The mystery of Jean Charest

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 5:38 PM - 12 Comments

There’s a word for businesses whose fortunes don’t conform to dominant patterns, outfits like collection agencies or discount food chains that do their briskest business in recessions: counter-cyclical. I’m beginning to think Jean Charest is a counter-cyclical politician.

Consider the latest poll results that put the premier well ahead of his competitors. Even if we assume incumbents enjoy a natural advantage over challengers during the summer months, Charest’s feat is impressive. Over the past few months, his government has been saddled with bad news coming from virtually all sides: the Caisse de dépot’s bottom line is a mess; Hydro-Québec is taking flak for a handful of impolitic donations; the provincial budget is riddled with holes; on more than one occasion, the Liberals have found themselves tiptoeing around potential ethical scandals; and to top it all off, Charest has shed two key cabinet ministers over the past 18 months. And yet, his government has rarely been as popular as it is now. Even the normally loquacious PQ is downright stumped.

Now consider the circumstances under which Charest has struggled most. In 2003, he was elected with a healthy majority and a mandate to “re-engineer the state.” At the time, the province’s finances were in (relatively) good shape, the economy was still chugging along, and the spectre of a referendum had dimmed to near-invisibility. Charest’s only immediate challenge was to keep the peace with the angry suburbanites who were still miffed at the municipal mergers. But even that didn’t seem too daunting—what were they going to do, vote for the PQ? But then came the protests, the strikes, the plummeting poll numbers. Soon, the dominant question about Charest wasn’t whether he was doing a good job or a bad one, but whether he was doing the worst job in history.

The early days of Charest’s post-2007 minority government provide another case in point. In a bid to prop up Charest, Ottawa had handed him hundreds of millions of dollars just days before Quebecers went to the polls. Charest promptly turned around and promised to use $700 million of that money to fund tax cuts. Even though the figure was barely a fraction of the billions in cuts he had promised (and never delivered) in 2003, the gambit nearly cost him his government. The 2009 budget, by contrast, included a sales tax hike for 2011—and Charest is as popular as he’s ever been.

All of which got me thinking: Are there any other counter-cyclical politicians out there—that is, politicians for whom times are good when conventional wisdom suggests they shouldn’t be and vice-versa?

Greetings, fellow cosmopolitans

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 47 Comments

Kirsten Weld has never been a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, nor has she made any donations. She hasn’t even voted for them in an election. So, when she recently received a letter from the Liberals at her home in New Haven, Conn., the 27-year-old was surprised. “Are you a second-class Canadian?” the envelope blared. The letter inside, signed by Michael Ignatieff, had this message in boldface at the top: “The Canadian Prime Minister is questioning your loyalty. I think he’s wrong.”

Among Conservatives, Ignatieff’s years spent abroad are a favourite point of attack—but the Liberal leader is hoping they will play better with the expatriate crowd. In a new campaign aimed at Canadians living outside the country, he’s playing up his globe-trotting in hopes of attracting donations. “My own path has taken me across the airwaves of the BBC to the pages of the New York Times, from remote villages in Afghanistan into lecture halls in Paris, Vancouver and Boston,” the letter says. Even the stationery is meant to evoke international travel: it’s marked with passport stamps from far-flung locales like Hong Kong, Paris and Sydney. A call to arms to expats to “stand against these attacks,” the letter ends by asking for a donation, to “affect the balance of power in Ottawa immediately.” Continue…

The suspense is killing us: Liveblogging Foreign Affairs on Canadians abroad. (Maybe.)

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 2:25 PM - 67 Comments

Disclaimer: As noted (read: ranted about) earlier,  ITQ has no idea how this particular SO 106(4)-driven emergency committee meeting is going to unfold — or, for that matter, if it’s even going to happen — today, or ever.  But that’s not going to stop her from showing up to liveblog whatever does end up going down this afternoon in 237-C, so check back at 2:45 or so for a pre-meeting scrum with NDP Foreign Affairs critic Paul Dewar. (He’ll tell us what’s going on, right? )
UPDATE: Okay, we’ve got the name of one potential witness, at least: ITQ has been told that Suaad Mohamud is in Ottawa, and ready to testify if invited to do so by the committee.

2:32:19 PM
Greetings, fans of justice for Canadians stranded abroad, foes of capriciously in camera-fied meetings and random parliamentary tour groups!
After securing the coveted corner seat in the soon-to-be-temporarily-locked-down committee room, ITQ has joined the stakeout by the Reading Room, which is conveniently located just across the Hall of Honour from the giftshop.

