Nixon, Harper, Watergate and Mike Duffy


House of CommonsI’ve been keeping an eye on the trial of Senator Mike Duffy, who’s currently on trial for – as far as I can tell – being greedy and stupid.

Duffy was appointed to the Senate (in Canada the Senate is a relatively toothless institution and appointment is based on an antiquated patronage system) by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Duffy was a journalist who’s been lobbying for a Senate appointment for himself since the Chretien government.

Theoretically Senators comb through legislation passed by the House of Commons to find issues and make improvements before passing it along to the Governor General for Royal Assent, which makes legislation – law. In practice, the final two steps are mostly for show though the Senate has  occasionally done more than rubber stamp things.

Both the Senate and the Governor General are historical left-overs from Canada’s British Empire past that we can’t get rid of because they are embedded in our Constitution, and we can’t open it up to fix that because … reasons.

Anyway, Duffy was accused of charging the taxpayers of Canada with some personal housing expenses that he probably shouldn’t have. It’s unclear if he broke any laws because we’ve since come to find out that there are precise few written rules about what Senators can or can’t “expense” onto the backs of taxpayers.

Regardless, the optics looked bad, and the ethics were questionable, and Duffy was ordered by the Prime Minister to repay the money.

And then it gets interesting.

Duffy didn’t think he should have to repay anything and as the dollar amount grew (eventually landing at $90,000), he got huffy and whiny.

Harper’s Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright, tried to broker a deal where the Conservative party would pay the money for Duffy, and Duffy would claim, publicly, that he paid the money back himself.

Shady, but it gets worse.

As the dollar amount climbed, the party balked, so Wright, a millionaire many times over, simply wrote Duffy a cheque himself, and Duffy pretended that he paid back the money he may or may not have owed in the first place.

And then it gets much worse. Lies were told. Retold. Revised. Re-imagined. Told again.

Cabinet ministers parroted lies in the House of Commons and to the media.

Senators told lies that were written for them by the Prime Minister’s staff and chief aides.

The Prime Minister vouchsafed for them all and when he wasn’t believed, he revised them himself.

More lies were told. Audits were rewritten by the Prime Minister office to cover the lies and then more lies were told to cover up the original lies.

Wright either resigned or was fired, depending on whose version of events you want to believe.

As it stands today, a lot of lies and covering up occurred to essentially try to make the Conservative Party of Canada appear to be ethical and upstanding when in fact, they aren’t so much.

At this point only Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy have been punished in any way for what appears to be the work of a half-dozen – probably more – people who are ranking members of the Senate and important advisers in the office of the Prime Minster.

While no one is saying that the Prime Minister knew about the cover up and lies as they were being manufactured, he did clearly know the truth at some point over the two-year saga of the downfall of Mike Duff,y and he did absolutely nothing about it.

Except to lie at worst or condone the lies at the least.

Why does this fascinate me?

Because I remember this morality play from my youth in the United States.

In the summer of 1974 my Dad was riveted by the Watergate Scandal.

He was a fervent Nixon supporter. Voted for the man three times and believed him to be an upstanding guy and a great President.

He was crushed by the revelations that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in and lied about that knowledge and assisted in the cover-up.

“He should have told the truth from the beginning,” Dad said. “It would have worked out in the end had he done that.”

It didn’t diminish the respect Dad had for Nixon’s accomplishmen,t but it coloured his opinion about political parties and their effect on the people who belong to them and run under their banners.

He never voted for anyone other than an independent again to my knowledge. And he despised Republicans, a party he’d voted for since his first election as a young man in the Navy just after the second world war.

In my mind all the hearings concerning Watergate were closely followed by Nixon’s resignation on August 9th in 1974, but when I googled it, I discovered that the original hearings, and the report that followed, happened in the early summer of 1973.

All of the television networks covered those hearings in May of 1973. An estimated 85% of the American public watched some or all of the hearings.

That I remember. We only had four stations back then. CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS. They all covered them at first, and then they tag teamed to make sure that all the hearings were public and available.

People wonder why it’s so hard to work up the general public about political wrong-doing today, and in my mind, it’s a simple answer.

When I was a child, there was no way to escape unpleasant news. Today there are hundreds of channels plus the Internet. It’s easy to avoid things you don’t want to know about even if you should be paying attention.

I was trying to explain all of this to my husband last night and my daughter today.

Watergate absolutely is the foundation of my understanding and feelings about political parties and politicians. It’s why I have spent the majority of my adult life stubbornly refusing to belong to political parties and even unions and organized religions.

I learned from that huge event, which reset many things in American politics, that ideologies were dangerous and usually corrupting. That good people would eventually succumb. That questionable people would become more so. That dogma is closed-minded and will be the downfall of civilization when the historians are finally able to sort through the wreckage.

