Rex Murphy, in his heart and soul

Rebuking and refuting and confounding the Nasty Caste

We used to value pricks.

Not the jumped up skinbags of hate.

We elected one of those as Premier as few years ago and the needy little shagger paid us back with a saltwater remake of High Plains Drifter.

Not those.

Pricks of our consciousness.

Our conscience.

The ones who wake us from sleep-while-awake, who burst the shell of assumptions and delusions we cower inside, to drag us out into the word he lives in and we ought to. The ones who remind us of how short we fall from sense and sensibility not because they relish the torment but because they know that we can do better. Can be better. The Morpheus, if you will, to our prospective Neos. He getting the joke in that, while they did not.

We used to value Rex Murphy but his death from cancer last week merely gave people a reminder of how little people talking about him knew or understood or genuinely valued the man and what he stood for.

It is hard to know which was worse: the racists and bigots and assorted other posers who revelled in his death simply because he did not agree with their racist, bigoted, or thoughtless views and told them so, openly. Or, as the single greatest Twitter/X feed in Newfoundland and Labrador history put it, the “onslaught of attention-seeking tweets from Newfoundland’s political glitterati on Rex Murphy’s passing, most of whom couldn’t read a sentence of his work without googling at least three fuckin’ words.”

Or for that matter the number of obits that contained errors of fact that were easily avoided if only someone cared about what they wrote. Even the National Post, the paper Rex wrote his last column for and where people knew how sick he'd been, got simple stuff wrong out the gate. The name of the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Rex once worked for. Frank Moores. With an “s”. Not Frank Moore. Here and Now remains CBC’s supper hour television show in the province, not a province-wide radio show as the Post had it.

The Globe and even VOCM claimed Murphy worked as executive assistant to Clyde Wells and Leo Barry, Wells’ predecessor as Liberal Party leader. The guy who actually had that distinction awoke Friday morning to find out he’d died under someone else’s name. The source of the error was Wikipedia, in any of those media cases. You can roll your eyes at the Globe for such familiar laziness but people who knew Rex Murphy’s career were easy to find in Sin Jawns, as other media showed.

VO recovered on Friday as their afternoon show with Tim Powers featured a couple of decent reminiscences of Rex up the front end from Peter Mansbridge and John Steele. John told the story of going to Chapters with Rex and seeing him mobbed to the point where the naturally introverted and private Murphy wanted to leave to have a bit of peace. After that, things went down hill. The only thing we need remember about the connection between Rex Murphy and Danny Williams is not what the skinbag thought of Rex but the quote Rex got from him in 2007: “I believe in my heart and soul that I embody the heart and soul of Newfoundland and Labrador.” That tells you all you need to know of the Prince of Galway and why his time as Premier was like it was and why Danny clamoured after Rex’s casket from out of the abyss of political irrelevance to find some taste of the attention he craves, even if it is weakened by reflection.

All of that plus Mark Critch and the old photos of Rex from the 1960s and 1970s with one form of Placentia Bay afro or another spoke more of the poverty of everyone else’s imaginary Rex than of Rex himself.

Thankfully, as with other writers, Rex left his own obituary in scores of books, articles, opinion columns, and speeches. They all reflect Rex as he was: thoughtful, without doubt and deeply so. Literate both in the sense of being able to use words to great effect and in the sense of being widely read himself.

Karl Wells, who was the God of Weather at Here and Now for years, wrote a charming remembrance of Rex and how he would come to the office, putter around, read, and then quietly sit and clack out in a few minutes a near perfect opinion piece that he would record for the evening show.

If you did not know better, it would be easy to think Rex would only be writing in the few minutes at the typewriter or later the keyboard. As Karl and others would know well, in the time when Rex appeared to be doing nothing at all or doing anything but writing, he was writing. Some times he might be staring off into space but in his head, he was experimenting, crossing out combinations of words and trying new ones. Finding the rhythm of syllables to say what would eventually be what he left in the column or spoke in one of his on-air performances. The act of getting the words onto paper or on screen was actually the end or near-end of writing that piece.

Rex was not one for cliche. Like all greater writers, he did not copy or mimic. He stole brazenly. And, like greater writers, Rex coined his own phrases, although one story that came up privately relied on an old joke. After his disastrous run for the Liberals in a St. John’s East by-election - he finished third behind the Dipper who won and the Tory who came second that time but who would win in the election after - Rex said he knew things were going badly when he saw more Tony Murray real estate signs on lawns in the district than ones for his own campaign.

Another story from the same campaign came from one of the volunteers who went door to door with him. It too has turned up, somewhat changed in the details, in other obits but this one is from its origin. “We left headquarters in the Centre Building. (Oh, the irony!!) Me armed with my clipboard and Rex headed to the Gower Street area for a bit of door knocking. With his Colombo trench coat and his unmanageable hair, he knocked on the door of an elderly resident who answered dressed in house coat and curlers. Rex unleashed his talking points and views of the world. After his spiel, the lady said “my dear, I never understood a word you said, but I’ll give you a vote.”

