Rex Murphy: These are strange and disturbing times
There are many strange, and not a few disturbing, things transpiring in the world today.
First, I remain fascinated by the CHAZistan phenomenon, the process by which six blocks of central Seattle were taken over and occupied by protesters.
I’d like to note that CHAZistan is a very unstable republic, for in a matter of days, this infant mobocracy has even changed its name. It is now CHOPistan, though I do not see the gain there. Moreover, the original name has more of a swing to it. Its sonic harmony with the word “jazz” was a happy one, suggestive of the improvisational, free-flowing nature of emergence.
But this is small stuff. What I really cannot get past is the logic of its being. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has addressed this puzzle. A group of people, some under the banners of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, wandered into the heart of a modern city and simply proclaimed that it was theirs.
There was no “conference of the parties” — to adopt the nomenclature of the largest, most continuous and useless gabfest in the modern world — to work out a deal, or reach a common understanding. It was purely a one-sided event. The various factions simply snapped their fingers, so to speak, made their claim, set up their fences and put up their guards. And presto, it was theirs.
The city officials — who are, it must be noted, a very dim and timid bunch — simply let them have it, and up to now, it has been theirs (the city tried to dismantle CHAZistan on Friday morning but appears to have given up).
There are a great number of people who live on these six crowded blocks, and others who go to work there. Has anyone asked them if it’s OK that they are no longer part of Seattle, if they are comfortable with the current leadership, comfortable with being asked to identify themselves as they go in and out of the statelet? Do they have no problems with the nightly displays of disorder, the mob wandering around what were once their streets, the violence and the shootings?
For you see, they have, for all intents and purposes, been stripped of their very citizenship, which is, or used to be before this new madness took hold, a very big deal. They have been stripped of their security. Police are no longer allowed in. Their city, state and national government have effectively abandoned them.
I ask in the words of that most savage satirist, Ambrose Bierce, a great and neglected master of scorn, can such things be? And as I have asked before, is it now open to any knot of self-righteous protesters, whatever their cause, to assume control and ownership of a part of any city in the United States? Self-righteousness, it seems to me, is the only qualification required.
A much more petty piece of the current mindlessness occurred in Toronto recently. One Elaine (Lainey) Lui, " apparently a performer” on eTalk and The Social, recently dumped rather viciously on Jessica Mulroney. Then we found out that she herself had written a number of racist and homophobic blog posts in the past.
Having been caught, she went the easy route and did one of the plastic and contrived public apologies that are now in vogue among the woke people who get trapped in their own hypocrisy. You know the lines: I have evolved; that was my earlier self; what a dirty rotten bastard I was, but not any more, because now I am a woke saint.
The strangest part was her central excuse. Lui is of Chinese descent, but she had apparently been overwhelmed by forces outside her own heritage.
“I have been conditioned in white supremacy, and I have enabled white privilege, even as a person of colour myself, because we too, given that white supremacy is so dominant, can have bias.”
What she is really saying is that her faults and errors have nothing to do with her, with her agency, or with her outlook on the world. Instead, it was the great devouring monster of “white supremacy” that worked its hideous magic and, if only for a time (for she is better now), took her over.
This is a slippery phrase at the best of times. After all, if it’s unconscious, how do you determine it’s there?
But I digress, because the point I would like to make is that it’s even more worrisome for the CBC in particular to use this phrase, because the most egregious example of unconscious bias in modern Canadian media is the CBC itself. Not bias towards the current shibboleths of political correctness, but certainly against any opinion that diverges from the party line.
The list of ideas CBC firmly wishes to leave unexplored would take a scroll of considerable length. CBC is a closed shop to a variety of viewpoints, unconscious of its suffocating assertion of superior judgment, and not overloaded with understanding of the whole country it is mandated to support.
I could go on, but a sharp eye from a fraught editor suggests otherwise.
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