Canadian Cincinnatus

Have you seen the latest Mad Max film?

The reason I ask is that while it has the critics raving, when they actually read their description, or when I watch the trailer, it sounds and looks awful.

I will tell you where I am coming from. As a teenager, I saw the original Mad Max in the theaters and the experience was riveting. I’d seen nothing like this before. All the familiar tropes weren’t there, and a lot of things I’d never seen before were. The effect was both disturbing and electric. I eagerly awaited the sequel. When the Road Warrior came out, I was not disappointed. It was even better.

Looking back at it years later, both films still stand up, though the original Mad Max was an uneven mix of bold originality and the banal. The homoerotic villains, the Aussie accents, the nihilistic post-apocalyptic environment, and the cruel, cynical dialogue were brilliant and original. In contrast, the loving home scenes with Max’s wife and young son were pure filler. It is as if the filmmakers didn’t quite have the confidence to pull it off completely: whenever they did something creative and bold and original, they felt they had gone overboard and had to reign themselves in. The result was uneven, but brilliant in many places. In the Road Warrior, their confidence had arrived, and it was justified.

(The less said about the third film, Thunderdome, the better. It was a bloated monstrosity that had the form of the first two without any of the substance. Too much money, too many hit songs and too many pop-culture divas.)

The issue is not CGI vs. actual stunts. CGI is fine, if used properly. What separates the first two Mad Max’s from a typical action flicks is that you actually care about the characters. When Max takes revenge on the Toecutter’s gang, you cheer him on because you were shown how utterly evil they are (they ran down his three year old son with motorcycles). In the Road Warrior, it is civilization vs. the barbarians. Take the scene where Humungous (“the warrior of the wastelands, the ayatollah of rock and rollah”) and his gang menacingly park their souped-up rigs outside the compound gates to deliver their ultimatum to the townspeople. Is there a more vivid scene in the entire history of cinema that visualizes the idea of Barbarians At The Gates better?

You cared because the filmmakers sweated all the little (and cheap) details – in the stunts, the cars, the set, and the dialogue. All reinforce The Story.

Take the first meeting between Max and the Gyro Captain. This scene’s charm emanates from the cautious and cynical way they maneuver around one another. Their world is nasty, brutish and short, and they act accordingly. They don’t take foolish chances. The dialogue perfectly captures their tactical wariness. The Australian accents didn’t hurt.

When Papagallo tells everybody to get ready to evacuate the compound, what follows are a series of rapid-fire scenes showing rushed preparation. Among them are a couple of quick scenes where chickens and pigs are being corralled. It lasts mere seconds but it reinforces the story: the people in the compound are makers; those outside are takers. Again Civilization vs. Barbarians. Road Warrior contains a thousand details like this.

Another critical factor is that both films are deeply embedded within the hot rod culture. Road Warrior featured a bevy of customized cars and trucks, but every modification made automotive sense. They weren’t designed by an art director, they were made by somebody who read Hot Rod magazine. (OK, you can’t switch off a roots-type blower, but other than that…) A Mad Max knock-off I saw a few years later featured Volkswagen Beetles covered with paper mache. None of the accoutrements served any purpose but I suppose the art director loved it. That flick disappeared without a trace.

The trailer to the new Road Warrior film features a huge VW Beetle-thingie on steroids with giant, monster-truck wheels. OK, but to what practical end (other than to look cool in front of the camera)? The originals stood out because every cool car detail served a practical purpose to the characters; they were also things that people living at that time could conceivable make. (Proof of the latter is that hard-core Mad Max enthusiasts have built some of these vehicles for themselves.)

Then I saw this piece by Andrew Klavan in PJMedia, entitled, ‘Mad Max’ – the Critics are Lying for Political Reasons, which confirmed my worst suspicions.

Which is all too bad. A friend of mine had a great idea for the third Mad Max film (again, forgetting Thunderdome ever existed): a remake of Steve McQueen’s second last film, Tom Horn, where he plays an aging but legendary lawman who has lived long enough to become an anachronism. If memory serves me correctly, it took place in the 1890’s where Tom Horn’s old gunslinger ways are increasingly out of step with a West being tamed. In my friend’s Mad Max finale, Max is an aging road warrior at a time when the post-apocalyptic world is recovering. Road warriors are no longer wanted as peace and order is coming back. McQueen was 50 when he made Tom Horn. Mel Gibson is 59 – the high side of the perfect age.

