God, gays and Scheer

— 11.01.2019 03:16 PM

I wrote this some time ago – you know, during that period when I was secretly running the CPC campaign.

(More seriously, I was reminded of the below column by this report – although, I must say, some Conservatives are clearly using LGBTQ issues to take out Scheer, when they’ve never before shown much concern before for LGBTQ issues.)

The bar isn’t much to look at. 

It’s on the tougher side of downtown, in a place where you cross the street when you see a couple guys coming your way. 

There’s a big marquee out front, announcing its name, and a pair of weathered wooden doors that are open to all, but not all dare step inside. 

No liquor licence. Envelopes stuffed with bills, handed over to the cops, are all that keep it open. 

Whenever there’s a raid, the bar’s owners will sometimes get tipped off. Not always, but sometimes. The raids happen, ostensibly, because people gather there – people who dare not speak their name out loud. 

Their sin? Dancing. The city doesn’t want them to dance together. 

In the early morning hours of June 28, the cops raid the place again. There are uniformed officers outside, and some plainclothes officers inside, posing as patrons. 

The cops go after one of the women in the bar, a regular. They push her and strike her. She gets mad and pushes back. They assault her some more. 

A crowd has gathered out on the sidewalk, watching what the cops are doing to the woman. A cop brings his baton down on her head and she starts to bleed, a lot. 

She’s mad, but not just at the cops, who are punching and kicking the bar’s patrons. As she’s being pushed into the back of a police van, the woman yells at the crowd: “Why don’t you guys do something?”

And they do. Just like that, just like a light being switched on, they do. Remembering, perhaps, all the years of bullying and beatings and actual murders, they erupt. They hit back. 

By the end, they’ve trapped the cops inside the bar. And, later on, it’ll take dozens more cops to rescue them. 

The bar isn’t in your town, but it could be. The raid, or something like it, doesn’t really happen in your town anymore – but it used to. 

And the kind of people who would go there? They’re found in your town. Lots of them. 

The bar really existed. Stonewall’s, in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Anyone could go there to dance and have a drink, but only one of kind person generally did so. 

Homosexuals. Gays, lesbians. The ones who – in those days, and in these days, too – weren’t allowed to dance together. Or come together. Or even, you know, be. 

The ones who would be denied jobs, or hotel rooms, because of the way they were. The ones who would be often beaten and sometimes killed for being who they were. 

Their uprising that June night – that’s what that lesbian who the cops were beating called it, an uprising and not a riot – would later bear the name of the bar: Stonewall. Every year, bit by bit, in cities and towns all over, there would be a commemoration of what happened at Stonewall’s bar that night. Remembering. 

In time, the remembrances bore another name. A name that described what they were really about. 

Pride. Pride in being, at long last, in being who they are. Being how God made them. 

Now, I don’t know Andrew Scheer all that well. He’s a family man, he goes to church. If he stayed that way, nobody would really care what he thinks about the various Pride events that happen across Canada every Summer. He’d just be another guy. 

But he’s not just another guy. He’s not a nobody. He’s the leader of the Conservative Party, and he’s running to be Prime Minister. 

When you’re a Prime Minister, you don’t get to pick and choose which Canadians you represent. You represent all of us, or you represent none of us. 

So, I ask Andrew Scheer: are you going to be one of the guys on the sidewalk, watching and not doing anything about what you see? Or, are you going to step forward, and say: “I support you. I will help you. I will protect you. You are no better or no worse than me.”

That’s what the Pride stuff is about, really: equality. Support. Humanity. 

Get off the damn sidewalk, Andrew. 

People are starting to notice. 


Comments (20)

Ms. Hébert on Mr. Trudeau

— 11.01.2019 02:37 PM

I totally disagree with her.

When you lose a million-plus votes, when you are shut out from Winnipeg to Vancouver, and when you lose a sure-thing second majority – and when nobody wants to hear from you, or any politician, for quite some time, thank you very much – laying low is a smart strategy.

I don’t know if they are feeling humbled, but they are looking humbled. As they should.


Comments (11)

Lights out

— 11.01.2019 07:20 AM

No, not me. (You wish.)

The power. The power’s out. Has been for hours.

That image up above is a pretty good representation of the County, this November 1. Power went out around midnight and is still out.

