So in the interim, pretend I told you about this:
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Placeholder
I've been busy working on a project. It's almost started.
So in the interim, pretend I told you about this:
So in the interim, pretend I told you about this:
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Economic Crisis In A Nutshell
[Unfortunately - by God's mercy, how it pains me so to admit it! - I cannot take credit for this piece; it was crafted by a far greater wordsmith than I can ever aspire to be. - r. raleigh, 4/20]
Yesterday, the New York Times’ Robert Mackey noted the growing number of commentators who are attempting to explain the economic crisis through metaphor and analogy. Some commentators, Mackey notes, have stuck to traditional metaphorical staples—cliffs, craters, and nudity—but others have proffered scrambled explanations involving tiger-riding, tangled mixed metaphors about weapons of mass destruction, and the renovation of houses that are on fire.
Mackey concludes, “Besides a sense of urgency, what these metaphors of war and disaster reveal is a fundamental need to explain somehow what it is that banks actually do to make money these days. While it used to be that a bank’s core business could be understood by anyone able to add, subtract, multiply and divide, in recent years bankers started to place very large bets on calculations that might give pause to people with degrees in quantum physics.”
The metaphors Mackey cites fail to adequately describe the economic crisis because they are too simple, not because the economic crisis is too complex. Complexity of subject matter is no bar to metaphor. It is a challenge to which the worthy metaphor will rise and an opportunity for true metaphorical excellence.
I will achieve this excellence. Here goes:
First, imagine yourself as a passenger on an ocean-going vessel or airplane. You do not understand the inner workings of this ship or plane, nor are you permitted to leave it. The captain of whichever vessel is a distant, dehumanized figure with the unquestionable authority of God and/or National Security, and the vessel has smashed into an iceberg, or is crashing from the sky into an iceberg, as case may be. Furthermore, the ship does not respond to conventional controls and its actual operations are a matter of theory. The ship is the economy. As a passenger, you have several pressing concerns which are subsumed into a generalized feeling of dread, helplessness, and desperate urgency.
To better understand the relationship between yourself and the captain of the plane/ship, please consider yourself a low-ranking member of a pack of hunting animals, such as wolves, or perhaps coyotes. (The more “creative” among you may consider yourselves hyenas, but please limit your consideration to canine animals. Canine social dynamics are requisite to the analogy.)
Now, imagine the forest/plain/field your pack hunts for sustenance has been devastated by overhunting. You and your fellows find yourselves on the precipice of a Malthusian crisis. As some form of canine life, you have limited means of personal expression and broader understanding. You must communicate through barking and/or yipping noises, as well as scented cues and ritualized nonlethal combat.
Place your canine self-construction—as well as the rest of your pack—onto the airplane/ship. This is now a vessel manned, piloted, and populated by a pack of wild dogs or wolves. The situation appears grim. The onboard reserves of antelopes and deer are devastated beyond repopulation, and things are on fire—horrifying, engulfing plumes of orange and blue death.
The economic collapse is that fire. Unlike regular fire, this fire produces charts and graphs instead of smoke. These charts illustrate various metrics and measures describing the rate of the flames’ progress, and the extent to which you are doomed. Like smoke, this information hangs in the air, choking and claustrophobic. The charts catch in the lungs of your brain, at once the first blush and the closest associative understanding we can expect of our apparent destruction—for who can understand the fire? After all, the fire is very similar to the economic collapse, which is very difficult to understand, and you are a coyote, wolf, or hyena, on an airplane or a ship, as case may be.
Some of your packmates bark/yip on the importance of putting out the fire, some have questions as to the cause of the fire, and some are preoccupied by the imminent doom of the plane/ship crashing into whatever object, and are less focused on the fire itself. (The crash is the next Great Depression.)