We’re all eagerly awaiting the arrival of NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, who wants to use this meeting as a springboard to a much more extensive investigation into this government’s treatment of Canadians who run into trouble abroad, from Omar Khadr to Suaad Mohamud and plenty more in between. In the meantime, though, we’re trading tidbits on potential witnesses: apparently, the Liberals want to call a whole whack of bureaucrats, from the president of the Canada Border Services Agency to the deputy minister at Foreign Affairs, as well as Mohamud, as previously noted, and a handful of others. Whether the other opposition parties are willing to back their play on that one, well — we’re just going to have to see what happens at this afternoon’s meeting.
Holding a spontaneous picket of the leader of the party you hope to keep as an ally strikes ITQ as a potentially risky strategy, however.

2:44:06 PM
Dewar is here, and he’s explaining what he wants to do — convince the committee to “work together” (drink!) to come up with a protocol for handling cases that arise in future. He does sound like he’s willing to meet the Liberals halfway, at least, on the witnesses tentatively scheduled for today, though. “We have a government that needs to be held to account,” he notes, as far as its obligation to protect citizens abroad — and it looks like it’s going to require a law to make that happen.

2:49:22 PM
This was a very smart move by Dewar — he’s got a captive audience out here, and he’s taking full advantage of it. I’ve not seen any other MPs yet, but I’m sure they’ll turn up soon — that, or they’ve slipped in the backdoor. Honestly, we need fewer egresses in this place.
2:53:46 PM
Continue…

You heard it here first

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 16 Comments

This analysis seems entirely reasonable. Or at least as reasonable as any other analysis you’re likely to read or hear on the subject in the weeks to come.

"We are now protecting the good-faith torturers"

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 2:05 PM - 23 Comments

Dahlia Lithwick skewers the tortured logic, so to speak, in U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to investigate only those low-level CIA operatives who exceeded the limits of the Office of the Legal Counsel torture memos, not the memos’ authors:

That isn’t just wrong, it’s outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it’s served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications—even after the fact—and you can do as you please. Prosecution of those who strayed beyond the new rules, without considering the culpability of those who strayed in creating the new rules, would mean that in America, a law degree amounts to a defense. Rep Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., put it this way earlier this month when he warned that it makes no sense to prosecute the guy who used 8 ounces of water to water-board but not the lawyer who said it was OK to water-board someone with 3 ounces of water.

The New York Times editorial board agrees. So do I. If a new president determined that his predecessor’s Office of the Legal Counsel had been busy writing flimsy faux-legal justifications for a state-run money-laundering scheme, a drug ring or a loan-sharking operation, he would be duty-bound to investigate, not only anyone who exceeded the legalistic cover story, but those who constructed it. The same is true if the crime in question is widespread and systematic torture. Holder has lifted the cover on this squalid business, and Obama’s reluctance to see him go even this far does the President no honour. But the mandate Holder has given his investigator doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Teachers’ Union tells the Alberta to pay up

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 1:25 PM - 1 Comment

Alberta’s teachers wanted more pay. The province agreed. But nobody expected wages to go up this much. In 2007, Alberta’s Teachers’ Association signed a five-year collective agreement with the province, which pegged teachers’ salaries to Statistics Canada earnings index. Early this year, it was announced that teachers’ pay would be boosted 4.85 per cent. And everything
was OK. But then in March, StatsCan changed the way it calculated the index. And that left the Alberta government scrambling to find an extra $23 million to cover the increase—at the same time that the province’s finance minister is expected to announce a $6.9 billion deficit. The union says the province must honour its agreement, pointing out that the province could have instituted new taxes to cover the disputed sum. “The province’s general fiscal situation is beyond the power of Alberta teachers’ influence,” a spokesman for the Alberta Teachers’ Association said on Tuesday. “We, for example, didn’t decide that we were going to forgo an increase in liquor taxes that would have paid for the cost of this increase four times over.” But the province says it simply doesn’t have the dollars. Meetings are scheduled to take place this week.

CBC

Alberta: $15 billion off in their projections

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 1:21 PM - 8 Comments

The Edmonton Journal columnist Graham Thomson unpacks what Alberta’s out-of-control deficit numbers means for the Stelmach Tories, and how they got here. Last August, the government projected an $8.5 billion surplus. They just announced a $6.9 billion deficit. “The culprit, say government officials, is the price of natural gas that has fallen to $3.75 a gigajoule from around $13 last summer,” writes Thomson (natural gas normally generates a good healthy chunk of provincial government revenue). “The culprit, counter critics, is a government that didn’t save enough during the good times and doesn’t know how to be fiscally prudent during the bad.” Thomson’s take? Neither side’s entirely right.

