Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Mackenzie Brothers

les jeux sont finis

By

Who would have guessed that the Vancouver Winter Olympics would turn into an event of great national unity, and become what many felt was the best of all Olympic Games. After all it had begun with some glitches and lousy weather? John Furlong, the decent, tenacious and ultimately triumphant organizer of it all said he felt that the turning point came when the obnoxious and snobbish British press, representing a country which managed a total of one medal at the games, printed a series of unfair and untruthful articles that only demonstrated their jealousy at the success of their long-ago colony. These unprovoked attacks managed to unite English, French and allophones and, with some reservations, even First Nations, in a public display of defiance of such attiudes by a former colonial occupier. In any case at some point the pent-up pride, even anger, seemed to transfer itself onto the athletes, who quite suddenly began winning so many events that with their 14 gold medals they not only set an Olympic record but easily relegated Germany with 10 and the US with 9 gold medals to the runner-up positions.

This was an extraordinary example of the configuration of politics and sport, and analysts are beavering away on the question of whether it will have lasting consequences in the forming of a national identity. Certainly the culminating sporting event, the gold-medal men’s hockey final between the US and Canada, which apparently was viewed by 85% of the Canadian population, has already achieved something along that line. All you had to do was observe the behaviour of the 150,00 people who poured out onto the streets of Vancouver after Sidney Crosby scored the winning overtime goal. It was the most dramatic example of two weeks of surging crowds that may have displayed too high spirits at times but streamed through the streets of a major city for 17 days without a single serious incident. The next Olympics will be in London. May the power be with them, but don’t count on it.

Lunching at Sachsen Haus

By

Die Sachsen are the only people to have so far outmaneuvered the Olympic bureaucrats that have turned Vancouver into a security training ground for the next potential terrorist attack at a major world event. The security chiefs of the next Olympics in very vulnerable London must be shaking their heads wondering how they can possible protect a very large city with many unhappy people and a complex subway system to the level that the combined police forces of Canada have managed in a large city with a largely contented population and its mountain resort two hours away. The answer is – not easily and certainly not without considerable disruption of the normal affairs of the city.
The German province of Saxony is not a recognized national national concept to the Olympic bureaucrats and therefore should not exist. But the clever Dresdeners rented the Vancouver Rowing Club in gorgeous Stanley Park and are doing a roaring business since no seat is more comfortable than one on the patio of a cafe on the waterfront of Stanley Park on a warm sunny day in British Columbia with a Sächsisch beer and Wurst in hand.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have come to see the spectacular sports events and cruise the city streets on the lookout for the best entertainment spots in the evening. And lots of them go to the Saxons for both lunch, dinner and entertainment, as the much larger and authorized Dutch, Russian and Swiss houses are jammed to overflowing in the city centre. As for the sports events, it’s been a very good Olympics so far for the Amurcans, Swedes and Swiss, leaving lots of smiling Uncle Sams, Vikings and cowbell ringers wandering about. For the Canajuns it’s been somewhat lala, but the big event has just started, and this promises to be the best hockey tournament ever. Once you’ve seen the Russian, Canadian and Swedish teams in action (the great Peter Forsberg has reappeared out of nowhere for the Swedes and looks fit as a fiddle). you can’t imagine betting against any one of them. If you’ve got a spare $4000 around you can pick up a ticket to the final, and one of those teams will be missing. Don’t miss it.

The Games begin

By

Arnold the Terminator was down on the Stanley Park seawall this morning at 7:00 to receive the Olympic torch from Steve Nash, run along the most spectacular urban stretch anywhere and pass it on to Sebastian Coe. By mid-afternoon it will have arrived at the spectacular new aboriginal centre awaiting the final lap to the opening ceremonies of the only world sporting even that will take place in North America in this decade. All over the city the national houses are springing up up and the most popular ones besieged. The Pub of Ireland has already down the ire of neighbours for loudness and lateness, the Swiss have turned one of the most popular restaurants in the city into an alpine retreat, the Russians have the science museum, the Dutch their Heineken House, the Germans their beer hall, the Scandinavians their shared centre to welcome their kings and queens, even the Slovakians and the Saxons have their houses.
Arnold must be representing Austria because there is no US House; the US contribution to the festival (other than the athletes, of course) is that Joe Biden will make a side trip from a fund-raising foray to Washington state, where the Democrats seemed poised to lose another election, and attend the opening ceremonies and that the Homeland Security boss who thought that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada, will grace the closing ceremonies.

Ukraine looks towards Russia

By

Viktor Yanukovich has apparently won the runoff election for president of Ukraine, thus tilting the European political map back towards the east, only 20 years after the events which seemed to be pushing it inexorably towards western Europe. Now the European Union, which was adamant in not considering Ukraine for membership, wallows in discontent as several members lurch towards bankruptcy – Greece, Portugal and perhaps even Spain leading the pack -and some others flirt very frivolously with the far right – Hungary in the lead. Meanwhile back in Brussels a completely no-name EU leadership predictably can’t lead as the real western european powers retreat behind traditional national fortresses.
Now one of the largest European countries has chosen to forget how much it once resented being called “Little Russia” and voted for a leader who represents the one-third Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine – he delivered his victory speech in Russian- and managed to win over ca. 20% of the Ukrainian-speaking western Ukrainians, tired of the complete failure of the leaders of the so-called Orange Revolution, though it is still unclear how man western Ukrainians just decided not to vote, having seen enough of so-called democracy. In any case it is clearly a great triumph for Putin’s increasingly powerful Russia, which already has a large ally in Ukraine’s northern neighbour Belarus, and a warning to western europe to get its ship in shape or risk losing much of the territory it thought it had gained in 1990.

