A future too horrible to contemplate

By Gerry Warner
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Nov. 26, 2010
“Super Sad True Love Story” is the title of a dystopian novel that’s sweeping America now and most readers don’t know whether to laugh, cry or vomit.
The author is transplanted Russian Jew Gary Shteyngart, who has lived in the U.S. since his parents emigrated when he was a young boy, but now talks only half-jokingly about emigrating to Canada. (His favourite author is Mordecai Richler and he wants to live in Gas Town, believe it or not.)
But getting back to the book, which I confess I haven’t read yet (just seen reviews), I can easily see why they’re comparing it to Orwell’s “1984” for its bleak view of American civilization in another decade or two as the economy tanks, students are taught how to use Facebook in Grade 1 and Dancing with the Stars runs on cable 24 hours-a-day.
The America Shteyngart describes is no longer the most powerful country in the world and is teetering closer to anarchy every day. The Chinese yuan has become its underground currency because it’s worth far more than the dollar and China is threatening to call its loans in if Americans don’t stop using the yuan to buy the latest gadget sweeping the land – an “apparat,” an all-in-one IPhone/Blackberry sort of a thing “used for shopping and communicating via the social networking behemoth Global Teens. The apparat is also constantly updating its users ratings: credit status, ‘hotness,’ potential as a lover – information all others are privy too as well,” according to Marsha Lederman’s fine review in the Nov. 20 Globe and Mail.
Remember that old book (how quaint) or movie of the ‘60’s, “Stop the World I want to Get Off?” That’s exactly how I feel when I consider the picture of life Shteyngart is painting of the not-so-distant future. In Shteyngart’s world, books are long gone and even Kindles are passé because everyone is on their apparats, trying to figure out what outfits are “hot” to wear today, what they should eat and what they should think. And like Winston Smith in 1984, Lenny, the protagonist of Super Sad True Love Story, really is in love, or so he believes.
His lover is a beautiful Korean woman, much younger than he, who moves in with him but eventually drives him crazy because she’s constantly on her apparat shopping or Teening her friend Jenny (on-line name Grillbitch ) while Lennie is trying to relax with one of those devices from the Stone Age which you can hardly buy anymore – a book.
I can hardly wait to get my own copy of “Super Sad True Love Story.” Not because I want to be depressed about the state of the future that were all careening towards so quickly, but because – I must confess – I identify so strongly with poor Lennie. Like him, I’m fundamentally quite geeky by nature. As the digital world smothers us more in pixels every day and you look upwards only to see cyberspace instead of a blue sky, there are times when I just want to say, whoa, wait a minute. This isn’t the planet I want to be on anymore. My planet was warm and friendly. People actually talked to each other instead of babbling into the infernal device in their hands.
In the planet I used to live on, people actually wrote each other letters on this flat, weird stuff they called “paper.” Sometimes they’d even illustrate their letters with drawings they drew themselves instead of downloading something on-line. Love was slower then. You actually got to know your lover as a person first – which believe it or not is a lot of fun – before you got to know them intimately. And if it lasted, you got married and you didn’t feel compelled to tell the universe about it on Facebook.
Okay, that’s enough. The world wasn’t exactly perfect when I was a callow youth. Back then, some people “lived in sin” outside Holy Matrimony, girls got “knocked up” (what an ugly expression) in high school and when they went away to “look after a sick aunt” some of us were naïve enough to believe them.
And to get back to Shteyngart, they said in the 60’s that television, Elvis Presley and pot was going to destroy civilization as we knew it and somehow it didn’t happen. Still, you have to wonder at times. When Shteyngart started his novel in 2006, he pictured a global economic collapse, a credit meltdown, bank mergers and auto company collapses. Oops! 2008 came along and all of those things happened. So he went into re-write mode, and wrote a much more pessimistic tome.
Too pessimistic, some say, but Shteyngart has an answer for his critics. “Let’s just say two words: President Palin.” He adds he will move to Canada if that happens. And you know what? I don’t blame him.

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End B.C.'s political gong show? Not likely.

By Gerry Warner
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Nov. 19, 2010
A few days ago I sent an email to a friend saying the Liberal government of B.C. was disintegrating. Now I have to revise that email and say the Liberal government of B.C. is exploding. Or should that be spitting? Kind of hard to tell these days.
Whatever the case, we certainly have an extraordinary political situation in the province now.
I have followed B.C. politics for almost 40 years and I’ve seen times when there was one lame duck leader or one party going around like a wounded goose. But until now, I had never seen two lame duck leaders at the same time and two parties so out of touch with the body politic of this loopy province.
I returned from Spain just after the provincial election in 2009 and when I heard the results, I can’t say I was surprised. But when I found out the number of people that bothered to vote – 50 per cent – I did a double-take.
Only half the registered voters exercised their precious franchise, a right that has been gained at the cost of many lives and much spilled blood over hundreds of years. Obviously there was a message in that abysmal turnout in the 2009 election; the people of British Columbia didn’t want either party or either leader. Subsequent events have only confirmed my conviction.
So where does this leave us? In a fine kettle of fish as my dear aunt used to say.
Some things have got to be done and they’ve got to be done soon. If outgoing Premier Gordon Campbell could scrap the ridiculously complicated HST referendum voting formula by executive fiat and make it a 50 per cent plus one vote, he could go one step further and move the date of the referendum to next January to get this destructive and divisive issue out of our hair once and for all. Ironically, if he had done this a few weeks back, he might have saved his job, but I digress.
The important thing now for British Columbians regardless of party is we’ve got to know as soon as possible where our government stands on this rightfully or wrongfully vilified tax. Until that’s done, B.C. is going nowhere and it will matter not whether tweedle-dee or tweedle-dum is premier. Or which party has a majority.
This leads to Part 2 of the Save British Columbia Strategy, namely that both major parties in the province have got to sort out their leadership issues as soon as possible. Leadership reviews and convention dates are not set in stone and can be moved as deemed expedient. And expediency is the order of the day now as this province increasingly looks like the political laughing stock of Canada.
The Liberals will hold a leadership convention Feb. 26 to replace Premier Campbell and that should give enough time to hold the HST referendum first and remove that albatross from the new leader’s neck. It will also give the NDP plenty of time to sort out their leadership mess, which we don’t hear as much about now only because of the spectacle of the B.C. Liberals self-destructing before our very eyes.
But if the NDP are going to maintain any credibility at all they must resolve whether they’re going to stand behind Carole James or choose a new face. Otherwise they run the risk of looking as bad as the Liberals.

