Does Iggy Exist? Do His Apologists?*

When one comes across one of Iggy’s or his apologists bald attempts to rewrite history, to pretend he never called himself American, or promoted the American Empire, or defended torture methods like sleep deprivation & hooding as “permissible duress” during interrogation, or advocated the invasion of Iraq as enlightened imperialism rather than some rescue mission for the Kurds, his eventual post-invasion, post-morass justification, one sometimes wonders whether one has fallen down the rabbit hole. And this is precisely as it should be, as Iggy is indeed a Humpty Dumpty figure, who believes his words’ meaning is independent of any recognised conventions of linguistics, logic & precedent. Unfortunately, he seeks not to govern Never Never Land but Canada.

One faces a dilemma when judging Iggy: Does he exist? By this I mean by what standard should one judge him. Should one pay him the compliment of taking him seriously? Or should one see him as an imaginary, unreal figure, an unconscious actor, a “real phony”, a character who seems to have stepped straight out of “l’Illusion comique”, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, Kundera, etc., and whose words should be treated as lightly?

It is quite accepted to think of public figures as actors, who are not the roles they play and who only hope their performance will allow them to advance on to bigger & better jobs. However, actors, however much they may lose themselves in a role, for a time, know themselves to be actors. Iggy does not, seemingly.

Should one stick to a reality-based assessment and condemn him for all his foolishness? Or should one take the long view and see him as a rare & delightful example of postmodernism made man, an unconscious performance artist, and just sit back and enjoy the show? A friend, a Vancouverite, inevitably, sees life as Futurama, with its joyful evocation of the eternal, repetitive & predictable tragi-comedy that is the human condition, and relishes human foibles all the more. He may be right.

But the problem is that like it or not, one lives in the world, and one’s governments make decisions that affect us and our descendants, in real & tangible ways. Life may well be but a dream, even so, better a pleasant reverie than a nightmare. So while one might be tempted to enjoy the Iggy-show, given he is evermore influential in our national life, one really has no option but to take him seriously and hence expose his folly.

There is the question of pity. We are all the products of our upbringing. Iggy did not choose to be an unconscious actor. Is it fair to criticise him for his idiocy when he has little choice in the matter? One thinks of a not dissimilar figure and his electoral slogan of “tough on crime & tough on the causes of crime”. We should try to eliminate the circumstances that lead to someone suffering from Iggy’s condition, but we can’t ignore the damage he has done, is doing & will do. Whatever made Iggy as he is, he remains responsible for his actions, and he must be held to account. However, his critics, myself included, should be (more) empathetic in our censure, recognising the limits placed on him by his condition, without weakening the vigour & pertinence of our condemnation. This can be difficult as we know Iggy has had all the advantages, suffering neither from excessive poverty nor wealth, not having been raised in any excessive intellectual or spiritual tradition, religious, philosophical, political or otherwise (unless one counts familial), within a worldly self-confident family, comfortable abroad and in Canada, and whose father was a famously toughminded, hardheaded liberal realist diplomat, whom it is difficult to imagine acquiescing in & cheerleading for the Bush Doctrine, like his son. Given Iggy’s background, few Canadians, few people anywhere, if any, have less excuse for such folly. But I suppose that is precisely why we Iggy critics should try to moderate our criticism with a degree of pity for the man – we know not what made him into an unconscious actor, but since he had all the advantages, it must have been something pretty powerful to have affected him thus.

Unconscious actors are rare and I can only think of one other somewhat analogous Canadian politician, Lucien Bouchard. One always suspected that deep down, somewhere, Bouchard knew he was contradicting himself, lying, dissembling, denying reality, etc.. But one never knew for sure, he never gave us a wink to let us know it was all a sham. As far as any of us could tell, Bouchard truly believed what he said, at any given moment, however much it contradicted what most of us would call objective facts and his own previous position(s), in however short order. The same heroic self-image, the same excessive sense of drama, the same brooding and pouting when attacked, the same inclination to move on if others weren’t going to bend to his whim, when things got tough. One significant difference was that contrary to his critics, Bouchard, in his own mind and those of most Quebeckers, had a consistent political project: what’s best for Quebec. Outsiders might think it odd to go from Unioniste to Nationalist PLQ to Trudeau Liberal to Lévesque Péquiste to Mulroney Tory to Bloquiste to Péquiste (and back to R. Bourassiste, it would seem), but he was mirroring, incarnating if you will, the political evolution of French Canadian Quebec society, which like him has always obsessed, rightfully, as a tiny ethno-linguistic minority within North America, as to how to ensure the best “rapport des forces” with Canada, North America & the world. One could argue that Iggy’s only consistency, his familial obsession & his messianic self-image as part of that history, is a political project. It seems to stretch the definition of politics so far as to become meaningless, but it’s arguable. In any event, Newman should think of consulting Vivian Rakoff on Iggy, just as Godfrey/Martin did for Bouchard. I suspect his analysis would be quite similar.

I note that Liberal-liberal critics of Iggy like myself are analogous to Péquiste-Separatist critics of Bouchard. They felt, and we feel, that the party embodies a vision & philosophy that is being betrayed by a narcissistic carpetbagging sophist, whose history contradicts his occasional claims to be one of us (how similar Bouchard’s invocation of his contact with Lévesque is to Iggy’s memories of Trudeau), who obtained the leadership through strongarm undemocratic means, and whose victory would be pyrrhic, as he would only preside over the quiet betrayal of our vision and our mutation into a “copie conforme” of our main opposition so as to become an effective electoral machine, but “sans plus de raison d’être”. “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?” The problem with Bouchard-Iggy types is, do they have souls? And so, just as the most furious anti-Bouchard rhetoric flew from longtime diehard Péquistes & separatists, so it is that longtime Liberals & liberals are the harshest critics of Iggy.