Eulogy for Kate McGarrigle

By

It may not mean so much for the international readers, but Canadians of interest will know that one of their family died today, and the country will a bit more artificial without her. Kate McGarrigle and her sister Anne had the right stuff for Canuckdom. Born in Montreal in 1946 with mixed French and English heritage, Kate also died there at her home, which was no surprise to her legions of fans who could hardly imagine her being at home anywhere else. In her spare time, though, she wrote songs like Talk to me of Mendocino which must to be the national anthem of the beautiful coast of northern California.

She belongs in the company of those dominating Canadian ex-pat musicians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, yes, and also her son Rufus Wainwright, whose cancellation of a scheduled tour of New Zealand tipped the country off that Kate was not doing well in her bout with cancer. But she never left the special world of Montréal in her secret heart – maybe that’s true of Leonard as well – and the McGarrigle sisters’ 10 albums in French and English immediately conjure up a world that the rest of us Canucks can only hope is not dying with the artists who captured it.

Proroguing – a new Canadian tradition

By

International reader may have some trouble making sense of the the title of this essay, since prorogue is not a commonly-understood word in normally-functioning democracies. But Steven Harper, the current Prime Minister of Canada, described this week in The Economist as a competent bureaucrat with a vicious streak (faint praise indeed) is doing his best to make it the word of the decade on his own turf. It is a British term which means to tell members of parliament their services are no longer needed until he feels it is safe for him to come out of hiding. It is a procedure not often seen in democracies that actually function with parliaments that actually do something. In a clever response the opposition liberals under Michael Ignatieff announced they would sit in the Parliamentary buildings and work for their money, and a substantial ground-root movement seems to underway to make the government pay for their disdain of Parliament at the polls.

Last year Harper prorogued parliament so that he wouldn’t have to face a vote of no-confidence that might have brought down his government. On New Year’s Eve he did it again, assuming no one would notice, since he was sitting on an increasingly hot seat as parliamentary committees tried to come to the bottom of a macabre cover-up of what Canada allowed to be done to their prisoners in Afghanistan. Journalists speculate he wanted very much to have his picture taken many times at the Olympic Games across the continent in sunny and warm Vancouver rather than sitting on the hot seat in frigid Ottawa. it also seems plausible that he felt Canadians would be in a much better mood after the hockey team wins the Gold Medal in Vancouver. God help him if Sweden – or gasp! – the USA beat the lads in their own rink, as the US Juniors did in overtime on New Year’s Day – in a spectacularly exciting game – in the world championship match in Saskatoon at minus 40 degrees.

Newfoundland geese, Nigerian bombers

By

Apparently the Canada geese that knocked that plane down into the Hudson river a few months ago were really from Newfoundland. Quick-thinking scientists did DNA tests on them that proved they were invaders from somewhere around l’anse aux meadows on the northern tip of the northern peninsula of the island where the Vikings once began the invasion of the Americas. For some reason this was met with a sigh of relief in certain quarters since it demonstrated that these weren’t American canadian geese. US geese apparently don’t do such things.

And now we have yet another shoe bomber/self immolator who strived mightily and unsuccessfully to commit suicide by killing 300 other folks in the process, and he too came from foreign shores. The result of this misadventure was total chaos in airports servicing the US market as security was tightened to the point of strangulation. The question is: what difference does it make where the wannabee killer came from, the result would be the same. Why have the greatest disruptions occurred at the US customs barriers at major European and Canadian airports, where security is surely better than at many domestic airports? Would the US Homeland security boss’s amazingly nutty statement some months ago that the 9/11 bombers came from Canada have anything to do with it? Canadians are amazed to still hear that urban myth when they visit the US and are even more amazed to discover Mme Napolitoni is still in charge of homeland security, though back then she had no idea how and where the 9/11 killers got on their planes.

In any case it is already clear that the only success that failed assassin will enjoy will involve the further isolation of the US because of border controls that are as useless as they are disheartening and ultimately counterproductive. Travellers are already looking around for some other place to visit and spend their money than in a place where a star-wars strip-search at the border has become a routine and legal procedure. Maybe the beaches of Cuba?

Oh Canada, where did you dig up these leaders?

By

It used to be that Canada punched above its weight in foreign affairs, an honest broker that could be counted on to consider options carefully before dedicating itself to finding a just solution to a difficult situation, even if it meant sending in its troops. Thus Canada entered the Second World War within a week of the Nazi invasion of Poland, more than two years before the United States did and had already suffered many thousand casualties in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the skies over Europe by the time the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour forced the US hand. After that awful war, nowhere captured more dramatically than in the on-the-spot sketches by Canuck war artists A.Y. Jackson and Alex Colville, Canadian Prime Minister Mike Pearson got a Nobel Peace Prize that was actually deserved, for his tenacious negotiations leading to an end to the Suez crisis.

