At some point, the obits for Rex Murphy got to be as tedious as the laments for Ray Guy.
No modern wannabes already hailed as minor celebrities wailed for attention with Ray as a prop like they did for Rex. That was bad enough. In both cases there was talk of someone other than the deceased and, on some occasions, the odd faux mourner might wonder why we do not have people like that today. That’s when the eye-rolling started because we have been here before.
In the Danny Williams years we had a figure much like Smallwood with matching bombast and pettiness but so lacking in the earlier Premier’s historical impact or intellectual depth. The irony is delicious for those who know enough to taste it yet Williams seemed to go without a matching and constant literary reminder of his mortality. No one to bring him down to size, as it were. And certainly in Ray’s case no one he’d savaged rushed out of the gloom of retirement to get another second in the limelight praising a man who - as Rex with Danny - had relatively few kind words for the old twitchy politician in his columns and commentaries.
What’s been particularly tedious about both Rex and Ray is the extent to which we forget how much both were not praised in their time. They were reviled and abused and then latterly ignored or in Rex’s case ridiculed. People forgot about Ray in his later years even though he kept writing until almost the end just like Rex. Not so Rex who continued to enjoy a form of celebrity on Twitter whenever one of his columns in the National Post appeared and whose association with Jordan Peterson convinced so many he’d lost his mind.
The popular reaction to Rex when he was alive, in other words, was actually the popular reaction all along but went conveniently ignored once he croaked. Ray had simply faded away so it’s understandable people didn’t recall how they’d felt about him at some time in the distant past. But Rex was at the end as he had been at the beginning and all along and truthfully how both had been for most of their professional lives as writers.
In Doug Greer’s 1995 profile of Rex Murphy at his peak, Peter Mansbridge explained what CBC management used Rex for in his heyday at The National, which was surely what the Globe did for a while and latterly the National Post did as well. Whether you agreed with Rex or not, you could not help but react to what he said. He was the catalyst, the spark, the trigger for thought (hopefully), debate (perhaps), and argument (for sure) about some current topic.
In St. John’s, both Steve Herder at the Evening Telegram and Bob Wakeham and the other senior managers at CBC shared the same view. They saw the same value in Ray and Rex. For a while, we had the luxury of both on tee vee at supper time during the week. “I am Clyde’s Irk” ought to be a classic Ray piece, if anyone remembers it although even a masterful actor like Rick Boland was not as good at the performance of it during revue that year as Rex had been on CBC doing it the first time.
There wasn’t just Rex or Ray. Noreen Golfman had a gig at CBC for a while. There was also a regular political panel featuring Bill Rowe and the only leader of a purportedly socialist party who’d never read a word of Marx in his life. None of the others as provocative or as insightful as the Big Rs but still there.
Something floated across my eye line the other day. Politics Sells screamed the headline in an email or something to that effect. There was then a litany of all the political Substack writers and what their audiences were. Robert Reich - Clinton’s old labor secretary - has 400 odd thousand. Dan Rather’s audience is equally large. Bari Weiss’ Substack-based newspaper has more than 500,000 subscribers. Their income was equally impressive. Reich pulled in something like a half mill and the largest subscriber-driven income on Substack is something like $5 million.
There are Canadian equivalents, too like Paul Wells or the The Firing Line to name just two although with nothing near the same number of paying followers as the Yanks had. Bari Weiss’ half-million subscribers is a fraction of the American market alone so small that we cannot imagine anything like it in Canada. Paul Wells says he can make a living out of his Substack income all the same and there are some Canadian versions of the Weiss story that do well enough to be a group effort. Weiss makes enough to hire others to produce Free Press. Most Canadian Substackers are like Margaret Atwood who has fewer than 50,000 followers (and fewer people paying her) despite the popularity of her handmaid book 40 years after it first appeared.
