“I think that the media are missing one of the key elements driving this wave of anger. We are in some way identifying with this man, and it’s not in the way the intelligentsia wishes and assumes we would. It’s not that we’re concerned about police brutality, because we don’t live in a police state, any more than Americans do. We know that, even though some people like to dress up their very safe lives with a little imaginary drama and pretend that they’re up against a sinister wall of authoritarian brutality. Canadians aren’t afraid that the police will storm their houses in the middle of the night, or drag them off to some torture chamber to beat information out of them.
“But what we DO live in is a clumsy, stupid, arrogant bureaucracy. And what we respond to is the fact that Dziekanski was held in a corral for TEN HOURS without anyone helping him, communicating with him, explaining anything to him. It was nobody’s job to link him up with his mother, so it was never done. It was nobody’s job to explain to him what he should do next, so he was just abandoned there. THAT is what Canadians recognize. We all know that any day, for any reason, that could be us. We could find ourselves snared in some idiotic, incomprehensible bureaucratic limbo. And the rage comes from knowing that if we ‘make trouble,’ if we do anything but be submissive and docile, this bureaucracy has no hesitation in physically bludgeoning us into line.”
***
That’s why Canadian electoral politics doesn’t matter, and why so many politically oriented Canadian bloggers are worse than irrelevant — they are actually dangerous.
In reality, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, because the bureaucracy remains the same.
The trouble isn’t that “the new boss is the same as the old boss.” The trouble is that the old boss’s underlings in the UNelected bureaucracy keep their jobs-for-life when the new boss takes “power”. They have their own agendas and don’t care who the figurehead of the year is.
But if you insist on blogging about the new MP for Armpit, SK, and ridings and polls and so forth, have at it. I guess it makes for a pleasant diversion from reality.
Anyway: I’d also add that the Canadian habit of saying “that isn’t my job” is something that should make them ponder their own contributions to other people’s everyday misery.
