My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

…is not nearly as bad as the reviews would have you believe, especially when you take into account that seemingly half of all people reviewing this movie do so in the following manner: “where is the singing and the archery versus knights and where are the Merry Men and why isn’t everybody an anthropomorphized fox THIS IS NOT HOW ROBIN HOOD IS SUPPOSED TO BE.” Which, okay, I get that some people want Robin Hood to be fun and frolicsome, but it’s not like you need a new Disney/Costner Robin Hood because that’s already there so try something else with the story elements. (If anything this film comes off as a more impressive version of the Patrick Bergin/Uma Thurman Robin Hood, which went the Robin McKinley route for historical relevance, and posed the Robin Hood story in Norman/Saxon antagonism – whereas this grounds itself in King John’s struggle against the northern English barons and the eventual signing of the Magna Carta.)

Granted, it’s not perfect by any means, and in particular appears to suffer from a bad case of too-long-for-feature-release-so-let’s-chop-the-running-time-itis; some plotlines end up just feeling incredibly rushed and I expect that in the long run this will follow the same path as Kingdom of Heaven, with a special “extended cut” edition showing up on DVD that’s actually far superior if you don’t mind a three-hour running time. But I enjoyed it well enough.

I had an interesting experience this weekend at a yard sale on my street. While digging through a bin full of kids’ clothes in hopes of finding some for my two-year-old son, I had a Spider-Man t-shirt thrust into my hands. “Trust me,” said the father of the boy whose old toys and clothes were being sold, “when he turns three he’ll be demanding that you get him one.”

It’s true; my neighbourhood is full of kids, and nearly all of the boys routinely wear clothing with logos or images of superheroes; Spider-Man is easily the most popular, but I often see Superman, Batman and occasionally Wolverine. Love of superheroes seems to be an almost universal phenomenon among boys of a particular age. At the same time, it’s almost certain that few of those boys will wind up being regular or even occasional comics readers. This presents us with a paradox: superheroes are more prominent in popular culture than ever (particularly kids’ culture), but fewer and fewer people are reading comics – and almost none of them are kids.

I don’t need to tell you what you’ll see if you go into a typical comics shop: adults, and not even particularly young ones. Sure, you’ll see a few teens, but odds are they’re there for whatever anime and manga the shop sells – and you certainly won’t see anyone under thirteen. This isn’t a new problem, and lots of people have discussed the reasons for it and possible strategies for addressing it. But I’d like to raise two points that I’ve never heard mentioned. First, that the loss of the children’s market is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what kids’ comics are for; second, that the paradox I describe above is not actually a paradox, in that the omnipresence of superheroes in media and merchandising is actually a cause of the loss of the children’s market.

Let’s start with the purpose of comics. Not the purpose of comics for you and me, or the purpose of comics for the kid who might theoretically read them, but the purpose they serve for the parents who might conceivably buy a comic for their child. For parents, comics are not an entertainment medium; they are a distraction device. Think back to your earliest childhood experiences with comics. Here are mine: being bought comics to keep me quiet at restaurants while we waited for the food; being bought comics to keep me quiet in the car while we drove to the cottage; being given comics in my Christmas stocking to keep me quiet while my parents slept a few more hours… getting the picture? So long as the content isn’t explicitly offensive (are you reading this, dismemberment fans?) parents don’t care what’s in a comic so long as it distracts Junior for a reasonable amount of time. Once you look at it that way, you see why comics for kids don’t work today. You need to go to a special store to buy them, and the price-to-value ratio is terrible – especially when you compare them to an in-car DVD player or an iPhone. (There’s a reason the NFB’s free library is one of the top iPhone apps.)

