Fix these names in your minds: Maddy Stieva, Carl-Olivier Rouleau, Stav Nitka, Nick Young, James Mitchell and Grant Dingwall. They’re young right-wing interns and staffers on the Hill, who staged a fake protest a while ago to disrupt a Justin Trudeau presser. Their performance, as it turns out, was directed by the Prime Minister’s Office.
The PMO is supposed to be government-centred, not party-focussed. It is paid for out of our taxes. But here we are, forced to subsidize a partisan attack on an opposition leader.
It gets way worse. The RCMP, who have effectively become the government’s very own political police, apparently sent a routine media request for information about the June 5 bogus demo to the PMO, although they’re now denying it.
And there’s obviously no point in complaining to lapdog Mary Dawson, Parliament’s “Ethics” Commissioner.
What makes these kids so willing to engage in clearly unethical acts? Part of it, of course, is the Conservative political culture of impunity. The end always justifies the means, unless you get caught. The aim is to destroy the enemy, by any means necessary, and the enemy is anyone who isn’t a Conservative.
But there’s perhaps a supplementary explanation for the behaviour of these junior Daleks. To them—and to a growing number of others—politics is no longer about flesh and blood governance. It’s all theatre.
Theatre is make-believe stuff. It’s entertainment. Participants watch, or they act. The actors perform roles, but the roles aren’t “really” the actors, are they? And so these Con kids wall themselves off from decency and boring old ethics by telling themselves they’re only playing.
Pudgy, past-it Stephen Harper playing Mr. Dressup in Calgary is just another example. We know he’s not really a soldier, just pretending to be one in front of the countless victims of the flooding. Just another photo-op, like Peter MacKay in the cockpit of a (fake, of course) F-35. We paid for that set as well.
How does one explain what a falsehood is to people who have been schooled to believe that the world is merely a stage upon which to dance, prance and have plenty of fun while doing it? For the Conservatives, after all, everything is spectacle—the 1812 nonsense, the G-20 fake lake, the phoney Harper apology to First Nations—and we’re the captive audience, barred from leaving the theatre until 2015.
In this context, why should anyone wonder how bright young somethings recruited by the Conservatives so gleefully embrace the dark side? It’s all they know. It’s just acting, right? But somehow the popcorn’s gone kind of stale.