Several of the fatter members of the pack were responsible for setting controlled fires on the ship, for which they were paid exorbitant sums of antelopes, which is very confusing and morally frustrating. However, apparently the ship’s day-to-day operations were powered by these fires. Emissaries of the mysterious captain insist their arsonist expertise requires their involvement in the firefighting activities, and additional antelope meat, taken from other pack members not connected with the fires. This fire-stoppage is designed to change the vessel’s course. Some wolves insist the airplane/ship should crash/sink to prevent subsequent disasters and others insist on doing nothing whatever, while several have “Gone Galt” and are busily licking themselves. Also, you have no health insurance.
That is the economic crisis, in a nutshell.
Yesterday, the New York Times’ Robert Mackey noted the growing number of commentators who are attempting to explain the economic crisis through metaphor and analogy. Some commentators, Mackey notes, have stuck to traditional metaphorical staples—cliffs, craters, and nudity—but others have proffered scrambled explanations involving tiger-riding, tangled mixed metaphors about weapons of mass destruction, and the renovation of houses that are on fire.
Mackey concludes, “Besides a sense of urgency, what these metaphors of war and disaster reveal is a fundamental need to explain somehow what it is that banks actually do to make money these days. While it used to be that a bank’s core business could be understood by anyone able to add, subtract, multiply and divide, in recent years bankers started to place very large bets on calculations that might give pause to people with degrees in quantum physics.”
The metaphors Mackey cites fail to adequately describe the economic crisis because they are too simple, not because the economic crisis is too complex. Complexity of subject matter is no bar to metaphor. It is a challenge to which the worthy metaphor will rise and an opportunity for true metaphorical excellence.
I will achieve this excellence. Here goes:
First, imagine yourself as a passenger on an ocean-going vessel or airplane. You do not understand the inner workings of this ship or plane, nor are you permitted to leave it. The captain of whichever vessel is a distant, dehumanized figure with the unquestionable authority of God and/or National Security, and the vessel has smashed into an iceberg, or is crashing from the sky into an iceberg, as case may be. Furthermore, the ship does not respond to conventional controls and its actual operations are a matter of theory. The ship is the economy. As a passenger, you have several pressing concerns which are subsumed into a generalized feeling of dread, helplessness, and desperate urgency.
To better understand the relationship between yourself and the captain of the plane/ship, please consider yourself a low-ranking member of a pack of hunting animals, such as wolves, or perhaps coyotes. (The more “creative” among you may consider yourselves hyenas, but please limit your consideration to canine animals. Canine social dynamics are requisite to the analogy.)
Now, imagine the forest/plain/field your pack hunts for sustenance has been devastated by overhunting. You and your fellows find yourselves on the precipice of a Malthusian crisis. As some form of canine life, you have limited means of personal expression and broader understanding. You must communicate through barking and/or yipping noises, as well as scented cues and ritualized nonlethal combat.
Place your canine self-construction—as well as the rest of your pack—onto the airplane/ship. This is now a vessel manned, piloted, and populated by a pack of wild dogs or wolves. The situation appears grim. The onboard reserves of antelopes and deer are devastated beyond repopulation, and things are on fire—horrifying, engulfing plumes of orange and blue death.
The economic collapse is that fire. Unlike regular fire, this fire produces charts and graphs instead of smoke. These charts illustrate various metrics and measures describing the rate of the flames’ progress, and the extent to which you are doomed. Like smoke, this information hangs in the air, choking and claustrophobic. The charts catch in the lungs of your brain, at once the first blush and the closest associative understanding we can expect of our apparent destruction—for who can understand the fire? After all, the fire is very similar to the economic collapse, which is very difficult to understand, and you are a coyote, wolf, or hyena, on an airplane or a ship, as case may be.
Some of your packmates bark/yip on the importance of putting out the fire, some have questions as to the cause of the fire, and some are preoccupied by the imminent doom of the plane/ship crashing into whatever object, and are less focused on the fire itself. (The crash is the next Great Depression.)
