Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  SOLZHENITSYN’S STATURE | August 9, 2008

  The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the passing of a human-rights giant. There are few individuals, writers or otherwise, who even approach his stature as an opponent of repression and tyranny. Solzhenitsyn belongs to a very select set of people whose courage and example lit the darkness of the century just past, among whom are Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

  Here in the contemporary West, the phrase “speaking truth to power” all too often drops from the lips of some self-regarding protester, the ravings of 9/11 “truthers,” or a Hollywood B-lister taking on “Big Oil.” Michael Moore was, I believe, hailed as speaking truth to power when he “took on” the world’s easiest and favourite target, George Bush, and played to the tuxedoed Amen corner at the Cannes Film Festival. That the film he made was mendacious, that its thesis was a guaranteed applause line, that there was not a one-in-a-billion chance he would “suffer” from making Fahrenheit 9/11, shows how empty, how deflated, the application of that once so potent phrase has become. Speaking mush to millions is more like it.

  How different the life and example of Solzhenitsyn, though even juxtaposing the commercial propagandist Moore and the Soviet hero makes me cringe—mosquitoes and eagles don’t belong on the same page. A few references to Stalin in a letter (one a description of the tyrant as “the whiskered one”) was enough to have the army hero Solzhenitsyn sentenced to eight years and internal exile for life. There was a “human-rights” violation. A Soviet soldier makes a few wisecracks in a letter and gets sent off to the horrors and deprivations of the Stalinist labour camps.

  We in the West don’t know of such things. For all the inanities, incompetence and disappointments of our politics, and however much on our worst and most cynical days we deplore their glide into artful contests between barely disguised twins (Democrat-Republican, Liberal-Conservative, who can tell the difference?), we have been so secured from the true horrors of unfettered state power that we barely understand how good we actually have it.

  We can bash away at our leaders, mock our MPs, late-night comics can ridicule a president, citizens can charge into committee rooms, newspapers can excoriate a policy or a minister, not only with abandon but without the slightest fear that anything of any real consequence will happen to us. Modern democracy is so very obliging to protest that protest has become routine.

  Our protests, our sallies against government or authority, are free in two senses: we may perform them when we wish—no one will stop us—and they carry no penalty, no cost. For those who have not done so, a little reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a magnificent assist to sharpening our awareness of how extraordinarily exceptional such a state of affairs actually is.

  The Gulag Archipelago is both a monumental encyclopedia of Stalinist repression and one of the greatest writerly acts of memorialization ever achieved. It is also the most sustained indictment of a monstrous, heartless and lying regime ever written. It is an anatomy of totalitarianism written by a single individual, toward whom its force and enmity had already been turned. Solzhenitsyn was to be but dust under tyranny’s wheel, but a great heart and greater courage, allied to a superhuman sense of utter conscience, turned the tables.

  There are many elements, many events, that combined to end the nightmare of Soviet communism, inaugurated by Vladimir Lenin in 1917, to end the regime in which human rights were a fiction and a mockery, cruelty was policy and absolute power the only real doctrine. But the decision of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to write what he knew, to organize and structure his account (the writer’s gift) to produce maximum effect, and to release it to the world regardless of the consequences to himself (some of which he had already and so bitterly tasted), was surely the sine qua non of real truth speaking to real power. Without Alexander Solzhenitsyn, without The Gulag Archipelago, the great tyranny might still endure.

  Doubtless, he wrote the Gulag, as he said himself so many times, primarily to give voice to those who suffered and to put the lie to the regime built upon lies. But to those of us here in the West who have been spared, by providence or luck, the hell that all tyranny introduces to its citizens, it has compelling relevance as well. For one, it will deeply remind us of the importance of human rights, and remind us, too, of what is really meant by that now tattered and trivialized phrase, when insults in some comedy store are allowed to be wrapped in its devalued banner and Canadian bureaucrats debate whether washing or not washing one’s hands in a fast-food outlet is a “violation” of them.

  With Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s passing, the world is less one hero.

