Calgary Sun’s Rick Bell: Humourless, Unrepentant Lefty

Over the years, many of us around Calgary have been treated to Rick Bell’s sense of humor. We have seen him loose some hair and many pounds, but not his wit. Sadly, last night some of us saw him lost his head.

I was talking to a group of friends last night at the Roundup Centre, waiting for results of the Alberta Tory leadership race to come in. The place was not quite packed yet, but there were lots of folks around. I noticed that we were standing within earshot distance from Rick Bell from the Calgary Sun, who was pontificating to some of his journalist colleagues from CBC.

If Ted Morton wins, he said, “it will not be the neo-cons in power, it will be the paleo-cons.” Our ears perked up, and when Bell realized that we were listening, he took a couple of steps back away from us, and with a smirk on his face he said he was an “unrepentant lefty.” We all laughed at the quickness with which he was backpedaling under the guise of humor.

I wanted probe the depths of Bell’s humor. I pulled my I-pod from my pocket and asked Bell point blank to go on record:

Civitatensis: I’m going to try to see if he [Rick Bell] would go on record as an unrepentant lefty? Rick,… would you go on record as an unrepentant lefty?

Bell: [long pause]

Civ: No?

Bell: That was called a joke.

Civ: Oh, okay

At that point, Bell walked away from us, somewhat rattled. I thought it was over, and I turned the pod off, but I was mistaken. Bell turned around and came back toward us, visibly agitated. He was ranting about being threatened. No threats were uttered, of course. It seemed more like the reaction of a man who had been caught doing something that he is not supposed to be doing.

Bell: [unintelligible] …team on more than one occasion. Why don’t you put that on the record?

Civ: I am not threatening you. I’m just saying, would you go on record saying what you said before?

Bell: It was a joke! [pause] Have a sense of humor!

Civ: The one who is getting agitated, without a sense of humor is you, Rick!

Bell: Because you don’t know the difference between a joke and a non-joke.

Civ: But why…

Bell: [unintelligible] …authorities the Morton people say that they’ll deal with people like me when Ted’s premier.

Civ: But why are you getting agitated, Rick?

Bell: Because I don’t like being threatened.

Civ: Who’s threatening you, Rick?

At this point, Bell walked away once again, he moved toward his media friends who asked him what was going on. One can still hear him say “No, don’t talk, they’re taping now!” I turned the pod off, and I put it away. Curious people had begun to gather to see what the commotion was about. Concerned bystanders were asking us who the ranting man was.

To our surprise, Bell came at us again, and I didn’t have time to pull the pod out in time. He walked right by us moving in the opposite direction from where he was talking to his friends and yelled out: “You have no sense of humor. That’s why you’re gonna lose!” The small crowd that had gathered burst out in a very loud laughter. Bell then paced back to his point of origin under the sneers of those present.

The whole scene was unseemly. We could not believe that the self-proclaimed comedian would not let go. Bell’s judgment was truly off.

I’m not a regular Calgary Sun reader, but I have sometimes read Bell’s writings, and I had a very different impression of him. He comes off as a thoughtful man in most of his columns. But not last night. His training and education surely abandoned him. He kept going away and coming back at us, his voice fluctuating.

Notice how the charge Bell made is that I have no sense of humor, but the one behaving like a sour lemon was he. He teased us but he could not understand that we were teasing him back. I suspect that his raging mood was a product of feeling that he had been “caught.” He had no idea that what I recorded was only what I transcribed here. He probably thought that I had taped his entire conversation with his colleagues, and G-d only knows what he had said before we heard him referring to Morton as a political dinosaur. He was worried, and I suspect that he overreacted because of it.

Let me say very clearly that I didn’t tape Bell without his knowledge. The question I asked was blunt, “would you go on record?” He saw the recording pod in my hand, he had fair warning that he was being taped and he still elected to say what he said and how he said it.

His response was to talk about alleged threats at the same time that he accused us of being humorless. That was peculiar, to say the least. He claimed to be upset because we supposedly don’t know the difference between a joke and what is not a joke. Since he doesn’t know us from Adam, why would he care about our supposed lack of humor?

Bell’s knee-jerk reaction was to get defensive and talk about threats right away. When asked directly who was threatening him, he would not give an answer. More curious still is that he asked this humble blogger to put the alleged threats on record. Does he not have the ability to put the supposed threats on record himself? Bell is not a shrinking flower. He has run for public office and he knows how things work in politics. He is a veteran columnist for a major newspaper in Calgary, and if he has been threatened by someone, he knows to alert the authorities. This is Canada, not Rwanda.

If Bell means that perhaps some of Morton’s supporters have written to him taking him to task for his lack of journalistic objectivity, well, that comes with the territory. The anti-Morton lecture he was giving to his colleagues was probably worse than what he had written in his column, and we were able to laugh about it –and about him.

Unrepentant lefty is one thing. That’s a political choice I can respect. But the attempt at humorlessly painting himself as a victim when Bell was caught verbally victimising a candidate behind the scenes; ranting and raving in a public place as a reaction was unseemly and worthy more of pity than scorn.

crossposted from civitatensis.ca