Perhaps the problem with Mad Max is that the first two films were made by the duo of George Miller and Byron Kennedy, and Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983 – two years after Road Warrior. The awfulness of the third Mad Max film, and the weakness of George Miller’s subsequent career, suggests that Kennedy was the more talented half of the partnership. Was Kennedy Paul Simon to Miller’s Art Garfunkle?

So, unless I hear otherwise, this Mad Max fanatic is going to stay away from the theaters. I might not even rent Mad Max: Bigger, Louder and Dumber.

 

 

Of soccer games, HR departments and PC lynch mobs

When I was small, my parents told me stories about what it was like in the Soviet Union. One feature was that every workplace, every classroom had snitches. You could sometimes tell who they were and sometimes you couldn’t. As a standard practice, there were at least two snitches in each setting, each of whom didn’t know who the other was. That way, the authorities would know if somebody was withholding incriminating information on their classmates or co-workers. The purpose of this massive surveillance apparatus was, of course, to control speech.

Growing up in the seventies, the attitude with regard to speech couldn’t have been more opposite. Traditional prudery was dying while liberals were still running around quoting Voltaire’s famous dictum, “I may disagree with what you say but I defend with my life your right to say it.” At the time, I thought that speech codes this side of the Iron Curtain were forever impossible. Anybody who tried would be labelled a prude and run out of town on a rail.

That was then. In the ensuing decades I have watched with increasing horror as former Voltaire-quoting liberals transmogrified into the Thought Police. A revealing skirmish in the Culture War occurred just this Sunday in Toronto at a Toronto FC soccer game.

While a TV reporter was interviewing fans, she was heckled by other fans (likely drunk) who harassed her with crude, sexual comments. Instead of ignoring these taunts, the reporter confronted the goons directly with her camera and mike. Instead of backing down and apologizing, they doubled down and said even worse things. The video went viral and soon the instigators were forced to cancel their Facebook and Twitter accounts. So far, so good.

Now the troubling part: one of the foul-mouthed punks was found to work for Hydro One (a local power utility) and was fired from his (lucrative) job. Driving home from work, I heard a labour lawyer gleefully announce on the radio that just because you are not on the job, your employer has a right to hold you accountable for actions you take and words you utter in your spare time, even if it has nothing to do with your work. Huh? When did this happen? When did it become permissible for your employer to discipline you for things you said or did on your own time? It certainly wasn’t that way in the 70’s. Any Junior Gestapo type in the HR department who tried to censor your off-work speech would have been tarred and feathered. Hydro One has subsequently stated that the employee in question was fired because he had violated their ‘code of conduct’. So now employers have the right to enact ‘codes of conduct’ that cover what you do or say on your own time? Swell.

Keep in mind that the man in question was not a public representative of Hydro One (like a PR flack) nor was he doing anything related to his job or career, nor did he identify whom he worked for. While he knowingly made crude comments on TV, he never identified himself. This incident had no bearing whatsoever on his job, except for the fact that his employer made his personal business their business. All of this is corroborated by the fact that the Social Justice Warriors had to actively hunt down who he was and where he worked.

In the Toronto Sun twitter feed, there were many people who said things like “fire him, yeaaah!”, and “serves ‘im right”. I am sure that there were conservatives were among them. I have this to say to conservatives (and anybody else) who think this guy should be fired for violating old-fashioned notions of chivalry: you are a dupe. The social justice warriors have you bamboozled. This is because the reasons given by the witch hunters for firing this guy have nothing to do with gentlemanly codes of conduct towards the fairer sex. They justify their actions with concepts like ‘harassment in the workplace’ and ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘war on women’ and ‘safe spaces’. In short, they are employing the same ideas that they use to suppress free speech on university campuses.

Now clearly, the guy’s actions were wrong. So what should have been done? The cops say they are looking into the incident. I can see that he might violate some petty larceny-type misdemeanor offence like disturbing the peace or public drunkenness or indecent behaviour. Great. Then charge him and convict him and give him his $500 fine or 2 weeks in the local jail. And of course, his employer shouldn’t be any required to accommodate any incarceration time he may be awarded. But terminating somebody after his fair trial is over is different from destroying his career just because the mob is screaming mad over something he said.

