Remember Stockwell Day? Way back in the early years of Filibuster I used to do a lot of cartoons about him. That was back when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance party, back when that existed.

He’s since been appointed president of the Canadian Treasury Board. Since Mr. Day is generally considered to be a strong right-winger, this was interpreted as a sign that Prime Minister Harper intends to “get tough” on fighting the Canadian deficit and scaling back excessive big-government spending. Or so optimistic conservatives had hoped.

Well this week Mr. Day held his first post-scaling press conference, and announced with great pride that he had cut over 400 jobs from the federal payroll, saving the taxpayers a grand total of (wait for it) $1.4 million dollars.

Wow, thanks Dr. Evil.

As Don Martin quotes in yesterday’s National Post, Day’s cuts cancel out a full 90 minutes of growth in the national deficit.

It’s a long, very critical article about life in modern Japan, written from the perspective of a foreigner who has been living there for about five years, and is falling steadily out of love with the place. I lived in Japan for only a single year, and fell out of love almost immediately. Hence the familiar tone.

It’s a really well-written piece, insightful and targeted and savage in all the right places. Aside from some of the author’s more insular rants near the beginning (born from his unique frustrations as a non-smoking vegetarian), the article projects, very coherently, a frustration with Japan that I believe inevitably consumes any reasonably intelligent western ex-pat after sufficient time has passed.

It’s insightful to the point of being somewhat esoteric, in fact. I question just how accessible the article would be to someone who has never experienced a prolonged period of Japanese societal immersion. Japanese culture, and the flaws and frustrations contained therein, is a topic surprisingly hard to articulate. It’s a nation defined by behavioral subtitles and lots of strange, unquestioned assumptions, that although seemingly minor in scope, achieve totalitarian magnitude in practice.

I like this passage:

In many Japanese offices, you’re required to scream “Good morning!” at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. Everyone in the office then shouts “Good morning!” back to you. At my orientation for one company, the Human Resources Girl — whose face (figuratively) literally screamed “Hall Monitor” — was going over the “Good Morning!” protocol. Her explanation weird despite its terseness: “This is how adults interact in Japan.” Most of the people at the orientation, like me, were under twenty-five. “Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?” I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: “If we’re the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream ‘Good Morning’ and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?” Her answer was immediate, and humorless: “Yes.” “Well, I mean, there’s no one else around to hear it, right?” “You still have to do it. It’s the rule. Every employee must do this. That’s why we call it ‘protocol.’” This instant was actually the very first time I begin to ponder the logistics of actually going ahead and being homeless. You know, cardboard, up against concrete, is not only not uncomfortable — it’s pretty good for your spine!

I pushed further: “What if I am the second person in the office, and the first person is someone with whom I have, previously, managed to successfully cultivate a congenial personal relationship? What if it’s a person whose first and last name I know, with whom I share interests and hobbies, and we’ve previously agreed that we think this ‘Good morning’ shit is some serious bullshit, and we just agree to be like, ‘Hey, what’s up’ to one another in the morning and we’ve also agreed that hey, if anyone else asks, we’ll just go ahead and say ‘Oh yeah, that dude totally screamed “Good morning” to me this morning’?”

The HR girl didn’t even blink: “You still have to carry out the customary ‘Good Morning.’”

Reading this without a larger Japanese context to compare it to, you would probably conclude that Japanese office bureaucrats are prissy and rigid. Or at least prissy and rigid to yakky American know-it-alls. The real lesson of this interaction, however, is even more sweeping: the Japanese have no respect for logic. Logic and rational argument are simply not values which hold high currency in Japanese society, where the supreme priority, above everything else, is maintaining social cohesion, be it through lies, oppression, absurdities, or whatever else. That sounds like a very harsh and judgmental thing to say, but it’s the truth, and a truth that is hard to appreciate the full significance of when you’re just hearing it via bitter anecdotes from some dude on the internet.

The author repeatedly links his criticisms to related insights about the Japanese video game industry. At first I thought this was a tad sophomoric, but it does make some sense. To my generation (and I assume his) video games have been our primary exposure to Japanese culture. Though they are obviously imaginative and fun, they also all contain a fair bit of irrational weirdness in their storylines, gameplay mechanics, and expectations of the player, but as a child you’re already expected to put up with a lot of nonsense in your life, so you don’t analyze the contradictions of your video games too seriously. Living in Japan can truly be an eye-opening experience in this regard, however. Things slowly fall into place. You slowly begin to realize that the weirdness present in the games you uncritically accepted as a child are really the manifestations of the fundamental weirdness governing all of Japanese society. And I don’t mean the flying raccoons or one-eyed umbrella ghosts or whatever, I mean the fundamental ways in which these games are structurally designed and intended to be consumed. I’d elaborate further, but the Kotaku guy does a better job.