Several of the fatter members of the pack were responsible for setting controlled fires on the ship, for which they were paid exorbitant sums of antelopes, which is very confusing and morally frustrating. However, apparently the ship’s day-to-day operations were powered by these fires. Emissaries of the mysterious captain insist their arsonist expertise requires their involvement in the firefighting activities, and additional antelope meat, taken from other pack members not connected with the fires. This fire-stoppage is designed to change the vessel’s course. Some wolves insist the airplane/ship should crash/sink to prevent subsequent disasters and others insist on doing nothing whatever, while several have “Gone Galt” and are busily licking themselves. Also, you have no health insurance.
That is the economic crisis, in a nutshell.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Mystery Status: Solved
Everything Harper has ever said/done now rings through with total clarity of purpose.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Politics and the English Language
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
- G. Orwell
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
- G. Orwell
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Scientific Polling on the Issues that MATTER
In times of economic crises and rampant North American federal elections, it is not entirely uncommon to see the various manifestations of popular media covered in all manners of charts, graphs and figures based on the most scientifically accurate data regarding the opinions of the terminally ignorant.
The ability to quantify thoughts, behaviours and pieces of the vast emotional mosaic that defines the human experience is perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of science and thought - let alone politics! - and it is an unfortunate tendency of society's prevailing biases that it is largely wasted on tracking such mundane phenomena as political approval ratings, potential election results, and modeling the variety of ways in which global markets are currently imploding.
What I have undertaken here for you, gentle reader, is a painstaking study and analysis of some of the major areas of political and economic activity that, for reasons unknown to yours truly, have been neglected by the so-called "credible" researchers. Using the skills I was taught in the process of acquiring a highly-employable Bachelor of Arts from the prestigious Memorial University of Newfoundland, I have presented my findings in a chart format that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
If you wish to use these findings in future research or reports, please cite the source as Richard Raleigh, MD., t.i.a. [thanks in advance]
Unfortunately, as provincial politics has been somewhat slow lately (understandably, as it is functionally irrelevant to the government if the House is sitting or not), we turn now towards to the federal scene, which has been substantially more interesting as of late.
It's almost as if you could say... a picture was worth a thousand words... ?
The ability to quantify thoughts, behaviours and pieces of the vast emotional mosaic that defines the human experience is perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of science and thought - let alone politics! - and it is an unfortunate tendency of society's prevailing biases that it is largely wasted on tracking such mundane phenomena as political approval ratings, potential election results, and modeling the variety of ways in which global markets are currently imploding.
What I have undertaken here for you, gentle reader, is a painstaking study and analysis of some of the major areas of political and economic activity that, for reasons unknown to yours truly, have been neglected by the so-called "credible" researchers. Using the skills I was taught in the process of acquiring a highly-employable Bachelor of Arts from the prestigious Memorial University of Newfoundland, I have presented my findings in a chart format that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
If you wish to use these findings in future research or reports, please cite the source as Richard Raleigh, MD., t.i.a. [thanks in advance]
Unfortunately, as provincial politics has been somewhat slow lately (understandably, as it is functionally irrelevant to the government if the House is sitting or not), we turn now towards to the federal scene, which has been substantially more interesting as of late.
It's almost as if you could say... a picture was worth a thousand words... ?
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Urban Candidates of 2008: A Field Guide
Elections are tough times for the committed voter. That single vote you can cast on October 14th is your only way to let your political overlords know how you feel, and it's an integral part of a functioning democracy that this vote is cast based on in-depth research and intense spiritual agonising over which candidate to support.
That said, doing your civic duty is extremely hard, especially in situations where none of the candidates are especially appealing and complicated issues like environmental sustainability and the economy dominate most political debates.
For times like these, the best idea is usually to let someone else do all the research for you and then tell you how to vote. Residents of St. John's/Mount Pearl, I am here to help you with just that.
So after weeks of painstaking research into the candidates vying to represent the urban portion of the Avalon, I have crafted such a perfect guide to this election that to simply look upon it may physically be too much for small children and the elderly.
