THE WHOLE… BLACKFACE… THING

So, yeah, this whole Justin Trudeau scandal made it to the level of “international news,” partially because it’s the sort of funny story that gets good play internationally and partially because the Conservative Party leaked it to an international news outlet (TIME Magazine, which for a glorious ten minutes gets to once again be something more than The Magazine In Your Dentist’s Office If He Thinks His Clients Won’t “Get” The Economist), so I guess we have to talk about it.

Obviously blackface and brownface and yellowface are all bad. I mean, obviously they are. Reducing ethnicity to a costume is a shitty thing to do. If you are reading this and think otherwise, I’m not sure how you came to be reading this in the first place. (Maybe you were looking for pictures of adorable pet birds.) And I’m not going to pretend that I had a super high opinion of Justin Trudeau before this news broke, because I didn’t especially - I have characterized him before as a replacement-level politician, the sort of guy who will give you mildly decent policies but mostly lacks the ambition and/or gumption to do anything more controversial. (I am honestly surprised he passed a carbon tax.) It does not surprise me that at the age of 29 - an age when most of us have already had to grow the hell up - he still considered racial costumes to be a jolly fun time, because if you know anything about Trudeau’s personal history you know for the first thirty-odd years of his life he was a pampered useless rich fuckboy, and dressing up in blackface or brownface or yellowface or in First Nations tribal gear for fun is the sort of thing pampered useless rich fuckboys do, because they are pampered and useless and have been taught that the rest of the world is basically there to entertain them. (Trudeau has tried to force himself to grow up, but sometimes his pampered useless rich fuckboy instincts kick in when they really, really should not.)

Really, all this scandal taught us is that the Canadian media and Canadian body politic is woefully, incredibly unprepared to have serious conversations about race at all. I was born in 1976, and that is the same time when many of the most prominent journalists in Canada were starting their careers as reporters: Margaret Wente, Rosie DiManno, Rex Murphy, Christie Blatchford, Christina Blizzard, Terence Corcoran, Chantal Hebert, and so many more. In 1976, about three percent of the population was non-white or of First Nations ancestry. Twenty years later in 1996, it was fourteen percent - more than quadruple. By 2016 it was over 27 percent - nine times as many nonwhite people existed in the country forty years previous. The current senior generation of journalists doesn’t understand the new landscape they’re in (and it is at least in part because they tend to live in white enclaves of increasingly diverse cities, or have retreated to the exurbs to write columns complaining about the traffic in their exurbs), which is why you could certainly find prominent non-white Canadian journos writing about this scandal in terms relevant to their life experience - so long as you were willing to read them in American outlets, like Scaachi Koul in BuzzFeed or Vicky Mochama in The Washington Post.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on the political aspects of this, and at this point that’s all that really is left. Trudeau apologized twice, and the second apology was mostly pretty decent, I think, in that it identified that his actions had hurt and affected people other than himself and that he was sorry for committing such harm. (The first apology was… less good in this regard.) The Conservatives (who by all accounts have had these pictures for months and leaked them at time of greatest political advantage, and you can’t blame them for that) are trying to make as much hay as they can, but they have realized that sadly, one of the problems of having a leader who is an unapologetic homophobe is that you don’t get that much room to complain when a rival leader makes a racial whoopsie, because at least the rival apologized and what have you done lately, Mr. Scheer? Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP spoke eloquently about the harm Trudeau’s action has caused, but it doesn’t matter because a large swath of the country will utterly refuse to vote for a brown guy who wears a turban, and Singh can’t even condemn the discriminatory “secularism” law in Quebec because if he does he knows perfectly well he will be called whatever the equivalent of “uppity” is for Sikhs in this country. And the Green Party is discovering that some of its candidates have also done blackface, because of course they did, one of them did it on the CBC for god’s sake.

When Doug Ford opened his great stupid yap about this topic, and someone asked him if there were any pictures of him in blackface, he said “I would never be that stupid.” You will note that he didn’t specify if that meant he would never be so stupid as to do it, or so stupid as to pose for pictures if he did. My own personal hunch - Doug aside, because I don’t need to manufacture awfulness about Doug Ford - is that there are a lot more prominent Canadians who were stupid enough to do the first and lucky about the second than anybody expects.

ACTUAL POLICY IN THE CANADIAN ELECTION FOR A CHANGE

Both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party have promised tax cuts in their election platforms, so let’s talk briefly about that instead of racism, just as a change of pace.

The Conservatives wanted their tax cut to be a big splash - a lowering in the first tax bracket rate (IE the first $47,630 of income) from 15% to 13.75%. They’re calling it the “universal tax cut.” The Liberals, by comparison, have proposed increasing the basic personal amount - the exemption amount Canadians don’t pay tax upon - from the current $12,309 to $15,000 over three years, but only for people earning less than $147,000 per year.

“Which of these is better?” you ask, plaintively. And the answer is “well, that depends on your priorities.” I mean, if deficit reduction is important to you, then A) you are a made-up person in a newspaper column by a boring pundit complaining about whichever party in power he hates and B) neither of these tax cuts is a good idea because they will both cost more money than they generate in economic activity which in turn generates taxes, because - and this is an important takeaway - almost all tax cuts are net-negative in terms of government revenue. Taxes have to be ludicrously high in order for cutting them to generate more revenue via economic growth than you lose from the tax going away, and basically the entire first world these days does not have taxes that high any more.

