Things have been a little light here this week because Torontoist asked me to review the latest report into the events at the G20 Summit here in Toronto back in 2010, and it took me a while to plow through it. But if you want my take on this one, it is here.

FLAPJACKS: So your problem is that nobody likes you and everybody hates you? Is that more or less the problem? It sounds like the problem.
MITT ROMNEY: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say –
FLAPJACKS: Right, so nobody likes you and everybody hates you. That’s not a problem. We can work with this. So… hm. There’s this tax return thing. You don’t want to release them.
MITT ROMNEY: You see, I don’t –
FLAPJACKS: Shut up. Doesn’t matter. We’re not going to release the tax returns. What we’re going to do is campaign against the right person.
MITT ROMNEY: Isn’t the President the right person?
FLAPJACKS: No, people like him. Except for the people who don’t, and they are already holding their noses and voting for you because of the aforementioned “everybody hates you” problem. What we need to do is flip the dynamic inverseways. That is a trademarked phrase, by the way. I trademarked that.
MITT ROMNEY: That seems like something you shouldn’t be able to trademark.
FLAPJACKS: You’re just saying that because you’re a billionaire finance guy. See? This is why everybody hates you. But it is fixable. What we are going to do is campaign against somebody else.
MITT ROMNEY: But nobody else is running for President. Nobody serious, anyway.
FLAPJACKS: So what? Look, the next time someone says “Mr. Romney, when are you going to release your tax returns,” you say “well, when is Tom Cruise going to release the terms of his divorce settlement to Katie Holmes? What is Tom Cruise hiding?” This will work because people may be entertained by Tom Cruise, but they don’t exactly like Tom Cruise. You will put Tom Cruise on the defensive this way.
MITT ROMNEY: But Tom Cruise isn’t –
FLAPJACKS: GAH. How hard is this to understand? You will not get people to like you better than Obama. It’s not going to happen. But if you flip the dynamic inverseways tee-em, then you might be able to get people to like you better than Tom Cruise. The choice between you and Tom Cruise is a campaign that maybe you can win. Meanwhile, the President is sitting over on the other side saying “but wait, Tom Cruise is a meaningless distraction” and nobody pays attention because they’re all, like, distracted and stuff.
MITT ROMNEY: But what if I can’t beat Tom Cruise?
FLAPJACKS: Then we go after someone else. Mel Gibson, maybe.
MITT ROMNEY: Actually, Mel donated –
FLAPJACKS: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP. God, you can ruin anything, can’t you? When are you going to start listening to me? We need to work on this. Okay, so if not Mel Gibson, maybe a Kardashian. I don’t want to start out with a Kardashian because that’s sort of like if Mike Tyson fought Ernest Borgnine, but a win is a win.
MITT ROMNEY: So I’m like Mike Tyson, then?
FLAPJACKS: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mr. Candidate. Okay, so we’ve got you beating Tom Cruise. That wins you everybody who hates and/or envies Hollywood, plus everybody who is freaked out about Scientology. So, win. But we need more. We need the votes of the people who love Hollywood. And to do that, we must get Hollywood to love you. Or at least tolerate you, sorta.
MITT ROMNEY: And how do we do that?
FLAPJACKS: We have you apologize for your Diet Coke addiction.
MITT ROMNEY: But I’m not addicted to Diet Coke. I’m a Mormon. We don’t drink caffeinated drinks.
FLAPJACKS: Start. Diet Coke is, like, delicious acid. So it’ll be easy. But even better than that, it will humanize you. People think you are a soulless robot.
MITT ROMNEY: I know.
FLAPJACKS: They look for the wires in your back.
MITT ROMNEY: Uh huh.
FLAPJACKS: They ask you how many diodes are in your tongue.
MITT ROMNEY: I get it.
FLAPJACKS: They ask you “what is love” in an attempt to make you explode.
MITT ROMNEY: Can we drop this?
FLAPJACKS: Okay. Soulless robots don’t get addicted to things. So we get you addicted to Diet Coke. First off, it will make you seem sympathetic. People will overlook the fact that you are a rich tycoon who ruthlessly exploited the American financial system in order for your own benefit, because you’re just like them.
MITT ROMNEY: I don’t see it.
FLAPJACKS: Christ, George W. Bush figured this out. Why do you think he became an alcoholic? Whose idea was that?
MITT ROMNEY: Wait, that was you?
FLAPJACKS: Well, no, I was six. But retroactively I am claiming it, and you know I can do that.
MITT ROMNEY: …right.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway, the point is this: Hollywood fucking loves Diet Coke. My god, do they love Diet Coke. They would have it coming out of taps if they could manage it. I understand many of the rich ones do have it coming out of taps. So when you admit, tearfully, that you are not a perfect Mormon and you have a Diet Coke addiction, Hollywood will like you better. Not as much as Obama, who is a smoker trying to quit, because that is golden right there. But they will at least understand your cold, robotic soul.
MITT ROMNEY: And that helps me win?
FLAPJACKS: Maybe. Depends on how the Tom Cruise thing goes. We need to get America to open their hearts to you.
MITT ROMNEY: So I can win their votes.
FLAPJACKS: Well, I was going to say “so you can rip them out like that guy in Temple of Doom,” but then again he didn’t need anybody to open their hearts because he used magic. Do you have any magic?
MITT ROMNEY: No.
FLAPJACKS: Pity.