  If Solzhenitsyn’s passing had no other virtue than to remind the world of what a truly independent mind and independent person looks like, and what power the example of both contains, it was not a mournful occasion. It’s a stock comment on Solzhenitsyn that he was a hero to conservatives when he was seen as just, or only, a critic of communism and then less a pet of liberals when he scathingly rebuked the West for its gluttonous materialism and mindless amusements.

  What he, most emphatically, was not was a shrivelled, manic, closed-minded hack of any “side.” He was not, in other words, a partisan.

  OUT OF HIS TREE | May 6, 2006

  I read this week that Keith Richards had fallen out of a palm tree. It was reassuring. Good old Keith, I thought, still rockin’ through life, still with a cigarette locked, maybe even welded, between his lips, on tour with Sir (Struts-a-lot) Jagger—no knighthood for Keith—and still finding time to get up a palm tree somewhere so he could fall out of it.

  Things happen around, or to, or with, Keith Richards that don’t happen to the whole boring galaxy of super-celebrities, and they always have. There’s not a self-respecting palm tree in the world that would drop Paul McCartney, for example.

  Keith wasn’t badly hurt, I understand. Updates mentioned a concussion—how could they tell?—and there was some early talk of an operation to drain blood from his head, which wouldn’t have been a novelty to Keith. In a way, that’s what he does for a living.

  Apparently, however, that won’t be necessary after all. I’m glad they didn’t have to bore. Certain crania should be left unmined.

  Some people say Keith Richards hasn’t aged well. What they mean, of course, is that, in the great conga line of Botoxed, breast-sculpted, personal-trainered, South Beach-dieting, yoga-pretzeled, old age-phobic, health-and-youth delusionists whose nipped and tucked faces gargoyle out at us from the front covers of the celebrity magazines, Keith Richards refuses to hop in sequence.

  What they mean when they say he hasn’t aged well is that he has actually aged, while they, chained to vanity and self-delusion, have tried to put surgery and silicone between them and mortality. They’ve made the fool’s bargain. That bell will toll, and toll for them, and a hundred face peels won’t mute the summons.

  The wild, abandoned years have washed over Keith Richards, and he’s welcomed every splash, and welcomed, too, every line and dent that hard days and long nights have graven into that iconic, laughing face.

  I like him because he’s not healthy. While others are sucking extract of seaweed to cleanse their colons, he’s outside—probably up a palm tree having a smoke.

  Every time he walks by some deluxe spa—where the already super-pampered are toning their muscles, or ripping their abs, or taming their wattles, or smelling their way to “wellness” (seriously, is aromatherapy a joke?)—he must have to cross himself to ward off the folly within.

  I like him because he knows who he is. When the preening front man Mick Jagger strutted, where Sir Elton and Sir Paul and Sir Bob Geldof had pranced before him, into the meretricious embrace of the British honours system and accepted a knighthood, it was plain man Keith who was the real rock star that day.

  “I don’t want to step out onstage with someone wearing a coronet and sporting the old ermine,” Keith told the British music magazine Uncut in an expletive-rich interview. “I told Mick it’s a paltry honour… . It�
�s not what the Stones is about, is it?”

  Ah, to have heard the expletives. But “paltry,” you’ll agree, is perfect.

  I like him, too, because he seems to be cause-phobic.

  No chance of Keith Richards showing up in PEI or Newfoundland someday, shading himself under the blimpish canopy of Pamela Anderson’s hyperinflations, to plead the cause of seals and chimps. No chance of him showing up wearing a Kabbalah trinket to “raise our consciousness” of the declining pitch of the howler monkey, or whatever happens to be the cause of the week, in a tête-à-tête with the Chairman of the Bored, Larry King.

  I liked it, too, when he declined the worldwide exhibition of the super-famous and the super-rich when they gave of their glamorous time to Make Poverty History. He asked the right questions and made the right remarks. To Uncut magazine, he said: “I mean, who’s this gratifying, and where are the Africans? Where was their say?” Referring to the pressure on him to participate, he said, “Oh yeah, all the Sirs had a bash, believe me.”

