Didn’t we used to be friends?

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 2, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 156 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick / CP

Nobody remembers the act that appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show after Elvis Presley. After the kid with the guitar, nothing else could leave much of an impression.

Similarly, whatever history records about Derek Burney, it will pay scant heed to the speech he gave at the big Liberal thinkers’ conference in Montreal over the weekend. Burney used to run the Prime Minister’s Office for Brian Mulroney. He was Canada’s ambassador to Washington from 1989 to 1993. He led Stephen Harper’s transition to power in 2006. But on Sunday he drew the short straw and spoke after a barnburning speech by Bob Fowler, the retired former ambassador who accused both Harper and the Liberals of selling out the country’s best diplomatic traditions. Coming after that broadside, Burney was all but ignored.

Too bad. Burney had useful things to say about Canada-U.S. relations. He devoted nearly half his remarks to the dangers of passivity and timidity, urging leaders not to “hestitate to lead,” calling for “confidence” over “reticence,” preferring a “vigorous, creative and active approach” over “risk-averse, correct stewardship” in a bilateral relationship that “should be stimulated and led by the prime minister.”

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The Executive-Driven World of Public TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 8:40 PM - 1 Comment

The big TV article of the day is “Why Britain Can’t Do The Wire,” by Peter Jukes, about the cautious, executive-driven culture of the present-day BBC and how it has caused the UK to fall behind the US when it comes to making interesting TV. (In the recent Monty Python documentary, the members mention that the show could only have been approved in the good old days when there weren’t so many executives at the BBC, all putting in their oar.) Just as interesting, and shorter, is this accompanying interview with David Simon, where he talks about the differences between US and British television: in the U.S., “the writer is god” (on good shows, anyway) and the head writer supervises a staff of writers, instead of doing every script himself as on most British shows.

It sounds a little paradoxical that having one or two writers write everything could produce a less writer-driven culture than the U.S., where only freaks like David E. Kelly write every script themselves. But it’s true. The reason, I think, is that TV is to some extent an executive-driven medium no matter what country you’re in. And in the U.S., writers are literally elevated to executive positions (it’s right there in the title, “executive producer”). There are many British shows where the head writer/creator has time to write every episode, in part, because someone else holds the power over the other aspects of the show. (This also happens sometimes in the States. Susan Harris wrote every episode of Soap, but left the producing duties to her partners, Paul Witt and Tony Thomas.) A David Simon or Milch can’t possibly write every episode, but everything is subject to his approval. And that can result in a show that more clearly expresses the vision of one person. If they wrote all the scripts, but ceded control in other areas, it would inevitably be different, because the other stuff — costumes, shooting, editing, locations — is hugely important. If one person has the final OK on everything, then it’s more likely that everything will work toward the same goal.

Canada is infamous for having a TV drama culture that (not always, of course, but often enough for it to be a pattern) combines the weaknesses of both systems: a domination by non-writing producers, with the head writer supervising a writing staff but not a whole lot else.

But the U.S. system, making a writer into an executive, is kind of a strange one, and one that goes against normal instincts. The writer’s temperament is not necessarily that of an executive. On the great DVD features for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, creator Alan Zweibel talks about how difficult it was to adjust from thinking like a writer — protecting his material and his scripts — to being responsible for all aspects of the production, and caring as much about episodes written by other people. The U.S. system essentially asks people like Larry David to do management jobs when they’re totally unsuited to being managers in any traditional sense. And yet it works, because somebody has to be in charge of any production. And while the director is the one most likely to be in charge of a movie, a writer is the only person who can come close to handling all aspects of a 13 or 22-episode TV season.

When China rules the world

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:30 PM - 60 Comments

As an academic and journalist working throughout East Asia, Martin Jacques has had a front row seat for the past decade on China’s economic and political emergence. The British author’s latest book is titled When China Rules the World.

Q: We in the West spend a great deal of time discussing China’s rise. But we seem to resist the next logical step, which is to consider how things will change around the world when China becomes the world’s pre-eminent economic power. Why is that?

A: I think that the world has been so used to American hegemony, and you had a recent period of American history under Bush which actually postulated exactly the opposite scenario—that we were in fact on the eve of a new American century. So we’re just not versed in the profoundly different thinking China’s pre-eminence will require. More than that, we have failed to understand that we’re not just talking about economic change. The impact of China’s rise is going to be at least as great politically and culturally as it will be in economic terms.

Q: So paint me a picture, in broad strokes. If, as some forecast, China’s GDP surpasses that of the U.S. in the next 20 years, how will China behave on the world stage?

A: Initially, I don’t expect it to behave hugely differently. Even in 2050, when it’s projected that the Chinese economy will be twice as large as that of the United States, China will still be, in terms of GDP per head, a lot poorer than the United States. But history’s very important in the behaviour of nations, and China comes from profoundly different civilizational coordinates than the West; it has a different history from the top dogs than we’re used to over the last 200 years. I think that the West is going to feel extremely disoriented by the world that is in the process of now being made. We’ve so long assumed that the furniture is our furniture, the language is our language, the sports played are our sports, the values are our values, the skin colour is our skin colour. My son’s 10, and his generation is going to grow up in a very, very different kind of world. Continue…

When K came to America

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

History, as Karl Marx’s famous dictum would have it, is supposed to be tragedy first time around, degenerating into farce only on its repeat swing. Hard then to say what the dour Marx might have made of his high-spirited fellow Communist Nikita Khrushchev and his 1959 tour across America. As described in journalist Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top (Public Affairs), even at the time the shambolic two-week affair struck many as a Cold War comic interlude, a kind of real-life rehearsal for Dr. Strangelove five years before the film. From our perspective, looking back over half a century during which East and West—thanks to MAD, that apt acronym for the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction—managed to avoid incinerating mankind, Khrushchev’s excellent adventure inspires not just laughter but nostalgia for a time when external threats did not come from shadowy organizations undeterred by the threat of retaliation. And for when the enemy had a sense of humour.

