Pity Toronto

Poor Toronto; we’re always never quite there, even though we try so hard. And by there I’m talking about our obsession with being a world-class city, whatever that connotes. The smell of our desperation is starting to get noticed though, which is worrisome for those of us who actually like Hogtown. Check out Gawker’s list of cities to move to when the Tea Party takes over America where Gawker astutely noted about our little hamlet: “there's a weird inferiority complex thing going on in Toronto that just gets a little sad after a while.”

Inferiority complex aside, however, there is something that sometimes seems a bit provincial about our beloved burg (take our reaction to Scott Conant HuffPo letter about his Scarpetta outpost at the Thomson).

Or remember when William Thorsell announced Daniel Libeskind was going to head up Renaissance ROM? At the time Libeskind with Da Shit; he had just designed the acclaimed Holocaust Musuem in Berlin AND had been hired to design the Freedom Tower which was to be built at Ground Zero. Take that New York – Toronto had him first (just like Susur Lee!). In our minds we had hit the starchitectural big leagues baby. So then we built our showy new Libeskind but then we all ended up hating it and more importantly everyone else hated it. For those with little short-term memory it was named the ugliest building of the decade by the Washington Post. To make matters even worse - by the time the ROM opened the era of starchitecture had died. The international financial crisis had led to an era architectural austerity yet there was Toronto holding the keys to an overpriced tin can.



Toronto is like that girl in your class who is the lamest member of the cool girl posse (think Gretchen in Mean Girls). True, she is still part of the cool posse, but barely so and bless her little heart – she’s always trying, clinging on to being invited to tag along. In fact she reeks of try. Toronto is like the last person to get UGGs and then proudly wears them the day Queen C declares UGGs are over. I mean – good for us, we got a Liebskind, but we opened our Libeskind the day the world zeitgeist decided that Daniel was démodé.

Le sigh for us.

Unlike for gays, however, it doesn’t get better for Toronto – first there was the whole Rob Ford thing, which I mean is sort of embarrassing from a macro-perspective, but then Roger Ebert had to pipe in with this tweet: “Toronto elects a mayor who doesn’t believe in public transit, arts funding, environment or homosexuality. Toronto?” I know most of us were hoping that we could keep a lid on the Ford thing for a bit longer, “maybe no one will notice that we, a self-proclaimed beacon of diversity, elected a Mayor who called Asian people Orientals and then made disparaging remarks about gay people?” When push comes to shove at least we could sort of gloss things over and boast about our Mayor-elect is so badass he got busted with marijuana! I know most of us were hoping that we would have at least until World Pride 2014 to deal with the issue had hand.

As if that isn’t bad enough – we’re about to become hit with “The Lake-Shore” some weird made-in Toronto reality show that features 8 of the worst (and I’m making a value judgement of these 8 people after watching their youtube auditions) people our fair city has to offer. The cast members are self-described in variants of: hardcore party animal, tease, fashionista etc… What’s even worse is they’re labelled as: the Jew, the Lebanese, the Turk, or the Italian. Just an FYI from his bio: our home-grown Italian loves to flash his hot Italian abs. Great – so not only are we going to be subjected by 8 idiots doing Jager Bombs to Shots Shots Shots by LMFAO and Lil John at Easy on the Fifth – we’re also going to be subjected by near racist epithets.

Awesome Toronto. Just f’ing awesome. And to take it up a notch – the international media is taking note: Gawker, NY Daily News, LA Times, Washington Post and Entertainment Tonight are all reporting about the Lake-Shore. One article was titled: “Canada's Lake Shore: It's Like Jersey Shore But Worse.” For a city that is constantly trying to join the big leagues of sophistication is this really what we need?

Look – I’d love a good Toronto-based reality TV show – maybe something Bay Street related? Or even a catty show about people who work in our burgeoning fashion industry – can’t someone give Robin Kay a show – that bitch would bring the CRAZY? Or what about a scripted show about rich Upper Canada boys and Branksome Hall girls – think Gossip Girl meets 90210: “Hey there Forest Hillary’s, guess who was spotted eating hummus at Mashu Mashu…”. Maybe the first episode can start with someone coming back from self-imposed exile from Lakefield or something… I don’t know… but like surely we can do something a bit cooler then copying a reality TV show based in New Jersey? I mean, really Toronto, really?