In Newfoundland and Labrador these days, the handful of conventional news media outlets we have offers nothing at all like either Rex or Ray or even Noreen any more on any of their platforms. Nothing. It’s not just in the news media. Since COVID, any public events on any big issue have simply stopped. Gone. Vanished.
As far as Substack and blogs and such goes on Newfoundland and Labrador politics, you are reading all of it. The audience today as best I can tell is roughly where it has been for most of the past 20 years. Made up of the same sorts of people too for the most part. And the traffic in any 30 day period is at the same intensity if not a bit higher than it used to be. And this Substack is not anywhere near the level of readership to produce a living income. This is not begging, although a few more paying subscribers would be most welcome. It is merely stating things for the record so the rumour mill will have no grist.
Some of that is a function of the niche: Newfoundland and Labrador is only so large and only so many people are interested in what goes on here. But there might be something else as well. Frankly as much as people describe what you read here as bile or venom or screed, the closest we have here to actual bile are people usually on the political left who backbite like mad sometimes. The other and only thing that we have to compare to the truly gossipy and harsh world of say Frank is The answer is no, the X/Twitter account whose biting, topical, and gossipy smack at local news and the people in it has drawn a sizeable audience of the titterati sort. We have less of the chattering class these days as the Titterers. Again, for the record - people bring it up to me all the time - I am not behind it nor do I know who is doing it although I wish I was or did. T’ain’t me, so to speak.
TAIN is anonymous. Perhaps that helps make it acceptable in a small place where everyone knows everyone’s business, where people are so proud of their misbehaviour or misfortune they brag about it but their circle keeps it a secret of sorts until they don’t. Many years ago one politician ran into trouble with da missus after an election and some overly-friendly relations with a woman not da missus. Off he went to the hotel for a while. The town buzzed. The province buzzed and by some accounts, the fellow’s friends and financial backers buzzed as far away as Vancouver until they phoned up to wonder what in the name of merciful feck he was doing. Took a beautifully staged piece on NTV with Jim Thoms about the wonderful happy family to signal the end of the crisis.
But that’s not actually the telling part of the story. I’d known about the backstory for a while, both who was involved and more importantly who wasn’t no matter what the gossip persistently said. The telling turn was when my mother brought it up one Saturday evening at our usual meal with the whole tribe at her house. While this might be hard to believe Scribbler’s Mother is one of the least political people alive and certainly not then or now likely to be tapped into the local gossip of any kind. When Mother brought it up, then it was clear there were serious political problems for anyone involved unless it got tidied up right away. The story was now circulating among the people outside the political coal mine, if you will, the canaries having long ago gone feet up. The Jim Thoms piece followed not long after Mother’s revelation, if memory serves.
As good and as funny as it is, TAIN gives us the smell of the political taint. The anonymity makes it safe for its writers, professionally and personally. But it is only the whiff. So far they have not actually showed us so much as the soiled undies let alone actual dirt. There could be many reasons for that but it is a reminder that even in this sort of humour what we see in front of us in public does not reflect all that people are talking about or very much of what is going on.
Thing is, TAIN is pretty much all we’ve got these days. Plus, as far the rest goes, aside from these scribbles, the sorts of people who used to have some public profile on serious topics don’t have one any more. Some died. Some retired. Some just stopped. But no one is stepping in to take their place. Fear of the mob someone put it down to the other day. Don’t want to be ridiculed or abused or set upon figuratively or literally online. They don’t stick their heads up.
Ok.
Danny Williams was like Smallwood in the sense he and his followers were the abusive mob. Sometimes openly. More likely than not the cowardly passive-aggressive type. But they’d take your head off one way or another if they could and try to certainly if you stepped on their corns. Uncle Mose writing to the Gulf News about some pothole got a call from the Premier not to assure the old fellow the problem would be fixed but to tell him off for making the Mullet-King’s burden that much greater. Other far more prominent types might have the voice coming down the phone give them back words they’d said in private to a clutch of supposedly trusted colleagues. One of them turned out to be low-rent Stasi agent in training who’d reported back to Der Furious Fahder of DeConfederation.
