Orange Blues
Driving against the sun feels like being the murderous L'Étranger estranged to the limits of bright light and heat. On Autoroute 10 Ouest I'm listening to rock classics on the radio, singing out loud alongside Jim Morrison 'People are strange when you're a stranger.' I'm on my way back to Montréal in a borrowed car (merci Francis!) having just hiked my way up to the Owl's Head Mountain with a semi-stranger. Suddenly my index finger, of its own accord, proceeds to preset 1 button on the display of the radio '....Jack Layton était....un choc...il avait....'. Jack Layton is dead at the age of 61. My heart sinks into the shade of a passing truck.
The leader of the New Democratic Party until recently when cancer no longer permitted him, Jack Layton stood for that rare political zest: hope for social democracy in a conservatively regressive (régro-cons, if I may) Canada. The designer of the bike parking poles in Toronto, owner of a tandem bike he used to ride with Olivia Chow -I'd spotted them at the Gay Pride Parade a few years back-, dancing to local DJs' beats on Queen West, camping with environmental activists, smiling on the cover of a local magazine talking about love, author of a book on homelessness... No, why should he have been the prime minister, I doubt he ever had time for elitist networking, lucrative contracts for the private sector, plotting a more aggressive presence in Afghanistan.
Bahar, when she was visiting from New York in 2003 saw him on television. She said 'Canadian politics must be progressive. There is a big difference between the States and Canada. I just listened to a politician named Jack, talking about social inequality and what to do about it with such eloquence.' I told her he was an exception to the rule. To my distaste years have proven me right. Conservative majority governments around the world manhandled citizenship, human rights, environmental issues, distribution of wealth and global pacifism. Center left has become, for the lack of a better word/world, the only left left at our disposal as the 'center' degraded into periphery and our geometry receded rightward. At this point I don't want to quote a dead poet but may I, just this once? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." While at it, let me quote a dead political theorist: "All that is solid melts into air".
A new centrifugal force, I dare imagine, must be spinning its way to appease the dead (the politician, the poet, the theorist). Jack Layton writes in his farewell note: "Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair." Already motto-ized, self evident and simplistic perhaps. The truest things in life have a cheesy quality to them, like a mother's hand touching a baby's toes à la Hallmark postcard. We must reinvent calipers if it needs be, re-dream and re-awaken to politics in the solid principles Layton lays out. A political restructuring in Canada is like driving half blinded by the sun on 10 Ouest at 7pm, almost reaching Montréal but unable to read back lit road signs that appear blank, but continuing on, a wrong turn here, another there, opening the window to ask strangers for directions at the red lights, or meandering because some things only mature, ironically, only if the short cuts are inaccessible. Fare thee well, Jack Layton, gonna play me some blues in your honor.
The leader of the New Democratic Party until recently when cancer no longer permitted him, Jack Layton stood for that rare political zest: hope for social democracy in a conservatively regressive (régro-cons, if I may) Canada. The designer of the bike parking poles in Toronto, owner of a tandem bike he used to ride with Olivia Chow -I'd spotted them at the Gay Pride Parade a few years back-, dancing to local DJs' beats on Queen West, camping with environmental activists, smiling on the cover of a local magazine talking about love, author of a book on homelessness... No, why should he have been the prime minister, I doubt he ever had time for elitist networking, lucrative contracts for the private sector, plotting a more aggressive presence in Afghanistan.
Bahar, when she was visiting from New York in 2003 saw him on television. She said 'Canadian politics must be progressive. There is a big difference between the States and Canada. I just listened to a politician named Jack, talking about social inequality and what to do about it with such eloquence.' I told her he was an exception to the rule. To my distaste years have proven me right. Conservative majority governments around the world manhandled citizenship, human rights, environmental issues, distribution of wealth and global pacifism. Center left has become, for the lack of a better word/world, the only left left at our disposal as the 'center' degraded into periphery and our geometry receded rightward. At this point I don't want to quote a dead poet but may I, just this once? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." While at it, let me quote a dead political theorist: "All that is solid melts into air".
A new centrifugal force, I dare imagine, must be spinning its way to appease the dead (the politician, the poet, the theorist). Jack Layton writes in his farewell note: "Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair." Already motto-ized, self evident and simplistic perhaps. The truest things in life have a cheesy quality to them, like a mother's hand touching a baby's toes à la Hallmark postcard. We must reinvent calipers if it needs be, re-dream and re-awaken to politics in the solid principles Layton lays out. A political restructuring in Canada is like driving half blinded by the sun on 10 Ouest at 7pm, almost reaching Montréal but unable to read back lit road signs that appear blank, but continuing on, a wrong turn here, another there, opening the window to ask strangers for directions at the red lights, or meandering because some things only mature, ironically, only if the short cuts are inaccessible. Fare thee well, Jack Layton, gonna play me some blues in your honor.
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