The justification given to the empowerment of the HR thought police is that we want to create a ‘harassment free workplace’. This goal sounds good in theory, but in practice it means employees living in constant fear for their jobs lest they make some off-colour joke or say something that somebody subjectively determines to be harassing for obscure personal reasons. This destination looks a lot more like the Soviet Union and a lot less like the Voltairean 70’s. Who wants to work in a place like that?

Any liberty loving person should find these social and legal trends repulsive and should refuse to go along with the burn-the-witch mentality that is all too prevalent these days.

The Alberta and UK elections: how to deal with insurgencies and how not to

On May 5, Albertans voted to end the longest unbroken streak of success that a governing party has ever enjoyed in Canada. The Alberta Progressive Conservative Party had been in power for 44 years straight. Today, the NDP, a socialist party, runs Alberta. The formerly governing Progressive Conservatives, led by Jim Prentice, went from 70 seats down to 10. They aren’t even the official opposition. In contrast, the British Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, was widely expected to lose seats, possibly even losing power to the Labour Party. Defying the pundits and the pollsters, David Cameron went on to win an outright majority on May 6. I believe the difference in outcome was due to the different way they handled their respective right-wing challengers.

The Alberta PC’s were challenged on the right by the Wildrose Alliance; the British Conservatives faced off against the United Kingdom Independence Party.

The Wildrose Alliance has been around in one form or another since 2005. In the 2004 and 2008 provincial elections, it won one and zero seats respectively. However, in 2012 it jumped to 17 seats. Trouble was brewing for the PC’s and everybody knew it. After an internal struggle to remove a horrible leader - Alison Redford, the ruling Conservatives decided to do something about Wildrose. On Dec 17, 2014 Wildrose leader, Danielle Smith and eight other MLA’s crossed the floor to sit with the Progressive Conservative government. Problem solved, or so it seemed. Unfortunately for the PC’s, Wildrose climbed from 17 seats in the 2012 election to 21 seats in the 2015 election – more than making up for the defections.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, David Cameron was grappling with his own right-wing threat: UKIP. An Alberta-style decapitation strike wasn’t in the cards: UKIP hardly had any seats in Parliament (except for some Conservative turncoats). Instead, Cameron stole some of UKIP’s thunder by promising to hold a referendum on EU membership and negotiate a better deal for the UK in Europe. He also made encouraging noises on immigration. Whether he will carry through on any of this now that he has his majority remains to be seen, but it was enough to keep UKIP from toppling Conservative MP’s through vote splitting.

Until this year, the classic example of this strategy was the Australian federal election of 2004 when John Howard won his fourth term as Prime Minister. While the vote share of his Labour rivals remained steady at 38%, his vote share increased by 3.6%. How did he do this? Simple. He co-opted the program of his smaller, right-wing competitors. For instance, the One Nation Party, led by Pauline Hanson – the ‘fish and chips lady’ - saw its vote share drop by over 3%. With new, revised policies on immigration, many One Nation sympathizers voted for John Howard instead, because he was actually in a position to deliver.

The classic example of what not to do occurred in the 1993 Canadian federal elections when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives went down in flames. After winning the 1988 federal election over the US free trade deal, Mulroney chose to systematically humiliate his right-wing base. Once free trade was passed, he veered left. He instituted a value added tax, passed draconian gun-control laws, and presided over chronic sky-high deficits. If this wasn’t enough, he tried - twice - to fundamentally rework the Canadian constitution in order to enshrine left-wing labour laws, multiculturalism, socialized medicine, and an apartheid system for native Canadians into its text. Thankfully he failed. When Canada’s right inevitably revolted, he thought, where are they going to go? Where they went to was the Reform Party, which went from one seat in 1988 to 51 seats in 1993. Thanks to vote splitting, the formerly dominant Tories went from 156 seats to two in 1993. Yes, you read that right, two.

The lesson for political parties in first-past-the-post electoral systems seems to be this: if you have a challenger who competes against you for your core voters, you had better take them seriously, even if they have achieved little to date. They will continue to be unsuccessful until, all of a sudden, they are no longer. The best way to alleviate the threat is to co-opt at least part of their policies. Because the people who join protest parties are animated by principles rather than ministerial limousines, a decapitation strike - like the one Alberta Premier Jim Prentice expertly executed against Wildrose - won’t work. The absolute worst thing to do is what Brian Mulroney and his hapless successor Kim Campbell did: spit in their faces.