That covers the parent side of the equation, but what about the kids? Children can whine hard enough to overcome nearly any parental reluctance to buy something, so if they’re so keen on superheroes why aren’t they demanding comics? Because they don’t particularly want to read Spider-Man comics; they want to be able to project themselves onto Spider-Man as a fantasy figure, and they don’t care whether they get that fix from movies, TV, the Web, their t-shirts or Underoos. This is where it gets counter-intuitive: rather than leading kids to comics, the merchandising is satisfying a need that once only comics could meet (of course, it doesn’t help that in many cases the media versions are better than the comics ones.)

So what can comics publishers do to get kids reading comics again? Well, they’re not going to do it by publishing kid-friendly comics in the traditional format; as good as those individual comics may sometimes be, they don’t meet parents’ value-for-cost analysis, and they don’t meet kids’ need for superhero fantasy any better than do other sources they can access more easily. What they need to do instead is make printed comics that are bigger and cheaper (imagine a scaled-down version of Marvel’s Essentials line) and sell them everywhere: gas stations, convenience store, grocery stores – you know, everywhere you used to buy comics. Or they can give up physical comics and concentrate on the Web – or, what’s really the most rational option, give up on comics entirely and simply license the characters.

Every season I consider doing recap/discussion posts for Survivor and every season I never quite get around to it, mostly because most seasons start out slow with a bunch of people you don’t really know mostly playing blind – which is amusing, but the real meat in watching a season of Survivor arises in the midgame once you know who the serious players are this time around, and who are the requisite bunch of bored housewives/wannabe actors who just wanted the experience and think that the “one in (whatever) chance at a million dollars” rhetoric is a literal chance rather than it having to do with playskill.

Which is a shame, because watching the interplay on Survivor is fascinating, not least because you basically get an omniscient watcher’s perspective on people’s attempts to discern what other people are doing/planning, and it gives the viewer a sense of superiority that’s often unwarranted. After all, at this point most people who go on Survivor are fans of the show1 and you have to know that every single one of them thought things along the lines of “well why didn’t X see that coming? It was so obvious!” Which it only is when you’ve got the overhead view, of course.

Thinking in those terms made it clear that Parvati is probably the best player in the game’s history – no offense to Sandra, who’s definitely got skills and whose second win wasn’t entirely unjustified, but the sheer number of times that Parvati accurately guessed what her opponents were doing before she could have gotten it confirmed that they were doing things was just amazing this time around, and she did it while basically being marked as a threat from the start of the game. More than once this season I saw her suss out a particularly clever move (my favorite was when she guessed that Rupert was bluffing about finding a hidden immunity idol – which Russell bought whole hog, incidentally).

And Russell’s play this season was much worse than his first time out. He basically only survived out of the early rounds due to a massive stroke of luck (IE, Tyson deciding to abandon an otherwise rock-solid plan to eliminate both Russell and Parvati for reasons that still remain incredibly dense) and then a second one which he barely had to work to achieve (JT throwing him an immunity idol on blind faith). And if in his first run Russell merely seemed blind to the necessity of social play, this time he deliberately ignored it – his rant at the reunion about how “America should decide” made that clear enough.

Of course, what Russell also illustrates is that Survivor players often fall into a pack mentality, looking for an alpha dog to lead their strategic alliance. Someone like Coach, for example, eagerly signs on to anybody who looks “strong” to him, which makes him little more than a useful tool.2 Even in this all-star season, a lot of players largely fell into pack mentality, with the villains signing into either Boston Rob’s alliance or Russell’s, and the heroes following either Tom or the dual-headed alliance of James and Amanda – and when James was too injured to continue JT stepped into the leader role largely by force of assumption. One of the reasons Sandra won, I think, is that she was clearly not just a Russell follower but instead clearly playing her own game, as her attempts to sabotage Russell were well-known to the jury, which won her a measure of independence.

