A snooty, over-privileged hack fights back!

In today's Globe, Order of Canada member John Fraser fires back at Margaret Wente's demolition of the Governor-General's Scandinavian junket that I mentioned a few days ago. It's pretty inept though; unable to adequately address the central charge that the trip was a navel-gazing ego-trip for a bunch of cultural elitists, he instead constructs a straw Margaret he can smack around.

For example, one line in Wente's column mentioned laying a wreath at a war memorial: "There were wreaths to lay at tombs of unknown soldiers and reindeer farms to inspect." Fraser's response is to accuse her of mocking the laying of wreaths and even hints she disrespects fallen soldiers:

Along with her distaste for what she sees as vice-regal hauteur and fiscal profligacy, the derisive contempt Ms. Wente summoned up for those silly little symbolic things a governor-general is expected to do -- such as laying a wreath at a war memorial -- was particularly telling. I mean soldiers who are so negligent as to die unidentified hardly deserve the inflated prose Adrienne Clarkson wrote and then spoke in Ottawa at the burial of an Unknown Soldier:

Here he cuts and pastes a speech of the GG's that displays how deep and sensitive she is -- 464 words of it! (It looks like blogging is having an effect on big media.) So what's he trying to say with this? That it's okay to blow $5 million of other people's money if along the way you lay a wreath in a foreign country? Would my wife let me off the hook if I charged a trip to France on our Visa, but solemnly visited a military gravesite while I was there?

In the small amount of space he has left Fraser rewrites the points of Wente's column in a childish tone, sprinkling the word stupid around liberally:

And why doesn't the Governor-General's husband just shut up? Who on earth wants to hear his ruminations on citizenship or Canada's ridiculous place in the world? In Ms. Wente's worldview, we are almost as stupid a little country as those other stupid little countries, with our very own stupid little vice-regal couple going on and on about our stupid vast and empty acres of northland, buzzing as it does with all those irritating and stupid little mosquitoes and stupid little writers like Jane Urquhart.

Yes, this is what the thoughtful defense of Canada's cultural elite by another member of the cultural elite looks like. And I love this line:

What on earth do we have to learn from a speck on the map like Finland, stuck by the whims of history and geography right next door to a behemoth of a country that is constantly on the verge of overwhelming its economy and culture?

Gotta weave some reflexive anti-Americanism in there, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Fraser concludes with the classic salve of schoolyard hurt feelings, "You're just jealous!"

It was always in the works that when their term in office was winding down, no matter what they had accomplished, no matter how hard they tried and succeeded in transcending the traditional Canadian penchant for self-loathing and nit-picking, no matter how well they had revived and strengthened the office of Governor-General, no matter how eloquently she evoked national self-esteem, Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul would have to face the wrath of those who always wanted to see them falter and fall. They both have strong personalities and strong views. They both are passionate about the country they were appointed to represent. How dare they! Who the hell do they think they are?

This is such a bad piece, it's a wonder any editor could be desperate enough for content that they would print it. It jumps randomly between the writer's voice and the supposed voice of the writer's subject (as in the above paragraph), uses a long, long quote for the flimsiest of reasons, and is, well ... childish. And it's from the Master of Massey College and a former Globe and Mail journalist. The cultural elites ain't what they used to be.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at February 24, 2004 02:16 PM | TrackBack