Without further ado, here is the only information source you will ever need to consult before heading into the ballot box on Tuesday morning.
-----------------------------------
ST. JOHN'S SOUTH-MOUNT PEARL
Siobhan Coady (L) - an ardent believer that "third time's the charm" is more than just folksy wisdom, perennial Liberal candidate Siobhan Coady is again running for a federal seat in the hopes that during an election where the premier of the province is actively registering third parties with Elections Canada in order to defeat her Conservative opponent, she may finally have a shot. Not that Siobhan is especially unqualified - she has smashed through a few notable glass ceilings in her business career, which is no small feat - and while she wouldn't necessarily make a bad MP, voters in the riding have consistently shown they have trouble swallowing the Siobhan Coady package. While there are a number of valid arguments against voting Liberal in this election, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Siobhan's main issue in this campaign is herself.
Shaking hands with Siobhan Coady is like shaking hands with the captain of the team who you just beat at soccer in 5th grade - he's smiling and saying "great game" but you know in the back of your mind that it's so tremendously insincere that it comes off as grating. This is Siobhan Coady's problem - she's so firmly trapped in the Uncanny Valley that every time she reminds you that she will "never give up, never give in" and flashes that insidious little smile, you can't help but feel like 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper in They Live after he finds the magic sunglasses. If you get that reference, congratulations, you've got as bad a taste in movies as I do.
Merv Wiseman (C) - Merv Wiseman is the only candidate running in this election that I have absolutely nothing to say about. That's how much I know about Merv Wiseman. Presumably, this is reflective of how hard Merv Wiseman is trying to win this election.
Ryan Cleary (NDP) - when I first heard that Ryan Cleary was running in Mount Pearl for the NDP I was honestly intrigued, although I brushed it off with "he's far too abrasive, he'll never win the nomination." Then a cohort of mine who attended the nomination informed me that Cleary delivered a passionate speech that sealed his nomination and I thought "my God, he might have a chance." I hadn't heard Cleary speak since the Trust and Confidence Rally in 2007 at Confederation Building where he delivered a heartfelt polemic on the injustices facing Newfoundland within our union with Canada that was so intense I almost felt my heartstrings flutter; considering that his main competition is a woman whose speeches sound more contrived and superficial than the dialogue you'd see on Springer, I figured that Ryan Cleary may legitimately find himself with a real job.
This is before Ryan Cleary was forced into a crash-diet of nothing but his own words right from the beginning of the election, and now he seems so intellectually malnourished that his only talking points on the campaign trail are lame protests against the Green Shift and quasi-incomprehensible monologues about his new-found love for Jack Layton that usually sound as if they're being delivered by a Will Farrell character. The only way to describe Cleary's entire campaign so far is "half-assed", which is disappointing because while I don't care for Cleary himself I know he's capable of doing a much better job. If I was Ivan Morgan, I'd put down the Purity biscuits and start cracking the whip at this point, because as far as I've seen there is no legitimate reason to vote for Ryan Cleary.
Ted Warren (Green) - Ted Warren is the best candidate in this riding by a long shot, and probably one of the best candidates running in the province. But you've never heard of him and you're not going to vote for him, so the fact that Mr. Warren is one of the most brilliant and eloquent minds I've seen run in politics for years is completely moot.