The visit must have seemed a serious event when first proposed. Khrushchev, who had slowly accumulated supreme power in the U.S.S.R. since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, may not have been as murderous as his predecessor. Nonetheless, he was devoid of diplomatic skills (“We will bury you”), thin-skinned, and ever ready to remind foreigners he had nuclear missiles at his beck and call. His would be the first-ever visit of a Soviet leader to America, and the prospect that he and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower might, as the latter delicately put it, have a “mutually profitable informal exchange of views,” would have sounded hopeful to most Americans.

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On the front lines of the U.S. meltdown

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 31 Comments

It’s just before 11 a.m., and a small group of men in scuffed sneakers and blue jeans have assembled on the courthouse steps in Stockton, Calif. They’re here for what’s become a familiar ritual in U.S. cities hit hard by falling house prices: the foreclosure auction. At the peak of the housing bubble, Stockton was one of the most frenzied real estate markets in the country. Now, with many of those homes in foreclosure, the bidding wars have turned surreal.

An auctioneer steps out of the courthouse, and with little fanfare starts to read out the details of several foreclosed homes. For a while there are no takers. Then he gets to a house in the nearby town of Manteca—opening price: $99,870.08. “Two more pennies,” says one bidder in a muscle shirt. Another man steps forward: “Plus a penny.” It goes on like this, the two bidders anteing up copper Lincolns for a home that, four years ago, might easily have fetched $40,000 above the asking price. “Going once, twice, third and final time. Property is sold at $99,870 and 13 cents.” Continue…

The Thriving American Muslim

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 12:02 AM - 20 Comments

Yesterday’s NYTimes reported a pretty interesting Gallup poll that took a 2008 survey on quality of life indicators and focused on the results for American Muslims. According to the poll, Muslims in the US are far more likely to see themselves as “thriving” (41%)  than Muslims in any other country except Saudi Arabia (51%)  and Germany (47%). The comparable figure for Turkey is 18%, Egypt 13%, Pakistan 11%.  France is 23%, and England it is a eyebrow-raising 7%.

Furthermore:

Asian-American Muslims (from countries like India and Pakistan) have more income and education and are more likely to be thriving than other American Muslims. In fact, their quality of life indicators are higher than for most other Americans, except for American Jews.

Meanwhile:

American Muslim women, contrary to stereotype, are more likely than American Muslim men to have college and post-graduate degrees. They are more highly educated than women in every other religious group except Jews. American Muslim women also report incomes more nearly equal to men, compared with women and men of other faiths.

But this isn’t because of a relative lack of religiosity amongst American Muslims. In fact, “American Muslims are generally very religious, saying that religion is an important part of their daily lives (80 percent), more than any other group except Mormons (85 percent). The figure for Americans in general is 65 percent.”

As for politics: “By party identification, Muslims resembled Jews more than any other religious group, with small minorities registered as Republicans, roughly half Democrats and about a third independents.”

So the upshot of this seems to be that Muslims in the US are pretty well assimilated. Their profile along a host of quality of life indicators seems to track, or even exceed, figures for the US population as a whole.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to explain this? Some possibilities:

1. The Richard Posner argument: American-style capitalism is the most powerful mechanism for social integration in the world. By having a system with a relatively weak social safety net (compared to Britain and France), everyone is forced to work, which (paradoxically, perhaps) socializes people into that very system.

2. America attracts a much more ambitious and upwardly-mobile Muslim immigrant. These are the people who would likely be thriving no matter where they live. This skews the US numbers.

3. American Muslims are as likely as any other American to buy into the cult of optimism and self-advancement in that country; so even though they may not be doing as well by objective measures as Muslims in other countries, they self-report as far more satisfied because of ideological commitment.

I’m sure there are other more plausible explanations for the data. It is probably a combination of factors — if I read Posner right, he sees 1 and 2 as complimenting one another.  It might help to have a better sense of the racial cross section of American Muslims – the poll reports that 35 percent are African Americans, but that’s it. Thoughts?

It's a Day For Canada To Be Validated By The U.S.

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 5:35 PM - 0 Comments

First the President comes to Canada (he came here first! He likes us best! In your face, Mexico!) and now CBS announces that they’re following up on Flashpoint by picking up a second CTV cop show, The Bridge, starring Aaron “Tyrol” Douglas.

The show is based on the reminiscences of former police union head and radio personality Craig Bromell. Since he’s a fairly controversial figure in Canada, there might be some controversy about the show (I said might) or its take on the nature of police work. But that shouldn’t be a factor in the U.S., where Bromell is unknown and where, more importantly, almost every cop show ever made features cops who are simultaneously battling scummy criminals and red tape from their superiors.

CHIEF: You busted up that crack house pretty bad, McGarnigle.  Did you really have to break so much furniture?
McGARNIGLE: You tell me, Chief.  You had a pretty good view from behind your desk.
CHIEF: You’re off the case, McGarnigle!
McGARNIGLE: You’re off your case, Chief!
CHIEF: What does that mean, exactly?
HOMER: It means he gets results, you stupid chief!
LISA: Dad, sit down.