The future is uncertain by definition. Yet our leaders and public figures often envision a future that’s just an unimaginative version of the past — the equivalent of a bloated software upgrade.
Selling this kind of low-rent futurism often takes a bit a spin.
Last week, Premier Christy Clark praised a recently deceased premier for initiating the Site C Dam Project. “Premier Bennett, you got it started and I will get it finished,” she said at his memorial service. “I will get it past the point of no return.”
Former broadcaster Rafe Mair assailed Clark for “playing Site C politics at Bennett’s funeral” and her “ghastly distortion of the truth.”
Mair should know, he was a cabinet minister in Bennett’s Socred government. A succession of B.C. premiers from Dave Barrett to Ujjal Dosanjh all had the opportunity to approve Site C and did not, he observed in The Common Sense Canadian. Who did? None other than Premier Gordon Campbell. His successor, Christy Clark, confirmed it.
Site C, subsidized by the B.C. taxpayer to the tune of $10 billion, is intended to supply yet-to-be energy to B.C.’s still-vaporous LNG economy. Yet with more bad news for the Liberal government’s optimistic energy projections, in the form of Royal Dutch Shell’s postponement of a decision on a LNG plant in Kitimat, Clark’s brave face is starting to look as unmoored from reality as the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
World-wide the traditional energy sector is under pressure from collapsing prices, cost-competitive alternative energy technology, divestment campaigns, and indigenous resistance to ecologically-damaging resource extraction. By embracing the fossil fuelish past, the premier stands with her back to a more sustainable future. On an overheating planet, such a posture is not rational — or even profitable — in the long term.
Speaking of strange postures from the past, you can’t beat the rhetorical Yoga of “pickup guru” Daryush Valizadeh, aka Roosh V. The author of Bang: The Pickup Bible That Helps You Get More Lays laments online about the Herculean efforts by nice guys like him to successfully nail young women who don’t deserve such attention in the first place. (Among his progressive ideas is the legalization of rape on private property.)
The 37-year old blogger and author, who lives in the basement of his mother’s house, floated trial balloons for worldwide meetups of proudly hetero men on Feb. 6, which were abandoned out of “security fears.” I recall one commentator insisting these meetups be outlawed for their “dangerous idiocy,” a standard for male-dominated social gatherings that would likely nix everything from the Westboro Baptist Church to Kevin O’Leary’s threatened Tory leadership campaign.
Roosh V’s website, “Return of Kings,” has a fittingly medieval ring to it. I’d like to believe the irony-free asshats who follow this site aren’t harbingers of a Road Warrior-like future in which women are tradable commodities, but rather outliers from The Island of Misfit Toys.
Not that there aren’t some backward-looking attitudes at work among the opposite sex, if you extrapolate from the trial of a certain former CBC broadcast host. Last week’s courtroom testimony highlighted incongruous details from two plaintiffs courtesy time-stamped digital documents from the defence. Among them was a playful email by the first plaintiff to Jian Ghomeshi, which included a photo of herself in a string bikini — sent a year and a half after her alleged assault. Another was a selfie of the second plaintiff, actress Lucy DeCoutere, cuddling with Ghomeshi days after he allegedly slapped and choked her. The latter also admitted in court to sending him a photo of herself simulating fellatio on a beer bottle afterwards.
Ghomeshi’s S/M lifestyle preferences aren’t in doubt, not after the novel way he defended himself to colleagues (CBC executives bounced him from Mothercorp after he showed them a video of supposedly consensual rough sex between himself and a partner). What is in doubt is the rubbery kind of feminism typified by women who interacted affectionately with a man after encounters they believe warranted police and judicial involvement.
I’d like to think of Clark’s stillborn LNG economy, Soosh V’s medieval bromancing, and the Ghomeshi fracas as relics of the 20th century — anthropological curiousities of thinking and behaving. That said, I don’t expect mass behaviour to be reformed anytime soon by revolution, robotics, or reason.
