I actually like Christie Blatchford.
I think she’s one of the best newspaper columnists working in Canada and have always admired the courage she’s shown in displaying sentiment in her work. When she writes about the military, police officers or her pets– subjects she seems most passionate about– she’s never been afraid to get a bit corny and turn the prose up a notch to a level some might find a little embarrassing in its purple enthusiasms.
About a month ago, after a police officer in the Toronto area died in the line of duty, she began one of her columns in the National Post in this manner:
“As the old African-American spiritual has it, they are coming for to carry him home.
By the thousands they will come, police from forces across North America, to line a parade route that cuts through the heart of this sprawling half-urban, half-rural region north of Toronto to march him to his funeral.
Just a week ago, York Regional Police Constable Garrett Styles was gloriously alive, an hour away from the end of his shift, an hour away from four days off.”
You see what I mean.
No matter, I’ve always found this voice– so distinctive and melodramatic– to be kind of fresh, even invigorating within the corporate homogeny of newspaper writing, and even if it was often over-the-top, it was just as often affecting.
On Monday, Jack Layton the leader of the NDP in Canada (the party of the left) died of cancer. He represented the riding in Toronto where Rachelle and I live and as I took the dog for a walk, I noticed that people on the streets were sincerely emotional about his passing. They commiserated on street corners, telling on another stories of their experience with the man, and on Broadview in front of his headquarters a makeshift shrine of flowers and other testimonials, was being created by people leaving gestures of their affection. It was touching and it was true, and this spirit, this need, manifested in spontaneous form throughout the city.
Blatchford, paddling against the stream, wrote a sneering piece in the National Post in which she criticized Layton’s unyielding political ambition that she saw rising even from the grave, and the hollow, tawdry display of those who would mourn a man they had never met in such a public way. There’s an obvious disconnect– a cognitive dissonance even– in how she views the spectacle surrounding those who fall in battle, to those who perish in a less romantic way. It’s embarrassing, that, and probably informed by the fact that she’s the daughter of a cop, a woman fully integrated into the warrior culture.
Blatchford’s always played the role of contrarian, (as her employers want her to) exhibiting a libertarian streak and a tomboy sensibility that’s given her a blue-collar kind of persona in spite of the fact she lives in the tony Annex district in Toronto.
We all contain multitudes, I guess.
Her antipathy toward the vulgar display of flowers and public mourning, something she speciously attributed to the pop sensibility that arose from Lady Diana’s death so many years ago, was an elitist and unkind posture to assume. Completely absent of any affection, imagination or empathy for the people who wanted to express themselves, she was indifferent to how dropping some flowers off might make them feel better about things, not her. Regarding it as a failure of feeling rather than a sincere expression of feeling, she was suggesting it was a kind of low-rent emotion, and as if some sort of royalty sniffed at the child-like banality of the people who would think to leave a stuffed unicorn at the foot of Layton’s office door.
Her words on this matter lacked any scent of self-awareness and were quite simply misanthropic.
But she wasn’t just rolling her eyes at the people laying flowers, but at Jack Layton, too. Now, I never met Layton, but the one thing that was obvious about him was that he was a really decent and good human being. You didn’t need to know him personally to see this or to be moved by it. He was a great guy, it simply radiated out of him, and that Blatchford chose to ignore this and focus on what she thought was an overly-ambitious nature in the man, was mean. To criticize Layton or any politician for being political, and perhaps having a different psychological assembly than the rest of the population is asinine, like whining about an athlete being competitive. The fact that she chose to attack him for leaving a letter, composed just days before his death, to the Canadian people, citing that as evidence of his pathological ambition, was crazy.
I mean, what do we think of when we sincerely face our own death?
None of us know until we’re in that unfortunate situation, but I know when I was sick with cancer I felt the need to set my house in order as best I could, and if that included writing a letter to my constituents and imparting some simple and inspirational advice to interested parties, so be it. To bitch about that instinct in people is simply to bitch about humanity, and to do that suggests that Blatchford has slipped into the role of crabby, old lady, now barking from her protected doorway at the imperfect, beautiful and vulnerable lives unfolding around her.