Plausibly a deterrent then but Danny and his ilk are gone from the political battlefield 14 years this November.
Didn’t realize that, did you? Seems like only yesterday he was talking about people who needed to be shot.
That’s why it seems strange that people are now afraid of some personal blow-back for saying anything, not just something offensive or abusive when the real threat of that is gone. In the same way, it’s strange everything is so quiet and so unbelievably bland given that controversy still sells. People pay attention to ideas and discussion even if the way they do so is different. And as the interest in TAIN shows, people like controversy. Even the people who want to avoid some public discomfort (unease) or discomfit (embarrassment) love a bit of the schadenfreude: pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. They are like the people who decried the coverage of Monica Lewinsky’s sexual escapades with Bill Clinton but bought the newspapers and watched the television for the latest stain of coverage of her little blue dress.
What the editorial boys knew in the townie newsrooms - and it was mostly men even in the 1990s - what they knew then was that the Rex or Ray columns drew attention and that drove revenue. Even the Ceeb’s budget haul from upalong depended on ratings. The more controversial Rex or Ray were, the more angry, the more provocative they could be, the more people reacted, which meant they paid attention. Not rocket science. It works even in the modern day when Rex Murphy trended on Twitter like clockwork among people who loathed him. In some cases may well have literally done a jig at the news he was dead. They could not help but read his words and then, more importantly, tell others about it and that made money for his employer.
That attitude is missing today in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it shows more than in other places. We are more prudish. We are more conservative. We are more secretive as a society than we have been in decades and willingly so. This not just in comparison to other places. Our greater concern for suppression is in comparison to the way we used to be not that long ago. It is not hard to understand the suppression of stories about abuse at Mount Cashel in the 1970s because we’d do the same thing today.
What we could not expect today is the follow-on in the media and in the inquiry appointed by a provincial government and led by Justice Samuel Hughes. These days we get a local judge to look at a political fiasco who decides to exclude all talk of politics with the result that we still do not know fully what happened, and therefore we cannot know how to avoid the same mistakes again.
In a talk about Muskrat Falls, someone asked me the other day just such a question - Part 1 and Part 2 - about what lessons we could learn from the disaster. I made the same point about the Muskrat inquiry but added that the main problem was our lack of discussion, our general willingness to let others decide, and to avoid any uncomfortable discussion in public. That’s the same thing we did during COVID and are doing again with hydrogen or for that matter talks with Quebec.
We were not perfect before. There is no golden age in the past to which we must return. But we must remember that we are further from health now than we were in past 40 years or so, financially or politically. We must remember that in those relatively better times Ray simply disappeared to live quietly in Newfoundland and Labrador in some sort of personal gulag imposed partly by a society that no longer cared to listen. Rex had to frig off to the mainland to become a celebrity honoured in his own town and among his own friends and relations.
So when someone wonders why conversations have dried up or that there are so few different points of view in public these days, they might consider that they are around but no one wants to listen. We don’t like to be discomfited or have any discomfort even if the unease people like Rex or Ray can bring is, like any ache or pain, a clue something is wrong and needs fixing. Sending them to Coventry - what would the Newfoundland equal be? - or to the mainland is never the answer when their only crime is that they show us honestly who we really are.
I have said, that in my opinion, Ray Guy is the Greatest person ever of our province. Initially I just thought of him as being funny. Able to make me laugh. Then I realised the depth of his knowledge, and the courage it took to tell the stories that needed to be told. Is there yet no great monument or significant scholarship in his memory? There is no one else in his class. Ray and Rex had different styles. Everyone understood Ray, while many struggled with Rex's big words (he was called a wordsmith). Occasionally I pick up my copy of a Ray Guy book. The humour is as fresh as ever, for me who remember the characters, mainly politicians, he knocked down.