frye, literature is not the same as concern: “it displays the imaginative possibilities of concern” (98).  Much later, in Words with Power, published in the same year as “Varieties of Eighteenth Century Sensibility,” Frye develops this discussion into a dialectic of “primary concern” — those things that concern all peoples in all societies at all times — and “secondary concern,” the ideological preoccupations of specific societies at specific historical moments: and literature is where secondary and primary concern are brought into relationship (42-3).  These reflections are where Frye’s veer sharply away from both the literary Marxism he engaged in the first quarter of his career, and the New Historicism he confronted in the final quarter.  It is in maintaining the distinction between an ideology and a myth that Frye’s criticism preserves the multicultural component that A.C. Hamilton has suggested will give it permanence in “an increasingly globalized world.” (CW 17, xxv)

To which I can only add that the inability of a whole generation of literary scholars to maintain a distinction between ideology and myth is at the root of the problems literary criticism now faces, including its steady decline in influence upon the general reading public.  In our current post-post-structuralist age, scholars tend only to talk to one another in a rarefied language only they understand.  But much of this is no more than what Frye calls the “squirrel’s chatter” of specialized scholarship.  He knew better than most that, because literature belongs to everybody, literary criticism belongs to everybody as well and can be written in a way that is accessible to anybody, as surely as every literary work is available to every reader who cares to engage it.  What makes literature accessible –and ought to make literary criticism equally accessible — is the universality of primary concern and literature’s unique ability to explore its imaginative possibilities.  As Frye puts it in Words with Power, any work of literature will reflect the secondary ideological concerns of its time, but it will also place those ideological concerns in the context of “making a living, making love, and struggling to stay free and alive.”  And that’s something everyone can understand.  We can only hope that literary scholarship will recognize sooner rather than later what Frye could already lucidly articulate forty years ago.