There were a lot of other things going on in the summers of 1973 and 1974. Oil embargos. Recession. Price controls that lead to shortages. Going without was something that in my memory, I associated with Dad’s union being so often on strike but now realize that there were much larger events in play.

Which brings me back to Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright and Stephen Harper.

There is a federal election called for October 19th. Generally elections here are short – five to six weeks – but the Prime Minister dropped the writ almost two weeks ago.

Speculation was that he wanted to spend the other parties into submission with a long election, and there’s probably something to that.

However, I think he hoped the election would distract people from the Duffy trial, and the revelation that he isn’t the ethical, responsible leader he has always sold himself to be.

He’s hoping that no one will notice, or that we will not remember on October 19th, that he promised to end the very things he allowed his closest aides and advisers to do. To ignore or bend rules. To rewrite them if they had to. To cover up. To lie. To demand that elected MPs support those lies by retelling them in the House of Commons and to the media.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s main goal was to remove accountability and tradition moral/ethical guideposts from the Canadian landscape and government system because they got in the way of people making money. And he did this while telling us the exact opposite. That he and his party were responsible, good people rather than the self-interested and short-sighted ones they are being revealed to be.

Nixon’s relativism on ethics and governing allowed Ronald Reagan to happen, and politically it’s been all downhill in America since.

Harper is our Nixon. That he happened because the Liberal Party got too comfortable and causal with power shouldn’t be forgotten, but it’s Harper’s version of conservatism – borrowed from theeven more than ethically challenged America version – that has brought Canada to the top of a hill that it wouldn’t take much for us to start rolling down.

Not a lot of people see this, or agree would entirely agree with my observation if they did, but I believe that as a country we are in a dicey place right now. It could either way.

But I stand by it. If this coming election gives the Conservatives another crack at forming government, and the opposition parties don’t band together to bring it down, Duffy will stand in history as our own Watergate moment in time. I don’t think that’s a milestone we should want for ourselves.

Why I Still Hate Twitter


Twitter iconI originally joined Twitter because that’s what bloggers did and for a while, it was fun. Like the old Internet days of yore message boards where you met all kinds of people and even though there were occasionally dust ups, mostly everyone was cool about it eventually because meeting all kinds of people with different voices, ideas and opinions was the whole point.

Eventually celebrities, brands and politicians discovered Twitter and things began to change.

Twitter is more than ever about tribes. It is not about meeting all kinds of people. It is about meeting people who think and act like you do and waging war on those who don’t. It’s like high school. The crappy pecking order part. That only people whose best days were in high school gleefully embrace because they are out of place in the adult world.

It is rare to meet new people on Twitter who you will want to still know a week later. I rejoice when I find those people.

More often, I find that I meet people who only find me unobjectionable so long as I don’t have any differing opinions, or if I do, I don’t express them very often. Even more frequently I run across people who make me despair for humanity until I remember that Twitter – mercifully – represents but a sliver of humanity even at peak tweeting hours.

Twitter is probably still the best place to meet and be able to interact with those who are closer to gears and cogs of society than most of us will ever be. Journalists. Politicians. Politicos. Think-tank types. Activists. It’s why I am still there, but the flotsam and jetsam that circles them is sometimes hard to wade through, and on really bad days, it’s easy to see why democracy has had an easy time catching on but a difficult time actually working.

My husband thinks I should just walk away.

“People suck,” he reminds me at least every other day.

And by “suck”, he means people have individual personalities that have been shaped by time, experiences, agendas, narratives and other people. These personalities are more, or less, agreeable depending on the alignment of your personality with theirs. Or your level of zen.

I’ve spent most of my life working with people, which is probably a very odd thing for an introvert such as myself who genuinely finds people exhausting and a bit of a distraction.

One of the advantages to having been a teacher is that I learned how to deal with multiple personality types and their variants simply as a matter of survival, so unlike my husband, I am not surprised when interacting is a chore or worse or when large groups of people in an enclosed space – which Twitter is – sometimes collide.

Given that I am not sharing kitten gifs, celebrity or pop culture, it’s not surprising either that I tend to run into people who in real life, I would shun like toe fungus.

I like politics. I am intensely interested in the social aspect of it and the ripples and quakes it creates provincially, nationally and globally. Some of the politically minded on Twitter are incredibly knowledgeable and worth following. Many are like me – just aware, learning and interacting. Some are watchers. Some are sharers. Some are lone wolves. All bring something to the table that makes the wading worth doing.

And then, there are the others.

Within the category of “other”, there are sub-categories. Partisans whose degree of geniality varies. Agitators who might be partisan but whose prime directive is to stir things up according to their own agendas. And finally, the insane, which needs no explanation.