Last year I wrote that Toronto with our garbage strikes and socialites had finally become Manhattan. I take that back – Toronto has become New Jersey, the armpit of America, and quite frankly this is embarrassing for all of us. Instead of international media taking note of whatever it is we do best – we’ve taking photos of our warts and have tagged them on the Facebook that is the international news media.

Yikes.

File this one under: Nancy Drew and the case of Toronto needs a good PR person. Stat.

Toronto Not So Divided After All

Sometimes my crazyness gets published.

Wahoo.

http://www.nationalpost.com/Toronto+divided+after/3751344/story.html

Flip Flopping Part Deux – the Rob Ford Edition:

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece mocking the McGuinty Liberal government for flip flopping over their sex ed policy. I mentioned that I much preferred bedroom flip-flopping to the political kind.

For the un-initiated: In the gay world flip-flopping is when two men (let’s assume they are partners, and maybe, depending on where they live in North America lucky enough to be considered husband and husband) take turns penetrating each other. This is what we gays like to call a flip flop f*ck and this versatility is one of the many reasons, of which sharing bow-ties and face-cream are others, that being gay is super awesome. And with that I just wrote the text to my own “It Gets Better Video.” Just think of the penetrative combinations the average gay couple’s sex life includes; while who's on first is NOT a common question being asked in gay bedrooms across the nation, we do get to ask: who's doing who first?

In politics, however, a flip-flop means something completely different, obviously; and furthermore, get that visual image of Dalton McGuinty and George Smitherman flip flopping on the health tax credit out of your head. Ew. In politics flip flopping refers to political leaders who approve a policy before clawing back on said policy; this claw back is often due to demands from special interest groups.

"Dalton really flip-flopped on Transit City," would be one example of a political flip flop. Occasional flip flopping on gay porn site Sean Cody would define the gay meaning.



While McGuinty probably knew about the gay kind of flip-flopping I'm pretty sure that Mayor-Elect Rob Ford doesn't. This is probaly because Rob Ford doesn't have very many gay friends. Or at least the type of bro-friendship that would lead to a bottle of wine and late night policy session where Dalton may ask, “So… uhm… George… I’ve always wondered how it actually works.” And if you don’t believe me – my first political campaign included a car ride wherein a straight friend actually asked: so how do you avoid getting beard burn on your thighs if a dude gives you a blow job. The reality of politics is that you spend a lot of time together and ya know… you exhaust a lot of topics.

Anyway… why am I so sure that Rob Ford doesn’t have a gay friend to enlighten about the intricacies of gay sex? If Rob Ford had a gay friend I'm sure said gay friend would help Rob with his style, be like look here’s my stylist at holts and maybe for Christmas purchase him an ab-roller and or P90X.

So subsequently and unlike McGuinty I'm pretty sure that Ford knows nothing about the intricacies of hard-core male on male action specifically flip flopping. This is of course a man who has said the following about gay people and HIV/AIDS: "If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn’t get AIDS probably, that’s bottom line. These are the facts." More recently Ford referred to homosexuality as a lifestyle choice (via twitter).



Imagine the awkwardness rolling around FordHQ (which in my mind looks like Gargamel’s Castle) this morning as the Toronto Star published the following: Ford Won’t Ditch Streetcars. According to Doug Ford “that was a rumour from our competition,” even though a direct quote from Ford’s Transit Plan, A Transportation Plan that Makes Sense for Toronto, is: “We will improve traffic flow downtown by removing some streetcars. Streetcars on downtown arterial streets will be replaced with clean buses that provide the same capacity on the same routes.”

Rob Ford you old dog – you just flip-flopped. And to quote Matt Damon from the seminal movie Good Will Hunting: How do you like them apples?




