After well over three months of stories by dogs, dead historical figures and the late, great Pac-Man himself, I suppose you’ve finally clued in to my real identity. Yes, who could be the source of all this profound strangeness but Yann Martel himself? While I’ve been working on several projects of late – sending books to Stephen Harper every two weeks to encourage some reflection in his soul – I’ve also felt it important to explore the borders between truth, falsehoods and fiction.
Welcome to today’s short-short story…
The Street Light Laments
Dull grey plasters the horizon. High above, white trim and two patches of blue give the proof to a morning sky. Walking briskly through the cold, Stephen Harper glances up at the misshapen street light. Over the course of the two years that he has served as the Prime Minister of Canada, this street light has slowly turned its neck so that the light now shines up. The Prime Minister looks down at his feet that bang out a simple drum beat on the sidewalk. One by one, his thoughts strike the itinerary points of the day. Any mild sense of disconcertion he might have is hammered out over busy thoughts of the day. If he weren’t such a busy man, he’d have time to marvel at the strangeness of metal in motion. Why has this seemingly ordinary street light in Ottawa turned itself around? Is it in love with the radiance of the sun? Is it bemoaning the uselessness of light in the world? Is it writhing in pain for some personal reason we can’t translate into human terms? There are questions afoot but the Prime Minister – the sole witness of this strange phenomenon – ponders, for four seconds, more cuts to the arts. Then he thinks about dinner. Then: roses for Laureen on the eve of their anniversary. Then: what if Obama? This is how the Prime Minister walks, pounding his thoughts out on the sidewalk.
FAST FICTIONS ------------------------------------------------------------ a short-short story everyday 
June 11, 2008 at 6:15 am
Dear Mr. Martel,
I don’t know if it was your intention, by confessing your identity here, to invite comment on your Stephen Harper project. Your other website doesn’t allow comments, or I would have posted there last year, when you sent your first book off. So I will dare to volunteer some thoughts.
I’m not in favor. I’m not a fan. I wish you would have the good grace to stop and spare us all the spectacle.
The essential problem is this. Your real conflict with Harper is political, and you have unwisely chosen to make it personal. You condescend and psychologize, portraying the man as a shallow, reactionary philistine. In the process I think you confess your own very personal tangle of motives.
I have read quite a few of the authors you have recommended to Harper, e.g. Northrop Frye, Tolstoy, Beckett, Kafka, Saint-Exupery, Harper Lee, Art Spiegelman, Voltaire, Francoise Sagan, Agatha Christie, Orwell. Others I am familiar with in a general way (Rilke, Woolf, Aurelius). The remainder (Laura and Jenna Bush, say) are scarcely part of the Western canon, and while I may not have read them, I have read hundreds of their equivalents. I’ve studied philosophy, folklore and social anthropology, worked my way through Kant and Freud and Carl Jung and Camille Paglia, written rhyming poetry, even earned a living as a writer. I won a Toronto Star short story prize, twenty-odd years ago. So however high you set the bar for “reflection,” or “stillness,” or well-read literary enlightenment, I probably still meet it.
And having met it, I regard your basic thesis as pure bollocks. First, you should know that reading all those authors did not cause me to share your political views. Millions of other classical liberals, conservatives, and libertarians also manage to read literature without suddenly developing a passion for arts subsidies.
Second, the reason you chose to bestow all this unsolicited advice on Stephen Harper is quite obvious. It is not because he seems unreflective to you — if that was the main reason, any random truck driver or dock worker who never went to college would serve about equally well. It is because he is a sometime proponent of limited government, and skeptical about the value of arts funding. Everything in your project follows from this. In truth, you choose to treat him as unreflective because you disagree with him, not the other way round.
Mr. Harper does not need to have the idea of a novel explained to him, as you did at some pompous length. He already has his own theory of culture, which he has advanced on various occasions — see, for example, his controversial remarks on the “culture of defeat” in Atlantic Canada. The problem is that his theory of culture clashes with your own.
There is a bizarrely unreflective, almost self-parodying quality in many of your book choices, and in your explanations. You send Harper “Animal Farm” and “Maus” and “Metamorphosis” and “The Cellist of Sarajevo,” explaining each one as if to a child, as if Harper is a naif who needs to be enlightened about the political horrors of 20th-century life, as if these were signature works in a moral and political tradition you belonged to and Harper did not. The subtext you intend, I think, is that Harper has fallen into some kind of quasi-fascist ideology, from which you hope to liberate him. If only he knew how ordinary people suffered, if only he could experience beauty or joy, if only he stopped for a moment and considered the world from someone else’s point of view, he would change his own. As I said above, bollocks. You’re playing a cynical game, the old ad hominem fallacy of implying anyone who disagrees with you is just stupid.
You refer in your Kafka entry to “The dysfunctional side of the 20th century, the dread that comes from mindless work, from constant, grinding, petty regulation, the dread that comes from the greyness of urban, capitalist existence, where each one of us is no more than a lonely cog in a machine.” Your short-short story above similarly suggests that Harper lives in a kind of mechanical anomie.
This is one of those tricks that as a writer I can appreciate, even as my lip curls in contempt. The intricate doublethink involved in the sentence about Kafka nearly sent me running into the street, to accost passersby. Look at what a conniving, dishonest thing Yann Martel has done!
