Hey, 'dja hear about this?

I was going to write a SERIOUS BUDGET RESPONSE, like everyone else’s doing, but that just wouldn’t suit our… style. Instead, here’s this.

On Monday, two older men – their hair graying, their eyes full of doe-eyed innocence – stepped back in front of the cameras with their finest suits freshly dry-cleaned, ready to return to work after a long time away from their famous desk. They’d taken a controversial break that had been panned by the media in order to get a fresh start at their job. In fact, they’re both hated by the media, and it seems most people you talk to hate them. But somewhere out there, a slight majority of the country – the quiet,  white, middle-aged, Wal-Mart shopping masses – admire this man.

One of them was Jay Leno returning to the Tonight Show he abandoned. One of them was Stephen Harper returning to the Parliament he prorogued.

Yes, we’re comparing the Prime Minister to Jay Leno. This ain’t exactly The Economist you’re reading, bub.

In each case, these were beleaguered public figures who would be trying to regain public sympathy after their controversial breaks from the spotlight. Jay Leno was condemned publicly for what seemed like his bullying, nonchalant attitude towards Conan O’Brien, the man whose job he was taking, and for a series of uninspired TV spots that did nothing to apologize for, or even mention, the controversy at hand. Harper had been at the Olympics, and was publicly condemned for his bullying, nonchalant attitude towards Parliamentary procedure, and for hiding behind the Canadian flag for 2 weeks at the Olympics while failing to apologize for, or even mention, the prorogation.

All eyes were on their return, waiting to hear the material they’d prepared in their off-time. For Jay, it would be his first week back – his monologues, his interviews, his general demeanor – people needed to know that he was worthy of the Tonight Show, they wanted him to prove he still had it, that during all of this two month-long bullshit he’d been preparing material to blow us away. For Harper, it would be the throne speech and budget – two long-awaited announcements that had been stored away during prorogation, people needed to know that work had been accomplished during the vacation and needed to have their needs met by a government with shaky confidence levels.

In each case, they dropped the ball.

Jay Leno... Stephen Harper... Jayphen Leper? Fitting surname.

To call Jay Leno’s first show back “underwhelming” would be like calling a root canal without anesthetic  “less than desirable.” In his first monologue back, he plodded through material that was so stale and so far past its best-before date, even a broke college student would throw it out of their fridge.  Dick Cheney jokes, Paris Hilton jokes – tired, beaten dead horses, the type of thing you can watch without even cracking a smile, as if your cheeks muscles are atrophied and paralyzed from the same awful, predictable punchlines. But for Leno, it was safe – he was just doing what he’d always done, re-packaging the same jokes he’s told for 15 years, why the fuck should he change a routine that works when he’s the top-rated man in late night? Stephen Harper also chose to play it safe. He came out with a budget that was met with collective underwhelmed groans. He didn’t take any risks, he didn’t come out from his vacation with new, fresh material – he did what he knew, which was a budget heavy on talk of belt-tightening, nothing new for social programs or the environment or students, a few token tax cuts, a few loopholes tightened. The budget was released with a whimper, clouded by a country still wearing patriotic red-and-white Olympic goggles and a brilliant diversion in the form of the O Canada “debate”.

Of course, each man has his critics. Notably, the media loathes each of them, calling them egomaniacs and control-freaks, caricaturing them as second-rate stuffed-suits trying to fill a huge desk. They’ve also got real critics in the form of opposition who wants to take their job. There’s one guy who’s particularly a real thorn in their side – a sharp-tongued intellectual-type who gets derided himself for being too erratic, too peculiar for the mainstream.

Call him David Letterman, or call him Michael Ignatieff.

Each were brutal with their criticisms leading up to this week. Letterman lampooned Leno as a self-serving hack in a series of heartfelt monologues, all of this coming from a man who still bitterly remembers that Leno stole his job. Ignatieff was vicious in his attacks on Harper over proroguing parliament, calling him a self-serving hack with disdain for Parliament, all of this coming from a man who’s bitter that Harper still has the job he wants.

The most vicious of all of them, though, has been the third-wheel. The late-comer to the party who can risk being inflammatory and hostile since, being outside of the main two-man fray, they’ve got nothing to lose. Call him Jimmy Kimmel, or call him Jack Layton. Kimmel, you’ll remember, got so pissed-off that he decided to do an entire show as Jay Leno. The NDP, meanwhile, are letting all the attack dogs out over the budget – right now the NDP.ca website has a graphic saying that there’s $5 billion exclusively for TAX BREAKS for BANKS and BIG OIL (not true, but, meh) with a picture of some horrid old fat cat smoking a big cigar, right beside a graphic for $0 FOR FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE coupled with a picture of a kid sucking on an asthma inhaler, the implication being Stephen Harper wants to kill your asthmatic kid by somehow poisoning the air, which has nothing to do with global warming, but damn, that’s some good inflammatory rhetoric right there!