Ford’s flip-flop on streetcar removal is of course no big surprise. Metrolinx, the regional transit agency, recently signed a $770 million streetcar contract with Bombardier; that is on top of a $1.22 billion purchase of 200 streetcars that the City made in 2009. Furthermore funding for Transit City, David Miller’s LRT (not streetcar) expansion project, has been committed to by the province (with a bit of help from Ford’s BFF Flaherty). Transit City routes will be owned by Metrolinx, NOT the City of Toronto. Metrolinx has a corporate Board of Directors, none of whom are politicians. For Ford to literally stop the supposed streetcar gravy train he’ll have to somehow weasel his way out these two contracts, and incur significant penalties from Bombardier, which as we all know is the Federal governments favourite Quebec-based company (oh and not to be too conspiracy crazy… but remember that Harper and the Conservative government needs all the help it can get in Quebec City…). Add all of that up together and it’s no wonder Ford has already flip-flopped on the streetcar issue. It was DOA to begin win.

That being said Torontonians do need to have a debate about streetcars, especially on King and Queen. I understand everyone’s frustrations with streetcars. As drivers they slow down through traffic, and as commuter’s they’re just not fast, flexible or big enough for our current transit needs.

Many people point to St. Clair West as an example of the failure of Miller’s Transit City potential. I beg to differ. St Clair is a failure because of significant cost over-runs (how it ballooned from a $48 million projection to $106 million project is a giant mystery) and a failure because it was sold as a transit time-saver, when in truth it only shaves 3 minutes in overall travel time. All of that being said St Clair isn’t a disaster, it was a PR misnomer.

The truth about St. Clair is that it actually facilitates cars as much if not more so then transit users.



Unlike Queen Street St. Clair now has dedicated left turning lanes. One of the big annoyances is being stuck behind a streetcar in either the centre lane or in the right lane and being unable to move as it offloads and on-loads users; this no longer happens on St. Clair. The reality is that now that construction is over – St. Clair is kind of a drivers paradise.

The other big fear mongering point that St. Clair detractors used in the recent election (especially in my Ward where pamphlets urged voters “Not to let what happened on St. Clair happen to Eglinton.” Have people lived anywhere near subway construction? [probably not… we haven’t built a subway in this city in like a decade]. If you thought St. Clair was ugly…. Try subway construction. Let’s not be so naïve as to think that an Eglinton Subway, for example, may not harm businesses along Eglinton. While tunnels can be bored using tunnel boring machines – most stations are built using cut-and cover techniques, which my dear friends means exactly like it sounds. They cut into the street, build and then cover it.
So let’s have a debate about streetcars, I’d love to see a study about having queen turn into an east only streetcar route and king westbound. Surely there are efficiencies that someone can find somewhere…

My long-winded point: the time is now for Torontonians need to have a debate about streetcars and maybe Mayor-elect Ford is winking at us gays with his latest flip-flop?

Please Don't Blame the Latte Drinkers...

Consider dearest friends, who’ve taken to Facebook and Twitter to express their outrage over Toronto’s 2010 municipal election, the reality that we’re going to have to live with Mayor Elect Rob Ford for the next four years. So the time is night to park our outrage on a colour coded sidewalk and learn to deal with apparent regime change.

The reality is that of the five main candidates for mayor (Ford, Smitherman, Rossi, Thompson and Pantelone) was there any one candidate that really excited anyone? In the ten months that we’ve had to deal with non-stop campaigning, breathless press-releases, doomsday warnings, endorsements, bad-advertising (Bocci Balls) and cock-a-many ideas (I’m looking at you Rossi) have you really been inspired by anyone’s vision for Toronto?

I ask that question even to Ford supporters (although I don’t really know any admitted Fordites); Ford’s vision consisted of stopping the quote un-quote gravy train and demanding respect for taxpayers. Anything beyond these mantra’s that was released by the Ford people was nebulous at best from a policy perspective. Destroying streetcar tracks, colour-coding sidewalks for parking purposes and slashing councillor budgets are probably not going to happen. So like Londoner’s during the Blitz – let us all keep calm and carry on.

In the ensuing cluster-fuck of post-election game playing I suspect that many people are going to argue that Toronto is now like London, England where a divided electorate oscillates between the musings of the inner city elite and demands of the exurb proletariat. We’ve already seen this supposed thesis from faux-Torontonian Richard Florida who tried to tie is aged creative class thesis to Toronto’s electoral map; the result was a downright intellectual #fail. Still the belief that a Ford win represents the triumph of the suburbs over the downtown elite will be propagated by all of us looking for answers over this undesired outcome.