Greg Byrne (NL First) - ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
ST. JOHN'S EAST
Walter Noel (L) - Walter Noel blows. If I were a Liberal in St. John's East I'd be tempted to hang myself if Walter wasn't so cartoonishly terrible he looped around and became hilarious. There are no questions directed at Walter Noel that don't end with him giving long winded explanations about why spending 8,000$ of public money on alcohol is completely justified because "there was no law against it at the time", and his only pet cause in this election is seeing to it that a 92$ million dollar tunnel is built to an island with a population of 200 that hasn't seen the creation of a single new job since Joseph R. Smallwood stalked the corridors of Confederation Building. On the rare occasion that Walter Noel is asked about something other than his personal flaws he usually responds by reading a few pages out of the Liberal platform book and then rambling on about how the Liberal Party of Canada is the only way to stop the NDP's stealth communism and that Jack Harris is a crook. Considering that Walter Noel looks and sounds like a '50s newscaster was molested by a Dick Tracy villain voiced by Skeletor from He-Man this doesn't even seem that out of place. Walter Noel really, really sucks.
And yet, he was still a better choice than Debbie Hanlon.
Craig Westcott (C) - you can live to see the days where the sun shall be darkened and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken loose, and I can guarantee you that you will never see someone look as uncomfortable running in a federal election as Craig Westcott. When asked to explain why his party holds policies even the Golden Horde would balk at he will usually mumble a few lines from Conservative briefing notes into the nearest mic, and the entire time Stockwell Day was giving a press conference about the need to crack down on young offenders in order to stop a coming epidemic of gang violence in outport Newfoundland Westcott looked more uncomfortable than the Premier did in whatever garbage luxury car he owned before he traded up to his current 250,000$ Maserati. He's not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination but no amount of prefacing his public appearances with "I disagree with my party over everything they stand for" can erase that not-entirely-unfounded sensation we all have that at the first opportunity his leader will drive the nation headlong into a reactionary dystopia.
But it's important to bear in mind that Westcott's not running for Stephen Harper; he's moreso running against the ABC campaign and its mastermind, Premier Danny Williams. Westcott has been the Holmes to Williams' Moriarty more than enough in the past for his candidacy to take on an almost cinematic feeling, especially since all of Westcott's public statements make a point of highlighting that his candidacy hearkens back to the battles of the National Convention in the 1940s. Stephen Harper is - regardless of whether or not it's a good thing - about to win another (probably majority) government, and if we elect to follow the pied piper of the ABC campaign through this storm, the province will be shutting itself out of having any representation in the cabinet of a federal government that already disdains Atlantic Canada. Considering that the alternative is that we'll be left at the beck and call of a comically inept provincial government here in Danny Williams' Hermit Kingdom, Westcott's pleas for us to swallow our revulsion at Harper's regressive policies in order to get a seat at the control panel of government before we end up like Quebec in 1995 shouldn't be discarded out of hand.
I'd go on but I can't bring myself to explicitly endorse a Conservative, even if he does occasionally sign my paycheques.
Jack Harris (NDP) - Jack Harris is really the only "good" candidate running in the city in this election. I say "good" because he has everything going for him you'd expect to find amongst anyone running for a major federal party. While he may not be quite as sharp on resource economics and concrete policy issues as someone like Craig Westcott, he also doesn't look visibly uncomfortable whenever he has to tow the party line. While he may not have quite the same level of money backing him like Siobhan Coady, he is also able to interact with his constituents in a non-robotic manner. And while he may not have the same level of executive experience as someone like Walter Noel, he also isn't scum.
In fact, the only real problem I can see with Jack Harris' campaign is that he's such a good candidate for his party and his riding and that his election is such a shoe in that it's boring. There's nothing interesting or noteworthy about Jack Harris, his campaign, or anything he'd do in the House of Commons. This is probably great for most people, but I'll be deep down in the cold, cold ground before I vote for someone sensible.
Howard Story (Green) - Much like his counterpart in St. John's South/Mount Pearl, Howard Story is a great guy with brilliant ideas and pointed conviction about the environment and systemic problems that none of the other candidates or parties seem to be taking much note of. But unfortunately for him his party is relegated even further back in the depths of leftist irrelevency than the NDP in the minds of most Newfoundlanders, so there's little point even discussing him. If nothing else, fans of Lost will appreciate him for his uncanny resemblance to popular anti-hero John Locke; if I may hand him some helpful advice via the internet it would be to start talking about how important it is to do whatever it takes to "save the Island."