I don’t mind partisans. I don’t understand it, but I don’t mind them for the most part.

In my mind, there is no reason to wed myself in perpetuity to someone else’s version of reality or utopia – take your pick.

No matter how compelling the dogma might be, it just seems a bit Stepford Wife to me. However, keep in mind that 12 years of Catholic school and nearly a lifetime in the United States failed to morph me into a bot, so it’s conceivable that I am just naturally immune to the need to belong or be labeled in a way that so many seem to feel is vital.

Agitators are not quite partisans. They nearly always wrap themselves in the dogma, narrative and agenda of others, but they don’t seem to have a clear centre of their own. If that which they base every belief and utterance where to vanish next week, these folks would wander aimless like walkers, attacking and savaging randomly because it’s the only thing they know how to do. In real life, they are that woman at work. The one nobody really likes but everyone tries to get along with to one degree or other because it’s just easier that way.

Some have a bit of wit and intelligence. You’ll know them because they have a lot of followers, but the number of people they really interact with, or who share their screed, is small comparatively. Majority who follow these types do so for the entertainment value rather than because they agree with them.

Agitators generally have a cadre of groupies who will swarm dissenters like fire ants and at least one Insane follower who regularly immolates him/herself for the cause.

They believe passionately in what they believe. If you don’t, it’s because you are slow-witted and in need of tedious remediation or just plain stupid – depending – and not because you may be skeptical or discerning. Or have a mind of your own.

Occasionally these types hit their marks with enough accuracy to draw wider spread interest and even praise. Unfortunately, this just serves to make them more shrill rather than more accurate.

A few carry the torch of blind loyalty with a bit more nobility. They doggedly stump for the cause minus the mean girl memes, gifs and snark of the aforementioned. They form clans rather than attract clingers. Discussion are had. Many are likable despite the fact that you never really get to know them apart from their mission statement. Often when interacting with them, you are left with the feeling that are a quota that was met, checked off and filed. They are not unpleasant interactions but a bit hollow.

Last there are the nutters. You don’t need to be told when you inadvertently attract their notice although you often will be alerted via a DM (direct message) from someone you follow. Those private missives go something like,

“Back away slowly and then block.”

Blocking is just what it sounds like. Twitter, like many social media and message boards, allows users to screen and to deny other users. In the Twitsphere, blocking is a way to shut out voices that differ from the ones in your head that your prefer and by doing so, limits their interaction within your echo chamber or tribe.

Blocking is a weapon for silencing, a tool for avoiding thought and it is occasionally viewed as a badge of honour because often – provided you aren’t crazy and danger to yourself and others – it’s the people rattling the cages of the status quo who are blocked.

To be blocked is to know you’ve made an impact. Caused someone intellectual discomfort. Reminded the Emperor that not only is he naked, he never had clothes in the first place.

By now, you might wonder if I do indeed enjoy Twitter for all protestations of my loathing of it.

I like some of the people I have met and interact with. I’ve had good discussions and debate. But I know that I won’t be a regular much longer. It’s not a tool change. No one has ever changed the world via Twitter and no one ever will. In my opinion. Change is what people in the real world do. They do it. They don’t tweet about doing it.

For all its virtual reach, Twitter is a small place that most people will never visit because life and change is for doers and Twitter is about mocking that really.

The agitators on Twitter, for instance, revile those who are out in the world-changing the things that the agitators hold dear.

A good examples? Deborah Drever. Young MLA from Calgary whose Facebook page was scraped and pictures used out of context to try to force a recall of her after the last election.

She was hounded in the social media until it spilled into the news and forced the Premier to remove her from the caucus. She would have to sit as an independent, which put her riding at a disadvantage. Something that no one, clearly, had thought of before they began their petty campaign tantrum.

She could have quit. They wanted her to quit.

But today, she is still an MLA and she’s out in her riding, interacting and changing things because ACTIONS – real world ones – are the only things that count. For all the bile that was spewed at her, she did what her bullies won’t – she ran for office, got elected and is in a position to affect life and lives.

The majority of people in the world don’t care about the pictures on anyone’s Facebook page but their own and no matter how something flares in a news cycle, something else will replace it quickly enough.

Same can be said of Twitter. It matters only to those who are there. It’s a good place to meet like-minded to talk, speculate and share theories but after you’ve finished, you push away from the keyboard and you go do something in the real world that matters more.

Twitter itself is an illusion.

Circling the Wagons


Here is the oddest thing about the closing of ye olde widda board for me, personally.

When the board closed, the alumni site at Facebook cranked up the invites/adds to its page. A group that was fairly dormant. And I was added.

