Friday 13 April 2012

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's Warren Kinsella*

*In homage to one of Canada's most spectacularly, narcissistically, and tunelessly pretentious descents into abject mid-life crisis.

And, speaking of decadence, allow me a short intermission...

I wonder, to those few Canadians who have become accidentally aware of Warren Kinsella's modest and unearned celebrity within a small, dull circle of elite political trainspotters, which of Kinsella's achievements among his trove of gumball-machine trophies gathered during a dismal career of representing everything Canadians loathe about their vapid, cynical, focus-grouped, spin-doctored politics shine the brightest. Would it be

1) Kinsella's use of a Barney doll to ridicule the Leader of the Opposition's Pentecostalism in what became the first overtly sectarian attack ever launched in the course of a Canadian federal election?

2) Kinsella's key role in a legendarily arrogant Liberal administration that laid waste to the progressive Pearson/Trudeau social welfare legacy and superintended corruption so vast and flagrant that its exposure destroyed the party and guaranteed an indefinite, perhaps generations-long, even more deeply corrupt "Conservative" overlordship?

3) Kinsella's 1997 electoral loss, amid a crushing Liberal national victory, against a half-mad Western separatist incumbent languishing on Reform's farthest fringes?

4) Kinsella's bathetically unctuous attack of the vapours over an offhand remark that allegedly places a blogger he considers good enough to poach from in the ideological company of the "Far Right", broadcast in blithe disregard of his own protracted collaboration with the odious Sun Media Corp. (among whose vile notorieties is the 2010 Ottawa Sun editorial that advocated the mass murder of civilians, an outrage that went unprotested by Kinsella) and of the fact that a strict application of his logic would force him to declare Noam Chomsky an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier?

My guess is that most would choose number 4chiefly because that event's diffusion has not had to rely on Kinsella's own negligible powers but has been driven by Dr. Dawg's superb systematic demolition of the pious fool's presumptuousness. I'll warrant you that, since last week, thousands of people have stumbled onto Warren Kinsella's existence for precisely the reason English Literature undergrads discover Thomas Shadwell. Enjoy your 15 minutes, Warren, to terminate when our laughter subsides and we return you to the scribbling, had-been* obscurity where, at no one's request, you regularly dole to a tiny, indifferent readership a clutch of limp, pedestrian lines, each one an ingenious rearrangement of the disarmingly candid sentence, "Yeah. I used to be a spin doctor; tough racket".

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* Instead of the conventional "has-been", we use the past perfect here to indicate that Kinsella was a has-been before he lowered himself below the dignity of has-been by joining the execrable Sun chain of over-priced bog roll.   

20 comments:

fern hill said...

That was dizzy-making, Sir Francis. ;-)

Remind me to never piss *you* off.

Dana said...

Sublime.

Crit said...

Sir Francis, I often disagree with you, but I consider your style (and even your substance, every so often) to be both entertaining and satisfying.

Long may you thrive and prosper!

Kindest regards,
Crit_Reasoning

Jack Mitchell said...

That's it, I'm calling the SPCA.

Sir Francis said...

Fern Hill:

Heh. I've read your stuff. Remind me never to piss you off!

Sir Francis said...

Dana:

In a good way, I hope...

Sir Francis said...

Crit:

Nice to hear from you. Long time, no read. I really should drop in at Maclean's at some point. I did find, though, that the level of discourse was falling ever so slightly. Perhaps things have improved lately.

Sir Francis said...

Jack:

Again, long time, no read. I hope your courses have gone well; I envy your students. I hope we can look forward to a book (or two) from you in the near future.

Jack Mitchell said...

Sir Francis!

Your ever-brilliant posts (I look forward to the sequel to today's first one, too) make me wish I were mixing it up with the forces of darkness, alongside you & CR & Dawg & al. A few more years in the peer-reviewed salt mines and I shall clean the rust from my blade.

You know my department (Dalhousie Classics) is historically a pillar of Red Toryism? My Chair actually gave last unction to George Grant.

Life is good, if frantic, and via the ancients I stock my magazine with anecdotes of Cato & Catiline, artis rhetoricae causa.

Sol said...

That was fucking brilliant.

Dana said...

Oh, yes, Sir Francis, in a very good way.

WK is a wastrel in the oldest and truest sense of the word and one whose talents and loyalties are best viewed in the rear view mirror.

Now...meh...“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Aeneas the Younger said...

Kinsella is an exemplar of a self-inflicted alienation.

To that end, he is too stupid to see that he is being used.

Antonia Z said...

Wow. Where have you been all my life?

Tomm said...

Sir Francis,

Here's a little something Conrad Black said that I thought you, in particular, would appreciate.

"...For a federal leader such as Thomas Mulcair to turn on one region of the country he seeks to lead, and excoriate Alberta’s prosperity as if Canada were a zero-sum game and Alberta’s wealth were wrung from the sweat of the faces of Quebecers, was as shabby a piece of demagogic hypocrisy as I have seen from any politician in this country. And I have been following these things closely since the piping days of Maurice Duplessis, W.A.C. Bennett, and Joey Smallwood."

cheers,

Sir Francis said...

Tomm:

Interesting. The demagogic hypocrisy whereby a man seeks to lead a nation whose values he once declared inferior to some alleged set of "Albertan values" and who once asserted that Atlantic Canadians were a tribe of "can't do" layabouts has apparently escaped his lordship's attention. Perhaps his nimble mind vacated those data to make room for more important information, such as the importance of keeping a firm grip on the soap, during his time spent confined at the pleasure of the people of the United States of America. Thanks for dropping by, though.

And if you run into Bruce Carson, please deliver my regards.

Tomm said...

Your welcome.

If I run into Mr. Carson I will pass on your best.

liberal supporter said...

Hahahahahahahahahaha!

Thanks, SF.

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

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ricky said...

I wouldn't want to piss either of you off. This post is seven years old and stands the test of time.