Assuming, however, that you don’t care that much about deficits (which is likely, because most people do not care about deficits): Kevin Milligan, an economics professor at UBC, did an analysis of the two tax cuts. According to his analysis, they will both cost about the same amount of money - about $5.5 to $5.6 billion in lost tax revenue. But the two will affect the Canadian populace differently because of how they are structured, and the short short version is “the Liberal cut is better for poorer people.” The basic personal exemption increase kicks in more value for lower-earning households than the first-bracket rate reduction does (most dramatically for households earning in between $40-80K) - and in fact, the first-bracket rate reduction is most effective for rich households.

Granted, we’re only talking about a differential, in most cases, of one or two hundred bucks per household. It’s just that in the Liberal scenario, that difference is for poorer and middle-class households, and in the Tory scenario, it’s in households earning more than $150K a year.

DONALD TRUMP DID A CRIME AGAIN

This time it was the whole Ukraine scandal, which for those of you not paying attention boils down to: in order to coerce Ukraine into “cooperating” with a potential investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the possibility that Biden forced a prosecutor to resign in order to protect his son, Donald Trump either threatened Ukraine with a cutoff of foreign and military aid or promised additional foreign aid or possibly both. There is really very little disagreement that the threats or promises happened, particularly after Rudy Guiliani basically admitted to it on national television. There is also really no real “there” there with respect to Joe Biden suggesting that the prosecutor be forced out, because the prosecutor who was forced out was actually sort of incompetent and had botched multiple aspects of his investigation, but even if there were, Trump’s actions would definitely be grounds for impeachment, because using foreign aid as leverage for your own political advantage is so corrupt it can’t even be called banana-republic stuff any more, because banana republics could never afford this sort of thing.

Of course, the Democrats are, as usual, softpedaling the whole idea of impeachment, with Nancy Pelosi in particular doing her usual stern-condemnation-with-no-real-world-impact thing. You can understand their reasoning: they’re worried that they will suffer political fallout when they impeach Trump and then he is inevitably not punished in the Senate for his crimes. That is a real possibility and anybody who criticizes the Democrats for being concerned about it is not thinking clearly. But that doesn’t mean that this possibility needs to drive the entire conversation, and that’s where the Democrats are whiffing this so hard. There is political benefit in the impeachment process as well: Nixon, after all, was quite popular when the impeachment process began, and it was only day after day of Nixon’s misdeeds being made public that killed his popularity and forced his resignation. Granted, political polarization means that we will probably never see Trump hit Nixon levels of unpopularity - but the Democrats could at least try to make it close. And with so many Presidential candidates loudly clamoring for impeachment it’s going to look awful stupid if Congressional leadership doesn’t do something.

2019 ISRAELI ELECTION 2: JUDAIC BOOGALOO

Israel had its second election this year last week and here is the thing about Israeli politics: there is a non-zero chance that this election won’t be able to form a government either.

The problem is entirely one of numbers. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud lost a fair amount of support in this election, dropping about one and a half percent in the popular vote and going from 38 seats in the Knesset to 31. Bibi’s natural governing partners are the various Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox religious conservative parties: United Torah Judaism, Yamina and Shas. Those three parties (which are all religiously conservative but economically span a reasonably wide political gulf otherwise) got about nineteen percent of the vote and 24 seats. That’s a total of 55 seats - six less than Bibi needs to form a government.

On the other side of the aisle, the centrist and staunchly anti-Bibi Blue and White coalition also lost a few votes, but only dropped to 33 seats (making them the largest party in the Knesset). B&W’s natural governance partners are the various left-wing parties: Labor and Democratic Union. But those parties only got 11 seats between them - that’s only 44. However, the Arab Joint List - a coalition of Israel’s four largest Arabic parties - did very well this election, expanding their voteshare from the previous election and getting a record 13 seats for Arabic parties. And they have stated that they would support a Blue and White government, because they fucking hate Bibi (for perfectly understandable reasons). But even with the Joint List, Blue and White only gets to 57 seats, which is also less than the 61 needed.

The last eight seats in the Knesset currently belong to Yisrael Beiteinu, the secular right-wing party run by Avigdor Lieberman, who is kind of a huge racist but also someone who loathes the current Orthodox Judaic political movement and who has soured on supporting Bibi. So right now the entire future of Israeli government depends on a bunch of right-wing secularist cranks deciding who they hate more: Arabs, or religious hardliners. It is honestly kind of a tossup, and moreso considering that “neither, let’s have a third election” is an entirely possible pick for Lieberman to make.

This is the sort of scenario that gives advocates of proportional-representation governments (which usually includes me!) hives, by the way.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched since last week:

Ready Or Not (2019, Matt Bettinelli-Opin, theatre) - 3.5/5

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, TV) - 5/5

American Ninja Warrior finished this past week with the first American Ninja Warrior to actually win the whole thing and become the million-dollar champion in four years, which is pretty amazing because the obstacle courses the show keeps designing are getting objectively harder but the contestants are getting objectively smarter and better at dealing with them, to the point where a lot of the contestants now run “ninja gyms” for kids as a career. Which honestly is pretty great, because this show is relentlessly positive in the most healthy way you can imagine: it’s everybody cheering each other on to be the best them they can be on the obstacle course, and rooting for each other to go as far as possible. They are all in it together: it is all of them against the insanely difficult obstacle course. In this sense it is the athletic equivalent of The Great British Bake-Off, except instead of breads failing to properly rise it is people falling into pools of water in often hilarious and occasionally painful ways.

I also finished playing Not A Hero, Devolver Digital’s dinky little run-around-and-shoot-dudes pixel game on Steam (well, one of them - this one is very British), and it was quite fun, both as a game and an entertainment, especially for the three dollars I spent on it for about twenty hours of gameplay, which is a decent deal by any standard.

See you in seven.