“Woke” is about only one thing: control,” Pierre
Poilievre says in a recent ad for the Conservative Party of Canada. An
example the ad uses is the decision by a Quebec school to substitute “Parents’
Day” for “Mother’s Day” in the interest of the children with single fathers
or who have lost their mother or who are sadly trapped in a dysfunctional
family or for any other reason experience the day as a trial. What Poilievre
doesn’t mention, of course, is that election campaigning is all about only one
thing: gaining control, and that invoking the “woke” myth is part of a strategy
to displace the dictator of “woke,” Justin Trudeau with me, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the
“not woke.”
Neither does the ad mention how the
“Parents’ Day” event would have unfolded differently if he and not Justin had
been “in control.”
What the CPU and the US Republican Party
have in common is the pursuit of control; no political party can enact its
policies without it, after all. To complete such an achievement in a democracy,
masses of people must either vote for you because they prefer you over the
others, or they must vote for you because they have good reason to fear all the
others. “Woke” is useful as a catch-all to refer to those others of whom we
should be afraid. So, Poilievre doesn’t need to debate the policies of New
Democrats and Liberals separately, he can use the “woke” shortcut to include them
both.
The trick is to say “woke” repeatedly,
always implying that it is to be feared and to convince the largely-uninformed
citizens that “woke” or “not woke” is all they need to know about the political
schemes being floated. That seems to be the plan for getting into the seat of
control for Republicans and Canadian Conservatives these days.
And they come by it honestly. Since
politicians were either Whigs
or Tories in early British parliaments and the Whigs sat on
one side of the aisle and Tories on the other, it’s been a fight between
the Whig’s “adapt to the times” and the Torie’s “keep doing what we’ve always
done because it was working” positions. What this adversarial model has turned
into in many democratic countries is a tragedy.
Voting in a democracy today is a lot like
supporting a sports team. Although there may well be community-bonding benefits
to thousands of fans excitedly supporting the Winnipeg Jets or the Saskatchewan
Roughriders, fan loyalty defies logic. Pro sport is an entertainment industry;
the actors traded like chattels, responding in their life choices more according
to remuneration possibilities than to Winnipeg or Saskatchewan loyalty. For
better or worse, pro sports fandom is the choosing of a myth, discarding a
harsh or boring reality for an alternative world for a time.
A party system of choosing political
leadership easily turns into something like that. A loyalty to a brand that
removes the need to scrutinize the motivation and credentials of a player with,
“He/she/they play on the (Conservative/New Democrat/Liberal) team; that’s good
enough for me!” That elections are “won” or “lost” pretty much sums up my
point.
The US Congress and Canada’s parliament
should be places where conservative and progressive views meet in the presence
of objective academics to hammer out directions for the country. That they’ve
turned the dialogue chambers into rancorous quarreling, backbiting, and
opportunistic one-upmanship renders them practically useless as problem solving
institutions.
Adversarial systems make adversaries of
citizens, train them to think about their common home adversarially.
In the mouth of Pierre Poilievre, “woke”
sounds a lot like “so*s of bi***es,” or “snivelling cowards,” or any other
playground taunt meant to denigrate a target. The irony is that it’s decidedly
the wrong word for the purpose intended. It’s got black, southern origins where
“staying woke (awake)” was an admonition to stay alert to what’s really going
on, in that case to the suppression of the African-American population. The
teachers who chose to honour all parents (including mothers) on the traditional
Mother’s Day were being “woke” to the different ways in which their students
experienced that day … and responded compassionately.
Give me a teacher who’s awake over one
hide-bound to the past meanings of things any day.
The irony lies, of course, in the
elementary observation that the opposite of “woke” is asleep.
You should have stuck with so*s of bi***es!
