“Nothing like a bracing dose of your venom to start a Friday!”
That was a comment from an old friend after reading last Friday morning’s scribbles. Another friend said something generally similar a few days later.
I gave up wondering how people take stuff I write. Happened a long time ago simply because - as I quickly learned - there’s no way I can tell how anyone will react to anything I write. Stuff I figure is wonderful people ignore and some things that I struggle with, that seem forced or fuzzy - like the Wednesday’s column - actually resonate with people in ways I never could have predicted.
The thing about the three politicians in search of an audience is that there wasn’t an ounce of anything like venom in me when I wrote it. The whole thing was more matter-of-fact than personal in the sense of going after specific people. They are simply types repeating the pattern of the types. The candidate who exists in everyone’s mind except his own but who plays the game. The Premier looking for love and adoration. The Prime Minister whose own wife never thought of him as Prime Minister and now so many wish he weren’t in the job.
And as much as the title was a rip-off of an homage to a well-known absurdist play about the relationship between fiction and reality - Six characters in search of an author - there really wasn’t anything more philosophical, deep, or pretentious to it than that.
If there was any emotion in the bit about Andrew Furey it was the usual one for these scribbles, namely disappointment. An enormously privileged guy with the chance to do great things and instead he wastes everyone’s time jerking off in public. The latest in a string of people to get the job because they could and who had no idea what to do with the job once they moved into the office. There’s a reason why I called this political period since 2003 a celebritocracy, a term I stole from someone else I think. Furey’s all there for the hob-nobbing but for the most part he prefers to be someone else. Cosplaying Trudeau. Overall, more like Paris Hilton without the depth.
The really important parts of that column were about joining up the dots, of highlighting the contrast between the dot of what Furey said about good policy for example, and the enormous space to the other dot that is the stuff he’s actually done. In that sense the column did what was obvious to everyone and really ought to have been obvious to Furey but wasn’t. Same thing with the American journalist rabbiting on about the Undesirables. All I did was point out the obvious dot on one of the chasm between what she said and the dot on the other side of the chasm being what she was actually doing.
Or the dead bodies piling up outside the major hospital in the province for two reasons. There is no plan to fix the problem. None. Nor is there any sense that someone ought to do something about it other than let the bodies pile up. Most of the bodies pile up because the social services department won’t pay to have the remains disposed of in a dignified way. The others chill there because the local medical examiner has some gaps in his powers that allow - in one instance - a body to lay there for three years even though the investigation into the death has long been closed or at least taken as far as it can go. That’s the dot of what is going on, the bodies pile up
The dot on the other side is Paul Pike - the minister responsible for most of the corpses being there still - who knew in February about the problem and neither he nor any of his colleagues in cabinet (another bunch of dots) would change the amounts covered by his department to give the freezer folks a dignified resting place.
They cannot argue a shortage of money. This government introduced a spring budget that spends record amounts, especially in health, and borrows near-record amounts to fund it.
They cannot argue that if these bodies get buried at public expense, everyone would abandon their loved ones to let the Crown foot the bill. That’s just an old bureaucratic excuse for failure. The people involved here are all clients of Pike’s department for one thing. And for another it actually doesn’t matter. In the simplest most utilitarian thinking cremating or burying the corpses just settles the matter.
And in a more philosophical sense, what we do as a society with the dead says everything about us. There might well be some turd somewhere on the public payroll whose come up with the idea it’s cheaper to store the bodies than to give them a proper burial. The scitte might be right on a spreadsheet. But as a society, it tells us that fundamentally we in Newfoundland and Labrador place no value on human lives.
You see, it doesn’t matter how someone comes to be laying on a slab in the basement of the province’s major hospital. Doesn’t matter at all. The person deserves a dignified final resting place and if it’s at public expense, at a cost of five grand for a cheap cremation with the remains in a plain wooden box, it is a hell of a lot better than eternity in an extra-large Baggie, crammed in a jumped up Kelvinator out back of the local children’s hospital.