Now that hard-earned reputation risks being eradicated by a government intent on doing nothing contrary to its economic interests which is more than satisfied to follow the dictates of the super heavyweights on matters like climate change, border controls and diplomatic independence. At the Copenhagen climate change conference Canada has received the fossil of the year award, on the Afghan file, it has received a letter signed by almost 100 of its former ambassadors protesting the treatment of one of its middle-level diplomats in Kabul, who was called before parliament and publicly demeaned by the Minister of Defence for having sent a number of reports to Ottawa warning them of something that was public knowledge – that prisoners passed on to the Afghan army by Canada and other western powers were routinely tortured by the Afghans – and which Canada for a lengthy period denied before its memory improved. In China Prime Minister Harper was publicly rebuked by the Chinese president for insulting Chinese sensibilities by taking too long to come and visit, for hosting the Dalai Lama and for not having attended the Beijing Olympics. Harper also had no plans to attend the Copenhagen Climate Conference until President Obama said he would be there. It is a long way from Pearson to Harper, and it seems safe to predict that it will take a long time for Canada to repair its international image so that it can begin punching, if not as a heavyweight, at least above the flyweight class it now occupies.

Lament for a great university

By

Though it has not gone unnoticed, there has been too little written about the disastrous decline that must inevitably occur in one of the world’s great universities, arguably the finest state university in existence, the University of California at Berkeley. Compared to the cultivated mustiness of the elite UK universities, or the inborn snootiness of the French écoles superieurs, not to mention the artificiality and class structure of such ridiculously rich private US outposts such as “America’s McGill”, Harvard, or the somewhat seedy centres of German knowledge such as LMU München, Berkeley has long offered an almost unique mixture of intellectual intercourse and natural beauty mixed in with a splendid library and a revolutionary streak that keeps the place jumping. And that at a price normal people can afford with some belt-tightening, unlike those with tuitions of $50,00 a year, who have also coincidentally come under great financial pressure as their hedge-funded endowments have collapsed in the last year. Poor Harvard has seen its endowment sink from 40 billion Dollars to either 30 or 22 billion, depending on who you believe, a sum that does not lead to displays of sympathy at working-class Berkeley
But unless something completely unexpected happens, the budget of the University of California system will face a shortfall of 600 million dollars next year, an 8% cut from last year’s budget and by law the system cannot run in a deficit. So this staggering sum of money must be taken out of the hide of the universities themselves, and it seems that the board of Governors has decided to simply pass the pain on to everyone equally. Chico State University and many others like it will thus have the same problem as Berkeley, to somehow cut 8% of the budget. The disaster at Berkeley can only lead to a sudden serious decline in the quality of the library, the closing of small non-profitable departments, the loss of elite faculty members as they search for greener pastures at expanding Canadian universities, which are largely unaffected by the economic crisis since hedge fund betting is illegal there, as well as the loss of the youngest and the brightest since there will be a hiring freeze. The only hope is that the injury time will be relatively short and the recovery from a potentially debilitating attack can still be attained.

In Praise of Herta Müller

By

Since the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was met with virtual ignorance and stunning disinterest in North America, my brother and I have decided to break the silence. The prize went to Herta Müller, whom we first met in 1985 in our native München when she was allowed out of her native Romania for the first time. The reason seemed clear enough. Though she was unable to work as a teacher in Romania as a totalitarian government clamped down and imprisoned writers it didn’t like – including her then husband Richard Wagner, an equally talented and prolific German-language author from Romania – she had won one of the most prestigious prizes for young writers in Germany, and for a work first published in Bucharest, Niederungen (Lowlands, translated into English as Nadirs). It seemed that she was profiting from a tendency of the Caucescu government to overlook weaknesses in its citizens if they won accolades in the big world, just as it would when Romania became the only Soviet-dominated country to not boycott the Los Angeles Olympics. Herta Müller was reminding the world that Romania was a country that produced great artists, architects and writers, even if this one wrote in the wrong language. And Niederungen was more of an attack on the German world of Romania than it was on Romania itself.
So it seemed to us as we talked with this young and nervous visitor to Germany. Three years later she had left Timisoara for Berlin, where she still lives, and for the next twenty years she has published something like a roadmap of dead ends and dangerous detours that was the fate of the Romanian-Germans as they tried to get out of a country that did not have a bloodless revolution as the Communist world collapsed, but a violent one whose repercussions still linger. And yet for the next 25 years she did not tell the darkest story of the brutality she and the Romanian-Germans confronted under Caucescu and his predecessors, as it would have affected the lives of too many friends and colleagues. Now she has told it and the Swedish Academy got it right when they wrote of her searing focus on the rootlessness and dislocation that is the fate of so much of European and for that matter world populations today. There is no doubt that she has personally been scarred by it, and there is also no doubt that she is a worthy recipient of literature’s highest prize as she has written stories that make it clear how that happened and what it means.