The Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Below, Ezra Levant in an orange wig with a can of Orange Crush mocks Jack Layton’s funeral. RIP or give it a rest?
Oh my – quelle horreur! – naughty Britons still appalled by the depredations visited upon their country by Margaret Thatcher’s government have shocked and appalled the world by pushing “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” to the top of the charts.
In case you missed it, the former British prime minister, who was in office from 1979 to 1990, died on Monday at 87. But it took until yesterday for the song from the Wizard of Oz – an apt metaphor itself for the operational side of neocon governments everywhere – to mischievously reach No. 1 on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s weekly music chart.
The right-wing media in Britain and, quite naturally, here at home in the colonies were full of opprobrium for the posthumous protest that cheekily pushed Ding Dong! to the top.
But really, given the misery the neoliberal project championed by Mrs. Thatcher and the likes of Ronald Reagan and Canada’s own Brian Mulroney has created throughout the world – consigning half the population of the planet to the status “surplus humanity” for the convenience of the 1 per cent – I’m surprised it took this long, and that the commentary has been this humourous and mild. (I mean, other than what Respect MP George Galloway had to say.)
We have a tradition – or maybe it’s a taboo – here in the West that one ought not to speak ill of the dead. But this needs to be treated with the proverbial grain of salt when it comes to politicians, even freshly dead ones, when the hagiography begins before they’re even planted in the ground.
Of course, the people penning hagiographies are bound to try to use this cultural squeamishness about speaking frankly with the goal of suppressing all criticism of the policies of the people they are deifying – as is most certainly happening now with Mrs. Thatcher and as happened last month here in Alberta upon the death of Ralph Klein.
This is especially true in the case of people like Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Klein whose noxious neoliberal policies continue to be enthusiastically proselytized by politicians of the right despite their unremitting record of economic and social failure.
This, in turn, is important because, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the Guardian, “those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized.”
So they need to be countered, and quickly – and it does no harm if this is done with a touch of humour.
Here at home, naturally, universally right-wing media coverage of this brouhaha has mostly taken on the tone of “more in sadness than in anger,” with a heaping side dish of “we just don’t do that sort of thing in Canada.”
Yet, in fact, we do. It’s just that we rarely do it when the likes of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan or Mr. Klein pass on to whatever reward awaits them.
On the other hand, never forget, if the recently dead political figure is someone on the left, one can say pretty much whatever one feels like and not invoke the supposed taboo.
And I’m not just speaking of press coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez here – although he’s a perfectly good example of this phenomenon in the Canadian media.
Who can forget Sun News Network TV commentator Ezra Levant marking the death of NDP leader Jack Layton in 2011 by donning an orange wig and sipping Orange Crush while exchanging mocking repartee with that great public intellectual Michael Coren?
The typical tastelessness of Mr. Levant’s display notwithstanding, what he had to say about Mr. Layton is directly applicable to those on the right who today purport to be horrified by even the mildest criticism of Mrs. Thatcher’s dark history.
“At what point,” asked Mr. Levant, “does somebody say, you’re putting that body on a bloody campaign tour? At what point does someone say, how many spin doctors … are allowed to set up a funeral before we say, ‘You’re getting creepy, guy?’”
“At what point do we say … this is a macabre attempt to, I dunno, bring back some political spirit from the dead,” he went on, noting that, “if I am not sufficiently deferential … if I am not being obedient and super polite, oh, they just open the sewer pipe.”
On this, for once, I think Mr. Levant basically got the principle right.
There can be very little doubt those who support the continued neoliberal project are using the death of Mrs. Thatcher to bring back a political spirit from the dead, and using our traditions of respect for the dead to open the sewer pipes if we dare to mention the obvious.
So in response to the Edmonton Journal’s timorous headline writer, who asked, “Has Thatcher-bashing crossed a line?” the answer is, “I’m afraid not.”
Cue the music!
Anonymous comments? Dean Del Mastro’s right: there oughtta be a law!
It’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Dean Del Mastro, the Conservative MP for the Ontario riding of Peterborough, who informed us the other day that there oughtta be a law about anonymous comments on the Internet.
“One of the best ways to end on-line and electronic bullying, libel and slander would be to force people posting hurtful comments to properly identify themselves,” Mr. Del Mastro (or some anonymous political sluggo toiling away in his constituency office) wrote last week on his Facebook account.
“This morning I read comments on a news story posted on an electronic news publication, many of them could only be described as hateful rants. The common denominator is that none of them identified the person that wrote them; this strikes me as something that Parliament should address,” said Mr. Del Mastro, who according to his official webpage “will be fully exonerated.” (What that’s all about, Mr. Del Mastro explained on his MP page, is that Elections Canada is just following up “on false complaints from a disgruntled former supplier who sued me unsuccessfully.” So, enough said about that, anonymously or otherwise.)
Well, I for one kind of agree with Mr. Del Mastro’s views on Internet anonymity, although it prompted a storm of snotty 140 character protests, many of them sorta, semi, somewhat anonymous. At least, I agree that it would be a better world in most ways if we would all just identify ourselves with our actual names when we wanted to say something rude about a powerful politician, businessman or corporation.
But then, we might want to amend some provincial Defamation Acts, like the ones in 10 of our provinces, so that Canadians actually enjoyed their Charter guarantee of free expression without the risk of SLAPP suits by powerful individuals and corporations with extremely well-financed chips on their metaphorical shoulders.
And even so, would be pretty hard to enforce given the ease with which false identities, fake identities, satirical identities and multiple online personalities can be ginned up on the Internet nowadays – a capability for which, as fans of the market like Mr. Del Mastro would have to admit, there’s a market.
But what really got me wondering about Mr. Del Mastro’s commentary was whether he cleared it through the Prime Minister’s Office. I mean, isn’t Stephen Harper’s PMO the sinister agency pulling the strings attached to what has come to be known (here, anyway) as the Tory Online Rage Machine?
And doesn’t the TORM, more to the point, depend on the anonymity of its legion of identities to be effective – if only because on most nights the vast majority of its thousands of defamatory, offensive and often profane observations are composed by the same five or six pimply faced adolescent Conservative Party operatives sitting in their underwear at their computers in their basement bedrooms in their moms’ houses?
You know, the kind of anonymous heroes who labelled the late Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for having the temerity to suggest that the so-called NATO coalition should open lines of communication with the Taliban, something that the Conservative government of the day rejected as unconscionable although the same Conservative government is prepared to consider it.
Mr. Layton has passed on, but those of us who admired him are still waiting for the apology.
Who can forget the famous Craigslist advertisement a few weeks before the last federal election from “a social media organization working for a political organization” looking for “a team of writers who will post to newspaper comments, media forums, FB pages, etc. We are NOT officially affiliated with the Harper campaign.” (The italics are mine.)
“Your writing must be right-wing, strong and use supplied talking points,” the ad said. “You are creating an on-line persona with a consistent tone. Ideally, you can make up facts and statistics to stir controversy. Where suited, humour, sarcasm and personal insults are welcome.”
“To apply,” continued the ad, which did not mention who would supply the talking points, “submit a 100 word post based on the headline ‘Ignatieff promises no coalition after election.’” That would be a reference to Michael Ignatieff, a now-forgotten pre-Justin-Trudeau leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Whatever, I think all reasonable Canadians could get behind Mr. Del Mastro’s effort to ensure these opinionated multiple personalities – who, we must remember, are NOT associated with any Harper campaigns, post or future – are required by law to identify themselves.
But will Mr. Del Mastro’s former pals and patrons in the Harper Election Machine? That remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.