So more than ever, it seems that the path to winning Survivor is a trickier and trickier balancing game: you need to be independent enough to be considered strategic, but not so strategic that you become seen as weaselly; you need to be friendly, but not ingratiating; you need to vote people off without making it personal to them; and above all you need to be smart, or at least smarter than most everybody else.3

Really, I understand that people can sometimes have antipathy towards reality TV, but Survivor is one of the ones I’ve never understood hating; it’s a fascinating peek into how people can become Machiavellian plotters, skillful or otherwise, and how various people react to perceived betrayal.

1. If Canadians were eligible to go on it I would do it in a second; I can’t see how it wouldn’t be immensely fun and memorable, even considering the misery contestants have to suffer. [↩]
2. Of course Coach is a really obvious example and most people don’t explicitly tell the camera they want a strong leader to follow, but the trend mostly holds. [↩]
3. Exception: Todd Herzog of Survivor: China, who managed to win without playing very smartly at all, mostly by using a basic alliance strategy which, inexplicably, nobody bothered to challenge. [↩]

The one thing Archie Andrews can be thankful for is that Betty Cooper doesn’t (usually) have god-like magical powers that allow her to kill or maim other people on a whim. Harvey… er… No-Last-Name is not so lucky. As revealed in this story from Sabrina # 21 (September 1974), written by Frank Doyle and drawn by Stan Goldberg before his characters’ faces started melting, Sabrina has adopted a policy of talking nice to her boyfriend while quietly using her Satanic powers to wreak destruction on any girl who even looks his way.

The violence begins in the splash panel, as Sabrina congratulates herself on her own lack of jealousy while literally raining thunder and lightning down on this poor girl whose only crime was to be (inexplicably) interested in Harvey. The whole thing has a “why don’t you stop drenching and electrocuting yourself” feel too it.

Then, after the girl has made it clear that she’s been thoroughly scared away, Sabrina tries to murder her by making a heavy sign fall on top of her. Just for the hell (again, literally) of it. Also, “Eeyipe!” was clearly a favourite Frank Doyle word along with “EEP!” “Urk!” and “W-ell.”

The freckled hell-spawn then returns to telling her poor sap of a boyfriend how wonderful he is, but senses danger when a stranger winks at him. So of course she does what anyone would do in a situation like that: causes her to have an entire supply of garbage poured onto her. I guess she was allowed to escape without any permanent scars only because she didn’t actually talk to him.

And, as the story ends, we see Sabrina casually destroying the lives, bodies and futures of literally every other young woman in sight, because it’s better to turn them into reptiles amphibians or cast them down to the centre of the Earth rather than risk having them talk to a guy who would later be played by Nate Richert. (Whatever happened to Nate Richert anyway?) I think my favourite image is of the girl being pulled into a mysterious building with a “girls wanted” sign. Apparently Sabrina is also using her witchcraft to sell women into prostitution.

I just wonder what Betty Cooper would do if she had supernatural powers. How could she ever top Sabrina’s combination of cruelty, viciousness and pathology?

I’m sorry I asked.

Everybody hates gratuitous resurrections, right? It’s just a fanboy thing, like bagging your comics or bickering about who would win in a Batman/Captain America fight. It just sucks that they (Marvel or DC, take your choice) continue to insult our intelligence by giving us unbelievably contrived resurrection storylines. “It wasn’t me who died! A cosmic alien impersonated me while I was in suspended animation, then blew herself up and telepathically inserted a shard of her consciousness into my clone, who then got absorbed into my mind when she died!” “No, I never died at all! Being impaled through the chest with an eight-inch-thick chunk of razor-sharp metal merely greatly inconvenienced me!” “Yeah, when I got decapitated by Wolverine? Funny story…”

Comics writers are well aware of this particular fanboy pet peeve; how could they not be? You only need to be accosted so many times at a convention by an angry fan saying, “You should never have brought back Barry Allen/Harry Osborn/Doctor Octopus because their death was so meaningful!” So they try everything they can to make sure that this time, when they kill off a character, they ain’t coming back.