There is a cautionary note for the victorious David Cameron in all of this. Just because UKIP won only one seat (out of 650) in the British Parliament, it nevertheless should not be ignored. UKIP received the third highest number of votes in Britain; its problem is that its supporters are spread out evenly across the UK. The Scottish National Party only got 4.7% of the vote but, because their supporters are concentrated in Scotland, they won 56 seats. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, a party can win many votes and have nothing to show for it, until they cross some critical (but ill-marked) threshold. The thing Cameron must remember is that the Wildrose Alliance won almost no seats in its first two outings, but look where they are now – 11 seats ahead of the once-dominant Alberta Tories. Cameron had better not be as complacent with UKIP as the Alberta Tories were with Wildrose. One day, the insurgents might just cross that threshold. In 2004 and 2008, Wildrose received 9% and 6.5% of the vote respectively. In 2015, UKIP won 12.6%, so watch out David.

Patrick Brown and the power of the grassroots

On Saturday, Patrick Brown beat Christine Elliot to become the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The contrast in style when it came to their respective leadership campaigns couldn’t have been starker. Christine Elliot, the wife of former federal Conservative Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, was the odds-on favourite to be the next PC Ontario leader. She had most of the existing Conservative MPP’s in her camp. In contrast, the Queens Park press corp initially gave the 36-year old Patrick Brown – a virtually unknown Federal Conservative backbencher, and a former Barrie city councilor – almost no chance. Who is he?

When it was revealed that he signed up 40,000 new party members (frontrunner Elliot had only signed up 26,000), everybody took notice. When Christine Elliot questioned the validity of some of these members, she showed that she was worried.

What was his secret?

Like Mike Harris before him – the last successful Conservative leader in Ontario, he understood the power of the grassroots. As the National Post post-mortem relates:

“Brown showed up when he visited ridings. He didn’t just appear and make a stump speech, but he did the work. As one Tory told me, he was stunned when Brown arrived at his local riding association and not only knew the local issues but had read a party policy paper the former candidate had helped draft. He had questions about local issues and knew how to connect with voters.

That riding went for Brown when the votes rolled in Saturday and he trumped Christine Elliott’s total take.”

“By contrast, the same Tory said Elliott gave a rote speech and didn’t come briefed on local issues.”

This anecdote illustrates Patrick’s virtues, virtues that several friends of mine who were involved in his campaign have already corroborated.  He was also active in Ontario’s ethic communities. During his campaign, he went on a trade mission to India and got an endorsement from the Prime Minister of India!

What is less remembered is that Mike Harris used the same playbook when he created the underpinnings of what was to become the Common Sense Revolution. When he became the PC Party leader (while Bob Rae was Premier), he didn’t stay put in Queen’s Park. He went out on the road to sell his message to the party’s members and to listen to what they thought. He visited every riding in the province. I have been told that these meetings could be very small: seven people in a church basement in Nowheresville, but that experience served him well. He earned the loyalty of his party’s supporters and learned a lot about what was possible to do and what was not. This was experience that former PC leader Tim Hudak could have used.

My favourite part of the Netfix series, House of Cards, was the Peachoid episode, the third episode in season 1. It began with Frank Underwood entering into high-stakes negotiations with the teachers unions on a big nationwide education bill. As the meeting began, Frank’s assistant pulls him aside to tell him about some trouble brewing in his congressional district. His assistant insists that he go back to resolve the problem. When Frank protests, exclaiming that the education bill is vastly more important than some petty local issue, his assistant reminds him who sent him to Washington. Just before the opening credits, Frank is sitting in a limo going to the airport. He says, “I hate this small-ball crap.” When I saw this for the first time, I thought: this is real politics.

All too often, riding-level stuff is ignored by our parliamentary press corp. Sitting around the seat of power, they think it’s all small-ball crap out there. Unlike Frank Underwood, they forget that this is the source of Parliament’s power. The fact that the Queen’s Park press corp views grass-roots conservatives with contempt and bafflement doesn’t help them. They are the least qualified people to explain what is transpiring there. They are geographically and ideologically isolated. As a result, somebody like Patrick Brown or Mike Harris can come up from nowhere and surprise them.

Nice going Patrick. And good luck.