Edmonton Journal

The many implications of Omar Khadr

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 55 Comments

Tonda MacCharles tries to read Stephen Harper’s mind.

Even some Conservatives privately admit they have been taken aback by Harper’s utter indifference to pleas about Khadr’s plight. There’s no clear explanation for it. Is it good foreign policy? Good politics? Or simple ideological stubborness?

There are hints, but no explicit statements, that the Americans still want to prosecute Khadr. The government denies any knowledge of the Obama administration’s plans for the only Westerner left in Guantanamo….

The Khadrs carry political baggage here. Harper may simply want to avoid getting stung the way former prime minister Jean Chretien was. Chretien in 1996 asked Pakistani authorities to release Ahmed Said Khadr, Omar’s father, who later turned out key to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fundraising efforts in Afghanistan. Photos of him at the hospitalized Khadr’s bedside loom large still.

It could be that Harper, having given up so much conservative political ground on fiscal and social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, does not want to risk further angering his base of supporters by appearing to be anything less than “tough on terror.”

German railway giants set sights on U.S. high-speed rail

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:43 PM - 1 Comment

Two German railway operators are angling to join forces to infiltrate the U.S. high-speed rail business. Siemans and Deutsche Bahn are hoping to cash in on the U.S. government’s infrastructure stimulus. The Obama administration has promised to pour up to US$8 billion into the country’s railways to link major cities with trains that will travel at speeds of 240km/h. Before the German companies’ partnership can go ahead however, they must settle an internal dispute.

Der Spiegel

What did Nixon say to Halderman?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 1 Comment

It is one of the enduring mysteries of the Watergate scandal: What were Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Halderman, discussing during the 18-and-a-half minutes that disappeared from the Watergate tapes? Phil Mellinger, a former systems analyst at the National Security Agency and high-tech corporate security expert, thinks he might be able to solve it. Researchers have for decades tried to recover the audio from the tapes, but Mellinger claims the answer to the riddle may in fact lie in Halderman’s meticulous note-taking. The amateur historian believes the two pages of Halderman’s notes from his meeting with Nixon may contain evidence there were in fact several other pages that went missing along with the tape. Using CSI-esque technology to re-create the notes from imprints left by Halderman’s ball-point pen on the existing pages, Mellinger figures he might be able to reveal just what the two men were talking about. An expert at the National Archives has already confirmed the second page of notes contains indentations that might respond to Mellinger’s technique and has recommended further testing be conducted. Senior officials are reportedly studying the request.

Mother Jones

If at first you fail, try and try and try….

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 0 Comments

Three years ago, Microsoft unveiled the Zune, a product that it hoped would rival the Apple iPod. It was a massive flop. The company has sold just 3 million of the devices (for a two per cent share of the MP3 market). This spring alone, Apple sold over 10 million iPods (it has a 73 per cent market share). But Microsoft refuses to give up on the Zune and a mobile music and gaming market that it sees as strategically important. Next month, it plans to introduce the Zune HD (which features high-definition video that can be streamed to television screens). Microsoft hopes to integrate the Zune with its popular XBox video game system and lure in its users. Still, it will be a long uphill battle against the iPod, but one that Microsoft is still willing to fight.

Business Week

Study sheds light on why heart attacks are more deadly for women

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:19 PM - 2 Comments

In the first month after suffering a heart attack, women may be twice as likely to die than men. According to a new study however, gender is not the key factor in this outcome. Doctors at the New York University School of Medicine found that there are major differences in the characteristics of the men and women who have heart attacks. Women are more likely to be older, have diabetes and high blood pressure, while men are more likely to have had previous heart failure, bypass surgery and to smoke. But when they compared men and women of the same age and status, the gender gap in survival rates was eliminated.

ABC

Reinsdorf bows out of bidding

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 1 Comment

The group of investors led by Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago Bulls and White Sox, missed their opportunity to buy the Phoenix Coyotes because they couldn’t meet an Aug. 25 deadline to place a concrete bid on the team. Reinsdorf says an “unwilling seller” and what he called “an organized effort designed to provide negative and misleading information to interested parties,” prevented his group from making a solid offer. However, the NHL and a new group called Ice Edge holdings both placed bids in time. They’re competing with Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who made a $212.5 million offer and plans to move the Coyotes to Hamilton, Ont., against the NHL’s wishes. The actual auction is set to take place on Sept. 10.