Pish-posh people. The reality is that Ford polled decently well downtown; his message resonated even with us latte drinkers. You may not know of anyone who voted for Rob Ford, but almost 400,000 Torontonians did. Vote spread in the old city and suburbs hasn’t yet been published – but by my simple arithmetic (using a 64% eligibility factor) there were 440,000 eligible voters in the old City of Toronto versus 1.1 million in the inner suburbs (North York, Etobicoke, etc..); accounting for 52% turnout that means there were 220,000 votes cast in Toronto versus 550,000 thousand in the inner suburbs. Are we assuming that every voter that bothered to vote in the old city voted for George? Don’t think so… That $60 vehicle registration tax buys almost 15 grande latte’s at Starbucks. And that anti-immigrant stuff? I had a cab driver who immigrated to Toronto from Sri Lanka with a Ford sticker on his bumper… to quote Kevin O’Leary from Dragons’ Den – MONEY. Where is MY MONEY?

The reality is that people from St. Clair to Cityplace to Flemingdon Park to the Bluffs were pissed right off at City Hall. No foot in mouth antics from our fat fuck of a nearly mayor Ford was going to stop their support of him.

So anyway before we all start freaking out and drooling over Calgary’s hot young thing of a mayor, let’s pull up the bootstraps of our Hunter Wellies (for those who live downtown) and whatever it is people buy from payless (class-joke alert!) and assess what we should do next.

There are two main take-aways from last night's result:

1) Things Are Going to Be Fine – Look I will probably not be sharing bow-tie tying tips with our mayor-elect (“Rob, don’t you hate that final step when you have to make the final loop…” “I know Naymark, I find it easier with silk bow-ties versus cotton,” “oh Rob you are so right! <3”), but the man is our democratically elected Mayor and as much as I may find him distasteful he is only 1 vote on a dysfunctional council 45. His hands are somewhat tied by legalities of our provincial masters. Furthermore Toronto has a unique (I may say blessed) ability to do seemingly ok without a strong leader. We’ve kinda had mediocre mayors since the City was amalgamated (the first couple years of Miller’s regime showed promise). This may be a complacent attitude, but sometimes when I walk around downtown I can’t help but think that all of this talk of Toronto’s decline is well, a bit overwrought. If Toronto is the next Detroit – why is Cadillac Fairview spending $200 million dollars renovating the Eaton Centre and why is the Ritz Carlton opening their first Canadian hotel on Wellington, amongst other hundred of construction projects that are occurring downtown? In a sense, and this is why I don’t agree with the two Toronto thesis, Fords victory was an attempt to bridge the clear disconnect between our fiscally responsible and fairly successful corporate identity with our fiscally irresponsible and union-jammed City Hall.

2) The Lack of Leadership in this city needs to be addressed - As a city we seem to not attract the type of leadership some of us think we deserve. Why was there not a single credible candidate in the centre-left that was able to bring forth a vision of Toronto that resonated with Torontonians? Rocco Rossi’s vision (especially from his early days) never resonated with the broad public while George’s “man with a plan” was vague at best. Is the city so devoid of its own sense of self that the best and brightest in Toronto could not cobble together a single hope vision that countered Ford’s vision for a fiscally responsible municipality? Eek.

So there ya have it folks – Ford, built tough.

Sliding into Real Life and Stealing Home…

There was a big NY Times magazine article a couple of weeks ago about how your late twenties is like [sic]the worst time to be alive. Sing it sister.

Captain Obvious, the NYT, portrays the latter twenties as a time of general generational fear. No shit NYT. For the past two nights I’ve had nightmares about being on a plane that crashes into a bunch of skyscrapers right after take-off and you’re telling me that I’m scared about something? What fancy Ivy League school granted you an MBO – a Master’s in the Business of Obviousness?

According to Dr. Google my dreams can be interpreted as follows: I have high expectations for myself and am concerned that they’re not going anywhere. I like to think that the plane is evocative of my career; I am psychologically afraid about failure to launch.

While I’m willing to chalk up such alarming and overly dramatic dreams to my own neuroses there is some circumstantial evidence that being late twenty-ish isn’t the walk in Central Perk that Friends made it seem.

