So when the Senate expense scandal broke, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a way, was playing to form as he offered stock answers to questions, and refused to take responsibility for the actions of his senior advisers. But since Senator Mike Duffy dragged Harper and the PMO into the eye of the storm with his stunning revelations, the prime minister appears to have taken his disdain for accountability to new heights — or lows.
The absurdity of it all is watching Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, deliver homilies about his father’s pizza shop, their no-doubt upstanding delivery man and the travails of Calandra’s children. Here is a prime minister facing perhaps the most damaging scandal of his political life, one that now appears to have brought an investigation into criminal wrongdoing to his doorstep, and he reduces the whole thing to mere storytelling. It smacks of contempt for the public, and in trying to understand what the goings-on in a pizza store has to do with an alleged conspiracy in the PMO, I was reminded of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book, On Bullshit, and it all began to make sense.
You’ll recall that in the book, Frankfurt tries to unravel the deeper, philosophical meaning of bullshit. Commonly understood to mean nonsense, or perhaps humbug, Frankfurt believes bullshit and its purveyors can be much more insidious because they have no regard for the truth. He postulates that for the bullshitter, unlike a liar, the truth is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the bullshitter whether what he or she is saying is the truth. What is important is that it serves his purpose. The liar, however, is well aware of the truth but chooses to disregard it in order to tell the lie.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction,” Frankfurt writes. The bullshitter, Frankfurt writes, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose,” which is how much of politics today is played.
“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as the essence of bullshit …” Frankfurt writes. “Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try and be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.” Sounds familiar?
When Harper gets up in the House and sticks to his talking points, refusing to answer question after question about his role and that of his senior staff in the evolving scandal, he may not even be evading the truth or fudging the facts. He is simply being true to himself in ignoring the facts because they don’t serve his purpose. He creates his own reality and focuses on it like a laser. When a Ralph Goodale or a Marc Garneau asks a question about impropriety in the PMO, Calandra takes his cue from Harper, and goes storytelling.
“Mr. Speaker, this would be a good time give another story, I know how fond the House is of stories,” he jokes about an issue that is no joke.
Facts don’t mean much, so he deflects with his own narrative based on the art of pizza delivery, or takes us inside his home to learn about daughters. If you are confused about what pizza delivery has to do with grave allegations of deception and conspiracy in the PMO, you shouldn’t be. One has nothing to do with the other, and that’s how today’s politics works — it is all about the story, the narrative, good or bad. If facts or the truth get in the way, they are discarded. It is all about storytelling, and smart politicians have become good at it because in the end, all a party needs for victory is about 40 per cent of the people who are listening and watching. First, the narrative must appeal to about the one-third of the electorate that is the base, and then you try to win the 10 per cent of those in the middle, and voilà, you are in.
That’s why Harper has been reading his lines in the House, and stuck to his guns at the Calgary convention feeling no need to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Scandal? What scandal? Facts? They are merely are inconvenience. Harper’s story is that he is the victim; he is the one trying to do what’s right and is thwarted at every turn by the Ottawa elite. And that is why before his adoring base, he launched a gratuitous broadside against the courts. It is part of his narrative, and that’s what winning politics looks like today. Harper is going to play it all the way to the ballot box in 2015.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Mohammed Adam
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