So the media are abuzz about new poll showing the NDP screeching ahead of the Tories in the hypothetical “if an election were held today” scenario, with the NDP in this fantasy scenario forming a minority federal government for the first time in the polling history of Canada. The NDP, polling-wise, now essentially own the Atlantic and Quebec, are dominant in BC and statistically tied with the Tories in Ontario and Saskatchewan.

To which I say: this should not be surprising. I mean, granted, we’re talking about the Canadian media here, who traditionally recoil from the idea of NDP governance like vampires do from garlic. But this was more or less inevitable given the combination of the fact that the Tories won with a little over forty percent of the vote (hitting what was arguably their ceiling) and the fact that, now that the Tories no longer have the excuse of minority governments to explain away their mediocre-to-shitty ability to govern, their general mendacity is starting to become quite obvious.

Let me put it this way: the average Canadian doesn’t really care that much about political foofaraw and they often don’t care about policy – except that they do care about those policies that directly impact them, and more pointedly they tend to care about those policies which they have personally experienced previously in their lives.1 This latter makes kind of a difference, because when the Tories proposed their plans to reform EI to basically make it more punitive on its users and Jim Flaherty said that there was no such thing as a bad job, that was stupid, because most people have either used EI to get by while they were in between jobs or know a friend who has, and the simple truth about employment insurance is that most people use it relatively responsibly and get themselves back on their feet, and the Tories making it more punitive is just a slap in the face to everybody who’s ever been on it. (There’s a real strong sentiment in this country that EI is perfectly fair and reasonable: you pay into it when you work, you get it when you lose your job.) The proposal to reform the Canada Pension Plan to revise the eligibility age upwards to 67 similarly hurt the Tories because, well, Canadians generally do expect the CPP to continue to exist (unlike Americans, who have basically bought into the “Social Security’s just not gonna be there for us” argument for the most part).

On top of that, the Tories then made two crucial errors, both of which made them seem comparable to U.S. Republicans. Bluntly: Canadians mostly hate Republicans. Although many Canadians may be fiscally conservative and be inclined to vote Tory accordingly, social conservatism is dying a long, slow and welcome death in this country – and even many Canadian social conservatives look at American social conservatives and blink. Therefore, the worst thing you can do in Canadian politics is seem like Republicans, and over the last decade Stephen Harper has masterfully downplayed the social-con aspect of the western Reform-a-Tories and put on a dumbshow of fiscal centrism, and it eventually worked well enough to get him his majority.

Unfortunately, the Tories then got themselves implicated in an election-tampering scandal. Granted, by American standards this is nothing: it’s a series of voter-suppression robocalls that look likely to trace back to Tory organizers. But Canadians enjoy making fun of broken American democracy,2, and even the slightest implication of stolen elections is enough to make Canadians say “well, let’s take this seriously and get to the bottom of this so it doesn’t happen again harumph harumph,” and then the Tories did the stupidest possible thing they could do: they started trying to get Elections Canada’s probe shut down in court. And when their first attempt didn’t work, they tried a second time, and now they have basically confirmed to the entire country that, yes, they fucked around with the election, and their forty percent support started getting woogy.

And then, while this was happening, the Auditor General came out and said that the Conservative government had wasted a shit-ton of money on the F-35 fighters they procured last year, to the tune of $25 billion. That is a lot of money. The NDP promptly made hay of it3 and Parliament began an inquiry into how this huge waste happened and who was responsible for it. Until this week, when the Tories moved to end the inquiry, and at this point we’re well into the “once is annoying, but twice is a pattern” stage for a lot of average Canadians who are only just starting to realize that the Tories pull this sort of thing all the time.