Someday I’ll write a more lengthy analysis of my own time in Japan. But for now, most of what want to say is being ably said by Tim Rogers.

Prime Minister Harper did his throne speech ventriloquism thing this week, unveiling a long, rambly list of promises before the first session of the now-no-longer-prorogued Canadian parliament.

Despite its considerable length, the speech contained nothing particularly bold or edgy, nor did the government’s follow-up budget, released the next day. No significant cuts or increases to spending, no new programs introduced or old ones turfed… it was all very status quo.

Lacking anything meaningful to discuss, we in the professional commentary scene have thus honed in on some of the government’s more bizarre proposals to complain about. And there are a few doozies indeed.

The first notable one was Harper’s promise to establish a new holiday entitled “Seniors’ Day.” Because, God knows, the people of Canada have just been clamouring for another excuse to buy halfhearted presents for their ungrateful elderly relatives.

The other, which has generated an enormous amount of headlines, was the government’s promise to bring about a more “gender neutral” national anthem. At present, the Canadian anthem contains a line that says “…in all thy sons command.” Someone, somewhere apparently considers this offensive,  and that person evidently has the Prime Minister’s ear.

UPDATE UPDATE: The Prime Minister’s Office now acknowledges that there has been “overwhelming” opposition to changing the anthem, so the deal is off. Someone better tell the seniors.

The main conclusion to be drawn in the aftermath of the 2010 games is that they were remarkably self-indulgent. The cloyingly insecure opening and closing ceremonies, which I have previously deconstructed, were one particularly overt manifestation, but the larger theme could be felt everywhere else in Vancouver too. Maybe that was a good thing for Canada, and a good thing for Canadian morale, and a good thing for our athletes, but it was still the reality. If we got a glimpse of some sort of “new Canada” over the last two weeks, it was a country that is first and foremost interested in gazing lovingly in the mirror.

A writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gil LeBreton, wrote an article yesterday in which he compared the nationalistic excesses of the Vancouver games with those of the 1936 games in Nazi Germany. Obviously that was an over-the-top and sensationalistic analogy, and the Canadian press has had a lot of fun mocking it, but a more mature reading of LeBreton’s column reveals some perfectly valid criticisms. “An Olympic host is supposed to welcome the world,” he writes. “This one was too busy being (their word) ‘patriotic.’”

“One thing I never saw: a simple flag or shirt with the five Olympic rings,” he adds. “Not anywhere. After 15 Olympics, that was a first.” There’s very little that can be factually disputed in his piece, and he provides numerous examples of Canada deliberately shunning all that brotherhood-of-man stuff for a more chauvinistic, Colbertian theme of Defeat the World.

LeBreton wrote a second, follow-up column today, responding to the backlash that greeted the first. And again, while he backpedals from the harshness of his Nazi analogy, he repeats “what passed for patriotism in Canada came across differently in the eyes of an international guest.”

The games were a success for Canada by any imaginable standard, but they also exposed, on a global stage, some of the less-than-appealing qualities of the Canadian national psyche: hypocritical boastfulness, pompous entitlement, chronic narcissism, and the underlying, crippling neediness and insecurity from which these other traits flow.

Sometimes it’s in moments of great success that we need to be the most self-critical, precisely because the impulse to do the opposite will be so strong.

Basically, the same fundamental problems that plagued the opening show were even more apparent during this one. Beyond that, there’s not a lot to say.

Minister Moore’s efforts to ensure more French was spoken were evidently successful, but only in the most uncomfortable, forced, be-good-because-dad-is-watching sort of way. Jon Furlong spoke even more French, a language he has absolutely no knowledge of (why would he?) and predictably sounded like a fourth-grader. Some of the Montreal artists alternated a verse or two in the sacred tongue, but the others did not, proving the unilingual reality of Canada’s musical talent — and culture — cannot be so easily avoided.

Shatner, Michael J. Fox, that other horrible woman, all offered dribble. Canadian geese, poutine, who cares? Only Canadians, because only Canadians believe ritualistically reconfirming our consensually established National Quirks That Make Us Different From The Americans™ makes for good entertainment. The appeal is parochial beyond words.

