Pushing Daisies in Partisan Politics: WWJD?

It did not have to be this way, but to imagine another approach is to misunderstand the Harper government.  It does not know how to do politics or public policy another way.  

There is a dark and deep "them-against-us" mentality that pervades almost every move the government makes, in domestic or foreign policy.  It is perhaps one reason why former finance Minister Jim Flaherty's death has been so lamented.

He could tell a joke, including on himself, which made him stand out in a government that is utterly without humour.

Over the past week I was in Germany, commemorating the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp with survivors, their family and various state officials.  Among the group was Chat Bowen, a former World War II pilot in the US Airforce who is one of The Lost Airmen of Buchenwald.

Chat tells a great tale of this one time when he was separated from his fellows in Buchenwald by the SS and placed before a firing squad.  The SS figured the 168 Allied Airmen they'd thrown into the Camp against the conditions of the Geneva Convention would have valuable insight to help them turn around a war that increasingly wasn't going in their favour.

You have to have met Chat to really understand what comes next but let me assure you, I believe the story exactly as Chat relays it.

According to Chat, his first comment was "what, it takes 20 of you for just little old me?"

The SS shouted at him stamped their feet and shouted their questions, threatening to shoot him at any second.  The more they aggressively pushed him, the more he found himself laughing.

"I found this complete calm come over me," Chat said in conversation over the weekend. "I flat-lined, I figured I was already dead.  So I said to them 'Go ahead - I know where I'm going and I know where you're going, and you've got a long road ahead of ya.'"

Chat is a practicing Christian who believes the Bible as literal truth.  I disagree with him on that, but you simply cannot argue with the philosophy he has developed concerning life.

So long as he's on the right side of the green grass, he says, there's not much that can upset him.  Cribbing the Dalai Lama he likes to say "if you've got a problem, solve it, and if you can't solve it then how's it a problem?"

Chat defeated the SS who lined him up for execution that day.  They smacked him and sent him back to the others, but he survived.  Even if they had killed him, the seed he planted that day would have come back to haunt them.  

He has continued in the same vane since that day, sharing his story and the lessons it tells, encouraging others to laugh, remember what truly matters and enjoy every minute that you're "vertical and on the green side of the grass."  He has a great deal to say against hate, too.  Hate, he says, is such a waste of energy.  It makes you sick.  He cannot do that to himself, much less to others.  He laughs instead.

None of what we see in modern politics is anywhere near as bad as what the Nazis did - but it's getting worse.  We've always used attacks, but they're becoming more deeply personal.  Hate, political advisers will tell us, is a purifying force.

Partisans are increasingly carving the population into ethnic blocks and targeting them for specific purposes.  All Parties are focusing on propaganda under the term of "attack ads."  

They're all portraying their leaders as the only one who can save everyone else from, well, each other.  Divide and conquer, etc.

It's almost like they don't know how to do anything else.  So engrossed in the game they have become that they are blind to any other alternative.

More than a few partisans on either side of the divide are practicing Christians yet, when it comes to politics, seem more willing to act like Caiaphas.  Instead of seeking to heal troubles within our faltering, power-centric political system, they would fight against anyone who seeks to break the silos that have fed them well for so long.

Why?  What's their end goal?  Is it absolute power?  To what end?

Stephen Harper and many of his Cabinet wolves are practicing Christians that supposedly believe the tenets of their faith - one that, notably, has this fella called Christ at its centre.

Would Jesus Christ have supported the Fair Elections Act?  Would he be as focused on throwing disenfranchised Canadians into the deep end and see how they swim on their own?  Would he have been proactively seeking ways to belittle his opponents so as to force them to cooperate with him world view?  Would he have been pushing the masses to put coin into his PR machine to fight back with more ads?

Where would Jesus have placed himself if he'd been in Buchenwald with Chat - with the SS, or in the line of fire?

Too many of our Political People have lost their faith and don't even realize it.  The cognitive dissonance must be terrible, given the amount of self-serving confabulation they put out.

Spin it as they may, though, the truth would be thus - if Jesus were around today, it would be them he'd be standing against.

It's time these political people stop asking whose on their side now and spend some time thinking about whose side they'll be on when they're horizontal on the brown side of the grass.

Political Skyfall

Skyfall is where we start

A thousand miles and poles apart

Where worlds cllide and days are dark

You may have my number, You can take my name

But you'll never have my heart.

Listening to the beautiful theme from Skyfall while reading the morning news got me thinking about Canadian Politics.  As secret emails and whispers of political hit-lists become public, the average citizen is getting a dark look at the process behind our politics and it's not a pretty sight.

Arrogant agents gone rogue, or acting with the tacit permission of eye-turning political bosses.  Truths being buried, forgotten and spun.  Tales of money lost, of individuals threatened and a select few people living by a set of rules that differ from what's expected of the average public.  Then there is the messaging, the carefully crafted turns of phrase designed to communicate in one direction only.You know the rules of the game; you've been playing it long enough.