And the problem now is that every time the Tories do it, they’re reinforcing the narrative. When they fire scientists who disagree with their climate proposals, when they eliminate the watchdog agency they proposed – every story that can be simplified down to “the Tories don’t want you to know the truth” just reinforces those earlier stories. The average Canadian doesn’t care about government watchdogs that much, because that sort of thing operates on an abstract level to most people.4 But Canadians do care about not being Americans, and if you link these policy stories to the things they care about through common themes, the Tories will start taking a beating. Which is exactly what’s happening.

Of course, all of this is relatively meaningless because the Tories do have a majority government and therefore we’re not going to have an election for another four years…

…unless, of course. that Elections Canada probe concludes that misconduct was so severe that we need a do-over of last year’s election, in whole or in part. Which, I suspect, is the major reason the Tories keep trying to kill it.

1. Which often differentiates them from Americans, who can experience selective amnesia about such things. [↩]
2. Also: American beer. [↩]
3. Noting that the Conservatives had called Jack Layton’s plan to hire 1,000 new doctors across Canada every year for a decade financially unsound, and that plan would have cost maybe $1.5 billion tops. [↩]
4. Not to me, of course, but then again I’m a big policy nerd and atypical in that respect. [↩]

Torontoist asked me to review the OIRPD’s report on police overreaction during the G20 summit here in Toronto, so I did.

So apparently George W. Bush plans to “publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth.”

No. Really.

Prospective titles for this book include

Don’t Know Much About (Economic) History, The One Percent Solution,, and Hey, If You Turn That Chart Upside Down It Looks Great!

She starts by asserting that Winter Wipeout is proof that gay people want heteros to suffer and… it actually manages to go downhill from there.

Also, watch the guy behind her. His reactions are hilarious.

Yesterday on Twitter Ezra Klein wrote:

Now, granted, at 36 I am only “young” in the sense that if I died tomorrow people would say “oh, such a shame, he was so young,” but that type of young lasts until you’re in your early fifties, at which point by no other metric are you considered young, except by older people who will still say things like “you whippersnapper.” But even so, let me take a crack at it…

Dear old people:

As I look out on this sea of wrinkled, crumply faces today, I have only one thought. It is not “man, you people should smile more,” even though smiling old people are much more pleasant for young people to look at, because when you’re frowny you make everybody more miserable and also you remind us of our own mortality. Seriously, you old people should just smile as much as possible. Unless your teeth have all fallen out, in which case you should stick to a close-lipped grin, or perhaps a magical twinkle in your eyes like Morgan Freeman has.

But no, the one thought I have for you is “get some perspective.” Which is funny, because if there’s one thing older people pride themselves on, it is having a greater sense of perspective. This is, I understand, based on the fact that old people traditionally have more life experience than young people, by virtue of being older. And to be fair, this is not the worst argument in the world. But let’s be honest: about one person in three lives practically their entire life in the same 100-square-mile patch of land, and four people out of five will live in three or less patches of land that size. (And that’s in the First World. In poor countries – let’s just say you’d really better enjoy looking at that one tree you like.) There is a limit to how much experience you can get this way, is my point.

But it’s not completely wrong to say that older people have more perspective, because I know I’ve got more perspective than when I was thirty, or twenty, or ten. In truth, I know much more than I did back then and I can make better decisions then I did back then. But this is the thing I’ve managed to figure out and so, so many of you old people have not: even knowing what I knew at twenty is not applicable to someone who is twenty now. Someone who is twenty now has different challenges than I did – and the gap between me and a twenty-year-old now is only sixteen years. Between you, you loveable old people you, and a twenty-year-old right now, there is a vast gulf, and your life experience means tremendously little – because so little of it is now applicable. Even if you do like Mos Def.

Let us pick a sixty-year-old person in the crowd, because sixty is basically the benchmark where we start considering people “old,” no matter how much we might talk about how many good years you have left – sixty is the age where cancer stops being a tragedy and starts becoming “that, or a heart attack or a stroke.” Someone who is sixty today was born in 1952 – basically you’re Sally on Mad Men. (Speaking for young people, we’re sorry that you had to see Roger Sterling get that blowjob.) You grew up with the Beatles, you remember JFK getting shot, maybe you marched in anti-Vietnam protests if you’re American – but all of that is background, really, because every generation has its music and its deaths and its political struggle.