Les Coltas (NL First) - his grammer are good!
Shannon Tobin (PC) - I have nothing bad to say about Shannon Tobin. He's the little candidate that could; he's a twenty-something fresh out of university who has too little experience to grasp basic policy issues, let alone the complex economic development issues (i.e. the Lower Churchill) that he's crusading for. He's got no district association and his federal party is only running a handful of candidates across the country, most of them are older than Tobin by half a century. His entire campaign is to appeal to the disaffected elderly who have been writing "Joe Clark" on their ballots since 2004 and who will live and die by the letters "ABC." He goes to public functions up against professional business people, journalists and politicians who have more years of experience being knowledgeable public figures than he's physically spent being alive, but he doesn't lose his nerve and he'll quote historical figures like Edmund Burke and Peter Cashin and spew Danny Williams' talking points like the best of provincial cabinet ministers. Say what you will, this kid has balls.
Shannon Tobin is running in the 2008 federal election powered only by his love of Newfoundland and Labrador, and by proxy its Glorious Premier Danny Williams. If you don't vote for Shannon Tobin, you hate Danny Williams. I hope everyone keeps that in mind this election day.
-----------------------------------
So as we move through the next 12 days before the day where you make your monumental decision to give a federal party 1.75$, I hope you'll consider my expert analysis and general words of wisdom about the candidates vying to represent you, the urban Newfoundlander, in Parliament for the next 4 years. Unlike Danny Williams, I won't tell you how to vote; all I will say is that I wish the Conservatives would drop this talking point because it's the dumbest thing in the world and that "not telling you how to vote" would invalidate the entire premise of campaigning and make this whole election an exercise in foolishness.
Huh.
That said, doing your civic duty is extremely hard, especially in situations where none of the candidates are especially appealing and complicated issues like environmental sustainability and the economy dominate most political debates.
For times like these, the best idea is usually to let someone else do all the research for you and then tell you how to vote. Residents of St. John's/Mount Pearl, I am here to help you with just that.
So after weeks of painstaking research into the candidates vying to represent the urban portion of the Avalon, I have crafted such a perfect guide to this election that to simply look upon it may physically be too much for small children and the elderly.
Without further ado, here is the only information source you will ever need to consult before heading into the ballot box on Tuesday morning.
-----------------------------------
ST. JOHN'S SOUTH-MOUNT PEARL
Siobhan Coady (L) - an ardent believer that "third time's the charm" is more than just folksy wisdom, perennial Liberal candidate Siobhan Coady is again running for a federal seat in the hopes that during an election where the premier of the province is actively registering third parties with Elections Canada in order to defeat her Conservative opponent, she may finally have a shot. Not that Siobhan is especially unqualified - she has smashed through a few notable glass ceilings in her business career, which is no small feat - and while she wouldn't necessarily make a bad MP, voters in the riding have consistently shown they have trouble swallowing the Siobhan Coady package. While there are a number of valid arguments against voting Liberal in this election, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Siobhan's main issue in this campaign is herself.
Shaking hands with Siobhan Coady is like shaking hands with the captain of the team who you just beat at soccer in 5th grade - he's smiling and saying "great game" but you know in the back of your mind that it's so tremendously insincere that it comes off as grating. This is Siobhan Coady's problem - she's so firmly trapped in the Uncanny Valley that every time she reminds you that she will "never give up, never give in" and flashes that insidious little smile, you can't help but feel like 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper in They Live after he finds the magic sunglasses. If you get that reference, congratulations, you've got as bad a taste in movies as I do.
Merv Wiseman (C) - Merv Wiseman is the only candidate running in this election that I have absolutely nothing to say about. That's how much I know about Merv Wiseman. Presumably, this is reflective of how hard Merv Wiseman is trying to win this election.