Okay, the fact that I was added is not odd. I did make friends in my time at the YWBB. Yes, I did. Don’t look so incredulous. A few anyway. So my inclusion in the round-up as Rome fell isn’t all that a weird thing.

The strange part is how nonchalantly I have been included in the conversations and happenings.

As I mentioned in another post, it’s just like a high school reunion where the most popular girl in the class, the one that married the star of the state championship basketball team, was a cheerleader and never gave more than a withering glance of disdain to you, is suddenly all smiles, hugs and

“Oh my gawd! you look GREAT! I am SO glad you are here.”

Alright, not that exactly, but creepily close.

Rob just chuckles.

“Back with your besties from the board, eh?”

I had no besties at the board.

In fact, the few YWBB members who I count among my friends are folks I met at the board but got to know via our widow blogging. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be friends.

Like most of my friendships – virtual and in real life – I grew on them slowly because I am something for which the taste for needs to be acquired and that takes time. Instant friendships have never happened for me. Ever. Except maybe Rob.

And I tend to develop friendships with people that no one would ever suspect me of being friends with.

As I recently told a very conservative political Twitter acquaintance (who follows me only because I confound her definition of a “liberal”),

“I have an open mind, a preferences for people who can pry theirs wide a bit too, and enjoy a healthy give/take debate. And snark is good too.”

Of course, I paraphrased into 140 characters.

Yes, I can be brief, but I don’t enjoy it.

So, where did I begin? Right, wagons circling.

Old board members do nothing well at all if not circle up. The founders should have remembered this if going quietly into the good night was their aim. (And they’d do well to remember it in the future if the rebrand of Soaring Spirits includes YWBB terminology, stories or ideas stolen from threads. Yeah, stolen. Really hope I am wrong about this.)

They posted a terse and uninformative message when they locked all the forums, which effectively threw the lurkers under the bus and sent the newbies, who generally have few contacts inside the board (forget about outside) in grief spins I don’t want to think about.

But if they thought this was going to satisfy the GenNext widdas, who really founded the current incarnation of the board, they’d apparently been away too long.

After the shock and the scramble to contact, add, send out the word and help – as much as possible – support the YWBB survivors as they hastily set up a new forum at Widda, the questions came.

What happened? Why so suddenly? What will happen to the thousands of pages of posts? The history. The stories? The resources? The friendships?

OMG! How will people find each other again!

All good questions and – as per usual – the founders were reluctant to come down off the mountain to deal with any of it.

My history with the founders is slight but contentious.

I took them to task about the cyber-bullying, and their non-to-tepid at best responses on a few occasions, and the few who bothered to reply to me were condescending when they weren’t just dismissive.

So while the others were willing to give a benefit of the doubt, I suspected that the founders probably had motivations that were more about them than the widow board or the members because that’s how it’s mostly been since they stopped actively needing it.

Is that judgmental?

Yes.

But I am just as harsh a critic of widowed folk who spring board their tragedies into careers that milk the vulnerability of grieving folk.

While the YWBB founders may have simply walked away after having picked up their lives, at least they didn’t sell hoodies and mugs with logos and pretend that somehow this was good works. And, thank the goddess, they avoided the Oprahfication of being widowed into a 12 step program where slapping on the stilettos, working out and attending weekend seminars to work that grief will land you in the valley of the happy widow dolls again.

Eventually the idea – a good one – took root among the alumnae of kicking in cash to maintain the board as an archive.

Posting agitation ensued to the point that one of the founders agreed to talk with the others, but the ultimate answer was still “no”. Closing down the YWBB was just a “business decision” that made the most sense.

Nothing personal, ya’ll.

A kind of dismissive, sucks to be you but I’ve moved on and what do you people want from me after fifteen years?

Still, the circling efforts and the fact that I was included (granted that some of the others probably didn’t/still don’t know who the fuck I was on the board) made me reconsider the nature of the board and whether or not I could really participate in the start up of the new one.

I am nine years out. Married again for nearly eight years.

I am not grieving anymore. Even the odd memories don’t knock me off course.

Although, I hate the fact that I cry easily now. I never did pre-dead husband and don’t like that I have lost my ability to be like a stone in the face of manipulating commercials, songs and YouTube videos.

Oh, I blame it on the approach of menopause, but it was widowhood that reduced me to this female cliché.

I have participated in these early days of Widda. I post. I share. I try to let people know that nine years out is a good place. It gets better.

But I haven’t totally hated the reunion. It’s good to see how far I have come in stark terms and how the people behind the aliases have done the same.

The furor is dying down now. The YWBB goes dark this coming Friday and now that the shock has passed and the posts are being archived on hundreds of different hard-drives, most of these people will go back to their lives. Just like people do after high school reunions.