What matters, really, is that you, the sixty-year-old person, were born into a society where you had it all. You had enormous purchasing power. Yes, computers have gotten cheaper, and that’s great, but the cost of basic shelter has increased and if we’re talking about home ownership it has exploded. At twenty-four, you the sixty-year-old person in 76 (the year I was born!) would be out of university – which cost you much less than it cost me, to say nothing of what it cost a kid today, because university tuition has wildly outpaced inflation over the past thirty-six years. That’s assuming you even decided to go to university, because in 1976 you could get a decent job with a high school diploma – and when we say “decent,” we mean “above the median salary” decent. Depending on what country you lived in, your access to quality healthcare would vary, but generally speaking it was easier for you to get it then than it is for a comparable young person to get it now, be that because a given country’s private system has collapsed or its public system has been chronically underfunded (but not for senior care, which so often manages to escape the knife). And of course you were guaranteed healthy retirements, and anyone my age or younger has been systematically trained to believe that retirement is something we’re never actually going to get to do. (Systematically trained, one would note, by old people. It is convenient how that goes.)

Young people don’t vote – it’s a truism, has been for a long time now. The reason we don’t vote (well, I vote, of course, but I am using the larger “we” here, bear with me) is because from day one in civics class – if we have civics class any more, that is, it may have been cut along with all the arts education funding and everything else that isn’t “useful” – we’re told that the purpose of government is for people to come together and address common concerns. And we keep hearing from every politician how young people are important – and then we see that what’s actually important, in practice, is to address the concerns of old people. Some of the young hippies would say “rich people,” of course, and that’s not incorrect – but other than Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake and LeBron, there aren’t a whole lot of young rich people.

Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people, who were also old people, all decided it really wasn’t that important any more – in part because they will all be dead when global warming really starts to screw over the human race in earnest – and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.

And young people could see the writing on the wall, and it said “you’re fucked, young people,” as the cost of simply having a life went up and up and up – to say nothing of the cost of bettering ourselves (which you demanded we do, even to get a shitty job working in a soulless office somewhere). And what was more galling was, again, your lack of perspective when you did these things, because at the same time as it became harder and harder for young people to get by, old people started to lecture young people more and more that they were not being young in the right way – e.g. the way that the old people had been young. Which meant an endless deluge of whiny newspaper articles about how young people were still living with their parents into their twenties and not getting married young like they used to and what about all the video games and the hoodies and the rap music? I am pretty sure Rex Murphy – yes, Mr. Murphy, I can see you over there in row twenty-nine – complains about how young people aren’t doing things properly at least once a month. Granted, in Mr. Murphy’s case “young people” can technically mean “everybody younger than Rex Murphy,” which in turn means “everybody in the whole world” since I am pretty sure Rex Murphy is a lich of some sort. In the event that he is not, could the person next to him punch him in the nuts? – yes, that’s great, thank you.

On top of which, your lack of perspective is truly galling when we consider civil rights. Let’s be honest: all those laws against gay marriage and movements against gay people generally? Are old people. And what’s really offensive, old people, is that you know – you absolutely have to realize – that you can’t win on this issue in the long run and possibly not even the medium run. The demographics are completely against you. Every single year, the polling in favour of gay marriage everywhere goes up a little, as more old homophobes die off and not enough new young homophobes show up to replace them. (Granted, the young ones try harder.) Hell, the people pushing for these restrictive and discriminatory laws are now admitting openly that they won’t survive for more than a decade or two! But you continue to get these laws passed everywhere you can, using the power of Old People Vote And Young People Don’t. On behalf of all young people everywhere (albeit only technically in my case), let me say it for you: you’re going to die, and these laws are going to be revoked. When I say you need to get some perspective, part of that is deciding for yourself whether you want to be remembered by your descendants as a proud, forward-thinking individual or someone who was loved (or not) in spite of (or because of) their bigotry. Because that’s how this is going to go down.

Look. I’m not saying my generation – or any younger generation, really – has any moral standing over you in this matter. If it had been me born in 1952, I’m sure I would have taken full advantage of the opportunities you got, and I’m sure every kid who’s twenty right now would do exactly the same thing. We’re not really trained, as a species, to think generationally about long-term sustainability, and at some point we’re just going to have to learn. (The point at which we’re going to have to learn it approaches us much more quickly as a result of policies you invented and promoted, but again – not judging.) We’re resigned to what we as young people have to do, which is fix your mess. But we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t add insult to injury by judging us for not living life the way you lived it when the way you lived life is no longer possible (no more clueless and patronizing New York Times articles that make a hash of sociology, please), or by making things just that little bit harder by enacting hate-filled laws we’re just going to have to overturn. Presumably Rex Murphy – surviving from the power of a gem which contains the screaming souls of a thousand dead CBC employees – will still be complaining even then. But at that point it’ll just be him. So get some perspective, because you don’t all have soul-gems to keep yourselves alive to a sinful age. Thank you.