The satirical online space The Beaverton wrote the obit that best captured his style and in the process paid him far more sincere tribute than did the official CBC line. The worst obits came from the places be worked: the Post, the Globe, VOCM, and CBC. The obit that came from the office where Rex had clacked out the television commentaries Karl Wells wrote about called him polarizing. No less an intellectual or journalistic idle than Peter Mansbridge said he was conservative and had always been so. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Murphy was absolutely consistent in his views throughout his life. He was no more conservative than the Marxist philosopher Regis Debray who remains, now in his 80s, the same man who spent time in a Bolivian jail having fought alongside Che Guevara. Debray these days writes op-eds for Le Figaro, not because Debray has changed into a conservative and mouthpiece for the Establishment but because the world has changed around him. The same is true of Murphy, who was not a Marxist but a small-l liberal.

That ridiculous label of “polarising” only comes from the fact Murphy refused to simply bend to the trendy mob’s will and could explain why they are wrong in ways they cannot deal with other than to attack him personally. The label “conservative” merely shows the extent to which Mansbridge and his ex-wife are of the same shallow intellectual and moral sort. Wendy Mesley too willing to confess her thought crimes rather than reject the idiotic accusations as forcefully as Murphy did when an an earlier version of the same Jan-Wong-wannabes came gunning for him over speeches when he worked for the Mother Corp and his audiences tended to be people the Corpse-Minders thought of as Right and therefore not right.

Doug Greer’s 1995 profile of Murphy at his peak - commentaries on The National, hosting Cross Country Checkup - is the most reliable guide for anyone who wants to understand the man. Greer and his producer delivered a candid and entertaining peek into what Murphy thought and why. The opening video of Murphy - in 1974 shooting a bottle of Screech with a 22 calibre rifle as he then starts to reject the mainland stereotypes of Newfies - aligns perfectly with a column he wrote 30 years later, slaughtering Margaret Wente’s stereotypical tripe about a supposed welfare ghetto.

“It’s a nasty cast of mind,” Murphy wrote of his fellow Globe columnist at the time, “that traffics so generously in stereotypes.” Then, as if knowing what would happen at the CBC with its later comedy show about Koreans, Murphy listed off the popular Canadian ideas about different groups, like Koreans, for example, who in the bigoted mind “know only convenience stores.” Google that and find the accusations of racism at the CBC.

There are two particularly striking parts of Greer’s 15 minutes. That is aside from the difference one can feel 27 years later between the CBC then and the CBC now in both the story Greer tells and the way he tells it. Even Mansbridge today is a shell of the Mansbridge in the mid-90s doc.

Look instead at two other bits. One is when Murphy talks about how Ontarians do not talk desperately of getting home the way Newfoundlanders and Labradorians do. People do not race to get back to Dartmouth, he offers. This remains true and was especially true for people of Murphy’s generation. His attitude to oil comes from the same place and anything said by mainlanders about his views over the past 20 years means they do not understand Rex’s concern for and the connection between oil and the place he loved so dearly.

Incidentally, he left the Pea Seas - les Bleus de Terre-Neuve un peu comme les Bleus du Parti Quebecois en meme temps - to work with Leo Barry, who left Brian Peckford’s cabinet as energy minister and went to lead the Liberals in a difference of opinion about oil policy. That story in itself and how Murphy ran as a Liberal candidate tells you how much Murphy was not a right-wing thinker, not a social conservative or a political Conservative.

The other is not Murphy all, but an unnamed fellow standing next to some bay talking about how “deep down in my gut today there’s a knob, and a tear in me eye, to look out where I once belonged and don’t belong there any more ‘cause my future’s took away from me.”

Greer and his producer and editor use the clip to connect with Murphy explaining the gift of public speaking that comes from the people in the place where he grew up. That’s the thing about Murphy’s writing and his speaking, which is true, by the way, of all truly great writers and speakers. The secret is not in the words used - too many obsessed with Rex’s word choices like Olivia about her partner’s ex-girlfriend - but in the musicality of it. The rhythm. The cadence. The beat. The source is the roots of Newfoundland and Labrador culture. Things are not written down but spoken. People talk to one another. They speak and sing and act and entertain themselves.

This is not “Irish” as Murphy - as Irish as they come from an Irish part of the island - suggested like so many others do, but from all of the people who made this their home over millennia and centuries. “Oral”. As if that were inferior to written. But it is literate, carrying on from Shakespeare’s age and genius, understood and used by everyday people every day as much now in Newfoundland and Labrador as 600 hundred years ago. And what they speak of is their own hopes and dreams and reality, which is what Murphy was on about with oil and how it would and did transform the place he knew.

In his heart and soul, Rex Murphy embodied the heart and soul of Newfoundland and Labrador. He did it in the way that mattered most: by being so, not by saying so. Rex was a stereotypical Newfoundlander or Labradorian: literate, articulate, funny, cutting, honest, generous, private, sensible, sensitive, curious. That may not be how we see him or ourselves, especially these days, but that is because so much of who we are is not reflected anymore as it once was when our books and our art and our politics came *from* here.

So much of all of that is now from outside. The university Rex knew and the campus he visited for parts of that documentary, for instance, are gone figuratively and literally. We see ourselves as the Nasty Caste sees us, not as we are. That is colonialism made flesh, for those who find that word slips easily off their tongues without knowing what it truly means.

Rex Murphy worked diligently his whole life to de-colonize Newfoundland and Labrador, and Canada too for that matter, which is why so many loathed him in his later years. He rebuked, refuted, and confounded the Nasty Castes, including the skinbag and the other bits of Newfoundland’s celebritocracy, and gave genuine pride to those who genuinely knew and understood him. Rex was, after all, merely one of them. Which means there is nothing mere about them just as there was nothing mere or mean about Rex Murphy.

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