Who's in Control?

 

“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!