The other day the National Post ran an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Love. Most of it was just the usual boilerplate hogwash apparently obligatory if one fancies oneself a member of the intellectual wing of the Canadian establishment. You know the sort of stuff:
“Most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.”
Well, it’s an improvement on his last book, whose general line was that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of rousing oneself to finish a sentence about it. Returning to the Dominion of Paradox after spending his entire adult life abroad, Mr. Ignatieff, Canada’s prodiggy son, announced in the intro to his previous tome on the land of his birth that writing it had “deepened his attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” Gee, that’s awfully big of you.
But evidently the spinmeisters nobbled him and demanded he oomph it up a bit for Vol. 2. He never imagined he’d have to write a second book about Canada, but hey, maybe there’s a book in that: Canada is an “act of imagining.” [Note to agent: Check J. Ralston Saul didn’t get to this one first.]
Anyway, the bit that caught my eye—and, indeed, made it momentarily stop rolling—was this:
“To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.”
It’s tempting to respond, “Oh, bugger off, you ridiculous poseur,” and pass on to something more rewarding, like Paris Hilton’s Twitter feed. But the sedating pretentiousness of Mr. Ignatieff’s prose style shouldn’t disguise the fact that this may be the most morally contemptible statement by a Canadian party leader since Confederation. (I’d be interested in alternative bids for that title, if you know of any. We may publish them as an anthology, although probably not a GG-award-winning one.)
“Their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it.” I wonder what it takes to formulate it that way, knowing, as Ignatieff surely does, that Christopher Pauchay was drunk, so drunk that he was oblivious (or so we must presume, for he was found guilty merely of negligence, rather than sadism) to the fact that it was well after midnight, minus 50 with the wind chill, and he had dressed three-year-old Kaydance and 16-month Santana only in T-shirts and diapers. At 5 a.m., Pauchay was found on a neighbour’s doorstep, stinking of booze, frostbitten and aggressive, so that the RCMP were obliged to accompany the paramedics. It was not until eight hours later, in the hospital, that he mentioned the children.
As to “the sick little girls,” Santana wasn’t sick until her father’s carelessness made her first ill, and then dead; and Kaydance’s body was discovered with a cut on her leg, but, given the number of Pauchay’s knives found scattered on his path through the snow, or the others his brother-in-law had seen him putting under the sofa that afternoon, there’s no way of knowing whether, amidst the other abuses he heaped fatally on her, the cut was also her father’s fault—or more benignly the consequence of a three-year-old toddling around in her diaper during her “parent’s” all-day bender.
Why couldn’t Ignatieff have used words like “drunk” and “abusive,” or even “minus 50” and “dressed only in diapers”?
Oh, come on, be reasonable. He’s a caring, progressive party leader. Can’t go around being judgmental. Stick to the passive voice—“children have perished”—and the usual sentimental evasions. The price of “imagining Canada” Ignatieff-style is that an awful lot of cold hard reality has to be discarded.
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