Sometimes it feels like going from 22 to 28 is like crossing the Rubicon from a happy-go-lucky city-state that sniffs glue into full-blown Empire that has mortgage payments on its far-flung colonies AND has to deal with the Senate that is its student loan payments [that’s a reference to Caesar that doesn’t fully work, just go with it].

Now before I get heckled for being one of those bitchy people who says stuff like: “5 years is so much older; I’m so mature and wise” let me tap in to save myself and admit that yes, everyone looks at someone five years younger and says, wow I’ve grown up so much in the last five years, I was so immature then. Just ask my sister, Bold Sharon, who is seven years older than me. While I can be found nursing a hangover most Saturday mornings, she can be found nursing her two children. So when I ask her if she likes my new haircut, she genuinely closes her eyes, takes a moment to pause while probably thinking: my brother is so immature, why does he smell like gin?

Five years is major at 18 and you look back at your geeky bar-mitzvah photo’s. Those seminal five years probably included such important life stages such as pubic hair. And truthfully at 27 – am I really that mature compared to my 23 year-old self? Not really… I mean, throw me into an open bar reception and I’m liable to get the slurs before midnight.

But still there is something about being closer to 30 then not. And I realize of course that being 27 or 28 isn’t really old. 30 is old. Just joking! Neither is old [especially since we’re all going to live to like 110], and yet – I would be remiss to not notice that there are vast different between being fresh out of college grasping an undergraduate degree and being 28 and fresh out of grad school. Something happens in those five years which make life a little bit more serious.

I ran into the daughter of a family friend the other day who is 23. She’s moving to New York to take some classes in design and then start her career in fashion; this is after spending the year in between her philosophy degree and grad school picking fruit in Australia. What is she most looking forward to? “Beginning real life…”
And that’s the trick really… at 23 you can still get away with living at home and eating fruit that your parents purchased from Harvest Wagon. Heck at 23 maybe your mom still takes you to Club Monaco every once in a while and buys you a nice new outfit. Life can be that much more frivolous when you’re 23.

By 28 that shit is cut off. Suddenly you realize that most of the people who are winning Teen Choice awards aren’t your age; they’re younger then you and they’ve achieved more success then you have or probably ever will. Not to say that aging is really the problem per se. Its not like I’ve booked myself a botox appointment for my 28th birthday.
At 23 the world is sort of your oyster; but by 28 you’re expected to have it all figured out, even if you don’t. This sense of listlessness coupled with anxiety has been identified by psychologists as the new life stage of “emerging adulthood”. Thrust into the world with a graduate degree and supposed maturity a 28 year-old isn’t really that different from your typical 23 year-old, yet there’s a looming sense that we should be. Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, who coined the term emerging adulthood, feels that twenty-something angst is deeply related to “the age 30 deadline.” That period is psychologically when we’re supposed to make life-altering choices about marriage, careers, babies etc...

I’m not sure this generational anxiety is simply about the age 30 deadline; rather it’s the fact that real life gets that much more complex as you wade through your twenties. I call this complexity the mail barometer. When I moved back home after university I cancelled my hydro, locked my apartment door for the last time and left the key in the mailbox. My most recent move required like twenty different address changes: OSAP, multiple banks, multiple visa cards, financial advisors, RRSP’s… I’m exhausted already; can’t I just watch Gossip Girl and eat pizza for dinner?

Remember when you were 8 and wondered when you were going to start getting mail like your mom and dad? That’s what being 28 is. You get mail. And most of that mail is money related.

But the root problem of being an emergent adult may be that you’re caught with one foot in the world of being a 23 year old who just wants to binge drink on weekends with another foot deeply entrenched into the mountain that is adulthood.

Straddling this chasm not only isn’t very fun; it is also exhausting. It may also lead to a groin injury and that is just simply bad for business.

Sarah Palin Just Wants You to Like Her...

My good friend Kenny once advised me after I lamented the fact that I needed everyone like me, “Buddy,” He said, “you gotta grow a bit of a thicker skin. I used to want everyone to like me, and then I sort of realized that not everyone does. Then I just stuck with people who did.”