Right now, I’m wearing several layers and trying to boil some water on the woodstove, for tea. The dogs think everything is great. Me, not so much.

Outside, power lines down, trees and branches down, and – symbolically, perhaps – my beautiful Canadian flag pole is down, too. The wind snapped it in two and it smashed down onto my truck.

So, be safe, everyone. Last night was supposedly Hallowe’en, and – around here, at least – we got more trick than treat!


Comments (3)

Huge NME interview with R.E.M.

— 10.31.2019 05:06 PM

Here.

I fell out of love with them after the first four (maybe five) albums. But this interview is so, so good.

Here’s the song that used to make me dance in the dark on Sunnyside, all on my own. Chris thought I was weird.


Comments (3)

Woke, schmoke

— 10.31.2019 03:21 PM

Two things, woke folks.

One, I read this with extreme interest, because in recent days, quite a few folks have “canceled” Yours Truly for, you know, (a) doing opposition research at an opposition research firm (b) opposing racism and anti-Semitism (c) trying to help a marginalized group pro bono.  It’s been something.  And it’s mainly why I turned off Twitter and Facebook.

Two, I fully expect no one will heed Obama’s words, here.  But I will post the New York Time’s report about them, just the same.  Maybe someone will listen.

Maybe.

Former President Barack Obama made a rare foray into the cultural conversation this week, objecting to the prevalence of “call-out culture” and “wokeness” during an interview about youth activism at the Obama Foundation summit on Tuesday.

For more than an hour, Mr. Obama sat onstage with the actress Yara Shahidi and several other young leaders from around the world. The conversation touched on “leadership, grass roots change and the power places have to shape our journeys,” the Obama Foundation said, but it was his remarks about young activists that have ricocheted around the internet, mostly receiving praise from a cohort of bipartisan and intergenerational supporters.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”

“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”

“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”

Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.

“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

 


Comments (11)

No GOTV, no ID = no big V

— 10.31.2019 07:20 AM

This writer started hearing about CPC problems with voter ID and GOTV efforts well before voting day. In a tight race, there is simply no excuse for that.

Akin, naturally, is the first to report on that.

Conservatives who believe that a mere switch in leaders will vanquish the Liberal foe will likely want to face some other realities, the most important one being that the much-vaunted ‘ground game’ that helped propel Conservative electoral machines from 2006 through to 2015 has rusted and is in dire need of an overhaul.

To wit:

In the Greater Toronto Area, local Conservative campaigns had not done their homework by August to identify their committed support while Liberals had, in fact, done just that. Identifying your support is a crucial and critical job of all local campaigns.

Multiple Conservative sources who worked on GTA campaigns say the pre-writ work was simply not up to previous standards. Jenni Byrne, the veteran of Harper-era Conservative election war rooms, is on the record saying the ’supporter’ lists in the GTA had the kind of numbers on it that the party had in its first election in 2004. That meant that the 2019 version of the Conservative party gave its opponent a significant head-start in this crucial battleground.

There was a significant mid-campaign malfunction of the software that manages the national Conservative voter identification database. The Constituent Information Management System or CIMS (pronounced ‘sims’) has been a key part of Conservative campaigns for more than a decade. But in this election, data collected at the doorstep by Conservative campaigners using a mobile “CIMS-to-Go” app went missing in transmission from the doorstep to the servers at national HQ. As a result, the door-to-door work of thousands of volunteers was not being captured and used properly by the central campaign. For the local campaigns, that also meant they had to re-do many canvasses and thus wasted precious time and resources during a writ period.

At some point in the campaign, local campaigns were asking the CIMS database at HQ for lists of what Conservatives call “likely accessible voters” — the key group of persuadable voters any campaign wants to focus on. But it quickly became apparent to many campaigns in the GTA that what local campaigns received from headquarters in Ottawa was not lists with thousands of names of “likely accessible voters,” but was, in fact, lists of avowed Liberal or New Democrat supporters. So at some point, Conservative campaigners were either wasting their time, or worse, were actually pulling the vote for their opponents. CIMS had to be shut down or curtailed as a result, leaving local campaigns with a huge data blind spot that would prove to be fatal for some campaigns.


Comments (7)