CBC

Colin Thatcher: How I was framed

By Byron Christopher - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 45 Comments

On the evening of Jan. 21, 1983, JoAnn Wilson was murdered, bludgeoned and shot in the garage of her Regina home. It had been three years since she and husband Colin Thatcher—the son of a former Saskatchewan premier and an ex-provincial cabinet minister himself—had filed for divorce, years marked by Wilson’s remarriage, an acrimonious custody battle over the three Thatcher children and a previous violent attack on her. Twenty months before her death Wilson had been shot through her kitchen window and wounded in the shoulder. No one was ever charged for it. On May 7, 1984, after a lengthy police investigation, Colin Thatcher was arrested for her murder. The sensational and controversial trial unfolded over the fall of 1984. Although Thatcher has never ceased to proclaim his innocence, he was found guilty, and spent 22 years in prison. Released on parole in 2006, Thatcher has spent his time working on his ranch near Moose Jaw, Sask., and writing his account, Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame (ECW Press).

In the book, Thatcher gives his version of events since his arrest, avoiding any direct recapitulation of the crime itself, and concentrating on three areas. Primary is what he sees as the Saskatchewan Department of Justice’s single-minded pursuit of a conviction. It was a determination, Thatcher says, that led Crown prosecutors—against their own official policy on disclosure of evidence, but not then against the law—to keep from his lawyer evidence that tended to exculpate Thatcher. The department’s actions, he writes, added up to a campaign of “unconscionable deceit and litany of lies of omission, much of which would not be known for years, the full extent probably never.” Among the information eventually possessed by the Crown but not passed on to Thatcher and his lawyer for years was a package mailed to the Regina Leader-Post newspaper that included an anonymous confession to Wilson’s murder and even the hatchet the letter writer claimed was the bludgeoning weapon. Continue…

Ted Kennedy: "The lion of the Senate"

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 1 Comment

Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy brothers and one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. Senate, has died at age 77 after a long battle with brain cancer.   After John F. Kennedy was elected President, Ted won a special election to fill his seat as a Senator representing Massachusetts. He won a full Senate term in 1964, and was re-elected for seven more six-year terms. Kennedy was sometimes dubbed “the lion of the Senate” because of his seniority and his strong personality. As a Senator, he was often seen as an unusual combination: a very liberal legislator (more liberal than either of his brothers on many issues) who was also a bipartisan deal-maker. He was one of the Senate’s most liberal members—he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq while his Senate colleague, John Kerry, supported it—and was distrustful of Presidents like Reagan, Bush, and even Jimmy Carter. Feeling that Carter was too far to the right, Kennedy ran an unsuccessful but high-profile primary challenge in 1980 (which may have inadvertently helped Reagan win the election by damaging Carter politically). But he was always willing to cut deals with conservative Republicans to get something he wanted, and convince his fellow Senate liberals that he had gotten a good deal that they should go along with. In 2002, he worked with President Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act.

One of Kennedy’s signature issues was health care. As chairman of the Senate’s health committee, he helped develop many important pieces of health legislation. He also played a leading role in many attempts to pass a universal health care system in the U.S. But his health problems meant that he was unable to take the lead in the current health care negotiations, and his death may make it even harder to pass a health care bill. Though Massachusetts has a Democratic Governor, the state no longer allows the governor to appoint a temporary replacement for a Senator (due to a law they passed to prevent Republican Governor Mitt Romney from making an appointment). Instead, Kennedy’s seat will remain unfilled until a few months from now, when there will be a special election to fill his spot. Without Kennedy, the Democrats will not have enough votes to break a filibuster of President Obama’s health care package. Or, if you want to look at it more cynically, it will give the Democrats a built-in excuse for delaying reform yet again. Continue…

Say Hello/Goodbye To Big Screen Classics

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

As a follow-up/rebuttal to our piece “Say Goodbye To Big Screen Classics,” Kevin Jagernauth at the Playlist talks to Criterion Collection CEO Jonathan Turrell, who says that independent companies like his own are not experiencing the same downturn as the big studios — “If we’re down, we’re down a very small amount” — and that despite the slower pace of recent releases, there has been “no concerted effort to go to newer films.” It’s a good piece and well worth looking at, particularly since my piece focused so heavily on the negative side of the situation; this is the other side, where some companies are still able to get older/classic movies onto the DVD marketplace.