Wise words often go on deaf ears. But much to my own dismay I've rarely been able to take Kenny’s advice to heart.

And so just the other day as I walked out of Holt Renfrew, my hair freshly cut, happily frolicking along Bloor Street, minding my own business, whistling Dixie (or whatever the current alt-rock band du jour is that I should be listening to on my iPod), I caught of a whiff of my own reflection in the highly refractive glass of the Harry Rosen window display. It was there amidst the Canada Goose coats and cashmere sweaters that I realized, with about as much as OMG as I could muster, NAYMARK NOT EVERYONE LIKES YOU.

Yes. I know. That’s right friends, there are clearly some people, who shall remain nameless, who probably can’t stand the sight of my J. Crew clad ass.

With fear and self-loathing coating my stomach I didn’t know what to do but sit down and contemplate my own nihilism over a latte at Starbucks. Life was suddenly the opposite of Sally Field’s 1984 acceptance speech for Best Oscar. Life was suddenly so much more negative: “You hate me. You really really hate me.”

Depressed and despondent I turned to a newspaper seeking distraction only to find out that the peon of the people, Government House Leader John Baird, declared that he too hated me as he railed against those damned “Toronto elites” of which surely I am one. Size queen that he is Baird was angry that us Centre of the Universts, i.e. leaders of the Liberal and NDP parties, were going to vote against the Conservative bill to abolish the long-gun registry. Such government invasiveness was deemed treason for Herr Harper’s government of the people. Baird, as you may or may not know, is a homo-sapien [jokes!] and as such has a long history of distaste for Toronto; even if as Glen Murray noted in a tweet: “Funny Baird attacking Toronto elites. Who are they? I imagine given the # of cosmos I have had with Rusty @ Byzantium he qualifies.” For those with short memories Baird once told Mayor Miller to “Fuck-off”.

But the hating didn’t stop at that I realized. The threads of elitist animonsity run deeper then a streetcar ROW track in downtown Toronto and the fury is not just an Ottawa versus Toronto thing. Anger at everything that Miller Antoinette represents is tantamunt to civil war too. Toronto’s mayoral race has seen steamrolled by an everyman candidate from Etobicoke rallying against the violent elitist beast which threatens to ruin the good shop Tarawno.

So Wwho is this steamroller? While Furious George n’est pas.

Non non les incompetents, our everyman is not a former drug addict, turned provincial health minister, turned gay adoptive parent trailblazer. Apparently our everyman is a slightly obese, “fat-fuck” who inherited a family labelling company and has sat on Toronto council for the past 10 years; mesdames and messieurs: Le Roi Roberto Ford!

L'etat c'est moi! Non! L’Eclaire Est Vous!

For the uninitiated the entire Rob Ford juggernaut has been pitched towards the anti-Toronto-elite Torontonian. Ford, with almost 45% of the decided vote, has stayed on a dedicated message for the entire campaign, rallying the car-driving, hard-working, anti-politician, Torontonian who is fed up that his garbage not being collected on time and is sick of the fact that it takes the City of Toronto like ten years to build a stupid streetcar lane, when it probably should stop build streetcars altogether, because they disrupt the flow of traffic and cause pollution. GRRR.

"Save us Rob!" 45% of us non-elite elite Torontonians are apparently screaming. Ford isn’t speaking to me because I get my hair cut at Holts and I’m almost 100% sure Rob Ford does NOT get his hair cut at Holts.

In fact if Rob and I were stuck in an elevator together I’m not entirely sure what we’d talk about; I’m actually not even sure where Etobicoke is.

“I drove a Ford rental car once.”

“Different family.”

“Oh right, of course. You been to the ballet recently?”

“No.”

But Ford’s brand of populism isn’t exactly new. Ford is stealing a page from the American politico populist playbook. A playbook so old that it can be traced beyond Brett Favre’s NFL career to the Rough Rider himself (if not earlier) and its latest incarnation is best personified by the elitist hating tsunami that is the Thrilla from Wasilla, the wise cracking Sarah Palin! Live from New York its Tina Fay!

Palin’s latest video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X67qgNtZPdQ&feature=player_embedded is simply entitled: Tea Party. It’s an ode to the Tea Party you betcha, but it also allows her nails on a chalkboard twang to yell at the public and let us know darn right just what exactly the Tea Party stands for.