Then Gilles Duceppe is George Lopez. You’re forgiven for completely forgetting about either one’s existence. They only appeal to a minority making up about a fifth of their countries – Quebecois and American hispanics, respectively – but within that seemingly narrow demographic they do big business, which translates into bafflingly surprising results (Lopez Tonight averages 1 million+ viewers and occasionally beats shows like Kimmel and Colbert, while the Bloc somehow has 48 seats.) Anyways, no one gives a shit about what either George Lopez or Gilles Duceppe have to say.

And, uh…. I guess the Green Party is Carson Daly or something? Enough with the opposition comparisons, this is getting silly.

So what was the substance of Harper’s big comeback? It was pretty much as thin and predictable as a Leno monologue. If you look at the talking points listed on the Conservative website, it’s pretty much the equivalent of telling the same old Monica Lewinsky and OJ Simpson jokes. Job creation. Hard-working Canadians. Ignatieff’s a tax-and-spend liberal. Carbon tax. Strengthening our economy. Conservative leadership. The same ancient punchlines, told without any of the storytelling flair. The same tired gimmicks, the same joke routines, the same ba-dum-tschh! of sidekick Flaherty on drums after each joke delivery.

Let’s see how their ratings go.

This is a Serious Politics hat. SHE'S SERIOUS ABOUT POLITICS, LIKE US.

WELCOME BACK, POLITICS! We missed you! Our Olympic break was fun, though, we got to post all sorts of silly things as the OFFICIAL CANADIAN™ POLITICS BLOG OF THE VANCOUVER™ 2010™ OLYMPICS™, writing about sexy curlers and acid flashbacks and Nickelback, but now we have to put our Serious Hat back on to make Serious Posts about the adult matter of Politics, which apparently just returned to Ottawa!

Also, Roll Up The Rim started again, in terms of national breaking news we have to report. So go forth and suck back a cup of warm, cream-diluted, African-inventin’ burnt patriotism and half-heartedly slip the slimy lid up until you see “RÉESSAYEZ S.V.P.” before continuing with one smooth motion into the trashbin toss.

Hey, remember Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament? Of course you do, you’re probably a damn member of the thing. If you’re still too old to be using Facebook (an age barrier which creeps upward by the day – it currently sits around 38), then you’ve at least heard about this group, since it’s been filling column spaces, creating blog buzz and was probably even mentioned on CTV Newsnet, to the delight of all 17 people who watch that channel. (Edit: I actually checked Wikipedia, and apparently the channel’s now called CTV News Network, and has been called that for like half a year – what the Lisa LaFuck?) This Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group was a big deal, see, because it was supposed to usher in some new era of grassroots political involvement across the country. Political involvement, social media, today’s youth, grassroots, new media, web 2.0, et-fucking-cetera.

These people met on Facebook, and then met up in the real world without supervision? Did they learn nothing about internet safety from Bert & Gert?

Back in February the Facebook group actually did stage something of a coup, when their 200,000+ members managed to actually translate into something happening in the real world! 15,000-odd people showed up for rallies/parades across the country to protest the proroguing. As we all know by now, Stephen Harper listened, and decided not to prorogue parliament Yeah, not much happened, but from the sounds of the media coverage, this was just the tip of the iceberg as this Facebook group was supposedly brewing a political revolution across the country – like the American Tea Baggers, except without the fat, racist, pill-addled Walmart-greeter wingnuts in Confederate flag-Snuggies.

All this media coverage got to the heads of the organizers of the Facebook group. You see, people start shitty Facebook groups all the time – I just performed a quick search, and there are no less than 1,600 Facebook groups with the sole purpose of calling Justin Bieber gay – but when your group takes off virally, you can get an inflated sense of self-worth. When 225,000 people join your group, you get the idea that this wasn’t just thousands of people mindlessly clicking “Accept” when their uncle sent them an invite – this is 225,000 followers of my movement! I’m a leader of a grassroots revolution of a quarter-million Canadians!