Doesn’t matter if the person was the anonymous victim of a murder whose killer will never be found, someone whose demons drove them to drugs or alcohol or some other wasted life, or any of the untold other reasons why someone would wind up abandoned at death. What happens once they’re dead and abandoned is on us, the community where they died. What we do to the least among us, we do to ourselves and in this case, the dead are literally the least among us. We treat our dogs and cats better than we are treating them.
No one suggests the end should be a Fillatre’s special with the most expensive casket or urn in the most expensive plot. Their final resting place may be inside a box made of recycled wood in a plot that holds dozens or thousands like them at the end. But it will have some small measure of human dignity, which is the very least any of us should expect simply because one day, inevitably, that will be us.
Later this month, there’ll be a lot of money spent to bring a body back from France of a soldier who died in the Great War but whose identity is unknown. What little is left of him after more than century will settle inside a stone box for people to file past a couple of times a year as they lay wreaths and the rest of the time for people to ignore.
This show has nothing to do with reverence for the dead or for history. The news release this week about the return of the bones is riddled with historical inaccuracies and lits of hollow words. The whole thing more reflects some people’s twisted modern fixation on Beaumont Hamel than what happened then, what it meant then and what it means now. Simple example: Newfoundlanders and Labradorians fought and died on land and at sea. The memorial was not erected to just one group but to all and they are all entirely ignored in this event as we bring home one and ignore the rest.
The fact we are even putting up a tomb of the unknown soldier is a reminder that this is less about us and more about looking like someone else, especially the crowd up-along. The memorial to this unknown man and his fellow volunteers, the ones who died as well as the ones who lived, some deeply scarred, is already built.
Unique among the Dominions of the British Empire - Newfoundland, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa - we built a university as a lasting memorial of the sacrifice of so many from such a small place. It was not static or mute but some something alive that would renew with each generation who passed through its doors. The university was just like the military forces themselves, that is, not segregated by sectarian colour like the society they came from. The soldiers themselves told off those at home when they tried to appoint officers on the base of a quota among Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Methodists. Would have none of that. They changed the place. And so it was no surprise that the men and women who’d served their country without sectarian division wanted a memorial that reflected them and that continued to live and build what they had begun, on into the future long after they were gone.
So if we want to honour those from Newfoundland and Labrador who served in the Great War, the Second World War, Korea and in conflicts after and on into the future, we’d be better spending our time taking back *our* university from the crowd currently wrecking it and restoring to what those of that generation meant it to be. We’d be all better off too if we took a fraction of the money spent on this gaudy show coming up in July and looked after the descendants of the Unknown and his fellows who are laying in the freezer boxes. Make sure that never happens again. Give those unknowns and those unwanted the dignified rest they deserve. Either of those choices would better respect the man whose remains are coming back from France this month and more importantly, would show him and us that we reflect the better world that he hoped for as the last measure of his life slipped from his lips in a dank field far from the snows of home.
Well said.
Concerning the issue of bodies piling up at the HSC …is beyond deplorable and indicative of how leadership, or lack thereof, only exacerbates our view of elected officials. Showing dignity on this issue should be akin to motherhood. Fixing this immediately would show compassion and leadership and really not sure why an immediate solution is not evident. A sad state and indicative of greater issues.
I (somewhat) recall an issue a number of years back concerning a disabled man having issues with NL Housing regarding a ramp and accessibility concerns. It hit the evening news and the next day William’s was on the phone to his Minister for immediate remedy. Within a short time the issue was resolved. Leadership at the time recognized an indignity and unfairness and it is was dealt with.
As you mentioned this is not about money to ensure that our residents are afforded dignity but a reluctance to provide leadership from the top to ensure resolution on what is right and proper.
It seems that such remedy’s are not rooted in sexy PR opportunities and therefore forgotten in the halls of the relevant Department and certainly not on the immediate radar for this Premier.
This needs to be immediate and communicated accordingly
Thought provoking reflection.