And what does the Toilet Paper Party stand for? [Insert sort of violent, sort of patriotic crescendo] “It’s a ground-up call to action!” She screams. Sometimes I fucking love that bitch.

But the Tea Party has soul too, bitches: “The soul of this movement is the people; everyday American’s who grow our food, run our small businesses, teach our kids and fight our wars.” [note: if you’re gay you cannot be part of the Tea Party because you cannot fight America’s wars, because America doesn’t really allow gays in the military, unless you're gay but you don’t talk about it. ever… sawry]

And what’s the inspiration of this jizz-fest? “Real people, not politico’s, not inside the beltway professionals, speaking out for common sense conservative principles.”

But wait, there’s more: “Who can argue about a movement that is about the people that government is supposed to be working for the people; that is what this movement is about.”

Who can argue about a movement you ask SJP? Well actually I can. But first lets make fun of that last sentence for its damn good Palinsim. There are 3 that’s and 2 movements in one run-on sentence! Bless you and the monkey you rode in on.

In whatever world we now live in (perhaps it is post-September 11th, but that seems a bit démodé at this point, perhaps it is in the “web 2.0” sphere) it appears that politics is now repositioning itself around a new dichotomy. Whereas we used to have a fairly stagnant liberal versus conservative death fight, we now have segued into a contest between the “elites” and the “populists”.

But is this new reality so deceptively simple? Or are pseudo-populists simply framing the fight in their chosen language in order to discredit what they deem to be elitist progresivism?

In her book, the Armageddon Factor, Marci Macdonald describes the work of Frank Luntz an “uber strategist” in the American right wing who has become infamous for teaching Republicans how to pitch neo-conservative ideas simply by changing their verbiage. Luntz ensured that the less kooky sounding global warming became “Climate Change”, and the Democrat led estate-tax became known as a “Death Tax.” Never doubt the power of words in political discourse.

I fear that Palin’s Tea Party populism has simply replaced a different, much more dangerous vernacular. While populism sounds benign, the creeping social conservative values that Palin and her populist ilk preach are not so benevolent. Comparatively the framing of the anti-elitist mentality is a simple rebranding of the word progressive into a negatively positioned word: elite sounds bad, progressive sounds good.

Populism as I've noted isn’t entirely new to the political scene. Jean Chretien rode his pony to 24 Sussex championing “da cause of da lil guy from Shwangan” (the little guy from Shwanigan via your handy dandy JC-English dictionary); however, Chretien’s populist image was peppered with a socially progressive and fairly pro-business bent. Remember, It was Chretien and Martin who balanced the budget, cut transfer payments to provinces, cut social programs and also sliced personal and business taxes. Not exactly your Palin-esque Joe the Plumber Little Guy.

Rather, Chretien allowed us all to be “little guys” with him regardless of your geography; this, retrospectively, was the beauty of the then Big Tent Liberal Party of the late nineties. I could be a latte-drinking Toronto MBA but I could still invoke the little guy at heart.

Palin and Ford’s populism is not the same.

Da lil guy that Palin supports and her brand of populism is, to be frank, at its heart: bigoted. Beyond the small c conservative values Rob Ford is espousing in his campaign, the man is from all accounts a bigoted individual. Tossing Baird aside because he is an idiot [can I be sued for saying that?] and quite frankly an outlier (that shit wrote itself) in comparison to the much larger Tea Party and in terms of scale Ford movements, today’s new populist charge is made up of homophobic, small-minded, and anti-immigrant politicians whose world view is narrow-minded at best.

And so as progressives or elites or whomever the fuck we are I suggest that the time is nigh to beware and be aware of the so-called new-era populist, which has somehow made it shameful to be a progressively minded individual. This isn't a case of a populist revolt, or an attempt to make everyone like them; rather, it is a case of wolves in sheeps clothing. And that is dangerous, no matter what side of the fence you're sitting on.

What a Difference a Generation Makes?