In other linky news, the Globe and Mail‘s John Doyle examines the strangeness of the Corner Gas Gemini shut-out: “The Geminis Are Beyond Weird.”

"Freedom is sweet, but its price is more important": Trials begin for democratic protesters in Iran

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:11 AM - 3 Comments

Show trials are underway in Iran for those arrested for protesting the June 12 rigged presidential election.

Potkin Azarmehr has photos.

Azarmehr also writes about Massoud Bastani, who was arrested three years ago and sentenced to be lashed 74 times. He refused to ask for a pardon, saying:

 ”Even though living in prison is difficult, I am not willing to ask for a pardon for a sin that I have not committed. Freedom is sweet, but its price is more important”

Iranian security came looking for Bastani again during the mass arrests this summer. They couldn’t find him, so they arrested his pregnant wife instead. Bastani contacted the prisons and was told his wife would be released if he gave himself up. He did. She wasn’t.

No one knows what Bastani and his wife were subjected to in prison, though my previous post gives us a pretty good idea. They broke him. Yesterday he said he had been paid $400 by an Iranian website in Canada to make a documentary about an imprisoned union leader in Iran. He asked for forgiveness.

Rewarding Philosophy

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:01 AM - 7 Comments

I’m not sure what is cooler: The fact that the Norwegian Parliament awards an annual prize worth $750k for international scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, that this year’s winner is UofT philosopher Ian Hacking, or that the Globe saw fit to put Valpy’s story about the prize on A1.

When I was in grad school, Hacking bestrode the philosophy department like a colossus. In a department chockablock with big hitters, Hacking was the one bonafide superstar. His classes were always way oversubscribed and sometimes it seemed like half the students in the department had him as a supervisor. When I got there he was best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially through his books Representing and Intervening and The Taming of Chance. But at some point Hacking had the  idea of wedding Foucault’s difficult and rather opaque insights about power and knowledge to hardcore research in statistics and the social sciences, launching in the process a whole new field of inquiry on social kinds, the looping effect, and the classification of people. His book The Social Construction of What? is a thoroughly accessible entry point into that work.

Hacking has received lots of prizes and awards and so on over the years, but one aspect of his work that usually goes unreported is what a lovely stylist he is. Ian Hacking is a gorgeous writer, something I only fully appreciated when I was writing my thesis and went back and read some old journal articles he’d written on Leibniz. Most Leibniz scholars don’t exactly go out of their way to make it fun; Hacking made it so.

Bonus reading: An article he wrote for the LRB a decade ago about Aum Shinryko.

UPDATED: 106(4)Watch: Hey, you know what else drives ITQ stark, staring bonkers?

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 10:43 AM - 31 Comments

UPDATE: Okay, we’ve got the name of one potential witness, at least: ITQ has been told that Suaad Mohamud is in Ottawa, and ready to testify if invited to do so by the committee.

—

When she can’t get a copy of the proposed witness list for an emergency committee meeting that is supposed to take place in a few hours.

Honestly, y’all, ITQ understands that the clerk can’t put out the official agenda until after the members have voted on the 106(4) motion — although somehow, the Natural Resources committee managed to do exactly that in advance of last Friday’s meeting, which was a welcome, if unexpected development. Really, though, is there any reason why the four (or more) members who sign off on a 106(4) request couldn’t at least give us some idea of which witnesses made it onto their respective wish lists?  Or better yet, but even less likely still, make the preliminary meeting – at which the motion is passed, and the list of witnesses finalized — public instead of holding it in camera.

Continue…

Gone native?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

After not-so-patiently awaiting the arrival of his replacement for the last eight months, at least the former U.S. ambassador is on Canada’s side in the ongoing battle over the Buy America provisions passed by Congress earlier this year. The Toronto Star reports that David Wilkins is “applauding” International Trade Minister Stockwell Day’s efforts to eke out a waiver, although he’s not sure if he’ll have much luck. “I think it’s exactly right to ask,” Wilkins told the Star’s Susan Delacourt during a visit to his former diplomatic stomping grounds last week. “I just think it’s bad policy. It’s unfortunate that this protectionist trend is continuing.” According to Wilkins, his successor—Chicago lawyer and Obama confidante David Jacobson—is “excited about coming to Canada and keen to get to know the country.” Although he hasn’t yet been formally confirmed, Jacobson is expected to be on the job by the end of September.

Toronto Star

Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 3:08 AM - 37 Comments

Unhealthy excuses

By The Editors - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 10:55 PM - 3 Comments

The global recession has not been a pleasant experience for most people. But it has boosted everyone’s supply of convenient excuses.