Ryan Cleary (NDP) - when I first heard that Ryan Cleary was running in Mount Pearl for the NDP I was honestly intrigued, although I brushed it off with "he's far too abrasive, he'll never win the nomination." Then a cohort of mine who attended the nomination informed me that Cleary delivered a passionate speech that sealed his nomination and I thought "my God, he might have a chance." I hadn't heard Cleary speak since the Trust and Confidence Rally in 2007 at Confederation Building where he delivered a heartfelt polemic on the injustices facing Newfoundland within our union with Canada that was so intense I almost felt my heartstrings flutter; considering that his main competition is a woman whose speeches sound more contrived and superficial than the dialogue you'd see on Springer, I figured that Ryan Cleary may legitimately find himself with a real job.
This is before Ryan Cleary was forced into a crash-diet of nothing but his own words right from the beginning of the election, and now he seems so intellectually malnourished that his only talking points on the campaign trail are lame protests against the Green Shift and quasi-incomprehensible monologues about his new-found love for Jack Layton that usually sound as if they're being delivered by a Will Farrell character. The only way to describe Cleary's entire campaign so far is "half-assed", which is disappointing because while I don't care for Cleary himself I know he's capable of doing a much better job. If I was Ivan Morgan, I'd put down the Purity biscuits and start cracking the whip at this point, because as far as I've seen there is no legitimate reason to vote for Ryan Cleary.
Ted Warren (Green) - Ted Warren is the best candidate in this riding by a long shot, and probably one of the best candidates running in the province. But you've never heard of him and you're not going to vote for him, so the fact that Mr. Warren is one of the most brilliant and eloquent minds I've seen run in politics for years is completely moot.
Greg Byrne (NL First) - ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
ST. JOHN'S EAST
Walter Noel (L) - Walter Noel blows. If I were a Liberal in St. John's East I'd be tempted to hang myself if Walter wasn't so cartoonishly terrible he looped around and became hilarious. There are no questions directed at Walter Noel that don't end with him giving long winded explanations about why spending 8,000$ of public money on alcohol is completely justified because "there was no law against it at the time", and his only pet cause in this election is seeing to it that a 92$ million dollar tunnel is built to an island with a population of 200 that hasn't seen the creation of a single new job since Joseph R. Smallwood stalked the corridors of Confederation Building. On the rare occasion that Walter Noel is asked about something other than his personal flaws he usually responds by reading a few pages out of the Liberal platform book and then rambling on about how the Liberal Party of Canada is the only way to stop the NDP's stealth communism and that Jack Harris is a crook. Considering that Walter Noel looks and sounds like a '50s newscaster was molested by a Dick Tracy villain voiced by Skeletor from He-Man this doesn't even seem that out of place. Walter Noel really, really sucks.
And yet, he was still a better choice than Debbie Hanlon.
Craig Westcott (C) - you can live to see the days where the sun shall be darkened and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken loose, and I can guarantee you that you will never see someone look as uncomfortable running in a federal election as Craig Westcott. When asked to explain why his party holds policies even the Golden Horde would balk at he will usually mumble a few lines from Conservative briefing notes into the nearest mic, and the entire time Stockwell Day was giving a press conference about the need to crack down on young offenders in order to stop a coming epidemic of gang violence in outport Newfoundland Westcott looked more uncomfortable than the Premier did in whatever garbage luxury car he owned before he traded up to his current 250,000$ Maserati. He's not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination but no amount of prefacing his public appearances with "I disagree with my party over everything they stand for" can erase that not-entirely-unfounded sensation we all have that at the first opportunity his leader will drive the nation headlong into a reactionary dystopia.