So apparently this mashup of the Hey Girl meme with Paul Ryan is the new hot thing, and I am nothing if not a slave to trends, so I am participating!

A couple weeks back Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great piece about white actors Hollywood keeps trying to push despite their continuing failure to succeed. (For those who quibble about Sam Worthington’s inclusion: watch Man on a Ledge and then try to tell me differently.) These actors are not bad actors per se (although I would argue Jason O’Mara is pretty bad), but they are pointedly non-special-in-any-way actors who keep getting breaks until something happens for them. Alex O’Loughlin is a good example of this: he was boring in Moonlight and then he was boring in Three Rivers and now he is boring in Hawaii Five-O, but on that show he is surrounded by more entertaining actors and pretty scenery so it has become successful and now O’Loughlin is the Hollywood equivalent of a made guy. The point is that minority actors, by and large, do not get these same types of chances. Idris Elba in particular should be huge now. Morris Chestnut seemed tailor-made to be an action star – muscular, attractive, charismatic, – but it never happened and he got shunted into “urban” romcoms. And so forth.

Anyway, I mention all of this because I just saw the extended trailer for Step Up: Revolution. (Yes, I know some of you are going to just click over to Reddit instead of reading the rest of this post, but try to bear with me.)

Now, if you are not familiar with the Step Up films, there is a simple pattern to them: boy meets girl, they are both dancers, one or the other has a crew and for some reason that crew has to win a big dance battle which is awesome, Love Conquers All, happy ending. Now, the first Step Up starred Charming Potato but since Mr. Potato was not available to do Step Up 2 The Streets, as he was now rich and famous and too important for such things, instead the film transitioned to his character’s previously unmentioned little sister analogue and she took the role of The Girl in the second movie.

Since all of the Step Up films take place in the same universe where dance battles are bigger than UFC, the third film, Step Up 3D had to be connected to the second and this time around the primary transition character was Adam Sevani’s Moose. Now, Sevani is a pretty badass dancer, and in fact he gets a romance subplot, but instead of being the lead he is secondary to some blandly attractive model-esque dancers who aren’t bad or anything but certainly aren’t the sick dancers that the rest of the cast are – and really aren’t so amazing as actors that they merit any additional consideration on that front. But they’re definitely attractive and Sevani is, let us be honest, geek chic rather than traditional leading man.

However, Step Up 3D also introduced Stephen “Twitch” Boss to the cast, and Twitch, as any fan of So You Think You Can Dance knows, is charismatic, articulate, a decent actor, a ridiculously good dancer, has an existing fanbase, and most importantly for our considerations at this point is quite handsome:

And producers promised that Twitch would get a greatly expanded role in Step Up 4 (which later got renamed to Step Up Revolution as they jiggered the plot to tie it into Occupy Wall Street, sort of, if Occupy Wall Street danced in far more badass ways than they usually do), so a lot of people, myself included, naturally assumed that he would be the transition character into the fourth film. But instead of this happening, Twitch is still a supporting character and the leads are going to be a white girl and a not-terribly-dark Hispanic guy.

Granted, one can’t get too upset about Kathryn McCormick playing the lead white girl, because she is totally awesome in her own right, but why can’t she just romance Twitch instead? I mean, interracial relationships are common nowadays – particularly in the dance community. But this is one area where Hollywood continues to be weirdly reactionary.

Now that Mitt Romney is the Republicanc candidate for president in all but name, the nation turns to consider his nominee for Vice-President. Who should fill the role? There are, of course, many possibilities.

Senator Marco Rubio

PROS:
– Shores up the conservative base
– Extremely telegenic
– Guarantees that at least a half-dozen Hispanic people will vote for Mitt Romney

CONS:
– Problematic backstory
– Far-right positions potentially alienating to centrists
– Does not appear to, like, know a lot of things

Representative Paul Ryan

PROS:
– Young and energetic
– Beloved by media types who enjoy that he makes right-wing economic theory seem reasonable and practical in a Mr. Rogers Repossesses Your House sort of way
– Really good at holding up charts, graphs, or anything made of paper

CONS:
– Kind of emphasizes how rich Mitt Romney really is
– Gets pissy whenever anybody points out that his budget plan will make poor people eat dog food even though dog food these days is healthy and good for you
– Two words: death stare

Rick Santorum

PROS:
– Is white and male, which helps with white male people and also people who like sweater-vests
– Would really piss off Dan Savage, and the base likes that
– Would give Andy Samberg many more opportunities to work on his lousy Santorum impression

