For reasons I do not fully ken, these two Eighties gems popped into my head this morning. I am a sucker for a weirdo bass line.
Useless facts: one guy was in both bands. Can you name him?
I interviewed XTC a million times. They are great guys.
A spark neglected makes a mighty fire.
Robert Herrick, an American writer and essayist, said that. He was an interesting fellow – a novelist, a poet, a Harvard grad, a professor at MIT. Coincidentally, Herrick was also the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands for a time. He was appointed to the position, but he likely knew something about politics just the same.
What would Robert Herrick think, then, about the confluence of the Fort McMurray fire and politics? What would he say was the spark that led to the fire that consumed Fort McMurray?
No one knows, of course, and nor does anyone know what caused the fire, either. But that hasn’t stopped too many people – on both sides of the ideological divide – from assigning blame. From pointing fingers, and recklessly accusing others.
It’s happened on the ideological Left and on the Right.
Early on, former NDP candidate Tom Moffatt posted this on Twitter: “Karmic #climatechange fire burns CDN oilsands city.” He even added “FeelTheBern” as a hashtag. What made Moffatt’s idiocy even more appalling was this: he is an Albertan. He should know better, frankly.
There were others. “Burn, tar sands, burn!” wrote Edouard Dugas, in Quebec. Dugas describes himself as a separatist and a capitalist. He later allowed that he wanted the “tar sands” to burn – not the actual people who work there.
Another one, on Facebook: “I hope everyone gets the irony of a massive fire in the heart of big oil country.” That came from Jim Ray in Guelph, who described himself as an “on-shore Volunteer at Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.” Also on Facebook, Carolyn Jean Bernard, out in Cape Breton, who wrote that it was “karma” for “those satanic oil frields.” She later deleted her comments and apologized.
American news and opinion web site Slate, no less, tweeted this: “Wildfire is devastating a Canadian city, now. This is climate change.”
And then, of course, there were the comments of Green Party leader Elizabeth May herself. On Wednesday, May was asked by reporters if the fire was linked to global warming. “Of course,” she said. “It’s due to global emissions.”
Of course. When a hellfire of criticism started to (appropriately) rain down on her, May hurriedly reversed herself. She claimed she hadn’t been attempting to link the Fort McMurray wildfire to climate change – although everyone knew that is precisely what she had done. “No credible climate scientist would make this claim, and neither do I make this claim,” May said, in a written statement, in that way avoiding being laughed at to her face.
The Left weren’t alone in their rank stupidity, however. Some on the Right side of the spectrum were just as stupid.
Their targets, for the most part, were Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. Trudeau and Notley’s sin: one was a Liberal, the other a New Democrat. Ipso facto, Trudeau and Notley were the arsonists.
To its credit, the conservative web site The Rebel had decided to raise money for the victims of the Fort McMurray. Unfortunately, the rebels also declared that Notley has “money for everything else, for everyone else – but not for firefighters.” Trudeau, meanwhile, was apparently no better: Syrian refugees, the rebels sniffed, are “a higher Liberal priority than Fort McMurray.”
One commenter on the far-Right Small Dead Animals blog therefore wrote that, after the fire, “the Fort McMurray Somali murderers and drug dealers will get a chance to repopulate around the country for awhile.” He went on: “if Fort McMurray was a Lebanese/Syrian port city [Trudeau’s Liberals] would have sent a warship at no cost to the foreign ‘victims’.”
Over on Twitter, biochemistry student Sean Krys expressed support for Fort McMurray, then added that “Notley is a bitch.” There was a lot more of that, and worse.
Whenever something terrible happens, of course, there will always be those who will plumb for votes in the depths of someone else’s misery. Fort McMurray – via the echo chamber of social media – is simply the latest manifestation of that illness.
What to say, then? To me, the most appropriate response came from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Asked about Elizabeth May’s appalling statement, Trudeau was clear.
“There have always been fires. There have always been floods. Pointing at any one incident and saying: ‘This is because of that,’ is neither helpful, nor entirely accurate. We need to separate a pattern over time from any one event. What we are focused on right now on is giving the people of Fort McMurray and the rest of Alberta the kind of support that they need right now and in the months and indeed the years to come.”
See? That’s how a Prime Minister speaks. It’s how any decent person would speak, in fact.
This May, things are hot enough as it is. We don’t need more fires set, rhetorical or otherwise.
It’s true. He told me. The Guns’n’Roses and ‘Mats bassist was at the Bovine on Saturday night and gave a shout-out to SFH and the Nasties. So sayeth Cam Carpenter. And these dudes.
Want proof? Here’s me and Tommy in 2010 at one of our shows, Andrew Coyne: he sold Nasties merch!
And that’s why Justin Trudeau has rightly said he won’t be heading out to Fort Mac just yet.
In my own (personal) experience, politicians need to be very, very careful about disaster-related decision-making. Don’t listen to Central Canadian backroom advisors looking for a photo op. Case in point.
That’s why I think this was the tweet of the day, in response to something I said, not as well. You can’t (i) whinge about Prime Minister Selfie, Tories and Dips, and then (ii) simultaneously complain when he won’t head out to Alberta for a photo op. You can’t suck and blow at the same time, you know?
@kinsellawarren the people who hate his photo-ops want him to do one
— RobJ (@vinefan99) May 9, 2016
Front page of yesterday’s Times.
I am a devoted reader of the New York Times. It was via the Times, in fact, that I first learned of the Carville-Clinton war room in 1992, contacted them, and basically copied their concept in Canada. It is the best English-language newspaper in the world, and it is the only newspaper we subscribe to anymore.
Their coverage of The Beast – the fire that has ravaged Fort McMurray and beyond – has surprised me, a bit. On the one hand, they have accorded it prominent, daily coverage, as seen above. Good.
On the other hand, however, they (like Slate) have published some extraordinarily ignorant things about what they themselves, just this morning, rightly called the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history. Like this. People were lured there by “a fat paycheque?” Really, guys? The ones now sleeping on the floor of an arena, and who only escaped with the clothes on their backs? Pretty classless, Times folks. Not good.
Anyway. I’m like most Canadians, in recent days: Fort McMurray has left me acutely aware, and wondering, what people outside of Canada think about it all, and if they in fact care. (It also perhaps explains why I, and many others, want to see the NBA and Dwyane Wade censured for the disrespect they’ve shown towards Canada. We’re a bit touchy, these days.)
So, while we are appreciative that the Times is giving the story the attention it deserves – and while it is amazing that the likes of CNN are assisting in the rebuild, as seen here – a bit more sensitivity towards the nearly 90,000 victims of the fire would also be welcome, please and thanks.
(That’s the subject of this week’s Hill Times column, too, which I will post here tomorrow.)
.@NBA @MiamiHEAT: The Abdul-Rauf precedent is clear. Suspend Wade. #Canada @Raptors https://t.co/twgT8I1k7i https://t.co/dMVm2he6bS
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) May 8, 2016
Disgusting, despicable, detestable: none of those words adequately captures what Conservative MPs did this week.
Forget about the fact that the anthem needed to be changed. Forget about the fact that their former leader, Stephen Harper, proposed changing the words in his 2010 Throne Speech. Forget about all that.
To do what they did to Mauril Belanger, who is dying, is just…sick. It is beyond words.
They will profoundly regret this.
The press release that went out last night. Share widely, please.
For the Liberal Prime Minister, it was quite a week. It was like there were two Justin Trudeaus – one, a serious Prime Ministerial leader type, and one who was entirely the opposite.
He does both, almost simultaneously, and he pulls it off. Or does he? Vote now, vote often! And add your comments, too, below.
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