Of course other politicians have run away from their records & reality, but they have done so knowingly. Daniel Turp is a fine example, who maintained, wrongly, that Quebec had a right to self-determination as a people, but while still an academic, had at least the coherence to recognise that his argument implied the First Nations did as well, and was an ally of the Cree. Then he joined the Bloc and immediately renounced what he had said scant days previously, completely contradicting himself. The Cree were so angry that when they published their study on Quebec, Canada, the Cree, self-determination & all that, they devoted an entire chapter to outlining Turp’s betrayal. This is the regular sort of open, cynical incoherence that is the everyday stuff of politics. Electoral politics, promises broken, etc.. But Turp never claimed he had never said what he said. Just the facts and his views had changed, etc.. The usual.

So Iggy (& Bouchard in his day) doesn’t exist, but the issues at stake are so important that we have to pay him the compliment of pretending he does, and take what he says seriously. But what of his apologists? Do they exist?

One asks oneself, how can a person read the infamous passage from Iggy’s NYT “Lesser Evils” article and not construe the following sentence to mean he is justifying two techniques defined by all reputable bodies as torture, by our own Federal Court last week* even: “Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress”. Does such a person suffer from Iggyitis as well?

Rarely, from what I can tell. For some it’s wishful thinking. Similar to Bouchard-Iggy’s magical thinking, but whereas that’s a defined personality trait, the wishful thinking is politically specific, a consequence of such a close identification with the person and party that in this one exclusive realm they can’t distinguish between reality & fiction. It would be like me pretending to myself that Dion is a Trudeauite, constitutionally, which I’d like, when I know full well he’s a Ryan-Bourassiste.

Other apologists simply assume that whatever Iggy has said, he only said it for consciously cynical reasons (get press, get in the Bush Administration’s good books, cultivate an iconoclastic liberal persona, sell books, etc.), in short, to advance his career, and as political animals, they understand & forgive the impulse. More than that, they positively approve. Who isn’t looking to get ahead, rise through the ranks, volunteer to staffer to official to MP and who knows, maybe beyond? It also means that they feel confident that whatever folly Iggy has committed in the past, with the proper guidance within the LPC, they can ensure he sticks to the approved script now, we win the next election, Iggy reveals himself as the Second Coming of Trudeau, Canada is made whole, everyone wins, everyone’s happy, they themselves get to advance up the the political ladder and all’s well with the world. So for now, like the happy warriors they are, they repeat his empty defenses verbatim. However, they’ll probably be disturbingly disappointed in the end. As another Kundera dancer, Tony Blair, said, "Just after the election, an old colleague of mine said: 'Come on Tony, now we've won again can't we drop all this New Labour and do what we believe in?'. "I said: 'It's worse than you think. I really do believe in it'.". The dancer, having fashioned a self-image as a heroic iconoclast, is loath to become just another cynical politician. Having attained power, the sillier & more counter-factual his position(s), the more he’ll advance them, bathing in the glory of being a martyr-king (see Blair, Doomed Campaign to Convince UK Of Righteousness Of Bush-Blair Foreign Policy, 2001-2007).

In conclusion, few, if any, of Iggy’s apologists suffer from his condition. They are either so invested in the man that they can’t bring themselves to recognise the evidence of their own eyes & ears, or they consider him as cynical as themselves. Since few Liberals & liberals approve(d) of the Iraq War, torture, America’s Lite Empire, QC Nation, etc., most of his apologists are contradicting themselves on the most existential political questions. Some suffer from the rose-tinted glasses syndrome we all exhibit when in love, others feel, like Mulroney, that politics is a whores’ game, and like any pro, they’ll keep their end of the bargain if Iggy keeps his.

Unfortunately, this means that while his apologists exist and would normally be worthy of response, they are either too enamoured or too cynical to listen. Still, this doesn’t remove from one the obligation to do one’s best to reason with them. One never knows. Every so often the misguided can be induced to see the light. But one owes a debt to oneself and given the poor prospects, one shouldn’t exhaust oneself in this Sisyphean endeavour.

In any event, it’s not all glum. However it all plays out (with Iggy as PM, leading an increasingly conservative, American & fractured Party & Country, I suspect)*, one can always enjoy the show. Lepage has nothing on Iggy for post-modern theatre. It will continue to be darkly comic.

* I wrote this on Tuesday May 5th, 2009, after the Convention. I was, as the piece makes clear, reflecting on Iggy and his supporters' worrying confusion of fantasy and reality. Typically, having written the thing, I was too lazy to do the necessary hyperlinks, so saved it as a draft. I thought I'd get them done over that week, but never quite got around to it. Then the Cons' negative ads started and I didn't want to be a party to their foulness, so I thought I'd wait to post it when all had calmed down. But when that happened, over the summer, I just couldn't be bothered - I think I only had one short post in the entire summer. I finally got around to the hyperlinks, and frankly, Iggy and his supporters` conduct subsequent to May makes it more relevant than ever, as recent events demonstrate. But as the reader will notice, I refer to the Federal Court`s Khadr decision the week before the convention, and was more depressively optimistic about the LPC and Iggy`s chances in an election than I am now. (I added the hyperlink to today`s Simpson column since it fits so nicely and confirms my May prediction).