Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (20 page)

If Clarkson believes what she thinks she understands from this Jungian mush, I fear for us all—men, I mean. Apparently, she does. “My personal view is that the world of politics is like this because it is a male world, with male values—the worship of triumphalism, contempt for weakness, and distrust of compassion. All of these are male feelings and attributes …” There goes half the country. This isn’t the world of politics, or the world of journalism, or commerce, or science. It’s a five-cent version of adolescent feminism.

It might have been useful to have something a little closer to reality and experience, some reflections on politics and journalism, the showbiz quotient of both, and what advantages those who know the media give and take from each other. What did Chrétien receive from Clarkson? Among other gifts, her celebrity. Canadian celebrity may be low-voltage compared to its U.S. archetype, but there is some virtue for the politician who can call upon someone already known to Canadians.

Clarkson, however, emphatically says, “I despise the idea of celebrity.” Coming from one of our most famous people, this is a curious turn. I may offer it as a personal axiom that people do not choose television for a career because they wish to consolidate their anonymity. Before she became GG, Adrienne Clarkson was a very big name. She was almost as famous as Don Cherry.

As governor general, she refused to give autographs because “I could not see giving a movie-star kind of quality
to an office that should inspire respect.” I fear she freighted the office with a more austere conception of its dignity than it can bear. Authors give autographs, yet literature staggers on.

And the “movie-star quality” of the GG’s office may be the only real lever to extending its decaying impact in a media age. Clarkson’s successor, Michaëlle Jean, is going to be a powerful presence simply by virtue of the fact that her innate “star quality” now has a stage on which to exert itself.

Finally,
Heart Matters
itself will not suffer at the bookstores because it is something of a tell-all written by a celebrity who occupied the nation’s highest constitutional office.

Heart Matters
is, as I have said, a divided affair. The portion of it that is family and personal memoir has considerable charm. It shows those qualities of confidence, application, ambition, intelligence and familial affection that established Adrienne Clarkson as a successful broadcaster and made her a national presence admired by many.

Its other half, dealing with the significance of Rideau Hall as a fulcrum for national enlightenment, with its laboured esteem for the prime minister who awarded her with placement within its gilded walls and her aggressive broadsides against the less enlightened one who succeeded him, is a disappointment and a contradiction.

It is a rather too-perfect illustration of the no-longer-novel concept of the memoir as politics by other means. Paul Martin’s
Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics
is almost certainly quite the last instalment of the Chrétien—Martin wars, that decade-long internal struggle for mastery of the Liberal Party.

Mr. Martin and his loyalists ultimately prevailed in that struggle. The proud and rancorous Jean Chrétien was more or less forced, finally, to give Paul Martin his turn. The victory was a pyrrhic one, however, an almost classic illustration of a battle that so wearies the forces of a nominal victor as to turn to ashes at the very moment of ostensible triumph.

The Liberal Party is still reeling from the effects of that clash, some of whose indirect fallout was the surprising rise of Stéphane Dion to its leadership. Even the Liberals’ dismal showing in the recent election arises from the divisions and loss of coherence suffered by the party as a result of that protracted and bitter feud.

The Martin-Chrétien fight was something of a Trojan War for the Liberal Party. If Paul Martin has a story to tell, it is surely this: how, from within the party, and while serving as the highest-profile finance minister Canada has even seen, he executed the longest-running coup against a successful three-term prime minister who was himself one of the most aggressive and canny politicians ever to hold that high office.

I would have liked to have seen much more than the clipped and almost rote summary
Hell and High Water
offers of that long, ardent campaign. What a yarn it must be. How did a relatively freshman MP, albeit, as son of Paul Martin Sr., one of distinguished political lineage, effectively bring the control of the party’s apparatus under his hands? How, under the Argus gaze and jealous watch of Mr. Chrétien, did he work the slow and detailed magic of his coup? Recollect that when Mr. Chrétien finally yielded, such worthies as Brian Tobin, John Manley and Allan Rock, none of them frail egos or shy of ambition, simply whimpered away from contesting the leadership contest that resulted. Such was the near-total control of the party machinery Martin, and what, in this book, he so endearingly calls his team, had achieved.

What was it like, on a daily basis, to endure the tense equilibrium between Chrétien and Martin?
Hell or High Water
gives a few anecdotes of climatic moments when an absolute break was impending: Martin’s top aides insisting he cancel a speech to introduce one by Chrétien is a typical bland example. But even these few have been the stuff of the informed gossip of Parliament Hill for years. And what Martin does tell—naturally, I suppose, since it is his memoir—works mainly to smooth the presentation of himself, and cast Chrétien and his team as angry, petty or paranoid.

He glides past all this drama, Chrétien growling and breathing fire from his lair, while Martin and his minions (cellphone ninjas) unravel his authority piece by piece. He
and his team are portrayed in soft lights—everyone Martin works with is incredibly dedicated, brilliant, puts in superhuman hours or is charged with their leader’s vision of Canada. They are merely “preparing” for the day when Chrétien steps down. It could be a high school soap opera, not the intense, ill-tempered civil war that consumed the best energies of Canada’s “natural governing party” for a decade.

But this is not the book’s deepest reticence. The one big question is: How did it all fall apart so quickly? How did the man who was so artful on the reach for the top prove so clumsy in staying there? Martin as finance minister, Martin as leader-in-waiting, was projected as the man who would amass huge majorities, extend the Liberal Party into regions of Canada where it had been a toxic presence. He was a wider, more generous-minded public man than those who typically tread ambition’s path, the leader with a humanist vision and the embodiment of a kind of natural ease and decency that was almost prototypically Canadian.