They’ve long ago realized that you can’t just kill someone off in an explosion or a fall; dying off-panel is an automatic “Get Out of Kill Free” card. And they’ve figured out that exotic deaths never work, either; if Wonder Man dies of ionic energy poisoning, you can bet that somewhere down the line, somebody’s going to get the bright idea to bring him back. And who’s to say that ionic energy poisoning doesn’t just cause you to go into suspended animation, anyway?

So it’s got to be on-panel. It’s got to be a “real” cause of death. And the latest innovation: It’s gotta be gory. Sure, you might survive a gunshot wound, but are you really going to survive having your head popped like a zit by Black Adam, or ripped in half…um…also by Black Adam…or impaled on a sword? (By Deathstroke; presumably, Black Adam was busy that day.) Um…actually, the answer seems to still be “yes”. The Martian Manhunter came back after being immolated on-panel, Ronnie Raymond returned from a full-on chest stabbing, Colossus wasn’t stopped by cremation, and even perma-death poster boy Bucky showed up again as Grim-N-Gritty-Cyborg-Assassin-Bucky.

Clearly, the only solution is an editorial mandate. From now on, it’s time to take a hard line: No more gratuitous resurrections. That’s right, no matter how popular the character, no matter how unpopular the death sequence, Psylocke is not coming back from the dead! Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has sp…oh. Hmm. Maybe that’s not as fool-proof as we thought.

The truth is, there actually is a fool-proof way of stopping gratuitous resurrections in comics. It’s even simple, easily executable, and would be wildly popular with fans. Ready for it? Here it is:

STOP KILLING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Seriously, is this really that hard to understand? There’s no way you can possibly make a death stick in a comic book; they’re fictional characters, they’ll come back as long as someone remembers them fondly enough to bring them back. And as Bucky proves, that can be an amazingly long time. Since there’s no way to make death anything more than a temporary condition in a comic-book universe, why keep deploying it? Surely it can’t be for shock value. Jaded fans no longer care about comic-book death, not when DC kills the Martian Manhunter and resurrects Barry Allen in the same crossover. Death in comics doesn’t matter anymore as much because it’s overused as because it’s impermanent. So why not just let death die for a while?

Except for the Sentry. The only possible reason to bring him back is that he’s NOT FUCKING DEAD ENOUGH.

The Sorcerer Supreme is of course tasked with the defense of this reality from all others. But the thing about defense, as any diplomat can tell you, is that there’s multiple ways to do it. A massive display of might is always a good option A, but there will always be those too cocky, too stupid, or too powerful to be dissuaded by your ability to turn armies into a pile of barely-sentient suet named Wuggles.

Option B is diplomacy, and as in our level of understanding, it is often very convenient and simple: being on polite terms with powerful sorcerers of other dimensions is, by and large, quite worthwhile. Firstly, it means that you can worry much, much less about them being hostile to Earth’s reality, which in and of itself is pretty awesome. Secondly, it means that every so often you can deal with them for help, which comes in handy – well, not that often, really, because rulers of other dimensions tend to inflate the value of their services more than you would think and usually it’s just a better deal to go with the really powerful grantors of power, but sometimes it can be downright useful, and better to have the option than not.

However, the opportunity cost of the diplomatic approach is often… irritating. For example, the Sorcerer Supreme is, like it or not, considered a “get” for organizers of social events in other dimensions. (Even when the other dimension’s powerful person offering the invite outclasses Doc. It’s like having a party and, say, the President of Hungary shows up – you look good even if your country makes Hungary look like a 98 pound weakling.) And you can’t turn down all the invitations. You can turn down the smaller ones, of course, and they won’t feel bad – even if you just send a polite note (or polite etched memory crystal, or polite scent-of-regret-on-jasmine-airbursts), simply that will make your prospective host feel better.

But some of them are too important to turn down. So when the Malagascor of Fijw requests your presence at the liferment ceremony of his firstling, you pretty much have to go – because, sure, Dr. Strange can probably take down the Malagascor of Fijw in a straight-up spell-sling, but why would you want to have a fight to the death when you can just go to a party instead?