But it's important to bear in mind that Westcott's not running for Stephen Harper; he's moreso running against the ABC campaign and its mastermind, Premier Danny Williams. Westcott has been the Holmes to Williams' Moriarty more than enough in the past for his candidacy to take on an almost cinematic feeling, especially since all of Westcott's public statements make a point of highlighting that his candidacy hearkens back to the battles of the National Convention in the 1940s. Stephen Harper is - regardless of whether or not it's a good thing - about to win another (probably majority) government, and if we elect to follow the pied piper of the ABC campaign through this storm, the province will be shutting itself out of having any representation in the cabinet of a federal government that already disdains Atlantic Canada. Considering that the alternative is that we'll be left at the beck and call of a comically inept provincial government here in Danny Williams' Hermit Kingdom, Westcott's pleas for us to swallow our revulsion at Harper's regressive policies in order to get a seat at the control panel of government before we end up like Quebec in 1995 shouldn't be discarded out of hand.
I'd go on but I can't bring myself to explicitly endorse a Conservative, even if he does occasionally sign my paycheques.
Jack Harris (NDP) - Jack Harris is really the only "good" candidate running in the city in this election. I say "good" because he has everything going for him you'd expect to find amongst anyone running for a major federal party. While he may not be quite as sharp on resource economics and concrete policy issues as someone like Craig Westcott, he also doesn't look visibly uncomfortable whenever he has to tow the party line. While he may not have quite the same level of money backing him like Siobhan Coady, he is also able to interact with his constituents in a non-robotic manner. And while he may not have the same level of executive experience as someone like Walter Noel, he also isn't scum.
In fact, the only real problem I can see with Jack Harris' campaign is that he's such a good candidate for his party and his riding and that his election is such a shoe in that it's boring. There's nothing interesting or noteworthy about Jack Harris, his campaign, or anything he'd do in the House of Commons. This is probably great for most people, but I'll be deep down in the cold, cold ground before I vote for someone sensible.
Howard Story (Green) - Much like his counterpart in St. John's South/Mount Pearl, Howard Story is a great guy with brilliant ideas and pointed conviction about the environment and systemic problems that none of the other candidates or parties seem to be taking much note of. But unfortunately for him his party is relegated even further back in the depths of leftist irrelevency than the NDP in the minds of most Newfoundlanders, so there's little point even discussing him. If nothing else, fans of Lost will appreciate him for his uncanny resemblance to popular anti-hero John Locke; if I may hand him some helpful advice via the internet it would be to start talking about how important it is to do whatever it takes to "save the Island."
Les Coltas (NL First) - his grammer are good!
Shannon Tobin (PC) - I have nothing bad to say about Shannon Tobin. He's the little candidate that could; he's a twenty-something fresh out of university who has too little experience to grasp basic policy issues, let alone the complex economic development issues (i.e. the Lower Churchill) that he's crusading for. He's got no district association and his federal party is only running a handful of candidates across the country, most of them are older than Tobin by half a century. His entire campaign is to appeal to the disaffected elderly who have been writing "Joe Clark" on their ballots since 2004 and who will live and die by the letters "ABC." He goes to public functions up against professional business people, journalists and politicians who have more years of experience being knowledgeable public figures than he's physically spent being alive, but he doesn't lose his nerve and he'll quote historical figures like Edmund Burke and Peter Cashin and spew Danny Williams' talking points like the best of provincial cabinet ministers. Say what you will, this kid has balls.
Shannon Tobin is running in the 2008 federal election powered only by his love of Newfoundland and Labrador, and by proxy its Glorious Premier Danny Williams. If you don't vote for Shannon Tobin, you hate Danny Williams. I hope everyone keeps that in mind this election day.
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So as we move through the next 12 days before the day where you make your monumental decision to give a federal party 1.75$, I hope you'll consider my expert analysis and general words of wisdom about the candidates vying to represent you, the urban Newfoundlander, in Parliament for the next 4 years. Unlike Danny Williams, I won't tell you how to vote; all I will say is that I wish the Conservatives would drop this talking point because it's the dumbest thing in the world and that "not telling you how to vote" would invalidate the entire premise of campaigning and make this whole election an exercise in foolishness.
Huh.
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