Things just keeping getting weirder in Alberta as Jason Kenney sings the Moody Blues!

My better half calls Republican politicians “ostriches” for trying to look, despite the catornado of tRump’s presideduncy swirling all around them, nonchalant by ‘sticking their heads in the sand’. Whilst down there in their sandy holes, they spin the textiles of their minds, the chief thread of these heraldic tabards being to defend against criticism of their negligence by way of shifting blame onto some kind of enemy, and they get their colour scheme straight by generally agreeing which might be the best one for their purpose. As if to also ignore their leader’s puerile, hair-triggered and crude personal attacks upon whomever he perceives as an enemy, they tend to stick with more the traditional blazons of simple, political partisanship rather than try to penetrate whatever hole tRump hides his own head in. It’s hard to tell, anyway, because he has mercilessly and regularly slagged even those who’re vital to the success—and likely survival— of his bizarre administration, ostensible allies he will certainly need, and seems rather to enjoy making fun of anyone who strikes him as funny looking or has a name easily mispronounced or prefixed as a childishly insulting nickname, almost as a distraction which, in its way, would dismiss more important criticisms raised. If serious issues like climate-change catastrophe are raised, for example, tRump will inimitably dismiss them by doing his memorable imitation of, say, a paraplegic reporter in the front row who happens to catch his roving, thief’s eye. He’s the president, after all: he sets the example for all citizens, someone children are supposed to look up to.

I’ve often thought, and many others have also observed, that the Canadian right appears to be adopting its rhetorical tactics straight out of the tRump playbook, admitting that prime minister Stephen Harper fired the head of the public nuclear-safety watchdog without warrant, but for ulterior reasons, first, long before tRump did the head of the FBI, various cabinet Secretaries and staff for similarly cocked-up reasons; and BC premier Christy Clark had perfected, also long before The Orange One, the dubious art of unabashed preposterousness—not that tRump himself has been the copy cat but, rather, because these neo-right Canadians found themselves further along the arcs of their respective political narratives before tRump and the American federal right have, and thus were first to resort to rabid-skunk absurdity typical of this phase of neo-right moribundity which the Republicans have only more recently gotten to. As I haven’t checked yet, I’ll have to vouch that my squeeze would probably agree Alberta’s UCP premier and his cabinet are also using the ostrich response to the altornado of bitumen criticisms swirling around them that they don’t want to hear, or at least pretend they don’t hear as the typically cavalier and absurdist way of dismissing those concerns.

Such facetiousness is generally accepted as so much partisan rhetoric, even though most people know it’s really a bunch of “hoochquatch”—a West Coast indigenous word for “baloney”—as the large majority of Canadians are unafraid to concur, and the large majority of Albertans probably consider impolitic to do so whilst inside the West Prairie wagon laager. All the same, most recognize the UCP’s ridiculous, anti-Alberta conspiracy theories for the nose-thumbing it is: the government’s gonna protect the province’s bitumen goose no matter how conclusively evident the arguments against it or how fiercely the flames of sudden climate warming rip through the province’s northern forests and towns. We get all that.

Of course this kind of flippant defence of the indefensible is only one step of rhetorical devolution descending the stairs to the narratological basement where, finally, singling out a scapegoat becomes starkly essential. Thus, when the black plague challenged the ridiculously overripe, high tourney-chivalry of late-feudalism that passed for government in 14th century Europe, the nabobs of harlequin gaudiness blamed the horrifying mortality of a worldwide (as then known) disease epidemic on local Jews who were accused—out of narratological necessity— of poisoning wells, the shire reeves and gauleiters taking advantage of the fury incited to also throw a few homosexuals, like so many faggots of brushwood, into the flames burning the falsely accused and staked scapegoats.

This is where the narrative courses pass the near-ritual of a government blaming everything on the previous governing party—which everybody recognizes, if not all acknowledging it, as stock, harmlessly inconsequential and largely false rhetoric. This is where political talk becomes unavoidably belligerent as the elements of “The Other”, supremacy and exceptionalism, territorial autochthony, a heroic age unjustly denied, redoubts of defence and recuperation, and eventual just revenge are introduced in their purest renderings. The preposterousness of the UCPs scapegoating and maudlin conspiracy theories makes them so ridiculous that we might overlook the fact that, though effective as facetious nose-thumbing, such propaganda is really a retrograde step toward dark barbarity as the ancients knew it.

Yet I do agree with the UCP leader, perversely, that, yes, the world really is buying into the political agenda “to stigmatize development of hydrocarbon energy” because that’s the only logical course to take when more development will undeniably threaten our very existence as a human civilization— indeed, as a living ecosystem.