And there’s another little political cloud on the horizon too, namely the possibility of a third major political party in B.C. Chris Delaney and his merry band of B.C. First’ers are signing up prominent people all over the province to join the B.C. First cause and considering that Delaney and his buddy Bill Vander Zalm played a key role in bringing down the Campbell Liberals, this is a possibility not to be dismissed. And the B.C. Green Party is still out there with a sizable amount of support.
All of this, in fact, is a recipe for political chaos and disarray that won’t do any good for anyone in this province regardless of which party they support. And there’s something else too.
Talk of who’s spitting on whom, the Stockholm syndrome and who is a bully and who isn’t, is not going to solve our very serious political problems either. That’s the kind of politics that got us in this mess in the first place.
It’s time to move on.

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After Gordon Campbell -- le deluge

By Gerry Warner
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Nov. 4, 2010
Did he jump or was he pushed? In truth, it doesn’t really matter because in any political party there’s always a willing Brutus with his knife drawn to perform the coup de grace when the leader can no longer stand on his feet.
And ever since that fateful day when soon to be ex-Premier Gordon Campbell told the people of B.C., ‘by-the-way, I’ve got a new tax for you’ his fate was sealed. The fact that he made that statement after the last election and not before, broke trust with the voters of British Columbia. And trust once broken is seldom repaired.
And it was surely an act of towering irony that a Premier and a party ideologically opposed to taxes – at least taxes on them and their supporters – turned to a provincial tax cut in their dying days in a futile attempt to bribe the voters to support the hated HST.
It didn’t float. Duh. Neither did the Titanic. As for the future, it’s now time for realpolitik in B.C. politics, both for the Liberals and the NDP.
Let’s begin at the very beginning with the Liberals. It’s time for the party to end the charade and give themselves an honest name. Don’t laugh! A party in as deep doo doo as the Campbell Liberals has to begin at the beginning. Call themselves the New Socreds, or the Disgraced Socreds, the Not-NDP-Party, the Free Enterprise Party, the We Know What’s Best for You Party. Call themselves anything they want, but not “Liberal” because they manifestly are not. A true liberal party would not have the lowest minimum wage in the country and the highest rate of child poverty. Eunff said.
As for who will succeed Campbell, a few things are brutally obvious. With the possible exception of one party member, and only one, the new leader must come from outside the party. The HST isn’t just Gordon Campbell’s tax. It’s the preferred tax of the Liberal Party of B.C. Every current member of the Liberal party supported it and for that reason they’re unfit to be the next Liberal Party leader. There’s no way around it. However one former Liberal Party member had the strength of his convictions to quit the Liberal Party over the HST several months ago. He didn’t wait until his leader was fatally wounded before letting his displeasure be known.
And that, of course was Peace River South MLA Blair Lekstrom, who is worthy of serious consideration to be the next leader of the Liberal Party of B.C..
But the Liberals must do something else to have a serious chance of winning the next election no matter who they choose for leader. And this is absolutely critical. What they must do is move up the date for the HST referendum as soon as possible. January 2011 would be nice. Think about it. If they leave the HST referendum until September 2011, not only will the new Liberal leader have to fight the HST Bogy Man but the entire province will stay in a development freeze on major projects because no one wants to do anything major in Beautiful B.C. until they know whether or not they will have to pay the HST. And if the HST was defeated in the referendum, what a weight that would be off the new Liberal leader’s shoulders.
It’s not rocket science.
Then there’s the NDP. I really have some empathy for Carole James. She took the party from two seats to more than 30 in the last two elections and pushed its share of the popular vote high in the 40 per cent range where it had never been before. But politics is a cruel business and it’s also true that James lost two elections to Gordon Campbell.
In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out, but in politics two usually does it. The NDP, which has largely been on the sidelines throughout the HST debacle, can’t afford to be on the sidelines while the Liberals go though the excitement of electing a new leader.
The party, which specializes in eating its own, is going to have to sharpen its knives unless James, like Campbell, decides to take a bullet for the party and gracefully steps out.
Going into the next election with a leader twice defeated by the disgraced former Liberal leader is a recipe for yet another NDP defeat.

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