  “All the Sirs had a bash.” There’s a T-shirt slogan worth a million “I care” wristbands. All the Sirs, the Dorian Grays of geriatric rock, are caricatures of themselves. Flocking to the palace for tea, lapped in ermine (bash no seals!), gushing their goodwill for the world’s poor—then back to their castles to check on their gold.

  So, it is good to hear that Keith Richards is still falling out of trees. He may be the only one in the whole parade of what we deliriously call rock icons who still keeps some honest sense of abandon—which is the heart of music, rock and roll or otherwise—and who doesn’t worship his own battered image. The rest of them are plutocrats and poseurs.

  But Keith Richards is in a palm tree all by himself (or, as the case may be, just beneath one).

  Ah, Keith! the only real god in the whole vanity-sodden pantheon. Up another tree, Keith, smoke another cigarette, and fall as often as you damn well please. A hundred Madonnas doesn’t add up to one-tenth of a Keith Richards. (See also “Cars Are Smokers, Too” on page 201.)

  THE PLEASURES OF SMOKING

  MONEY TO BURN | May 31, 2003

  It’s ancient history—possibly before the Cheers era, definitely before Friends—but there was a time, and it lasted for a long while, when Kraft Dinner was seventeen cents a package. And cigarettes were forty cents for a deck of twenty. Kraft Dinner and smokes for little more than half a buck. If we’d had good weather, and of course we didn’t—I summon these reveries from long-ago Newfoundland—it would have been paradise. A good, fat, fresh codfish could be had from the boat for a dime—but, tearful with remembered joy, I digress.

  Those times are no more. Cigarettes now are almost as expensive as a similar volume of platinum, and of the two (Kraft Dinner, Export “A”), I am not certain which is more acceptable to smoke. Kraft Dinner may now be bought at certain convenience stores in the city of Toronto for a princely $1.50, a price nearly nine times the earlier one.

  Kraft Dinner, however, has maintained its cachet. Packaged pasta has prevailed, where nicotine and its sibling tars, so rancorously and at such cost to the Canadian social fabric, have—alas—gone the way of anathema.

  In fact, Kraft Dinner revolves in that all-but-unobtainable orbit of the Tim Hortons doughnut and the A&W Teen Burger. It is one of that great trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian cultural icons. Hamburgers, macaroni and doughnuts—Canada, this is your nation.

  In passing, I must note that it is my personal view that the Kraft Dinner we get nowadays, despite the urgent assurances on the package, is not the “classic” of old. The pasta is smaller, and the powdered cheddar in a sack (which, when blended with butter and milk, is used to pave over the macaroni), is less thick, less intimate with the little elbows than it used to be. A definite fall-off, in my view.

  I’ve summoned these reveries, not out of cloying nostalgia or in obedience to the dread mantra that hails everything from “the good old days” as infallibly superior to an ever-specious present. Not at all. Rather, it was all the talk of pot on Parliament Hill, all that murky double-speak of “decriminalizing,” while insisting pot was still illegal. The weary contortions of the Liberals trying to look really liberal—going soft on weed is the very amaranth of liberalism—while not surrendering their equally precious commitment to the nation’s health, and of course the well-being of the children.

  Put reefer and Parliament in the same sentence, and linguistic contortions cannot be far behind. Nor did the hypocrisy of a government that has been fundamentalist on one mode of inhaling seeking to add parliamentary respectability to another mode—at least equally obnoxious, twice as smelly and real hell on the carpet. What really focused my attention during the pot debate, if focus may be allowed on such a topic, wasn’t the justice side of the argument, but its health corollary. It was the announcement by Health Minister Anne McLellan that her department was allocating $245 million—please stare at that figure—to advertise the dangers of smoking the pot that her colleagues were, by implication, proclaiming innocuous.

