This week’s column: on the CBC, cultural appropriation and my friend Steve

— 05.22.2017 11:32 AM

“All novelists are liars.”

Thieves, too. So said Mordecai Richler.

We were in the dark at the back at the Bovine Sex Club on Queen West, my friend and I were, waiting to see the Chicago punk band, Off With Their Heads. My friend had just told me the story of how, years ago, he organized a debate at the University of Toronto between Richler and a brilliant feminist academic. The topic: “cultural appropriation.”

Richler had insisted that the brilliant feminist academic go first. He even suggested she get more time than him.

The assembled students were all on her side, my friend said. When she finally finished, Richler – perhaps the greatest novelist and writer this country has ever produced – all but shrugged.

Cultural appropriation, he said, wasn’t just defensible. It was, he said, absolutely necessary. To write great stories, Richler said, writers must adapt and adopt cultures – the language and the idiom and the symbols and the stories and the words – that are not theirs.

In this way, Richler said, all the best novelists are thieves. “They are liars,” he said.

The U of T students erupted in wild applause, said my friend, himself a former National Post columnist with a liberal and Liberal pedigree. Richler then walked out to a near-ovation, off to go drinking with one of the Rabinovitches in a suite at the Four Seasons.

My friend was relating the Richler tale on the very afternoon another friend, Steve Ladurantaye, had been in the news because of cultural appropriation. His employers, the CBC, had removed him as managing editor of The National.

His sin: to joke, in a tweet of a half-dozen words, that he would make a donation to a fictional “cultural appropriation prize” that other prominent Canadian journalists had conjured up. Steve’s tweet had been in jest, but the response was anything but laughable. Almost immediately, a tsunami of rage descended on the writers, prompting deletions, apologies, retractions, demotions and resignations across the Canadian media demi-monde.

Steve – who, inter alia, signed up plenty of minority and indigenous writers for the CBC’s new opinion space – was out.

Now, columnists aren’t supposed to write about things in which they are personally involved, but after kicking off this column with the Mordecai Richler story – one about culture, one that I plainly appropriated – what the Hell. Five points.

One, Ladurantaye is a close friend. We are even in a geriatric punk band together, and we are going into the studio this week. Not a few of our songs attack racists and bigots. One is even called Donald Trump Is An Asshole. Not exactly the cultural output of a racist, that song.

Two, as a lawyer and a consultant, I’ve worked under four different Prime Ministers on First Nations files in six different provinces. My firm has represented dozens of First Nations, from the Yukon to Ontario. The work I’ve done, however varied, is always about just one thing: theft. Theft of First Nations land. Theft of their way of life. Theft of their economic independence. Theft of their sovereignty. W. P. Kinsella’s banal little novels – no relation, I assure you – never once came up in all that time.

Three, I’ve got a novel of my own coming out in the Fall, with Dundurn. It’s called X: Recipe for Hate. It’s about teenagers and racism and punk rock. One of the main characters is a young Miqmaq woman, conjured up entirely by my imagination. In the book, which I hope will horrify some, I unreservedly appropriate things about her indigenous culture. Should I have sought someone’s permission to do that? Or should I have not even written about her? Those are rhetorical questions, believe me.

Four, I am father to a beautiful and sweet and perfect indigenous daughter, a proud citizen of the Carcross Tagish First Nation. She knows Steve and adores Steve, just like the rest of us do. Sitting at our kitchen table, under two (2) Kwakiutl totem poles, my daughter has never had any problem with Steve. He would not have been sitting at our table if she had. She, like me, thinks he is a good and decent and tolerant man.

Fifth and final – and this one deeply pisses me off. The “cultural appropriation prize” – which, make no mistake, was stupid and insensitive and condescending – resulted in literally thousands of news stories, from coast to coast. More than 40,000, according to the oracle of Google. 