Of course, you’re not. You’re a guy who made a Facebook group. The Facebook fan page “Running downstairs on Christmas morning and realizing you’re Jewish” has over 200,000 fans, too. “Back in my day vampires sucked blood, not cocks” has in the ballpark of 200,000 fans. “The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants” boasts over 600,000, while “Realizing you borrowed the pen you’re sticking in your mouth” dwarfs the CAPP group with over 800,000 fans. “Flipping the pillow over to get to the cold side” has a whopping 3.5 million fans. That doesn’t make any of these into mobilized, sweeping political movements. It makes them Facebook groups. What the media hasn’t realized is that having 225,000 people in a Facebook group doesn’t mean that 225,000 active members are working towards any kind of end goal, just like there isn’t a massive 3.5-million-strong political party based on the principles of pillow-flipping sweeping the world. It just means that a bunch of people vaguely felt something, so they clicked “Accept” when they got a group invite, and then probably never checked the group page but hoped that their membership would make some sort of intangible difference in the world.

Long story short – as the Globe&Fail reports, the CAPP Facebook group, which has apparently begun taking itself way too seriously and has somehow raised ten-grand (yes, in real dollars, we’ve left the realm of Facebook make-believe) is trying to turn itself into some sort of legitimate political movement.

HOLD ON, it gets funnier I promise.

They’ve kept their CAPP acronym by changing their name from Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament to the more stilted-sounding Canadians Advocating Political Participation. (A completely unrelated aside: my alma mater did that too! It was called Waterloo Lutheran University, and they were all, hey, our school’s not Lutheran anymore, but we wanna keep the WLU initials, so, uhhh… thinkin’…. how bout… fucking GOT IT. Wilfrid, Laurier, University. Nailed it. True story, I swear!) Anyways they’ve put together a website at canadaparticipates.ca. Honestly, look at the site, and think about how the Globe wrote a whole article about this thing, and about how it started as a Facebook group, and there’s ten-thousand dollars floating around somewhere to pay for this stuff. Ok, that’s a little funny already, but in a sad-funny way, like watching a fat figure skater falling.

The first event ever put together by the new CAPP? Some comical silliness they called the Not So Secret Democracy Mission. Alright, I’m just gonna post their mission statement, it’s too funny on its own. Read this in the voice of a little kid who’s dressed up in a suit and making his voice all low to sound super-duper-serious:

“On January 23, 2010, we showed up in tens of thousands in over 60 communities in Canada.

This time, we’ll show up with even more.

On March 2, 2010, the last day of prorogation, Mr. Harper will be under the impression that we’ve all forgotten about his evildoing. Care to show him that not only do we still remember…that not only are we still ANGRY…but that WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

[...] THIS IS A MISSION THAT WILL GO DOWN IN CANADIAN HISTORY.”

They helpfully also mention that they “do NOT condone violence”. Oh, thank God! I thought for a second your top-secret campaign to single-handedly change the course of Canadian democracy was going to involve just kneecappin’ suckers with crowbars at Tim Hortons. Turns out, it just involves them making a budget Youtube video, and you watching that Youtube video, and, if you wouldn’t mind, making a video response so the original video gets more popular, pretty please? Seriously. This was their event that they thought would go down in Canadian history.

Alright, fuck, here’s the dumb video in question, shot with some Ryerson film studies major’s Handicam, set to the dulcet tones of “Default Windows Movie Maker Sound Files > Emotional Piano.mp3″, which features people saying stuff for a minute while somehow also saying nothing:

So what was the point of the top-secret-mission if this whole “event” was just the launch of a bland Youtube video with a cast of nameless, multiethnic people saying bumper-sticker slogans across Toronto? Back to the mission description:

On that day, we encourage EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO SEES IT TO POST A VIDEO RESPONSE. In that fashion we hope that we can “hijack” YouTube and become the most discussed/watched video for that day. You can even post video responses TO video responses!

So when’s that day coming up? It was Tuesday. As in, yesterday. How’d that Youtube hijacking go for them? Did they bring the Internet to a crawl with their medium-shattering anarchist takeover of Youtube?

The Facebook group advertising the event had over 700 people saying they’d attend. When the big day came, they got four video responses.

Four.

To summarize: One of many Facebook groups pop up to protest proroguing parliament. One of them gets more popular than the others. People in the media, specifically dumb people, somehow interpret this as a call-to-arms of a political revolution. The Globe writes about how they’re the next generation of political involvement. The organizers, believing all the hype, become a foundation fighting against political apathy, and on their big launch date, with the backing of media attention, they attempt to hijack Youtube by flooding the system with video responses. They get four.

MapleRag is official launching the campaign to fight the growing trend of apathy towards groups that fight apathy.

[Globe article]

[CAPP website]

[CAPP's Fail-video]

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-Matt