Friday 24 December 2010

Jesus would approve

Yesterday - two days before Christmas - as I went around to a couple of stores food-shopping, I couldn't help but notice how desperately unhappy everybody looked.

At Safeway, for example, the parking lot was absolutely chokker, so you had to go around & around waiting for someone to leave. Inside: relentless fluorescence; aisles of way-too-much and-way-too-many-choices; high prices on everything; masses of "Xmasy" stuff - all the extra decos and elements one is supposed to have to make the family Christmas dinner the Dinner of All Dinners. Masses of people pushing carts, trying to get down an aisle and all looking so stressed and pressed and miserable.

But everyone was pushing away.

Pushing through traffic. Pushing to get a parking spot. Pushing around the carts. Standing in long lineups to pay and finally get out of there. All the while, "I'll Be Home For Christmas" is grinding away in the background sound track.

Lugging stuff to the car. More pushing in traffic to get to the next place, and the next.  Need this, need that, gotta have it all. Christmas has to be perfect or........

You read articles during December on "how to manage stress at Christmas" - TV shows on ways to pace yourself so you can "get through it." Lots of serious talk about how awful Christmas is for many people,  how to manage your budget around gifting, and how to navigate the family dynamics, oy. So much stress around this holiday of "love."


People were putting so much energy into getting all this stuff done and so much money into it. Millions of people worldwide pushing and shopping to create this one-day event. The day when all your love is on the line with everyone you care about - plus gifting the postman, your hair stylist, the kids' teachers, the cleaning lady, your building manager.

No pressure there........

As I saw all these grim-faced people, so determined, and pushing themselves to get through their To Do list and for the best of intentions ... I thought, wow, if only the money spent on "Xmas" and the collective energy that goes into trying to create that perfect day for individual families could be re-directed towards world peace, what a different world this would be.

It would indeed be Good News, a joy to the world, and I'm sure Jesus would approve.

Monday 6 December 2010

Carole, we never knew ye

Can't say I saw the Carole James resignation coming. 

But now that she's done it, I'm not totally surprised.  I think we're seeing a woman of principle in action. This is her pulling the pound-of-flesh number and saving the baby.

I've been intrigued for a long time about how opinions are formed -- and widely held -- about leaders like Carole James, how they're held resolutely by people who have never met her and often haven't seen more than a 30 second clip or two. But they know they don’t like her. Hmn………

Joe Clark suffered under the same phenomenon. He was basically rejected nationwide as being a geek (in a time when being a geek was definitely not cool) because he lost his luggage on an international trip. 

The negative branding of Joe-Who? was so well done that even though the airlines lost the luggage and everyone knows that, Joe took the fall. 

In the campaign and for years afterwards, he was unable to recover from the media branding of him as a goof.  Then, years later (after he'd stitched the PC Party back together and especially after he  had served a term or two as Minister of Foreign Affairs--and represented us so credibly abroad) people began to see his merits and murmured nationally that maybe he would have made a good prime minister. As I recall that was around year six of the Reign of Ol' Jawbone.

Stéphane Dion is another recent example of how absolutely impossible it is to undo initial negative branding. He simply wasn't able to counter that initial K.O. punch no matter what he did. He could have walked on the surface of the  Rideau Canal in July and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Similarly, I can see Carole James being appointed to head up this or that public inquiry or commission and people over time coming to see that, wow, she was a woman of substance--how come we didn't see that in 2010? (By then, the media will be able to give her some good press because she won’t be a threat anymore.)

So how does this happen? How does a good person, perhaps even a really good leader, just never get the chance? 

Is it some kind of media bullying?  

I saw her recently talking with Vaughn Palmer and he seemed to think she was okay, so we can't blame him. Michael Smythe? The Sun or Province? CKNW? CBC?

What I fear is that it's none of the above, but rather the untrained, ill-informed quasi-pundits who are looking for glam & telegenics in our leaders, not substance.

That makes me wonder about how much power leader any leader has a political party.

The NDP, like all the parties, has committees and riding associations that feed ideas into vehicles like policy conventions - big huge affairs where people spend a weekend wrangling over policy. And voting it in or out. So how much policy can a leader actually set on their own then? 

I was really shocked at the news that the BC Federation of Labour paid of $72,000 of Moe Sihota's salary as president of the Party. I love listening to Moe take on Erin Chutter on the CBC Radio's Early Edition’s political panel every week, so this was disappointing news to learn about Moe too. Naturally, I don't know all the circumstances around that whole deal, but I’m unable to conjure up any instance in which that situation would not feel very, very icky. Did Carole countenance that?

Was Carole James just one vote on that BC Council that said yes to the BC Fed fund-infusion to Sihota -- or does the leader carry more than one vote on the Council? 

Because if the Council can overrule the leader or the leader is just one vote in many -- then why do we fuss so much about who is the leader of a political party? If it’s truly democratic that should not matter as much should it?

The amount of time we spend in BC (and in national politics) on leadership politics would be amusing if it wasn’t so annoying and essentially shallow.  

Don't the parties and all the party members and all the MLAs or MPs - count for anything? Aren’t the councils and the caucuses the major influence on the directions the party takes? 

IS a leader like Carole James able to abrogate all the work of riding associations, policy conventions, caucuses?  Really?--how?

It's unfortunate that the BC-NDP appeared to be shooting themselves in the foot at a time when they were riding so high in the polls, although polls are a very fickle measurement of anything at all.

I have admired Jenny Kwan since she and Joy McPhail rose in the Legislature and talked nonstop through the night to try and stop a Bill from passing that would send hospital workers back to work during their 2004 job action. 

Jenny seems to be woman of principle as well. I'm disheartened , though, that these two women of principle, and their followers, were not able to get together, iron it out, and work together: it would have been the proverbial test of the pudding wouldn't it? 

And this is one pudding that's kind of fallen in the middle.


 

Article: "3 Common Pitfalls in Memoir Queries" by Jane Friedman

Read about these 3 common pitfalls in memoir queries , by Jane Friedman. About Jane Her blog is here . She says, " I report on the book...