  There was a time when a million dollars was thought to be an immense amount of money. But here is a government, on one of its off days, proposing as a sidebar, as a mere sputtering afterthought, to toss $245 million—two hundred and forty-five!!! Nearly a quarter of a billion—to blunt the portended impact of some of its own most progressive legislation.

  When did money cease to mean anything? When did expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars, merely to deflect the impact of another government program, become so insanely trivial that the amount at stake barely crawled into some newscasts? When did they, meaning the politicians or the citizenry, become so numb, dare I say narcotized, to such vast expenditures?

  Was it the estimated price of almost a billion dollars—one thousand million—to construct a useless list of the country’s firearms? Was it the other billion dollars that went sluicing through Human Resources and Development Canada? The rhetorical question that screams to be asked is, What are they smoking?

  I forebear to explore beyond to ask the other blatant question: Does anyone, anyone at all, anywhere, believe that money spent by the government in pursuit of “public-service messaging” ever rattled the opinion of anyone whose sentience was greater than a stone’s?

  Hear that sound? It’s a quarter of a billion dollars whistling its way to nullity. And so I thought of the long-ago days when even seventeen cents could supply nourishment and comfort, and those ever-so-long-ago days when a pittance was really a pittance, instead of, as now, a stack of bullion that once would make Croesus drool.

  A JOINT IS A SMOKE | Novemeber 27, 2004

  Social pressure accounts for the decline of smoking. It is surely not the risible Health Canada public-service messages, or the extravagantly inane scare pictures on cigarette packs, that have worked.

  These latter are wildly over the top. There’s one picture of a carious mouth, a portrait of such dental horror that it must have been lifted from some mummy comic book.

  If two-year-olds were ardent smokers, this campaign would have its perfect audience. Mix it up with a health-service warning from the tooth fairy and there wouldn’t be a two-year-old lighting up anywhere.

  No, it isn’t the official stuff that cut down on the tobacco habit. It’s the frown of acquaintances, the increasing chill that ever-so-superior non-smokers send out to the last wastrel of their set who dares to take out the Player’s Light pack. It’s really very simple. Social opprobrium is the scourge that reforms. The only thing stronger than nicotine is the fear of friends’ disapproval.

  Alas, reform is never a straight line. Just when it might be thought the art of inhaling was going the way of the hula hoop and the dodo, we have a report this week that there is something of a renaissance of pot smoking. Hemp is hip again.

  Since 1994, the number of people smoking pot in this country has doubled. Even more impressive, a key component of the population—the very element most government campaigns a
re most urgent about “saving,” namely the young—has taken to pot with a vengeance. The same study also revealed that almost 30 per cent of 15-to 17-year-olds and 47 per cent of 18-and 19-year-olds used marijuana in the past year.

  It went further, reporting—and I’m really glad to hear it—that “It’s easier to get marijuana on a school ground today than it is to get alcohol or cigarettes.”

  (Just as a footnote here, I can’t remember when it was ever particularly easy to get booze on a playground, but then, I grew up in circumscribed and difficult times. The Most Holy Rosary Parish School of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, had few supplements to the basic curriculum, and tots of vodka or rum during recess were most definitely not among them. It might have helped. There were problems in trigonometry that definitely needed some form of remedial lubrication.)

  I think what we’re seeing here is another illustration of that wonderful irony that goes under the rubric of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Peer pressure and remorseless rudeness (driving smokers out of doors) has whittled away at the cohort that looked to tobacco for a friendly lift during each day’s many mortifications. But vague signals of approval toward marijuana as an alternate solace, its much-hyped value as a “medicinal” tool (remember the tired line from every party, “I only drink for medicinal purposes”) and the official moves to decriminalize pot have worked to celebrate the mellowing weed.

  No one is going to frown at a pot smoker. She may be mollifying a pain. She is certainly not to be branded as a slave to Big Tobacco. And just look at her teeth: they’re perfect. No mummy’s curse has scarred that mouth. And the young, bless their adventurous and experimenting hearts, know more than any others what is hip and what is not. Cigarettes are so passé. Besides, they offer no real mood change.