But of course it’s never that simple. Because

– the Undying King of Pallia and the High Ku Of Ku both find Stephen and demand he intercede on their respective behalves in the interdimensional war they’re currently fighting, both convinced that he’s promised to do so

– the party from Asgard insist that Dr. Strange, as an honorable champion of Earth, have them as his personal retinue, which is problematic considering they’re mostly half-drunk berserkers (except for that one valkyrie who looks oddly familiar…)

– Regena, daughter of Gjo, wants to discuss arrangements for an upcoming wedding that Stephen is quite certain he didn’t agree to (but she is quite certain he proposed, and in most gentlemanly extravagance!)

– he has to make sure that he and Umar are never in the same room – not because he fears her (although of course he does because he’s not an idiot), but because he’s put quite a bit of work into making sure that the Dark Dimension’s intelligence network thinks he’s still on Earth (and who the hell invited Umar to this thing anyway?)

– a Kronn chronolord demands retribution for the horrible insult Strange will cause him in twenty-five minutes’ time, although the exact nature of that insult is a mystery to all concerned

– and of course, the Malagascor had ulterior motive for inviting Stephen in the first place…

So I been thinking that it’s time I stopped working at the pet store because seriously, the pet store sucks. You’re over by the doggy bins and you’re marking down the puppies because they’re a month old now and they just look at you like “if you drop my price by another two hundred dollars can I have a family pleeeeeeease?” And then you look over at this one basset hound who’s not even a puppy anymore and you’ve marked him down four times now so he’s only five hundred dollars and he’s just given up on everything, he just lies in the corner waiting for the end he knows is coming.

Also, the pay sucks. They could at least pay me thirteen dollars an hour to take care of the depressed dogs, and also the depressed cats and the depressed parrot and the lizards, who are probably not depressed but are kind of stupid.

So it’s time for a new job! And I have decided that I am going to be a published author! Now I know what you are thinking, you are thinking “but Flapjacks you have never ever written anything except awesome blog entries which totally steal the show from MGK, how will you become the next Stephen King? Will it involve murder?” No! Of course it will not involve murder. Murder doesn’t get you published. Unless you kill somebody really really famous and important and then get a successful insanity defense and then thirty years later all is forgiven and you write a memoir. Or if you are O.J. Simpson. But regardless neither of these options appeals to me, so murder is right out.

No, I will become a famous published author on the virtue of my prose. My book is tentatively titled The Civil War Never Happened. (I need a better title. Maybe The Lie Between The States. Or something catchy. One of you come up with something! I am too busy becoming a published author to think of a title!) It is about how the Civil War never actually happened, and all that stuff you hear about the Civil War is just a toxic smokescreen invented by liberals to make real patriotic Americans feel bad about loving their country.

Consider!

– Civil War theorists claim that the Civil War happened between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. But this eminently makes no sense. For starters, in the beginning, there was just a United States of America… and nowadays, there is just a United States of America. Do these Civil War theorists seriously claim that a whole other country just showed up one day, and then ever so conveniently went away? Don’t you think that’s just a little suspicious? Who do these liberals think they’re kidding?

– Civil War theorists claim that the Civil War happened because of slavery. But if it happened because of slavery, then where did all the slaves go? Kind of handy for them to just stop being slaves, all at once! That’s like, supposedly, a million people or so! Who all decided to quit their job! Can you imagine what that would do to the economy today if everybody who worked at Taco Bell (which, I have it on good authority, is just like slavery) just up and quit? It would be chaos! And yet, the Civil War theorists would have you believe that these ex-slaves just all went and got new jobs and the U.S. economy was fine and dandy. Uh-huh.