Meanwhile, outside the velvet confines of the Annex and CBC HQ, me and my wife and a few others have been labouring to persuade Canada Post to stop delivering an actual NEO-NAZI NEWSPAPER to Toronto-area mailboxes, and to shut it down. The hate rag, called Your Ward News, regularly features tributes to Adolf Hitler, promotes Holocaust denial, calls blacks “niggers,” and defames every minority on Earth.

But do you think that we can get just one (1) of the presently-offended multitude to help us oppose it? Do you think we can get one (1) of them to write an op-ed or a letter to the editor, opposing the delivery of neo-Naziism to peoples’ doors? Do you think we could get just one (1) of them to consider, just for a moment, that the promotion of actual National Socialism and anti-Semitism and race hate merits their attention?

Not on your life. In the Deepest Annex, or down in the conference rooms at the CBC, cultural appropriation is more important than, you know, any of that stuff. Holocaust denial? Naziism? Real racism? To them, those things aren’t as important.

Mordecai Richler, wherever he is, is laughing his ass off.


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“If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

— 05.22.2017 11:24 AM

Good question, “President.”


Oh, and this:

President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn won’t provide records to the Senate intelligence committee and will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to a subpoena from the committee, according to a source close to Flynn.

Flynn’s refusal to cooperate comes as he faces scrutiny in several inquiries, including on Capitol Hill and a federal grand jury that has issued subpoenas to associates of the ex-national security adviser.
Flynn’s refusal to cooperate will also intensify scrutiny over Trump’s decision to hire him initially for the job and his decision to keep him on staff for 18 days after the President was warned by former acting Attorney General Sally Yates that Flynn may have been compromised by the Russians.

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Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ

— 05.21.2017 02:16 PM


As my kids will tell you, I actually believe he is. I’m a Catholic, and I believe in God and the Devil and all that. I therefore also believe there is an anti-Christ and, based on the available evidence, his name is Donald Trump. He is the Beast. 

Want proof? Okay. Forget about his attacks on the Pope. Forget about his shredding of the Commandments (all of them, I bet). Forget about all that. 

Take a look at the Book of Revelation, where the Unpresident is anticipated with impressive portentousness. Take a look at this, too: “The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” That’s from Thessalonians, folks. It practically reads like Trump’s C.V. 

Frank Bruno, the New York Times columnist who I aspire to be but will never be, has this to say today about Agent Orange’s world religions tour, here:

His own relationship with the Almighty has not always taken obvious or typical forms. Although he was brought up Presbyterian, the Manhattan church that he attended, Marble Collegiate, was best known for its celebrity preacher, Norman Vincent Peale, who marketed and monetized the power of positive thinking.

“Attitudes are more important than facts,” Peale asserted. Little Donald listened well.

And Big Donald went on to treat the Commandments as if they weren’t etched in stone but doodled in disappearing ink. He stiffed creditors, made a mockery of the truth and publicly boasted about his promiscuity. He never talked all that much about religion, not until the campaign. Even then the results were interesting.

He referred to the sacraments as if they were pets: “my little wine,” “my little cracker.” Instead of citing “Second Corinthians,” he said, “Two Corinthians,” so that Corinthians sounded like a matched set.
Questioned about the circumstances in which he might gaze heavenward for expiation, he said he didn’t “bring God into that picture.”

But my favorite of his spiritual musings came when he was asked, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, “Who is God to you?”

“God is the ultimate,” he answered. “Nobody, no thing, there’s nothing like God.”

The angels wept.

Hallelujah. 

Why did “Evangelical Christians” vote for him in such numbers, you ask? Because they love jerks like ComradeTrump, that’s why. Serial thieves/perverts/fraudsters like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell were just warm-up acts for the presidential anti-Christ. The Evangekicals adored them, too. 

Anyhow. Donald Trump is indeed the anti-Christ. Trust me on this.  And, apropos the times, “the mark of the Beast” isn’t 666. It’s this. 

Know him by it. 


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Donald Trump, pouring gas on himself and lighting a match. Again.

— 05.18.2017 12:53 PM

Again. And again and again and again.



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