Bet on Conservatives to always go against the crowd, trying to demonstrate originality but always doing so in the most egregious way, and you’ll never be disappointed.
And this was the case with one of the National Post Full Comment columns for today, titled “Layton’s death turns into a thoroughly public spectacle”, where Christie Blatchford, a journalist some would describe as ultra-conservative, lambasted the Canadian public for making a spectacle out of Jack Layton’s death.
Whoa, oh no she didn’t! What did she just say?
Let’s review. She wrote:
“How fitting that his death should have been turned into such a thoroughly public spectacle, where from early morn Monday, television anchors donned their most funereal faces, producers dug out the heavy organ music, reporters who would never dream of addressing any other politician by first name only were proudly calling him “Jack” and even serious journalists like Evan Solomon of the CBC repeatedly spoke of the difficulty “as we all try to cope” with the news of Mr. Layton’s death.”
Now I know conservatives see almost everything from religion to diapers through a narrow moralistic lens, but what exactly is wrong with a lot of people mourning the passing of a great civil servant?
I would understand if people started to, say, sell “Union Jack” T-shirts after his funeral, or mourn for a whole year, people who never even met Jack Layton, or building a statue for him a month from his death. Yes, that would be excessive and some of Christie’s arguments would have been valid. Like this one:
“In truth, none of that is remotely unusual, or spontaneous, but rather the norm in the modern world, and it has been thus since Princess Diana died, the phenomenon now fed if not led online. People the planet over routinely weep for those they have never met and in some instances likely never much thought about before; what once would have been deemed mawkish is now considered perfectly appropriate.”
But this is not the case. Jack Layton’s death happened twenty-four hours ago, not enough time in my opinion to criticize the reaction of the public to the news.
I think the problem rests with the way conservatives look at their fellow Canadians. Quick to criticize, they point out the moral relativism of Liberals and blame them for almost every economic policy gone wrong; they claim the NDP are a bunch of entitlement cry-baby socialists and refer to the Greens as largely irrelevant. Let us not mention what they think about the Bloc.
Fortunately, there plenty of comments on her article online, found here, to more than make up for my modest response. People, both on the left and on the right, spoke out against her narrow tirade. In particular against her criticism of Layton’s letter to Canadians, goes like this:
“The letter is full of such sophistry as ‘We can restore our good name in the world,’ as though it is a given Canada has somehow lost that, bumper-sticker slogans of the ‘love is better than anger’ ilk and ruthlessly partisan politicking (‘You decided that the way to replace Canada’s Conservative federal government with something better was by working together with progressive-minded Canadians across the country,’ he said in the section meant for Quebecers).”
“The letter is vainglorious too. Who thinks to leave a 1,000-word missive meant for public consumption and released by his family and the party mid-day, happily just as Mr. Solomon and his fellows were in danger of running out of pap? Who seriously writes of himself, ‘All my life I have worked to make things better’?”
Really, Christie, critiquing just for the sake of being controversial and remaining relevant is not really a sign of good journalism. In fact it only precipitates the reverse: irrelevance and writing impotency.
So Christie can claw her way up the journalistic ladder if she wants, but no matter how good her writing is, or how controversial, it will only make Jack Layton even more revered and more respected and his demise even more tragic.
The mourning of his death should not be held as in contempt of decency, and reverence of his person should not be compared with mindless religious worship.
Jack deserves better than that.