The Great Recession has been blamed for everything from an increase in child abuse in New Zealand to rising obesity in the U.S. Anyone with bad news to deliver has found the recession a handy crutch—it’s explained away the cancellation of cherished but expensive television shows, layoffs and restructurings planned prior to the crash, poor fashion choices and even mothers’ return to the workforce. Continue…

Bye Bye, BIRDIE Ballet

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 4:55 PM - 1 Comment

This is actually sort of TV-related because of the most recent episode of Mad Men, which built part of the story around the sensation Ann-Margret caused in the film version of Bye Bye Birdie in 1963 (and the differing reactions of Don, who likes what Pauline Kael called A-M’s “slick, enamelled and appalling” persona, and Peggy, who’s uncomfortable with the fakeness of it all and the idea of selling that fakeness to women). There’s a stage revival of Birdie coming up — which now turns out to have very good timing, since this episode helped to revive some interest in the property — and Gina Gershon, who is playing the female lead, says that the big ballet scene in act two was cut because it’s… “gang-rapey?!”

In the scene, Rose, originated on stage by Chita Rivera and on film by Janet Leigh, crashes a Shriners banquet, flirts and cavorts on, around and underneath a table with the fez-heads.

As written, it’s a funny dance showcase. So why is it too hot to handle in 2009? Gershon told The News’ theater critic Joe Dziemianowicz, “It seemed a little too gang rape-y.”

That should come as interesting news to countless high schools, parochial academies and theater camps where this number has been performed for nearly 50 years.

The idea that a silly comedy scene that kids have been performing without incident since 1960 is “gang-rapey” is so crazy that even an objective news item can’t quite take it seriously, so people are left wondering whether:

a) The scene was cut because Gershon couldn’t handle the dancing (it didn’t work well in the movie because the unbelievably miscast Janet Leigh wasn’t really up to it)

b) The scene was cut because the producers decided it didn’t work any more (it is kind of a relic of an era when every musical had to have a ballet in it at some point).

Either one sounds more plausible than Gershon’s semi-official explanation. Anyway, here’s Chita Rivera re-creating the number in (I think) 1984:

I’m not expecting much of a revival of Birdie, which is one of my favourite stage musicals but is never treated with the respect it deserves. (The revival will have the music re-orchestrated for a smaller orchestra, even though the original orchestrations, by Robert Ginzler, are among the five best sets of arrangements ever written for a musical.) The movie threw out many of the songs, completely re-wrote the script, and gave additional material to the character played by Ann-Margret. (The title song that Don and Peggy argue about was filmed after principal photography had wrapped; the director, George Sidney, realizing that A-M was the key to the film, commissioned a new song and paid out of his own pocket to film it with her.) All of which turned out to be very good box-office — because Ann-Margret made it a hit — but has caused the original stage version to be performed thereafter as if it’s a broad, cartoonish, loud show like the movie. It’s actually a rather quiet, gentle, warm-hearted satire of early ’60s America, with a musical style mostly influenced by ’50s jazz bands.

But it was a good idea for Mad Men to use the movie, because it is one of the key works of that era: absurdly fake and artificial in every way, sometimes deliberately, sometimes just because so many people are miscast (Ann-Margret as an innocent teenager, Janet Leigh as a Latina, Paul Lynde — repeating his Broadway role — as a suburban dad), and with Ann-Margret projecting a sexuality that is halfway between studio-manufactured gloss and something more dangerous and uncontrolled. That whole movie so perfectly embodies the whole Mad Men world — artificiality and order with cracks and flashes of unpredictability — that you almost need to rent the movie to understand what the culture was like in 1963.

However, Peggy’s being unfair in one way: it’s clear that Ann-Margret is being deliberately “shrill” when she sings the song before the credits. When she sings the second half of the song at the very end of the movie, she sounds better (in part because extra reverb has been added to her voice). Apparently George Sidney figured this would get audiences thinking that she had progressed from teeny-bopper innocence to full-blown sexualized womanhood, and he seems to have figured right. (I should add that the film-geek in me thinks that Sidney and Ann-Margret are a director-star combination as fascinating and important in their own way as that other iconic ’60s pairing, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.)

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3279269&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

One minor observation on Jack Layton's visit to the National Press Theatre

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 4:37 PM - 21 Comments

It is a truly remarkable thing that, with the Prime Minister and two opposition leaders individually and publicly committed to Making Parliament Work, our democracy remains an utter mess.

Kady has far more comprehensive coverage here.