Ditto for the giant inflatable beavers and the rest of the “salute to cliches.” Though the CTV announcers constantly reminded viewers that it was all tongue-in-cheek, the heavy twinge of self-righteousness that ran through the whole thing didn’t make for particularly effective satire. Canadians only mock themselves as a way to mock others, which is to say, Americans. Exaggerating the cliches of Canada is not done out of any genuine spirit of self-deprecation. None of the urban nationalists who organized the closing show would ever be willing to make peace with the fact that Canada is, in actuality, an underpopulated, underdeveloped, wilderness nation consisting mostly of ice, evergreens, and furry animals. We only observe such things ironically, with the omnipresent heavy-handed, unsubtle subtext that we’re really so much more. And will be more. And deserve to be more.

A particularly revealing moment came when the woman comedian snarkily jeered to our international friends, “I’m sorry you thought Canada was one great big frozen tundra.” That generated wild cheers from the Canadian audience. That is the sort of thing we like, a joke where the punch-line is always “Canada rules!”

The best part of the show, as usual, was the music. Why it couldn’t it all be music?

But one thing I do admire about this president is the way he seems to be at least trying to usher in a new culture of public, partisan dialogue. Over the last few decades, the trend of public debate has been increasingly theatrical, repetitive, emotional, and snippy. Short, witty, talking-points repeatedly endlessly with either great faux-outrage or faux-enthusiasm. Your average election debate, TV interview, or speech on the floor of the legislature is more useless and pointless than ever before, because there is no genuine substance backing up the words, and there’s no genuine substance because the intellectual qualities that add substance to political dialogue, such as moderate language, thoughtful tone, persuasive intent, and complex argument, are now seen as either a waste of time or a sign of weakness.

Obama may not have much to say, and he may not be a particularly innovative politician, but I do like his apparent desire to move beyond this, and actually return to an era in which politicians spoke like mature, intelligent, respectful adults to one another, deserves praise.

This exchange at the summit, between the President and John McCain, has been widely covered, because of the way it evokes the 2008 the election, which of course makes for easy newspaper headlines (”McCain and Obama stage tense rematch!”). But look at the contrasting behavior of the two men.

Compare the mechanical, awkward way McCain delivers his little laundry list of focus-grouped GOP grievances to the detached, bored air of Obama, who wants to talk about more substantial things. Obama seems like a real person, while McCain comes off as some bizarre creature of Washington.

Elitism is a problem in politics, and a problem for the Democrats. But it’s wrong to make elitism and maturity synonymous, because they’re not. The maturity Obama projects — and promotes — is a huge and important part of his appeal, but Republicans don’t seem to be interested in learning from it.

As one of those who hysterically denounced Dion’s coalition plan at the time — I even likened it to a coup, an analogy Selley mocks — I had to author a response. So I wrote:

Chris Selley makes a valid point when he notes the vastly different ways that coalition governments are perceived in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the former, they are a routine expectation, while here they are perceived as “tantamount to coups d’etat.” The problem, however, is Mr. Selley’s conclusion that this reality reflects the comparative immaturity of Canada’s political culture.

Canada has obviously inherited a number of constitutional traditions from Britain but we’ve also had at least two centuries to establish our own. The modern Canadian style of government reflects decades of gradual evolution as a North American democracy; an evolution that has not occurred in perfect tandem with the U.K.’s unique European experiences.

It’s said that both Britain and Canada have a “Westminster” style parliament, but so do dozens of other nations, from New Zealand to India to Papua New Guinea, and no one expects us to be taking any lessons on governance from them. The Canadian style of government should reflect the interests and expectations of the people of Canada. If coalition governments are not a common occurrence in Canada, then coalition governments are not part of our tradition. It’s as simple as that.

A just government gains legitimacy through a social contract with its people. We obey the government because we understand how its executives are chosen, and we understand, as voters, our own role and power to influence that process. In a country like Canada, that has a fairly unclear written constitution, much of our social contract with the government is based on an understanding of precedent and tradition. Dion’s plan to get the governor general to fire the prime minister and install a three-party coalition in his place —  weeks after the last election had concluded and Harper had formally begun his second term — was a dramatically unprecedented gesture in Canadian history, and would, had it succeeded, overthrown decades of democratic precedent and struck a serious blow against the democratic legitimacy of our entire political regime.