CONS:
– Unpopular in his home state of Pennsylvania
– Religious extremism is kind of creepy
– Is a giant fucking asshole

Kcarab Amabo, The Mirror Universe Barack Obama

PROS:
– Combines Barack Obama’s charisma with the soul-destroying ruthless drive for power necessary to thrive in the modern GOP
– Proven track record of leadership in the Mirror Universe, which still totally exists and has not collapsed into a singularity due to Presidential science experiments that went against God Himself
– Has memorized all of the Evil Overlord List and in fact has added entries of his own, mostly about singularities

CONS:
– Birth certificate may lead some to believe he is actually Yrrab Oreteos, a citizen of Aisenodni, rather than a full-blooded Nacirema
– All the backwards spelling will eventually get on people’s nerves
– You don’t want to put someone more talented than you in the #2 spot, Mitt Romney, even if he is evil and ambitious
– Horrifying fascination with gravitational anomalies

A Sexy Pirate

PROS:
– Sexy
– So sexy
– Women voters will love the sexy

CONS:
– Pirates so 2005
– Constantly calling the US Armed Forces “the ARRRRRRmy” will get old real fast
– Will suggest to corporate America a lack of concern over intellectual property rights

Jason Sudeikis

PROS:
– Would stop Jason Sudeikis from impersonating Mitt Romney
– Much more charming than Mitt Romney
– Captures vital “people who still think Saturday Night Live is cool” demographic

CONS:
– Hollywood elite
– Sudeikis’ Romney impersonation more likeable than Mitt Romney and its loss may hurt the campaign
– Will hurt Romney with those sectors of the Republican base who hate laughter when it is not directed at minorities

Pope Benedict XVI

PROS:
– Puts the whole “Mormon issue” to rest and provides the campaign a clear answer re: separation of church and state
– Catholics will be told to vote Romney/Benedict or be cast into the pits of Hell
– Mitt likes eating fish on Friday already anyhow

CONS:
– Really old – like, “stinky” old
– Likely to cause a religious war of some kind
– Jedi will rise up to support Barack Obama in the general election and the Stormtroopers are not yet ready

A Giant Novelty Can of Tab

PROS:
– Increases Romney’s appeal to 40something women
– Who could have a problem with Tab?
– No calories!

CONS:
– Kind of out of date
– Nobody really likes Tab
– Pink can problematic in the Deep South

T-Pain

PROS:
– Kind of awesome even though he is killing music as we know it
– Impeccable dresser, will lend sense of style to the campaign
– Wobbly techno-voice could subliminally reassure people who think Romney is already inclined to be shaky on the issues by making wobbliness cool

CONS:
– Well, he’s black, for a start
– Association with “hippity-hop” music problematic with GOP base, who only like that sort of music when it is performed ironically by white suburban guys talking about the Founding Fathers
– Mitt Romney will not be able to tell the difference between him and Will.I.Am

One Of The Ponies From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

PROS:
– Guarantees “brony” vote
– Appeal to younger voters hits Obama in key demographic
– Was cool about a year ago, which for a Republican campaign is amazingly up-to-date

CONS:
– “Brony” vote outnumbered by “we hate bronies” vote
– Republicans traditionally terrified of bright colours
– Seriously, which one is that? We can never remember

An Oil Tanker

PROS:
– Is very, very big and will impress voters
– Gets all the subtext out of the way
– Like, all of it

CONS:
– Leaky
– May explode
– Sort of a “high risk, high reward” candidate

Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford

PROS:
– Is white and male and fat and very conservative – he’s like a less-moderate Chris Christie!
– Anti-elitist in all the ways that Republicans like
– Complete disregard for “facts” will work well in debates when his claims of things that are obviously and wildly untrue will confound Joe Biden

CONS:
– None at all
– Seriously
– Please, take him

A Woman

PROS:
– Shows that the campaign is open to modern thinking
– May help the campaign win back female voters alienated by the GOP’s track record on, well, everything
– Probably will smell better than Mitt Romney

CONS:
– Could potentially wear immodest clothing
– Republicans already tried this once and it didn’t so much work that time
– Might get all the other women jealous, because you know how women are, am I right, fellows?

A Clone of Mitt Romney Grown In A Vat

PROS:
– Allows Mitt Romney to take wildly differing positions on any issue simultaneously

CONS:
– Means that there are two of Mitt Romney

(previously)

A lot of people have emailed me asking me for my take on the Trayvon Martin killing, and although I’ve kind of wanted to write about it at the same time I have not wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Mostly this is because I am A) white and B) not American, so I’m two steps removed from being able to make any truly cogent commentary – all of the greatest writing about this that I have read has come, not surprisingly, from black people trying to articulate why they’re mad about it, and I don’t know quite how to approach the enormity of the black experience in America from a doubly outside perspective. So this may not be searing eloquence here, is my point.

