Hear about free speech? A man tried it. Found there wasn’t any.
As Liberal MLA Kevin Krueger discovered, there’s just speech that the conventions of the time allow. The cultural police – egged on by the correct and led by the media, billy-clubs flailing – pummelled Krueger with merciless joy for saying what he really thinks. They’d warmed up on his former Liberal colleague, John van Dongen, who also spoke his mind. “Rants,” the media opined.
Like all the purse-lipped patrollers of the allowed and the disallowed through the ages, the media once again gave our hypocrisy a brisk canter around the track. We’re the same toilers for truth who demand straight answers from politicians and sneer and seethe when they reply to a tough six-word query with 736 words of obfuscation, none of which addresses the question. God help them if they speak frankly.
Of course they duck and dodge. Evasion is the most sincere form of fear. A politician’s career can be doomed by a few careless words – a sexual slur, an “ethnic” joke, even by mild snootiness: In the 2002 Vancouver mayoral election Jennifer Clarke, a smart lady and good councillor, fatally described her Point Grey audience as “the crème de la crème,” violating democracy’s sacred and unattainable myth of equality.
New Democrat Glen Clark’s phrase “wriggle room” survives long after he left the hot seat of the premier’s chair for the comfy leather one in Jimmy Pattison’s executive office.
The optometrists don’t make glasses strong enough to cure the weak historical eyesight of most people of this supposedly enlightened age who can’t see that today’s society is no more tolerant of outliers than the Victorian. Only the definition of the tolerable and the targetable has changed. The real alteration has been in the British Columbia language. (Elsewhere too, maybe, but I don’t travel.) The red meat of muscular, blunt vocabulary smelling of woods and sea has become the linguistic vegetarianism of persons who use lettuce-leaf terms like “unacceptable” and “at this point in time.” I blame Vancouver’s New Cosmopolitanism, the pollution by Toronto and international sophisticates, sippers of perfectly chilled white wines.
I admire stintingly what I call the Three Wise Men – host Bill Good, Vaughn Palmer and Keith Baldrey – of CKNW’s “Cutting Edge of the Leg(islature),” as superbly informative as it is subtextually comic. These gatekeepers who separate rants from reason, the permissible from the impermissible, amusingly don’t have a pinch of coon droppings’ disagreement among themselves. The show’s perennial mantra is: “I agree with …” The politesse incroyable, the clubbiness professional, the bonhomie impeccable: It’s like eavesdropping on High Tea at Buck Palace.
Predictably, they pounced on Krueger, who was listening to the show, unexpectedly phoned in, and didn’t back up an imperial inch, pugnaciously repeating his takes: Conservative leader John Cummins (“ridiculous”), New Democratic premier-in-waiting Adrian Dix (“a liar”), ex-colleague van Dongen (former party whip “trying to organize a mutiny … a blatant conflict of interest”) and the legislature media (“lazy”). When he hung up, he was gaily mocked all over again.
Of course, under such Queensberry Rules of political discourse, Adrian Dix, a consummate actor who impersonates a kind of socialist Boy Scout, can fox the media without raising a sweat. •