Dion’s argument at the time, and Selley’s argument in his editorial, amounts to basically “Canadian precedent be damned! International precedence counts too!” But of course that’s an enormous can of worms. Even if we just entertain the idea of “Commonwealth precedent” things quickly go nuts. The Governor General of Grenada once consented to a military coup in that country. So I guess that’s a Commonwealth convention we are supposed to seriously entertain for Canada, too. Getting the rest of the world involved in determining our style of government is a messy business that offers very few clear answers. At best, it simply puts some phony gloss of legitimacy on ideas that would otherwise have no domestic credibility.

In response to my letter, another Post reader got something published today:

A letter writer notes that coalition governments “are not part of our tradition.” Strange, the present federal government is a coalition of Alliance/ Reformers and Progressive Conservatives.

He’s being glib, but his comments inadvertently prove my point. The North American political tradition favors a strong two-party system. During the decade-or-so period when Canada had two nominally conservative parties, there was enormous, constant pressure for them to merge with each other, in order to form a stronger, united right-wing party. And they eventually did, and so we are back to the old Conservative vs. Liberal dynamic of yore. Many other countries would have never considered a merger of this sort, because small, limited-appeal parties are a very entrenched and accepted element of their political culture. If Canada was a European country we would probably be ruled by a PC-Reform-Social Credit-God-knows-what-else coalition right now. But we’re not, we’re ruled by a single political party, because that’s the sort of government we expected our system to produce.

“Government = bad” seems to be the main mantra of the American conservative movement these days. It’s a message we saw repeated again and again at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and it’s the one consistent note of the otherwise fairly incoherent Tea Party movement. Republicans, sensing the direction the winds are blowing, have tried to co-opt as much of the anti-government tide as possible, hoping to cruise to victory in November by making “government vs. freedom” the crux of all talking points.

The problem, though, is that not all anti-government agendas are created equal. There’s the mainstream, beltway Republican style of anti-government activism, pushing for lower taxes and less regulation and the like, but then there’s also the kook style, going on about the NWO and martial law and the Bilderberg group all the other nonsense that thrives in the shadier corners of the internet. There is evidence that the lines between respectable anti-government and kook anti-government are becoming increasingly blurred in the modern discourse, due in part to the uncritical legitimacy a lot in the former camp are offering the latter, for strategic, short-term partisan reasons.

Scott Brown, for instance, made some statements recently that treaded dangerously close to expressing sympathy for the crazed lunatic who flew his plane into the IRS last week, talking about the legitimate mood of frustration sweeping the country. Then you have people like Debra Medina, the Tea Party-endorsed Republican candidate in the Texas gubernatorial primary, who have gone on record expressing calculated doubt in the “real story” of the 9-11 attacks. And of course Sarah Palin famously gave the keynote address at a recent activist conference that, among others, featured speakers raising all sorts of conspiratorial junk about Obama’s birthplace and religion.

You probably have examples of your own. Or not. Talk about it in the forums by clicking on the link below.

But the inherent problem with Canadian spelling is the vagueness of its supposed rules. There’s a sense that our way is inspired by British conventions, and intended to be contrary to American reductionism, but determining exactly how far to go in either direction is quite a hazy business. So much of it is simply determined by the expectations of the powers-that-be in that particular moment of your life. My highschool English teachers had one standard, my professors another, the copy editor of my college newspaper yet another still. I’ve always been taught that the slime that comes out of your nose is spelled “mucus,” but then the other day I saw some Tylenol ad that spelled it “mucous,” so clearly the Canadian advertising industry has its own set of beliefs, too.

Today at the bookstore, however, I discovered that the Government of Canada actually produces an official guide to Canadian English, entitled The Canadian Style, produced by the Department of Public Works and Government Services. This book, in turn, recommends Canadians refer to the Gage Canadian Dictionary for all spelling-related uncertainties, since this is the dictionary used by “most federal departments and agencies.”

So I guess that brings some closure to the matter. I don’t think it’s a particularly legitimate system, mind you, since I don’t think government authority should be the highest arbitrator of cultural norms, but that’s the present reality of Canada. As someone who tries to be a good representative of my country, whatever its institutionalized absurdities, I’ll try to defer to these rule books more often when writing for my site.

On a related note, here’s a very interesting interview with a guy named Jack Lynch, who wrote a book about the evolution of the cult of “proper English,” and the fairly dubious intellectual foundations of the entire premise.