Sadly, I think the best way I can discuss it and why, this time at last, the anger from black people is not going away (and it isn’t, and it shouldn’t) starts with the context of The Hunger Games movie. Yes, I know I’m making a leap here that is seven-league-boots long, but bear with me, I’m just using it as a starting point. And yes, that means some spoilers for the movie based on a book which came out four years ago, so deal with it or don’t read.

One of my favorite things about the movie (which is good, but not perfect by any means) was how Alexander Ludwig played Cato at his death – the alpha-dog career Tribute is completely beside himself because he’s finally realized that the ruleset he’s internalized doesn’t apply. All his life he’d been trained to accept a reality where, sure, he’d have to kill some people, but it was part of an inevitable progression towards the life he imagined he was supposed to have and anyway those people didn’t matter. The consequences of being a tribute were never supposed to apply to him. He was following the rules, and optimizing himself to work within those rules, and although at his end he realizes that the rules were basically bullshit and were never going to guarantee him anything, he’s still trying to work within them even when he’s accepted the reality of his own imminent death because he’s internalized them so much that he can’t entirely believe that the rules aren’t going to step in and save him.

Okay, nerd digression over, we can stop talking about the movie now and go back to society. Society, for the most part, is the process of internalizing rules and accepting that following them is good. Usually these rules exist for good reasons. “Don’t kill people,” for example, is a good rule because it means if everybody follows it nobody will try to murder you, except rulebreakers, and then those rulebreakers run into “don’t break the rules” and they’re in trouble. Granted, sometimes there can be stupid rules, but luckily we have managed to advance society to the point where we can discuss and change the rules. This is about as good as society is gonna get unless we become telepathic.

Now – were I black and in America, I would be perpetually pissed off to begin with, because it’s quite evident that being black in America means you get a different set of rules than, say, white people do. But simply having an unfair set of extra rules isn’t really enough to get people really, really mad most of the time. (The civil rights struggle basically started after the Civil War ended and took nearly a century to get to the point where a majority of the black population was engaged, and it wasn’t because black people weren’t being treated like shit at the beginning of it.)

No – what gets you really mad is having the fact shoved in your face that not only do you have a different set of rules, but in fact that those rules don’t apply whenever someone feels like having them not apply for whatever reason. And even then, black people in the USA have been remarkably restrained. Amadou Diallo gets shot to death by cops and sure, people get pissed off, but there’s no real uprising. Sean Bell gets shot to death by cops and again – it’s an everyday thing, right? Cops shoot black people and get away with it. Black people got angry about Rodney King, but since then it’s been clear that nobody really gives a shit if cops beat up black people for no good reason and that gets internalized as one of the rules, so it becomes perceived as less of a big deal (on some level) when Diallo or Bell gets shot.

But Trayvon Martin pushes the envelope too far again, because his killing was so much more extreme. He was a kid, for starters. He wasn’t shot by cops, but by some random idiot with a gun who didn’t even get arrested. When the conflict started he walked away. These facts are not in dispute.

(Naturally, this means conservatives have started trying to justify Trayvon’s death, which tells you all you need to know about modern American conservatism. Liberals get angry about a senseless murder, so conservatives decide that the murder must have been proper because liberals are angry about it. Trayvon deserved to die because he was 17 and not the little kid who shows up in all those photos in the media! He deserved to die because when he was pursued by someone with a gun he may have fought back! He deserved to die because he was suspended from school for having a plastic bag, traditionally used to hold pot! This is what modern conservatism has come to: demonizing a dead kid for being in the wrong place and the wrong time.)

This is a new level of disrespect for black people who followed the rules – as unfair as those rules might be. Part of internalizing rules is accepting the fact that if you break the rules you will be punished, and even if the rules aren’t fair you can at least always follow them and stay safe from punishment – which, for black people, is often lethal. But the moral of the Trayvon Martin killing is that the rules never existed in the first place and indeed will just be revised as necessary (and retroactively if need be) to make sure that anything is justifiable under the rules. That’s why the anger isn’t going away this time. It’s why I hope it continues to not go away.

Because, seriously. 17.

Every time I hear about Geraldo Rivera’s comments on the Trayvon Martin shootings, I always picture him talking to the victim’s family. I picture him sitting there, an expression of Sincere Concern on his face (the one he’s practiced over years of TV “journalism”), perhaps putting a hand on one family member’s knee in a sort of “There, there” gesture. And I picture him trying to explain the position he’s apparently decided is the sensitive, honest and concerned stance to take.