– Civil War theorists would have you believe that there is ample evidence that slavery happened. However, this is all based on a misconception. See, one of the great extinct species of North America, like the dodo and the passenger pigeon, is the polled slaverford (pronounced “SLAV-eh-ford”), a curiously thin-necked breed of cattle. Modern-day “historians” have mistaken records of the great slaverford drives of the south for ownership of people, and tarred honest Southern cattle barons with crimes against humanity which they did not even commit! They pull forth slaverford chains, which were used to drive herds of the cattle across the Southern prairies, and mistakenly assume that they are intended for use on humans. You could almost pity these poor liberal academics who have never been out in the real world, and therefore do not know that the polled slaverford was hunted to death by Irish immigrants in the early 20th century, and that mention of the slaverford in history books was excised by President Kennedy in order to protect his ancestors’ honour.

– Liberal imagineers claim that the Stars and Bars is a “Confederate” battle flag, but in fact there is ample evidence which you can read about in my book which makes it clear that the Stars and Bars was a reward given to the thirteen most patriotic-est states of the Union by Abraham Lincoln himself!

– Civil War believers claim that the Civil War cost the lives of over 200,000 men. However, what they fail to account for is that during the supposed dates of the Civil War, there were no less than three smallpox epidemics as well as a cholera pandemic, dengue, tuberculosis, dropsy, okie-pokie-smokie, and the dreaded “Iowa flu.” It didn’t take a war to kill all those men: they just all got sick and died in a perfect storm of bacteria! Those bodies with bullets in them? Brave American soldiers, both wearing the Blue of the Army and the original Gray of the Marine Corps Auxiliary Marching Band (people really liked their marches in the 19th century), who committed suicide rather than take up valuable doctoring resources, making the ultimate patriotic sacrifice for Mom and apple pie.

– Why the Lie? (Oooh, maybe that should be the sub-title.) Why perpetuate the lie that is the Civil War? Clearly, it is the work of liberal academics out of touch with Real America, who are in cahoots with big business interests like Big Costume, Big Fake Historical Rifles, Big Camping Supplies and Big Bugle. Seriously, did you really, really think there was a place called “Appamattox” before 1943? World War II was the excuse this dreadful conspiracy needed to rewrite American history! While brave young soldiers were off fighting Hitler and… uh… the Japanese leader guy, the imagineers were going around inventing a new history so that when they got home, they’d feel guilty about being Southern, because liberals hate hush puppies and bluegrass music! And then they would have the gall to profit off them! Doesn’t that make you mad as all heck?

So anyways, that’s my book, and even as I finish up this blog post I have already gotten four offers to publish the book before I even hit “publish” in WordPress, so I’m totally sure this is going to work out just fine, guys oh my god I’m gonna make so much money. Do they make swimming pools for money like they do in Uncle Scrooge comics? I bet those are awesome in real life.

If I were Barack Obama, and I wanted to convince 73-year-old Anthony Kennedy that, were he to step down, his replacement would be someone similarly moderate in judicial style – well, Obama’s Supreme Court picks make a lot more sense in that regard, don’t they?

Granted, it’s probably a moot point until Obama’s possible second term (Kennedy will be 77 by the end of it). But if I wanted to convince the Supreme Court’s “swing vote” to retire, that is how I would do it.

So Barack Obama has gone and nominated Elena Kagan as his next Supreme Court pick, which should surprise absolutely nobody; she was always going the frontrunner for the job once she got some experience in a major government position under her belt first, which was why Sotomayor got nominated last year instead of Kagan – the latter was still being seasoned. (Here, I’ll go one better: when Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires next year, it’ll be probably be Merrick Garland or Sidney Thomas replacing her. I’d prefer to see Pamela Karlan, Harold Koh or Leah Ward Sears – I would have preferred any of those over Kagan, frankly – but Obama is who he is.)