You'd be surprised how many political operatives see themselves as pseudo James Bonds; tough, competitive, willing to do what needs done in a dark world to keep the forces of evil at bay, or to keep their own team in power.  They stand tall, frequently drink hard, and are extremely confident in their ability to do what they do - it just happens that what they do isn't very nice.

To them, the world's not a particularly nice place.  It's full of operators just like them, playing to win; spying on Brazilian Presidents, issuing deliberately misleading robocalls, parodying then cribbing Opponents' policies, playing one segment of the population against the other to secure votes are all just tricks of the trade.  There's no middle ground in this game; you win or lose, and if you're not willing to do what it takes, someone else will.

That, political people will tell you, is the uncomfortable truth that people don't want to hear - politics is an ugly business.  Attack ads are used for one simple reason - they are effective.  Nobody likes to talk about this reality, but it remains the reality none the less.  Politics is war and someone's got to do the bloody work, which is why we have War Rooms, isn't it?

When you see yourself as the tip of the spear, you see yourself as doing the essential dirty work that others don't want to get their hands dirty with.  As such, there are certain compensations one feels entitled to.  

Bond abuses the public purse for the finery to which he feels entitled; he treats the bits of public property that line his utility belt with abandon.  He disregards the rules of superiors to maintain the security of his country, ignoring that fine mental line between aggressive service and bloody revenge.  After all, that's the job he's paid to do - use his judgement in the field and keep threats to his employers and his country at arm's length. 

For their part, Bond's superiors are willing to give Bond a lot of leeway, because he produces results.  They tend not to worry about the destruction of public property that goes along with his methods; in fact they turn a blind eye to what he does, so long as he wins.  

Until, that is, that methodology becomes public.

That's where Skyfall finds James Bond and M - relics of a less-connected, more individually consequence-free past, operating with yesterday's code of conduct, getting in trouble for unjustifiably collected secrets and quietly unethical practices for which justification can't be spun.

That's kind of where we are with politics, too.  

Mike Duffy was hired to do a job - beat the drums of war and motivate the Conservative base to open their wallets, which they did; does that not deserve a bit of leniency on the hard-and-fast rule of political ethics?  Could that explain at least part of the story he's spinning of willful enabling by the Conservative Party?

Nigel Wright did the same; he was given a crisis to King and Party to solve and did his job.  

David Price and Sandro Lissi?  You can't train loyalty, which is why Ford brought them in.  He knew they would get the job he wanted done; broader consequences weren't an issue.  Should anything untoward come to light, the politicians just need to minimize, bait-and-switch or if all else fails, sacrifice the agent to protect the sanctity of the Party (which often as not stands in as cover for their own skins).

There are more than a few leaders attempting to pull the plausible deniability card; they didn't know what their operatives were doing, be it about scandals, video tapes or gas plants.  It's an old line, but in these days of transmedia, social murmeration and stories that seem to have legs beyond where they should,  the appearance of accountability and authenticity doesn't cut it.  People are demanding the real thing, raw and unfiltered.

Which is why the War Room spinmeisters and the bosses that enable them are facing an existential crisis.  They have operated under the convenient belief that people don't want to be consulted on process or end product; the job of politicians is to present visions that the public can choose from, period.  The rest of the political process they compare to sausage making; people don't want to know what goes into the product, they just want the product itself.  So back off, people - and let them to their work.

It's an apt metaphor, worthy following through; politics is like sausage, as are the policies they result in.  The end product is not as healthy for the people as it could and should be, largely due to the lack of transparency around what goes into making it.  In today's climate with email trails, social media and citizen investigative journalism, that process is increasingly coming to light and people don't like what they see.  

In fact, there's a growing social movement for both increased transparency of process and increased input from the general public; the more we see what goes into political sausage, the more we realize we've been duped and sustained on a diet of chum bits.  There's blood in the water; what we crave now is meaty substance.

The revelation of process doesn't reflect well on the politicians who have sanctioned War Room politics for so long.  As the cognitive dissonance of standing for one thing but practicing another reverberates more loudly, something has got to give.

This leaves the War Roomers in the same precarious place Bond finds himself over the course of Skyfall - as champions of old ways being questioned, uncertain if there is still a place for what they do.

Let the sky fall

When it crumbles

We will stand tall

Face it all

It's a question the pointy-end people have a hard time answering at face value.  Confident, competitive and aggressive, they don't get ahead by giving in to doubt or insecurity or by questioning their own tactics.  They get ahead by exploiting the doubts and insecurities of others.


These folk aren't trained to register crises of institutional faith or paradigm shifts - to them, the political landscape is just an ever-shifting battle field. 

For seasoned political operatives, the shadowy battle for public hearts and minds and against enemy Parties never ends.  Is it any wonder they fear the trend towards open government and open data?

It's no coincidence that we're seeing a growing friction between politicians and the political operatives that have served them loyally, just as it's not happenstance that this tension is mounting at a time when more and more people are recognizing that our democratic system is broken.

War Room political operatives see two-way consultations and meaningful dialogue as weaknesses, creating openings that less-civic minded opponents will exploit.  They will fight to keep the Berlin Wall of politics in place.  

Of course, change will happen - it always does.  As with any good story, the question is who will get sacrificed before the last act is over.