“Yes,” he says, “on the one hand, George Zimmerman did hunt down and kill your unarmed son in cold blood after being instructed by police not to follow him. That’s certainly half the problem. But just as importantly, well…your son wasn’t exactly dressed formally, was he? I think we have to place at least as much of the blame on your son’s clothing choices as we do on the decisions of the raving paranoid who followed your son down the street and then shot him in broad daylight. If he hadn’t been so, well…slovenly…then I feel that there was a very good chance that Zimmerman might have decided your child was ‘one of the good ones’, and left him alone. We’ll never know, of course, but I think that if black people don’t follow the unspoken dress code that white people have decided on for you, then any consequences of that are really on your own head. But, you know, I’m not blaming your bad parenting or your son’s sloppy dress choices. You just didn’t know that wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a nice neighborhood was a possible death sentence for a young black man. Now that you’re aware, I’m sure that you and all your kind will remember your place from now on, and unfortunate incidents like this won’t happen again.”

And he wonders why someone hit him in the face with a chair once…

Some time ago – I can’t find it now, it may be gone – some enterprising person designed a website that would auto-mail a letter for you via snailmail to your Member of Parliament. You would write the letter as if it were an email, choose your MP, and it would do the rest. It survived off a surprisingly small amount of donations. The theory (which is mostly correct) is that politicians pay disproportionate attention to physical letters and ignore emails.

Now: when someone is smart enough to automate the process so that it provides a pre-written letter for one’s issue of choice (which you can edit, if you like) and auto-detects your MP (or representative in Congress, or whatever), then Facebook activism will actually just become activism. Because imagine if those 100 million Kony video views translated into 1/10th the number of letters. Washington would be flooded with paper. If nothing else, it would force politicians to stop paying disproportionate attention to physical letters, which are the domain of old conservatives.

(Now imagine it if it was an issue of real and lasting importance, rather than a story about an admittedly bad person which has been driven wildly out of proportion for what is likely profit motive.)

Look, I know each week a conservative politician in Canada will open their mouth and say something stupid and be the Worst Politician In Canada (for that week). That’s how the news cycle works. But I don’t want people to lose perspective. Yes, Rob and Doug Ford are incompetent and ignorant. Yes, John Baird is a contentious blowhard who probably shouldn’t be in any diplomatic role, much less Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yes, Stephen Harper is a smug robot who has to work overtime to keep his contempt for Canadians’ general predilection for egalitarianism under the surface. Yes, Jason Kenney is an embarrassment who frequently says and does stupid things.

But not a one of these people is worse than Vic Toews, because as bad as they might be, they are all still occasionally capable of doing good things in public service. Not so Toews, whose track record speaks for itself: he has constantly and consistently advocated for bad public policy. When Vic Toews was made Minister of Justice, he attempted to pass a three-strikes law (which was obvious at that time to be extremely bad policy), advocated for lowering the age of criminal responsibility from twelve to ten, and added police representatives to judicial advisory boards (a move that practically the entire judiciary complained could cause severe imbalance in the judicial nomination process). He also very likely “forgot” to inquire closely into the Karlheinz Schrieber affidavit.

As President of the Treasury Board, his job was one of government oversight, which meant that Toews introduced the new Lobbying Act, which actually makes it easier for lobbyists to arrange unreported meetings between government officials and lobbyists’ clients. Toews also scrapped the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, which was a useful and cheap tool for Canadian citizens to exercise oversight over public documents.

And now, of course, as Public Safety Minister, Toews is demanding that ISPs install equipment to track their users and that such information be available to the government without warrant. Why? Because of child pornographers, of course! The flood of child pornography that we all know threatens to drown the nation apparently demands it, according to Toews.

Again: Vic Toews is the worst politician in Canada. Any politician can say stupid or thoughtless things (Justin Trudeau does so regularly). It is quite another thing, however, to consistently advocate for and draft, and execute bad or actively harmful government policy. Vic Toews does so and he has done so for most of his government career, in service of an authoritarian ideology that is at odds with the right-wing small-government ethos for which he so frequently agitates (and which belies his political career, now in its seventeenth year). To use a line I have used before: if Vic Toews agrees with you about anything, consider strongly the possibility that you are wrong about everything.

UPDATE: And just as I write this, up pops Vikileaks on Twitter, making a point about personal privacy by publishing excerpts from affidavits in Toews’ divorce case.