And, just like in days of old when knights were bold and Jews were gayly nervous, the UCP must weaponize its narrative by singling out alleged enemies of the Albertan people—evil-doers emanating from Europe, or Vancouver and Big Island eco-warriors, or the Rockefellers, or wherever—when concern about petroleum pollution and climate change is really coming from all directions and from many, many ordinary people everywhere—even, I dare say, many Albertans. Like any demagogue, the UCP knows how the better a story is, the more easily will its audience suspend disbelief in its absurdity—and there’s nothing like a well-defined villain to make a story better than average. Same way, nobody will leave the theatre if the plot line is has brought the audience to the edge of their seats as if to the very brink of extinction: they’ll surely wait for and demand a happy ending, usually an orgasm of revenge after which the good guys fetch their ‘baccy pouches and smoke a triumphant Bull Durham. The texture of morning-after gooseflesh will depend on how much the story departs from gritty, Sunday-sidewalk reality coming down. The bitumen bards of long practice know this. They know, too, that the current narrative has been driven toward fewer degrees of bardic freedom, to the brink of war for which there are but few outcomes possible—the happiest one being also the most unlikely—and they therefore must depend on one other narratological heuristic: people have, especially en masse, very short memories.

A brief word, then, on reminding voters of what the other party has done in power. If the NDP government had acted like adults and refrained from perfunctory—or even justifiably retaliatory—blaming of previous conservative governments’ policies for many of Alberta’s problems as they found them, it was its leader Rachel Notley’s mistake.

We here in BC experienced the same mistake when the front-running NDP leader Adrian Dix decided to run a “positive politics” election campaign which forbade his candidates from saying anything negative about the BC Liberals’ record—which meant not saying anything about their record at all, so much of it being flat out perfidious (like the corrupt privatization of BC Rail, to name but one perfidy).

Two narratological points here: first, if naturally forgetful voters had been reminded of the BC Liberals’ outrageous record—which, yes, would have perforce required saying some negative things about them—Dix’s party might not have blown a 20-point lead and been defeated by a bubble-headed, prancing majorette whose single-note paean plumbed new depths of preposterousness—predicting and LNG boom for which there was no discernible market—pumping a nonexistent industry day after day, every single day of the campaign, even to the point of promising so many surplus billions that her government could wipe out the towering, BC Liberal-accumulated provincial debt in just a couple of years!

Second, it wasn’t so much that voters believed Christy’s outlandish promises as it was that Dix had disappointed this audience by not playing his archetypal role as combatant, much less, then, could he have ever been a hero. Audiences’ unconscious attachment to well-worn narrative arcs was amply exemplified when Dix stubbornly suffered, limp-armed, a rhetorical beating from a relative policy ignoramus who, so unopposed, was allowed to punch way over her weight and win the contest, keeping the prized white hard hat she wore with her fitted and darted coveralls every day of the campaign.

The simple, bread-and-circus expectation of the average BC voter wants to be entertained during the writ period, and if Dix couldn’t provide the more-loved, classic narratological element of conflict, it defaulted to Christy to supply some excitement: as dull as watching the pretender play the role of punching bag for the incumbent was, especially an incumbent who would’ve been easy to best had voters only been reminded of her government’s sordid record and challenged her absurdly fantastic LNG promises, the most undeserving candidate in policy terms ended up winning by upset—and BC voters would eventually become upset to find Christy’s one and only mandate of her own featured four of BC’s worst years in terms of debt accumulation and breaches of duty and trust. The lesson is that, as rational and objective as some might want politics to be, the never absent narratological factor is powerfully and usefully prejudicial—and politicians ignore this fact only at their peril.

Thus what some would call ‘psychological warfare’ often conforms to narratological principles which everyone should try to remember; and political discourse, especially during campaigns, the boxing ring of politics, must recognize and hold to account the use—and abuse—of these principles, if not to win, then to keep the social audience (enthralled or indifferent, a good story penetrates all) from suspending disbelief in patently false, chauvinistic or, worse, hatefully provoking partisan bullshit like the UCP’s laughable anti-Alberta conspiracy theories—which are truly stories in their own right.

Finally I would say to my NDP compatriots in Alberta: ‘taking the high road’ is simply not an option during campaigns —‘campaign’ means ‘field of war’, after all. The enemy’s record must be weaponized against them if it is perfidious; this is compulsory. The Dippers have a big enough caucus, now, for the first time in loyal opposition, sufficiently funded to prepare a stout debunking of the UCP’s hoochquatch which, in four years from now, will be more impossible (if that’s even possible) to verify or justify than it is now. Don’t imagine it so self-evident as to get low priority: stories, even tall or false ones, are powerful factors in any human intercourse, not least politics. Remember, voters only relief from the bother of campaigns is entertainment of some kind; hopefully it’s important policy discourse —but put in the most entertaining way: there must be, at the end of the spectacle, political blood and teeth on the floor. Otherwise, it’s hard to sell tickets.