I wrote this and forgot to post it... so its like a week old. Apologies, but hey... new content is new content and content is king.
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I’m pretty sure we’ll never really know if the Highfield Road Gospel Hall was specifically targeting a gay couple’s house on Highfield Ave last Sunday as they went about their merry business preaching the Gospel of Jesus or whether they were just spreading the general love of Jesus to an entire street. In many ways it doesn’t matter. The ensuing cluster-fuck and viral sensation that their preaching has become has turned into a he-preached, he-said type of ordeal. At first the story heroicized the residents of Highfield Street for protecting their gay neighbours from an act of supposed homophobia; however, the story would soon morph into one of those freedom of speech nuggets people like to argue about: the Church goers were denied their god-given [sic] right to gather and sing. After all in Canada we have the right to assemble freely.

The video of the incident is available here for those who haven’t seen it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHpiXmPWPwk

I generally don’t like getting involved in tit-for-tat debates, or making blanket statements about how proselytisers of church doctrine are probably less down with the gay-gay than your average hip-hop rapper. In fact the actual event doesn’t interest me as much as everyone’s reaction to it. Divergent reactions to the posting of the video, I believe, have exposed enormous generational cleavages in Toronto’s gay community.

The video of the incident was filmed by a 29 year-old man by the name of Geoffrey Skelding. Skelding is gay. He posted his video on YouTube with the heading of: neighbourhood kicks out religious haters. From the outset the story was framed with this clichéd bias of religious people preaching against homosexuality. Frankly this was a fairly easy narrative to buy considering most religious group’s historical opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage.

Interestingly enough, the supposed targets of the attack, Blair Chiasson and his partner, Paul Collins, have eschewed the party line. They have refused to be victimized. In an interview with the Toronto Star, Chiasson declared, ““I don’t like how the whole issue is being distorted. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.” As Blair further noted about Skilding’s video: “They took a non-issue and turned it into an issue.” The Star article pointed out that Chiasson was 45 and for some reason his age (versus Skilling’s age) struck me as inherently connected to his distaste with the event.

To me the difference between Skilding and Chiasson’s reaction seems generational; and not just in its viral nature… which is very Gen Y in and of itself. Rather, Chiasson’s desire not to talk about what happened was, in my mind, and maybe I’m reading too much into the situation, a desire not to bring attention to his own homosexuality. Now it won’t be the first time that I’ve grossly misinterpreted something, but my honest interpretation of Chiasson’s remarks to the Star was: nothing to see here folks, we’re just two normal people living our lives. Thinking back to the Star article, which clearly states Chiasson’s age, I realized that Chiasson and his partner would have come of age in the eighties, a decade when queer bathhouses were frequently raided by Toronto’s police force, queer marriage was decades away and when the concept of a Pride Parade would have been fairly foreign to anyone. Sure there we’re gay people, but sadly 1985 Toronto was a very different place for gay men.

Chiasson’s interpretation of the incident seems to me as representative of his generation’s own struggle for queer rights. Most gay men I know in their forties or fifties fall into two categories: dudes who made the struggle for queer rights an integral part of their lives or men and women who tried to quietly go about their business, climb whatever ladder they were on, all the while hoping that no one would notice that they were gay.

Skelding, who is basically my age and who is only 16 years younger than Chiasson, would have come of age up in a very different Toronto. The Toronto of the late 1990’s and early 00’s was light years ahead in terms of its acceptance of homosexual citizens. And while Toronto’s queer community may have its struggles (as the most recent Pride debacle has shown), Toronto today is probably one of the most welcoming cities for LGBTQ people on the planet. I don’t even think I’m being hyperbolic about that. We have an out gay man, George Smitherman, running to be mayor and I can’t think of reading one snarky comment about his sexual preference. Over a million people attend our Pride Parade which features TD Bank as its lead sponsor. Almost every major company that I know of has a queer affinity group in order to make sure they’re diverse enough. In 2010 Toronto Police wouldn’t be caught dead raiding bath-houses; they’re too busy planning their Pride float.

This is not meant to be a damnation of Chiasson. Rather, I think it is interesting to see how far the queer community has come in Canada in a short period of time. Certainly the fact that an entire neighbourhood was so quick to react to perceived homophobia speaks quite impressively about how Torontonians are willing to accept gay men and women; although it may speak less of our city’s appreciation of the church and church groups.