As for Kagan, the lefties proclaiming her “Obama’s Harriet Miers”1 are all on crack. Miers was an undistinguished family lawyer. Kagan is a former Harvard Law School dean. There’s kind of a difference. You can complain, perhaps, that Kagan hasn’t written a lot of articles, but so what? She’s clearly intelligent and frankly people arguing that she’s a stealth conservative are on even crackier crack than the “Obama’s Miers” crowd because people who are stealth conservatives don’t spend their lives working in liberal law schools and for Democratic presidents.

In short: she’ll be fine. Not a daring or exciting pick, but a solid one.

1. And why is everything in this administration “Obama’s X,” where X is something that happened to Bush? Bush was a disaster, Obama isn’t. NOT THE SAME THING. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Darren Kramble writes to ask:

As a Canadian ex-pat, I know that the Tories currently have a minority government, but I have no idea how that is going. Anyway, I live in the UK, and the country seems to be freaking out at our hung parliament, as if it is the end of the political world. I’m fairly happy with it, as Labour is now out, as they inevitably would be, but the Tories don’t have a majority that would allow the more batshit crazy things they might want to try. So, any advice to the UK? How is having a minority government working?

Short version: not very well.

Longer version: In the past, Canada’s had very productive minority governments. Lester B. Pearson, for example, gave us major policy changes with a minority government, which included universal healthcare, armed forces unification, and our new flag. There’s nothing in a minority government that inherently says that they have to be unproductive or bad.

However, our recent minority governments, while certainly not outright disastrous, is less than satisfactory. There’s a few reasons for this, some of which are specific to Canada and some of which I’m pretty sure are universal.

What’s specific to Canada is that here, our parties have become regionalized to a certain extent – the Liberals in the eastern half and more urban areas of the country, the Tories in the western half and more rural areas, the NDP competing mostly with the Liberals for space. There’s less incentive to cooperate because excacerbating cross-party and therefore regional tension is, frankly, better for your electoral prospects. (In a UK context, this seems like it could potentially be an issue, given that Labour and the Tories have their regional strongholds to an extent.)

What’s not specific to Canada is this: in a minority government, somebody has to take power. This seems like it’s not an issue, but it is because the minority government, Parliamentary power or not, is in charge and therefore can determine when an election takes place, either by calling one or by putting forth a bill which gets defeated.

This seems like a precarious position, but in practice it isn’t, because in Canada the Tories have figured out something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections. Which isn’t surprising, because elections tend to be vast resevoirs of bullshit expunged forth combined with general nastiness and pettiness, made even less pleasant thanks to the omnipresence of mass media. (This is my general theory as to why electoral participation has steadily trended downward in most democracies over time.)

So if voters don’t like elections, what do they want? As few elections as possible. But what do minority governments generally guarantee? An election sooner rather than later. So whenever the minority threatens to bring down the government over an issue, you get the endless caterwauling about “endless elections” from both the citizenry and the media willing to complain about it (and they are more than willing, believe me). Which in turn means that the minority is generally blamed for the extra elections which come with minority governments, even when that doesn’t actually make sense given the track record. (Note that the 2006 and 2008 federal elections were both called by the party in power trying to seize electoral advantage; the former failed for the Liberals, the latter succeeded for the Conservatives.)

So there’s essentially a built-in political downside to forcing an election if you’re in the minority. What happens? Well, in Canada we mostly have feckless dipshits for political leaders (really – David Cameron looks good in comparison), so their natural political cowardice combines with the disincentive to call a federal election and thus you have a minority government more or less governing as a majority government, which just pisses off and disenfranchises everybody who didn’t vote for them. (Which, in Canada, right now means more than 60 percent of the country.) This just perpetuates the vicious cycle: voters are disillusioned by their lack of control over political process, so they don’t vote, which results in them having even less control, and so on and so forth.

In short: first-past-the-post systems are terrible for minority governments. A proportional system like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems want is much better for producing responsive minority governments because they basically require cross-party cooperation to work in the first place; that’s what you want.

Times like this, it feels like my childhood is just going away forever.