That sentence about Kafka is not really addressed to Stephen Harper, or to anyone with knowledge of history or economics. Neither is the short-short story. You are writing almost entirely for the benefit of your fellow artists, many of whom resent having to sell what they produce. Many Canadian artists admire dictatorships like Cuba as being “authentic” and dislike the open society of the United States as being “corporate”. They experience angst, misery, and dread under capitalism, or at least they say they do, and their works are filled with such sentiments. Margaret Atwood’s “Survival” first documented the Canadian tendency to self-pitying victim narratives a generation ago, and I find the flavor has not improved any over the years. Your peers profess to find capitalism Kafkaesque, and will nod and smile at what you wrote. But judged as an honest appeal to Stephen Harper, with his well-known views, your method of argument is stupid and futile and demeaning. You have to know it won’t work. You profess again and again to be interested in Stephen Harper’s well-being, you say you want a dialogue; you are clearly dissembling on both counts.
There was indeed a great deal of misery, angst, dread and petty regulation in the 20th century, but as I am sure Mr. Harper would explain, they were largely the product of the various flavors of statism in play at the time, especially fascism and communism. The horrors of statism are not going to be cured by increasing government involvement in the arts, or by Stephen Harper taking a more active role in ritual celebrations of the Canada Council. If you managed to get through “1984” or “The Gulag Archipelago,” you would know this. If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend them.
Even if you don’t believe me on this point, you must know Mr. Harper spent years writing about regulation and markets and the unintended consequences of government action. He has well-established and well-informed views on those subjects, which Kafka and Orwell (in the unlikely event that he hasn’t already read them) would only reinforce. So your intent here can only be rhetorical. You are playing to the crowd, using the well-worn and popular trope that Conservatives and Republicans are ignorant dolts who don’t read, that their views proceed from cultural deprivation and not from conviction. And if you actually believe that trope — some people do — then so much the worse: it means you regard half of your neighbors as mentally inferior to you.
Again: there is no chance of your “enlightening” Stephen Harper using this freshman reading list, and there is no reason for you to think otherwise, because insofar as any of your recommended books take a viewpoint on the nature of the state or arts funding, he understands their meaning perfectly well already. No amount of sudden admiration for poetry is going to suddenly alter his long-held views on political economy, nor should it. One of the features that distinguishes Mr. Harper from other politicians is that he has a very specific framework of ideas, and is known as an intellectual: apart from some comparatively modest religious commitments, and concessions he makes to the social conservative wing of the part, Mr. Harper comes across as being for political and economic freedom, wherever possible. He thinks that individualism and private enterprise are the best cure for misery, angst, dread, and petty regulation. He has no particular interest or enthusiasm for the subsidized arts, because (like the “culture of defeat” in the Maritimes), they involve a surrender of self-responsibility. But I think this is precisely what inspired you to take the route you did. It is because Harper is an intellectual, an economist, a writer of essays and speeches, that you treat him like a moron who has never read a novel. As a statist of the usual Canadian kind, you clearly have different values, and that is your privilege; but this kind of rhetorical game is demeaning even by the usual standards of Canadian statism.
Perhaps the worst element in your project is this. As the head of government, Mr. Harper has an important symbolic role to fill, as well as a practical one. For example, when he took office, he immediately flew to Kandahar, to visit the troops. This was an important symbolic gesture. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Harper or the war in Afghanistan, the visit was part of his job.
You professed in the beginning to want Mr. Harper to take a more active role in the arts, to treat them as important, to celebrate them. You wanted him to take time out of his day, at that 50th anniversary celebration, and act as a kind of father figure, or authority figure, to put his blessing and that of his government on the event. You were angry that he did not. You asked, “Do we count for nothing, you philistines, I felt like shouting down at the House. Don’t you know that Canadians love their books and songs and paintings? Do you really think we’re just parasites feeding off the honest, hard work of our fellow citizens?”
But after a year of patronizing and evasive lectures, I see very little of authentic respect left in your relationship with the Prime Minister. The symbolism you professed to be so important is scarcely going to work now, what with you tutoring him (using small words) in why capitalism is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Why in God’s name would he bother to engage you after a scene like that?
In short, Mr. Martel, there is something very ugly in what you are doing. In later years I think you will come to regret having done it. It would be one thing if you simply came out and said, “I disagree with Stephen Harper’s philosophy of self-reliance and his preference for markets, and I want more government funding and a higher profile for the arts in an expanded state system.” I could respect that, as a forthright expression of your class self-interest or what have you. Put together a petition, have all your artist friends sign it. That’s the political process. But this game you are playing just galls me, and it galls other people as well. Please stop.
Yours sincerely,
Dean Brooks
June 11, 2008 at 1:45 pm
[…] lot of fun pretending to be others. I even got a comment recently from someone thinking that I was Yann Martel. As this blog has almost reached five thousand visits I think it stands on its own and I can tell […]
June 11, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Oh, you’re not Yann Martel, you’re just channeling him. Okay, very sorry, my mistake.
But then my counsel would be: Please don’t imitate Yann Martel and his childish taunts of Stephen Harper. It’s a train wreck already, don’t encourage him.
And if anyone knows of a more appropriate place where I can break into this year-long monologue and actually address the real Yann Martel, that would be helpful too.
June 14, 2008 at 7:02 am
Who cares? Harper sucks dick!