If you’ve indulged in banned substances while in high office, or stolen the pocketable equivalent of a fully loaded Lexus RX 300, how do you restore Canadians’ faith in your credibility? It isn’t the $64,000 question: Everyone knows you just say, “I’m sorry,” and it all goes away. Cases in point are Quebec’s PQ leadership front-runner, Andre Boisclair, and freshly politically transfused Svend Robinson.
While still a provincial cabinet minister, Andre Boisclair used cocaine, a psychologically addictive and judgment-altering drug; how much he won’t say. Perhaps $64,000 worth? It would be a neat bookend to the $64,000 ring former B.C. MP Svend Robinson stole for his boyfriend 18 months ago. Like Svend, Boisclair is counting on voters “to forgive him for past mistakes.” And with reason. A poll in late September indicated that Boisclair is set fair to win the leadership race in November. When pressed to reveal details of his “youthful errors” (He was 30-something while using: Is that still “youthful”?), Boisclair petulantly demanded: “What more do you want from me than a confession?”
Behold the moral zeitgeist summarized in just 10 words. .jpg)
Svend is feeling similarly cocky: A poll in his riding had more than half the pollees reporting that the ring theft would “make no difference whatsoever.” Why? Because triumphant appeals to the heart—don’t judge me, feel my pain—have come to trump the expectation of meaningful consequences.
Sentimentality—not, alas, a banned substance—is our national marinade. Extended immersion tenderizes our analytical faculties into mush in the presence of fulsome sentiment.
We saw this propensity to wallow in sentiment “in full-throated cry”—to Coyne a phrase—following the G-G’s recent installation speech, when Andrew and other normally sensible pundits swooned over a vapid address whose soaring rhetoric could have applied to any Western democracy. (Racial, economic, religious, linguistic: What nation doesn’t have its solitudes?)
Sentimentality turns the perpetrator’s lachrymose acknowledgment of bad behaviour into an invitation to himself and his audience to shed what Milan Kundera, in defining kitsch, calls “the second tear.” The “first tear” is private and unfiltered, the genuine, spontaneous response to strong emotion. The second tear is public and self-reflexive, summoned rather than greeted. Unlike natural tears, second tears act as a purgative for the shedder only when mirrored in the eyes of others.
Svend’s public aspect is kitsch incarnate. He’s not only a ready blubberer himself, but an inspiration to teariness in others, as he constantly reminds us (Google Svend Robinson, tears). He made sure to inform us he cried when attending the 1999 suicide of MS sufferer Sue Rodriguez; and that he watched the gay marriage vote this past July “with tears of joy flowing down my cheeks.” He most recently cried when informing a reporter that a native woman told her son, in his presence, that he was “a good man” (the obliging Globe reporter included the tears as part of the story). And of course he cried us a river when admitting he took the ring.
For his sympathizers, the self-promotional histrionics accompanying Svend’s public suffering are translated into the glow of Christ-like selflessness. They cannot see that Svend’s celebrated sensitivity disguises a crass political opportunism.
Inappropriate behaviour in office used to entail legal sanction and shame. Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky experience was the tipping point into shame-free kitsch redemption. The touchy-feely Clinton clasped hands with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, attended church, looked sheepish and confessed he had sinned. Like Svend, feeling the pain of the disenfranchised had always been his specialty. Now he called in his chips, and everyone, including Hillary, forgave him, as life skipped gloriously forward.
From Clinton’s painless re-invention of himself as a reformed sinner, wrongdoing politicians thenceforth understood that a sentimental confession by itself could win back public confidence. And so it does.
Why are Canadians such masochists, so tolerant of the weak and the whingers in public life? The sense of moral superiority that attends our power to grant absolution gives us a momentary high, like cocaine, I suppose. But how can we expect responsible leadership when we continue to delegate real power over our lives to transparent narcissists? That’s the real $64,000 question.
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