Via Bourque, The Tyee is campaigning for Pamela Anderson to become the next Governor-General. It’s not as frivolous as it sounds. Or better. It’s as frivolous as appropriate to the office. Here’s the case:
In addition to being female entertainers, both Clarkson and Jean are married to self-aggrandizing artiste-philosophers whose work is incomprehensible to ordinary folk.
Clarkson’s mate is writer John Ralston Saul, a supercilious swell whose essays reportedly find great favour in salons and faculty lounges from one end of Toronto to the other. Jean is wed to Jean-Daniel Lafond, a former philosophy professor who now produces films.
Pam’s in step. She once was married to Tommy Lee, the drummer for Motley Crue, a heavy-metal musical group which sold millions of albums. And just as regular people haven’t got the faintest idea what Saul and Lafond ramble on about, no rational person can fathom the popularity of Tommy Lee or Motley Crue.
Start the campaign
But there is one tiny problem. Pamela Anderson is (with two exceptions) what you might call a ’self-made gal.’ Everything she has earned was through her own labour, creativity and perseverance. To the best anyone knows, she has never collected a nickel from the government: no patronage appointments, no awards, no contracts, no plums.
She’s simply a hard-working woman who has achieved phenomenal success through her own initiative.
But consider the roster of Canada’s Governors General. First there were the British snobs who received their aristocratic titles and vice-regal appointments through family ancestry. Then there were the ex-politicians and former civil servants who wanted to enjoy an early retirement while collecting a government pay cheque.
And now we have Clarkson and Jean, and their spouses, Saul and Lafond, who, between the four of them, have been feeding at the public trough for nearly a century in total. Employment at the CBC, contracts with the National Film Board, grants from the Canada Council, and countless appointments and sinecures from nearly every imaginable taxpayer-financed institution and agency, provincial and federal - the list goes on.
There you have it. Pam, with “two exceptions,”is a self-made gal and while Adrienne and Michaelle, along with the various Liberal Party bagmen and aristocrats, got appointed through various affirmative action measures.
Whereas many of our GGs up to now have been fake and useless, Pamela’s fakies are hardly useless. Though just as frivolous as our GGs.
Affirmative action: the breast-plant of the postmaterialist class.
UPDATE: Lorne Gunter reflects on the problem of celebrating M. Jean simply for being black.
bijoux55 wrote:
One more hurdle for Pam. She was born in British Columbia. By my count Canadian born citizens were only allowed to be GG’s from 1952 to 1992.
Oscar Peterson, Romeo Dallaire, Rick Hanson, Nancy Greene, even Terry Fox or Norman Bethune if alive, would not now have a shot.
Why? Although Paul Martin cannot seem to think beyond the end of his penis as far as GG appointments go (accordingly Pam would be head and, um, shoulders above Madam Jean) he is kowtowing to the immigrant populuation to which Pam does not belong. There is nothing wrong with immigrants, or foriegn born GG’s, but have we not grown up enough as a country to permit native born Canadians a shot at our top honour.
Our birth rate is plummeting. As a Canadian woman who has single handedly raised two kids I know it is a big committment and a lot a work. Is it too much to ask that I could dream that my son or daughter could one day be the Governor General of Canada. No. Well that is why we will soon be a geriatic country being cared for by foreign born immigrants. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Posted on 30-Sep-05 at 10:47 am | Permalink
Tom wrote:
Bijoux: You wouldn’t get chosen GG even if you were a foreign born immigrant. Offices and honors in this country are open only to specific sorts of people with very specific ideological commitments and cronies. The rest of us must stumble on under their yokes.
Posted on 30-Sep-05 at 11:46 am | Permalink
Peter wrote:
Before Jean came along, Marc Garneau was thought to have a good chance. Unfortunately, he didn’t meet the selection criteria (didn’t work for the CBC).
Posted on 30-Sep-05 at 11:53 am | Permalink
George Freeman wrote:
As a whole, parliamentary democracy in Canada is in a pretty decrepit state. The appointments of M. Jean and M. Clarkson are farcical in nature, when you consider how such appointments disgrace the top office in the country because of under-qualification and lack of legitimate appointment process. Such appointments show little regard for the fact that Canada has a monarch, one who maybe deserves better representation than that offered by Liberal-loving-public-trough-historically-disenfranchised cronies.
Posted on 30-Sep-05 at 1:27 pm | Permalink
bijoux55 wrote:
George: We get the government we deserve. Canada is one of the oldest democracies in the world yet are our senate and the head of state, the gg are appointed in an undemocratic and obscure pork barrel fiesta. Most banana republics are more democratic.
The appointment of Michaelle Jean: FLQ consorting, pea brained, government dole subsisting, marxist left wing hipsters that they are has been a wake up call for me. If she was elected, god forbid, I would have to suck it up and accept it. But appointed by a corrupt, desparate and third rate minority Prime Minister as insurance against the dissolution of his crumbling government. It is frightening.
Posted on 01-Oct-05 at 8:26 pm | Permalink
George Freeman wrote:
Democracy describes a general ideal that a governed people should rule themselves.
Canada is a constitutional monarchy, and whether Canadian subjects of this regime deserve it, is open to debate. But seeing as most Canadians are born to the country they get, and thereby don’t ever get a choice in what type of government they will have, the question of what Canadians deserve is rather moot.
The problem with Canada is that it is not even a well functioning constitutional monarchy, where legitimacy is bestowed on government authority from the right sources, corruption being checked by those sources—whether they be democratic or monarchical. As you rightly point out, most government action is orchestrated by “a corrupt, desparate and third rate minority Prime Minister”—poster boy of the Canadian oligarchy, as Cerber calls it.
Posted on 02-Oct-05 at 5:00 pm | Permalink