Dyer Maker

Brava and all that to NOW magazine for starting to run columns by Gwynne Dyer, though I’m not sure why his byline there identifies him as an “Academy Award nominee” first and foremost. Makes you think he played a corrupt, racist mayor with a secret love of Hispanic music in Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” or something.

I was up at my in-laws' Ottawa Valley-area cottage a couple of weeks ago with the wife and kids. About midway through the stay, I ran out of things to read, having finished this, and finding myself not in the mood for either this or this, both of which I brought with me with the assumption that dryly comic British fiction travels best (which it usually does, at least for me).

Not wanting to tuck into the cottage’s collection of fat, historical novel or anthologies of outhouse-themed jokes, and already starting to feel the effects of modernity-withdrawal for being away from a city for so long, I started in on the copies of the Ottawa Citizen lying around the place, waiting to be used to light a fire.

Just depressing. Not because of the uniform rightward slant or the jingoism – both of which I was prepared for, and even prepared to momentarily overlook in exchange for news from the outside world – but because of how reasonable-sounding it all aspired to be. The most laughably hollow rhetoric was being presented as mere common sense. The most specious arguments were set forth as reasoned debate. I found myself actually yearning for some naked hate, for some outright nutjob calling for the immediate nuking of all “sand-niggers” everywhere.*

But no, the mainstream right has long-since learned to disguise itself as the centre. On almost every page, the white sons and daughters of entitlement sadly shook their heads, let out a small sigh and told me that all of this was not complicated at all, that everything happening in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan boils down to one very simple question: do you support the terrorists or do you support freedom?

Boy, that is simple!

Of course, “freedom” was occasionally replaced with “democracy” or “morality” and the like, but the basic question was always the same. Are you in favour of evil or good? Hatred or love? Blood or chocolate?

So it was a great relief (and a surprise) to find Dyer’s face staring out from the local paper, which, being owned by Osprey Media, is among the few places in Canada where his stuff actually gets printed. (He has been banned from all CanWest-owned publications for a decade.) Better yet was his take on the Lebanon crisis – that all Hezbollah has to do to come out of all this is survive, and since Israel has no way of destroying them militarily, its campaign is futile and counterproductive, and it should therefore start laying the ground for real peace. You can’t bomb an idea, just those currently holding it, and there will always be people ready to take their place. Bombing just scatters an idea and helps it multiply.

If you’re interested, go here to read a review I wrote of Dyer’s most recent book, With Every Mistake.



*There was, at least, some laughs to had at the expense of one columnist who, in the process of condemning his university campus bookstore for not stocking any Aristotle in the philosophy section (there may have been some elsewhere, but he didn’t have time to look…), referred to Messrs. Marx and Engels as “communist sympathizers.”