It will not do simply to record the mischiefs and petty revenges Chrétien designed for his successor, to point to the sponsorship scandal as poison in the well from which no one could recover, as providing anything close to a full accounting of what went wrong. Nor, in Martin’s second election, does the retelling of RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli’s brutal, and almost certainly deliberate, intervention (the income trust leak) explain in any full sense why the lustre had so terribly decayed, or why watching the latter
months of his term as prime minister was, even to nonpartisans, very close to painful. The dour, “frightening” Stephen Harper, an infant in national politics, replaced him, a near giant. How did that happen?

All prime ministers are struck by political storms, all leaders are tested under fire. Something was missing in Paul Martin, whom the nation had viewed as Chrétien without the nasty edge, with a wider vision and a defter touch—so that, ambition satisfied, he suffered the painful disintegration that he did, his reputation transmuted so quickly into the cruel name bestowed by
The Economist:
Mr. Dithers.

The levers of power in his hands, what scattered his focus? Having built an agenda remarkable in range and detail—on international affairs, aboriginal issues, medicare, humanitarian intervention—why was its communication so dismal?

Mr. Martin goes nowhere near really answering these central questions.
Hell or High Water
is repair work for a reputation—renovation, not revelation. Its prose is bland, far more the catalogues and clichés of a party platform than a book of genuine personal scrutiny. He may be out of office, but he is not out of politics. Paul Martin is still campaigning.

Finally, on more personal grounds, this could have been an immensely affecting story. How hard must it have been for him, to fulfill a dream so intimately bound up with the story of his own father (elbowed aside by the arrival of that frolicsome novelty, Trudeau), and then to see it vaporize in the few months he unsteadily managed to hang on to power.

Longer than Kim Campbell and Joe Clark, but it was not merely to best the fruit-fly duration of those tenures that Mr. Martin endured the long climb to feel the “cherry knock against [his] lips” and see it drawn away again.

It would be hard telling to go to the core on these matters, but it is a real regret that he has not done so. I regard him as possessing, in a manner far more subtle than we see in most high public figures, special qualities of decency, honour and a true, deep fealty to the country he admires beyond all others. It was the glimpse of those qualities, even when he was embroiled in the long wait for the keys to 24 Sussex, that caught the admiration, and fired the expectation, of so many Canadians. I even think it true that many Canadians felt genuinely sorry that he did not really find his way, translate his dream, once he achieved power. I wish
Hell or High Water
had found the courage and the candour to unfold the real stories.

There is a lot more to Paul Martin, and a lot more to his singular career, than this too-quick apologia, this last dance with Jean Chrétien, permits us to see.

Now, here’s a mouthful:
Public Sex, Art, and Democracy
.

It’s the title of a play that has opened in a Vancouver art gallery. The climax of the play—in the classical, theatrical understanding of the word as well as in its more mundane sexual connotation—is a “Lewinsky.” Prior to the play’s performance, one of its organizers alerted the world that it would feature live oral sex—a first in Canada, so it is claimed.

On stage, I mean. Or so I surely hope.

It was also claimed that the performance—the play itself, and the performance within the performance—would be art. I presume that’s why it was getting its first run in an art gallery: to send the right signal. Much as if one stumbled across two oral sex actors in, say, Stanley Park, you might conclude they were engaged in landscape architecture. Conversely however, if the orally incontinent were caught bobbing for apples in the back seat of a parked car, the mind
would not float automatically to Rembrandt or his peers in the great artistic tradition of the West. You’d probably mutter, unappreciative boor that you are, something like “Couldn’t you wait till you got home?”

But if two sufficiently randyfied actors, artists, performers—it’s difficult to settle on the right word here—go to it in an art gallery (to the left of the soapstone carving there, and just before you get to our exhibition of Peruvian shawls), I think a cue is being given that the viewer hasn’t been transported to some wet T-shirt festival, but is actually watching something artistic.

Now, I’m all with King Lear on this: “Let copulation thrive.” But I don’t know—two people naked, busy about each other; throw in a hammock, a monkey with a bullwhip, and a crate of 10W30 crank oil, and it might even be called a party. But in this case, it’s Vancouver, and furthermore it’s an art gallery in Vancouver, and with that combination, all definitions are up for grabs.

Art appreciation, like sex, can be ticklish. Of course, the high question is: Is copulation, or any of its delightful approximations, variants, and surrogates, “art” because the “artists” charge admission to watch? We had that kind of “art” for years in New York’s Times Square and every low-rent entertainment district in North America for years—twenty-five cents a peep.

And what of the patrons? Are they “connoisseurs?” As in, “I like the way he’s fondling her back, it’s a ‘quotation’ from Tommy Lee’s early work in the famous home video
with Pamela, and I think I recognize some of the foreplay from the
Debbie Does
oeuvre.” Or are they just your garden-variety skanky voyeurs, albeit sipping Chablis?

Is it art just because it’s not in the bedroom or at the local motel? Is sex art when, by the ancient tenets of real estate, it exploits “location, location, location?” If one were to smoke in an art gallery, would you be having a cigarette or making a statement?

Subtle stuff, I know. But remember the full title of this exhibition:
Public Sex, Art, and Democracy
. The art bit I can kind of understand. But democracy? How did the voters get hauled into this grope? Is there a stage backdrop of Tiananmen Square on which the hungry amorists cast their eager silhouettes?